A Couple Quick Semi-Heresies from the Left on Trump Voters

     DRAFT: IN PROGRESS. 


       It's a basic point, academically expressed as, "People are 'multiply situated' and are rarely one thing." Now, it doesn't always seem that way for a reason I learned in some problematic lessons back in high school. Lesson one came when I was dumb enough to mutter aloud my dismissing of another student as a "TNSJ." I was overheard and pressed on the point and explained the initialism meant, "Typical" Chicago "North-Side Jew." The person asked me if I was not a "typical North-Side Jew," and I responded with something less reprehensible than my first comment: "I hope I'm not a typical anything." 

     
      We can miss that "All people are 'multiply situated'" because some people go beyond adolescence living stereotypes of "Professional FILL-IN-THE-BLANK." For them, my advice would be to dial back their "professionalism" to where they can say that "BLANK is my main identify and for good reasons" — e.g., being oppressed for it — "is my current priority.
      
      Now a fair number of Trump supporters are professional Americans, patriots, Christians, and so forth, and that is in the normal order of things. So is, in a group that large, a fair number of bigots, racists, and just assholes. If we judged every group by its worst people no group outside a congregation of saints — and a small congregation at that — could avoid condemnation. 
     
      What is more interesting among Trump voters is that a fair number seem motivated by issues of the White working class without being members of the actual working class, which in the USA is pretty heavily non-White anyway: 45% or so, and rising. A fair number of Trump voters seem to be not working class but insecurely middle class economically and motivated by fear of becoming working class. With some justification, they may fear they're in "zero-sum games" with people they (a) formerly didn't have to compete with, period, and (b) now have legal protections on the job and elsewhere that they lack. 

      The competition with new groups — women, non-Whites, new groups of immigrants — is something they're going to have to get used to, given the demographic trends and the rules of decency. But, there is this much of a legitimate and pressing complaint by various subdivisions of "White": The Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution needs to provide "equal protection" to everyone to some degree — in our multiple identities — and job protections like tenure need to be more general and less elite. Many Trump voters are motivated by "the politics of resentment," and the answer to that resentment isn't to bring others down but bring large groups of people up. Employers have too much power over most workers, period, and the "workers of the world" are distracted from that by getting divided up. For strong historical and political reasons, different groups have gotten needed extra protections, and that help can generate understandable envy. 
      We humans are multiply and complexly "situated" and have different roles. Most of us, though, for much of our lives, are workers, or unemployed. Whether you labor with mostly with your muscles or your mind, you still sell your labor, and you spend much of your time and devote much of your life to one job or another. Elite workers as Professional Professionals need to see that they — we for most of my life — probably supported Bernie Sanders and voted for Hillary Clinton but potentially share economic insecurity with middle-class Trump voters and share issues of economic power with workers generally. 

       An unnamed Lord says in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well,

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and
ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our
faults whipped them not; and our crimes would
despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.

And even so for our acts and words. I said a stupid, bigoted, self-threatening thing, but when challenged I was able to formulate something I believed and was able to expand upon the idea: "Only pigeons belong in pigeon holes," and there is problem if someone can legitimately be put into one. People sometimes can be with a smidgen of fairness because of a problematic line from another teenage Chicago North-Side Jew of the 1950s, dismissing a guy on the fringe of our group as living the stereotype of "a professional Jew": i.e., someone who not only put Judaism at the center of his life, but put Jewishness as the essence of his being — and let people know it.

* * *

      One area, though, where we need more group identification: age and generation; indeed we need again some Professional Youth. Young Americans are insecure and may not make it into the upper-levels of the working class. Transferring money from education and job training to health care and prisons (etc.) generally helps older people — especially those on Medicare — at some cost to younger people; ditto for declining to invest in the environment and infrastructure. Trump supporters tend to be fairly old, White, insecurely middle-class voters, and their representatives know what they're doing in making it difficult for, among other groups, young people to vote. And young people don't help if/when they demand candidates they can get all enthusiastic over. 

          Young people: The Trump administration is not your friend. But there was a backlash against the young starting in the late 1960s, and "the Youth" of that period are now pretty aged, but the backlash continues and has revved up, and you weren't helped much by the William J. Clinton administration either. Yes, you need to be forced to contribute to health insurance — but only if it's truly universal, such as Medicare for all, and only if that kind of transfer of money is offset by those investments in education and job training that you need now, and in protections for the environment and conserving of resources that only you will live long enough to enjoy. 

Allowing Four Lawyers to Marry

         The truly serious issue on marriage in the US and elsewhere isn't on gay marriage as such but the issues implied in Justice Samuel Alioto's asking if four lawyers could marry. 

         The core system on marriage for the last few millennia centers on a sexually reproducing heterosexual couple. And this makes excellent sense if "The world must be peopled!" Over those millennia, society and then the State came to reward heterosexual marriage out of "pronatalist" policy: "People are the riches of a nation," and the idea was to increase the number of people.

         Okay, but what about nowadays, when the world's been peopled and then some, with seven billion of us and counting, and a strain on the environment and on resources? If we want to be less "natalist," we want to encourage arrangements that are not sexually reproductive at all, or less so, but which might allow raising adopted children — plus providing companionship and economic advantage.

