Looking at the camel reminded me of the saying that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Imagine if the logo of Christianity happened to be not the cross, an instrument of torture used to kill a poor carpenter, but rather a camel and the eye of a needle . . . **
The air shuddered with the beat
of a punch-press fed
metal sheets, throwing back
hollow molds. The crushing knell
of the punctual machine
never stopped; we thought,
what if that worker’s hands just once
not fast enough —
We filed from one post to the next,
like doing Stations of the Cross,
under the hot metal roof
breathing the hot metal dust —
and looked at the men and women,
who never looked at us,
bent over presses and drills,
their bodies flashing lurid white,
yellow and blue
in flares of acetylene —
the proletariat we wrote about
on history exams.
The tour was over;
we stood in the concrete yard,
startled by the free sky.
Our faces were tinged with gray,
soldered with needles
of piercing light.
the pounding pounded inside us —
those people with motionless eyes
in robot rhythm
below the trinity
portraits of Lenin, Engels, Marx,
never looking up.
~ Oriana
The similarity between religions and what might be called “grand ideologies” is striking, especially in the realm of heavy propaganda. Part of the political propaganda I grew up with was school trips to factories. We enjoyed the steel mill and the glass factory, but the motorcycle factory was brutal, and I think this one turned out to be subversive. We (mostly the children of Warsaw professional elites) got a glimpse of how brutal the life of the much-glorified “proletariat” can be — and it sickened us. The big chart of accident rate on the same wall as the portraits didn’t help much, nor the director’s speech about the apparent improvement: fewer accidents this month than last.
“Workers’ paradise” was never as ironic as inside that factory. In fact I think Bosch would have found it inspiring as a model of hell.
I'm all for the use of robots to do this kind of dangerous industrial work. Humans should work at jobs that require qualities that only humans have: we could use more staffing and more quality and empathy in health care and education, for instance. Or, for people who love creating with their hands, more arts-and-crafts jobs would fit the bill.
Nor would it be so terrible if mothers who really want to stay home with their children did so. We could perhaps invent a robot that can change diapers, but only a mother can do it with love.
**
“Due to the lack of experienced trumpeters, the end of the world has been postponed.” ~ Matt Flumerfelt
THE ENIGMA OF HITLER, PART 3
~ “Hitler and Goebbels were the first relativizers of the Holocaust, the first purveyors of false equivalence. “Concentration camps were not invented in Germany,” Hitler said in 1941. “It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations.” The British had operated camps in South Africa, the Nazis pointed out. Party propagandists similarly highlighted the sufferings of Native Americans and Stalin’s slaughter in the Soviet Union. In 1943, Goebbels triumphantly broadcast news of the Katyn Forest massacre, in the course of which the Soviet secret police killed more than twenty thousand Poles.
The magnitude of the abomination almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror. Yet the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions—lines of influence, circles of complicity, moments of congruence. Hitler’s “scientific anti-Semitism,” as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus Affair. The British Empire was Hitler’s ideal image of a master race in dominant repose. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a Russian forgery from around 1900, fuelled the Nazis’ paranoia. The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about the fate of the Jews. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler spoke of the planned mass murder of Poles and asked, “Who, after all, is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?”
The Nazis found collaborators in almost every country that they invaded. In one Lithuanian town, a crowd cheered while a local man clubbed dozens of Jewish people to death. He then stood atop the corpses and played the Lithuanian anthem on an accordion. German soldiers looked on, taking photographs.
The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge. Large-scale deportations of Jews from the countries of the Third Reich followed upon Stalin’s deportation of the Volga Germans. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief planners of the Holocaust, thought that, once the Soviet Union had been defeated, the Jews of Europe could be left to die in the Gulag. The most dangerous claim made by right-wing historians was that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror, and was therefore to some degree excusable. One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side. This was the achievement of Timothy Snyder’s profoundly disturbing 2010 book, “Bloodlands,” which seems to fix cameras in spots across Eastern Europe, recording wave upon wave of slaughter.
