See Christopher B's first comment under my recent post Can you control your own beliefs?
Everyone is putting up their Bob Dylan posts this week, so I suppose I should have a run at it too. Simple and profound. Though some of your will may be free, you will obey forces without thinking about it. You will serve somebody. It is best to at least be aware who that is rather than kidding yourself.
Mark Stoler over at Things Have Changed updates and reposts the story of Captain Witold Pilecki , who volunteered to go to Auschwitz when it first opened in 1940 to learn what it was and gather intelligence for the Polish Home Army. He was there for two-and-a-half years coming close to death twice, before deciding to escape and bringing out his plan for liberating the camp.
It took four months for Pilecki to cautiously make his way across Poland, finally reaching Warsaw and the Home Army. To his bitter disappointment, the proposal for the attack was not endorsed by the Home Army leadership which did not have the arms, ammunition and transport to carry it out. The Poles made an attempt to gain logistical support for the operation from the British, including bombers and planes to carry airborne troops. They sent Pilecki's 11 page report to the British who dismissed it, believing the report to be a gross exaggeration, and declining to help.
That is a common story of disbelief in the West, not crediting the reports brought from Germany and especially the Bloodlands of Eastern Europe. There is ample evidence of real information making it to the highest levels of power in Britain and America, especially from the other David Wyman , the Holocaust scholar from UMass Amherst. But whether people "knew" is a slightly different question. Our ability to not see and not believe what we do not wish to be true is present at every point in our "dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime." The first courage is to see oneself. Pilecki himself wrote in his report "Camp was a proving ground of character. Some - slithered into a moral swamp. Others - chiseled themselves a character of the finest crystal."
In the Battle for Warsaw Pilecki was captured and sent to a German POW camp. He was liberated in 1945 but went immediately to the Polish Guard in Italy to fight the communists. He was secretly executed after a show trial in 1948.
... a former prison guard who watched over Witold during his imprisonment approached the Pilecki family, telling them "I want to help you because your father was a saint . . . Under his influence, I changed my life. I do not harm anyone anymore."
I have followed the Fertility Crisis a fair bit over the last decade, before it became the hot topic it has become more recently. Thee is a lot of discussion about why women aren't having children, why men aren't getting married, whether it's too expensive, too socially unpopular, with twenty theories for each of these. I have engaged in the discussion and highlighted a few possibilities myself. It has started to become like the discussions of "what should we do with the schools?" or "why aren't people going to church anymore?" Anyone whoever had an education or was ever in a church thinks they are an expert with a unique perspective which they should feel free to pronounce on.
I don't mean to sound entirely negative about that. There's no obvious answer and the discussion can be interesting. Also, it's got lots of numbers and graphs. I think on all such discussions I get quickly exasperated with the people who don't bring their own numbers and graphs or worse, won't look at anyone else's because they have a Theory, dammit. We don't need no steenking graphs. We have the answers.
There have been a couple of recent additions to the discussion which have caused me to step back and think "Maybe I have been missing a basic point. Let's look at this."
Lyman Stone, whom I have have admiration for, thinks there is a huge flaw in the numbers in that the decrease in children per woman measures the number of births rather than the eventual completed family size. There is still a decrease below the level of replacement, but the overall drop is only about half as large, or even a third as large, as historical levels up until very recent times. Babies and young children died a lot before reaching an age at which they could reproduce.* I have linked to him putting forth variations of this for a couple of years now. He and others (Ruxandra Teslo, Cremieux Recueil) have thus thought that a few moderate solutions might be enough to turn the tidce, rather than trying to find the big societal makeover that is going to fix everything. Stone just updated and discussed with new numbers from Turkey, which has been a controversial discussion in the last decade.
Next, I have just read Richard Hanania taking a 30,000-ft view and wondering if there actually is a problem at all. For what human beings want out of life, not only individuals but entire societies seem to manage their fertility rates moderately well, and have throughout history. Because this is against a background of constant catastrophe, how automatically we do this has been obscured. But one of the things that humans want is some respite, some alone time. In most eras it is hard to afford even a little of it, but as prosperity has increased we can afford to have more - and maybe that's fine. I should point out that I started by liking Hanania, grew tired of him because of his reluctance to engage opposition fairly, but have come back on board a bit this year. He is quite intelligent and an original thinker. I just wish...well, never mind. that should be enough. I don't have to live with the guy after all.
*It helps to bear this in mind when we look back (or abroad) at societies where women have children at what we would consider horribly young ages. Life was uncertain for the entire tribe. Catastrophes could reduce population quickly. When a man had enough resources to support children he was expected to take a wife, or more than one. When a girl was old enough to conceive, she was expected to. The cultural excuses arrangements for that were varied, but catastrophe was the underlying problem which had to be repeatedly solved. The increased prosperity of Western Europe allowed both sexes to marry later or not at all. (See our old friend the Hajnal Line.) As the rest of the world gets prosperous, they are doing the same.
A guest post at N3 discusses how much of our belief system is installed at least in broad outline by circumstances and genetics. I have my suspicions.
Wherever the climate is hot and humid - from Singapore to the DRC - people tend to be both more xenophobic and more conformist than the global average. Why? Because hot and humid climates are rich in pathogens like bacteria, fungi and parasites. The locals’ wariness of strangers comes from a heightened fear they might bring infection. And their learned conformity is a form of behavioural immunity to ensure nobody deviates from the practices they know will keep them safe from contagion.