         Soooo ... Mr. Alioto perhaps spoke better than he knew. We need to look at alternatives to reproducing couples and we need to rethink the incentives given to people to form reproducing couples and then reproduce. Such rethinking, and then acting, could include shifting tax burdens away from the childless and more toward those overly enthusiastic about reproduction, celebrating Childless People's Day once a year (or twice, to balance out Mothers' Day and Fathers' Day), toning down the praise of families and family values, noting that the nuclear family sucks for raising kids — putting too much burden upon one couple — and moving toward the old extended family.

         I'm not sure I'd like to see four lawyers raising a puppy, let alone children, but we do need to start talking about allowing such relationships the privileges and advantages of married folk.

         And with that we can start our serious arguments over marriage: the mostly economic ones that will seriously question who gets what, just how much, and for how long and for how many offspring.

Civil Libertarians Putting Americans in Harm's Way (7 June 2013)

Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground;

Mother earth will swallow you, lay your body down.

— Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young

Yo, Civil Liberties Pushers complaining about surveillance! (Cheek swabbing for DNA gets into other issues.)

            Are you saying that you would endanger innocent Americans, increasing the risks of death, dismemberment, rape, or maiming to American men, women, and even our children just to defend your right to privacy?!

            'Cause I will say something like that, except I would put it as defense of, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," to quote the US Bill of Rights, Amendment 4.

             To repeat the cliché: Freedom isn't free, indeed, and part of the cost of freedom is avoidable deaths of innocent people. Look, most Americans — that "great, silent majority" — would be safer from terrorism and crime in a police state. Anything less than a police state is a net increase in risk for most Americans. Let's all grant that.

            Let's grant also that John Kerry was right in his gaffe — definition: a politician's letting slip what he thinks and/or the truth — "We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives but they're a nuisance," a deadly threat for the victims, but this side of a loose nuke not a threat to the Republic. Also, with nukes complicating the equation, not a major risk factor in American lives.

             If you're into the Constitution and Liberty and all that, you need to be willing to tolerate some increased dangers, and there has to be "a clear and present danger" before you even start to talk about giving up liberties. Then you have to do risk-assessment.

            You're worried about unlikely but catastrophic risks, and you should be? Well, there's Earth getting hit again by a substantial comet or asteroid, and there's full-scale thermonuclear war. Either could wipe out the human species, and a number of others, or at least blast human civilization back to a pre-industrial era. We can do a better job tracking extraterrestrial threats and we can reduce the number of nuclear warheads worldwide to a level below what risks Nuclear Winter. And we can do both without any reduction in liberty and, if nuclear build-down is done carefully, with an increase in security.

            Climate change is more complicated, but the risk can be reduced with only minimal loss of liberties and none of those of the basic sort. People will lose some of the "right to be left alone" as pollution controls become more rigorous and invasive, but there is no right to pollute. (I have a right to piss in the stream, as we used to say, only if the stream can clean up after me before it gets to humans and other critters that want to drink the water or take a swim.)

           If we really want to reduce the risks for Americans we can work on getting more people decent, affordable medical attention, reduce our production of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and improve our ability to respond to all sorts of lethal and otherwise harmful events, and not get hung up with  terrorism and crime. 

             Indeed, it's better to prevent a terrorist attack than to respond to one; but terrorist attacks are a whole lot less frequent than ordinary fires and explosions and high-speed car pileups. And robust response to all sorts of "Shit Happens" events can come with just about no costs in civil liberties.


            Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were more right than they may have intended with "Find the cost of freedom." Right: calculate the cost and do the bloody value judgments; and that's literally bloody: the cost of freedom has always involved innocent blood. 

Now Let Us Praise Some SF Prediction: Privacy and Philosophy (9 June 2013)

      In her introduction to the 1976 reissue of her book, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin denies that she, or most SF authors, are into prediction: "Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying." Le Guin, though, thinks novels particularly and fiction generally can earn their keep because, paradoxically, fictions are not just complex and convoluted lies but also thought experiments that can tell us important truths about current society and may be useful, on occasion, in thinking about truths for the future.

      Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., approached the issue with the metaphor and image of artists as canaries: "I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coalmine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever."

     Science fiction isn't very good at prediction because, as Le Guin notes, it's into extrapolating current trends — and history indeed consists of the continuation of most current trends, but also the occasional weirdo change, frequently (and ironically here), a scientific and/or technological change that changes a lot.

     So every now and then I praise some SF that has been kind of good at predicting and very good at the canary-in-the-coal-mine job and warning of increasing dangers. The occasion for beginning to write this essay was my listening to Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain (2004), which kills off a flock of canaries warning about global climate change. Still, this time around I want to return to four classic dystopias — and I'll allude to a couple more works — and an anti-utopia; two of these stories you've probably heard of, the rest maybe not.

     Okay, for the more pedantically inclined, a brief justification of differentiating "dystopia" and "anti-utopia": If a eutopia is a story about a Good Place (eu-topia), a dystopia is a story about a Bad Place (dys-topia). Some dystopias may have started out as eutopian projects, but if so that point isn't stressed, and dystopias are mostly agnostic about the possibility of eutopia. An anti-utopia is an attack on trying to set up at least one kind of eutopia and, at an extreme, an attack on utopianism root and branch (and leaves and stems and seeds). George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is a dystopia, with no patience with the idea that Nazi and (more to Orwell's point in the late 1940s) Stalinist thugs are spoiled eutopians: when the novel's severely-limited protagonist, Winston Smith suggests that the totalitarian Party of Oceania works for the common good, the Party official O'Brien cruelly corrects him: "The Party," O'Brien says, after blasting Smith with excruciating pain, "seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others […]. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end" (Part Three, section 3).