The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.”
America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated. He made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion. The Volga would be “our Mississippi,” he said. “Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.” Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families. Autobahns would cut through fields of grain. The present occupants of those lands—tens of millions of them—would be starved to death. At the same time, and with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticization of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’s less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.
Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense. Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type. “Race Law in the United States,” a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans. Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major difference between American and German racism.
American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in “The Great Gatsby.” (The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 tract “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” says, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.”) California’s sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934.
There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.” Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.
When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether. For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality. The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America. In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted. The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it “astounding” that other countries would decry Germany’s treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans died fighting Nazi Germany. Still, bigotry toward Jews persisted, even toward Holocaust survivors. General George Patton criticized do-gooders who “believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.”
Leading Nazi scientists had it better. Brian Crim’s “Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State” (Johns Hopkins) reviews the shady history of Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from the V-2 program. When Braun was captured, in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy of the American military-industrial complex, and cannily promoted the idea of a high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace. He was able to reconstitute most of his operation Stateside, minus the slave labor. Records were airbrushed; de-Nazification procedures were bypassed (they were considered “demoralizing”); immigration was expedited. J. Edgar Hoover became concerned that Jewish obstructionists in the State Department were asking too many questions about the scientists’ backgrounds. Senator Styles Bridges proposed that the State Department needed a “first-class cyanide fumigating job.”
What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler’s malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy. He would certainly have at his disposal craven right-wing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher. He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.
*
The artist-politician of the future will not bask in the antique aura of Wagner and Nietzsche. He is more likely to take inspiration from the newly minted myths of popular culture. The archetype of the ordinary kid who discovers that he has extraordinary powers is a familiar one from comic books and superhero movies, which play on the adolescent feeling that something is profoundly wrong with the world and that a magic weapon might banish the spell. With one stroke, the inconspicuous outsider assumes a position of supremacy, on a battlefield of pure good against pure evil. For most people, such stories remain fantasy, a means of embellishing everyday life. One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who has a “vague notion of being reserved for something else,” may attempt to turn metaphor into reality. He might be out there now, cloaked by the blue light of a computer screen, ready, waiting.” ~
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-racism-influenced-hitler
It may be hard for us to believe, but Hitler used to be called "Beautiful Adolf." What about Eva Braun? "Beautiful Adolf and Sweet Evi" (source: my mother)**
“AN INCONGRUOUS INNOCENCE”
~ “Along the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as a cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland even as things got worse and worse.
Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us.” ~ Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy
**
~ “What I find especially sobering is to consider HOW RATIONAL THE TWO WORLD WARS SEEMED TO SO MANY PEOPLE AT THE TIME. It is easy for us, with so much hindsight, to look back upon those conflicts and see frothing, irrational, bloodthirsty lunatics who — we tell ourselves — would never find an audience among us "enlightened" moderns. What we tend to forget, therefore, is how rational the arguments made by belligerents back then seemed to people. What we see now as blatant chauvinistic nationalism seemed back then like a natural, rational response to harms done to one's nation by others. Now, we see that dynamic playing out again, as irrational, destructive motives are spun so that they seem totally reasonable.” ~ Peter Johnson
“By hating Hitler and trying to fight back, Jews are only increasing the severity of his policies against them. If Jews throughout the world try to instill into the minds of Hitler and his supporters recognition of the ideals for which the race stands, and if Jews appeal to the German sense of justice and the German national conscience, I am sure the problem will be solved more effectively and earlier than otherwise.” ~ Professor Cadbury, 1934
“Always stay open-minded and receptive, 'cause like maybe Hitler was right.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
**
Let’s detox with beauty:
“We’re not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside.” ~ Allen Ginsberg, The Sunflower Sutra
YOU ARE NOT COMPLETELY HELPLESS OVER BEING IN LOVE
~ “The researchers, Sandra Langeslag from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Jan van Strien from Erasmus University Rotterdam, examined 40 participants in what was “the very first study” of its kind, according to Langeslag. Each participant came armed with 30 photos of his or her current or former partner — half of the participants were in a relationship, while half had recently been through a breakup — and were instructed to try to regulate their love feelings by using the technique of “reappraisal” — viewing a slideshow of the images and focusing each time on a positive aspect of their beloved for “up-regulation,” or a negative aspect for “down-regulation.”
