Quotulatiousness

August 29, 2023

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois “runs so fantastically counter to the entire ideology of ‘decolonise'”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:10

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill finds himself surprised at the inclusion of a very unusual book on a list demanded by those pushing for “decolonization” of university curricula:

W.E.B. Du Bois by James E. Purdy, 1907, gelatin silver print, from the National Portrait Gallery which has explicitly released this digital image under the CC0 license.
Wikimedia Commons.

“Decolonise the curriculum” is a movement that wants university courses to focus less on dead white European males and more on writers of colour. Its argument is that black students need texts that speak directly to them. They need books by authors who look like them. They need books about experiences and ideas they can more readily relate to than they can the stuff written about in “high white culture”. Black students must be able to recognise themselves in what they study, we’re told, or else they’ll feel cheated and demeaned.

I was surprised to find that one of the leading decolonise movements, at the University of Edinburgh, was arguing for WEB Du Bois’ 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, to be included on the English curriculum. The activists said it was unreasonable to expect black students to engage with so many white authors. They also need to engage with people like Du Bois, in whose work they might “recognise themselves”. I was surprised, not because I think The Souls of Black Folk shouldn’t be on more university courses – absolutely it should. No, it’s because The Souls of Black Folk runs so fantastically counter to the entire ideology of “decolonise”. It made me wonder if these activists have even read it. Du Bois’ book contains some of the finest arguments you will ever read against the idea that high culture is a white thing that others cannot connect with.

One of my favourite passages in the book, from the chapter on what kind of education black men are fit for, touches on this very question. Here Du Bois makes his critique of those in his own time who were arguing that blacks only require basic education and industrial training. He describes his own experience of higher learning, writing:

    I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the colour line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas … From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension.

That passage, Du Bois’ moving belief that Shakespeare does not wince at him, captures a central thread of his writing: universalism. Du Bois agitates against accommodating to segregation or low expectations, and argues for the rights of “black folk” to assimilate into the spoils of civilisation; to become, as he puts it, “co-workers in the kingdom of culture”. To those in the late 1800s and early 1900s who argued that black people needed a targeted form of culture, one specific to their needs and capacities, Du Bois said: “We daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than breadwinning, is the privilege of white men, and the danger and delusion of black men.”

Du Bois insisted that it is only through assimilation into the “kingdom of culture” that self-knowledge and self-improvement can truly occur. As he wrote: “Wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil.” The veil he’s referring to is the veil of colour, the one that separated blacks from whites in post-slavery America. For Du Bois, that veil was best lifted via assimilation into the American republic’s political universe and its realm of culture.

Du Bois’ critique of the notion that high culture was for white men, and would prove mystifying to black men, has sadly been superseded by an “anti-racism” with an entirely different outlook. Now, the supposedly radical stance is to believe that high culture is disorientating for black people, and possibly even damaging to their self-esteem, and therefore they require something more targeted. In short, they need release from the kingdom of culture. That, in essence, is what the decolonise movement desires: the “liberation” of non-white peoples from the cultural gains of Western civilisation. Behold the crisis of universalist belief.

August 22, 2023

Societal norms breaking down even among music fans at concerts

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia on the increasing number of performing artists on stage who are being physically attacked by their own fans at live concerts:

Consider these recent events:

  • During a Pink concert in London, a fan tossed a bag of human ashes on stage. Pink was totally chill, and on the video of the incident can be heard asking: “Is this your mom?”
  • A fan threw a cellphone at Drake during a Chicago performance — and the singer almost caught it, but it hit his hand instead.
  • Pop singer Bebe Rexha wasn’t so fortunate, and a hurled phone sent her to the hospital in June.
  • Harry Styles has been repeatedly struck with objects while performing — taking on everything from a flying Chicken McNugget to a water bottle in the groin.
  • Country star Kelsea Ballerini was struck by a flying bracelet thrown by a fan in Boise, Idaho. Jewelry is a lovely gift, but in this instance the impact caused the singer to flinch, and stop playing her guitar. A few minutes later she had to leave the stage.
  • An assailant actually jumped on stage during an Ava Max performance in Los Angeles, and slapped the singer, scratching her eye in the process — before a security guard restrained him. The singer somehow managed to finish the song.
  • Rapper Latto got hit with a flying object during a concert in Germany. She responded by telling the perpetrator “I’ma beat your ass.”

It’s a curious coincidence that, during this same period, activists have started throwing things at famous works of art. You wouldn’t normally think of museums and concert halls as epicenters of paintball-esque outbursts. But in the year 2023, they are hot spots for all the worst tendencies.

Of course, there’s a long history of fans throwing things on stage. But until recently, they were usually nice things. Only in the rarest instance — for example, a vaudeville show of embarrassingly low quality — were tomatoes tossed at a performer.

[…]

Our culture has changed, and not for the better. I have come to believe — as I’ve explained elsewhere — that US society shifts between cycles of hot and cool. We are currently approaching the peak of the hot cycle, and this is always accompanied by anger, conflict, and violence.

When I first started to say this, more than 15 years ago, people were skeptical. But who will deny it after everything we’ve seen in the intervening years?

You may think that violence plays out on the battlefield, not at a pop concert. But music has always been a cultural indicator. In some ways, it is our most revealing source of information on society. Sometimes the future shows up in our music even before it gets covered in the newspapers.

So even if I am saddened by the craziness at music concerts, I can’t say I’m surprised There’s something ugly simmering in our society, and it has finally arrived at the pricey front row seats of concerts. All of sudden, fans have decided that an expensive ticket gives them the right to do something abusive to their favorite pop star.

