Update on Neolithic Grave Discovery

I wrote a year ago about deciphering the data from a Neolithic grave site in Poland. I thought it likely at the time that these were *Corded Ware people killed by Yamnaya, or even more likely from those under pressure from Yamnayan expansion.  It would be early for them directly, but they could have created pressure and disruption beforehand. An arrowhead in the shoulder of one of the victims is clearly from a long-established culture of farmers, descended from those who entered Europe in that expansion 3000 years earlier. The Corded Ware people were herders, and though they had long been in the area, their ways were still more nomadic, and conflict over resources was ongoing.  But this was not the newest invaders raiding the previous invaders, it was the long-settled fighting back or defending against the encroachment of one of the many bands who had invaded long before and still roamed the area.

The Corded Ware people were an earlier group of steppe Indo-Europeans, not likely drawn from the ruling elite.  They therefore may have struck out on their own from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe because of defeat or poor prospects.  The Yamnaya who later pushed them out seem to be drawn from the more powerful groups.

*Again my caution about named categories.  They are useful for putting structure on discussions, but they obscure as much information as they reveal. The Corded Ware people were likely many small groups, leaving at somewhat different times and taking different routes. They did not use all land they came upon, kicking the current residents out, but sought good pasturage, leapfrogging over areas, some inhabited, some not. They might settle among established groups in places they weren't using.  Or they might create pasture by sending young men on ahead to burn out forest to be occupied a few years later, with the fire chasing out the previous farmers and whatever hunter-gatherers there were. They adopted the technologies they encountered unevenly.  Though they stayed in contact with each other, they fought with each other and became different.  They married with, or captured brides from different tribes. The model to think of when encountering the word migration is to think of Europeans (and Africans, Asians) coming to the New World, not because it is typical, but because it is varied over a 500-year period. You can't sum up what happened in a sentence or a paragraph or just draw a single fat arrow on the map to illustrate it.  So too with prehistoric migrations.

Honour and Holiness

Most people have some code of honor. We might attend a school with an Honor Code, or take an oath serving in the military binding us to some standard. We might join any number of organisations that require we adopt not only a list of rules, but particular attitudes toward women, or fellow-members. More difficult to describe but just as powerful are informal codes, sometimes instilled in us from earliest years. Wodehouse did a send-up of this with the Code of the Woosters, with the insistence on the straight bat and not shooting a sitting bird by the upper classes, but they were (and still are) real enough to some of those gentlemen to shape or even dictate behavior. Many of these are not trivial.

There is a dark side.  In prison the code is nearly reduced to one directive, not to snitch, and something similar held in the Mafia. Secret societies were mostly benign and even laudable - I recall reciting the line "worthy of the commendation of all good men" in many ceremonies. Yet even those had a climate of favoritism and elitism that excluded others by sex, by class, by race.

There is also the application of "honor" to ideas of mere status or even public perception of status. Men who were overproud of their rank - perhaps even their imagined rank - would "demand satisfaction" from another who they felt did not greet them with proper courtesy, and this did not mean common politeness, but an acknowledgement of rank and even superiority. The lines and shadings are not clear, but it reaches its worst in the street culture of gunplay over someone who was dissing me. 

Still, despite its potential for abuse it is regarded as a general good thing. It is usually applied by good people not so much to hold others to our standards, but to hold ourselves to our own standards, as a Matter of Honor. It can become expensive, even unto death. A good man does not lightly toss aside what he has been taught since birth is worthy conduct.

The Gawaine poet intentionally sets up this contrast between honor and holiness as an impossible test for the hero. Sir Gawaine is repeatedly described as exceptional in courtesy, even best in Courtesy, which was the chivalric code and more. The good knight relies on his code in all his actions, up unto the full temptation scenes, and they serve him well. Religion, faith, holiness, these are present only by implication in the background. Play by the good rules and all will be well. Yet the Green Man (in disguise) and his Lady have engineered problem with no solution. Gawaine must either commit sin or offend against courtesy by breaking the rules of hospitality by a guest.  

This was the poet's point, yet it is not set up as a flannelgraph tale. He could have made a simple didactic point that all human codes are inadequate and only righteousness can win in the end, yet chooses this story instead.  Not only can you not do it, even Gawaine cannot accomplish it, and who are you compared to Gawaine? The conflict tears him in half, which itself echoes the imminent situation he faces, of having his head severed from his body.  When the moment comes that he will receive the return stroke of the Green Man, he is already torn in half, and the lesson he learns by receiving mercy only partly restores him.

