Wednesday, March 27, 2024

The Internet and the Bridge Collapse

In Baltimore yesterday the news was all bridge collapse, all day long, the biggest thing to happen here since the Ravens won the Super Bowl. 

Meanwhile, on the Internet, the entirely predictable conspiracy theory explosion was under way. This incident is a paradigmatic case because it is so obviously an accident; if the crew intended to ram the bridge as a terrorist attack, why would they warn authorities so that they successfully shut the bridge down and got the traffic off? I suppose Alex Jones' cyberattack is remotely possible, but that seems to me like a very crude way to proceed; how could you predict which way the ship would drift after it lost power? Quite likely it would just end up on a mudflat.

World War III isn't so bad, is it?

This guy doesn't seem to know that 1) in our world there are security cameras trained at every key piece of infrastructure 24/7, and 2) the news channels all say the same thing because they just parrot statements from government officials.

One of my sons follows conspiracy accounts for fun, and he says everyone is claming the attack was a "false flag." But surely for there to be a false flag, there has to be a flag? A false flag operation is when you blame one entity but another really did it. In this case, our government hasn't blamed anyone.


Apparently Barack and Michele Obama once made a documentary that included a scene of a huge ship running onto a beach, which somehow proves they were behind this attack.

Meanwhile in MAGA land, it's all the fault of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. I mean, the shipping company is based in India and the whole crew is Indian, but they somehow promoted the wrong people for ethnic reasons anyway?

All the people I follow passed this stuff along with the tag, "predictable response." And it was predictable. 

What does that mean?

What, if anything, do the people who post this stuff really believe? Are a lot of them doing it for fun and profit?

But let's assume a lot of people really believe this stuff, or at least believe it is plausible. Why? How did we come to have this reservoir of distrust so vast and deep that even perfectly obvious accidents appear to people as sinister acts by evil cabals? Is this just hangover from Vietnam, the Cold War, and the Invasion of Iraq? If our government tried harder to be more honest, would that help? Or does this distrust spring from a deeper place?

The other day I was talking to my conspiracy-enjoying son about the fake moon landing thing, and he said, "To some of these people, everything the government says is a lie, and since all we know about the moon landing comes from the government, it has to be fake." But the people who say things like that constantly rely on "the government" to tell the truth – about the weather forecast, upcoming road closures, when the first day of school will be. How do they know which statements are just from the government, and which are from "the government"?

How much does any of this matter?

Monday, March 25, 2024

E.T.A. Hoffmann's Fantastic "Tales"

E.T.A. Hoffmann, the artist and his cat
confront the Prussian Bureaucracy

A few weeks ago I stumbled across the comment that E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was “the first master of modern fantasy.” This made me curious, since honestly I did not know anything about him beyond “The Nutcracker” and his general reputation for the uncanny. Since I needed something to listen to during upcoming fieldwork, I got an audiobook of one of the many collestions of his “Tales.”

Hoffmann was 13 years old when the French Revolution began and 39 when Napoleon was defeated, so he came of age with the era of revolution and continental war. He earned his living as a bureaucrat for the Prussian state but was in his heart a Romantic in the most profound sense. Which is an interesting fact about human nature. He had his first really good job as a legal official in Prussian-ruled Poland, which meant that he was in Warsaw in 1806 when Napoleon's army marched in. (Wikipedia says “The Prussian bureaucrats lost their jobs. . . they divided the contents of the treasury between them and fled.” Which is just the kind of thing that might happen in a Hoffmann story.) Hoffmann later ended up stuck in the middle of the Battle of Dresden, bullets whistling through the house where he was taking shelter. And when the war finally ended and he got another good job, he fell ill with syphillis, which, among other things, killed him at the age of 46.

