On Libya

Count me among those quite skeptical about this war. I think some swift linking to Andrew Sullivan posts can easily summarize this:

1. This will probably give people in the Islamic world a more negative view of the West, which is not good in regards to the “fight on terrorism,” or whatever you want to call it. The big hope with Obama’s election is that he could turn this around a little, but with the drone attacks and the continued support of many other — not just the Egyptian — regimes, it’s becoming clearer how false this hope was.  

2. There are tons of better ways that we could allocate our resources to help people around the world. I think this is a salient point. Just because their deaths are more gruesome and we can better cognitively grasp human to human violence means that we should always favor defense against violence instead death by disease…? It’s odd that there are ways that we know are proven to save lives and help people — the example Ezra Klein uses is malaria — but we don’t because a lack of will-power. I have posted on a related topic like this before, but I really think that this is one of the areas/questions that will figure with much greater prominence in ethical discussions in the future. I just wish that this would happen sooner.

3. The whole Arab League endorsement should have been taken with much, much more skepticism than it was — a point that’s been proven by their backing out. 

4. It puts a stain on Obama’s reputation as being cool and measured, which will most likely have negative consequences for him in the future. 

5. There’s really no reason not to have a congressional debate about this. Maybe Obama wants to make this seem like not that big of a deal — which might also explain why he’s in Brazil. But this 1. goes against a lot of what candidate Obama said about the importance of the democratic process and 2. allows the right to raise their voices about him, even though they probably agree with him. 

6. I understand the realist concerns of not getting militarily involved in every humanitarian conflict like this. For instance, we aren’t involved in the Ivory Coast or the Congo — though if examine Obama’s rhetoric that makes the case for not being there much harder to construe. But, I understand, rhetoric and real action are two different things. But the least we could do, to not be big hypocrites, is stop the funding of the Bahraini and Yemeni governments. Those guys are on the wrong side of this whole Arab Spring revolutionary wave, and what’s more, they have taken some very real action that goes against the beliefs that we so loudly espouse in regards to other contexts.  

It might just be me, but it doesn’t seem that Obama was particularly keen on this war, so if he brought this to a congressional vote, he could have at least abstained from the official U.N. resolution vote and had the excuse of domestic politics for not getting involved. Maybe it would make it seem like Congress is calling the shots and not him, but I’ve always been under the impression that that’s how it’s supposed to work anyways. 

I’ll add that I think James Fallows has a good bit on this:

 ”I didn’t like the “shut up and leave it to us” mode of foreign policy when carried out by people I generally disagreed with, in the Bush-Cheney era. I don’t like it when it’s carried out by people I generally agree with, in this Administration.”

———-

Having said all that, I think I understand much of the logic behind this move — except for the part about not having a debate in Congress about this. But, in my understanding, it’s largely  about not creating incentives for other Arab regimes to just violently crackdown on protestors. But there are so many other things that are out of our control that trying to instate logical incentives on such a mess like geopolitics seems like a folly bound to happen. 

Maybe it creates good incentives for Yemeni and Bahraini leaders to peacefully transition out of power or peacefully reform — though cutting off our support would probably be a better way to create those incentives. But, on the other hand, what does this say to Iran. As a blog post Sullivan linked to says

 It struck me as ironic that just under eight years ago Gaddafi specifically engaged in a course of action [by giving up his nuclear program] clearly intended to forestall US military action against his regime and that, despite that, he is now under military attack from the US and its allies. Moreover:  if he had actually acquired just one nuclear weapon, the current actions would likely not be taking place.

 Says Doug Mataconis: “If you are Mahmoud Ahmedinejad or one of the Iranian mullahs, what lesson do you derive from Libya’s experience?”

It reminds me of one of my favorite Malcolm Galdwell parables. It’s in an article about overconfidence and the Wall Street meltdown. Basically, it’s about a very talented bridge player who thinks, because of the similarities of bridge and the financial sector, that his skills at bridge predestine him for success on Wall Street. As Gladwell writes, 

It makes sense that there should be an affinity between bridge and the business of Wall Street. Bridge is a contest between teams, each of which competes over a “contract”—how many tricks they think they can win in a given hand. Winning requires knowledge of the cards, an accurate sense of probabilities, steely nerves, and the ability to assess an opponent’s psychology. Bridge is Wall Street in miniature, and the reason the light bulb went on when Greenberg looked at Cayne, and Cayne looked at Spector, is surely that they assumed that bridge skills could be transferred to the trading floor—that being good at the game version of Wall Street was a reasonable proxy for being good at the real-life version of Wall Street.

