Connections: Physicist David Deutsch on the Human Career and the Fermi Paradox

In the summer of 2016, physicist David Deutsch was a guest on Sam Harris' engaging and thought-provoking podcast Waking Up. (The podcast was released on August 21, 2016 and can be found at the link to the right, or in platforms such as iTunes.)

Among the many fascinating topics the pair touched upon during their lively, almost two hour conversation, two in particular stood out for me, connecting with books I have read over the past few years: Deutsch’s concerns about the threats he sees to the future of humankind; and his explanation and discussion of the Fermi Paradox, and possible explanations for it.

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Regarding the future of humanity, at 1:17:58 into the conversation Harris asks Deutsch:

SH: What worries you about the viability of the human career at this point? What’s on your short list of concerns?

Deutsch opens his reply with a succinct and rather pessimistic sketch of human history, before going on to identify what he feels was the key moment of transition that led to the explosion of progress of the last several centuries:

DD: Well, I see human history as a long period of complete failure. Failure, that is, to make any progress. Now our species has existed for depending on where you count it from maybe 50 thousand years, maybe 100, 200 thousand years, but, anyway, the vast majority of that time people were alive, they were thinking, they were suffering, they wanted things --- nothing ever improved.

The slow improvements that did happen, happened so that … geologists can’t distinguish the difference between the artifacts from one era to another with a resolution of like 10,000 years. So, from the point of view of a human lifetime, nothing ever improved. Generation upon generation upon generation of suffering and stasis.

Then there was slow improvement, then a more rapid improvement, then there were several attempts to institutionalize a tradition of criticism, which I think is the key to rapid progress in the sense that we think of it, progress discernible on the time scale of a human lifetime. And also error correction, so that regression is less likely.

That happened several times, and failed every time except once: in the European enlightenment of the 17th, 18th centuries.

Deutsch’s highlighting of the importance of the development of a tradition of criticism recalled for me a similar analysis by historian Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. (The discussion that follows on Harari's views is adapted from my review of his book, linked to at the right; quotes from the book are referenced with the page number.)


Harari’s book centers on the idea that the key trait that differentiated Homo Sapiens from the other human species, and allowed them to therefore become the sole surviving species of humans, was the development of the ability to create imagined orders: fictions or constructs that form the basis of all of our non-biologically driven thought and action. He goes on to describe the wide variety of extraordinary ways in which this ability manifested itself during the evolution of human society and civilization.

Evoking Deutsch’s identification of the development of a tradition of criticism as the driver for the Enlightenment, Harari highlights that same moment, if in slightly different language, in pinpointing the beginnings of the Scientific Revolution some 500 years ago as the period when humankind began to acknowledge its own ignorance, and so ceased to blindly divide knowledge between that which was ordained by religious belief and that which was simply unimportant to know. Along with this change came a shift to making observation and mathematics central to improving our understanding, and a focus on turning scientific discoveries into technical advances.

Like Deutsch, Harari also sees this development as having occurred successfully only in Western Europe, and as having resulted in an unparalleled advantage for the West in its growth.   There, Harari notes, this revolution was matched by a burning desire to fill in the gaps, a “mentality of conquest” (283) that set off a frenzied search for new discoveries both in a scientific sense, and also in the searching out of news lands in parts of the globe unknown to Europeans: “As time went by, the conquest of knowledge and the conquest of territory became ever more tightly intertwined.” (284)

This combination of interest in science and desire for conquest resulted in a decisive edge for nations in Western Europe, Harari argues, as they reached outward. Although empires in Asia and the Western Hemisphere produced scientific discoveries on par with Western Europe, and were more powerful than countries in Western Europe as the Scientific Revolution began, “they lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form in the West and which could not be copied and internalized rapidly.” (282)  Thus, as Western Europeans began exploring the globe, these more powerful empires stayed close to home, and found themselves unprepared to counter Europe’s expansion onto the world scene.

The deep belief and faith in progress and the future that accompanied the Scientific Revolution in Western Europe also set the stage for the development of capitalism. Harari points out that capitalism and the Scientific Revolution worked hand in hand in the West, becoming a combination of imagined orders that strengthened one another in a powerful feedback loop as investments in science led to new discoveries that led to new technologies that gave governments the power to gain control of more resources, and so provide yet more funding for further scientific advancement.

Thus, whether naming it "a tradition of criticism," per Deutsch, or an "acknowledgement of ignorance," per Harari, a critical change in thought patterns in Western Europe some half a millennium ago, provided the impetus for the rapid growth and spread of its civilization, and so utterly shaped our present world.


Returning, then, to Deutsch's comments, he goes on to express his deep concern over what he sees as the fragile nature of this tradition of criticism, and the lack of understanding among those currently benefiting from it of how to maintain that tradition, and so Western civilization.

DD: So, you asked what worries me. What worries me is that the inheritors of that little bit of progress, little bit of salutary progress, are only a small proportion of the population of the world today. It’s the culture or civilization that we call the West. Only the West really has a tradition of criticism institutionalized. And, this has manifested itself in various problems, including the problem of failed cultures, which see their failure writ large by comparison of themselves with the West, and therefore want to do something about this that doesn’t involve creativity. And that is very, very dangerous.

So, then there’s the fact that in the West, the knowledge of what it takes to maintain our civilization is not widely known. In fact, as you’ve also said, the prevailing view among people in the West, including very educated people, is of a picture of the relationship between knowledge and progress and civilization and values and so on, that’s just wrong in so many different ways.

So, although the institutions of our culture are amazingly good, that they have been able to manage stability in the face of rapid change for hundreds of years, the knowledge of what it takes to keep civilization stable, in the face of rapidly increasing knowledge, is not very widespread, and in fact, severe misconceptions about several aspects of it are common among political leaders, educated people, and society at large. So, we’re like people on a hugely well designed submarine, which has got all sorts of life-saving devices built-in, but they don’t know they’re in a submarine, they think they’re in a motorboat, and they’re going to open all the hatches because they want to have a nicer view.

Deutsch’s concern regarding what he perceives as the loss among those in the West of “the knowledge of what it takes to maintain our civilization” recalled for me the thesis of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gassett, in his 1930 essay The Revolt of the Masses, in which he argues that there has been a loss of what he refers to as the “vital force” necessary for the maintenance and further development of civilization.  (The discussion that follows on Ortega's views is adapted from my review of his book, linked to at the right; quotes from the book are referenced with the page number.)


Although Deutsch did not elaborate in his conversation with Harris on what he considers to have been the origins of what he refers to as the "severe misconceptions about several aspects" of "the knowledge of what it takes to keep civilization stable," Ortega makes explicitly and firmly clear his opinion of its origins already in his title: a revolt of the masses.

Early on in his essay Ortega clarifies that the revolt to which he refers is not the violent overthrow of a governing regime but rather an upending of the social order, in which the masses have inserted themselves into, and asserted their sovereignty over, all aspects of society: “the accession of the masses to complete social power.” (11)  The consequence of this has been the loss of the “vital force" necessary for maintaining civilization.  That vital force, he says, had been provided for centuries by aristocrats: scientists, philosophers, politicians and other intellectuals who took responsibility for the enrichment and governing of civilization, and guided the progress of human society in all spheres of development.

By aristocrat, Ortega refers not simply to someone with money, power or prestige, but rather to what he calls a select minority, “the man who demands more of himself than the rest”, and so is capable of supporting and advancing humankind’s social development.  This is not a class issue, Ortega claims, differentiating the select minority from the masses, "who demand nothing special of themselves, [and] for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection." (15)  Thus, the distinguishing feature of someone in the masses is an inability to recognize the efforts required by our forebearers to achieve the benefits of current day civilization, and consequently an unwillingness to struggle to improve oneself and society.

Critically, the masses had historically ceded power to these aristocrats, allowing them to determine the distribution and access to the benefits thus created.  In one of the more striking claims of Ortega's analysis, however, he argues that the very advances that have improved life for so many have also inevitably led to the accession of the masses that now threatens civilization’s future.  These newly ascendant masses, in contrast to the select minorities who labored diligently to advance civilization, have viewed the resulting benefits as a kind of outgrowth of the natural world --- essentially a birthright.

Thus, failing to recognize the effort required to maintain and grow civilization, the masses have narrowed their focus onto themselves, and have found no reason to exert effort in “pushing themselves to excel, [and] have little feeling of ‘duty’ or ‘obligation’.” (65)  A further consequence of this has been that the masses regard their thoughts and opinions as perfect, and so take on new ideas and beliefs without making any effort to develop the rationale and reasons for them. This leaves them unwilling, then, to put up with contrary opinions, because to do so would subject their own ideas to uncomfortable discussion and consideration.

Ortega goes on to describe the world as having been led by Europe from the time that an integrated global civilization developed. In his view, however, the accession of mass-man to a position of power, and their unwillingness to exert the effort required to advance, or even maintain, civilization’s complex infrastructure, have diminished Europe’s ability to maintain its leadership role in the world.

