The Dying Art of Disagreement

This is the text of a lecture delivered at the Lowy Institute Media Award dinner in Sydney, Australia, on Saturday, Sept. 23. The award recognizes excellence in Australian foreign affairs journalism.

Let me begin with thanks to the Lowy Institute for bringing me all the way to Sydney and doing me the honor of hosting me here this evening.

I’m aware of the controversy that has gone with my selection as your speaker. I respect the wishes of the Colvin family and join in honoring Mark Colvin’s memory as a courageous foreign correspondent and an extraordinary writer and broadcaster. And I’d particularly like to thank Michael Fullilove for not rescinding the invitation.

This has become the depressing trend on American university campuses, where the roster of disinvited speakers and forced cancellations includes former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice, former Harvard University President Larry Summers, actor Alec Baldwin, human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, DNA co-discoverer James Watson, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, filmmaker Michael Moore, conservative Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will and liberal Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Anna Quindlen, to name just a few.

So illustrious is the list that, on second thought, I’m beginning to regret that you didn’t disinvite me after all.

The title of my talk tonight is “The Dying Art of Disagreement.” This is a subject that is dear to me — literally dear — since disagreement is the way in which I have always earned a living. Disagreement is dear to me, too, because it is the most vital ingredient of any decent society.

To say the words, “I agree” — whether it’s agreeing to join an organization, or submit to a political authority, or subscribe to a religious faith — may be the basis of every community.

But to say, I disagree; I refuse; you’re wrong; etiam si omnes — ego non — these are the words that define our individuality, give us our freedom, enjoin our tolerance, enlarge our perspectives, seize our attention, energize our progress, make our democracies real, and give hope and courage to oppressed people everywhere. Galileo and Darwin; Mandela, Havel, and Liu Xiaobo; Rosa Parks and Natan Sharansky — such are the ranks of those who disagree.

And the problem, as I see it, is that we’re failing at the task.

This is a puzzle. At least as far as far as the United States is concerned, Americans have rarely disagreed more in recent decades.

We disagree about racial issues, bathroom policies, health care laws, and, of course, the 45th president. We express our disagreements in radio and cable TV rants in ways that are increasingly virulent; street and campus protests that are increasingly violent; and personal conversations that are increasingly embittering.

This is yet another age in which we judge one another morally depending on where we stand politically.

Nor is this just an impression of the moment. Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare.

The polarization is geographic, as more people live in states and communities where their neighbors are much likelier to share their politics.

The polarization is personal: Fully 50 percent of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as a family taboo.

Finally the polarization is electronic and digital, as Americans increasingly inhabit the filter bubbles of news and social media that correspond to their ideological affinities. We no longer just have our own opinions. We also have our separate “facts,” often the result of what different media outlets consider newsworthy. In the last election, fully 40 percent of Trump voters named Fox News as their chief source of news.

Thanks a bunch for that one, Australia.

It’s usually the case that the more we do something, the better we are at it. Instead, we’re like Casanovas in reverse: the more we do it, the worse we’re at it. Our disagreements may frequently hoarsen our voices, but they rarely sharpen our thinking, much less change our minds.

It behooves us to wonder why.

* * *

Thirty years ago, in 1987, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago named Allan Bloom — at the time best known for his graceful translations of Plato’s “Republic” and Rousseau’s “Emile” — published a learned polemic about the state of higher education in the United States. It was called “The Closing of the American Mind.”

The book appeared when I was in high school, and I struggled to make my way through a text thick with references to Plato, Weber, Heidegger and Strauss. But I got the gist — and the gist was that I’d better enroll in the University of Chicago and read the great books. That is what I did.

What was it that one learned through a great books curriculum? Certainly not “conservatism” in any contemporary American sense of the term. We were not taught to become American patriots, or religious pietists, or to worship what Rudyard Kipling called “the Gods of the Market Place.” We were not instructed in the evils of Marxism, or the glories of capitalism, or even the superiority of Western civilization.

As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.

To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind — this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.

It’s what used to be called a liberal education.

The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.

Socrates quarrels with Homer. Aristotle quarrels with Plato. Locke quarrels with Hobbes and Rousseau quarrels with them both. Nietzsche quarrels with everyone. Wittgenstein quarrels with himself.

These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades, even centuries.

Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.

In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.

“The Closing of the American Mind” took its place in the tradition of these quarrels. Since the 1960s it had been the vogue in American universities to treat the so-called “Dead White European Males” of the Western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Allan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation.

He also insisted that to sustain liberal democracy you needed liberally educated people. This, at least, should not have been controversial. For free societies to function, the idea of open-mindedness can’t simply be a catchphrase or a dogma. It needs to be a personal habit, most of all when it comes to preserving an open mind toward those with whom we disagree.

* * *

That habit was no longer being exercised much 30 years ago. And if you’ve followed the news from American campuses in recent years, things have become a lot worse.

According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today — fully 44 percent — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does. More shockingly, a narrow majority of students — 51 percent — think it is “acceptable” for a student group to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. An astonishing 20 percent also agree that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking.

These attitudes are being made plain nearly every week on one college campus or another. (...)

There’s no one answer. What’s clear is that the mis-education begins early. I was raised on the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me. But today there’s a belief that since words can cause stress, and stress can have physiological effects, stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilization.

The mis-education continues in grade school. As the Brookings findings indicate, younger Americans seem to have no grasp of what our First Amendment says, much less of the kind of speech it protects. This is a testimony to the collapse of civics education in the United States, creating the conditions that make young people uniquely susceptible to demagogy of the left- or right-wing varieties.

Then we get to college, where the dominant mode of politics is identity politics, and in which the primary test of an argument isn’t the quality of the thinking but the cultural, racial, or sexual standing of the person making it. As a woman of color I think X. As a gay man I think Y. As a person of privilege I apologize for Z. This is the baroque way Americans often speak these days. It is a way of replacing individual thought — with all the effort that actual thinking requires — with social identification — with all the attitude that attitudinizing requires.

In recent years, identity politics have become the moated castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our “safe space.” But it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind — a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought, to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie.

Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn’t treated as being merely wrong. Instead it is seen as immoral, and therefore unworthy of discussion or rebuttal.

The result is that the disagreements we need to have — and to have vigorously — are banished from the public square before they’re settled. People who might otherwise join a conversation to see where it might lead them choose instead to shrink from it, lest they say the “wrong” thing and be accused of some kind of political -ism or -phobia. For fear of causing offense, they forego the opportunity to be persuaded. (...)

* * *

I began this talk by noting that Americans have rarely disagreed so vehemently about so much. On second thought, this isn’t the whole truth.

Yes, we disagree constantly. But what makes our disagreements so toxic is that we refuse to make eye contact with our opponents, or try to see things as they might, or find some middle ground.

Instead, we fight each other from the safe distance of our separate islands of ideology and identity and listen intently to echoes of ourselves. We take exaggerated and histrionic offense to whatever is said about us. We banish entire lines of thought and attempt to excommunicate all manner of people — your humble speaker included — without giving them so much as a cursory hearing.