It isn’t, however. In bridge, there is such a thing as expertise unencumbered by bias. That’s because, as the psychologist Gideon Keren points out, bridge involves “related items with continuous feedback.” It has rules and boundaries and situations that repeat themselves and clear patterns that develop—and when a player makes a mistake of overconfidence he or she learns of the consequences of that mistake almost immediately. In other words, it’s a game. But running an investment bank is not, in this sense, a game: it is not a closed world with a limited set of possibilities. It is an open world where one day a calamity can happen that no one had dreamed could happen, and where you can make a mistake of overconfidence and not personally feel the consequences for years and years—if at all. Perhaps this is part of why we play games: there is something intoxicating about pure expertise, and the real mastery we can attain around a card table or behind the wheel of a racecar emboldens us when we move into the more complex realms. “I’m good at that. I must be good at this, too,” we tell ourselves, forgetting that in wars and on Wall Street there is no such thing as absolute expertise, that every step taken toward mastery brings with it an increased risk of mastery’s curse. Cayne must have come back from the Spingold bridge tournament fortified in his belief in his own infallibility. And the striking thing about his conversations with Cohan is that nothing that had happened since seemed to have shaken that belief.

Not to accept Gladwell’s thoughts as the God-given truth, but that seems pretty relevant to the logic for this war. I know there are a hundred of other important pieces, especially politics with other allies… but this whole talk about incentives, all which can be set out in a paragraph or two, seems to simplistic and a little too seductive. That’s one point, I think should be made more often. 

I haven’t even got into to the possibilities that something might go wrong, which I think is really important to consider and I’m glad others have been so forceful on that… But I think I’ll leave it there. 

the Power of Ideas

Popular culture has a conception of ideas as being abstract and not being particularly relevant to life being live. It doesn’t take much effort, though, to see that ideas have much more power than we typically give them credit for. I don’t want to go on and on about this, because I feel like I’m stating the obvious… but I find cases where ideas have such a powerful weight to be really fascinating. This weekend, I found two such cases and thought I would post them up. 

This is a review of a new memoir by a woman who spent a relatively long period of her life being quite miserable because of her attachment to the notion of being muse to an artist:

What attracted culture-hungry young women to artists and writers a half- century ago? Roiphe, who grew up on Park Avenue aware of her mother’s misery and her father’s affairs, preferred burning out “like a brilliant firecracker” (borrowing an image from Kerouac) to living “like my mother’s pearls resting in a velvet box.” But a woman did not have to go up in smoke to feel alive — it was possible to find an exhilarating kind of breathing space with a man absorbed in his work, who did not provide safety, who did not or could not play the traditional male role. As for writing, painting — anything serious — one had to do that in defiance of the widespread dismissal of women’s efforts, not that it wasn’t hard. Roiphe was not the only talented girl who gave up writing too soon, after a few crushing words from her tweed-jacketed English professor. Sadly, her ambition shrank to this: “I was going to be a muse to a man of great talent… . I was going to caress the forehead of the bedeviled and misunderstood F. Scott.” She was a dangerously naïve innocent with an unhealthy fixation on fame and glory, which she would share with the grandiose young man she fell for…

And this is a interview with a woman who just wrote about male friendship among American adolescents: 

How can we help boys and girls (as well as men and women) to remain better emotionally connected to one another?

We need to rethink how we are defining maturity, which, inthis culture, is equated with independence, autonomy, and separating from others. I think maturity should be defined as the ability to have mutually supportive, intimate, and deeply empathic relationships. If that was the epitome of maturity, the way we think about parenting and about schooling our children would radically change. In addition, if we paid attention to the decades of research underscoring the importance of friendships for the psychological health of males and females, we would also change the way we parent and school our children. Rather than autonomy, independence, or critical thinking being the goal of development, the goal would be to foster children’s social, emotional, and cognitive capacities so that they can thrive in all areas of their lives.

It says something of the power of ideas or ideals that they can make us unhappy. I think that’s also why they are worth exploring.
 