After reading or listening to eight Hoffmann tales, some of novella length, I have formed my own idea of where to place him in literary history. I think what it means to call Hoffmann's works “modern fantasy” is that they are set in a world of unbelief. In a Hoffmann story, people sometimes get a glimpse of the fairy world, but if they dare to mention it their friends tell them to stop working so hard, cut back on the drink and get some rest. After beholding the battle between the toys, led by the Nutcracker, and the minions of the Mouse King, Clara wants to tell her family but then thinks, “Of course none of them would believe me. They would only laugh at me.” 

On the other hand the stories themselves are for the most part quite traditional, firmly rooted in the fairytale universe. Hoffmann's world is full of princes and princesses, sometimes recognized and sometimes in hiding or under spells that make them forget who they really are. There are wizards, witches, talking animals, faraway kingdoms with outlandish names. One of his tricks is to take a character who has magical or sinister associations in folklore – an apple-selling crone, a natural philosopher, a wandering poet, a scholar of ancient languages – and, after introducing these people in a naturalistic way, show that they have magical powers after all. 

In Hoffmann's stories, as in fairy tales, the magical other world is always close by; but for Hoffmann the gate can only be opened by special people under special circumstances. Hoffmann was a Romantic, and for him the person able to cross into other lands is above all the poet. In one of the most famous stories, “The Golden Pot,” the hero eventually does marry a fairy princess and go to live in Atlantis. Dear reader, he says, you may well be jealous, but you should not be, because you can also live in the fairy realms whenever you like, through poetry. Others who manage to cross include a grown man who still acts in many ways like a child, a pair of lovers, and an overwrought man haunted by a tragic past.

Hoffmann had a fascination with doubles. He shared this with the German literati of his time; Goethe swore that he had seen his own doppelganger on the street in Bonn. In one of Hoffmann's stories two regular citizens of Rome dress up as the prince and princess of an exotic kingdom, who just happen to be in Rome visiting for the carnival, and great confusion ensues. The two ordinary Romans end up believing for a time that they are the real prince and princess, and this somehow, in a very Romantic way, makes them into better, nobler souls.

Hoffmann also had a thing for stories within stories. The written version of “The Nutcracker” devotes half its words to a story the toymaker Drosselmeyer tells Clara about how a prince came to be transformed into the Nutcracker. In general, if things ever are explained in a Hoffmann story, they are explained by a long and often rather tedious mythical tale; but just as often the relevance of the mythical tale is not at all obvious, and one wishes it had been left out.

Longwindedness is, I found one of Hoffmann's two biggest faults. I don't think he was being paid by the word, but he certainly wrote like he was. The other weakness is the problem he had making the fairy world wonderful. When the Other Lands are only hinted at, they can seem marvelous, but when they are described they become pages of purple prose about Suessian flowers and buildings carved from gem stones. In “The Golden Pot” the hero is presented with a choice between marriage to an earth girl who is pretty and charming in an ordinary way and the magical daughter of the King of the Salamanders, and despite the vast weight of adjectives lavished on the Salamander's daughter (beautiful, wondrous, gleaming, etc.) I thought the ordinary girl seemed like the more tempting choice.

Making things wonderful is just hard. Consider all the trouble Christian writers have making heaven appealing. In The Lord of the Rings the hints we get about the ancient cities of the elves make them seem amazing, but when you read about them in The Silmarillion they seem pretty drab. Like Hoffmann, H.P. Lovecraft devoted pages of overwrought prose to the gemstone cities of the Other Lands (he must have read Hoffmann, I think) but the effect is to make me think my suburb is a nicer place to live.

The same goes for horror, of course; in very few horror stories does the final reveal live up to the dark hints one gets at the beginning. Hoffmann has a dark reputation but at least in the stories I read, there wasn't much to be afraid of. Sometimes things are weird and confusing, but not at all scary.

Illustration to “The Golden Pot” by Alexander Pavlenko

What did magic mean to Hoffmann? 