In his comments, Deutsch called the fact that "the knowledge of what it takes to keep civilization stable ... is not very widespread" as being "very, very dangerous."  And, so although Deutsch may or may not agree with the details of Ortega's arguments for the causes that have led to this present situation, his conclusion is not so far removed from Ortega's: a vacuum in leadership has developed, one that left countries and regions of the world drifting in dangerously divergent directions, and, as a result, “Europe is suffering from the greatest crisis that can afflict peoples, nations, and civilizations.” (11)

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At about 1:39:20 point in the conversation, Harris raises the question of the Fermi Paradox with Deutsch. (Note that Deutsch corrects him to say it’s the Fermi Problem, but my review of the two terms indicates that Harris was correct, and that the Fermi Problem is actually a different concept; the Fermi Paradox could be argued to be a type of Fermi Problem, focused specifically on the existence of extra-terrestrial life. So, with the awareness that I'm correcting a world renowned physicist, I’ve reflected that in the opening words of Deutsch’s reply.)

SH: I wanted to get your opinion on the Fermi Paradox.  And, describe what the paradox is for those who don't know it, but then, tell me why our not seeing the galaxy teeming with more advanced civilizations than our own isn't a sign that there's something about gathering more knowledge that might in fact be fatal to those who gather it.

DD: The Fermi [Paradox] is: where are they? Where are the extra-terrestrials?

The idea is that the galaxy is very large, but how big it is, is trumped by how old it is. So that, if there were two civilizations anywhere in the galaxy, the chances that they had arisen less than, say, ten million years apart, are infinitesimal. So therefore, if there is another one out there, it’s overwhelmingly likely to be at least ten million years older than us, and therefore to have had ten million years more time to develop, and also in that time there’s plenty of time for them to get here, if not be space travel, then by sheer mixing of the stars in the galaxy. They only need to colonize a few nearby stars to them, so that after say a hundred million years, or a billion years, those stars will be far apart, and spread about the galaxy. So, we would be seeing evidence of them, and since we don’t see evidence of them, they’re not out there.

Well, this is a problem, but I think the problem is just that we don’t yet understand very well most of the parameters. And if you just fill in the parameters, like you know: are they likely to use radio waves; what are they likely to do by way of exploration; what are their wishes likely to be. In all these cases we make an assumption that’s kind of based on saying that they’ll be like us in that way, and that they will use technology in the same way that we do. And, we only need to be wrong in one of those assumptions for the conclusion that we should have seen them by now to be false.

Now, another possibility is that we are the first, at least we are the first in our galaxy. And I think that would be quite nice.

SH: Does that second assumption strike you as very implausible, or not?

DD: Like I say, I don’t think we know enough about all the different factors affecting this for any one idea to be very plausible or implausible. I mean, what’s implausible is that they can have a different way of creating knowledge to us. That kind of thing is implausible, because it just implies that physics is very different from the way we think it is, and if you’re going to think that, you may as well, believe in the Greek Gods.

Another possibility is that most societies don’t destroy themselves --- like I said, I think that’s fairly implausible for us and it’s very, very implausible that this generically happens. … I think what is more plausible --- although again, I must say that this is just idle speculation --- is that most societies settle down to staticity.

Deutsch's comments on the Fermi Paradox reminded me of Chinese engineer and science fiction writer Liu Cixin's answer to it in his recent science fiction trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past.  I link to my review of the first of the novels in the trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, at right.  Links to my reviews of the remaining two novels can also be found there.

In his trilogy, Liu postulates the universe as being what he refers to as a dark forest.  Broadly, his thesis is that given the inherent nature of the limitations in ability to communicate over large distances, and the patterns of rapid technological growth, planetary civilizations come to recognize the danger of revealing their presence to others in the galaxy, and so hide, like fearful animals in a dark forest, afraid to reveal themselves in case a more powerful animal might see them, and predisposed to attack first, if they discover some other animal.

More details on his viewpoint, and on his extremely engaging and thought-provoking trilogy, can be found in my reviews of his novels.

Returning again to Deutsch's comments, he goes on to give a more complete description of his idea of staticity:

DD: Now, our experience of staticity is conditioned by static societies in our past, which, as I said, have been unimaginably horrible from our present perspective.  But if you imagine a society who’s material welfare is say a million times better than ours, and somehow that become settled into a sort of ritualistic religion in which everybody does the same thing all the time, but nobody really suffers --- that seems to me like hell, but I can imagine that there can be societies in which, as you said, they can’t see the different ways of being.  So, it’s like you said, used the example of being near Oxford and not knowing about Africa; you could be on the top of the tallest mountain in Britain, and not know that Mount Everest exists.  And, if the height of the mountain is what measures happiness, you might be moderately happy, and no know that a better happiness is available.  And, if so, you could just stay like that.

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Have you read these books, others by these authors, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Physicist Leonard Mlodinow on the Concept of Free Will

On her engaging and thought-provoking radio program On Being, host Krista Tippett has invited in a number of physicists. During her discussions with them, she has often touched on the concept of free will, and, in particular, raised questions about the view among some physicists that free will does not exist: that at least in a theoretical sense, our every thought and action are determined by the same physical laws that govern every other event in the universe.

Tippett returned to that topic in a recent conversation with the physicist Leonard Mlodinow, entitled Randomness and Choice, and as the exchange developed, her deep discomfort with physicists’ viewpoint on free will became apparent. For Tippett, a lack of free will makes a human being little more than a kind of automaton, tightly constrained to think and act in ways that are dictated by the laws of physics.

With Mlodinow, the discussion on free will began with Tippett referencing an earlier exchange she had had with physicist Brian Greene on the topic. (For a transcript of a key moment in that program with Greene, see the post-script to my review of Edward O. Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence, which can be found here.)

Greene had tried to assuage Tippet’s concerns by noting that the complexity of the human brain makes it effectively impossible to predict our future actions, and that this fact gives us the feeling of having free will even though in reality we don’t. The short-coming of this argument, as Tippett pursues with Mlodinow, is that having the feeling of having free will is not equivalent to truly having free will.

She notes that, independent of however convincing the feeling of having free will may be for us, if we consciously accept that we don’t truly have free will, then it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that we have no responsibility for our actions. A disturbing consequence of this would seem to be, as Tippett points out, that moral qualities such as heroism or cowardess that we might associate with particular actions, suddenly have no meaning, since a person has merely reacted based on the fixed, physical laws of the universe.

Mlodinow attempts to create a path through this thicket by starting from an argument similar to Greene’s comments on the complexity of the mind, but that doesn't satisfy Tippett anyone than it did when Greene presented it.  She sees an opening in something Mlodinow wrote, which describes a concept that he refers to as a randomness inherent in our environment and our interaction with others. 

Ironically, Tippett — the journalist and author — interprets Mlodinow's writings on randomness in a strict, almost scientific sense, assuming that he means that a fundamental randomness exists in the universe, and that this could be a window through which free will could be considered to exist for human beings.  Mlodinow —the scientist —  explains however, that he uses the word randomness in a more colloquial sense, and that it relates to an <i>apparent</i> randomness, one that arises directly out of the complexity argument described above; given enough information, that randomness would disappear into the laws of physics.

He then goes on to describe his thinking related to the concept of randomness, arguing that when faced with the constant stream of events in our lives that are, for all intents and purposes, random, we make choices, and that we must make these choices as if we do have free will.  Thus, even as he acknowledges his fundamental scientific understanding that the physical laws of the universe determine our every decision and action, he makes clear his belief that we must not use that reality to absolve ourselves of responsibility for what we do.

Ultimately, although Tippett’s fascinating discussions with physicists such as Greene and Mlodinow help us think about many of the deep questions involved in the concept of free will, we are left with no clear-cut answers. It remains for each of us to resolve for ourselves how we understand this mystery of human existence.

MS. TIPPETT: So, I had a conversation with Brian Greene and that still has me thinking and we ended up talking a lot about something that I know is a given for physicists, and it’s there in your writing, although I think you nuance it in interesting ways. And I want to get into this with you. Which is, no scientist in any field claims to be able to predict or understand human personality or destiny, but most physicists do believe fundamentally that nothing happens in the universe that is not the result of fundamental forces and laws of physics. I mean, you’ve wrote this from the birth of a child to the birth of a galaxy. And that is just a really stunning and puzzling fact. [Laughs].  

DR. MLODINOW: [Laughs] Yes. And, I could give you a monologue for hours about that, but I’ll try not to.  

MS. TIPPETT: Well, I mean, let’s just have a conversation about it, because I haven’t been able to really stop thinking about it, puzzling with it. And as I was reading, getting ready to talk to you, I realized you’re a perfect person to talk to this about. I mean, where would you start talking about that as a puzzle?  

DR. MLODINOW: There are a lot of aspects to that question. Maybe the most basic one is really comes down to are there miracles? Meaning exceptions to the laws of nature. Or does everything follow physical law? In a way that’s the essence of the question. You know, Isaac Newton, when he invented his physics, which is to say the beginning of modern physics, the physics of the everyday world, he believed that everything followed his laws without exception, except that God steps in now and then, and sets things straight when they start to go awry.  

MS. TIPPETT: Right. Right.  