     In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), however, the Powers that Be emphatically intend remaining in power, but they know enough to do that by creating a society where people are thoroughly unfree and controlled and set in a class and individual place in a rigid hierarchy — and therefore are happy: innocents, of a sort, in paradise, this Brave New World ("that hath such people in it"). Huxley was to go on to write the eutopia Island (1962), and Island and Brave New World should probably be read together as a complementary pair, but Brave New World is an anti-utopia.
     Anyway, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World are two of the works I want to talk about, and I assume you know them. (If you do not, stop wasting your time reading my schlock and read them now; they're in most libraries and on the web.) The others you may not have heard of: Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1920), E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," and Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl's Space Merchants (1952/53).

     What We, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and Space Merchants all get right and what interests me in this part of my essay — who stole what from whom does not interest me — is privacy in two senses.

     First, all these worlds except the Brave New one are worlds of total (We and Nineteen Eighty-Four) or large-scale surveillance. In We, people live in apartment buildings, and the buildings are made of transparent glass; spies are common, and, of course, one's friends and colleagues will be honored if they betray you to the One State. Even more of course, in Oceania in 1984, "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU." In Space Merchants, there are just microphones and taps on rooms and such.

     I have dealt with surveillance fairly frequently, and at the moment of writing this piece (June of 2013), I needn't add my voice; people have been talking a lot about surveillance. And, frankly, right about now what I'd have to say is mostly (pause here for dramatic effect): You know, the three most beautiful words to hear may be "I Love You"; but among the most enjoyable to say are "Told You So." All sorts of people have told you so. Orwell's London of 1984 explicitly prefigures in terms of surveillance London of the early 21^st century, one of the most "surveilled" places on Earth outside of a penitentiary or Las Vegas casino. Certainly, Americans who are shocked — Shocked! — at government surveillance in 2012-13 just haven't been paying attention: the National Security Agency has been gearing up for widespread, computerized-assisted surveillance since at least 1978. And cheek swabs for DNA testing have been an issue for nearly a decade, and were central — in decorous satiric exaggeration — to the 1997 film GATTACA.

     But surveillance is just one way to invade privacy, and the great 20^th-century dystopias showed The Powers That Be invading personal space not just to get information out but also to get indoctrination in.

     Big Brother is not only watching you, he is also drumming in slogans and boring you to unconsciousness: "Orthodoxy," after all, "means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness"(1984 1.5), and there ain't nuthin' BB loves more than that orthodoxy! And, of course, in the Brave New World conditioning starts in the womb-bottle and continues life-long, though growing more subtle in bodily adulthood. (The goals of the State include keeping people emotionally juvenilized.)

     We missed the bullet of fanatical totalitarian indoctrination, but Pohl and Kornbluth extrapolated from the capitalism and crazes for psychology, marketing, and advertising in the mid-20^th-century and presented a future world where personal-space is constantly violated by long TV commercials, intrusive advertising, and, well, other people. The near-future society of The Space Merchants is ruled by ad agencies and others — but especially ad agencies — who worship The God of Sales. And Sales wants worshippers: the more the better, the dumber the better, the more passionately consumed by their role of consumers … the better.

     Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., started out his writing/canary-bird career with Player Piano (1952), warning against structural unemployment due to automation of industry and reminding us that private-enterprise, industrial bureaucracies are, by God, bureaucracies; Pohl and Kornbluth help teach that pervasive advertising and marketing is a form of propaganda: «Capitalism is good; consumption is good; my general identity is consumer; my more specific identity is a consumer of __________ products [fill in name of Agency]. Buy! Buy! Buy! __________ [fill in names of some specific products, but the controlling idea — and I do mean controlling — is Buy].»

     In the near-future world of Space Merchants, the Agencies, Chamber of Commerce, and big firms generally pretty directly control the government of the United States, and most of the rest of the world. In our present, power is more diffuse, which is good — but a bunch of Little Brothers and Medium-Size Brothers are also a threat; and minimally regulated markets impinge on us in ways undreamed of in Orwell's Oceania or even Pohl and Kornbluth's hucksters' utopia in Space Merchants.

     E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) is set in a far-future that seems extremely implausible. The opening sentence of instructs us to "Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee." The room is underground, inside a world-machine; and at the center of the room "there sits a swaddled lump of flesh — a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus." In a very short space in this sentence, Forster brings together some of the major motifs of 20th-century SF. He gives us a degenerate future humanity, but more important he places our species underground, inside a machine, and in an environment explicitly likened to a hive.

      Mechanizing the underworld had been done before, by H. G. Wells in The Time Machine (1895), and Wells has a sublunar world of rather degenerate Selenites (Moon people) in The First Men in the Moon (1901); still, to put a whole human civilization underground was something new and important. Back to the time of myth-making, the underworld was the realm of "Chaos and Old Night," the womb of the Earth Mother. It's no less than the complete reversal of an archetype to mechanize Mamma, and the motif will be familiar to anyone who knows such SF films as Metropolis, THX-1138, or A Boy and His Dog.