The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement — namely: shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak — is absent. (...)

I do not believe the answer, at least in the U.S., lies in heavier investment in publicly sponsored television along the lines of the BBC. It too, suffers, from its own form of ideological conformism and journalistic groupthink, immunized from criticism due to its indifference to competition.

Nor do I believe the answer lies in a return to what in America used to be called the “Fairness Doctrine,” mandating equal time for different points of view. Free speech must ultimately be free, whether or not it’s fair.

But I do think there’s such a thing as private ownership in the public interest, and of fiduciary duties not only to shareholders but also to citizens. Journalism is not just any other business, like trucking or food services. Nations can have lousy food and exemplary government, as Great Britain demonstrated for most of the last century. They can also have great food and lousy government, as France has always demonstrated.

But no country can have good government, or a healthy public square, without high-quality journalism — journalism that can distinguish a fact from a belief and again from an opinion; that understands that the purpose of opinion isn’t to depart from facts but to use them as a bridge to a larger idea called “truth”; and that appreciates that truth is a large enough destination that, like Manhattan, it can be reached by many bridges of radically different designs. In other words, journalism that is grounded in facts while abounding in disagreements.

I believe it is still possible — and all the more necessary — for journalism to perform these functions, especially as the other institutions that were meant to do so have fallen short. But that requires proprietors and publishers who understand that their role ought not to be to push a party line, or be a slave to Google hits and Facebook ads, or provide a titillating kind of news entertainment, or help out a president or prime minister who they favor or who’s in trouble.

Their role is to clarify the terms of debate by championing aggressive and objective news reporting, and improve the quality of debate with commentary that opens minds and challenges assumptions rather than merely confirming them.

by Bret Stephens, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Plato and Aristotle in discussion, by Luca della Robbia (1437) CreditDeAgostini/Getty Images

Reggae Shark

[ed. Classic]

The Satoshi Affair

Ten men raided a house in Gordon, a north shore suburb of Sydney, at 1.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 9 December 2015. Some of the federal agents wore shirts that said ‘Computer Forensics’; one carried a search warrant issued under the Australian Crimes Act 1914. They were looking for a man named Craig Steven Wright, who lived with his wife, Ramona, at 43 St Johns Avenue. The warrant was issued at the behest of the Australian Taxation Office. Wright, a computer scientist and businessman, headed a group of companies associated with cryptocurrency and online security. As one set of agents scoured his kitchen cupboards and emptied out his garage, another entered his main company headquarters at 32 Delhi Road in North Ryde. They were looking for ‘originals or copies’ of material held on hard drives and computers; they wanted bank statements, mobile phone records, research papers and photographs. The warrant listed dozens of companies whose papers were to be scrutinised, and 32 individuals, some with alternative names, or alternative spellings. The name ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ appeared sixth from the bottom of the list.

Some of the neighbours say the Wrights were a little distant. She was friendly but he was weird – to one neighbour he was ‘Cold-Shoulder Craig’ – and their landlord wondered why they needed so much extra power: Wright had what appeared to be a whole room full of generators at the back of the property. This fed a rack of computers that he called his ‘toys’, but the real computer, on which he’d spent a lot of money, was nearly nine thousand miles away in Panama. He had already taken the computers away the day before the raid. A reporter had turned up at the house and Wright, alarmed, had phoned Stefan, the man advising them on what he and Ramona were calling ‘the deal’. Stefan immediately moved Wright and his wife into a luxury apartment at the Meriton World Tower in Sydney. They’d soon be moving to England anyway, and all parties agreed it was best to hide out for now. (...)

Ramona wasn’t keen to tell her family what was happening. The reporters were sniffing at a strange story – a story too complicated for her to explain – so she just told everyone that damp in the Gordon house had forced them to move out. The place they moved into, a tall apartment building, was right in the city and Wright felt as if he was on holiday. On 9 December, after their first night in the new apartment, Wright woke up to the news that two articles, one on the technology site Gizmodo, the other in the tech magazine Wired, had come out overnight fingering him as the person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, who in 2008 published a white paper describing a ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash system’ – a technology Satoshi went on to develop as bitcoin. Reading the articles on his laptop, Wright knew his old life was over.

By this point, cameras and reporters were outside his former home and his office. They had long heard rumours, but the Gizmodo and Wired stories had sent the Australian media into a frenzy. It wasn’t clear why the police and the articles had appeared on the same day. At about five that same afternoon, a receptionist called from the lobby of Wright’s apartment building to say that the police had arrived. Ramona turned to Wright and told him to get the hell out. He looked at a desk in front of the window: there were two large laptop computers on it – they weighed a few kilos each, with 64 gigabytes of RAM – and he grabbed the one that wasn’t yet fully encrypted. He also took Ramona’s phone, which wasn’t encrypted either, and headed for the door. They were on the 63rd floor. It occurred to him that the police might be coming up in the elevator, so he went down to the 61st floor, where there were office suites and a swimming pool. He stood frozen for a minute before he realised he’d rushed out without his passport.

Ramona left the apartment shortly after Wright. She went straight down to the basement car park and was relieved to find the police weren’t guarding the exits. She jumped into her car, a hire vehicle, and, in her panic, crashed into the exit barrier. But she didn’t stop, and was soon on the motorway heading to north Sydney. She just wanted to be somewhere familiar where she would have time to think. She felt vulnerable without her phone, and decided to drive to a friend’s and borrow his. She went to his workplace and took his phone, telling him she couldn’t explain because she didn’t want to get him involved.

Meanwhile, Wright was still standing beside the swimming pool in his suit, with a laptop in his arms. He heard people coming up the stairs, sped down the corridor and ducked into the gents. A bunch of teenagers were standing around but seemed not to notice him. He went to the furthest cubicle and deliberately kept the door unlocked. (He figured the police would just look for an engaged sign.) He was standing on top of the toilet when he heard the officers come in. They asked the youngsters what they were doing, but they said ‘nothing’ and the police left. Wright stayed in the cubicle for a few minutes, then went out and used his apartment keycard to hide in the service stairwell. Eventually, a call came from Ramona on her friend’s phone. She was slightly horrified to discover he was still in the building and told him again to get out. He, too, had a rental car, and had the key in his pocket. He went down sixty flights of stairs to the car park in the basement, unlocked his car and opened the boot, where he lifted out the spare wheel and put his laptop in the wheel cavity. He drove towards the Harbour Bridge and got lost in the traffic.

As Ramona drove along she began texting the mysterious Stefan, who was at Sydney Airport, having already checked in for a flight to Manila, where he lived. Stefan had to make a fuss to get his bag removed from the plane and then he spoke to Ramona, telling her that Wright would have to get out of the country. She didn’t argue. She called the Flight Centre and asked what flights were leaving. ‘To where?’ asked the saleswoman.

‘Anywhere,’ Ramona said. Within ten minutes she had booked her husband on a flight to Auckland.