The results? Well, participants did indeed feel more love after up-regulation and less love after down-regulation. What’s more, brainwave measurements showed this wasn’t just an illusion: The Late Positive Potential brainwave, which “indicates how emotionally salient a stimulus is for you,” was diminished after down-regulation and somewhat enhanced after up-regulation, says Langeslag.
“The idea that we can regulate love makes a lot of sense, because we can regulate every other emotion,” says Dr. Holly Parker, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University, where she teaches a course on the Psychology of Close Relationships. There is plenty of evidence, she says, that “we can dramatically change how we see something, how we see someone, based on how we frame our perspective.” Indeed, James Gross, a professor at Stanford University, is one of the pioneers in the field of emotion regulation, which has shown that despite feeling that emotions “arise unbidden and it’s hard to do much about them,” people can actually modify their own emotions when they see fit.
This is not a new concept — psychologists stretching all the way back to Freud have thought that our mind may be able to control certain emotions. So it’s a little surprising that more research like this hasn’t already happened. The field of emotion regulation research, says Gross, has tended to concentrate on strategies to regulate negative emotions, such as anger and anxiety, without much prior research on how to regulate positive emotions like love. Besides which, the members of Foreigner are not the only ones unsure of what love is. Many psychologists refer to love not so much as an emotion itself, but instead a motivational state to a variety of emotions such as happiness or perhaps jealousy. Love is not obviously a “pure” or “basic” emotion, says Gross. “I think we can be pretty confident that there’s something moving around,” he says, “but we can’t yet be sure that it’s really love.” ~
https://www.ozy.com/acumen/how-to-make-yourself-fall-in-love-or-out-of-love/71532?utm_medium=SM&utm_source=FB&utm_name=CPC
Couple in the street in moonlight; André Poffé (1911-1990)**
RESPECT YOUR “INNER ADULT”
It seems that only the inner child “gets respect.” The concept surfaced in 1963 as part of Transactional Analysis. It’s part of the “three selves” theory: Child-Parent-Adult. The child stands mainly for feelings, the parent for collective rules, and the adult is the thinker who can make wise, “autonomous” decisions. The adult is not on automatic, simply repeating behaviors from childhood or copied from parents. The adult questions the rules, but doesn’t assume that if you just let the inner child finger paint and play with the food, all will be well.
Whatever the usefulness of this model may be, what interests me is that only the “inner child” gained popularity. The phrase has entered the language. Thus we are urged to take good care of our “inner child.” That’s the self (or sub-personality) that’s valued most. “Take good care of your adult” would be met with incomprehension. It’s assumed that the best and most “fun” part of ourselves is the inner child.
I don’t know if this has to do with the broader culture: little children are adored, but as they grow older they are seen in less positive light and meet with harsher treatment. They enter the winner/loser system. The frequency of stress-related illnesses and depression should probably make us pause and ask some questions about values and priorities. Do we perhaps have pervasive “adult abuse” — harmful work environments, for instance, inadequate pay, abusive bosses etc.? Is it OK to expect a new mother to know how to take care of an infant with no help? Or, if a parent develops Alzheimer’s, it’s OK to expect the daughter to assume the whole horrific burden of care?