The Half-Hearted and Corrupt

 Well, that would be us, then, wouldn't it? We might nerve ourselves up to die for a glorious cause, but...

How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt. (Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory, 1940.)

Other quotes from that book of Greene's. He has been compared to another Catholic writer, Flannery O'Connor, for his unflinching look at the evil of  humankind while seeing the operation of grace underneath. And just plain writing compellingly and artfully while doing it.

Operator

It belongs to a forgotten era.  How long since anyone called the operator?  The reference is no longer poignant, as it was for those of us with little money and less access to a telephone who nonetheless needed to make a call, sometimes in the dark or in the rain. "My best old ex-friend Ray" is a great line. I should mention that the matchbook is also a dated reference.  Those are collectibles now, if you can find one.

This one isn't much better, still locked in an era long gone. I still live there though.

The Fourth Person of the Trinity

A lot of groups have one, though they usually deny it mostly because it isn't a formal belief.  That matters, but the folk-belief of what the people in the pews matters also. It is a legitimate discussion what the various weights of such things are.  It is easy enough to argue against the extremes. "Sure some of the Jews here essentially worship Bar Kochba, but they are still good Jews, really. When you look at it kindly.  And squint.  Squint hard." Without necessarily having a person or an object to focus on, we can still see lots of Catholics who believe non-Catholic stuff, sometimes taught to them by nuns when they were young, or Baptists that believe in divining rods, or Pentecostals whose core believes accord more with New Thought than Christianity, or Unitarians/Episcopalians/UCC/Lutherans these days who think that Jesus was a 60s liberal, really. You just have to look. It does not always coalesce into a single focus, but it does.  And when it does, it seems to last forever.

Educated Catholics express such frustration that Protestants accuse them of worshiping the Holy Mother. We don't. Let me explain this to you one more time, in very precise language. In terms of official position, they are absolutely right. People who know ethnic Catholics from the last few generations will say in response, "Sure, but this is not theoretical. I've seen it."  And if you grew up in a town with lots of Catholics, you have. So which is the "real" Catholic belief? That really depends on what rules you are setting up for asking that question.

Most of my sons went to technically independent Christian schools that had strong Baptist foundations for some or all of their education. I still recall visiting the sanctuary of one of them early in my older sons' first year there, after hours in the autumn, when it was darkening outside and I was killing time waiting for one of them to finish with soccer or something. There was an open Bible on a stand in the front of the church, illuminated by an overhead spotlight.  All else was in shadow - the altar, the stained glass, the side decorations.  I thought "It would be hard to convince a visitor from Mars that these people don't worship this book, whatever else they say."  And if you have been in such schools and such churches, it would be hard to even make a decent defense to the Martian. With both the Catholics and the Baptists, I think the lack of robust expression of the Holy Spirit is part of it, however careful and accurate their official theology is.  Not all of us are capable of such abstraction, and all of us are limited. While Pentecostals elevate the Holy Spirit more than others, it is mostly just feelings and effervescence.  Which are very good things, pointing to the reality.  Yet those are often (usually?) taken for destinations rather than way-stations.  Humans is humans.  Sumus quod sumus.

Even Catholics used to tell jokes about their grandmothers from the old country praying to Mary, telling the voice of Jesus in the sanctuary "Shut up, I'm talking to your mother." I don't think that happens much anymore, but as I am only in touch with mostly assimilated Catholics of later generations, I may be missing something.

By the way, do people level this accusation against the Orthodox?  In Europe the antagonism was between Rome and NW Europe.  No one cared what the Greeks or Russians thought, let alone Syrians or Copts, who were regarded as as legendary as gryphons. And would the accusation be fair?  they do venerate Mary.  Let me know what you know.

All this I knew decades ago, but I am now late in my seventh decade.  What are the new nominations for fourth Persons? I mentioned 60s liberalism as a vague new theology, but it doesn't have an embodiment that is still central. Gandhi and MLK are merely incantations at this point. No one worships them, merely disdains their critics. I have read many Jews who assert that the Buddha has much to teach that is consonant with Jewish thought, but I don't think he rises much above that.

Is there anyone out there I am missing? I am not so much looking for someone who is widely popular as some one or some thing that has lasted, even among a minority of Christian believers. I suppose there is always Braco.