It makes no sense, but it’s definitely part of the zeitgeist. And it will almost certainly get worse before it gets better.

But these cycles eventually turn. There’s a law of reflexivity at work. People do burn out on anger, sooner or later. I’m hoping it will be sooner in this instance.

August 21, 2023

Baby Boomers – “a marketing category is not an age group”

Filed under: Health, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt (who’s a few years younger than me) tackles the generational conflict that always seems to flare up on social media, if not so much in real life:

I’m going to write about boomers, why a lot of us blame them for … almost everything, why my generation (roughly 55 to 64) not only are not boomers, but tend to be the most vociferous in “D*mn it, I’m not a boomer.” Why I’m vaguely amused that millennials call everyone older than them “boomer”. And why I find it bizarre that my kids both hate millennials and identify as millennials, though they both are d*mn close to z and closer to z in attitudes. (And the younger one in date of birth, I think.) And why all this is unfair, because a marketing category is not an age group, and yet, perfectly fair in aggregate, because demographics is not destiny, but it sure as heck is economy. And economics shapes your life in a way you probably can’t think about too deeply without becoming enraged.

So, yeah, friends, in-betweeners, X, millenials and Zers, lend me your ears. I come not to bury the boomers and not to praise them, but to explain to everyone, including the sane boomers in the audience why the fractiousness exists, and to give — under the heading of giving perspective on the lives of others that we normally keep quiet about — an idea of how my non-generation (We certainly are not Jones. We don’t jones for anything that the boomers had. We just aren’t them) has gone through. Without blaming the boomers, because an accident of birth is not their fault.

First of all, and taking in account that I’m the one who says the population is not booming out of control, let me dismiss the idea the baby boom wasn’t real. That’s goofy. (To put it mildly.) You can argue the causes, but for about ten years — no, not the twenty five claimed. Marketing generations are not demographic generations — after World War II, families grew. Blame it on prosperity, which allowed one parent to stay home and raise the sprogs. Blame it on tax credits (it has been argued if the comparable applied today, people would have families of five or six too.) Sure, blame it on the move rural to city, which was tied to prosperity too, and the fact that the newly independent nuclear families didn’t have to put up with grandma’s critique of their child bearing or raising. Or blame it on the men having been away and the relief of the long war being over.

Blame it on whatever you want, but even without looking at the numbers, just by looking at family histories, families of five or six weren’t rare. And three was about average, I think. Four not anything to remark on.

But, you’ll say, that’s fairly normal for the past period. Sure. My mom, who was almost a boomer comes from a family of five (should be six, one lost in infancy) and dad from a family of four. And I’m almost sixty, and both dad and I were very late children. So, yeah “But that was normal before.”

Yes, it was, but now throw in prosperity, moves to the cities and … It’s not the babies who were born, you see, it’s the ones who survived. Even mom who was raised, for brevity of explanation, in a slum where going to your playfriend’s funeral, or more likely his infant sibling’s funeral was absolutely normal, had more of her friends survive than was normal for her parent’s generation.

To put it another way. Up until the late 19th century, women routinely bore 10 children and didn’t get to raise a single one to adulthood.

Even in the nineteenth century, women at the upper class level Jane Austen wrote about, routinely made two or three baby shrouds as part of their trousseau. Because that many deaths were expected. By my parent’s time that had improved — no, not medicine, sanitation. Better drains, a weekly bath, and washing your clothes more than twice a year — to the point that you would regularly raise about half of what you bore. (My family, having steel constitutions rarely lost a child. To compensate, we were always relatively low fertility.)

The improvement brought on by rudimentary sanitation and washing up was such that in the nineteenth century Europe burst at the seams with kids, which led to rapid invention, expansion, and yes, the adoption of a lot of half baked ideas. Because that’s the result of a lot of kids suddenly in a society. Baby busts … well, most of the Middle Ages, lead to slow innovation, a tendency to ossify the social structures, laws and regulations increasingly made by old men, for a world they only imagine exists. Stop me when this sounds familiar.

The baby boom happened at the intersection of the discovery of antibiotics and their popularization and also inoculation of school aged kids, both of which meant an unexpected number of children surviving childhood and surviving it in good health. And people having about the number of children their parents had. BUT — and this is very important — those children grew to adulthood and did so without any significant physical impairment.

What it caused was the same effect as if everyone alive had decided to have double or more the number of children. It was a massive demographic elephant moving through the societal snake.

August 20, 2023

QotD: Fear of death

Filed under: Health, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The two basic drivers of social change are fear of death and caloric surplus. They exist, as Marxists would say if they cared about actual human behavior, dialectically — the fear of death prompts a frantic search for caloric surplus; once attained, caloric surplus makes the once-adaptive fear of death neurotic and dysfunctional, literally morbid.

[…]

As pretty much every Victorian anthropologist remarked, “savages” all seem deliriously happy — when life is a constant struggle, your every moment is filled with deep meaning, high purpose. So, too, with men at war — Robert Graves or someone like that once said that his time in the trenches were the greatest moments of his life, because everything other than the now disappeared. I can’t speak from personal experience, but I’d lay good money that no combat veteran completely re-enters the civilian world, largely for this reason.

Those are reasonable fears of death. We all accept, intellectually, that we could go at any time, and we will inevitably go eventually, but unless you’ve had a brush with death — a moment where you know, with perfect clarity, that there’s a significant chance you’re going now — you can’t really appreciate it, emotionally.

Severian, “Communal Salvation”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-11-19.