I was very grateful to the hospice workers for helping me when my mother was dying. I was extremely grateful that someone came every day, and that I could call 24/7 if I had a question. Such beautiful care when a person is dying . . . I began to wonder if this kind of care would be possible before then, when the person is not dying but simply under severe stress. The invariable answer was that it would cost too much to have such programs. Hospice (run by nurses) actually saves money (it’s very expensive to die in a hospital), so it took off. Other helping programs would be in the “humanitarian” category, and thus get very low priority — if any.
*
Another point where I disagree with the worship of the inner child is creativity. The element of playfulness in creative work should not blind us to the fact that Michelangelo sculpting the Pietà is not like a child playing in a sandbox, and Yeats writing 56 drafts of “Sailing to Byzantium” is not like a babbling four-year-old who’s having fun with words. A culture that disvalues the “adult” may be admitting that typical adulthood is not very rewarding, and creative jobs are scarce. This is where basic personal income might prove a boon, but if a society is primarily punitive rather than nurturing toward its adult population (and arguably even toward its children, once they are past the cute stage of being the “little ones”), that would take an enormous shift in attitude.
And if we picked up the motto “Respect your Inner Adult,” who knows where it might lead. Toward more maturity and self-nurturing? Standing up to the abusive “parent” boss? Demanding that politicians care for the common good? That Christian churches don’t see the congregation as a “flock of sheep” but as thinking adults?
A whole less fearful, more “adult” world might emerge . . .
HILLBILLY ELEGY AS PROPAGANDA
~ “Men who shirk employment and women who lack the appropriate amount of shame for their illegitimate children populate the world of Hillbilly Elegy. Instead of attending church, the people of Hillbilly Elegy worship material desires beyond their means and use welfare fraud in the service of their doomed pursuits.
“This is the reality of our community,” Vance writes. “Our homes are a chaotic mess. We scream and yell at each other like we are spectators at a football game. At least one member of the family uses drugs—sometimes the father, sometimes the mother, sometimes both.”
Vance’s use of the word “we” transforms the personal reality of his difficult childhood into a universal experience. The broadest point made by Hillbilly Elegy on the basis of this experience is that “public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, only we can fix them.”
The argument that corporations did not help create the problems of Appalachia is stunningly ahistorical—while coal is no longer a significant employment sector in Appalachia, we are still dealing with the industry’s economic exploitation and extractive logic—but it is not even the most problematic claim Vance makes.
As the National Review, which employed Vance as an occasional contributor, asserted in its gleeful review of the book, Hillbilly Elegy had at long last proved that white Appalachians have “followed the black underclass and Native Americans not just into family disintegration, addiction, and other pathologies, but also perhaps into the most important self-sabotage of all, the crippling delusion that they cannot improve their lot by their own effort.”
For many conservatives, the beauty of Hillbilly Elegy was not just what it said about the lot of poor white Americans, but what it implied about black Americans as well. Conservatives believed that Hillbilly Elegy would make their intellectual platforming about the moral failures of the poor colorblind in a way that would retroactively vindicate them for viciously deploying the same stereotypes against nonwhite people for decades.
The lives of poor white people, especially those with the additional burdens of addiction or legal issues, become the empirical proof for conservatives that we have based our attention to racism on fractured logic. The irony, of course, is that even as we become the ambassadors of this colorblind worldview, poor white people can’t escape the generic moralizing of their betters, who got a head start honing their brand of arrogant tough love and hard truths on black communities.
The second manifestation of this belief is more complicated and requires us to go back in time to discover how white Appalachians were transformed, in some intellectual circles, as a race or “stock” unto their own and the consequences that followed. Vance didn’t invent this particular fiction; he simply exploits it to provide his narrative with a cohesiveness and cultural weight that wouldn’t otherwise exist.
Why does that matter? It turns out that if you create and sell a version of Appalachia as a place filled with defective people, eugenicists—yes, eugenicists—start paying attention to your work. And the esteem, as you’ll learn, isn’t unilateral.
Vance cited Murray’s Coming Apart approvingly in Hillbilly Elegy, and Murray, who also claims Scots-Irish ancestry, apparently found Hillbilly Elegy riveting as well.