Back from a Blogging Break

So it’s been a few weeks since my last post. I went on a little blog sabbatical due to increased busyness at work, a heavy Chinese lesson load, an 8-day vacation to Thailand and, most recently, an annoying little cold. (The Packers winning the Super Bowl also required a good deal of my very precious energy and attention).

But the break was also because a lot of my thinking — and writing — occurred at a more personal level. It was really nice, and while I haven’t stopped thinking about those things or pursuing them, it will be nice to get back to some more familiar territory… though I hope to write a longerish post about some of those things in the near future.  

Anyways, I just wanted to say that I’ll be around. I also wanted to share a quote from an article on Montaigne (h/t Arts and Letters Daily) that kind of goes in hand with what I do here:

Montaigne’s literal self-centeredness has more in common with the self-portraits of the Renaissance painters who created the form (one element in an evolving complex of ideas about Man and his place in the universe), than with the compulsive exhibitionism of today’s Facebook or Twitter users. For Montaigne it’s a matter not of self-display to the world, but of self-discovery in the world and through engagement with it. Writing in the way he does is essential to that process, as he quietly contemplates the workings of his own mind. He has none of the blogger’s fear of silence or the desperate modern need to connect and communicate.

Thoughts on Obama’s Tucson Speech

By all accounts, Barack Obama delivered a capable, if not very capable, speech at the memorial service for the victims of the violent attack in Tucson. But I was pretty uncomfortable with its emphasis on ideals. To me, it seemed a bit too easy, decidedly counterproductive and, yes, even somewhat dishonest. 

First, I should give credit to the good parts’ of Obama’s speech — which were those that I found very practical and anti-idealistic. Obama is calm, clear-minded and appropriately authoritative in regards to the assailant: 

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations - to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless… Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world, and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding.  In the words of Job, “when I looked for light, then came darkness.”  Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath.

For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack.  None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind.

So yes, we must examine all the facts behind this tragedy.  We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of violence in the future.

While I strongly disagree with the word choice of “evil” — I think that word in itself evokes a “simple explanation” — his larger message which warns against these simple explanations is a very good one, and one that is well-put. Acknowledging the complexity of something like this, while not backing down from the challenge it presents strikes me exactly right. Predictably, my favorite line is the first from the excerpt, where he warns about how our brains’ (or our “natures” ‘s) initial reactions don’t always produce the most effective reaction. 

This is what a political speech should be in this type of situation. Calm, measured, reserved and, yes, skeptical. Obama then skillfully pivots to a discussion about America’s reactions and the debates that the shooting raised. All of it was on the mark. 

But this section was just an interlude in the middle of a very idealistic speech. While Obama addresses the victims, he reduces them to little archetypes of goodness and patriotism. Here is all that Obama has to say about one of the victims:

New Jersey native, Phyllis Schneck retired to Tucson to beat the snow. But in the summer, she would return East, where her world revolved around her 3 children, 7 grandchildren, and 2 year-old great-granddaughter.  A gifted quilter, she’d often work under her favorite tree, or sometimes sew aprons with the logos of the Jets and the Giants to give out at the church where she volunteered.  A Republican, she took a liking to Gabby, and wanted to get to know her better.

I don’t think I need to do a deeper analysis of it, though I should add that every single retelling of the victims’ lives highlighted that individual’s community service or their civic engagement. This aspect of the mini-eulogies was what I thought was the most dishonest and most egregious, because Obama did seem to bend all of the stories of these peoples’ real lives to make a larger political — though not partisan — point. 

So I will say that I was glad to see that other people were troubled by this practice. Here is Ezra Klein pivoting off a quote from a New York Times “Vows” column about Congresswoman Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly: 

Gabrielle Giffords is a real person. She’s been on bad dates. She’s wondered why men didn’t call her back. She has slightly old-fashioned ideas about courtship. She isn’t just a symbol of democracy or civility or senseless violence

I would add that this symbolization process — and much of the speech itself — was clearly an attempt to assauge the fears and insecurities of the American people in the wake of this event. In that way, it was less about the real tragedy and those directly effected than it was about a nation’s need for a communal hug.

But the impact of this symbolization process is not just in its slight offense to these very real individuals and their very real families,* it’s counterproductive. The more we eschew rational views of complex problems for rose-tinted ideals, the harder it is to successfully address these complex problems in a balanced and nuanced manner. 

And address complex problems in a balanced and nuanced manner is what Obama has wanted us to do — for good reason! — on so many occasions, such as national security and healthcare… and in this speech. 