In the early evening, Wright, scared and lost, made his way to Chatswood. He texted Ramona to come and meet him, and she immediately texted back saying he should go straight to the airport. She’d booked him a flight. ‘But I don’t have my passport,’ he said. Ramona was afraid she’d be arrested if she returned to their apartment, but her friend said he’d go into the building and get the passport. They waited until the police left the building, then he went upstairs. A few minutes later he came back with the passport, along with the other computer and a power supply.

At Auckland Airport, Wright kept his phone on flight mode, but turned it on to use the airport’s wifi to Skype with Stefan, using a new account. They had a discussion about how to get him to Manila. There was a big rock concert that night in Auckland, and all the hotels were full, but he crossed town in a cab and managed to get a small room at the Hilton. He booked two nights, using cash. He knew how to get more cash out of ATMs than the daily limit, so he worked several machines near the hotel, withdrawing $5000. He ordered room service that night and the next morning went to the Billabong store in Queen Street to buy some clothes. He felt agitated, out of his element: normally he would wear a suit and tie – he enjoys the notion that he is too well dressed to be a geek – but he bought a T-shirt, a pair of jeans and some socks. On the way back to the hotel he got a bunch of SIM cards, so that his calls wouldn’t be monitored. Back at the Hilton he was packing up his computers when the dependable Stefan came on Skype. He told Wright to go to the airport and pick up a ticket he’d left him for a flight to Manila. His picture was all over the papers, along with the story that he was trying to escape.

Within hours of Wright’s name appearing in the press, anonymous messages threatened to reveal his ‘actual history’. Some said he had been on Ashley Madison, the website that sets up extramarital affairs, others that he’d been seen on Grindr, the gay hook-up app. During a six-hour layover in Hong Kong, he killed his email accounts and tried to wipe his social media profile, which he knew would be heavy with information he wasn’t keen to publicise: ‘Mainly rants,’ he said later. When he got to Manila airport, Stefan picked him up. They went to Stefan’s apartment and the maid washed Wright’s clothes while he set up his laptops on the dining-room table. They spent the rest of Saturday wiping his remaining social media profile. Stefan didn’t want any contact to be possible: he wanted to cut Wright off from the world. The next day he put him on a plane to London.

Mayfair

Technology is constantly changing the lives of people who don’t really understand it – we drive our cars, and care nothing for internal combustion – but now and then a story will break from that frontier. I was one of the people who had never heard of Satoshi Nakamoto or the blockchain – the invention underlying bitcoin, which verifies transactions without the need for any central authority – or that it is the biggest thing in computer science.​1 It was news to me that the banks were grabbing onto the blockchain as the foundation of a future ‘internet of value’. The story of a mythical computer scientist was an odd one to come my way. I’m not much detained by thoughts of new computer paradigms. (I’m still getting the hang of the first one.) But to those who are much more invested in the world of tomorrow, the Satoshi story has the lineaments of a modern morality tale quite independent of stock realities. There are things, there are always things, that others assume are at the centre of the universe but don’t make a scratch on your own sense of the everyday world. This story was like that for me, enclosing me in an enigma I couldn’t have named. A documentary is a fashioned thing, of course, as fashioned as fiction in its own ways, but I had to overcome my own bafflement – as will you – to enter this world.

A few weeks before the raid on Craig Wright’s house, when his name still hadn’t ever been publicly associated with Satoshi Nakamoto, I got an email from a Los Angeles lawyer called Jimmy Nguyen, from the firm Davis Wright Tremaine (self-described as ‘a one-stop shop for companies in entertainment, technology, advertising, sports and other industries’). Nguyen told me that they were looking to contract me to write the life of Satoshi Nakamoto. ‘My client has acquired life story rights … from the true person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto – the creator of the bitcoin protocol,’ the lawyer wrote. ‘The story will be [of] great interest to the public and we expect the book project will generate significant publicity and media coverage once Satoshi’s true identity is revealed.’ (...)

The ‘Stefan’ who was hovering during the raid on Craig Wright’s house and office is Stefan Matthews, an IT expert whom Wright had known for ten years, since they both worked for the online gambling site Centrebet. In those days, around 2007, Wright was often hired as a security analyst by such firms, deploying his skills as a computer scientist (and his experience as a hacker) to make life difficult for fraudsters. Wright was an eccentric guy, Stefan Matthews remembered, but known to be a reliable freelancer. Matthews said that Wright had given him a document to look at in 2008 written by someone called Satoshi Nakamoto, but Matthews had been busy at the time and didn’t read it for a while. He said that Wright was always trying to get him interested in this new venture called bitcoin. He tried to sell him 50,000 coin for next to nothing, but Matthews wasn’t interested, he told me, because Wright was weird and the whole thing seemed a bit cranky. A few years later, however, Matthews realised that the document he had been shown was, in fact, an original draft of the by now famous white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto. (Like the governments they despise, bitcoiners deal – when it comes to ideas – in ‘white papers’, as if they were issuing laws.) Last year, when Wright was in financial trouble, he approached Matthews several times. By that time, Matthews had become friendly with Robert MacGregor, the founder and CEO of a Canada-based money-transfer firm called nTrust. Matthews encouraged MacGregor to come to Australia and assess Wright’s value as an investment opportunity. Wright had founded a number of businesses that were in trouble and he was deeply embedded in a dispute with the ATO. Nevertheless, Matthews told MacGregor, Wright was almost certainly the man behind bitcoin.

Matthews argued that since Satoshi’s disappearance in 2011, Wright had been working on new applications of the blockchain technology he had invented as Satoshi. He was, in other words, using the technology underlying bitcoin to create new versions of the formula that could, at a stroke, replace the systems of bookkeeping and registration and centralised authority that banks and governments depend on. Wright and his people were preparing dozens of patents, and each invention, in a specific way, looked to rework financial, social, legal or medical services, expanding on the basic idea of the ‘distributed public ledger’ that constitutes the blockchain. This is utopian thinking, even by normal geek standards, but it’s a hot topic in computer science and banking at the moment, and hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in such ideas. Thus: Matthews’s proposal.

After initial scepticism, and in spite of a slight aversion to Wright’s manner, MacGregor was persuaded, and struck a deal with Wright, signed on 29 June 2015. MacGregor says he felt sure that Wright was bitcoin’s legendary missing father, and he told me it was his idea, later in the drafting of the deal, to insist that Satoshi’s ‘life rights’ be included as part of the agreement. Wright’s companies were so deep in debt that the deal appeared to him like a rescue plan, so he agreed to everything, without, it seems, really examining what he would have to do. Within a few months, according to evidence later given to me by Matthews and MacGregor, the deal would cost MacGregor’s company $15 million. ‘That’s right,’ Matthews said in February this year. ‘When we signed the deal, $1.5 million was given to Wright’s lawyers. But my main job was to set up an engagement with the new lawyers … and transfer Wright’s intellectual property to nCrypt’ – a newly formed subsidiary of nTrust. ‘The deal had the following components: clear the outstanding debts that were preventing Wright’s business from getting back on its feet, and work with the new lawyers on getting the agreements in place for the transfer of any non-corporate intellectual property, and work with the lawyers to get Craig’s story rights.’ From that point on, the ‘Satoshi revelation’ would be part of the deal. ‘It was the cornerstone of the commercialisation plan,’ Matthews said, ‘with about ten million sunk into the Australian debts and setting up in London.’