August 14, 2023

The WEIRDos – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies

Filed under: Books, Economics, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Another anonymous book review at Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten considers The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich:

Coming as he does from the scientific side of the aisle, Henrich isn’t just going to tell a story. He has a hypothesis about an empirical puzzle. The puzzle is the most important question, the big one, the one that once you think about it’s hard to think about anything else, the economists’ Holy Grail since Adam Smith: why are some countries rich and others poor?

His hypothesis comes from cross-cultural psychology. The West got rich because Westerners are different. People from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies are WEIRD – the acronym comes from a previous article of his. In particular, compared to everyone else in the world and in history, modern Westerners:

  • Are individualist, not collectivist or conformist
  • Feel more guilt and less shame
  • Explain people’s actions by their innate dispositions, not their social role
  • Reason analytically not holistically
  • Follow more universal norms and less relationship-specific norms
  • Are more patient
  • Trust strangers more and are more honest.

This psychology might make societies richer, for fairly well-known and plausible reasons. The Weirdest People in the World (henceforth just WEIRD) sets out a causal chain from cultural change to psychological change to modern economic growth. The start of that chain is surprising: an obscure set of rules pushed by the medieval Catholic church, which banned marriage between cousins. The most important argument of the book is that these rules created WEIRD psychology.

How it worked: these marriage regulations served to dismantle intensive kin networks, which are the social cement of society almost everywhere else in the world. For most people in history, family hasn’t just been the place where children grow up and couples spend time together. Family has been the basic human group, and there have been extensive and precise rules dictating who counts as family (or clan) and how each person should act with respect to different relatives. The Church’s regulations, the Marriage and Family Programme (MFP), aimed to replace intensive kinship, and over many centuries it was more or less successful in doing that. We’ll come back shortly to why it wanted to.

So, the causal chain looks like this:1

WEIRD‘s key evidence is the link between the places where the Church promulgated the MFP and a set of psychological and social outcomes: the level of cousin marriage, the psychology of people living in those places today, social capital and economic growth. This is the scientific story of European history, and Henrich’s answer to the most important question in the world.

These maps from one of the scientific articles behind WEIRD show the basic causal claim: the medieval church reduced the intensity of kinship institutions.

He tells it with an extraordinary mastery of a very wide range of sources from anthropology, psychology, behavioural economics, economic history, and historical narrative. This book is for everyone, but the connoisseur will enjoy the bibliography: if you think it’s important and relevant, it’s probably in there, and there was also plenty of work which I did not know, and now feel I should. It takes a very smart person to keep this many balls in the air. Being at Harvard probably doesn’t hurt either – that’s the “collective brain” of the human network, which makes an appearance later on in the book.

So this book really sets down a marker: the anthropologists are returning from the Amazon, the Sudan and Polynesia, and coming for Western history and economics. It will be interesting to see how those target disciplines react.

Is it true?

Economists and historians think about Western history very differently.

Historians love irony and contingency. They enjoy byways. Triumphalist, linear narratives of progress are distrusted as “Whig history”. Growth economists, by contrast, are all about the linear bigness. They have a relentless focus on the one question of how the West got rich, and if you call that triumphalist, they will take out a chart of South Sudanese child mortality and laugh at you.

Both historians and historical economists — a more appropriate name than “economic historians” nowadays — are interested in causality. But economists have a crunchier, more “scientific” standard for what counts as proof of causality. You’ve got to have a treatment and a control group, and by default if you claim there are no confounds, they won’t believe you. You need you some plausible exogeneity. A random river where Napoleon’s armies stopped. The distance from Wittemberg where Luther nailed up his theses. And then, how does that affect something that matters today (if it doesn’t, then who cares?) Of course, the longer ago the exogenous treatment, the more impressive the result.

You can see the incentives that these disciplinary demands might set up, and that might worry you. At worst, you might get a kind of “underground river” concept of history, where

  1. X happened long ago
  2. [underpants gnomes whispering]
  3. Y is correlated with X today

Indeed this does seem to skip all the interesting, contingent bits:

On the other hand, if you want to explain an all-important outcome like the take-off into modern economic growth, then you can’t just mumble “one damn thing after another” or “irony and contingency”. That a hundred things randomly conspired to make the West Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic is not a satisfying story. Why would the die rolls keep favouring this one place? (And you can’t invoke the law of large numbers. There are only five continents in the world, and modern economic growth did not have to happen anywhere at all.)

    1. It’s a bit more complex than that. In particular, the end of intensive kinship directly helps economic growth because it clears the way for voluntary associations to thrive. But the psychology angle is what’s really unique to WEIRD – in particular, Francis Fukuyama has previously argued that kin institutions might be a problem for higher-level cooperation.

QotD: The US Army in the Korean War

Filed under: Asia, History, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Korea was the kind of war that since the dawn of history was fought by professionals, by legions. It was fought by men who soon knew they had small support or sympathy at home, who could read in the papers statements by prominent men that they should be withdrawn. It was fought by men whom the Army — at its own peril — had given neither training nor indoctrination, nor the hardness and bitter pride men must have to fight a war in which they do not in their hearts believe.

The Army needed legions, but society didn’t want them. It wanted citizen-soldiers.

But the sociologists are right — absolutely right — in demanding that the centurion view of life not be imposed upon America. In a holy, patriotic war — like that fought by the French in 1793, or as a general war against Communism will be — America can get a lot more mileage out of citizen-soldiers than it can from legions.

No one has suggested that perhaps there should be two sets of rules, one for the professional Army, which may have to fight in far places, without the declaration of war, and without intrinsic belief in the value of its dying, for reasons of policy, chessmen on the checkerboard of diplomacy; and one for the high-minded, enthusiastic, and idealistic young men who come aboard only when the ship is sinking.