I don't want to be too simplistic, because a lot happens in these stories, written across 20 years, and the atmosphere in them varies a great deal. But to me the core is that magic is gnosis; magic is the secret knolwedge that allows us to make sense of our chaotic world. In “The Golden Pot” the narrator tells us straight out that in Atlantis, as in poetry, “the sacred harmony of all being is revealed as the deepest secret of nature.” Through their crazy Roman carnival, our two young lovers reach some kind of understanding that makes them love each other more deeply and face the future with more confidence. When other characters learn that they are actually princes or princesses under a magic spell, mist falls from their eyes and they finally see things clearly. 

This is a major part of what we mean, I think, by Romanticism; a belief in a kind of knowledge one cannot study but may reach through art, love, and experience, a knowledge that lifts us up above the sordidness of human life and makes us, for a while, the princes and princes of Trebizond or Atlantis. Hoffmann rewrote fairytales in the light of this understanding. Sometimes the results are marvelous, but more often the flood of words gets in the way.

The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco

Three new Aztec codices have been discovered! They were kept by a family who considered themselves the stewards of traditional knowledge in Culhuacan and Iztapalapa, formerly a distinct region that is now within the Mexico City megalopolis. They have now been donated to National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico. The whole press conference at which this was announced is on YouTube; English summary here.

The first is called Map of the Founding of Tetepilco, and is a pictographic map which contains information regarding the foundation of San Andrés Tetepilco, as well as lists of toponyms to be found within Culhuacan, Tetepilco, Tepanohuayan, Cohuatlinchan, Xaltocan and Azcapotzalco. The second, the Inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco, is unique, as Oudijk remarks, since it is a pictographic inventory of the church of San Andrés Tetepilco, comprising two pages. Sadly, it is very damaged.

Finally, the third document, now baptised as the Tira of San Andrés Tetepilco, is a pictographic history in the vein of the Boturini and the Aubin codices, comprising historical information regarding the Tenochtitlan polity from its foundation to the year 1603. 

I think the above is the map; all of these are screen caps from the press conference.

And this is the inventory. All of the images below come from the chronicle. More on these documents here.








Thursday, March 21, 2024

LInks 22 March 2024

Mosaic from House of the Doves, Pompeii

British Wildlife Photography Awards.

Bipartisan momentum for nuclear energy in the US government.

AI says Biden is cognitively fine.

Since 2007, the cost of a megawatt of solar photovoltaic equipment has been falling at a rate of 44% per year. Which is amazing, although the essay this comes from errs in thinking that we can keep taking more land for solar farms indefinitely, when there is already opposition to every suggested plan.

Remarkable Ming Dynasty Tomb excavated.

The Callahans and the Murphys was a 1927 silent film that the studio pulled because it was so offensively stereotypical about the Irish, and it was thought lost, but a couple of clips survive. (NY Times, IFI)

Kevin Drum has the list of senior Trump appointees who do not now support him, starting with Mike Pence.

Sabine Hossenfelder, short video arguing that "our existence actually transcends the passage of time."

Alex Taborrok argues that it is unconstitutional for state universities to charge higher tuition to out-oif-state students, since Article IV says “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.”

About 74,000 years ago the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia erupted, perhaps the most powerful volcanic eruption seen by Homo sapiens sapiens. People have theorized that this nearly wiped out humanity, but evidence from Ethiopia joins evidence from two other regions in showing that humans coped just fine.

More biologists who think life began at undersea hydrothermal vents. Too bad their theory has a "then a miracle occurs" bit in the middle.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Classical Education, or, the Fearless Pursuit of Which Truths?

The New Yorker has a story this week about "classical education", focusing on middle and high schools, which reminded me that I had something to say about the "classical" curriculum being offered at the new University of Austin. 

In middle and high schools, "classical" education doesn't have much to do with the Greek and Roman classics. Instead it is about a vision of order: uniforms, quiet hallways, classrooms where respectful students memorize poems, diagram sentences, and learn facts about history rather than, I don't know, composing raps about slave revolts. On the one hand this is almost the perfect expression of one of contemporary conservatism's main themes, the fear of disorder; nothing speeds around conservative Twitter/X faster than a story about students assaulting their teacher. But on the other, some schools of this type do very well in poor neighborhoods, because it turns out that what many kids raised in very disorderly environments need is more order.