The plan was always clear to the men behind nCrypt. They would bring Wright to London and set up a research and development centre for him, with around thirty staff working under him. They would complete the work on his inventions and patent applications – he appeared to have hundreds of them – and the whole lot would be sold as the work of Satoshi Nakamoto, who would be unmasked as part of the project. Once packaged, Matthews and MacGregor planned to sell the intellectual property for upwards of a billion dollars. MacGregor later told me he was speaking to Google and Uber, as well as to a number of Swiss banks. ‘The plan was to package it all up and sell it,’ Matthews told me. ‘The plan was never to operate it.’

by Andrew O'Hagan, LRB |  Read more:

Image: Craig Wright in the Oxford Circus office, uncredited

[ed. Excerpted from the The Secret Life: Three True Stories (out next month)]

Survival of the Prettiest

A little over a decade after he published “On the Origin of Species,” in which he described his theory of natural selection shaped by “survival of the fittest,” Darwin published another troublesome treatise — “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relationship to Sex.” This expanded on an idea he mentioned only briefly in “Origin.” Sometimes, he proposed, in organisms that reproduce by having sex, a different kind of selection occurs: Animals choose mates that are not the fittest candidates available, but the most attractive or alluring. Sometimes, in other words, aesthetics rule.

Darwin conceived this idea largely because he found natural selection could not account for the ornaments seen in many animals, especially males, all over the world — the bright buttocks and faces of many monkeys and apes; the white legs and backside of the Banteng bull, in Malaysia; the elaborate feathers and mating dances of countless birds including bee-eaters and bell-birds, nightjars, hummingbirds and herons, gaudy birds of paradise and lurid pheasants, and the peacock, that showboat, whose extravagant tail seems a survival hindrance but so pleases females that well-fanned cocks regularly win their favor. Only a consistent preference for such ornament — in many species, a “choice exerted by the female” — could select for such decoration. This sexual selection,as Darwin called it, this taste for beauty rather than brawn, constituted an evolutionary mechanism separate, independent, and sometimes contrary to natural selection.

To Darwin’s dismay, many biologists rejected this theory. For one thing, Darwin’s elevation of sexual selection threatened the idea of natural selection as the one true and almighty force shaping life — a creative force powerful and concentrated enough to displace that of God. And some felt Darwin’s sexual selection gave too much power to all those females exerting choices based on beauty. As the zoologist St. George Jackson Mivart complained in an influential early review of “Descent,” “the instability of vicious feminine caprice” was too soft and slippery a force to drive something as important as evolution.

Darwin’s sexual selection theory thus failed to win the sort of victory that his theory of natural selection did. Ever since, the adaptationist, “fitness first” view of sexual selection as a subset of natural selection has dominated, driving the interpretation of most significant traits. Fancy feathers or (in humans) symmetrical faces have been cast not as instruments of sexual selection, but as “honest signals” of some greater underlying fitness. Meanwhile, the “modern synthesis” of the mid-1900s, which reconciled Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics, redefined evolutionary fitness itself not in terms of traits, but as the survival and spread of the individual genes that generated the traits. Genes, rather than traits, became what natural selection selected.

And so things largely remained until now. This summer, however, almost 150 years after Darwin published his sexual selection theory to mixed reception, Richard Prum, a mild-mannered ornithologist and museum curator from Yale, has published a book intended to win Darwin’s sex theory a more climactic victory. With The Evolution of Beauty (Doubleday, $30), Prum, drawing on decades of study, hundreds of papers, and a lively, literate, and mischievous mind, means to prove an enriched version of Darwin’s sexual selection theory and rescue evolutionary biology from its “tedious and limiting adaptationist insistence on the ubiquitous power of natural selection.” He feels this insistence has given humankind an impoverished, even corrupted view of evolution in general, and in particular of how evolution has shaped sexual relations and human culture.

As Prum knows, he’s in for a fight. The biologists who most militantly defend the adaptationist Darwinian view of evolution, such as Richard Dawkins, do not gladly suffer dissent. But true to his argument, Prum seeks to prevail less through brute force of attack than by making his case with clarity, grace and charm. Like a bowerbird arranging its display for potential mates, he seeks not to best his chesty, chattering rivals, but to persuade the open-minded. The result is a delicious read, both seductive and mutinous.

Richard Prum is first and foremost an obsessive birder. Having personally seen over a third of the world’s 10,000 known bird species, he draws on his observations and wide reading to defeather and gut the adaptationist view that beauty is an “honest signaling” of evolutionary fitness. His attention never strays far from nature, and his writing in these bird passages is minutely detailed, exquisitely observant, deeply informed, and often tenderly sensual. When describing, say, the “throbbing” display of the lavishly decorated argus bird, he delivers a feathery brush of the erotic.

Prum is also an expert on the evolution of feathers, and he writes of them with the insight and appreciation one hears in the funnest art critics — think Kenneth Clark crossed with Sister Wendy. Prum makes an elegant, plausible argument that rather than having evolved for flight, feathers may actually have first evolved as a decorative surface for sexual display: fitness as a downstream benefit of beauty. The art-critic overtones come not by chance. Prum considers birds artists. Manakins (Prum’s study group) carefully choreograph their dances. Bowerbirds mastered perspective in their bower building eons before human painters grokked it during the Renaissance.

Bowerbird males provide Prum some of his most convincing examples. These remarkable birds woo their potential mates by constructing circles, cones, or maypole-like structures out of twigs, then ornamenting both the structures and the ground within and around them with stones, shells, beetle cases, colorful fungi and other found art. Both the architecture and the male’s behavior invite the female to observe and consider while leaving her both the space to do so and a clear escape path. In some bowerbird species the male laboriously arranges and rearranges his display, examining it from various angles and making small fixes, writes Prum, with the care of a “fussy florist.” The males of several species observe the female examining their work while half-hidden behind a tree or some fencelike part of the bower. If she likes what she sees, she stretches her neck and raises her tail in invitation, and the male comes to mate. (This takes only seconds, and the two will never meet again.) If she doesn’t, she leaves.

Prum believes these and similar courtship appeals in other species have arisen from a long, multigenerational, co-evolutionary conversation between mating partners. The male’s aesthetic and social qualities are repeatedly tested, judged and (through selection) modified according to whether they please potential mates. Thus the females’ individual preferences, says Prum, help drive evolution.

Like all selection, this is not intended to reach any particular goal; it just unfolds according to the demands of either fitness, or in this case, beauty. A trait selected for its beauty, of course, might create problems by selecting for ornaments that work against fitness. But, most crucially in the end, and often offsetting these problems, this “aesthetic” courtship, says Prum, creates an environment, temperaments and rituals — a sort of culture — that give the female sexual choice, autonomy and safety. (As noted, she doesn’t get everything; once she and the male mate and part, she raises the offspring by herself.)

