The Too-Forgiving Bell Curve

On this day:

1411
King Charles VI granted a monopoly for the ripening of Roquefort cheese to the people of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, as they had been doing for centuries.
1783
The Montgolfier brothers publicly demonstrate their montgolfière (hot air balloon).
1876
An express train called the Transcontinental Express arrives in San Francisco, California, via the First Transcontinental Railroad only 83 hours and 39 minutes after leaving New York City.
1896
Henry Ford completes the Ford Quadricycle, his first gasoline-powered automobile, and gives it a successful test run.
1913
Emily Davison, a suffragette, runs out in front of King George V’s horse, Anmer, at the Epsom Derby. She is trampled, never regains consciousness and dies a few days later.
1928
President of the Republic of China Zhang Zuolin is assassinated by Japanese agents.
1942
World War II: The Battle of Midway begins. Japanese Admiral Chuichi Nagumo orders a strike on Midway Island by much of the Imperial Japanese navy.
1974
During Ten Cent Beer Night, inebriated Cleveland Indians fans start a riot, causing the game to be forfeited to the Texas Rangers.
1986
Jonathan Pollard pleads guilty to espionage for selling top secret United States military intelligence to Israel.

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The pioneer liberals vindicated the supremacy of law over the arbitrary power of men. That is the abiding truth which we inherit from them.--Lippmann

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According to the Natural History Museum’s reference on mass extinctions, a mass extinction is conventionally defined as an event in which roughly 75 percent of the world’s species are lost over a short period of geological time — less than 2.8 million years. The Big Five mass extinctions are the End-Ordovician (~445 million years ago, glaciation and sea-level collapse), the Late Devonian (~360-375 million years ago, marine anoxia), the End-Permian “Great Dying” (~252 million years ago, the worst single event in life’s history), the End-Triassic (~201 million years ago, large-scale volcanism), and the End-Cretaceous K-Pg event (~66 million years ago, the asteroid impact that ended the non-avian dinosaurs).

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“Late-stage Kakistocracy” — the “phase of democratic decline where the regime starts running out of people who will work for it, and so the folks who aren’t qualified for their current positions are promoted to even larger positions for which they are even more unqualified.”

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Obama wanted to "fundamentally change" America. What did he mean by that? 

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The Too-Forgiving Bell Curve

Lunatics come in many shapes and sizes, as do society's responses. Sometimes, a simple, small thing that goes wrong allows both totally crazy behavior and, strangely, a willingness of reasonable people to excuse the atrocity for its seemingly "symbolic" qualities. "Mad as it was, it was well-intentioned." So Mangioni has a fan club, Mamdani a mayorship, and Bill Gates a teaching position.

In 1914, Mary Richardson took a meat cleaver to Diego Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus at the National Gallery in London. It is said she wasn't crazy because there was a sort-of-recognizable, if disjointed, "purpose" behind this act. She was protesting the arrest of the charismatic Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the suffragette movement in Britain. As a militant suffragette herself, Richardson decided to “destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government for its role in the destruction of Mrs. Pankhurst and other beautiful living women.”

She pursued her life as a militant suffragette with various arsons and once bombed a railway station. Richardson was at the Epsom races on Derby Day, 4 June 1913, when fellow suffragette Emily Davison jumped in front of the King's horse. Ms. Davison died in Epsom Cottage Hospital later.

Ms. Richardson later became the head of the women's section of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) led by Sir Oswald Mosley.

Like pregnancy, craziness is an all-or-nothing affair, and it is in their deeds where people usually reveal themselves. As charming as he was and as talented a conversationalist, Ted Bundy was as crazy as a mud hen. But, in fairness to crazies, there is a grey area here. Crazies can not help themselves. Some people behave terribly or dangerously, not because they are crazy but because they are just plain vicious.

 

The Merging of Stupid and Madness

On this day:

1780
American Revolution: British Major John André is arrested as a spy by American soldiers exposing Benedict Arnold’s change of sides.
1806
Lewis and Clark return to St. Louis after exploring the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
1821
Tripolitsa, Greece, falls and 30,000 Turks are massacred during the Greek War of Independence.
1857
The Russian warship Lefort capsizes and sinks during a storm in the Gulf of Finland, killing all 826 aboard.