Either 1. Obama is not aware of this dichotomy, and there is a battle within him between these two views, or at least a tendency to forgo the route of rationality and complexity when he gain from idealism, or 2. Obama is aware of this and tries to find a balance. I very much think it’s the latter. 

Obama is an odd figure because he straddles both of these worlds: he’s both an academic and a community organizer. Reading both of his memoirs and watching him closely for the last couple of years makes me think that he feels more comfortable as an academic, where this questioning, introspective and rational viewpoint is more at home. But you can also tell that he knows that he would be a lot less effective without the emotionalism — and the requisite imagery and over-the-top style — necessary to lead large groups of people. I think this can be best seen in the campaign — where Obama would give firebrand speeches and use simplistic but powerful imagery — and Obama’s change in style once he was elected — where he, somewhat suddenly, told people not to get their hopes up/place too much of their hopes squarely on his shoulders and mentioned that there was going to be a lot of hard work to do.**

This is why I always think there is something dark or a little cynical about “leaders of men.” I think Obama knows there is something dishonest about his speech in Tucson, but I always think he believes that it was necessary - that people needed him to do it. I say it’s dark or cynical because I think he knows how manipulative he is being. That term is a little taboo — at least in contemporary America — but it would be nice if it wasn’t so taboo so there could be a dialogue about it. (I.e. When are leaders being manipulative? Can you be manipulative out of good intentions? Or does manipulation corrupt those good intentions? Etc. etc.). 

When I think about this, I think it would be better if rationality always ruled the day over emotionalism. though, when I get very reflective about, I can tell that I buy into emotionalism — not always consciously — in many occasions. One of the reasons I’m so hard on Obama is because I was one of those people who was moved by the three words “Yes, We Can,” but now is very critical of many of Obama’s policies and see that emotional symbol as an invitation to project many of your views and hopes onto this slightly more progressive/refreshing than most, political campaign and political figure. 

Was I naive to do this? Definitely. Was Obama taking advantage of that/being manipulative about that? Another yes. 

So I look to Obama — and this speech — partially with skepticism or even cynicism as someone who has already been fooled once. But I also do seem him as making progress. It’s important to remember that he has been a force for calmness, skepticism and rationality — my first excerpt from his speech in Tucson proves that. Maybe these proportions are not at the balance point that I would like to see, but, with what little historical perspective I do have, it does seem like he is making progress. 

* I know some might have not found this process offensive, and that many people do this all the time. But for me it is offensive. I always found it odd that people don’t mention the faults of a person at their funeral — as if the very mention of a shortcoming will prevent us from seeing the larger good. I would argue that this definition by contrast is integral to seeing a larger good. For what it’s worth, I would be very disappointed if people brushed over my faults (whatever they might be… ) at my funeral. 

** I think a good case could be made for Obama evading responsibility for getting people’s hopes up during the campaign. 

Facebook’s Identity Problem

Time’s Mark Zuckerburg Person of the Year* article**, besides from being very good, really summed up a lot of my recent thinking on Facebook. Here are the relevant paragraphs:

…Sometimes Zuckerberg can sound like a wheedling spokesman for the secret police of some future totalitarian state. Why wouldn’t you want to share? Why wouldn’t you want to be open — unless you’ve got something to hide? ”Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity,” Zuckerberg said in a 2009 interview with David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect. This is a popular attitude among the Silicon Valley elite, summed up by a remark Google CEO Eric Schmidt made last year on CNBC: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Say what?! Those are some of the craziest statements I’ve ever heard! It’s really bizarre hearing this from two people who are billionaires because of their ability to get into the human pysche and provide what it wants. Luckily, the writer of the Time profile, Lev Grossman, pushes back:

“But what makes life complicated in the postmodern technocratic aquarium we’re collectively building is that there actually are good reasons to want to hide things. Just because you present a different face to your co-workers and your family doesn’t mean you’re leading a double life. That’s just normal social functioning, psychology as usual. Identity isn’t a simple thing; it’s complex and dynamic and fluid. It needs to flex a little, the way a skyscraper does in a high wind, and your Facebook profile isn’t built to flex. 