Prum sees such aesthetic choices as driving a gradual “aesthetic remodeling” — an evolutionary reshaping of mating behavior, and even of male social behavior more widely, by the civilizing pressure of female preference. Prum stresses this is not about emasculating males, or dominating them; it’s simply about selecting for males who allow females autonomy and choice.

by David Dobbs, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: John Collier’s 1883 portrait of Charles Darwin

Sea Salt

Sea salt
photo: markk
[ed. I've been collecting sea salt lately in shallow lava depressions after strong south swells (I have my secret spots). It's the lightest, cleanist, fluffliest sea salt you can imagine. Tropical snow. Makes me feel like Walter White.]

via:

Life on the Road, and in a Walmart Parking Lot

As I write this, they are scattered across the country–

In Drayton, North Dakota, a former San Francisco cabdriver, 67, labors at the annual sugar beet harvest. He works from sunrise until after sunset in temperatures that dip below freezing, helping trucks that roll in from the fields disgorge multi-ton loads of beets. At night he sleeps in the van that has been his home ever since Uber squeezed him out of the taxi industry and making the rent became impossible.

In Campbellsville, Kentucky, a 66-year-old ex-general contractor stows merchandise during the overnight shift at an Amazon warehouse, pushing a wheeled cart for miles along the concrete floor. It’s mind-numbing work and she struggles to scan each item accurately, hoping to avoid getting fired. In the morning she returns to her tiny trailer, moored at one of several mobile home parks that contract with Amazon to put up nomadic workers like her.

In New Bern, North Carolina, a woman whose home is a teardrop-style trailer—so small it can be pulled with a motorcycle—is couch surfing with a friend while hunting for work. Even with a master’s degree, the 38-year-old Nebraska native can’t find a job despite filling out hundreds of applications in the past month alone. She knows the sugar beet harvest is hiring, but traveling halfway across the country would require more cash than she has. Losing her job at a non-profit several years ago is one of the reasons she moved into the trailer in the first place. After the funding for her position ran out, she couldn’t afford rent on top of paying off student loans.

In San Marcos, California, a thirtysomething couple in a 1975 GMC motorhome is running a roadside pumpkin stand with a children’s carnival and petting zoo, which they had five days to set up from scratch on a vacant dirt lot. In a few weeks they’ll switch to selling Christmas trees.

In Colorado Springs, Colorado, a 72-year-old van-dweller who cracked three ribs doing a campground maintenance job is recuperating while visiting with family.

There have always been itinerants, drifters, hobos, restless souls. But now, in the second millennium, a new kind of wandering tribe is emerging. People who never imagined being nomads are hitting the road. They’re giving up traditional houses and apartments to live in what some call “wheel estate”—vans, secondhand RVs, school buses, pickup campers, travel trailers, and plain old sedans. They are driving away from the impossible choices that face what used to be the middle class. Decisions like:

Would you rather have food or dental work? Pay your mortgage or your electric bill? Make a car payment or buy medicine? Cover rent or student loans? Purchase warm clothes or gas for your commute?

For many the answer seemed radical at first.

You can’t give yourself a raise, but what about cutting your biggest expense? Trading a stick–and–brick domicile for life on wheels?

Some call them “homeless.” The new nomads reject that label. Equipped with both shelter and transportation, they’ve adopted a different word. They refer to themselves, quite simply, as “houseless.”

From a distance, many of them could be mistaken for carefree retired RVers. On occasions when they treat themselves to a movie or dinner at a restaurant, they blend with the crowd. In mind-set and appearance, they are largely middle class. They wash their clothes at Laundromats and join fitness clubs to use the showers. Many took to the road after their savings were obliterated by the Great Recession. To keep their gas tanks and bellies full, they work long hours at hard, physical jobs. In a time of flat wages and rising housing costs, they have unshackled themselves from rent and mortgages as a way to get by. They are surviving America.

But for them—as for anyone—survival isn’t enough. So what began as a last-ditch effort has become a battle cry for something greater. Being human means yearning for more than subsistence. As much as food or shelter, we require hope.

And there is hope on the road. It’s a by-product of forward momentum. A sense of opportunity, as wide as the country itself. A bone-deep conviction that something better will come. It’s just ahead, in the next town, the next gig, the next chance encounter with a stranger.

As it happens, some of those strangers are nomads, too. When they meet—online, or at a job, or camping way off the grid—tribes begin to form. There’s a common understanding, a kinship. When someone’s van breaks down, they pass the hat. There’s a contagious feeling: Something big is happening. The country is changing rapidly, the old structures crumbling away, and they’re at the epicenter of something new. Around a shared campfire, in the middle of the night, it can feel like a glimpse of utopia.

As I write, it is autumn. Soon winter will come. Routine layoffs will start at the seasonal jobs. The nomads will pack up camp and return to their real home—the road—moving like blood cells through the veins of the country. They’ll set out in search of friends and family, or just a place that’s warm. Some will journey clear across the continent. All will count the miles, which unspool like a filmstrip of America. Fast-food joints and shopping malls. Fields dormant under frost. Auto dealerships, megachurches, and all-night diners. Feature-less plains. Feedlots, dead factories, subdivisions, and big-box stores. Snowcapped peaks. The roadside reels past, through the day and into darkness, until fatigue sets in. Bleary-eyed, they find places to pull off the road and rest. In Walmart parking lots. On quiet suburban streets. At truck stops, amid the lullaby of idling engines. Then in the early morning hours—before anyone notices—they’re back on the highway. Driving on, they’re secure in this knowledge:

The last free place in America is a parking spot.

by Jessica Bruder, LitHub | Read more:
Image: SwankieWheels

The Coming War on Business

The only time I saw Sam Francis face-to-face — in the Washington Times cafeteria sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s — I thought he was a crank, but it’s clear now that he was at that moment becoming one of the most prescient writers of the past 50 years. There’s very little Donald Trump has done or said that Francis didn’t champion a quarter century ago.

In a series of essays for conservative magazines like Chronicles, Francis hammered home three key insights. The first was that globalization was screwing Middle America. The Cold War had just ended, capitalism seemed triumphant and the Clinton years seemed to be an era of broad prosperity. But Francis stressed that the service economy was ruining small farms and taking jobs from the working class.

His second insight was that the Republican and conservative establishment did not understand what was happening. He railed against the pro-business “Economic Men” who thought G.D.P. growth could solve the nation’s problems, and the Washington Republicans, who he thought were infected with the values of the educated elites.

In 1991, when his political mentor, Pat Buchanan, was contemplating a presidential bid, Francis told him to break with the conservative movement. “These people are defunct,” Francis told Buchanan. “Go to New Hampshire and call yourself a patriot, a nationalist, an America Firster, but don’t even use the word ‘conservative.’ It doesn’t mean anything anymore.”

His third insight was that politics was no longer about left versus right. Instead, a series of smaller conflicts — religious versus secular, nationalist versus globalist, white versus nonwhite — were all merging into a larger polarity, ruling class versus Middle America.