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The U.S. Secret Service said Tuesday that it "dismantled a network of electronic devices located throughout the New York tristate area that were used to conduct multiple telecommunications-related threats directed towards senior U.S. government officials.

"This protective intelligence investigation led to the discovery of more than 300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards across multiple sites," the Secret Service said in a statement. "In addition to carrying out anonymous telephonic threats, these devices could be used to conduct a wide range of telecommunications attacks. This includes disabling cell phone towers, enabling denial of services attacks and facilitating anonymous, encrypted communication between potential threat actors and criminal enterprises. "

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Right now, I understand that is Oregon, Ohio State, Texas… Texas Tech because of their oil money. There’s five or six [programs] out there that have unlimited NIL resources. It’s kind of scary for everybody else.”-- Indiana head football coach Curt Cignetti on multi-million NIL deals.
12 of Tech’s 18 transfer additions this cycle are rated as four-star players.The estimate on the money spent on the portal this year for Texas Tech? $28 million..

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The Merging of Stupid and Madness  

“It was kind of an ultimate protest against the system. There comes a point when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun.” 

Clyde Barrows? Trotsky?

These are the words of Sara Jane Moore, a doctor's wife, mother of five, who, in 1975, tried to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford. Why? There are explanations. She became interested in the crazy Symbionese Liberation Army. Squeaky Fromm, one of the crazy Manson girls, had just tried to kill Ford. But can you catch crazy?  

You can't get crazy by reading about crazies. Nor can you just sign up. One of the rules of psychology is that crazies do not join groups. A defining characteristic of madness is that they cannot bond. 

Manson might be mesmerizing, but lunatics will not line up shoulder to shoulder with him. Wendy Masako Yoshimura might be interesting and provocative, but...

Yet there they were, lining up, sacrificing for each other, doing horrible things to strangers... just like a real group of normal killers. But, of course, Sara Jane didn't have the one characteristic of normal killers: she had no motive--or, at least, had no good one. She said she was opposed to the Vietnam War, but Ford had nothing to do with the War, and it was already over when Mrs. Moore tried to kill him. And what about one of the victims joining the team? Patty Hearst was a quiet upper-class girl kidnapped and raped by one of these groups, and after a while, she was guarding the bank door with an automatic.

Is this beginning to sound familiar? 

One of the staples of modern thinking is that the bell curve inevitably allows for the festering of a certain number of lunatics who will eventually act to the detriment of the culture. The culture's defense, it is said, is testing and vigilance. But testing and vigilance would not find the staid suburban Sara Jane. Or Hearst. Or Kirk's killer, apparently a good citizen with no real history. 

We might mainstream the peripheral and hope to identify the dangerous outlier. But Mrs. Moore and Kirk's killer point to something new under the sun. These are relatively average people moved to vicious acts by deep passion and righteousness. People who are unbridled by societal constraints once they have come to grips with their virtue. Like Old Testament holy men, they recognize their calling and make the sacrifice. But they sacrifice you.

A culture where the unreasonable bleeds into the irrational.

"There comes a point when the only way you can make a statement is to pick up a gun." That sounds like a culture with a problem.

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Bigotry and Madness

We find that the most generous welfare states in Europe do not perform better than other less comprehensive welfare state regimes.--a paper

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Reuters reports the German government, Siemens AG, and other parties will provide billions of euros in project-related guarantees to support Siemens AG's struggling wind turbine division. This financial assistance comes just weeks after the company warned about mounting losses amid a meltdown across wind and solar industries.

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The average Puerto Rico number of births per woman was 0.9 in 2021.

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Bigotry and Madness

Three Palestinian students were shot in Burlington, Vermont in late November. Initial reports were that the attack was a textbook case of Islamophobia: the shooter, James J. Eaton, had allegedly “harassed” the students and then opened fire on them because they were wearing keffiyehs and speaking Arabic.