     We don't live in a literal machine underground, and we are not bloody likely to. Forster, though, is known for the brief epigraph, "Only connect…," and what Foster gets very right is showing us a world of connection and radical lack of connection.

     The world of the Machine is highly connected: air and food and data and ideas are conveyed in to each of the cells and excrement and data and ideas and scholarship go out. And every now and then one can get new clothes and stuff, and I'm sure there are entertainment channels we don't learn about (the point-of-view character consumes and produces lectures and Ideas). The Machine connects people, but only mentally, so to speak — and connects them within the limitations of high-volume machine-mediated connection. The visuals are a little degraded, and other communication subtleties are lost.

     Nowadays, this may sound like a cliché of a nerd's life in his parent's basement working the Internet, using his iPhone, and waiting for new shorts and sandals from Amazon.com. Foster was writing at the beginning of the 20^th century, and he seems prescient.

     Well … maybe.

     Le Guin and most SF critics would say what he was doing was telling lies in the form of an insightful fable, a fable for his time that turns out highly relevant to ours. The Machine can stand for advanced human culture, for technology and techniques of social organization: all useful things but which, taken too far, no longer connect people but alienate us. The world of the Machine is a world of humans tenuously connected to one another and radically disconnected from the physical world and direct experience, disconnected from nature, history, and, ultimately, disconnected from each other.

     Out of touch.

     This much is very clear in the story: subtlety is not totally a virtue in the popular arts. Nuance is, though, and there is one nuanced bit relevant for Nineteen Eighty-Four, the late 20^th century, and maybe nowadays, as products of US and Western European higher ed. in the late 20^th century move into positions of authority.

     The bit of nuance I'm talking about comes in a paragraph many readers may skip through quickly because it appears between two major plot developments. The second is "the reestablishment of religion" as many people come to worship the Machine (beginning of part III, "The Homeless"). The first change in the culture is "the abolition of respirators" so that the people of the Machine, who can no longer breathe easily the air on the Earth's surface, are now prevented from leaving the Machine. This was a problem for students of surface things — the sea, for example — but such scholar/scientists were few and their activity mildly vulgar. More important, advanced intellectuals of the time theorize the rightness of restriction to the Machine.

     A lecturer on what we'd call the web, "one of the most advanced of them" in his thinking, enjoined his audience — we're told he "exclaimed" the line, "Beware of first-hand ideas! […] First hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation." The lecturer uses for an example his own field. "Do not learn anything about this subject of mine — the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought" — significant name there, Urizen, unimaginative reason and law in William Blake's mythology — learn instead what "Gutch thought Hu-Yung thought […] Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these eight great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives," although he never says how this idea might be employed. What is important is to this advanced intellectual and to the story is abstraction away from the physical, the material. "'And in time' — his voice rose — 'there will come a generation absolutely colourless, a generation "seraphically free / From taint of personality," which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.'" His conclusion is greeted with "Tremendous applause," less because of the genius of the speaker and more that that lecture "did but voice a feeling already latent in the minds of men — a feeling that terrestrial facts must be ignored," so abolition of the respirators and confinement to the Machine "was a positive gain."

     Making fun of cranks is one of the oldest shticks in satire, but what is mocked here is significant. Parallel to people's physical alienation from the world and the human body is the psychological and philosophical alienation of literal Idealism, capital "I" Idealism of the Platonic/neoPlatonic, religious-fanatic extreme sort.

     Idealism is a perennial philosophy and always out there, going in and out of fashion. Forster earned his keep as canary in the coal mine if for nothing else attacking this trend in a popular and understandable medium — as opposed to, say, most academic philosophy — in 1908.

     Re-reading Nineteen Eighty-Four in an English department in 1984 and following, what struck me most forcefully was the part of "The Grand Inquisitor Scene" — Winston Smith's interviews with the Party official O'Brien — where O'Brien corrects Smith's naïve, old-fashioned, empiricist view of the world. Today we might say that O'Brien makes Smith sane again by getting him again in love with Big Brother, gradually talking and torturing Smith away from membership in "the reality-based community."

     Totally cut off from the world, in a torture room in the Ministry of Love — for all practical purposes, as much a man-made total environment as Foster's Machine — Smith is taught "that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else." And if this is the case — if reality is what came to be called socially constructed, literally, ontologically socially constructed, what then?

     I've put it, If reality is created between our ears, it will be determined by the guy with a gun in our ear. O'Brien more elegantly clarifies that reality exists "Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party" (1984 3.2).

     Well, maybe Foster's warning and Orwell's did some good, not predicting the future but, in Ray Bradbury's formulation trying "to prevent it," or prevent things from being worse. Hitler and Stalin are dead; the Third Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — "four lies in one phrase" — are gone; and I can hope that those in power sympathize strongly with "The Social Construction of Reality" in terms of world-views, of epistemology, but otherwise are dues-paying members of the reality-based community.

     Whatever: if we acted only if certain of the results of our actions, we wouldn't do much of importance. Speaking out against vice and stupidity was much of the job of Foster, Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, Vonnegut, and their generations. As I write, Fred Pohl is still alive — and we'd now better start working on the warnings of Pohl, and of the team of Pohl and Kornbluth. 