The other answer is to give up Korea-type wars, and to surrender great-power status, and a resultant hope of order — our own decent order — in the world. But America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world.

It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.

In the first six months America suffered a near debacle because her Regular Army fighting men were the stuff of legions, but they had not been made into legionaries.

America was not more soft or more decadent than it had been twenty years earlier. It was confused, badly, on its attitudes toward war. It was still bringing up its youth to think there were no tigers, and it was still reluctant to forge them guns to shoot tigers.

Many of America’s youth, in the Army, faced horror badly because they had never been told they would have to face horror, or that horror is very normal in our unsane world. It had not been ground into them that they would have to obey their officers, even if the orders got them killed.

It has been a long, long time since American citizens have been able to take down the musket from the mantelpiece and go tiger hunting. But they still cling to the belief that they can do so, and do it well, without training.

This is the error that leads some men to cry out that Americans are decadent.

If Americans in 1950 were decadent, so were the rabble who streamed miserably into Valley Forge, where von Steuben made soldiers out of them. If American society had no will to defend itself, neither did it in 1861, at First Manassas, or later at Shiloh, when whole regiments of Americans turned tail and ran.

The men who lay warm and happy in their blankets at Kasserine, as the panzers rolled toward them in the dawn, were decadent, by this reasoning.

The problem is not that Americans are soft but that they simply will not face what war is all about until they have had their teeth kicked in. They will not face the fact that the military professionals, while some have ideas about society in general that are distorted and must be watched, still know better than anyone else how a war is won.

Free society cannot be oriented toward the battlefield — Sparta knew that trap — but some adjustments must be made, as the squabbling Athenians learned to their sorrow.

The sociologists and psychologists of Vienna had no answer to the Nazi bayonets, when they crashed against their doors. The soldiers of the democratic world did.

More than once, as at Valley Forge, after Bull Run, and Kasserine, the world has seen an American army rise from its own ashes, reorient itself, grow hard and bitter, knowledgeable and disciplined and tough.

In 1951, after six months of being battered, the Eighth Army in Korea rose from its own ashes of despair. No man who was there still believes Americans in the main are decadent, just as no man who saw Lieutenant General Matt Ridgway in operation doubts the sometime greatness of men.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.

August 1, 2023

QotD: US Army culture before the Korean War

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Doolittle Board of 1945-1946 met, listened to less than half a hundred complaints, and made its recommendations. The so-called “caste system” of the Army was modified. Captains, by fiat, suddenly ceased to be gods, and sergeants, the hard-bitten backbone of any army, were told to try to be just some of the boys. Junior officers had a great deal of their power to discipline taken away from them. They could no longer inflict any real punishment, short of formal court-martial, nor could they easily reduce ineffective N.C.O.’s. Understandably, their own powers shaky, they cut the ground completely away from their N.C.O.’s.

A sergeant, by shouting at some sensitive yardbird, could get his captain into a lot of trouble. For the real effect of the Doolittle recommendations was psychological. Officers had not been made wholly powerless — but they felt that they had been slapped in the teeth. The officer corps, by 1946 again wholly professional, did not know how to live with the newer code.

One important thing was forgotten by the citizenry: by 1946 all the intellectual and sensitive types had said goodbye to the Army — they hoped for good. The new men coming in now were the kind of men who join armies the world over, blank-faced, unmolded — and they needed shaping. They got it; but it wasn’t the kind of shaping they needed.

Now an N.C.O. greeted new arrivals with a smile. Where once he would have told them they made him sick to his stomach, didn’t look tough enough to make a go of his outfit, he now led them meekly to his company commander. And this clean-cut young man, who once would have sat remote at the right hand of God in his orderly room, issuing orders that crackled like thunder, now smiled too. “Welcome aboard, gentlemen. I am your company commander; I’m here to help you. I’ll try to make your stay both pleasant and profitable.”

This was all very democratic and pleasant — but it is the nature of young men to get away with anything they can, and soon these young men found they could get away with plenty.

A soldier could tell a sergeant to blow it. In the old Army he might have been bashed, and found immediately what the rules were going to be. In the Canadian Army — which oddly enough no American liberals have found fascistic or bestial — he would have been marched in front of his company commander, had his pay reduced, perhaps even been confined for thirty days, with no damaging mark on his record. He would have learned, instantly, that orders are to be obeyed.

But in the new American Army, the sergeant reported such a case to his C.O. But the C.O. couldn’t do anything drastic or educational to the man; for any real action, he had to pass the case up higher. And nobody wanted to court-martial the man, to put a permanent damaging mark on his record. The most likely outcome was for the man to be chided for being rude, and requested to do better in the future.

Some privates, behind their smirks, liked it fine.

Pretty soon, the sergeants, realizing the score, started to fraternize with the men. Perhaps, through popularity, they could get something done. The junior officers, with no sergeants to knock heads, decided that the better part of valor was never to give an unpopular order.

The new legions carried the old names, displayed the old, proud colors, with their gallant battle streamers. The regimental mottoes still said things like “Can Do”. In their neat, fitted uniforms and new shiny boots — there was money for these — the troops looked good. Their appearance made the generals smile.

What they lacked couldn’t be seen, not until the guns sounded.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.

July 31, 2023

QotD: Stranger in a Strange Land at 50

Filed under: Books, Health, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Heinlein’s very popular novel had a significant short-term effect on the culture when it came out but a negligible long-term effect, beyond adding “grok” to the language. Its most radical message was the idea of group marriage of a particular sort. The nests it described were stable high trust families formed with minimal search and courtship. You looked into someone’s eyes, recognized him or her as a water brother, and knew you could trust each other forever after. It was a naively romantic picture, possibly workable with the assistance of the protagonist’s superpowers, risky in the real world but fitting well into the naively romantic hippy culture of the time. Quite a lot of people tried to implement it; for some it may have worked. When I spoke on a panel at a science fiction convention some years ago, one audience member made it reasonably clear that she had joined a nest, was still in it, and was happy with the result.