But that description did not fit the shooter, who was a known “progressive” who had made social media posts in support of Hamas in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Nor did he say anything to the students before the incident. The shooting probably wasn’t political at all: According to Eaton’s mother and his girlfriend, he had a “history of violence and mental illness.” Probably, he simply picked his targets at random in his moment of lunacy. (from don)

I try to keep current on these things but I never heard that. Just as I haven't heard the motives of so many of these murderers. It is as if the generalities society demands we make of the subsets that we are told divide and separate us suddenly do not apply--or are mailable for some larger, unspoken purpose.

But should the culture allow these random mad acts to be translated by motivated people as bigoted animosity? Can a free people tolerate that?

Patty Hearst

Patty Hearst has haunted me ever since day one. Her story started in February, 1974 when she was kidnapped by a group that called themselves The Symbionese Liberation Army, a group of wackos, crackpots, overt madmen and one possible genius. It is hard to pick what part of the story is the most distressing. And now, years later, the story is back, spearheaded by a publicity blitz for a new book, American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst, by Jeremy Toobin.
 

Patty Hearst was 19-years-old, the granddaughter of the wealthy newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, when she was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. They were a small group with no coherent goals and several were clearly mad. Toobin's explanation for them is the best I have ever heard: They were the activist endpoint of the demonstration, the Guerilla Theater. They were not a movement, they were an armed display. A revolutionary spectacle.

There are two inexplicable elements to the story. (Toobin asks a third question: How did she get off?)

First, crazy people do not join groups and they certainly do not join other madmen. Isolation, preoccupied self-absorption, is the very nature of psychosis. Charming as the notion might be, there are no revolutions in an asylum. An individual might threaten Nurse Ratchet but he will have no help. So how did these lunatics organize? Modern problems make this question all the more important.

Second, what happened to Hearst? She was a rather simple girl from a very rich family thrown into this loony bin who emerged a gun-toting, stranger bombing, bank robber. How did this happen? What was going on in her mind? There was some serious problems at the time. During the early and mid '70s, there were 1,000 — 1,000!— bombings a year in the United States, many the result of the murderous Bill Ayres, his murderous wife and his SDS. But Patty Hearst, bank robber? Again, with the maniacs drifting to more modern death cults, it is a reasonable question.

The Smart girl failed to take some opportunities to escape but she was a frightened child. Hearst may not have been a PhD candidate but the life she was trapped in certainly looked worth escaping. Why didn't she? Here is Toobin on one of Hearst's escape opportunities: "Patty and two of the SLA members decide to go shopping. They need stuff and they go to a sporting goods store. Bill and Emily Harris go inside the sporting goods store, leaving Patty in a van across the street, with the key in the ignition. She's free to leave — she can drive away, she can walk away — but instead she waits. Bill and Emily Harris stupidly decide to shoplift. They leave the store and the clerk tackles them on the sidewalk. Across the street Patty Hearst is looking at her two comrades tackled by the clerk. So what does she do alone in the van? Does she drive away? Does she walk away? No, she picks up a machine gun and fires wildly across the street to try to free Bill and Emily Harris. It doesn't work at first, so she picks up another gun and fires another fusillade of bullets across the street, miraculously not hitting anybody, but, in fact, successfully freeing Bill and Emily Harris, who get back into the van and drive off."
She also ended up in the E.R. with poison oak. Nothing. She was in difficulty on a hike and was helped by a forest ranger. Not a word. Instead she maintained her anonymity and went on robbing banks, shooting up streets and placing bombs.

After her small group of inept desperadoes were all killed, Hearst was eventually captured by the FBI, convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 7 years in federal prison. She served 22 months before President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence. Later, President Bill Clinton pardoned her.

Toobin calls the presidential actions on Hearst's behalf an example of "wealth and privilege in action. ... The fact that she got these two presidential gestures of forgiveness is the purest example of privilege on display that frankly I have ever seen in the criminal justice system," Toobin says. Although, for some reason, many of the insane radicals of the time were never seriously judged. (See Ayres, his murderous wife and their SDS death cult.)

           

Hearst's iconic photograph in front of a Symbionese Liberation Army flag several months after she was kidnapped.

The New France

Marie Brenner has written an article in Vanity Fair on France and anti-Semitism. It is very sad. Here are some sections.