“Middle American groups are more and more coming to perceive their exploitation at the hands of the dominant elites. The exploitation works on several fronts — economically, by hypertaxation and the design of a globalized economy dependent on exports and services in place of manufacturing; culturally, by the managed destruction of Middle American norms and institutions; and politically, by the regimentation of Middle Americans under the federal leviathan.”

Middle American voters, he wrote, were stuck without a party, appalled by pro-corporate Republican economic policies on the one hand and liberal cultural radicalism on the other. They swung to whichever party seemed most likely to resist the ruling class, but neither party really provided a solution. “A nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes the better.”

The Buchanan campaign was the first run at what we now know as Trumpian populism. In a profile of Francis called “The Castaway,” Michael Brendan Dougherty smartly observed that Buchanan and Francis weren’t just against government, they were against the entire cultural hegemony of the ruling class. [ed. Maybe. But Buchanan was first and foremost - like Trump - mostly interested in promoting himself.]

Francis wrote a wickedly brilliant 1996 essay on Buchanan, “From Household to Nation”: “The ‘culture war’ for Buchanan is not Republican swaggering about family values and dirty movies but a battle over whether the nation itself can continue to exist under the onslaught of the militant secularism, acquisitive egoism, economic and political globalism, demographic inundation, and unchecked state centralism supported by the gruling class.”

Francis urged Buchanan to run an unorthodox campaign (of the sort Trump ended up running), and was ignored. “If Buchanan loses the nomination, it will be because his time has not yet come,” Francis wrote. The moment would end up coming in 2016, 11 years after Francis’ death.

by David Brooks, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Peter Cosgrove/Associated Press

Congress Votes to Increase Military Spending by $81 Billion

Where did all the concern over deficits go? After two years of the media lamenting, worrying and feigning outrage over the cost of Bernie Sanders’ two big-budget items—free college and single-payer healthcare—the same outlets are uniformly silent, days after the largest military budget increase in history.

Monday, the Senate voted to increase military spending by a whopping $81 billion, from $619 billion to $700 billion—an increase of over 13 percent. (The House passed its own $696 billion Pentagon budget in July—Politico, 7/14/17.) The reaction thus far to this unprecedented handout to military contractors and weapons makers has been one big yawn.

No write-ups worrying about the cost increase in the Washington Post or Vox or NPR. No op-eds expressing concern for “deficits” in the New York Times, Boston Globe or US News. No news segments on Fox News or CNN on the “unaffordable” increase in government spending. All the outlets that spent considerable column inches and airtime stressing over Sanders’ social programs are suddenly indifferent to “how we will afford” this latest military giveaway. The US government votes 89–9 to add $81 billion extra to the balance sheet—the equivalent of the government creating three new Justice Departments, four more NASAs, seven Treasury Departments, ten EPAs or 546 National Endowments for the the Arts—and there’s zero discussion as to “how we will pay for it.”

As FAIR has noted for decades (e.g., 2/23/11, 5/8/16), the media’s deficit discourse has always been a PR scam. A rhetorical bludgeon used to cry poverty any time a left-wing politician wants to help the poor or people of color that somehow is never an issue when it comes to pumping out F-22s and E3 AWACS, which evidently pay for themselves with magic.

The increase alone in military spending—over a budget that was already bigger than the next eight countries combined—is greater than the total amount spent annually on state university tuition by every student in the United States: $81 billion vs. $70 billion. This is to say that if the budget for the US military had just stayed the same for 2018, the US could have paid the tuition for every public college student this year, with $11 billion left over for board and books.

by Adam Johnson, FAIR |  Read more:

Image: US Air Force/Madelyn Brown

Sarah Palin Promises Alabamans That a Vote for Roy Moore Is a Vote for Trumpism

Early Thursday evening, after a cartoonish debate between Roy Moore and Luther Strange, the Alabama politicians who are competing for Jeff Sessions’s old Senate seat, around five hundred people were gathered outside the train depot in Montgomery to rally in support of Moore. Heading into the event, Moore, a former Alabama State Supreme Court chief justice who twice was removed from office, was leading the incumbent, Luther Strange, by at least eight points in the polls. With the notable exception of President Trump, who endorsed Strange, the Republican Party’s anti-establishment wing has rallied behind Moore. Sebastian Gorka, the former Trump adviser, would be stumping at the depot on Moore’s behalf, as would Sarah Palin. At least one flyer touted the evening as a “Sarah Palin Rally with Judge Roy Moore.” An Asian woman, one of perhaps a dozen minorities in attendance, held a sign aloft that read “Mr. President and Mr. Vice President, I Love You But You Are Wrong!"

Debbie Dooley, a co-founder of the Atlanta Tea Party, drove a hundred and fifty miles from Atlanta to attend the rally. As members of the Bikers for Trump group flexed their muscles for TV cameras, young children waved American flags, and churchgoers clutched copies of Palin’s books, hoping to get them autographed, Dooley worked the crowd urgently. By 7 p.m. it was still nearly ninety degrees outside, but Dooley—e-mailing, texting, and talking in equal measure—was unfazed. She had come to explain the importance of next Tuesday’s G.O.P. runoff, and of voting for Moore, to anyone still sitting on the fence.

At one point, Dooley approached three women who stood at the edge of the crowd in a tight semicircle. They looked to be in their sixties, a bit older than Dooley. Two were sisters, split in their support.

“I drove three hours one way to get here,” Dooley told the women, who hadn’t asked.

“Why?” one sister asked.

“This is the most important Senate election we’ve had in a long time,” Dooley replied. “I went to the University of Alabama. So, roll, Trump, roll.”

Dooley went on, “Let me tell you why. Am I upset about Trump? Oh, heck yes, I am. But I’ve been in politics for over forty years, O.K.? The last thing you want is for this to be a contest between those that like Trump and those that don’t like Trump.” She pointed at her phone. “So I even made a thing on Facebook that shows that Trump’s base supports Judge Moore.”

“I don’t support Moore,” the first sister said.

“I do,” Dooley said. “Who do you support?”

“Strange,” the sister replied.

“Neither one of them are fit to serve, in my opinion,” the second sister said.

“He’s not gonna win,” Dooley said, referring to Strange. “Judge Moore is going to win.” The sisters and their silent friend were eyeing Dooley more intently now.

“Look at all this,” Dooley said, again pointing to the screen of her phone, where she’d pulled up what appeared to be a news story. “ ‘Luther Strange set up a sweetheart deal.’ Look at all this corruption. I call him Lying Luther.”

“Do you know about Moore’s?” one sister said. “I know about Moore’s. Years, years, years of corruption. I don’t trust him.”

“I think Donald Trump has been given bad advice,” Dooley said. “I think that Mitch McConnell—look at the way he’s kind of slowly moving the President away from the Trump doctrine. I think the President has got advisers around him that are doing bad. Roy Moore winning can do more to advance the Trump doctrine. We will have sent the message that this is a referendum on Mitch McConnell’s leadership.” She went on, “I hear that if Roy is elected, the establishment will be so afraid, you’ll have some senators step down and decide not to run.”

“Do you support building the wall?” one sister asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Dooley replied.