DR. MLODINOW: So he believed in some kind of limited miracles. Pierre Simon Laplace, who proved that the solar system is stable, was very famous for saying something that he actually semi-stole from a Catholic priest. But his statement — very famous statement is that if you know everything, the state of everything now, and you know all the laws, and you have infinite calculation ability, then the future and the past are both determined. Neither is hidden from your knowledge or from your eyes. And so when Napoleon asked him why there was no God in his science, Laplace said, I have no need for that hypothesis. [Laughs].  

MS. TIPPETT: Right.  

DR. MLODINOW: If you believe that there are no exceptions, whether they be big miracles or minor deviations from the laws of physics, whether you look at the quantum laws that are fundamental or Newton’s laws. Whichever laws you look at, neither set of laws has room for deviations or choice, let’s say. Conscious choice. So, if you believe that the brain follows those laws, as everything that — in the laboratory that we’ve ever looked at, does, then it’s not a question for scientists.  

MS. TIPPETT: But the totality of our lives and circumstances at any given moment is the result of so many more — like we imagine choice and we imagine we have an intuition of purposefulness. Or the need for that. But one thing that was very striking to me about, you know, getting into the way you think about this is, I think, one thing I said to Brian Greene, you know, his title — his book title that’s so well-known is The Elegant Universe and you physicists use that language of elegance and beauty together with truth, right, in terms of, you know, the equations that are true are elegant and somehow this picture of the laws of physics being as tyrannical as any medieval God was…  

DR. MLODINOW: [laughs]  

MS. TIPPETT: …this is what really troubles me. At the extreme edges of talking about the laws of physics this way, you could just substitute the way the most primitive human cultures have used the word God, and we are so reduced.  

DR. MLODINOW: Well, this is interesting, because now we’re coming to the difference between theory and practice. [Laughs]  

MS. TIPPETT: [Laughs] Yeah.  

DR. MLODINOW: And, the idea that we have no free will is an interesting philosophical question. In reality, we do have free will. Because in reality a system as complex as the brain with 100 billion neurons and I think 1,000 to 10,000 connections between each of them on average, is so complex that not only could one say that one can’t, in principle, model it or predict exactly what it’s going to do next, but almost in principle you can’t. Because in very complex systems, small changes in the state of the system produce large changes in the output.  

MS. TIPPETT: Right. DR. MLODINOW: It’s called — that’s called chaos. But that’s typical of very complicated, non-linear systems. And…  

MS. TIPPETT: The human beings are…  

DR. MLODINOW: …the thing about the brain is…  

MS. TIPPETT: …I would say every human being…  

DR. MLODINOW: …that even…  

MS. TIPPETT: …every human being is a complicated, non-linear system. [Laughs]  

DR. MLODINOW: [Laughs] Yeah, hey the ones I know are.  

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.  

DR. MLODINOW: Of course, not me, I’m very straightforward, and logical, and always right. [Laughs ]. But other people are like that. And, when you look at their brain, there’s no way, even if you put the equations of physics, it’s an infinite possibility. And with something as complicated as the brain, I believe that errors in these measurements are always going to ruin your predictions. So in physics you have these things called effective theories, which are saying okay, there’s some other theory underneath it, but that’s too complicated. This one works. And this, but we’re still even going farther and saying almost in principle that the brain is too complicated to apply Laplacean determinism and so, the free will that we feel that we have is really — does defy the God as you say, the rulers or the despots of determinism. [Laughs]. So that’s just another way of looking at it. That’s probably as far on the spectrum toward free will as most scientists are willing to go.  

MS. TIPPETT: Right. Well, I mean, and let’s just bring it down to earth. You know, your father, resisting the Nazi’s in Poland, if you took this blanket statement that there is no choice, there is no free will, somehow this was all determined by forces beyond our control or comprehension. Your father’s life there and his action meant nothing, and had no nobility, and no meaning, and there’s just something — everything in, I don’t think just me, but most scientists as human beings, would rebel against that thought.  

DR. MLODINOW: Well, to me, even with my own view of free will and feeling that the laws of nature don’t have exceptions, what my father did, or what anyone does, is meaningful. Because if you think of this way, that he’s a biological organism that I don’t know his — the layout of his brain or how that produces whatever he does, so I judge him by his actions. And what he was doing with those heroic actions was revealing who he was. And, there are other people who revealed who they were and, you know, it wasn’t, in my mind, as attractive of a person. [Laughs]. So, I don’t think that there’s a difference between he’s on the spot making a decision do I take the fall for this or do I try to blow up that or whatever his decision was, is any less heroic if the decision was meant to be based on who he is as a person.  

MS. TIPPETT: Mm-hmm. I mean, it raises the question of whether there is such a thing as courage, or maybe it’s just that our definition of courage is like isolated acts, but…  

DR. MLODINOW: Well, of course there’s…  

MS. TIPPETT: …you’re saying maybe it’s…  

DR. MLODINOW: …or maybe the courage is who you are. And the courage isn’t that decision at that moment, the courage is that you’re the kind of person who would make that decision.  

[Music: “Oblivion” by Ahn Trio]  

MS. TIPPETT: I’m Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today with the physicist Leonard Mlodinow. He’s reflecting with me on the puzzling dissonance between our human sense that we choose and shape our lives, and the scientific observation that free will is an illusion. He is a child of two Holocaust survivors, and someone who’s written books with figures as diverse as Stephen Hawking and Deepak Chopra. He’s been sharing the nuanced way he reconciles his life experiences with modern physics faith in randomness.  

MS. TIPPETT: I find a bit of an opening, also, in the way you think about this and the way you write about randomness. So here’s something you wrote and I think these two things went together. I mean, you write about your father’s — a story he told you about how he got the job in the bakery at Buchenwald, the concentration camp. His sense that this is just random but tell that story.  

DR. MLODINOW: Oh, that was in The Drunkard’s Walk.  

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.  

DR. MLODINOW: And the book is about randomness and life. And to me, you know, when I was thinking about writing that book, I was almost shaken by the realization that I’m, you know, a random effect of something very bad. And I hope that for me, I’m glad I’m here, but I’m only here because Hitler or the Nazis killed my father’s previous family. And that led to my being here.  

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.  

DR. MLODINOW: And that was a very hard to thing to face, in a way, that — what’s the meaning of my life, when it arose from something like that? And in that story, he was in the Buchenwald concentration camp, and he had stolen — he stole a loaf of bread from the bakery. And, the baker, I guess there were a certain number of people who had access. They lined them all up and brought the guys with the guns. And they said who stole the bread? And my father didn’t say anything. And then they said, okay, we’re going to start at this end of the line, and we’re going to shoot everybody, until either you’re all dead or the thief steps forward. And so he puts the gun to the head of the first person. So my father, at that point, steps forward, and admitted that he stole the bread. And, he told me that it wasn’t a heroic thing that — he didn’t do it out of heroism, he did it surely practical that these guys are all going to die, and I’m going to die, too, or I’ll just be the only one. So he stepped forward. And instead of killing him, though, the baker acted like God, and somewhat arbitrarily took him under his wing and gave him a job as his assistant in the bakery. And so, he had a much better job after that, based on that incident. And it just shows you that even in the midst of all this cruelty, there’s randomness, or I don’t know what, whim? I don’t know if the guy — I don’t know if he was being human and let some of his humanity peek out, or he wanted to play like God, I don’t really know what was the person’s motive, but that’s one of many things that happened to my father. If it had happened differently, I wouldn’t be here, and my kids wouldn’t be here. And everything would be different in, you know, that lineage.  

MS. TIPPETT: You know, one of the things that’s so fascinating is how quantum physics has presented a picture of the world that is so much more of reality, the way things work — that is so much less ordered, more — there’s chaos, there’s randomization, and it wasn’t there for Newton or even for Einstein or they didn’t want — you know, Einstein didn’t want those things to be there. And, you know, one of the things you say is anything that is possible eventually will occur. [Laughs]. Just wait long enough and strange things will happen. But still, there’s an order to it.  

DR. MLODINOW: Doesn’t your life work that way? [Laughs].  

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. [Laughs]. But here’s the out I — here’s the opening I feel you give. Here’s something else you wrote. “The outline of our lives, like the candle’s flame, is continuously coaxed in new directions by a variety of random events that, along with our responses to them, determine our fate.” You know, you say that we are driven to see patterns and create patterns where the patterns aren’t there, but essentially there’s so much randomness. But, you — seems to me that you’re also presenting our responses as mattering. There is randomness, and then you talk about that even though that is true, you know, the number of at-bats, the number of chances taken, number of opportunities seized does make a difference. It does shift things. Can you explain that in scientific terms?  

DR. MLODINOW: [Laughs]. Yeah, I was thinking about Brownian motion, so that says it all.  

MS. TIPPETT: [Laughs].  

DR. MLODINOW: No, I’m just kidding [laughs]. The — so The Drunkard’s Walk, which is the title of that book, is sometimes called The Random Walk and it comes from a jagged path that particles in Brownian motion seem to take for no apparent reason. In Brownian motion, people look at — this in the 19th century, they noticed that little grains of pieces of pollen would jiggle around for no apparent reason in liquid. And they thought at first maybe that was a life force, because there was no force on it. Maybe that’s what was jiggling, because it’s pollen. But they eventually figured out, and Einstein actually is the one who explained it, that this jiggling comes from the impact of the molecules on the pollen, pushing it this way and that way. And I saw a parallel with our lives, because when you look at your life, if you had to sit down and think about, and I’m talking about in detail, not just the headlines, if you think about all the details of what happened to you, you will find that there was a time where you had the extra cup of coffee, where if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have met Person A.  