Amedy Coulibaly, who had grown up in a Paris suburb with his Malian parents, attacked people in a Jewish delicatessen, the Hyper Cacher, in a quiet area in Porte de Vincennes. The day before, Coulibaly had killed a policewoman who was investigating a traffic accident in the suburb of Montrouge. He had at least one Kalashnikov rifle, a Scorpion submachine gun, two Tokarev pistols, knives, ammunition, and a silver laptop, with instructions on how to upload his footage and what to say to the news media. What he did not bring, however, was any equipment to make it work without Wi-Fi. The Hyper Cacher had no Wi-Fi. He held 19 people hostage, eventually massacred four people. He wore a GoPro video camera strapped to his torso to record the slaughter. He reportedly announced to his hostages: “I am Amedy Coulibaly, Malian and Muslim. I belong to the Islamic State.” He admitted that he had killed the policewoman in Montrouge and that he was working with Cherif and Said Kouachi, the brothers responsible for the Charlie Hebdo massacre. He said, ‘There are many people like me who are now preparing in Arab countries.’ He told others, ‘I am not crazy. We understand the Koran. We understand the good and the right way.’ He said, “Do you understand why I am doing what I am doing? Do you understand what I am doing here? I am here because the Prophet has given me an order. I am here to stop the war in the Arab countries.”
By the time the siege was over, four French Jews were dead, including one young man who grabbed a gun that Coulibaly had left on a counter because it had jammed. 

France has the largest population of Jews in Europe (and the third largest in the world, after Israel and the United States) and has always been seen as the laboratory to understand what is happening on the Continent. But Jews make up less than 1 percent of the French population. Even so, according to the S.P.C.J., they are the target of 51 percent of all racist acts in France. The country has become Israel’s biggest source of immigrants.

70% of French Jews are Sephardic Jews, the Jews of Spain, Portugal, North Africa and the Middle East and their descendants. The adjective "Sephardic" and corresponding nouns Sephardi (singular) and Sephardim (plural) are derived from the Hebrew word "Sepharad," which refers to Spain.

 “This is not the Paris of Woody Allen. That Paris no longer exists.”
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The base of the Statue de la République is defaced with a swastika as a protest in support of Palestinians turns anti-Semitic, Paris, July 26, 2014. By Etienne Laurent/EPA/Corbis.

Truth, Beauty and Conviction

Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1988 to the outrage and condemnation from the Islamic community. Indeed a Fatwa, a holy hit contract, was put out against him and those associated with the book. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator, was stabbed to death; Ettore Capiolo, the Italian translator was seriously injured but not killed in a stabbing attack. William Nygaard, the publisher for the book in Norway, was shot three times but survived. The Turkish translator, Aziz Nesin, was the target in the Sivas bombing which resulted in 37 deaths.

The artist has always suffered for his work and sometimes great insight is not required. Sometimes slander, calumny or simple tasteless cruelty must be defended. Andres Serrano's Piss Christ and Brown's DaVinci Code come to mind. But the artist always stands firm for his truth. And nowhere does this noble symbolic strength for art rise more defiantly than Hollywood. From interviews to self-congratulatory awards we can always rely on Hollywood--ever green--to take the high road.

So fear not. We can certainly expect Hollywood to stand up to the attempts at intimidation associated with The Interview.

By Society's Fruit....

Mindless violence by children against strangers--this world is becoming a bit harder to understand. There are facile suggestions--video games, bullying, the destruction of the family--but social influences are very hard to isolate as cause. Certain small changes with big impact like the wheel, the stirrup or the short sword can be seen as factors in the movement of peoples but how does one isolate a factor the influences the behavior of an individual?
I have one: What are the implications of a child growing up in a world of complete uncertainity, where norms are discouraged to the point of irrationality and the laws of nature are beyond our reach. Even science hedges. One and one is very likely to be two. There are infinite universes but we cannot see them or examine them and never will. Everyone is equal. String theory. All of these notions might be true but they are equally beyond rational existence. Everyone knows that only five or six people understand string theory; it is not a thought, it is an equation. Everyone knows that equality doesn't exist, even between twins. The enlightenment was supposed to free us from this but we have circled back: The average man sits in a world that is as mysterious to him and as unreasonable as the world of the native worshipping the volcano god but without the reassurance of the god.
Our world is not so horrible as to drive men mad. But other times were. The Black Death, the Mongols, WWI and WWII, extermination camps--we have had a history of horrors that might make any sane man question existence. But these are not new and this behavior seems to be. Perhaps it is nothing more than a statistical blip, a couple of outliers on the bell curve getting publicity. Perhaps this has been a factor in all societies, its just that our wackos are better armed.
But it does not feel that way.