At a talk at the American Enterprise Institute in October 2016, the pair showed off their camaraderie, laughing and joking on stage together. They discussed their “pretty clean Scots-Irish blood” while getting to the heart of what “hillbilly culture” actually is.
“There’s something to be said for the fact that Scots-Irish culture is both unique and regionally distinct, but it’s also spread pretty far and wide,” Vance offered. Murray, who in the darkest corners of his brain still likes to believe he’s a social scientist, nodded and smiled at this conflicting package of attributes that wouldn’t pass a freshman essay—regionally distinct but spread far and wide!—as if it was the truest fact he’d ever heard.
He was then quick to point out, “and our leading characteristics though, which I learned long before I read Hillbilly Elegy, is being drunk and violent.”
More laughs.
It is not possible, in my view, to separate Hillbilly Elegy from the public persona crafted by Vance and on display at events like these. It is one of overperformed humility.
And it is not immaterial to me that individuals with power and capital still subject us, in our pain, to the sense of entitlement that allows even the most ambiguous of outcomes to be presented as a concise narrative, richly rewarding, satisfying to everyone but us.
Entitlement. It is, I think, the perfect word to bear in mind as the next chapter unfolds. Elegy is another. In a former life, I used to be a translator, which allowed me to spend several years reading poetry. While reading Greek poetry, my professors warned us to be careful of the double meaning of elegies; they were, it seems, often written as political propaganda.” ~
https://bostonreview.net/race-politics/elizabeth-catte-mythical-whiteness-trump-country
West Virginia Mine Entrance, 1908~ “In many ways Appalachia functions as a domestic colony—valuable only for the land’s resources. Its people have been treated as a disposable means to an end . . . The people of Appalachia are still often considered second-class citizens in America, routinely referred to as “trailer trash,” “hillbillies,” “rednecks,” “weedsuckers,” “stumphoppers,” and worse.
The most recent addition to the false accounts of Appalachian life is the widely read book Hillbilly Elegy, the author of which grew up in the decaying Rust Belt town of Middletown, Ohio. Nevertheless, he blames his personal difficulties on the culture of Appalachia.
The ongoing dismissal of Appalachians as “lazy, dangerous, and dumb,” is the same method of denying humanity that has been applied to African Americans, Indigenous Americans, and wave upon wave of immigrant to this country.” ~ Chris Offutt
That glorious photo of the camel had me thinking about the distance between the words of Jesus as found in the gospels and the ideas of evangelical Christians. And as well, a recent article in our local paper, advice from a woman about how to ensure you aren't giving money to the undeserving homeless. Not all the poor are deserving of your charity, so be on your guard, they may be lying or scamming you into supporting their shiftless, lazy lifestyles. She was particularly outraged by a man whose cardboard sign said "why lie, I need beer." (I've seen this guy myself . . . and seen motorists wave him over and hand him a few bills) She said she saw a car stop and actually hand him a beer. The whole gist of her article was scornful and judgmental: here are people stubbornly choosing poverty and life on the streets the way sinners choose sin — and charity only encourages their fecklessness.
Like this self-righteous woman, the evangelical Christian Right seems to take positions diametrically in opposition to the values and teachings of the Christ of the gospels. He kicked the moneylenders out of the temple, called the poor and the meek blessed, advised against casting stones, harming children, (“the least of these”), amassing wealth (that camel and the needle's eye), and passing judgment on others' worthiness.
Our evangelicals think wealth a sign of grace, poverty a mark of sin. They live for profit and power — most obviously in those TV preachers focused on getting more and more money out of their audience/faithful, and of course, the occasional private luxury jet. The suffering of others, of children, of the poor, of the powerless and the subjugated is meaningless and inconsequential. Their thinking is founded not in the values of freedom, equality, justice, compassion, generosity and humanity, but in racism, sexism, authoritarianism, self aggrandizement, the maintaining of privilege for their own race, class and sex. They admire despots. Their God is more Jehovah than Jesus, and even more totally — Mammon.