Sexual mores changed but not, for most, in that direction. Living in southern California in the eighties, the view that seemed most common among young adults — many of those I associated with would have been people I met through the SCA,1 a subculture that had noticeable overlap with both science fiction fandom and hippiedom — was very different. The ideal pattern was stable monogamy but who could be so lucky? Insofar as it had been replaced it was mostly by the increasing acceptability and practice of casual sex.

There has been some development since Stranger was published, in practice and theory, along the lines of group marriage of a somewhat different sort. Polyamory is more self-conscious and, at least in theory, more structured than what we see in Stranger. Partners are classified as primary or secondary and a good deal of attention paid to what those terms mean and what behavior they imply. The result is in theory closer to the Oneida Commune of the 19th century, on a much smaller scale, than to the nest described in Stranger.2

This fits not only what happened in the real world but what happened in Heinlein’s fictional worlds. Consider a more sophisticated version of group marriage, the line marriage in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It is highly organized, with new members brought in at the low age end on a regular pattern of alternating gender. There is extensive search/courtship. And the protagonist offers a plausible explanation of its social role, why the institutions developed and what purposes it served.

Finally, consider Friday, a later novel. The protagonist, surprisingly naive given her profession — secret agent — joins a group marriage, makes a substantial commitment to it and is booted out, her share of the assets stolen, when it is discovered that she is an artificial person, the superior product of genetic engineering. Her much later commitment to a second group marriage follows more careful research.

David D. Friedman, “Odds and Ends”, David Friedman’s Substack, 2023-04-29.

    1. The Society for Creative Anachronism, a historical recreation organization I have been active in for a very long time.

    2. The practice sometimes ends up as open marriage, monogamous for purposes of producing and rearing children but with no obligation to sexual exclusivity — an option made possible by reliable contraception.

July 30, 2023

“Give me Andrea Dworkin’s anti-fella fury over this matrician tripe any day of the week”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill clearly doesn’t think Caitlin Moran’s new book What About Men? is worth reading:

Men, I have bad news: Caitlin Moran is coming for us. She comes not to man-bash, not to holler: “All men are rapists!” It’s worse than that. She feels sorry for us. “I’m violently opposed to the branches of feminism that are permanently angry with men”, she writes at the very start of her very bad book. Instead she pities us. She frets over our toxic stoicism, our inability to be vulnerable, our unwillingness to be open about our fat bodies and small cocks. She wants to save us from all the “rules” about “what a man should be”. From all that “swagger” and “the stiff upper lip”. By the end I found myself pining for some good ol’ angry feminism. Give me Andrea Dworkin’s anti-fella fury over this matrician tripe any day of the week.

What About Men? is, I’m going to be blunt, rubbish. I knew it would be from the very first page where Moran says that “when it comes to the vag-based problems, I have the bantz”. Imagine using the word bantz unironically in 2023. What she means is that she’s done all the vagina stuff. She’s completed feminism. She’s known as “the Woman Woman”, she says, in an arrogant timbre that puts to shame those cocksure blokes who stalk her nightmares. She wrote the bestselling pop-feminist tome, How To Be a Woman (2011), which contained such gems of wisdom as “don’t shave your vagina” because it’s better to have a “big, hairy minge”, a “lovely furry moof”, “a marmoset sitting in [your] lap”, than a bald cooch. (Emmeline Pankhurst, I’m so sorry.) So now, naturally, she’s turning her attention to men. She’s discovered there is “a lot to say” about “men in the 21st-century”. Lucky us.

What she says about us is almost too daft for words. You realise by about page 22 that she’s never met a bloke from outside the media-luvvie, ageing rock-chick, “Glasto”-loving circle she famously inhabits. (I almost died of second-hand embarrassment when she said in How To Be a Woman that she lives an edgy existence, “like it’s 1969 all over again and my entire life is made of cheesecloth, sitars and hash”. Maam, you write a celebrity column for hundreds of thousands of pounds for The Times.)

Even her cultural references in What About Men? are off, as befits a woman who is essentially a square person’s idea of a cool person. She laments that young men are in “the grip of a fad” for super-skinny jeans. Jeans so tight they look “sprayed-on”. Jeans so tight that the poor lad’s balls end up “crushed against the crotch seam, in vivid detail”. Really? It’s not 2006. Bloc Party aren’t in the charts. I’m no follower of fashion but even I know most young men haven’t been wearing bollock-squashing jeans for a few years now. My nephews wear baggy jeans, à la Madchester. Pretty much the only time you see unyielding denim these days is on the portly thigh of a mid-life-crisis middle-class dad. The kind of men, dare I say it, that Ms Moran mixes with.

Her commentary on t-shirts is a dead giveaway, too. The only fashion flare the tragic male sex is allowed to enjoy is the tee, she says. Especially past the age of 40. You’ll see fortysomething fellas in “band t-shirts, slogan t-shirts, t-shirts with swearing on”, she says. Will you? Where? Again, only in the knowingly dishevelled privileged set Moran exists in. Every man in his forties I know always manages to put a shirt on. So desperate are emotionally repressed men to express themselves, says Moran, that some even buy t-shirts “from the back pages of Viz” that say things like “Breast Inspector” or “Fart Loading: Please Wait”. Not once in my life have I seen a man in a Viz tee. The problem here isn’t men – it’s Moran’s man-friends. She could have saved herself the trouble of this entire book by befriending some normal blokes.