Diversity, Fukuyama and the Non Sequitur

The mom of the bomber, in the middle of her ridiculously implausible "denial tour," said if her son were executed "I will say Allahu Akbar!“

Somehow this fits. In fact all of this seems a non sequitur. Nothing leads from one point to another.
A family flees to this country and is welcomed and protected. The family goes on welfare support. They become comfortable and the children pursue their educations. One marries a local girl and has a child. Then they blow up countless strangers. Afterwards they go to several social events.

Any of these episodes might be individually coherent, even reasonable. But together they are more like that charming boy on the bus trip from Florida to Washington State, Ted Bundy. Except we know Ted was quite mad and these boys are not. They are just vicious. But purposelessly so to the Western mind. Any connection to the world of politics or religion is more senile than symbolic; there just is no obvious reason, at least to us. Is there a new social madness, like the obscene phone caller, made possible only by some innocent modern circumstance?

So what is going on? Is it really beyond reason?

A great worry is the tremendous variability of social norms. American prisons, as an isolated culture, look nothing like the culture its constituents came from. Pirate ships demonstrated a democratic structure that was not present in any of the cultures the pirates left. The savagery of the western American farmer in the Indian Wars had nothing in common with the east coast of his origin. Shards from shattered societies like the Symbionese Liberation Army or Jonestown or Amish communities look fantastic to the rest of us but are, nonetheless, quite well ordered and often of great integrity.

Solzhenitsyn thought the American inclusiveness was charmingly naive on a local level and blunderingly stupid internationally. At his 1978 Commencement Address at Harvard, Solzhenitsyn said, "Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture .....constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking.....But the persisting blindness of (Western) superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems....such a conception is a fruit of Western comprehension of the essence of other worlds."

George Bush was an evangelist for democracy. Almost all Westerners believe the progress the West has made is towards a preordained ideal.  Francis Fukuyama wrote about it as "The End of History." All was fulfilled in us.

Imagine, then, that all the behavior we see as so strange and inconsistent is being viewed through a distorted Western prism, that bombers are not indoctrinated or "brainwashed" but progressing along their cultural norm, that the acceptance of adult-on-children violence is not acceptance at all but rather the norm, that their connection to Western development is tangential, not incremental.

Maybe these cultural "divides" are rather ancient schisms and have more consequence than we ever thought.

The Killer of Men

"These tragedies must end," Obama said at Newtown this weekend.

Proud words. Apparently Washington has an insight into these problems they are not sharing. What can we simple folk work out from the information of the last several home-grown disasters?

One, the perpetrators were male, except when they weren't. For example,  Jennifer San Marco in Goleta, California.
Two, they were crazy, except when they weren't. McVeigh at Oklahoma wasn't crazy nor were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine.
Three, they used guns, except when they didn't. McVeigh and the Columbine wannabes used--or tried to use--explosives.

Generalities about people and groups in most circles are called bigotry and prejudice unless it is done by some social scientist or politician for some vague presumed good. Indeed there are some who think the very inability of social science to generalize well is the reason for our success as a species: The unpredictability of the individual for astonishing good as well as evil. Killers like this one in Connecticut are not only unpredictable, they are the obverse of our creative side.

Or are these malignancies really outliers? Mao killed over 35 million, the Khmer Rouge killed 30% of Cambodia's population (so many that they developed a bullet conservation program and made "to hoe" a verb meaning "to kill"), Stalin killed 45 million and Hitler 6 million Jews alone, and the Turks killed over a million Armenians in 1915. Ahmadinajad promises to kill all the Jews in the world--the world--and there does not seem to be an age requirement in his mind. And Lord knows how many Hutus and Tutsis were killed. We are not talking combat here, we are talking murder.