Besides, I loved memorizing poems, diagramming sentences, and participating in spelling bees.

Of course some of the current interest in education based on old books and old methods is just a reaction to various progressive foibles, and what some parents who send their children to such schools want is for them not to read stories about gay and trans people. But I have been doing my best to ignore that kind of trivia for fifty years now and propose to keep ignoring it, because I find it so peripheral to what education should be about. Education is too important to be left to people who want to fight about Heather's Two Mommies.

When we move to a higher level, whether that is college or the sort of elite prep school where kids really do read the Iliad, there is much more going on. At this level, one goal of a "classical" education is to get students away from their own lives and worlds and induce them to think in a more abstract, generalized way. Once they learn to do that, the theory goes, they can then apply their generalized reasoning skills and broad understanding of themes like justice and liberty to their own situations. There is a great deal of evidence from both the European and Chinese traditions that this can work. We have seen many, many people who were educated by reading 2,000-year-old books and went on to careers as political reformers and even revolutionaries (Jefferson, Robespierre, Talleyrand, Disraeli, Lenin, Yau Lit).

The classical model of education was always opposed, at least in the west (and after 1840 in China) by people who thought it was a gigantic waste of time. Better, the competing theory went, to immerse yourself in actual contemporary problems. This was related to the growing importance of science and engineering, which to many people seemed more useful subjects of study than Plato's ethics.

Which brings me to the University of Austin, a new university that is being opened with the expressed goal of fighting the takeover of American higher education by woke leftists. Their vision of education is "classical" in the sense of trying to get students away from contemporary concerns and toward a higher, more theoretical plane. From their description of the freshman curriculum:

Seminars will examine (among other subjects) the foundations of civilization and political life; the importance of law, virtue, order, beauty, meaningful work and leisure, and the sacred; the unique vibrancy of the American form of government and way of life; and the character and consequences of ideological tyranny. What is knowledge, and how does it differ from wisdom? What does it mean to say that we are modern? What is technology, and what are its intellectual presuppositions, social conditions, benefits, and dangers? Why do we suffer? Does death negate the meaning of life? Works studied will range from Homer, Euclid, Genesis, the Gospel of John, Ibn Tufayl, and Confucius to Descartes, Tocqueville, Orwell, Douglass, and O’Connor.

What I wanted to say when I first read this paragraph is that it is riven with contradictions at the deepest level. Other than being famous, what do these authors have in common? Consider the work from this list I happen to have looked into most recently, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, which translates as something like "Alive, Son of Awake." This medieval Arab work tells the story of a feral boy raised by a gazelle on a desert island, who teaches himself the language of birds and discovers the truths of philosophy by reasoning. In particular, he reasons his way to belief in one supreme god. He also becomes humankind's greatest astrologer, although I got lost in that part and skipped most of it. One might be tempted to call this mysticism, since it implies that an uneducated child, removed from the corruption of society, can work his way to divine understanding more readily than a scholar with a library full of old books. On the other hand, it is full of old philsophical ideas, especially Plato's.

Taken literally, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, is not an argument in favor of "classical" education. It is closer to the opposite, a sort of hippie faith in the innate creativity and goodness of children. It is also ridiculous. One assumes, then, that it is not being taught as a text the students are supposed to believe. 

So why is it being taught? Why are any of these books taught? Once upon a time people said that we assigned them because you needed some familiarity with them to be considered educated, but that is certainly not true now. Is it because they are good texts for introducing students to big ideas? Because the impressive names get students to pay attention in a way that books by Bill Smith and Ralph Jones would not? Because they make for good discussions? 

Do any of them contain some sort of truth that we want students to absorb?

Consider that the U. of Austin offers these two mottoes in parallel:

WE FEARLESSLY PURSUE THE TRUTH
At UATX, we recognize the existence of truth. We seek truth so that we may flourish.

WE CHAMPION ACADEMIC FREEDOM
At UATX, students, faculty and scholars have the right to pursue their academic interests and deliberate freely, without fear of censorship or 
retribution.