Fans

A Celtics fan threw a Dasani bottle at Kyrie Irving the other night.  He was arrested. He should be arrested. First, he should be thrown out, and maybe lose his privileges to ever be back. Arenas, teams, and leagues have the right to enforce decorum in that way. Their house, their rules. The article lists other bad behaviors by fans, some of which warrant arrest, but all of which is in the purview of the people throwing this party to exclude customers who aren't getting with the program.

But it is not automatically racism just because the target was black.  Irving gets it partly right in terms of history and entertainment, yet I think he misses the part that tomato-throwing was largely white-on-white crime for hundreds of years, but still weaves it into the modern racism narrative.

It could be racist, of course.  If we let the accused talk long enough he might say enough to convince us that he would not have done this to Gordon Hayward, who also used to play for the Celtics. (I admit even that is not a perfect analogy.) However...the NBA is mostly black.  Guys who used to play for your team but are now coming back and might defeat you are going to be disproportionately black. It's one of the things that African-Americans aren't used to, being so dominant in an area that they are the default, the generic NBA player. I will note in passing that there is considerable resistance to the idea that they are in one of those areas where whatever societal prejudices might be in play, they ain't in their neighborhood.

This is part of the slow build of resentment that is not based on evidence. Because of confirmation bias, people who already convinced this is all racist will take this instance as evidence. But it isn't. Yet it will be added to the fuel.

Update:  The arrested fan was wearing a Garnett jersey.

Beowulf:The Monsters and the Critics

I think of myself as rereading this every five years or so, but have mentioned it only in passing here, so I may be thinking of an earlier version of myself. I am rereading now and keep thinking I will put up this excellent quote or that one, but there are simply too many.  I recommend reading it entirely. It is fifteen pages, long for an essay, plus an appendix half that length, because this is Tolkien. You may decide after seven or eight pages that you have gotten the idea and are not fascinated by the inside baseball of Anglo-Saxon. The central point is that the monsters are not an embarrassing mistake in dramatic art revealing how shallow its author and its culture must be, but are central to the story, and the critics have simply misunderstood what is up. 

Oh, all right.  Since you insist.

 I hope I shall show that that allegory is just—even when we consider the more recent and more perceptive critics (whose concern is in intention with literature). To reach these we must pass in rapid flight over the heads of many decades of critics. As we do so a conflicting babel mounts up to us, which I can report as something after this fashion.5 'Beowulf is a half-baked native epic the development of which was killed by Latin learning; it was inspired by emulation of Virgil, and is a product of the education that came in with Christianity; it is feeble and incompetent as a narrative; the rules of narrative are cleverly observed in the manner of the learned epic; it is the confused product of a committee of muddle-headed and probably beer-bemused Anglo-Saxons (this is a Gallic voice); it is a string of pagan lays edited by monks; it is the work of a learned but inaccurate Christian antiquarian; it is a work of genius, rare and surprising in the period, though the genius seems to have been shown principally in doing something much better left undone (this is a very recent voice); it is a wild folk-tale (general chorus); it is a poem of an aristocratic and courtly tradition (same voices); it is a hotchpotch; it is a sociological, anthropological, archaeological document; it is a mythical allegory (very old voices these and generally shouted down, but not so far out as some of the newer cries); it is rude and rough; it is a masterpiece of metrical art; it has no shape at all; it is singularly weak in construction; it is a clever allegory of contemporary politics (old John Earle with some slight support from Mr. Girvan, only they look to different periods); its architecture is solid; it is thin and cheap (a solemn voice); it is undeniably weighty (the same voice); it is a national epic; it is a translation from the Danish; it was imported by Frisian traders; it is a burden to English syllabuses; and (final universal chorus of all voices) it is worth studying.'

Nationalism Revisited

Reposted from August 2018.  I was going to write something new, but liked this well enough.  It seems valuable for Memorial Day.

I have previously expressed the opinion that it was not nationalism that created WWII, but it was nationalism that won it.  The German attitude was more properly described as a tribalism or racialism, though they called it nationalism.  Jews, Slavs, or Roma who lived within the German nation were not considered part of Das Volk, but ethnic Germans who lived over the borders were considered part of the larger family.  Some nations, of Scandinavian, Frankish, or Anglo-Saxon descent were considered people to be ruled if they would not cooperate, but not exterminated. Hungarian and Romanian "nationalist" figures such as Antonescu were likewise protectors only of ethnic Romanians, not all within the borders. (This is unsurprising in Europe up until that time, because borders moved frequently, but language and ethnic heritage remained primary. It's just wrong to call it nationalism.)