These folks are in the ascendancy now with Trump, his cohorts and admirers. So we have children removed from their parents and stored in cages for "choosing" to enter the US illegally. Immigrants and refugees are depicted as criminals, animals, vermin, invading our country with the intent to destroy it. The steps from this to full-fledged pogroms, ethnic cleansing, another genocide, totalitarianism, are frighteningly few and short. It's obvious in the language itself — what do we do with vermin? We eradicate it.
All hope is with resistance, in the numbers of people refusing to accept the sabotaging of democracy and betrayal of humanity, the unraveling of what has been achieved in protecting the environment, in the cooperation of nations, in upholding the rights of all persons, whatever their sex, their color, their ethnicity, their identity, their poverty, their lack of power.
So much is at stake. And not only for us, for all peoples, all nations.
This is Idaho rather than Appalachia, but I think this is most people's stereotype of "hillbillies."
Oriana:
I'm especially worried about the use of terms such as vermin and infestation. As you say, the next logical term is extermination. No one doubts that extremists are already pondering the best methods. The Nazis were efficiency experts on this.
You’d think Jesus would be a huge thorn in the side of the Evangelicals. You have to suppress crucial teachings. But that can certainly be done — simply never mention “Blessed are the poor” or indeed the camel and the eye of a needle. If the minister says that the poor are poor because they are sinners, we have a whole different gospel.
As one right-winger explained to me on Facebook, “we have here multi-generational sin.” And the context indicated that he meant sex.
Coal company houses, Jenkins Kentucky, 1935*
THE EFFICIENCY PARADOX
~ “The Verge spoke with Edward Tenner about how the efficiency paradox happens, its costs, and how to balance intuition and technology.
Q: You define efficiency in the book’s preface as being able to produce goods or providing service with a minimum of waste. Then you talk about “continuous-process efficiency” versus “platform efficiency.” What’s the difference between these two?
~ People in the Elizabethan times and even in the Middle Ages didn’t have the concept of efficiency we do today. That really depended on the rise of thermodynamics in the 19th century and the need to get as much power as possible from water turbines and from steam engines. That efficiency of the 19th century is what I call “continuous-process efficiency,” and it’s when things that were made piece by piece could now be made in a stream. For example, when paper was made in the 18th century, it was always in sheets. In the 19th century, entrepreneurs found a way to have paper coming off a mill continuously, and that is what made possible mass literacy, newspapers, inexpensive books. It was in its way as important as the Gutenberg revolution of the 15th century had been.
Now, platform efficiency is really a whole other type. It’s something that’s really in the cloud, and it’s about bringing buyers and sellers together with a minimum cost and extremely rapidly. So it’s things like getting a ride or buying a ticket or paying rent or banking.
Platform efficiency is wonderful, and I’m not at all condemning it, but one of the unfortunate consequences is that it has tended to attract investment capital away from much harder things. It’s much easier to make a small fortune with a platform-based startup than it is, for example, to develop a more efficient battery. I came to believe that because these physical and chemical enterprises take so much longer, are so much more expensive, are so much messier, and so they’re less attractive to investors. That’s one negative side of platform efficiency.
Q: Was there a time in American culture when we didn’t care as much about efficiency?
~ One of the interesting things about American culture is that even the subcultures that pretended to disdain efficiency — like Southern planters — ran on the principle of trying to squeeze as much profit as possible from enslaved labor and from the soil. So, there was this industrial regimentation in the South as well as in the factories of the North.
America, I think, has always been a pioneer of efficiency. They were admired by Europeans for their rigorous efficiency in doing everything, and the criticism of Americans was that they were so concerned with making money and with efficiency that they were losing out on the finer things in life. On the other hand, European observers were always coming over here and trying to copy American methods!