Mammal Meat and Octopus (12 Jan. 2014)

            As I will make clear to anyone who will give me a chance, I strongly reject the idea that "All life is sacred" in large part because if that is the case, I'm a mostly unrepentant serial mass murderer: When I was in college, I worked summer lab jobs that included sterilizations of surfaces, instruments, used sputum bottles (testing for tuberculosis), and, most relevantly, of petri dishes loaded up with whole colonies of bacteria.  Billions and billions of living organisms — and I killed them routinely, five days a week. What I mention less frequently is that in the course of my studies and work I also killed a frog or two, two rabbits, one cat, a number of dogs, and a significant number of lab rats. I also used to fish with my father.

            I make no apologies for the bacteria nor for the fish (which my family ate) but rather regret the frog or frogs, and feel guilty about the mammals, especially one dog I failed to kill humanely — but that's a story in itself and for elsewhere. In any event, I've had to think about where to draw ethical lines about killing, possibly more than people who haven't "whacked" rats very literally: for some experiments we couldn't overdose the rats on Nembutal or whatever but had to use what we came to call "shock sacrifice," which translates smashing them across the back of the head with an iron bar or pipe wrench.

            I finally decided that I'd draw the line with the routine killing of mammals and would neither do it myself nor have the killing done in my name except in extraordinary circumstances. So I captured, took back outside, and released a field mouse who'd come into my apartment and danced a little number on my chest while I slept; but I had killed — the euphemism is "euthanized" — two cats who would have otherwise died in pain, and I will use traps, poison, or an exterminator to kill non-lab rats if they infest my home.

            I will not, however, eat mammal meat. Fish yes, chicken oh yes, and definitely nonkosher invertebrates with the exception of octopuses. My sister and I got invited "back stage," so to speak, at a major aquarium (Monterey, CA, probably) and got to see an ill but recovering octopus that kept picking the locks on its containment vessels. As far as the staff could figure out, the octopus was getting bored in its aquatic isolation cage and entertained itself with the locks and moving next door and, it sometimes seemed to the staff, watching their reactions.

            Mammals are cousins of us humans, and any animal — whether with or without a backbone — that gets bored, picks locks, and just possibly gets a kick out of pissing off its jailers is too smart to (casually) eat.

            Two things here for readers who don't routinely kill their fellow critters above the size and complexity of, say, cockroaches.

            First, think carefully when you hear bullshit about academics always and necessarily "living in ivory towers." Indeed, academics usually have clean fingernails in our work — that was one of my career goals given other jobs I had before teaching — but in some fields there may be blood under those nails: less nowadays with computer modeling, which is a good thing, but maybe more than, say, with accountants or advertisers or construction workers (though far less blood than people serving you by working in slaughterhouses).

            Second, there are reasons one might avoid mammal meat, or even go vegetarian, that apply to people with no dead dogs or rats upon your consciences.

            Contemporary raising of mammals for slaughter and consumption is frequently cruel, and irresponsible in terms of worldwide nutrition and public health, and in terms of the environment. (Raising poultry and farming fish are also problematic, but I'm talking here of drawing lines, and I respect the decisions of vegetarians and vegans, but drew mine more selfishly.)

            It takes a lot of resources to raise a steer or pig or lamb for food, starting with land to raise them on humanely. Raising them industrially takes less land, but it may require grain — "corn-fed beef" is from cattle fed corn that might've fed people — and definitely requires water and crowding, and crowding itself is an issue.

            Even herd animals need a bit of space between bodies — although humans have selectively bred sheep and reindeer to be neurotically into bunching up — and, more important for humans, if you put a lot of mammals in a small space you risk epidemics among them. And how to prevent such epidemics, and get the animals to put on weight faster and so move them more profitably to market? Antibiotic prophylaxis. I.e., you fill 'em up and/or shoot 'em up with antibiotics, with the inevitable result of breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

            Evolution in action, gang: you put antibiotics into the environment, and they kill off all the susceptible bacteria. The ones who remain can (figuratively) look around and see ecological niches with lots of room for expansion. So they expand, the resistant ones: healthier cattle and pigs, at least for a while, but way more robust bacteria. And those bacteria will not necessarily stay down on the farm.

            Can you say "zoonose"? I can. I lived for close to a decade in the neighborhood of one of the main Illinois zoonose research center: that's the word for diseases that move from other animals into human beings, and you don't want production of new and more potent strains of zoonoses. You don't want antibiotics unnecessarily in the environment anywhere — especially not in a bacterial megaparadise like reservoirs of fermenting pig shit — not even if those antibiotics only help produce resistance in bacteria that attack only humans.

            You also don't want too many cattle standing around burping and farting —although burping, counterintuitively, is the bigger problem — and, additionally, producing manure. The contribution isn't major, and can be offset by using cow and pig … effluents (?) for biofuel and fertilizer, but our bovine and porcine meat-providers also add to greenhouse gasses.

            I miss meat, especially when watching the "food porn" commercials on TV featuring impossibly perfect double cheese burgers with bacon and a side order of spareribs. Still, I will continue to decline to eat anything with a backbone, face, and the potential to produce young that suckle — or eat anything that just may have a brain complex enough to get bored when trapped in a tank.

Divide, Distract, and Rule (7 March 2014 [20 March 2015])

           The current crisis when I first wrote this blog in in early March 2014 was Russian troops pretty well taking over Crimea and threats and posturing over the fate of Ukraine. A year and a bit later, the crisis continues. 