It seems to me that these two statements directly contradict one another. If you believe in the truth, and think that having it leads to flourishing, why do you tolerate falseness? And why do you assign classic works that nobody agrees with any more? Ibn Tufayl may be ridiculous (as I think), but he is far from the worst author in the "Great Books" curriculum. From Aristotle's defense of slavery to Lenin's preaching of violence as a sacred calling, the western tradition is really pretty awful. The Iliad is about how great it is to kill people. If the Gospel of John is true and promotes flourishing, what possible reason could there be to read the Iliad?

What if some student, professor or scholar thinks that the "American form of government and way of life" are not "uniquely vibrant," but monstrous and horrific? What if some student, professor, or scholar thinks contemporary America is a Satan-besotted doomscape due for righteous cleansing by God any day now? What if somebody is a woke Marxist?

Two contradictory visions of education are on offer here and, I think, two contradictory visions of America. In one there is the Truth, and we struggle to understand it and align our lives to it so that we may flourish. Everything else is, by definintion, false. This is the way Jesuit eduction used to work: yes, a fair amount of intellectual exploration, but always in the service of Catholicism. Some of the conservative intellectuals who have been in the news lately seem to share this perspective, like Sohrab Ahmari, who has argued that since freedom and democracy have made America a godless wasteland, we should discard them. 

You cannot, in a deep, philosophical sense, be for both unfettered debate and a nation that flourishes because it adheres to a certain truth. And you cannot, I submit, simultaneously value the western canon, believe fervently in free inquiry, and operate a university that has any real connection to modern conservatism.

To the extent that the UATX curriculum tries to straddle this divide, it is incoherent. Of course, it might still function ok; the whole program of American higher education is incoherent. But I wonder if UATX can maintain the enthusiasm of its supporters while pursuing both academic freedom and conservatism.

Which gets me back to the two visions of America I alluded to back in November. One kind of American patriotism maintains that there are good and bad Americans. The good ones stand for God, Country, Military Sacrifice, the Constitution, football, barbecue, driving big cars, and Standing On Your Own Feet. The bad ones, well, you know who they are.

I adhere to a different model of patriotism. I think America is great because it holds all kinds of people who agree about nothing. I like the country the way it is, and I would hate to see it evolve into anyone's idea of perfection. This extends to how I feel about education. I like assigning old books partly because they are full of ideas I find horrific. My own educational plan would include subjecting my students to Aquinas on why masturbation is worse than rape, Lenin on revolution, the Iliad or the Hagakure on war, and so on. I think education should shake people up.

But I would be the first to admit that I don't know the truth about the Big Questions, and that my way of teaching probably doesn't help anyone else work that out, either.

I have met various conservatives, going all the way back to Party of the Right guys at Yale, who told me that they celebrate unfettered debate because it inevitably leads to conservatism. I think that's nuts. So far as I can see, unfettered debate inevitably leads to disagreement. If UATX really pursues a policy of complete academic freedom, they are going to end up with Marxists, Maoists, Woke Liberals, Race theorists, Libertarians, and probably Holocaust deniers.

I submit that you cannot simultaneously value the western canon, believe fervently in free inquiry, and operate a university that has any real connection to modern conservatism. I mean, hardly any of the authors in either the UATX list or the similar list at St. Johns believed in democracy; most of them would have been frankly horrified by America. (On the other hand the curriculum for Directed Studies at Yale includes more democrats.)

I suspect that what the rich people backing UATX want is the middle school model, education that is orderly, patriotic, anti-hippie, anti-woke. Some of the professors involved probably do want genuine free inquiry, including taking Marxism or polyamory seriously as ideas. As I said, it is certainly possible that UATX can come into being and thrive despite this contradiction.

But to the extent that UATX really promotes the Fearless Pursuit of the Truth, it will promote, not order or conservatism, but violent disagreement.