For all of Zuckerberg’s EQ, Facebook runs on a very stiff, crude model of what people are like. It herds everybody — friends, co-workers, romantic partners, that guy who lived on your block but moved away after fifth grade — into the same big room. It smooshes together your work self and your home self, your past self and your present self, into a single generic extruded product. It suspends the natural process by which old friends fall away over time, allowing them to build up endlessly, producing the social equivalent of liver failure. On Facebook, there is one kind of relationship: friendship, and you have it with everybody. You’re friends with your spouse, and you’re friends with your plumber.”

(I even think the metaphor “skyscraper… in a high wind” doesn’t do the types of metamorphosis required by modern society — I think the opening lines of this Interpol song are more apt.) 

All of this relates to Zadie Smith’s final pronouncement on facebook — one that I agree with — that she made in her NYRB review of the Social Network: 

 ”… The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.”

There is something reducing about the way people present themselves on Facebook. This has a little bit to do with the layout of the website — as Smith writes — but more to do with the ridiculous amount of people who have access to your Facebook page — as Grossman writes. There’s an argument to be made about keeping your “facebook friends” to a slim number, but I think that ignores some of the societal pressures/practicalities that Grossman lays out in the last paragraph that I excerpted of his article. 

I would say that I have a lot different interests and do a variety of activities. A lot of these interests/activities are seemingly unrelated. Now, if I listed all of these interests/activities out — or wrote facebook statuses in relation to these interests/activities, I think that would seem pretty ostentatious —and that’s something I’m very aware of. Most people I have interacted with maybe have seen me through the contexts of one or a handful of these interests or activities, but very few people are aware of all of these things. And that’s fine. The great thing about today’s technology and society is that there are a lot of little communities that you can participate in — either passively or actively — and therefore be able to share these interests and activities with.***  

And I don’t think my friend who I talk to about the Packers’ playoff games and the new Big Boi album really thinks that I have weak integrity or am hiding something from him if I don’t talk about the latest Evan Osnos piece, or if I don’t talk about what it is like being a vegetarian in Taiwan. Having diverse interests/activities requires an ability to adapt to your surroundings and/or to whatever little world you are in at a certain moment. Very few people these days occupy only one world, as Grossman points, and this adaptive process is almost necessary for today’s world. 

But facebook really doesn’t cater to this more fluid sense of identity — it’s, more or less, all or nothing.

I actually don’t want the guys I grew up with playing basketball around the neighborhood to read my blog or even know that I’m in Taiwan — yes, some people like their privacy — but I would sure like to lament Brandon Jenning’s 4-6 week injury and talk about the prospects of the Packers beating up on the Falcons this Sunday. But rather than do that, I basically have just given up facebook as a medium.

I still have facebook, but I mainly use it to keep in contact with friends that I really do want to keep in contact with — past a 60-some character status update about some time and Wisconsisn-specific sports event — or to check out other people’s profiles, out of some undying anthropological curiosity — which is why I never have deleted a friend. 

So that’s why I was so intrigued by this Sean Parker video (top of post). The whole video is interesting but the relevant part is from 3:10 to 5:00. He says some really encouraging things that are very connected to my own thoughts about Facebook: 

“This is my biggest criticism of the facebook project today, and when I spend time with the facebook project team, this is the thing that I’m always pushing is that the tools for segmenting or compartamentalizing your life and broadcasting information to one group versus another, and subscribing information from one group to another are not advanced enough yet… We need to get better [at this].”

David Kirkpatrick, the author of the best-known book on Facebook and the one interviewing Parker in this video, points out that “lists,” a facebook application that was an attempt to do what Parker is describing, was attempted but later de-emphasized. In response to that point, Parker says, “This happens because it’s a mass product, and we’re trying to serve the needs of the mass population.” 

So by the end of the video it’s unclear whether this is something that isn’t a reality yet because 1. the technology is not there yet or 2. it was tried out and the masses dumped this in preference for an algorithim to sort their friends by who they are most in “contact” with. 

I very much hope it’s the later. It would be nice if I could use facebook regularly again, and maintain contact with people from my past or how I’m not that good of friends with without being worried about having my privacy being invaded. I haven’t talked to the guys I grew up with in 6 or 7 years. I don’t really have a need to go out to lunch for them and talk about what we’re doing now — that actually sounds horrible. But I would like to comment on a post on their wall about how much the Bears suck. I think they would appreciate that too. 

But I’m a little doubtful as to whether that’s going to happen.