            This is an important crisis, and one with, as they say in theatre, "legs," but I'd like to put it into a couple or more larger contexts and then get to the necessity of regaining focus.

            The first bigger context is nuclear.

            The US-led invasion of Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait was not matched by anyone invading China when China seized and then periodically cracked down on any moves toward independence, or even dissent, in Tibet (e.g., 1959, 1978, 1989, 1998). Now there are many differences between Iraq and Kuwait on the one hand and China and Tibet on the other. China is very large and populous and very far away from the USA, and Tibet doesn't export oil; since the time of the Silk Road China has been off-and-on a major producer and potentially huge market for the world's goods, and in recent years has been the source of a significant amount of the funding of the economy of the United State. Countries like Iraq, however, are where they are geographically and probably don't want to push their populations up a lot; and they either have oil or they don't. Iraq has oil — oh, boy, does it have oil! — and what it didn't have that China had since 1964 is nuclear weapons. A dangerous lesson world leaders could find in the invasion of Iraq in Gulf War I (1990-91), strongly reinforced by "Gulf War II," the 2003 Iraq War, could be summed up in the line Tom Lehrer assigned to Israel in his song "Who's Next": "The Lord's our shepherd says the psalm; / But, just in case — we'd better get a bomb."

            Arguably — and more respectable folk than I are arguing it — Russia's threats to Ukraine can teach that lesson in spades: the Ukrainians had nuclear weapons after the fall of the USSR and, to their credit, gave them up in the deal sealed with The Budapest Memorandum and Trilateral Statement of 1994. Russians have strong cultural roots in Kiev and as good a claim to Crimea as anyone who isn't Crimean Tartar, but an invasion of Crimea and threats to Ukraine proper suggest a horrible principle in a world already overstocked with nukes. With the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the other points on "The Axis of Evil" either got a bomb (North Korea) or set themselves on the way to getting a bomb (Iran).

            To repeat again the screamingly obvious but insufficiently absorbed: If there are enough nukes in human hands to destroy human civilization or bring on a nuclear winter and massive extinctions, that's many too many nukes, period. Nukes proliferating to different countries just increases the danger.

            On survival grounds, we need to be cooperating with the Russians for radical reductions in atomic weaponry, and then in conventional weaponry: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrendous, but they're just blips in the graph of the destruction caused in the Second World War; we need sharp reductions in armament period, for survival and for prosperity. As President Eisenhower pointed out, money spent on weapons isn't being spent on things more useful.

            The Ukrainian crisis —actions and words by US politicians as well as Slavic oligarchs — reduces the chances for reductions in weapons.

            The crisis is also hurting related areas where we need active and close cooperation with the Russians, and the Chinese and some Iranians and others.

            This side of an asteroid hitting Earth (or a comet), the threat of quick extermination of the human species and others is primarily that mere presence of so many nuclear weapons. A less cataclysmic threat lies not in a "Clash of Civilization" but a conflict of world-views of, on one side, various kinds of True Believers vs., on the other side, those of us with a stake in maintaining more or less the present world and retaining and expanding what was truly progress coming from the Enlightenment.

            There's a generalized Fundamentalist threat, primarily located in, but hardly restricted to, the Abrahamic religions and most immediately threatening in militant, jihadist, puritanical Islam.

            We need cooperation on this one, and coordination, starting with, say, both the US and Russian Federation swearing off invading Afghanistan for a while, and refraining from arming jihadists and from ham-fisted repression and other invitations to insurrections and mass movements.

            So let's keep focus there, and, for Americans, let us keep a whole lot more focus — keeping that eye on the prize — on events here at home.

            We do tend to get distracted.

            I. F. Stone says somewhere (translation: I couldn't find it on the first page of a Google search), I. F. Stone says somewhere that when the American Right pushed "roll-back" of the Soviet Union in the early days of the Cold War what they most wanted to roll back was the New Deal.

            Things haven't changed much.

            There really was a quiet revolution in the 1980s and following, under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Thatcher went beyond reining in overweening unions to pretty well break them, and between Thatcher and Reagan we got the start of a great movement of politics to the Right and the movement of money from poorer people to richer people — and then a whole big bunch of it to the very, very rich.

            The Ukrainian crisis must be muddled through to a compromise all sides can despise and live with. The conflicts of world-views — the big-ass Kulturkampfe "culture wars" and little battles of gay rights, women's rights, and human rights and civil liberties: these must be fought, and the twilight battles of identity politics pressed to their conclusions.

            But the old rule was, Divide et impera; if you want to get power and keep it, divide the opposition; "Divide and rule." And, of course, distract your opponents, and those you're screwing over so elegantly they don't even know that they are your opponents. (Distrahe et impera? Sorry, I only know enough foreign language for occasional pretentious pedantry.)

            The Radical Right still wants to roll back the New Deal, and they more successfully will block expanding the benefits of the New Deal to the "unworthy poor" who might vote for Democrats or non-racist populists. The ultra-rich, for their part, intend to stay ultra-rich and get richer.

            So, no, it isn't "class warfare,"but there is class conflict, and of a sort we haven't really seen in the US outside of the Gilded Age and slave economy in parts of the old South: that 1% and smaller vs. the rest, minus those in the top 10% with the delusion they'll make it to the ultra-rich in a generation.