False Spring in Catonsville




We're still four weeks away from our expected last frost, and we have freezing temperatures in the forecast for this week, so it looks like a lot of stuff has bloomed too soon. But it has been a glorious week.



Friday, March 15, 2024

Links 15 March 2024

Marc Chagall, The Sun of Paris

World's oldest loaf of bread found at Çatalhöyük. It's roll-sized, made of barley, wheat and peas, and had been left out to absorb wild yeast and ferment for some time before a house fire aborted its trip to the oven.

Amusing street art by Frankey

Spectacular gold-filled tomb excavated in Panama.

The phrase "late capitalism" was coined in 1902 and has meant several different things since then.

Fascinating review of a new book on text-based amulets in medieval England.

Armies worldwide are equipping their elite infantry with special computerized gun sights that are supposed to let them shoot down small drones with rifle fire.

Remarkable Neolithic village site found in France with a large cemetery, wonderful. English at The History Blog, French original at INRAP.

Today's headline: Georgia Men Plotted to Have ‘Large Python’ Eat Woman’s Daughter, Feds Say.

NY Times headline about the upcoming election: A Nation Craving Change Gets More of the Same. As I have noted here before, the endless desire of Americans for some nebulous "change" never ceases to amaze me. I cannot recall any candidate ever saying, "Things are pretty good and I want to keep them that way."

Kevin Drum: We Are Living in a Golden Age of Light Bulbs

The brightest object yet observed in the universe is a quasar that shines 500 trillion times more brightly than our sun. 

Sabine Hossenfelder on one of the most exciting ideas in recent physics, Postquantum Gravity, 7-minute video. And Hossenfelder tries to bury String Theory, 25-minute video. Trenchant and amusing.

In 1940 Walter Benjamin committed suicide while fleeing from the Nazis. But he put off his flight from Paris until he had finished this 8-page manuscript, On the Concept of History. Benjamin was a key progenitor of the "woke" view that history is nothing but oppression, progress is a lie, and this should make us sad. Incidentally Marxist thinkers do not agree on what attitude Benjamin took here to "historical materialism," but it is certainly complex and not a clear endorsement.

Quick summary on Twitter/X of what is in the new AI Act just passed by the European Parliament.

The Squamish Nation owns a lot of valuable land in Vancouver. After years of protecting it from development, they have decided to partner with a major real estate developer to build a bunch of tall apartment towers. Because it's their land, the local planning authority has no say, and neither do the citizens of Vancouver, some of whom are shocked by this departure from their notion of native values. Via Alex Tabarrok.

Emanuel Macron on French TV, Thursday: "If Ukraine falls, our security will be at risk. If Russia continues to escalate, if the situation worsens, we must be ready, and we will be ready. . . . we will make the necessary decisions to ensure that Russia never wins." Macron is one of several senior European officials to have said lately that Russia is preparing for war with NATO. That seems crazy to me but then so did invading Ukraine.

Ukraine's naval drones have basically closed the Black Sea to Russian military shipping.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Iranian Fire Festival as Protest

Farnaz Fassihi in the NY Times:

Iranians have looked for opportunities in recent months to display defiance against the rules of the clerical government. In Tuesday night’s annual fire festival, many found a chance. Across Iran, thousands of men and women packed the streets as they danced wildly to music and jumped joyfully over large bonfires. . . . The police said the crowds were so large in Tehran and other cities that traffic came to a standstill for many hours. . . .

This is the festival called Chaharshanbeh Suri, part of the lead-up to Nowruz, the traditional Persian New Year, which falls at the Spring Equinox.

In many places, the gatherings turned political, with crowds chanting, “Freedom, freedom, freedom,” “Death to the dictator” and “Get lost, clerics,” . . . The dancing crowds were another example of how far a large part of Iran’s society, particularly the youth, has moved away from the ruling clerics.

In some apartment complexes in Tehran and other cities, DJs played Persian pop songs as a packed crowd danced and sang along. . . People circled the bonfire and held hands while singing “For Women, for Life, for Freedom” from the lyrics of “Baraye,” an anthem of the female-led uprising in 2022.