That Moran’s pool of men is shallow is clear from the fact that all the men she talks to for the book seem to be as steeped as she is in chattering-class orthodoxy. She includes a transcript of long chats with male acquaintances and, honestly, reading it feels like being stuck in a lift with craft-beer wankers who do IT for the Guardian. At one point she informs her readers that her male friends are mostly “middle-aged, middle-class dads who know about wine, recycle, have views on thoughtful novels” and would probably “cry if they saw a dog struggling with a slight limp”. Writing a book about men from the perspective of men like that is like writing a book about women from the perspective of Princess Anne.

July 20, 2023

Three phases of a cultural cycle

Filed under: History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray visits an art museum and shares some thoughts provoked by his experiences:

There’s a moment, in a museum supported by a deep permanent collection, when you transition from glowing oil paint depictions of Lord Major Fluffington P. Farnsworth-Hadenwallace, Seventh Earl of Wherever, Ninth Duke of Someotherplace, posing in his lordly estate with a bowl of fruit and his array of status decorations, to the shocking emergence of late-19th century innovations in painting, and you find yourself thinking that huh, this Renoir dude really knew his stuff, like you’re the first person to ever notice.

Good eye, Sterling

These explosive moments of creativity were usually social: artists gathering, talking, seeing the work of other artists and thinking about new ways of seeing and showing. Individual acts of artistic liberation appeared in the context of an emerging cultural freedom. Renoir and Monet hung out together.

You can see the tide coming in and going out. You can watch enormous waves of joyful innovation, or — respectful nod to the German Expressionists — anxious and anguished innovation. It’s on the wall: here’s the moment when people experienced unusual freedom of vision. You can see artists pursuing beauty with disciplined attention, in a cultural atmosphere that allows the pursuit.

And it’s just so abundantly clear that something opened in the world, somewhere between 1870 and … 1950? Or so? And then it began to close, and the closure recently began picking up force. There are periods of general creativity and periods of general stultification and retrenchment; there was one Italian Renaissance, one Scottish Enlightenment, and so on. Weimar Germany, sick as it was, fired more brilliant art into the world in twenty years than many cultures produce in a period of centuries, though a certain teenager who lives in my house would like you to know that Fritz Lang sucks and please stop with those boring movies and I’ll be in my room.

So it seems to me that the first part of the cultural cycle is the making phase, the period of astonishing innovation; then comes the consolidation and appreciation, the moment the heirs to sewing machine fortunes show up and notice how good everything is; then comes the phase when a few monk-equivalents try to keep the record of accomplishment alive in the context of a hostile or indifferent culture, while most institutions reject innovation and turn to scolding, wrecking, and cannibalization. The fifth Indiana Jones movie. She-Hulk. Like that. I just spent twenty minutes in a Barnes and Noble, and the “new fiction” section may still be making me feel tired next week.

We’re living through a decline in fertility — in literal fertility, in rates of people being married and making babies and hanging around to raise children — at the moment when cultural fertility also seems to be going into freefall. Your results may vary, but I’m finding the moment manageable, largely with piles of earlier books and the occasional sprint to a place like the Clark. Fecundity and sterility appear in cycles, but you can time travel. You can reach back. Mary McCarthy got me through June, and Willa Cather is helping with July. Evelyn Waugh covered roughly February through May.

If you’re near the Berkshires, a worthwhile Edvard Munch exhibit is around until mid-October.

It’s very strange to be in the river and then to suddenly notice that it isn’t running — you’ve hit a long stretch of dead water, so still it starts to stink. I assume it will pass. But until then …

July 18, 2023

At some point we moved from “therapy for serious issues” to “it’s totally normal for everyone you know to be in therapy”

Filed under: Business, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In occasional conversations with younger folks (mainly Millennials and GenZ’ers), it’s surprising how often the topic of “therapy” comes up. Everyone I talk to under the age of 40 seems to be in therapy for this or that … when did that change? I’m no iron man (ask any of my friends), but it would never have occurred to me to seek counselling for what appeared to be the ordinary kind of issues that everyone else was dealing with. Friends and acquaintances who did were almost always struggling with some out-of-the-ordinary concern and certainly weren’t eager to discuss the course of their sessions as part of casual chit-chat. Freddie de Boer seems to share some of my discomfort on this topic:

Ladies, is your man engaging in the method of quasi-scientific self-improvement that’s currently mandated by high-status urbanites aged 21-45? If not, run, girl.

Before you go worrying or lecturing over my title here, let me say my personal life has never been better, really. But my total alienation from what I take to be my culture and its various attitudes and assumptions just grows and grows. Every day, it seems, there’s a fresh horror, and nowhere does it smack me in the face more than with mental health.

The above advertisement, which I think premiered in 2022, takes the medical tool of therapy and renders it a bit of dating-market gamesmanship, something bros just have to get on board with in order to hook up with high-value gals. I don’t expect a 30-second advertisement to reflect the reality that therapy is a frequently-adversarial process, that it’s at times uncomfortable by design, that it only works for certain kinds of problems, or that there are times when it can actually exacerbate them. And while I certainly do hold it against them for contributing to the corrosive “everybody should be in therapy” attitude — which is little different from believing that everybody should be on antibiotics — I also know that a for-profit therapy company is going to be pushing that line. (A macro-problem with for-profit medicine lies in the fact that the financial incentive is always to go on treating a medical problem forever without curing it.) What really gets to me is how a therapy company is going out of its way to make therapy appear so trivial, how the characters appear deliberately portrayed as unserious people and therapy so unapologetically represented as just a dating-market football. The commercial is somehow both grandiose about therapy’s purpose and dismissive about therapy’s actual use.