The fact that Parker brings up this idea gives creedence to one of the thesis — yes, that is the plural form of thesis, I checked — shared by Grossman, Smith and Jose Antonio Vargas — who wrote the New Yorker profile of Zuckerberg: Facebook is a product inextricably linked to its creator, Mark Zuckerberg. 

Compare this from the Time profile of Zuckerberg,

“He works constantly; his only current hobby is studying Chinese… He’s spent his whole life in tight, supportive, intensely connected social environments: first in the bosom of the Zuckerberg family, then in the dorms at Harvard and now at Facebook, where his best friends are his staff, there are no offices and work is awesome… Zuckerberg [started dating his girlfriend] seven years ago, before he started Facebook… He drives a black Acura TSX, which for a billionaire is the automotive equivalent of a hair shirt. For Thanksgiving break, he took his family to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando. He bought a wand at Ollivander’s.”

to this from a Vanity Fair profile of Parker:

“…Parker is widely considered a Web oracle… That said, he has a libertine side. Parker has a knack for missing deadlines and appointments, for disappearing for weeks on end, for avoiding the press… He was pushed out of Facebook after an arrest for cocaine possession in 2005. (No charges were filed.).. A lover of the good life, Parker maintains a collection of elegant white shoes, a closetful of Tom Ford suits, and a $100,000 Tesla electric sports car he never quite seems to have time to drive… When his friends fund-raise for charity, several told me, Parker is often the one who contributes the most… An autodidact who barely finished high school, he is nonetheless almost painfully cerebral… There is hardly a topic—literary, political, medical, or technological—about which he cannot offer an informed and nuanced opinion in his rapid-fire patter… Oh, and when he’s home in New York he takes piano lessons from Sean Lennon.”

It’s not hard to see why Zuckerberg would have such a clean and simplified sense of identity, and why Parker probably has a more postmodern one.**** Maybe Zuckerberg’s business sense will win out and he will see that the majority of his 600 million users have a similar outlook as Parker or maybe Parker will have to accept that masses don’t want to compartamentalize. I guess it could go either way, but if I had to put money on it, I would say that I probably won’t be using Facebook all that actively for the forseeable future…

* First of all, it is ridiculous that Zuckerburg got person of the year when Julian Assange really should have. There is nothing 2010-y about Zuckerburg except that he was the subject of a pretty unrealistic film, where as many of the biggest stories in 2010 couldn’t have been imagined without Assange. 

** The Time piece is a really nice compliment to the New Yorker profile of Zuckerberg, which was also awesome. It kind of makes you wonder why this bloggingheads episode between the two writers of those two profiles was so vapid and pointless. 

*** Alexis Madrigal points out that this is one of the biggest flaws in Smith’s piece, as well as writing some really good insights into how we have adapted to using facebook in general. 

****It’s also noteworthy that Parker emphasizes “identity” as the core message of Facebook — as he does in the youtube video — where as Zuckerberg emphasizes connecting and being “open” as the core message — in both the Time and New Yorker pieces. 

Another Great New Yorker Piece on China

This time it’s from the current Beijing correspondent Evan Osnos. Here is is, though, unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall. It’s about China’s fairly brutal and chaotic history in the past 50 years, and psychoanalysis’ decline in the West. What do they have in common? Well, they think they might be each other’s saving grace. Well worth checking out. 

Indigenous Peoples and Evolution

I recently stumbled upon this TEDTalk (hat-tip Andrew Sullivan) and found it pretty interesting. I was going to comment on the speaker’s delivery, but instead of forever being an armchair critic I’ll just share a few thoughts I had. 

Here were the two best quotes from the talk, which was given by anthropologist Wade Davis who is an explorer/writer for National Geographic about the importance of preserving and learning from indigenous peoples: 

… The central revelation of anthropology… is the idea that the world in which we live in doesn’t exist in some absolute sense but is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices our lineage made, albeit successfully many generations ago… (1:14). 

… The problem is that even those of us sympathetic to the plight of indigenous peoples view them as quaint and colorful, but somehow reduced to the margins of history meanwhile as the real world, meaning our world moves on… Now the problem isn’t change. All cultures through all times have constantly been engaged with new possibilities of life. And the problem is not technology itself… It’s not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere, it’s power: the crude faith of domination. And whenever you look around the world you see that these are not cultures destined to fade away, these are dynamic, living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to…

I see some connection between the two quotes, and it’s the same thing that I always come back to that when I hear about these subjects: science and evolution. 