It's deeply moving to see people defying their oppressors in this joyful way, but I still see little chance that the regime will fall.

Heinrich Lefler

Heinrich Lefler (1863 – 1919) was an Austrian artist who did a bit of everything: painting, drawing, graphic design, and staging. He is one of those artists for whom there will never be a complete catalog, because for years he paid the bills by doing whatever came through the door. 



I discovered Lefler through his calendars, which are all over the internet.



He also did well-known illustrations of fairy tales.




I like these, done for a chronicle of German history. I could look at pictures like these all day.

Steve Fraser, "The End of the Future"

In an interesting if ultimately irritating essay at Jacobin, Steve Fraser takes on one of my favorite questions: why are Americans so depressed about the future? Fraser is focused on politics, where no party holds out hope for anything both new and good. Conservatives, ok, one might expect them to decry change and try to reverse it. But liberals and even radicals, he argues, are the same, focused entirely on bringing back certain parts of the past. The Bernie Sanders campaign was all about brining back the New Deal. But this, says, Fraser, is not what radicalism used to be.

Historically, however, the Left was always about creating new worlds. Rather than restoring the past, it approached history as a platform for inspiring the future.

Yes, Sanders and his people realized that the New Deal had flaws, but: 

Criticizing the New Deal for its imperfections, even the most damning imperfections, is categorically different than reckoning with its vaunted achievements.

After all, what made the age a golden one — its unionized assembly line, its social security, its decent standard of living — came at a steep price: the soul-crushing monotony of that same unionized workplace; work surveilled, disciplined, and alien; political inhibition; pervasive social and sexual self-repression; bureaucracy’s iron cage (Weber’s “polar night of icy darkness”); the tutelary condescension of the social welfare apparatus; imperial domination masquerading as democracy; an insatiable appetite for consumer fantasies from which the heart grew ever more diseased; and an enervating decomposition of the social organism and its replacement by a narcissistic, anomic individualism. The New Deal was a peace treaty that, like many such settlements, left the underlying causes of war unresolved. 

If the New Deal was born, in part, out of revolutionary desires, resuscitating its corpse won’t rekindle those aspirations. Only a vibrant anticipation of a wholly new way of life, a renewal of the future, can do that. But the future is dead. How did that happen?

The answer, says Fraser, is that "capitalism" killed the future. This is an interesting point of view, but I'm not buying it. Fraser admits that capitalism had a big part in creating our longing for an ever brighter future. But capitalism has changed, he says, becoming that dreaded thing, "neoliberalism."

What is commonly referred to as neoliberalism might better be characterized from a materialist standpoint as the era of deindustrialization and disaccumulation, as an asset-bubble economy with little in the way of productive investment.

This kind of thing makes me crazy. Capitalism has many flaws, but a lack of "productive investment" is not one of them. Who created the personal computer? The internet? The cellular phone? Yes, all of these things relied on basic research funded by the government, but private firms have invested multiple trillions of dollars in these industries. Who is building solar and wind farms at such a staggering rate? Private companies; according to the White House, private investment in green energy and associated manufacturing has been half a trillion dollars since 2021. (They would be building even more if local governments were not fighting so hard to stop them.) Who is building electric cars? Efficient heat pumps? LED light bulbs? Who is experimenting with fusion reactors? And, sorry, if you don't think those things are "productive" in the same sense as steel mills, you're just a deranged tankie.

And then there is the question of "deindustrialization":

Deindustrialization was not only destructive but demoralizing. Whole ways of life went under. Industries, unions, towns, churches, fraternal societies, main-street businesses, local hospitals, schoolhouses, community centers, movie theaters, and dozens of social gathering places from restaurants to bowling alleys all died away or lingered on as ghostly remains. Beginning in the late 1990s, what one book has called “deaths of despair” became an epidemic. These fatalities from suicides, or suicides by drugs and alcohol-saturated livers, occurred disproportionately among middle-aged white people, those supposed beneficiaries of Progress: mainly working class, lacking higher education, often out of work, fearful of new information-age technologies, downwardly mobile, coming from failed marriages and broken families and shrinking social support networks.