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.  

DR. MLODINOW: Or you probably don’t realize that if you hadn’t done this, you would have gotten into crash which you — car crash but you didn’t, because you were a little bit later than and the guy — the drunk guy hit someone else or whatever. When I look back in my life, or I looked at the life of certain celebrities, I could find so many instances like that. And I had fun tracing some of them. How little things make a big difference, and — but the little thing that happens to you, other than if it’s something random like getting hit by a car, but in other ways, the little things that — what they really do is they raise opportunities for you. Or they raise challenges. And the course of your life depends on how you react to those opportunities and challenges that the randomness presents to you. So that’s what I meant by that. That if you’re awake and paying attention, you will find that things happen. They might seem good, they might seem bad at first, you don’t even know. Or you’re wrong about whether it’s good or bad. But, in time, it becomes clear whether the thing was good or bad, but the important thing is how you reacted to it.  

MS. TIPPETT: And, how is that acceptable for you as a physicist in a way that the notion of free will is less convincing? I’m just trying to figure out what the distinction is.

DR. MLODINOW: Well, if I were to describe your every atom, then there wouldn’t be this randomness. I mean, there is still quantum randomness, which I don’t — I think just as a red herring here, but randomness is really a context-dependent term. So imagine you’re flipping a coin. That’s one of the archetypical random event in our culture. We always flip a coin. And it comes out, if it’s a fair coin, 50/50. But actually if you control very carefully how you put the coin on your thumb, and how you flip it, and where it’s going to land, you can — it’s not really random. It’s going to come out heads every time, or tails every time. So, whether it’s — the coin flip is random or not really depends on what you know and how much control you have. And so what I’m saying about life is you don’t know a lot, even if you think you do [laughs] and you don’t have a lot of control, even if you’re a control freak. So a lot of things that happen to you in that sense are random and the same thing with your reaction to it. Yes, maybe a god-like person who knew what the state of all the atoms in your body could tell how you’re going to react, but since none of us are that, it really does matter, and you do have a choice. And that determines your life.  

MS. TIPPETT: Okay.  

DR. MLODINOW: It doesn’t sound like you’re very satisfied, though, I think.  

MS. TIPPETT: No, no. I just wonder, I mean…  

DR. MLODINOW: Hmm, another scientist answer, ha. [Laughs].  

MS. TIPPETT: [Laughs] Well, I feel like this could be a few hours, but I mean, I do hear, I mean, the words…  

DR. MLODINOW: So, the quality of your voice tells a lot, doesn’t it. [Laughs]  

MS. TIPPETT: [Laughs] Yes, it does. It does. I just wonder if there’s a vocabulary thing here. Do you know what I mean? Like that the notion of free will doesn’t work for science, but, I mean, you used the word choice, and I suppose that would be subject to some debate, but I feel like there’s a way in which you’re saying, you know, that what we do matters. Although you might say it, and describe it, and see it in a very different way that humanity has said that kind of thing up to now. Knowing what we know now about the universe. Is that fair?  

DR. MLODINOW: Yeah. I definitely think that my decisions matter.  

MS. TIPPETT: Mm-hmm.  

DR. MLODINOW: Now, it’s more of a philosophical question, I guess, whether I was destined to make that decision.  

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.  

DR. MLODINOW: In my life, that question doesn’t — is something to ponder at times, but the effective theory is that yes, if I step off the building, I’m going to fall off the roof, and bad things will happen. And I don’t know whether I was destined to decide not to step off or not, but I take the decision as if I have a choice.  

MS. TIPPETT: Mm-hmm.  

DR. MLODINOW: And I think you have to live your life that way. And no one — whether or not you can argue that theoretically there’s a choice or not, no one knows enough to tell you what choice you’re going to make.  

MS. TIPPETT: Right. Right.  

DR. MLODINOW: Not even yourself, I think. 

[Music: “Halcyon” by Jon Hopkins]  

MS. TIPPETT: I’m Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today: physicist and writer Leonard Mlodinow. 

MS. TIPPETT: There’s a way in which this thing that physics is pointing out and that you point out in your books and on — they subliminal, the way our subconscious is kind of influencing us in ways we aren’t aware of and randomness. I mean, you — there’s a way in which that pointing out how little control we actually have over so much of what happens to us is a piece of truth that the spiritual traditions have carried forward in time. And that philosophy has known for a long time. I also sense that there’s — the way you take that in, even the science of it is that’s real power in that knowledge. Does it change the way you kind of move through your everyday life knowing about your lack of control? I mean, how does that — how do you work with that as a human being?  

DR. MLODINOW: Well, certainly it does change, I certainly don’t mean to say that the unconscious is not you and there’s someone else [laughs] pulling the strings.  

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah, yeah.  

DR. MLODINOW: But what we don’t realize is how much of our feelings, our actions, our beliefs, are coming from our unconscious mind. And I think that when we raise our consciousness about our unconscious, you’re knowing yourself better and to know yourself better, I think, is a good thing. You understand how you’re going to react, and you understand why you did things. And you just have more understanding for yourself. So it not only helps you make in a way better decisions, economically, but it helps you make better decisions, I think spiritually, because you have, in a way, more tolerance for yourself, as well as more understanding.

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Other reviews / information:

My review of Leonard Mlodinow's book written with Stephen Hawking, <u>The Grand Design</u>, can be found here.

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My book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Why Do Trump’s Supporters Remain Steadfastly Committed to Him?

Since the beginning of the year I’ve been listening regularly to Sam Harris’ podcast, Waking Up, on which he has engaging and thought-provoking conversations with people from a wide variety of fields. As he summarizes on his site, his intent is to explore ‘important and controversial questions about the human mind, society, and current events.'

In the wake of last fall’s election results, ‘current events’ has, not surprisingly, become a recurring topic of his conversations with the guests he invites onto the podcast, just as it has for so many of us in our discussions with family, friends and colleagues (assuming, of course, that we can even broach the subject at all in the current polarized climate). His guests have included: former world chess champion, and now political activist, Gary Kasparov (The Putin Question); political commentator, and former speech writer for George W. Bush, David Frum (We’re All Cucks Now); journalist and author Anne Applebaum (The Russia Connection); and, in the wake of the most recent revelations of mid-May, Applebaum again, along with journalist and author Juliette Kayyem (The Path to Impeachment).

One question that has surfaced repeatedly in Harris’ conversations and analysis: why do Trump’s core base of supporters consistently dismiss as unimportant Trump’s on-going string of seemingly self-destructive behaviors — actions and statements that for any past politician would have certainly been career ending? Harris, for example, raised that question in his discussion with Applebaum in The Path to Impeachment (~29 minutes in):

So, what do you think it’s going to take, because this is the thing that I find above all so depressing about what his existence is doing to American society. I mean it’s just uncanny to continually hear from Trump’s defenders, who seem completely oblivious to his flaws. No matter how awful you imagine Hillary Clinton to be, and how much you wouldn’t want her to be President, it seems to me that you have to admit that Trump is showing some signs of a dangerous unprofessionalism, at least. And so I mean, what do you make of the fact that there seems to be no path from where we are through the brains of Trump’s defenders to an admission of what should be obvious, that this person is unfit for office. What would he have to do, do you think, to actually turn the tide?

Applebaum’s answer was the verbal equivalent of throwing her hands up in the air, saying that, well, perhaps the tide will finally turn, that enough negative stories will build up to create a tipping point. Her response is not altogether unreasonable given the unceasing stream of shocking moments that Trump has generated. My concern with that line of thinking, however, is that it’s been the working assumption since early in the primaries; there has been a consistent belief after each new negative event by or about Trump would be the one that finally ended his run — and obviously that point has so far not been reached.

I would argue that this line of thinking — believing that the next mistake he makes will be the decisive one — constitutes a kind of failure of imagination on the part of those dismayed by Trump as president — an inability to recognize and acknowledge the deep-seated nature of his base’s commitment to him. Only by understanding the origins and depths of this commitment can we imagine how Trump’s political story might end. To that end, I suggest that Eric Hoffer’s treatise from 1951, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, offers a path to just such an understanding; in it, Hoffer demonstrates how all mass movements, whether they result in good ends or bad, "share certain essential characteristics." (xi). (For my full review of the book follow the title link; quotes from the book include page number references.)

To be clear, I would not characterize Trump’s supporters as constituting a mass movement in the traditional sense. His base largely continues to support him, but does not appear to be, at least at this point, a mobilized group ready to be called to action; they voted for Trump, and are now simply waiting for him to fulfill the promises he made during the campaign. Nonetheless, many of Hoffer’s descriptions in his book of the general characteristics of members of mass movements seem to be strongly represented among Trumps hard-core supporters. Thus Hoffer’s analysis can perhaps provide insight into the motivations of these supporters, and why they hold so faithfully and tightly to Trump.