I'll bet there is something to it, but my reflexive association with conformist is Swedish. People from Appalachia are traditional, but are they conformist? And they are in a different contagion environment than humid port cities of the South anyway. Is there anything we can legitimatelyn measure, here? I kept thinking of exceptions, and lack of clarity about definitions of things like conservative or religious. So I am bringing it up here as a thought exercise. What language we learn as a child is entirely circumstance. But what things are fully under our control, or even partly? We think of ourselves as free agents, and dislike ceding any territory to those who would point to aspects of ourselves we seem to have absorbed without due reflection.
Fifteen years ago I did an extended, nay overextended series May We Believe Our Thoughts? (MWBOT) There are links to research and essays on the topic by people smarter than me if you want a deep dive here.
This seems like the sort of topic where even if you are self-deluded your personal anecdotes are likely to be mines of information for the rest of us.
Decades ago I took a once-a-week inservice for 6 weeks on creative problem-solving. I remember little of it, but the one thing that has stuck with me was "Imagine that the problem is ten times worse. Then imagine that it is ten times less. This usually brings clarity." It did then, as I tried to address a personal problem in that way and hit upon the idea of leaning into something rather than trying to ignore it. Worked. Usually, when one asks "What if this were only one-tenth as big a problem? What if my debt were a hundred dollars instead of a thousand? What if I had to work two hours of mandated overtime instead of twenty?" it is clear we would just ignore it: Yes it's unfair, but not worth my time.
Thus it was gratifying to learn from Real Clear Politics that this was a favored strategy of General Eisenhower. (Instapundit CWCID) Whether he applied that as President Eisenhower I don't know, but I do know that the complaint against him was running the country from the golf course - which looks remarkably wise at the moment. Cal Coolidge and the ten boulders coming down the mountain toward you and all that. Ike probably exaggerated and over-intervened in Suez, but underestimated how much political hay would be made in his second midterms from a brief, shallow recession. That is too limited a data set for me to draw conclusions.
I seldom remember the strategy now, because problems are manageable. Yet it would likely do me good to list them and run the exercise.
I have asked for this to be played as the benediction at my funeral.
Let me know if they forgetBlessed are the peace-makers, not the peace-lovers. I am not taking that thought any further, only reminding you that the two are not synonymous and may even be opposed at times. Look first into what it might mean for individual conflicts, tempted by no thoughts of politics. Only then should you very tentatively wonder "How shall we then live" in a corporate and even national sense.
I grew up UCC in the Vietnam era. I never heard anyone suggest it meant anything but being antiwar. I now think it is a great evil to narrow it that way, suggesting that our clergy was more into feelings and social acceptance among the literary class than Bible application. I have since lived among those who leaned so far out on the other side of the boat that they fell into the sea there.
James speculates that a Hilbert Table might be just the thing for a banquet in heaven. I knew it must have something to do with David Hilbert the eminent turn-of-the-century mathematician, but had to look it up.
"...as many dimensions as guests, everybody sitting next to Jesus and kitty-corner with every other guest."
The New England Gilbert and Sullivan Society will be doing all thirteen operettas September 4-7 in Concord, MA. Tracy and I will be attending at least one, TBD. We have friends from college whose oldest daughter will be singing.
The tricolon is a rhetorical device of three parallel words or phrases that express related ideas. We love them. They just sound better. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The few, the proud, the Marines.
It works in 60s pop music, too
As I understand it, Iran is one of those countries that leaks its wish list to compliant media sources, claiming that the US has agreed to those terms. They can then claim that Trump is backing out of a done deal. It apparently works very well on the American press.
Maarten Boudry writes a long, evidence-filled essay about the Gaza Genocide, They Don't Believe It, Either. There are some still pictures with text in them, and some fully-labeled graphs. The one moving picture is a 90 minute video of a guy talking into a microphone. So the excitement isn't exactly jumping off the page. There must be some of his opponents who would work their way through the whole thing and attempt to answer it in kind, but I'm not recalling any in the popular discussion.
They are competing on different playing fields.
Relatedly, there is a world of difference between saying that Israel has done some terrible things and someone should stop it vs claiming that the Jews are responsible for all our problems. Classic Motte-and-Bailey argument.
I recommend pausing it early and often to look at the categories and absorb them.
Doing nothing
Meeting with friends
Cooking
The refusal to see or remember the Holodomor by Elana Gomel
When I was a child, we lived near the central train station in Kyiv. I love trains, and the station, with its beautiful 19th-century industrial design, was my favorite. But my grandmother seemed to be ambivalent about it, even though we had to take a train to our dacha quite often. When I asked her about it, she said, “I remember the women.”
Why College Turns People into Socialists. To be technical, it should be "How" college turns people into socialists, but it's an otherwise accurate essay. I am going to send it out to some people I know for their reactions.
The subsidization of student clubs poses similar problems: one’s tuition funds all student organizations regardless of that group’s productivity or ideology. When I was enrolled at Columbia, for instance, my tuition money funded “Students for Justice in Palestine”—a group that periodically declared their desire to murder me—and as a tuition-paying student, I had no option to opt out of supporting the group’s atrocities. Similarly, my tuition funded many clubs with little use to the college “society” at large. Several clubs did nothing but throw parties all semester. Under a capitalist system, such defunct or unpopular organizations would not stand a chance, but at a university, all student clubs, kept alive through shared funding, survive regardless of popularity and functionality.