I don’t know how it is that we’ve simultaneously spent so much time validating and honoring people who struggle with their mental health and at the same time made mental health as a topic so frivolous.

I appreciated this conversation about TV therapy from The New Yorker. In it, Inkoo Kang says “I feel like there’s this idea that therapy is easy. And then you actually go to therapy, and you’re, like, ‘Oh, this is actually the worst’. That particular realization is very rarely dramatized.” I would argue that if therapy never feels like the worst, then you probably aren’t getting as much as you could out of the therapeutic process. Part of what makes finding and sticking with a therapist so difficult is that it’s close to impossible to divide your sense of what you want from a therapist from a broader understanding of what you need from a therapist. Are you sure you don’t like your current therapist because you’re “just not vibing with them”? Are you sure you want to fire your therapist because they seem “toxic”? Or is it because you signed up for therapy expecting it to be a constant exercise in validating everything you think and say and instead you’re one of the lucky few with a therapist who actually does their job and sometimes calls you on your bullshit? Of course, some therapists really aren’t very good, or more commonly, you can be a receptive patient and the therapist can be a competent practitioner but you have communication styles that just don’t gel. These things can be very difficult to parse on your own, which is why I always tell people to give it more time than they think they need. But either way, nothing is served by this effort to make therapy just another elite checklist item that shows you’re an enlightened person, except maybe Betterhelp’s share price.

July 13, 2023

QotD: The Annales school of history

Filed under: Economics, Environment, France, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Annales school is a style of historical thinking that emerged in France in the early 1900s; at least for pre-modernists, the dominating figures here tend to be Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel. It got its name because of its close association with Annales d’Historie Economique et Sociale. Fundamentally, what sets the Annales approach apart is first its focus and then the methods that focus demands.

The big shift in focus for the Annales school was an interest in charting the experience of society below the level of elites (though the elites are not abandoned either), what is sometimes termed “history from below”, as distinct from traditional elite-centered “great man” history or the more deterministic Marxist models of history at the time. You can see the political implications, of course, in the very early 1900s, of declaring the common man worthy of study; this is generally a history from the left but not the extreme left. That focus in turn demanded new approaches because it turned the focus of social history towards people who by and large do not write to us.

In reaching for that experience, Annales scholars tended to frame their thinking in terms of la longue durée (“the long run”); history was composed of three parts: événements (“events”), conjonctures (“circumstances”) and finally la longue durée itself. Often in English this gets rendered as a distinction between “events” (kings, wars, politics, crises) and “structures” (economics, social thought and at a deeper level climate, ecology, and geography). What Annales scholars tended to argue was that those structures were often more important than the events that traditional historians studied: the farmer’s life was far more shaped by very long-term factors like the local ecology, the organization of his farming village, the economic structure of the region and so on. And then the idea goes, that by charting those structures, you can figure things out about the lives of those farmers even if you don’t have many – or any – of those farmers writing to you.

Important to this was the idea of enduring patterns of thought within a society, what Bloch termed mentalités (“mentalities”, like longue durée, this is a technical term usually used in French to make that fact clear). Mentalités – Bloch’s original example was the idea that kings had a holy healing touch, but this could be almost any kind of social construct or pattern of ideas (indeed, one critique of it is that the notion of mentalités is broad and ill-defined) – can last a long time and can inform or constrain the actions of many actors within a society; think of how successive generations of kings can have their decisions shaped or constrained by their societies view – their own view – of kingship. That view of kingship might be more impactful than any one king and so pervasive that even a king would struggle to change it.

So how does this influence my work? I tend to be very much a “history from below” kind of historian, interested in charting the experience of regular farmers, soldiers, weavers and so on. The distinction between the long-term structures that shape life and the short-term events that populate our history is very valuable to think with, especially for identifying when an event alters a structure, because those tend to be very important events indeed. And I think a keen attention to the way people thought about things in the past and how those mentalités can be different than ours is very important.

That said, the Annales stress on mentalités has in some ways been overtaken by more data-driven historical methods on the one hand or a strong emphasis on local or individual experience (“microhistory”) on the other. Mentalités tend to be very big picture, asking how, say, “the French” thought about something over a period of decades or centuries and seeking to know how that shaped their experience. But archaeology, demographics or economic data can reveal patterns of behavior which might not correspond to the mentalités that show up in written texts; this is fundamentally the interaction that informs the “revenge of the archaeologists” in the study of the ancient economy, for instance. On the other hand, not everyone in that big group thinks the same and a microhistory of an individual or a single village might reveal telling local variations not captured in massive-scale structures.

Fortunately, historians do not need to be doctrinaire in our use of theory, we don’t have to pick one and stick to it. Different projects also lend themselves to different approaches. I think the Annales school offers a lot of really useful tools to have my historian’s toolbox, but they sit alongside military theory, archaeological material culture studies methods, philological approaches, a smattering of economic and demographic tools, etc.

Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: January 13, 2023: Roman Traditionalism, Ancient Dates and Imperial Spies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-01-13.

July 10, 2023

QotD: Liberal and conservative views on innovation

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Liberals and conservatives don’t just vote for different parties — they are different kinds of people. They differ psychologically in ways that are consistent across geography and culture. For example, liberals measure higher on traits like “openness to new experience” and seek out novelty. Conservatives prefer order and predictability. Their attachment to the status quo is an impediment to the re-ordering of society around new technology. Meanwhile, the technologists of Silicon Valley, while suspicious of government regulation, are still some of the most liberal people in the country. Not all liberals are techno-optimists, but virtually all techno-optimists are liberals.