It must be acknowledged that those who voted for Trump certainly had a variety of reasons for doing so, including, for example, a visceral dislike of Hilary Clinton and strong conservative views on particular social policies. But I feel that the most valid analysis of his support has recognized that the core base grew out of a much more fundamental and so much more enduring motivation: people frustrated with the path their lives are taking, who feel little hope for the future, and who are convinced that the political and social elite of the country not only cares nothing for their plight, but actively pursues policies that work against their interests.

I recently heard an interview given by historian Vincent Harding back in 2011 (details here) — long before Trump appeared on the political scene — in which he provides a trenchant analysis of the source of this frustration:

I have a feeling that one of the deeper transformations that’s going on now is that for the white community of America, there is this uncertainty growing about its own role, its own control, its own capacity to name the realities that it has moved into a realm of uncertainty…. Up to now, uncertainty was the experience of the weak, the poor, the people of color.... But now, for all kinds of political, economic reasons, for all kinds of psychological reasons, that uncertainty, and unknowingness, is permeating what was the dominant, so-called, society. That breaking apart is for me more likely the source of the anxiety, the fear, the anger, the unwillingness to give in, the need to have something that they can hold on to and say, this is the way and it's got to be our way or we will all die.

The feelings of “anxiety … fear [and] anger” Harding describes have led to a deep frustration among a significant portion of the American population, and, turning now to The True Believer, we find that the starting point of Hoffer’s analysis is in fact that “the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements.” (xii) Hoffer goes on to write that American society can be particularly reactive to the kind of uncertainty that Harding has described:

One of the most potent attractions of a mass movement is its offering of a substitute for individual hope. This attraction is particularly effective in a society imbued with the idea of progress. For in the conception of progress, “tomorrow” looms large, and the frustration resulting from having nothing to look forward to is the more poignant. (15)

 Hoffer adds, in a statement that now, almost seventy years later, feels ripped from the top stories of our day:

The present-day workingman in the Western world feels unemployment as a degradation. He sees himself disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things, and is willing to listen to those who call for a new deal. (27)

As noted above, the central point of Hoffer's thesis is that the frustrated masses that come together to form a political or social movement — whether with positive ends, such as the American Revolution, or negative ends, such as Nazism — share certain common characteristics.  For one, to be moved to action, Hoffer found that they must in part be “intensely discontented yet not destitute … [and] wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking.” (11)  It would certainly be hard to dispute that many of Trump’s supporters seem to underestimate the challenges Trump could face in delivering on his promises, whether it is to bring back in significant numbers heavy-industry manufacturing jobs, or to make Mexico pay for the wall, to name but two of the more obvious examples.

Regarding the willingness of Trump’s core base of supporters to discount his seemingly unending string of controversial and often offensive statements and actions, Hoffer’s analysis again resonates. He argues in the book that, by submerging themselves into a unified mass of the disenfranchised, people lose the critical discernment of individuals, and develop such feelings and behaviors as “a facility for make-believe, a proneness to hate, a readiness to imitate, [and a] credulity.” (59)

In particular, he describes a “connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and a proneness to credulity.” (83)   He notes that “the facts on which the true believer bases his conclusions must not be derived from his experience or observation but from holy writ. … To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason.” (79) Thus, critically — and dishearteningly for anyone who hopes that sober discourse could turn Trump’s supporters against him — “the fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense.” (85)

This then would appear to be the point we have reached. A group of people so angry, so disenfranchised, so frustrated (to use Hoffer’s term) that they are beyond the reach of reasoned counter-argument. In such an environment it is not so surprising then that for Trump’s base: any facts contradicting what Trump says are defined as fake news; Trump’s inability to make good on his legislative promises despite Republican majorities in the House and Senate is blamed on a lack of support from establishment Republicans and Democrats; calling Trump out for inopportune or inappropriate comments is simply the press or his irrational detractors making a mountain out of a molehill. It would seem that there is quite literally no argument that can be made that would convince a hardcore supporter of Trump to turn their back on him.

Which leaves us where? What is then the path to Trump’s base turning on him? I would argue that path goes through Trump himself. He will have to say or do something that shows him reneging on what he promised his base, something over which he clearly and visibly has control and for which his base cannot rationalize the blame for his failure onto other politicians or the media.

The challenge is that Trump seems to instinctively recognize this, and so continues to push a legislative agenda that fulfills his promises even though it clearly can never pass as proposed; he assumes that his supporters will blame that failure on congress. Meanwhile, on those things that are truly within his control, he does what he promised during the campaign, whether through executive actions, or, for example, in pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Accord. He cannot be reasoned out of doing these things, because he is not doing them for ideological reasons — he does them to survive.

Note, too, that making the argument to Trump that he is now losing some of his support is unlikely to gain traction with him. He was told throughout the primaries that he couldn’t win, that the numbers weren’t there, and yet he became the Republican nominee for president; and this repeated itself again in the general election. Even if some supporters have indeed now begun to drift away, there remains a vocal core that continues to support him. Given all that, why would he suddenly start listening to the polls, and stop believing in his own infallibility? And, ultimately, his self-assuredness only reinforces his supporters’ faith.

Thus, we come to recognize that the answer to the question of why Trump’s base seems so unwavering in its support despite all he has done lies not in over-simplified and disparaging explanations of irrationality or stupidity. Harding’s identification of the social shifts now taking place suggest that a significant portion of the American population has sunk into a deep frustration with their lives; Hoffer’s analysis demonstrates how this frustration can lead people to band together to create a powerful and unyielding group ready to rally behind a populist candidate, and how such a group would become largely immune to arguments against their standard-bearer.

Those with the power in politics and society at large to effect changes that could have acknowledged and attempted to ameliorate the social and economic challenges for a significant portion of their fellow citizens over the past several decades have failed to do so, and have as a consequence allowed the development of a group of people primed for Trump’s arrival on the scene.

At this point, it would seem that we are all consigned to ride this political roller-coaster for the foreseeable future.


As an aside, there is one rather disturbing thought to consider: if Trump does finally fall from power, and Pence becomes president, it’s not clear that Trump’s base would support Pence going forward — in fact, it seems highly unlikely, as Trump’s hard-core base clearly seems to find little to like in either the Republicans or the Democrats. Thus, after coming together to pin their hopes on Trump, they will suddenly find themselves without a standard-bearer in government. Will they quietly become invisible? Or, will they perhaps turn to a new populist leader, one more competent and focused than Donald Trump, who may harness their frustration with even more dangerous effectiveness?

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Hoffer anticipates too the rise in hatred that has been evident since late in the campaign, and has only spread since election night. The use of hatred of the other may seem a commonly accepted means of riling up a crowd, but Hoffer’s analysis provides perhaps a new and deeper insight into how such techniques work. He notes that “even in the case of a just grievance, our hatred comes less from a wrong done to us than from the consciousness of our helplessness, inadequacy and cowardice — in other worlds from self-contempt.” (94) Thus, again, the heart of the matter is to be found in frustration and disenfranchisement. In a statement with strong implications today, seven decades after it was written, Hoffer claims: “Should Americans begin to hate foreigners whole-heartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.” (96)

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My book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

“Thoughtful People” in Partisan Times

On a recent edition of the radio program On Being entitled How to Live Beyond this Election (27 October 2016), host Krista Tippett interviewed teacher and community activist Eboo Patel, and poet Natasha Trethewey.

Addressing the increasingly vitriolic and partisanship discord that has largely eliminated considered discussion and debate in the U.S., Patel recalls a key moment in his own growth as an engaged citizen --- as someone interested in developing understanding, and participating in discussion:

DR. PATEL: One of the ways my life changed in college was William Raspberry who wrote for the Washington Post.

So, when I was 19 or 20 — and I was a fire-breathing dragon at this time. You couldn’t come within 50 feet of me without getting long lectures on people of color, consciousness, and socialism. My dad damned near kicked me out of the house at one point. He said to me, “If you give me one more lecture being bourgeois, you can find some other bourgeois dad to pay your bourgeois college tuition."

[laughter]

DR. PATEL: William Raspberry writes a column in which he says, “The smartest people I know secretly believe both sides of the issue.” And that was so striking to me. Because I was — the way I viewed the world at that point was, “I’m the smart one. You all are the dumb ones. My job is to figure out how to make you smart.” And the definition of “smart” was you thought like me.

MS. TIPPETT: Or how to make you see things my way, which is smart.

DR. PATEL: Yeah, exactly, right? And this notion of William Raspberry, who was, generally speaking, a progressive columnist was like — look, the smartest people I know choose the pro-life side and understand that there’s something else at stake. The smartest people I know are against the death penalty and understand that people who might be in favor aren’t crazy, that there’s a set of values, something at stake there.

(Patel’s comments begin at 28:26 into the unedited version of the interview; the unedited and edited interviews can be found here, along with the transcript of the edited version.)

Patel refers to a column, Our Civil Disagreement, written by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist William Raspberry (1935-2012) at the close of his long career. In that essay, which appeared in The Washington Post on 19 December 2005, Raspberry used the word “thoughtful” as opposed to “smart,“ which I would say is a small, but important difference; one does not necessarily need to smart to be able to be open to carefully listening to and considering opinions that differ from one’s own. Otherwise Patel captures well the essence of Raspberry’s wonderfully stated counterpoint to our partisan times.