Which, fine, it is true that many Americans are suffering, and that many communities are dying. But if you think struggling people and dying communities are new problems, you should learn more about the nineteenth century. And if you think the US is "de-industrializing," I invite you to glance at the graph of industrial production shown above. American manufacturing is booming. True, it is not the same as it was before; the labor intensive parts have mostly moved to Asia or Mexico, and what remains employs ever fewer workers. But manufacturing employs fewer workers everywhere in the world. And if you think we should be doing something to keep coal miners mining, like the Germans do, sorry, I disagree.

I simply don't buy simple economic explanations of our problems. The American economy is doing really well, better over the past 25 years than almost all other rich nations. Yes, a lot of our jobs suck, but as Fraser admits, lots of old industrial jobs sucked, too, and those jobs were a lot more dangerous than ours are. But in the US we have deaths of despair and Italy, where there has been no meaningful economic growth in a generation, does not.

I found this more interesting, about the failure of liberalism:

Liberalism, as it morphed into neoliberalism, had betrayed itself by abandoning the future. As Christopher Lasch pointed out decades ago, this entailed giving up on its own humanist tradition, its point d’honneur and the basis of its legitimacy in favor of an ill-kept promise to deliver the goods. It had become its own refutation; at once cheering on an extremist individualism, wreaking havoc here, there, and everywhere in the name of freedom, while simultaneously bemoaning the loss of community and the family that its own imperatives made inevitable.

I think there is something to this, and I would say that the sad demise of clubs and bowling leagues that Fraser blames on "deindustrialization" owes more to this than to economic changes. Not that I am blaming liberalism for this; MAGA might be the most hyper-individualist mass movement in history.

But if we are suffering from "extremist individualism," what are we supposed to do about that? Ban social media? Jail the Kardashians? 

And how would socialism help?

I still think all of this misses the basic point, which is the ocean of misery that seems to me woefully under-motivated. At Jacobin they devote a lot of energy to arguing that the problem of global warming doesn't change the basic economic issue they want to focus on, the need for socialism; besides "neoliberalism," the main idea they attack is "green capitalism." But it seems to me that saying we are doomed under capitalism is the same as saying we are doomed, period, because we are not going to have socialism. 

I think people like the writers at Jacobin are part of the reason we are so depressed about the future. Just like environmental doomsters and MAGA ranters, they fulminate nonstop about how bad things are, about how even things that actually look good on the surface are really disastrous underneath. THAT, to me, is precisely the problem, the unwillingness of any major group of contemporary intellectuals to see that the glass is half full. I don't think Fraser has an explanation for why that is so.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Daffodils and Orchids



Peak daffodils already, weeks early.



And a conjunction of reblooming orchids. Learning how to make this happen has been one of my greatest advances of the past few years.

Monday, March 11, 2024

A Day on the Potomac

I was "monitoring" today, which means watching other people work and hoping my learned presence deters them from damaging nearby archaeological sites. The work I was watching today went in fits and starts, so I had a fair amount of downtime. Which I used to explore.

In the morning I walked down a little stream to the Potomac River; after a very wet winter and heavy rains on Saturday, the stream was roaring along.

The Potomac was high

which blocked the trail loop I was hoping to walk.

But the river wasn't actually flooding, as you can see from the old flood gauge, still dry.

There were blubells down by the river.



Walking in the morning I saw no wildflowers in the woods, but as the afternoon warmed they opened up all around me.

When work died down again in the afternoon I walked off in a different direction, toward the ruins of the Leiter Estate. This was the country house of people whose Washington house has its own wikipedia page. Above is a plan of the estate in 1918.

One of the paths that cris-crossed their grounds happened to lead from where I was working up toward the house.

Garage.

House ruin, with the river in the background.

Some other ruin.

View up the old driveway.

Yes, I was really there.