The huge Soviet-era industrial complexes were based on the Gary, Indiana, steel mills, and Lenin and the other Soviet leaders greatly admired Henry Ford.
Q: Let’s talk about some of the examples of the downsides of efficiency. In one of the chapters, you talk about the effects on arts and culture.
~ By removing so much trial and error and productive mistakes, platform efficiency can lock us into existing patterns. For example, publishers or film producers can analyze data to see what genres have been most popular, what will attract viewers of a certain demographic, and this could indeed make publishing more predictable or producing more profitable.
But so many of the big hits have been real surprises that have broken so many of the rules. AI is really great at finding hidden rules and applying them and optimizing everything according to hidden rules, but it’s really the rule-breaking events that have made life exciting for us.
Q: I'm also interested in a study you mention about how popularity works and the cost of getting rid of gatekeepers of popular culture.
~ People have presented gatekeepers as a drag. They’re one level between the consumers and the producers. So, if you don’t have them, you are reducing transaction costs and making things more efficient. You can just find things yourself. In the mid-‘90s, Bill Gates and his co-authors wrote The Road Ahead about the friction-free economy of the future, where there wouldn’t be these middlemen.
But these gatekeepers did have a useful role. They could recognize talent that was not quite ready to go mainstream, but had something interesting and exciting there that was worthwhile to develop. If you eliminate the gatekeepers, it’s a little like sports without coaches.
For example, there was a study from Princeton that showed that when you statistically study what people — ordinary consumers, not an elite panel of critics — think of the quality of various works offered on the web, the ones that become very popular have only a small advantage in quality. It’s not really random, but it’s small. When you look at patterns of popularity on the web, there’s a small core interest that snowballs quickly. Without gatekeepers, so much of popularity depends on what happens to become popular first.
Q: In your chapter on education, you talk about the “value of the inefficient medium,” like paper, for example. What are some examples where inefficiency makes us learn better?
~ I’ve read studies of reading and comprehension that psychologists have done over the years. Electronic reading and paper reading each have their own advantage. The electronic medium is better for recognizing details, but that reading on paper gives you a better, holistic sense of what an author is trying to say. That’s a trade-off.
This is similar to what I say in my chapter on geography. The paper map is awkward in a lot of circumstances and inferior to the electronic map, which I use all the time. But on the other hand, the paper map gives you a sense of the broader terrain, and it’s very helpful in orienting yourself.
Q: Medicine is an area with a lot of hope for AI and big data: precision medicine, AI diagnosis. What are some of the drawbacks here?
~ In medicine, there are warning signs, and these warnings, in turn, have to be addressed or ruled out by further tests. As more diagnostics develop, there’s a high possibility of false positives that make people go through more tests — and some of the further tests may actually have side effects of their own.
Recently, in The New York Times, there was a review of the new book by Barbara Ehrenreich, who is swearing off the medical system altogether. On the other hand, there are people who pay large amounts of money for so-called concierge medicine with doctors that are always monitoring them. There are different styles, and I’m not belittling the project of life extension, but I think quite a few critics of medicine have pointed out the advantage of a holistic approach to people’s health and the kind of understanding that the best old-fashioned doctors had.
Q: The last chapter of your book talks about strategies for balancing algorithms and common sense. How did you come up with these strategies?
~ I tried to see which of the ideas applied across the chapters. For example, people are familiar with the idea of serendipity, and so that didn’t need a lot of introduction. The point about serendipity is just that if you eliminate mistakes then, you’re going to be too dependent on immediate and recent experience and not open enough to productive surprises. But the concept of “desirable difficulty,” on the other hand — where we can learn better if things are more difficult — is less familiar to people because it occurs in studies, for example, of reading comprehension that show that something less legible might actually encourage people to concentrate more.
Q: What else are we missing?
~ There are two factors that are underestimated by people and that are serious issues in the application of efficient technology. One of them is what’s called “local knowledge.” All of us know that there’s some route that might look really great on a map, but we know it’s a problem because we’ve traveled over it.