The entire column is worth the time to read, and can be found here; I’ve reproduced below the portion that inspired Patel’s epiphany:

…we've come to think that producing winners and losers is the essence not just of politics but also of life. It isn't.

Making this country work for everybody is, and it would be a good thing if all of us -- journalists emphatically included -- remembered that.

What has made this a little easier for me is a discovery I've mentioned before: that in virtually every public controversy, most thoughtful people secretly believe both sides. I know I do. But the fact that I am unalterably both pro-life and pro-choice keeps me from savaging thoughtful advocates of either view. (I still retain my license to savage anyone who insists on putting horror masks on people whose opinions they don't like.)

Can it be that trying to see the other guy's side simply takes too much of our time and energy? Sometimes I suspect that the desire to savage rather than convince an opponent stems from the nagging suspicion that just maybe we are on the wrong side of the logic. I mean, if you are convinced that your position is the correct one, why wouldn't you want to examine it and explain it in a way that might win a convert or two?

One wonders what Raspberry would make of the ever more disturbing depths to which public partisanship and bickering has sunk in just the few years since his death.

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For a look at the origins of modern day partisanship, see Making American Foreign Policy, by Ole R. Holsti, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Duke University. From my review of the book (linked to here):

[Holsti] demonstrates how Vietnam sundered the Cold War consensus that had existed since WW II, and from the data he demonstrates the quite divergent and highly partisan viewpoints that have developed, and how an alignment arose between domestic and foreign policy opinion on each side of that partisan divide. He also examines the trends in opinion over the past five decades, noting that even such dramatic events as the end of the Cold War and the 9-11 attaches have not led to the development of a new consensus, and that in fact the partisan and ideological divides in politics have only become deeper.

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My book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Historian Vincent Harding Foreshadowed --- in 2011 --- Social Conditions that Escalated to Impact the 2016 Election

In a 2011 interview on the radio program On Being hosted by Krista Tippett, historian Vincent Harding (1931-2014) identified among “the white community of America” a growing “uncertainty” over their place in an economy and society undergoing a dramatic transformation away from the America of their youth --- the era of their parents and grand-parents. He described “the anxiety, the fear, the anger” that was growing out of the disintegration resulting from these changes.

The uncertainty that he described in 2011 manifested itself at the ballot box in 2016 by playing an important role in the powerful rejection by a segment of American society of the current direction of the country, a reaction that went beyond voting for or against specific policies or plans. Though the results of the election should not be simplistically reduced to any single, isolated cause, Harding’s words do seem startlingly prescient, anticipating some of the principal conclusions being drawn in the flurry of analyses that the election outcome has unleashed.

His comments, which I have reproduced below, came in response to a question from Tippett about the changing face of hope in the United States. I have included Tippett’s specific question and Harding’s response to it as lead-in to give the context to his subsequent comments on the white community in America, which come toward the end, and which I have highlighted in italics.

The interview (“Vincent Harding --- Is America Possible?” can be found at the On Being website here. Tippett’s question and Harding’s reply can be found starting at the 59:13 mark of the unedited version of the interview. The transcript on the web-site is of the edited, final version of the interview; below I have added in the parts of his comments that did not make the cut into the edited version, showing them in [brackets].

MS. TIPPETT: I was listening to the BBC in recent weeks, and they’re watching us from afar. They were interviewing a journalist about this moment in American history, which seems very tumultuous and the question was, “Is it really more violent and more despairing than it’s been before or does this happen repeatedly?” And the comparison was made with the 1960s.

They said, look, there was a lot of social turmoil then. There were assassinations, right? I mean, many assassinations. But this journalist said — and I just want to know what you think — he said that he thought the difference between the 1960s and now was that even though there was incredible tumult and violence, it was at the very same time a period of intense hope, and people could see that they were moving towards goals. And that that’s missing now. What do you think about that analysis?

DR. HARDING: Hmm. Krista, I think that that is such a complicated kind of issue that I can only pick at it and tease it out and play with it in the best sense of play. I think that what I see now is the fact that all over this country, wherever I go, and, of course, where I go tends to be sort of self-selective because I am most often going into situations where people are operating out of a sense of hope and possibility, where in their local situations, whether it be Detroit, or Atlanta, or a campus someplace, or a church community in Philadelphia, that there are women and men and young people who are operating out of hope. [That they really believe in the possibilities that come to them from their own connection to the history of hope, as it were, and to the vision that they have of who they are and who they could be.]

My sense is that, in the ‘60s, there was probably a larger kind of canopy of hope that we could see, and we could identify, and that people could name and focus on. Now, we are in particular spots, locations, sometimes seemingly isolated. But I feel that there are points, focal situations, where that is still available and where people are operating from that.

So I think that it is not simply the matter of hope or no hope.

I have a feeling that one of the deeper transformations that’s going on now is that for the white community of America, there is this uncertainty growing about its own role, its own control, its own capacity to name the realities that it has moved into a realm of uncertainty that it did not allow itself to face before. 

[Up to now, uncertainty was the experience of the weak, the poor, the people of color, that that was our realm. But now, for all kinds of political, economic reasons, for all kinds of psychological reasons, that uncertainty, and unknowingness, is permeating what was the dominant, so-called, society. That breaking apart is for me more likely the source of the anxiety, the fear, the anger, the unwillingness to give in, the need to have something that they can hold on to and say, this is the way and it's got to be our way or we will all die.]

And I think that that’s the place that we are in, and that’s even more the reason why we’ve got to figure out what was King talking about when he was seeing the possibility of a beloved community and recognized that, maybe, for some of us, that cannot come until some of us realize that we must give up what we thought was only ours [in order for all of us to find new possibilities] in the building of a beloved nation. Can there be a beloved nation? Why don’t we try and see?

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W.E.B. Du Bois, author of the classic work of the black experience in the post-civil war era The Souls of Black Folk (my review here), had a similar comment on this in 1935.

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My book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

A Bittersweet Moment for a Parent

A wonderful reflection from Spanish writer José Luis Sampedro (1917-2013) on a moment every parent longs for, but that can nonetheless bring with it profound feelings of melancholy.

(…) tuve a mi hija y la verdad ése fue un gran momento. (…) Sí, la niña fue algo grande, aunque a los pocos años me dio un disgusto tremendo. El día en que hizo pis ella solita. Sí, no se rían, fue un gran disgusto. Yo me levantaba a medianoche para ponerla medio dormidita a hacer pis y una noche oigo a la niña despierta que se levanta sola, la oigo mover el orinalito, sentarse a hacer pis y volver a la cama y me digo: <<¡Vaya por Dios, me quedé sin hija!>>. Sí, sí, ustedes no lo entienden pero sentir que la niña ya no me necesitaba fue duro. Algo parecido cuando más adelante vienen y te dicen que se casan. Bueno, no tanto, seguarmente exagero, pero me sent&iacute desplazado.

… my daughter was born, and truthfully it was a wonderful moment. … Yes, my little girl was something wonderful, although soon after she caused me a terrible sorrow. The day that she peed on her own. It’s true, don’t laugh, it was a great sorrow. I had been getting up in the middle of the night to take her, half asleep, to pee, and one night I heard my little girl wake up and get out of bed on her own, and I heard her move the little potty, sit down to pee, and return to bed, and I said to myself: “Good heavens! I’ve been left without a daughter!” I know, I know, you don’t understand it, but to think that my little girl no longer needed me was hard. Something similar to when, much later, they come and tell you that they are marrying. Fine, not quite, I’m surely exaggerating, but I felt myself displaced.

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Other reviews / information:

This quote is taken from the book Diccionario Sampedro (Dictionary Sampedro; p. 33), which is a collection of excerpts from Sampedro’s works of non-fiction and fiction. At some point, once I finish the book, I hope to have a review of it up on this blog; I’ll come back and update this post with the link when that happens.

The quote originated in Sampedro’s book Escribir es vivir (To write is to live). Unfortunately, I don’t believe any of Sampedro’s works have yet been translated into English.

The translation into English of the excerpt above is mine.

Pulling from the autobiographical summary in Diccionario Sampedro: Sampedro was a professor of Economics and an author; his writings on economics as well as his novels reflected his humanistic point of view.

For my review of Sampedro’s book La vida perenne (The Perennial Life) click here.  Published posthumously, the book contains reflections from Sampedro on the various philosophies he explored and studied over a lifetime of curiosity about the human condition. It includes both his own commentary on what he learned, as well as citations from writers, philosophers and spiritual texts world-wide.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
My book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Poet Nikki Giovanni on the concept of achieving Justice

During an interview with Krista Tippett, host of the radio program “On Being”, poet Nikki Giovanni made a profound observation about the nature of pursuing justice in the face of injustice:

Giovanni: The third line in the poem [I am working on now] says, you know, “We cannot be unraped.” And I was interested because, you know, we’ve had a lot of campus rape, and then we found out that some of it isn’t quite, ah, quite accurate. But no matter what it is, we cannot ‘unrape’. And, I’m not sure, I’m having this argument with myself, I don’t know where this is going to go by the way, but I’m not sure that ‘justice’, can come from any of that. Only thing that come from that is revenge. And, revenge is a bad idea, I mean the Greeks learned that [long] ago.