“Well, Moore doesn’t.”

“That’s a lie,” Dooley said.

“Well, I heard him say it.”

“You heard part of it,” Dooley countered. “You did not hear all of it.” She then pivoted: “Luther refuses to go on record against daca. I actually saw the video.”

This went on for another ten minutes. Then Dooley saw a Biker for Trump she knew and wandered off.

“Who was she, again?” one of the women asked once Dooley was out of earshot.

The biker was named Bill Taylor. He had a braided beard and a tattoo on his left arm that said “Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.” He was friendly. “Moore and Trump are more or less the same,” Taylor said. “Trump jumped the gun. He just went for the incumbent. We’re sending a hundred, hundred and fifty bikes to Trump’s rally for Strange in Huntsville tomorrow.” He added, “For the President, not for Strange.”

“I can promise you,” Dooley chimed in, “that Luther will say you endorsed him.”

“It’s been a big rift in the organization,” Taylor went on. “This week, especially. Because everybody backs Moore, but it’s ‘Bikers for Trump.’ So we have to go up there to Huntsville for the President.”

After a group rendition of “Proud to be an American,” as well as the national anthem and a prayer for Moore rebuking Strange for “hiding behind the skirts of others,” a local radio personality took the stage. He noted that Trump had been “ill advised” in his endorsement of Strange. The d.j. for the event also seemed to have been misled: at seven-thirty, John Lennon’s “Imagine” came on the speakers. Only half of it played, right up to “no religion, too.” (The d.j. later said, “It was just a test song I picked. It was on my phone.”)

Soon, another local speaker was excoriating the Senate Majority Leader. “Mitch McConnell,” he said, “you can spend five million, ten million, or fifteen million, but you can’t make chicken salad out of chickenshit!” Siran Stacy, a former running back for the University of Alabama, took the podium next and addressed Trump. “You can come down here,” he said. We’ll slaughter a hog and give you some sausage. But don’t tell us how to run our house.”

After being introduced as a “rock star who helped write Trump’s U.N. speech,” Gorka finally emerged from Moore’s bus. “Washington watched the debate, and they’re worried,” he said. “Tuesday must be a sign to the swamp dwellers in D.C.” He went on, “Tuesday is November 8th all over again: the voters can choose corruption or choose America.” With that, Palin, introduced as “the original mama grizzly,” appeared. She told the crowd that Moore “was deplorable before deplorable was cool.” She employed a number of football metaphors—“trick plays may razzle-dazzle,” she said, in apparent criticism of McConnell, “but defense wins championships.” A man in the crowd told a friend, “She’s speaking our language.”

by Charles Bethea, New Yorker | Read more:
Image:Tami Chappell / Reuters

[ed. Incomprehensible (on many levels). I can't figure out what the hell these people are voting for, and it doesn't sound like they know either. But rest assured, if there's an event where Sarah Palin can command a stage (and even better, a nice payoff), she'll be there.] 

Stephen Stills

Both of Us, Bound to Lose
[ed. See also: Pensamiento]

Report: Nothing Stopping You From Deleting Your Facebook Account Right Now

WASHINGTON—Saying the entire process would take you less than a minute, sources reported Friday that there is absolutely nothing at all stopping you from deleting your Facebook account right now. “There’s no reason in the world you can’t go to your Facebook account this very second and erase it completely from the internet,” sources reported, adding that no one is standing in your way and you’ll be happy to move on with your life and never, ever look back. “No one’s permission at all is required for you to visit www.facebook.com/help/delete_account, click the “Delete My Account” button, and verify your password, at which point you will be free from the social media platform for the rest of your life. You can do it. You should do it. Do it right now.” At press time, sources told reporters they were unsurprised you were too fucking weak to pull the trigger.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: Facebook

Japan braces as North Korea threatens hydrogen bomb test in Pacific
via:

[ed. Insanity x 2. See also: ADD politics.]

Change Becomes You

Six years have passed since I discovered that my son was using drugs,’ wrote Vincenzina Urzia in Anthony and Me (2014), a memoir of her son’s drug addiction. ‘I was really sad all the time and devastated, not to mention how worried I was about his wellbeing. My son was not the same person anymore.’

This is a puzzling idea, for someone to become ‘not the same person any more’. The phrase smacks of philosophy – perhaps even obscurity. Yet it is simultaneously apt, capturing the emotive sense of no longer recognising someone whom we once knew. Many have witnessed someone they loved change so profoundly that the person remaining seems an entirely different one.

Drug dependence powerfully exemplifies this phenomenon of not being the same person: a mother sees addiction transform her son into a shadow of his former self. Other examples can evoke the same feeling. A ruinous relationship or divorce leaves a friend so changed that he seems like a totally different person. So too can Alzheimer’s disease – which affects up to half of elderly Americans. A parent or relative develops severe Alzheimer’s, and it seems as if the person once known has disappeared. Across a range of experiences, profound changes can make well-known friends or family become entirely different people.

These examples suggest that change fundamentally challenges our sense of self. Yet, many other large changes don’t disrupt our identities. In fact, some profound changes actually seem to make us become really or truly ourselves. Consider finding one’s true self through romantic love; discovering a hidden life passion; committing to radically improving one’s health; or experiencing a religious or spiritual conversion. The same effect might arise from harder experiences, such as surviving a period of wartime or incarceration. All of these result in tremendous transformations, but they don’t threaten identity. Instead, these changes seem to unearth our core selves, making us become who we really are. This allows for a seemingly paradoxical statement: paradigm cases of continuing to be the same person involve becoming radically different. (...)

Our apparent purposes are broader than those given by nature or even culture. While the singular purpose of an acorn is to grow into an oak, humans are creatures of multifaceted and diverse potentiality. This implies an exciting – but dangerous – aspect of the purposeful self. Often, who we seem to be now becomes more lucid over time. To illuminate this feature, consider examples of great achievements. Imagine that a young child grows into a great artist. In such a case, we reflect back to years earlier and see the seeds of artistry in the younger person. This judgment might be an error or bias; maybe it is not truly their purpose. But it is undoubtedly a common story we tell.

And whether this story is right or wrong, it seeps into our morality. The philosopher Bernard Williams introduced a fictional thought experiment about ‘Paul Gauguin’ inspired by the life of the real artist. In the thought experiment, young Gauguin decides to leave his family to pursue his artistic ambitions. As Williams astutely noted, whether young Gauguin’s choice is blameworthy or praiseworthy seems to depend on how things turn out. Philosophers call this phenomenon ‘moral luck’. If old Gauguin fails as an artist, young Gauguin seems blameworthy, but if old Gauguin succeeds, we say, as Williams puts it in Moral Luck (1981): ‘a little grudgingly perhaps: “Well, all right then – well done.”’ A different way to understand the story is in terms of young Gauguin’s apparent true self and purposes. Upon seeing old Gauguin the successful artist, we attribute seeds of artistic potential in young Gauguin; pursuing his true calling seems more excusable. In the hypothetical world in which old Gauguin fails, we worry that the young man who left his family – years earlier – departed from his moral and familial purposes (as we now perceive that he did not really have an artistic one).