            Focus, people, focus:
                        * Species survival, starting with major cuts in nuclear forces and with nuclear nonproliferation.
                        * Avoiding fanatical, fundamentalist mass movements of the European variety in the middle third of the 20^th century — or in the Wars of Religion of the 17^th century.
                        * Fairer and more stable allocation of wealth and income, starting with fairer taxes and economic policy in the US of A.


            Yeah, do divvy up the labor on different causes, and there's plenty of political and social-justice work to go around. But don't get divided into competing identity groups. Don't get distracted.

Doing What We Ought to Do Anyway: Meat and Water (8 July 2014)

   In a moment of candor, an official of the Alumni Association or U of I Foundation or other money-raising activity of the Univsersity of Illinois told me that soliciting people like me — nonrich people — barely repaid the effort. We were solicited, persistently, so we'd give something and the "Development" people could record that gift and add it to their statistics and appeal to serious potential donors with "Hey" (or the equivalent in rich-people's speech), "89.37% of alums have contributed, so don't you want to do your part?!" Also, getting us to contribute small amounts early on in life kept or got us "invested" in the Big U, which would be of use to the solicitors if they hit us up later on, when we might have made some money.

      Something like that is going on in California where our Governor, Jerry Brown, is asking — with increasing intensity — ordinary folk to conserve water. 

      We in California do need water discipline. In a surprise best-seller, Brian Fagan looks at The Great Warming of about 900-1500 C.E., with the arresting subtitle Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. Viking and more generally Nordic and European people did rather well the last time Earth warmed up; peoples in water-sensitive areas — including what is now the US Southwest —  often did not come through well, if at all.

      Which is why out here arguments on the causes of climate change and the details of proper responses can seem weirdly pedantic and perversely political.

      Right now, immediately, without debate, we ought to be taking the more obvious actions on all levels, including individuals: doing things we should be doing anyway.
      Given that future generations might want petroleum and maybe some coal for what are significantly called "petrochemicals," we should be leaving a fair amount in the ground and not, for God's sake, burning it.

      Given that beef is good and good for you — the film operation I work on is looking for money from ranchers ... — but Americans should reduce beef and pork consumption on health grounds, we would do well to go over to more chicken and fish to reduce methane release, a greenhouse gas.
     And for the last part — personal conservation of water — a story.

     I had Legg-Perthes disease as a child:  bone death in the ball and, in my case, socket of the hip. I recovered completely by sophomore year in high school, but I still found it of karmic appropriateness that I got through adolescence and young adulthood with no broken bones beyond one finger and a couple of toes. Anyway, I had never worn a cast until one time well into adulthood I slipped on black ice while jogging and got myself a carpal navicular fracture and wore a cast for three months. The cast removed, I went into high-rehab mode squeezing balls — and was back at my internist's office very quickly thinking I'd sprained every ligament and tendon in my hand.

      My doctor checked me out and said my hand was fine but that I should start with the big ball (a tennis ball) and work my way to the little ball of Silly Putty. He reminded me that I hadn't used that hand in three months and that the pain was normal and, indeed — "If you weren't feeling pain I'd have you at the hospital for neurological tests. ... Didn't the orthopedist explain that to you?" I told him the orthopedist had said, "There may be some discomfort," and my GP replied, "Ah! Doctor talk. You layfolk would say, 'There will be pain.'"
     And we got to talking of other things, one of which is relevant here. I told the doctor that I was happy to be showering again regularly, though I'd gotten proficient at sponge baths and had received no complaints on body odor. He said that spong-bathing was good — it turned out to be a crucial skill for when I broke my foot and that took a year to heal — he said it was good I'd learned about alternatives to showers since, "Americans bathe too much."

     My doctor was convinced that we showered and bathed more than was good for our skin and that this would become an increasing issue as I aged and — strongly relevantly here — as the US population aged.

      It won't make up for much of the water wasted on golf courses or sloppily used in agriculture, but Californians to start with can start adjusting to long-term drought with learning to take more sponge baths; and rich Californians (et al.) can cut back on demands for private swimming pools.


      We should be cutting back there already, and if we ordinary folk start conserving, the Governor can go to the heavy-users of water and say, "Hey," or the proper agri-biz form, "89.37% of your human-individual fellow citizens have cut back even on showers; so it's time to do your part." And we ordinary folk will have "investments" in water conservation — and maybe laying off the lamb and beef and pork — to support conservation by important people.

Hobby Lobby, Contraception, Cats — & the "Goal" of Sex (18 July 2014)

      It's significant that in deciding what's being called The Hobby-Lobby Case the Supreme Court of the United States found, in the words of Justice Samuel Alito, that "The owners of the businesses have religious objections to abortion, and according to their religious beliefs the four contraceptive methods at issue are abortifacients." Writing in Mother Jones, Erika Eichelberger and Molly Redden — like many others — have taken issue with this finding since "According to the Food and Drug Administration, all four of the contraceptive methods Hobby Lobby objects to [...] do not prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg into the uterus, which the owners of Hobby Lobby consider abortion. Instead, these methods prevent fertilization." I.e., these methods are not abortifacients causing, well, an abortion, if a very early one, but contraceptives, preventing conception: the uniting of egg and sperm to make a zygote, in this case a unique human individual (either immediately or down the line of development with poorly-labeled "identical" twins and triplets and such). Eichelberger and Redden assert that Alito "and the other conservative justices are saying that in a conflict between a religious view and scientific research, religion wins."