A debate on the merits of change between these two psychological profiles helps guarantee that change benefits society instead of ruining it. Conservatives act as gatekeepers enforcing quality control on the ideas of progressives, ultimately letting in the good ones (like democracy) and keeping out the bad ones (like Marxism). Conservatives have often been wrong in their opposition to good ideas, but the need to win over a critical mass of them ensures that only the best-supported changes are implemented. Curiously, when the change in question is technological rather than social, this debate process is neutered. Instead, we get “inevitablism” — the insistence that opposition to technological change is illegitimate because it will happen regardless of what we want, as if we were captives of history instead of its shapers.

This attitude is all the more bizarre because it hasn’t always been true. When nuclear technology threatened Armageddon, we did what was necessary to limit it to the best of our ability. It may be that AI or automation causes social Armageddon. No one really knows — but if the pessimists are right, will we still have it in us to respond accordingly? It seems like the command of the optimists to lay back and “trust our history” has the upper hand.

Conservative critics of change have often been comically wrong — just like optimists. That’s ultimately not so interesting, because humans can’t predict the future. More interesting have been the times when the predictions of the critics actually came true. The Luddites were skilled artisans who feared that industrial technology would destroy their way of life and replace their high-status craft with factory drudgery. They were right. Twentieth century moralists feared that the automobile would facilitate dating and casual sex. They were right. They erred not in their predictions, but in their belief that the predicted effects were incompatible with a good society. That requires us to have a debate on the merits — about the meaning of the good life.

Nicholas Phillips, “The Fallacy of Techno-Optimism”, Quillette, 2019-06-06.

July 9, 2023

QotD: Military history informs modern concepts of conflict

Filed under: Education, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the body of knowledge military history creates serves as the foundation for political and military (two separate but related things!) thinking about war and conflict. This is not new, of course; as I noted above, the field of military history emerged out of a desire to train military leaders. What has changed is that this is no longer an exercise for training (often hereditary) aristocrats for battlefield command in societies where political and military decision-making was generally restricted to men born to the job. Instead, all citizens in a democracy have a role in shaping decisions about war and peace.

At the same time, something has not changed, which is the human propensity for conflict. And so the most obvious reason to study the history of human conflict remains: to prepare for the conflicts of our day which, despite our best efforts, are sure to occur. And since political decision-making is no longer confined to a small elite, it makes sense that both the target and scope of military history has changed. This is part of why the focus on the broader “war and society” lens is important: if average citizens need to (through elections) make choices on the security posture of their country, they are going to want to know “what is conflict going to be like for me and my family?” Thus the greater focus on the experience of the common soldier (what is sometimes called the “Face of Battle” school of military history, after J. Keegan, The Face of Battle (1976)) and on the experience of the “homefront” as well as on the victims of conflict. I know that last focus sometimes frustrates the “cult of the badass” adherents, but frankly, no matter how many reps you can do, you were always more likely to be one of Alexander the Great’s victims than one of Alexander’s soldiers (much less Alexander himself).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Military History?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-11-13.

July 6, 2023

QotD: Liberalizing the US Army after WW2

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In 1861, and 1917, the Army acted upon the civilian, changing him. But in 1945 something new happened. Suddenly, without precedent, perhaps because of changes in the emerging managerial society, professional soldiers of high rank had become genuinely popular with the Public. In 1861, and in 1917, the public gave the generals small credit, talked instead of the gallant militia. Suddenly, at the end of World War II, society embraced the generals.

And here it ruined them.

They had lived their lives in semibitter alienation from their own culture (What’s the matter, Colonel; can’t you make it on the outside?) but now they were sought after, offered jobs in business, government, on college campuses.

Humanly, the generals liked the acclaim. Humanly, they wanted it to continue. And when, as usual after all our wars, there came a great civilian clamor to change all the things in the army the civilians hadn’t liked, humanly, the generals could not find it in their hearts to tell the public to go to hell.

It was perfectly understandable that large numbers of men who served didn’t like the service. There was no reason why they should. They served only because there had been a dirty job that had to be done. Admittedly, the service was not perfect; no human institution having power over men can ever be. But many of the abuses the civilians complained about had come not from true professionals but from men with quickie diplomas, whose brass was much more apt to go to their heads than to those of men who had waited twenty years for leaves and eagles.

In 1945, somehow confusing the plumbers with the men who pulled the chain, the public demanded that the Army be changed to conform with decent, liberal society.

The generals could have told them to go to hell and made it stick. A few heads would have rolled, a few stars would have been lost. But without acquiescence Congress could no more emasculate the Army than it could alter the nature of the State Department. It could have abolished it, or weakened it even more than it did — but it could not have changed its nature. But the generals could not have retained their new popularity by antagonizing the public, and suddenly popularity was very important to them. Men such as Doolittle, Eisenhower, and Marshall rationalized. America, with postwar duties around the world, would need a bigger peacetime Army than ever before. Therefore, it needed to be popular with the people. And it should be made pleasant, so that more men would enlist. And since Congress wouldn’t do much about upping pay, every man should have a chance to become a sergeant, instead of one in twenty. But, democratically, sergeants would not draw much more pay than privates.

And since some officers and noncoms had abused their powers, rather than make sure officers and noncoms were better than ever, it would be simpler and more expedient — and popular — to reduce those powers. Since Americans were by nature egalitarian, the Army had better go that route too. Other professional people, such as doctors and clergymen, had special privileges — but officers, after all, had no place in the liberal society, and had better be cut down to size.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.

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