My first thought when the very environmentalist character Walter Berglund from Jonathan Franzen’s great Freedom says, “Every animal has a right to its own survival” was, “Says who?” I don’t believe that Davis — or Franzen for that matter — believe that there is some higher reason why every species/society has the right to its own survival… but they don’t offer much to make me think otherwise — though Franzen is a much different case because he’s writing fiction and I don’t want to make the mistake of the intentional fallacy. 

Because there is probably is no higher reason — and if there is, it hasn’t revealed itself to be all that efficient. The fact is that animal and plant species die out, as do civilizations. It’s all of a product of the ongoing project of evolution — all this is, basically, is a free-for-all. 

I don’t mean to play devil’s advocate — I would much rather see everyone live in harmony, but my preferences, like many others’, carry very little weight in the face of “progress.”* It’s simply not the case. 

So in fact, it actually is a matter of change and adaptation. The march of man is just as natural a change as any other natural change, if you take a macro view. Just because we have consciousness doesn’t mean all of a sudden that what we do isn’t “natural.” Man is beholden to the same impulses and inclinations as other animals are — and other plants are, as well — though those impulses and inclinations are more varied and complex.

And if you can’t adapt to these changes that are byproducts of man’s evolution… then you are living at odds with your environment as it is now, and you are prone to suffer the consequences. 

This is why I think this first quote of his is misleading in some regards. It suggests that there are all these different forms of reality… which is true, though only if you are speaking of reality as a subjective conception produced by human consciousness. But there is also another “reality,” and that this a larger objective reality that no one can escape… the law of gravity and all of that. 

It reminds me of what science blogger John Horgan wrote about Jonah Lehrer’s recent New Yorker essay, which explored the recent uptick of faulty scientific studies (and is totally worth reading):  

But here is how Lehrer ends his article: “Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.” This assertion is absurd. We may choose to believe in psychoanalysis rather than behaviorism, because both are equally flimsy. But the evidence is rock-solid for quantum mechanics, general relativity, the germ theory of infectious disease, the genetic code and many other building blocks of scientific knowledge, which have yielded applications that have transformed our world. There’s nothing truthy about a hydrogen bomb.

Though I think he’s being a little unfair to Lehrer’s writing, he is right. There is nothing truthy about a hydrogen bomb. And there is nothing truthy about evolution. And the faster that fact is established the better we will be equipped to deal with how we react to that and handle — which is something relatively in our powers as conscious beings with free will. 

But Davis’ talk doesn’t really help facilitate that very worthy discussion — it instead creates easy dichotomies of good and bad, the corrupt powerful and the noble powerless, while missing the larger points. 

There is some worth in this video though. The most interesting part of his talk came from this quote: 

… In the end, it really comes down to a choice. Do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity? Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said before she died that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous, generic worldview, not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would awake from a dream one day having forgotten that there were even other possibilities… (18:12). 

I have heard this thought expressed before — and that previous expression was actually more to the point and more powerful, so I will quote it (hat-tip Old Roads Blog):

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives. 

Wow, that’s a great quote that deserves to be chewed on.

Anyways, this is what is interesting to me about Davis’ talk. It represents the faults of one way of grappling with the world — education would be an appropriate word — and the benefits of the other. The talk does a great job of, at least, giving glimpses into other ways of life and what we can learn from them. But it shows the pitfalls focusing too narrowly on these alternatives at the exclusion of seeing a larger picture. 

For me, I have been on the other side of the spectrum from Davis. I always have been interested in understanding the shape of this larger picture… what is true and what is not. This has not always been the pursuit of the objective — it has been partially that, but also an effort to establish my own subjective viewpoint. 

But recently I have enjoyed exploring some alternatives. I’ve been reading a book called the Gift which, it turns out, is partially about the artists role in the modern economy — which is what I originally thought it was — but also partially about gift societies throughout history. Reading about how gifts constituted a large economic and societal role is so intriguing because it’s so foreign to me. And I think I’ve been doing a good enough job of pushing away the voices that scream “Evolution! Defense!” at the turn of every page to actually learn some things, which is great.**

I’m not sure that I would want to be like Davis and primarily concentrate on alternative forms of living — I would actually say his thinking suffers from the intensity of this concentration. But I think his talk can act as a good explanation of why it’s so important. 