      I'll put it provocatively (and alliteratively) that five male Roman Catholic Justices prudently set a precedent privileging belief on the issue of contraception — and will be able to back that up down the line with adding traditional beliefs, even if those beliefs aren't exactly scientifically correct.
There are Biblical injunctions — mitzvot —  to be fruitful and multiply, injunctions we humans have fulfilled faithfully and probably excessively, dangerously excessively. (Caring for the poor, honesty in our business dealings, loving one another, welcoming the stranger — these we've been less good at, but let that go.)

      There are complex Biblical views on "levirate marriage," and you can argue if you like whether or not the Biblical character Onan did evil and deserved to die because he wouldn't impregnate his bother's widow  (Genesis 38.8), but it's a stretch to go beyond that reading of the story to condemn all "spilling of seed" by human males.

      And, in general, Scripture is screamingly silent on contraception, condoms, "Plan B" and other matters. To get the (pro)natalist job done, the Judaism and Christianity had to go outside Scripture.
Roman Catholicism went to Natural Law, and that's where Justice Alito knew what he was doing to privilege personal belief over science and the Court later will be able to bring in traditional belief over what seems to be pretty clear science.

      A strong traditional Roman Catholic position contra contraception is that contraception violates Natural Law because the natural goal (finis, telos) of sex is reproduction.

      And what if there are strong reasons to believe on scientific grounds that such beliefs are wrong and wrong-headed?

      Consider a profound "stupid question" (my phrase) I'm getting from somewhere in the work of the ethologist Konrad Lorenz: probably On Aggression —  or maybe out of the textbook Ethology: The Biology of Behaviror by Lorenz's student Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt. Ready? Then, Why do cats hunt?

      The teleological answer is that cats hunt, and hunt very well, in order to eat. Okay, but do this thought experiment: Take a hungry cat and put him/her into a large room. (I'll now switch to "her" because English mildly genders cats female.) Introduce into the room in some humane way — the nastiness will come soon enough — a mouse.

      The cat spots, tracks, and stalks the mouse. If all goes well, from the cat's point of view, she approaches, pounces, bites, shakes, and kills the mouse, and then eats it.
The cat has hunted and she has eaten.

      Introduce another mouse.
The cat will spot the mouse, track, stalk, pounce, bite, shake, kill, and then eat at least the good parts.
Introduce another mouse.

      The cat will spot, track, stalk, pounce, bit, shake, kill — probably — but, if no longer hungry, leave the mouse or look for some hunting-challenged human to give it to as if that human were a mildly retarded kitten who just couldn't get the hang of mouse hunting and needs help ("Look, dear; this is what we hunt and kill and eat").

       Throw in another mouse.

      Or don't, since by now you should have figured out where this is going.
At least if I remember the experiment correctly — and if this interpretation has held up — cats' hunting is not some sort of holistic instinct with the telos of mouse-eating but an ordered series of stereotypical, genetically-based (although that's complicated) behaviors that in this weird experiment will finally get the cat just sitting there while mice run around it.

      In nature, however, the natural order of things is that this series of behaviors will — increasingly as the cat learns her craft — result in the cat's catching small critters of various sorts and eating them. Common cats hunt as a hierarchy of behaviors and eats and frequently go on to reproduce as excessively as humans.

      Why do humans have sex?

      In some cases human beings engage in vaginal intercourse with the intensely desired goal to have children. But not often. Usually we have sex to "get off," for pleasure.

      And, often enough, and nowadays more often than is good for our survival, human beings will get off in such a way that they eventually (re)produce more humans.

      Is sex an instinct? In the old ethological sense of an innate and species-stereotypic pattern of muscle movement, the only thing instinctive about sex is that final, semi-convulsive humping before climax. The rest is a vastly complicated superset of behaviors resulting from intricate interactions among culture, immediate social structures, individual history, and maybe even some freely-willed decisions.

      Maybe sex is a "drive," if such terms are still used.

      It does not seem likely that sex is, scientifically viewed, a goal-directed, "teleological" ... whatever, as suggested by Aristotle, accepted as commonsensical by generations of anyone who thought about such things at all — and pretty much dogmatized by the Roman Catholic Church.
Arguments from "Natural Law" are helped a good deal if it turns out that scientific inquiry shows that what's argued is indeed what's taking place in (small "n") nature. Such arguments are undercut when scientific study indicates — and I paraphrase here — Nope, that ain't how things work.
There is no Mosaic injunction "Thou shalt not wrap thy willy, guys" — or Jewish guys, anyway — "or otherwise practice the perversion of contraception." Moses and the pronatalist tradition didn't get specific on that one because condoms were a long way in the future, to say nothing of "the Pill" or "the morning-after pill."

      Nothing in Christian Scripture either — and I invite comments on the Quran.

      The Arustitelian  tradition and Natural Law have been the Church's best argument against contraception for centuries, and Aristotle, though still respected, just isn't the scientific authority he once was.

      We look more empirically at nature nowadays, and that kind of research hasn't been kind to the idea of goals in nature.

      So Justice Alito did well to privilege what is strongly believed to be true over what may actually be the case — at least when it comes to contraception. Down the road just a bit will be the sort of disasters that will make the Church's position of contraception very, very controversial, and what the Hierarchy believes to be the law of nature will need all the privilege it can get.