The other is tacit knowledge. The idea is that no matter how much information you feed into an intelligent system, there are many, many things that are tacit, meaning that they are not explicitly stated anywhere. You can’t find that information in an encyclopedia.
One example is how little children can understand the meaning of a proverb — like “a stitch in time saves nine” or “a rolling stone gathers no moss” — in a way that a computer can’t. There are many things that even little children can appreciate that the most advanced technologies of machine learning can’t, and I think that to me is one of the most exciting things about the mind and about being human.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/12/17229158/edward-tenner-efficiency-paradox-big-data-artificial-intelligence-book
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When I am dead, I hope it may be said,
“His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
~ Hilaire Belloc, author of Cautionary Tales for Children
Oriana:
Let me paraphrase it this way: a true writer would hardly mind being a scarlet sinner (excluding major stuff like murder) as long as their books are read. Poets are particularly, ridiculously eager for readers.
“Religions should be neither tax-exempt nor contempt-exempt.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
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“If [God] is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? . . . If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? IF he has spoken, why is the universe not convinced?” ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Necessity of Atheism (1811)
ABNORMALITIES IN WHITE MATTER IN SCHIZOPHRENIA: DISCONNECTIVITY
~ “White matter (WM) consists of myelinated axons that enable different regions of the brain to communicate with one another. A fatty sheath called "myelin" gives white matter its color. Gray matter (GM) represents the neural volume of brain tissue in specific regions.
The latest ENIGMA white matter study was led by a team of researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) who unearthed that poorly myelinated white matter was present throughout the brains of people with schizophrenia. This discovery of white matter abnormalities throughout the entire brain debunks the long-held hypothesis that schizophrenia is correlated with white matter abnormalities only within the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes.
Interestingly, the most glaring WM abnormalities were found in the corpus callosum (which facilitates communication between the left and right cerebral hemispheres) and in the frontal portion of the corona radiata, which is central to information processing.
In a recent statement about the ENIGMA study, Kelly said: "The issue is that frayed 'ethernet cords' are present everywhere. We can definitively say for the first time that schizophrenia is a disorder where white matter wiring is frayed throughout the brain. These findings could lead to the identification of biomarkers that enable researchers to test patients' response to schizophrenia treatment." Adding, "Our study will help improve the understanding of the mechanisms behind schizophrenia.”
What we are showing now has been hypothesized for some time: Schizophrenia is a disorder related to brain dysconnectivity. We are seeing that it is not one or two connections that are affected, but the entire communication network of the brain — from large regions to small regions. These affects are not noticeable when we try to compare a few patients to a few controls. However, they are seen when we can combine efforts across countries and continents. We now know this effect in the entire brain is seen around the world, and this is extremely important if we want to develop ways of helping patients everywhere.
Neda Jahanshad concludes, "Rather than looking for genes that affect a certain 'stretch of wiring,' scientists will now look for genes that affect the brain's entire communication infrastructure. We're showing that just studying a single brain region to try to find out what causes schizophrenia is not a good approach. The effect is global.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201710/move-over-gray-matter-white-matter-is-taking-center-stage
Oriana:
I remember that when schizophrenia first started being discussed as a brain disease, a howl of protest rose from psychologists: everybody knew it was due to bad mothering! The "schizophrenogenic mother"! As recently as the early nineteen nineties, there were still attempts to squelch the biological approach. Not that childhood trauma doesn't play a role, but then the majority of children who undergo various kinds of trauma, even of the severe sort, do not become schizophrenic (though they will be scarred in various ways). Eventually enough research has accumulated (e.g. showing similarities between schizophrenia and Alzheimer's, tracing inflammation etc) to have made inroads.
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ending on beauty:
Not without its charms is this terrible world,
not without its mornings
worth our waking.
~ Wislawa Szymborska