* I use the word “progress” with no subjective intentions. I do not mean that things are getting “better” just that they are always moving forward. 

** Here is a short article — and it’s second part — that were actually too of the most profound ways imagining, or learning about, an alternative viewpoint has changed my thinking recently. I think they are both great reads. 

China’s State-Capitalism and the West’s Worries

This is another post that is just basically a link to another great New Yorker article… though unfortunately the article is behind a paywall… But this was one of the best articles I’ve read in the New Yorker in a long time. It was an article about China’s state-driven form of capitalism. It really explained it this protectionist, nationalistic and maybe even authoritarian form of capitalism as a part of a larger evolution. 

He points out the historical difficulties in using Russia and China as examples that people will prefer authoritarian capitalism to “open-market capitalism,” which is something I definitely worried about before… that is, before I read this article. He does this by citing the examples of South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Taiwan which are all democracies that basically free-market, though they were definitely on the other side of this division only 30 years ago. 

But his best part of the article is his dismantling of the myth that the economic superpowers today got to where they are on the basis of free trade. 

“From Lord Palmerston to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Western oddicials have long demanded that countries open their domestic markets to foreign competition. But Britain and the United States embraced free trade as an ideal only after they had built up manufacturing industries that could dominate those of foreign rivals… In 1721, the [British] government of Robert Walpole placed a range of tariffs on all manufactured imports, erecting a protective wall around businesses that created the Industrial Revolution. A century later, while the heirs of Adam Smith were expounding the theoretical virtues of free trade, Britain retained some of the highest import tariffs in the world: more than fifty percent on many manufactured goods. Those levies stayed high until the eighteen-sixties, when the country’s competitive advantage in textiles, steel and other industries was firmly established. As the late economic historia Paul bairoch stressed, the idea that Britain rose to economic dominance through free trade is nonsense

The same is true of the United States… During the War of 1812, which was precipitated in part by trade disputes, [Congress] doubled import duties on manufactured goods, to twenty-five per cent. A few years later, the levies were raised to an average of forty per cent. Then Abraham Lincoln raised them again, to roughly fifty percent. Ha-Joon Chang, an economist at the University of Cambridge, has observed that Lincoln, revered as the Great Emancipator, “might have equally be labeled the great protector—of American manufacturing.” 

During the half century after Lincoln’s presidency, the business-backed republican part was in power for most of the time, and tariffs on manufactured goods remained at forty to fifty per cent, the highest levels anywhere. It was during these years that the U.S. economy grew to rival the economies of Britain and Germany in industries such as iron and steel and chemicals—all of which benefitted from protection.”

Cassidy goes on to talk about how protectionism still exists in the U.S. in many industries, most notably in the form of agriculture subsidies. He also shows some of the recent fruits of these American protectionist policies; to again use the most notable example, the internet was a product of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  

All of this should act as calamine lotion for those who are worried about the appeal and competitiveness of China’s state-capitalism and how that relates to the future. (And, as a Westerner who is more than a bit scared by China’s authoritarian streak, I would definitely count myself in this group… before I read this article). One of the most particular “soothing” passages is an explanation of what would happen if China got in a trade war with the West… but I’ve already excerpted too much of the article. Oh and he also puts concerns about China’s involvement in Africa, which gets a lot of attention, in a larger context that includes American involvement in Africa as well (unsurprisingly, we have a much worse track record). 

But more than that this article should remind many in the West who disprove of government coming anywhere near the economy about the benefits that government can bring to the economy — though, there are a lot of drawbacks…and I don’t think many people will see this as impassioned case for protectionism, because it isn’t. Here is how Cassidy ends his article: 

“Unfortunately, in policy circles—and among much of the general public—the old mantras about the free market and private enterprises continue to dominate. In seeking to broaden access to private health insurance, the Obama administration was accused of plotting a takeover of the entire health-care industry. In cutting taxes and boosting federal spending to avert a depression, it was accused of embracing socialism. Even supposedly serious economists lend support to these views, arguing that the dysfunctional health-care industry is best left to its own devices, or that the eight-hundred-billion dollar stimulus program has had virtually no impact on jobs and on G.D.P. This is what comes of forgetting the critical role that states have played in nurturing, protecting, and financing their industries, as well as in taxing and taming them. The greatest danger that Western prosperity now faces isn’t posed by any Beijng consensus; it’s posed by the myth of the free market.”