This interpretation of the self as purpose-driven also makes sense of a recent experimental-philosophy discovery: we have a tendency to see improvements as more identity-preserving than deteriorations. People judge changes for the better as more consistent with identity than changes for the worse. The hypothesis of the purposeful interpretation is that the change for the better informs our impression of the earlier person. When we see someone improve, we attribute this goodness to the potentiality of their earlier self. Upon seeing the growth of a magnificent oak, we are more confident about what the acorn was really meant to be. And upon seeing a person’s positive powerful improvement, we are more confident about that part of the person’s true self, at the time before the improvement. However, upon seeing a person’s deterioration, we worry that they have departed from their true callings.

by Kevin Tobia, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Paul Gauguin Self Portrait with Halo and Snake (1889).

Eh! U Da Kine, Ah?

[ed. Local Hawaiian food show (his daughter cracks me up). If you're wondering what U da kine means, this kind of explains it... kine of (the last two paragraphs, anyway).]

Athit Perawongmetha, Crocodiles eat chicken heads at Sriracha Tiger Zoo in Chonburi province, Thailand. 2017.

via:

The Slackers

A Plea for Culinary Modernism

Modern, fast, processed food is a disaster. That, at least, is the message conveyed by newspapers and magazines, on television cooking programs, and in prizewinning cookbooks.

It is a mark of sophistication to bemoan the steel roller mill and supermarket bread while yearning for stone­ ground flour and brick ovens; to seek out heirloom apples and pumpkins while despising modern tomatoes and hybrid corn; to be hostile to agronomists who develop high-yielding modern crops and to home economists who invent new recipes for General Mills.

We hover between ridicule and shame when we remember how our mothers and grand­mothers enthusiastically embraced canned and frozen foods. We nod in agreement when the waiter proclaims that the restaurant showcases the freshest local produce. We shun Wonder Bread and Coca-Cola. Above all, we loathe the great culminating symbol of Culinary Modernism, McDonald’s — modern, fast, homogenous, and international.

Like so many of my generation, my culinary style was created by those who scorned industrialized food; Culinary Luddites, we may call them, after the English hand workers of the nineteenth century who abhorred the machines that were destroying their traditional way of life. I learned to cook from the books of Elizabeth David, who urged us to sweep our store cupboards “clean for ever of the cluttering debris of commercial sauce bottles and all synthetic flavorings.”

I progressed to the Time-Life Good Cook series and to Simple French Cooking, in which Richard Olney hoped against hope that “the reins of stubborn habit are strong enough to frustrate the famous industrial revolution for some time to come.” I turned to Paula Wolfert to learn more about Mediterranean cooking and was assured that I wouldn’t “find a dishonest dish in this book . . . The food here is real food . . . the real food of real people.” Today I rush to the newsstand to pick up Saveur with its promise to teach me to “Savor a world of authentic cuisine.”

Culinary Luddism involves more than just taste. Since the days of the counterculture, it has also presented itself as a moral and political crusade. Now in Boston, the Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust works to provide “a scientific basis for the preservation and revitalization of traditional diets.

Meanwhile Slow Food, founded in 1989 to protest the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome, is a self­-described Greenpeace for Food; its manifesto begins, “We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods . . . Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer.” As one of its spokesmen was reported as saying in the New York Times, “Our real enemy is the obtuse consumer.”

At this point I begin to back off. I want to cry, “Enough!” But why? Why would I, who learned to cook from Culinary Luddites, who grew up in a family that, in Elizabeth David’s words, produced their “own home-cured bacon, ham and sausages . . . churned their own butter, fed their chickens and geese, cherished their fruit trees, skinned and cleaned their own hares” (well, to be honest, not the geese and sausages), not rejoice at the growth of Culinary Luddism? Why would I (or anyone else) want to be thought “an obtuse consumer”? Or admit to preferring unreal food for unreal people? Or to savoring inauthentic cuisine?

The answer is not far to seek: because I am an historian. (...)

The dishes we call ethnic and assume to be of peasant origin were invented for the urban, or at least urbane, aristocrats who collected the surplus. This is as true of the lasagne of northern Italy as it is of the chicken konna of Mughal Delhi, the mooshu pork of imperial China, the pilafs, stuffed vegetables, and baklava of the great Ottoman palace in Istanbul, or the mee krob of nineteenth-century Bangkok. Cities have always enjoyed the best food and have invariably been the focal points of culinary innovation.

Nor are most “traditional foods” very old. For every prized dish that goes back two thousand years, a dozen have been invented in the last two hundred. The French baguette? A twentieth-century phenomenon, adopted nationwide only after World War II. English fish and chips? Dates from the late nineteenth century, when the working class took up the fried fish of Sephardic Jewish immigrants in East London. Fish and chips, though, will soon be a thing of the past. (...)

We may mistake the meals of today’s European, Asian, or Mexican middle class (many of them benefiting from industrialization and contemporary tourism) for peasant food or for the daily fare of our ancestors. We can represent the peoples of the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, India, or Mexico as pawns at the mercy of multinational corporations bent on selling trashy modern products — failing to appreciate that, like us, they enjoy a choice of goods in the market, foreign restaurants to eat at, and new recipes to try.

A Mexican friend, suffering from one too many foreign visitors who chided her because she offered Italian, not Mexican food, complained, “Why can’t we eat spaghetti, too?” If we unthinkingly assume that good food maps neatly onto old or slow or homemade food (even though we’ve all had lousy traditional cooking), we miss the fact that lots of industrial foodstuffs are better. Certainly no one with a grindstone will ever produce chocolate as suave as that produced by conching in a machine for seventy two hours. Nor is the housewife likely to turn out fine soy sauce or miso.

And let us not forget that the current popularity of Italian food owes much to the availability and long shelf life of two convenience foods that even purists love, high-quality factory pasta and canned tomatoes. Far from fleeing them, we should be clamoring for more high-quality industrial foods.

If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, peasant, fresh, and natural foods.

Virgin olive oil, Thai fish sauce, and udon noodles come to us thanks to international marketing. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the preserved and processed staples — salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea — produced by agribusiness and food corporations. Asparagus and strawberries in winter come to us on trucks trundling up from Mexico and planes flying in from Chile.

Visits to charming little restaurants and colorful markets in Morocco or Vietnam would be impossible without international tourism. The ethnic foods we seek out when we travel are being preserved, indeed often created, by a hotel and restaurant industry determined to cater to our dream of India or Indonesia, Turkey, Hawaii, or Mexico. Culinary Luddism, far from escaping the modern global food economy, is parasitic upon it.

Culinary Luddites are right, though, about two important things. We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos. As far as good food goes, they’ve done us all a service by teaching us to how to use the bounty delivered to us (ironically) by the global economy.

Their culinary ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving. Nostalgia is not what we need.

by Rachel Laudan, Jacobin |  Read more:

Image: French women hitched to the plow, 1914–18. American Photo Archive

Gu Gan（古干 Chinese, b.1942）
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