Tippett: That justice can come from, that justice can come from any of what? Of ...?

Giovanni: That, that there’s no ju --- if you, right now, came in here and beat the living crap out of me, there is no ‘justice’; there’s no justice, I had the living crap beaten out of me. I can sue you, I can do something to try to satisfy myself, but that’s not going to be --- there’s no justice. Unless I would, tie you up and beat the living crap out of you --- and nobody wants to do that --- that’s what I’m saying. I can get revenge, but I can’t, there’s no justice. And so I’m beginning to wonder, should we change this, this, this dialogue we have. I saw the president the other day, of the United States, saying, you know, to the ah community, whoever it is that, that’s been blowing up people, you know, 'we’re going to get you’. That’s, that’s not justice. And, I’m sorry to say it like that --- I’m not namby-pamby --- but we’re going to have to find a way to talk to each other, and I think that, that’s what’s important.

(17 March 2016; 1:02:55 into the unedited version of the interview, available here.)

Her thoughts on justice resonate at so many levels of modern life, whether the personal wrongs we may individually face, the national discourse on race and the police, or the international efforts to respond to ISIS.  When we talking about achieving justice in response to some sort of violence --- some injustice --- what do we really mean, what do we actually wish to achieve?

One can understand Giovanni noting that "I'm having this argument with myself, [and] I don't know where this is going to go," because comments such as hers will almost unavoidably generate knee-jerk, facile retorts: 'What, shall we just let the rapist go then?  Shall we just let ISIS behead people?'  By reaching for the extremes of a literal interpretation, one need not bother to consider the deeper meaning of her words.

But clearly she does not intend to say that we should simply turn the other cheek in the face of such violence, as she reinforces with her "I'm not namby-pamby" comment toward the end of the quote above.  Instead, I would argue, her point is that we must understand what we are asking for when we ask for justice, what we accomplish --- and fail to accomplish --- in pursuing justice through a violent response.

We may need to resort to violence in some cases, whether it be incarceration (through the outcome of the judicial system), or military confrontation (against a terrorist group).  But, Giovanni seems to argue, we need to recognize that these responses do not truly achieve justice, and in reality most closely resemble revenge.  And, perhaps, if we recognize that in the end such means also represent a kind of violence, and that violence breeds violence, then maybe we will take the first steps to understanding that to truly end injustice --- for the long-term --- we have to, as she says above, "find a way to talk to each other" to stop the injustice from occurring in the first place.

The Ideology of Austerity

In an article in the 28 November 2011 issue of The Nation magazine (Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist) Marilynne Robinson examines the drive in the United States (and elsewhere) to address the current economic crisis through austerity programs that focus on rolling back many of the public institutions that have come to play such important roles in our lives, and that came about as our society developed a greater sense of community and recognition of the common good.

Though I highly recommend following the link above to read the complete article, I have include below some selected passages from it.  (The bold emphasis and text in brackets are mine.)

 Over the years we seem to have become habituated, even addicted, to the notion of radical threat, threat of the kind that can make virtually anything seem expendable if it does not serve an immediate, desperate purpose of self-defense --- as defined by people often in too high a state of alarm to make sound judgments about what real safety would be or how it might be achieved, and who feel that their duty to the rest of us is to be very certain we share their alarm.  ...  In this climate of generalized fear civil liberties have come under pressure, and those who try to defend them are seen as indifferent to threats to freedom.  The world is indeed dangerous, an for this reason the turning of our society, and of Western society, against itself is flatly contrary to any rational strategy of self-defense.  But this is highly consistent with a new dominance of ideological thinking, and very highly consistent with the current passion for austerity, which gains from it status as both practical necessity and moral ideal.

...

At best there are two major problems with ideology.  The first is that it does not represent or conform to or even address reality.  It is a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe.  The second is that it inspires in its believers the notion that the fault lies with miscreant fact, which should therefore be conformed to the requirements of theory by all means necessary.  To the ideologue this would amount to putting the world right, ridding it of ambiguity and those tedious and endless moral and ethical questions that dog us through life, and that those around us so rarely answer to our satisfaction.  Anger and self-righteousness combined with cynicism about the world as he or she sees it are the marks of the ideologue.  There is always an element of nostalgia, too, because the ideologue is confident that he or she is moved by a special loyalty to a natural order, or to a good and normative past, that others defy or betray.

...

...in America, an abstraction called capitalism has truly begun to function as an ideology.  The word is not included in the 1882 edition of Webster's Dictionary, and in the latest Oxford English Dictionary "capitalism" is simply "a system which favours the existence of capitalists," as systems like the self-declared social democracies of Western Europe have always done.  In contemporary America it has taken on the definition and the character that Marx ... gave it.  This despite the fact that Marx did not consider the united State of his time essentially capitalist.  This despite the fact that the United States as a society is structured around any number of institutions that are not, under this definition, capitalist.   Suddenly anything public is "socialist," therefore a deviancy, inevitably second-rate and a corruption of, so to speak, the public virtue.  If I could find any gleam of intelligence or reflection in all this, or any sign of successful education, I would be happy to admire it, so passionate are my loyalties.

...

This brings me ... to the subject of competition, great ally of austerity. ... In need of the focus {of competition} that comes with having an alien and threatening government to contend with, an appreciable number of Americans choose to consider their government alien and threatening, and, for good measure, socialist.  Again, this kind of thinking is eminently compatible with austerity, as the redistributive activities of government are exactly what they choose to be austere about.  Other alternatives include returning tax rates for the very wealthy to historically typical levels and cutting subsidies to oil companies.  Or there could be a candid admission that the responsibilities of the government involve it in great expense.  None of these options ignite populist zeal.  This is reserved for attacks --- call them "austerities" --- directed toward public schools, Social Security, national healthcare, the laws that protect air and water quality.

Comment on Kumi Naidoo editorial in The Nation 'The Safe Bet: Renewables'

I mostly appreciate and agree with the points Kumi Naidoo makes in his editorial 'The Safe Bet: Renewables' [July 27].  Certainly it is important to continue to support the further development and implementation of renewable sources of energy.

However, he undermines his argument by not acknowledging several fundamental scientific barriers that must be understood and addressed.

One is in regard to his statement from a UN report that '[renewable energy] dominates nuclear power globally by a ratio of six to one'.  It is true that the report indicates that renewable energy is a larger source of energy than nuclear energy, 12.9% to 2%.  But Mr. Naidoo leaves out two important points: 1) 10.2% of the renewable energy is listed as 'biomass', which still generates greenhouse gases; and 2) 2.3% is hydropower which leaves 0.4% of energy coming from wind, solar and geothermal.  So, true sources of renewable energy that do not create greenhouse gases (unlike biofuel) and are broadly expandable (unlike hydropower) still trail nuclear energy by an order of magnitude.  There is much development still needed before they become significant factors.

Another important point that Mr. Naidoo ignores in his article is that oil, gas and coal provide something that wind and solar in particular cannot provide: a stable energy supply available day and night.  Aside from the obvious problem that the wind is not always blowing nor the sun always shining, battery technology is not currently developed to a point were the necessary amounts of energy can be stored for use during these 'down' times.  He should clearly acknowledge this as a fundamental area of technology development that is needed to make wind and solar power more broadly feasible energy sources.

Finally, he trumpets the current shift in Japan and Germany away from nuclear power.  But, despite the significant gains that Germany has made in implementing solar panels and solar water heaters (in a trip there earlier this year it was surprising how wide-spread these were in the area I visited), both Japan and Germany are expected to need to turn to increased use of coal, oil and gas to replace the energy that is being given up by nuclear power.  (Germany actually may also need to turn to nuclear energy from France.)  The reality is that there is an immediate need for an energy source that will produce 24 hours a day and that will allow us over the next couple of decades (i.e., very quickly) to reduce to near zero the generation of greenhouse gases.  Renewable energy sources today satisfy neither of these criteria.  It is hard to see at this point a source of energy other than nuclear power that will allow us the time to make the transition to clean energy while avoiding the approaching climate disaster.

To be clear, I largely agree with Mr. Naidoo's goals.  I would like to see subsidies for coal, oil and gas companies ended, a carbon tax implemented, investment in renewable energy increased and the phase-out of particularly coal as a source of energy.  But it does a disservice to these causes to ignore the reality of the scientific challenges facing us in working toward these goals. 

Better to be upfront about the challenges, and point out feasible path to a solution: end subsidies for coal, oil and gas companies and use these subsidies to invest in the further development of renewable energy technologies.  Implement a carbon tax (the income from which is directly turned over to people) to drive efficiency improvements through the market.  And, though possibly unpalatable, but critical, invest in the nuclear power plants required to allow us to end our need to burn coal before we pass a dangerous tipping point in our climate.

Career Counseling for Paul Wolfowitz from Maureen Dowd

From Maureen Dowd's column in The New York Times today:

Even now, with our deficit and military groaning from two wars in Muslim countries, interventionist on the left and the right insist it's our duty to join the battle in a third Muslim country.