Until Mr. Obama has some way of first protecting people from the great killer of men, the State, he is wasting his time with these terrible, but small, tragedies. And we, the potential victims, deserve leadership with a better understanding of our risk.

A Good Man is Hard to Find

I think it all has to do with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the misconception that the government is obliged to provide those things or has the jurisdiction to deny them. We’ve gotten away from the principle that they were only created to secure those rights. And that’s where, I believe, much of the trouble has surfaced.

This seemingly reasonable statement that undoubtedly would be agreed with by many was made by Timothy McVeigh, the bomber of children, innocents, by-standers and government employees at the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. It raises the interesting question of "Psychological Homogeneity", the notion that people who are deranged in a small way are likely crazy all over.

A recent movie about the Craiglist Killer created a picture of him as a complex--but not necessarily contradictory--man mainly through the sympathetic depiction of his attractive fiance who wandered through the story planning her wedding, in complete ignorance of her husband-to-be's criminality; she never suspected a thing.

Ted Bundy, of course, was a charming guy well liked by everyone who met him who moved though the young female population in the United States like a infectious fatal illness. He actually can be tracked by the statistical deviations in the deaths of young women as he travelled from Florida to the West Coast.

Ted Kaczynski was a bit peculiar--he was terrible shy--but he graduated from high school at 16, listened to Vivaldi and Bach, got a PhD from the University of Michigan in mathematics and was regarded as a very bright social critic. The fact that he mailed letter bombs for 7 years to the homes of total strangers, killing and maiming them with the risk of doing the same to their families, did not seem to fit. Moreover, like Bundy, Kaczynski always had supporters, the former because people--particularly women--simply couldn't believe the charges against such an attractive man and the latter was admired by people, particularly academics and artists, who saw the murderous but presumed anti-technological acts as somehow less of a crime, somehow forgivable in a poorly articulated intellectual way. (One attack on David Gelernter, one of his victims, by Joyce Carol Oates was particularly bizarre.) People Magazine made him one of The Most Intriguing people of 1996.

Norman Mailer campaigned for the parole of Jack Abbott, a career criminal who had sent him essays on the prison system. He was paroled in 1981 and his book of the essays, In the Belly of the Beast, was published the same year. The New York Times gave it a terrific review but, unfortunately, Mr. Abbott saw fit to kill a waiter in an argument in a restaurant the same week and was sent back to prison.

This is a serious problem. One would like to think that a homicidal maniacal necrophiliac would give you some hint sometime between the appetizer and the coffee. More, one would hope that once the mask was off and the evil revealed for all to see, so many people--particularly intellectuals, those self appointed guardians of our zeitgeist--would not be ambivalent.

Shards

Today is the anniversary of the murder of Sharon Tate by what the press called, strangely, "The Manson Family". I knew of the actress only through my passing interest in terrible movies, specifically "The Fearless Vampire Killers", but the story was riveting. The circumstances of her murder were particularly gruesome but the arresting aspect of the event was the nature of the attackers: They seemed on the surface to be totally mad yet they were organized and moved like a pack. Manson himself was less interesting than the others; he was never physically involved in the killings and his influence in the events only highlighted the main problem. By themselves the murderers were inexplicable but, as agents, the pitiless blood drinking lunatics were impossible.

Madness is a terrible curse only exaggerated by our misapprehensions of it. We sniff around its edges, sometimes come to ridiculous cultural conclusions and submit the victims to more of the same. We have tried to frighten madness out, boil it, burn it, exorcise it, reason with it and more recently stun it with pharmaceuticals. Yet of all its diverse appearances, one thing is constant: The madman never organizes, never joins. His illness separates him spiritually from others, isolates him not because he is shunned but because he is unable to form bonds. He is alone with his illness, castaway and marooned. Contrary to fanciful social allegories, there is never a revolution in a madhouse.

Yet here we have a group of total crazies planning and executing an attack on several families over several weeks. Many had previous psychiatric diagnoses and one later made a motiveless attempt on Gerald Ford's life. How could these people organize? How did they group and integrate towards an end? Is there some new pathology afoot? Or has the culture become so large and so forgiving that, at its edge, otherwise inexplicable social behavior--like snake handling--can find a home.