"It is both morally right an in America's strategic interest to enable the Libyans to fight for themselves," Wolfowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.

You would think that a major architect of the disastrous wars and interminable occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq would have the good manners to shut up and take up horticulture.  Bu the neo-con naif has no shame.

A Negative Effect to Energy Efficiency Regulation?

A few days after a recent post in which I discussed issues surrounding government regulation of energy efficiency (Government Regulated Energy Efficiency and the Light Bulb), I read an interesting related article in The New Yorker magazine, by David Owen, The Efficiency Dilemma (December 20/27, 2010). 

In the article, Owen recalls the work of William Stanley Jevons, who published a book in 1865, “The Coal Question,” in which he argued that increasing the economy (efficiency) of the use of coal would not delay the exhaustion of England’s coal reserves, but would rather hasten it.  Jevons’ thesis, as Owen relates it, was that more efficient use of coal would lower the cost of whatever was being produced from coal, and so increase the demand for it, and so, ultimately, increase the use of coal.

If some technological advance made it possible for a blast furnace to produce iron with less coal, he wrote, then profits would rise, new investment in iron production would be attracted, and the price of iron would fall, thereby stimulating additional demand.  Eventually, he concluded, “the greater number of furnaces will more than make up for the diminished consumption of each.”

Owen goes on to present arguments of modern economists for and against the idea that ‘effort to improve energy efficiency can more than negate any environmental gains.’  He refers to a negative, ‘rebound’ effect, in which improved energy efficiency actually leads to greater overall use of energy.

There are two issues I have with Owen’s arguments.  One is general: I feel he makes the fallacy of false equivalency; he states at one point that ‘most economists and efficiency experts have come to’ the conclusion ‘that the Jevons paradox has limited applicability today,’ but, he dedicates half the article to an economist who argues that Jevons was correct and his theory applies to modern economies.

My second issue with the article is that Owen begins with Jevons’ original theory, which Jevons applied to production processes, and extends it to the product efficiency improvements being regulated by the government.  Many of the arguments Owen presents seem to confirm at first glance the thesis that efforts to improve energy efficiency can negate environmental gains, but don’t stand up under further investigation. 

Taken together, though Owen has written a thought-provoking article on the larger trade-offs of the push for energy efficiency, his article sensationalizes the ‘rebound effect’ beyond what can currently be supported by data, and so goes too far in calling into question the benefit of having the government regulate energy efficiency to reduce energy use.

Automobile Fuel-Economy Regulation

Automobile development and fuel economy regulation are one example where I would argue that Owen’s data don’t support his conclusions:  Owen states that ‘the first fuel-economy regulations for U.S. cars … in 1975 … were followed not by a steady decline in total U.S. motor-fuel consumption but  by a long-term rise, as well as by increases in horsepower, curb weight, vehicle miles traveled (up a hundred per cent since 1980), and car ownership.’  But look at this in more detail.  The plot below shows data from the site infoplease; the data is for ‘personal passenger vehicles, buses, and trucks.’  I have drawn in a dashed line for 1975, when the fuel-economy regulations were first introduced in the US.

 Looking more closely at Owen’s six claims, based on the data in the plot above:

• The total U.S. motor fuel consumption has increased, but the increase is basically on the same rate of increase as was already occurring from 1960 to 1975; in fact, if anything, there was a period of time from the mid-1970’s to around 1990, when fuel consumption dipped slightly.
• The vehicle miles traveled has increased, but the increase is again only slightly above the trend already established in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, before the fuel-economy regulations were introduced; as Owen reports, vehicle miles traveled were up 100% from 1980 to 2006, but, then, they were up 100% from 1960 to 1980, also.
• Vehicle ownership is increasing, but it can be seen to roughly track the US population increase, and is on the trend already established well before the 1975 regulations were introduced.  (I assume Owen meant vehicle (cars and light-duty trucks) and not car; the statistics at the same site show car ownership has actually flattened since the late 1980’s, most likely because of the increased purchase of SUV’s and light trucks.)
• Regarding the increases in horsepower and curb-weight, a plot from an earlier post is reproduced below.  As can be seen, vehicle weight dropped significantly in the 5 years after the regulations were introduced, and 0-60 time (related to horsepower) remained relatively flat, as manufacturers focused on meeting the regulations, but once the regulations were met, manufacturers had little motivation to improve fuel economy standards and so the focus went back to improving performance (for example, by reducing 0-60 times and making larger vehicles).

Later in the article, Owen states:

The Model T was manufactured between 1908 and 1927.  … its fuel economy ranged between thirteen and twenty-one miles per gallon.  …  But focusing on miles per gallon is the wrong way to assess the environmental impact of cars.  Far more revealing is to consider the productivity of driving.  Today, in contrast to the early nineteen–hundreds, any American with a license can cheaply travel almost anywhere, in almost any weather in extraordinary comfort; can drive for thousands of miles with no maintenance other than refueling; can easily find gas, food, lodging, and just about anything else within a short distance of almost any road; and can order an eat meals without undoing a seat belt or turning off the ceiling-mounted DVD player.

A modern driver, in other words, gets vastly more benefit from a gallon of gasoline --- makes far more economical use of fuel --- than any Model T owner ever did.  Yet motorists’ energy consumption has grown by mind-boggling amounts, and, as the productivity of driving has increased and the cost of getting around has fallen, the global market for cars has surged. 

All of this is clearly true, as a set of facts.  But, it lumps under ‘fuel efficiency improvements” many things that have been implemented not directly to improve fuel efficiency, but rather to provide an improved service, to improve the country’s business infra-structure, or to improve particular companies’ bottom-lines.  The interstate high-way system was not built to improve fuel-efficiency, any more than side roads were paved to do so, or companies located fuel stations on well-traveled roads to do so.  All of this happened, and will continue to happen, for many reasons, none of which are related to the regulation of vehicle fuel economy.

Thus the trends leading to increased energy consumption in motor vehicles existed well before the fuel economy regulations were introduced in 1975.  These trends were a result of the governments desire to improve the countries economic infra-structure, and manufacturers desire to sell more products by improving what we can generically call performance (e.g., horsepower and comfort), and none of this was driven by government regulation of fuel economy.  The fuel economy regulations only forced the manufacturers to also consider energy efficiency in their designs.  This is not to argue that increased fuel economy standards do not at all affect consumer behavior, and in theory lead to some overall increase in fuel usage as the cost impact of driving is reduced.  It is just not clear, based on the actual data, that the fuel economy standards themselves had any sort of significant ‘rebound’ impact leading to an overall increase in energy usage.

Refrigerator Energy Efficiency Regulation

Owen mentions refrigerators as another example.  He states that an ‘escalation of cooling capacity has occurred all over suburban America,’ adding that ‘as the ability to efficient and inexpensively chill things has grown, so have opportunities to buy chilled things --- a potent positive feedback loop.’  But, the question again is whether the ‘escalation of cooling capacity’ is really a function of improved energy efficiency, in particular. 

Below I reproduce another plot from the earlier post, this time showing both the average energy use per refrigerator and the average size of refrigerators over time in the United States.  From the starting point of the plot, in 1947, there is a roughly linear increase in the average size of refrigerators sold, and in the energy use per refrigerator sold, up through the point where energy efficiency regulations were introduced in the mid-1970’s.  Thus, purchasers of refrigerators were driving an increase in the size of the refrigerator, despite the fact that it meant higher energy use.  Only with the introduction of the energy efficiency regulations does the energy efficiency of refrigerators improve (dramatically); but, the size of the refrigerators purchased continues to increase, albeit, more slowly.

So, again, there is every indication that consumers would have continued to purchase larger, higher energy consuming refrigerators, even without energy efficiency regulations pushing down the energy costs for operation.  It is simply not clear that consumers make energy efficiency a key element in their purchase decisions (unless, possibly, subsidies such as tax rebates drive such behavior).

The Bigger Picture of Reducing Energy Use

Aside from the specific examples discussed above, where I feel that Owen has exaggerated any relationship that can be found in the data tying government energy efficiency regulation to a rebound effect of leading to higher energy use, there is the concern, that he also discusses, of a secondary effect, which can be summarized as follows: saving consumers money through increased energy efficiency in one area (say their automobile or refrigerator) and so reducing their energy costs, frees them to spend money on some other energy using device, and so leading to an overall increase in energy usage.

As Owen states in his article, such a relationship is intuitively appealing, but difficult to prove in the data.  Certainly the number of energy using devices owned by the typical American consumer is increasing.  But can this increase be ascribed primarily to having more disposable income due to energy efficiency improvements in existing devices, such as automobiles and refrigerators?  More likely (though I am admittedly stating it without supporting data) the lowered cost of these new devices and the U.S. government’s subsidies in support of low energy prices would appear to be the major drivers of this trend.

All of which points to a more appropriate, if still today politically untenable, approach to reducing energy usage: a carbon tax.  If reducing energy use is considered a good thing (for the environment, for our political situation in the world), then increasing the cost to the consumer of using energy will have the most direct impact on energy usage.  And, it will drive energy efficiency improvements across the board on products, through consumer demand, as opposed to having to be legislated piece-meal by the government.  (The movie Carbon Nation, for example, makes this argument.)