In contrast, while the Allies had a lot of international cooperation, they ran largely on nationalist sentiment. Not only the Americans, who, as a mixed people had no choice except nationalism, but as the war progressed, the Soviet Union hunkered down into its constituent parts and Stalin made his appeals on behalf of Mother Russia, not the New Soviet Man. My thought has been that while nationalism has dangers and can be a false god, internationalism is a worse one. It might in theory be a better thing, and if we ever do become better humans I will change my vote. At the moment, however, I consider it an overreach. When we pretend to be better than we are we are in enormous danger, and those who are loyal to international enterprises smuggle in some much more primitive prejudices. They do not transcend nationalism, as they imagine, but replace it with something that aims higher but strikes lower.

That is an observation of the group mentality, not the individual.  I am fully prepared to accept that there are many people who do transcend nationalism on an individual basis. As Steve Sailer has pointed out, however, in the traditional concentric circles of loyalty humankind tends to use, they more often skip over ring rather than include.  There is more virtue to be signaled in loving those far away rather than neighbors. How much more noble to love illegal aliens at the expense of poor citizens!

I will have to revise my WWII picture however.  It still applies to Germans.  Yet my reading of Japanese history recently convinces me that nationalism was indeed their motive.  They did not find Koreans, Taiwanese, or Chinese racially inferior, but culturally so. Their attitude toward those in Vietnam, the Philippines, and the Pacific Islands was more tinged with a racialism.

I'm not sure how I incorporate this into the overall picture, but I have to start by wounding my old model. Any of you who have knowledge about Japanese and other Asian cultural and racial attitudes, please weigh in.

Cross-posted at Chicago Boyz

Simplified Narrative

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff published The Coddling of the American Mind in 2018 and I greatly approved. They examined the deterioration of discourse among schoolchildren, the HS graduating classes of 2014 and beyond in particular and tried to dig into the data before drawing conclusions.  Unlike me, who grabs two facts and runs with it for a year.  At least it's not a decade.  I back off after a while, unlike some here, who are stuck in 1970, or 1990, or 2010. I would say "You know who you are," but unfortunately you don't and for old guys like me, this site is largely a debating society among people who are stuck in 1970 versus those who are stuck in 1990 versus those who are stuck in 2010.

That's actually not a terrible thing.  If we could time-travel and impose that debate on the people of the turn of the 13th-19thC's, even among the few, I think it would do some good. We all have a touch of Ignatius J Reilly here, and that's fine.

That graduating class of 2014 is significant, as it is an inflection point. It is the first class that had spent all its post-latency years online, acquiring devices in middle-school and having a hybrid experience between online and meatspace socialisation.  I witnessed it firsthand, chaperoning one of Kyle's field trips, where the girls (the boys were 1-2 years behind in devices) were taking selfies of themselves in the front of the bus, sending them to friends, and then running back six seats laughing to look at those photos with those same friends. I laughed at the ridiculousness of it at the time. Conservatives are ever thus: we deplore changes in the culture of youth that turn out to be unimportant, but chuckle at changes that turn out to be frighteningly crucial. We always accurately sense that something is terribly wrong, but then attack the wrong development.

The suicide, anxiety, and depression rates increased from 2011-2014 to heartbreaking levels. Haidt and Lukianoff declared that the online life was the reason. We who grew up in other eras do not understand this.  We are dismissive of these snowflakes. Yet they developed in this world. Sam L, and Korora, and Unknown, and Granite Dad can shrug and say "C'mon, if they don't like you, screw 'em." But we had a life outside of the internet.  We do not remotely appreciate what life is like for them.  Online death is complete social death. It is easy for us to say it doesn't need to be that way, but for them, it might be.  We can only rescue the few from the online world to breathe free.

Talk to people involved with basic training over the last ten years. One of the great services we provide to those recruits is that they learn they will not die if they can't check their accounts.  Yet it fades within a year after.

All that as background.  The HS 2014 class went on to do what? They became the college 2018 class - or 2019 class, the way things are now - and that is the group we have been reading about as such crazies, attacking very liberal but mostly reasonable professors. While a few have been joining Antifa and looking for fainting couches, most have just been keeping their heads down and trying to pick up credits without anyone cancelling them.  We might deplore their courage, but remember they live and die on social media in a way we cannot understand. We could easily stand up to most of those knuckleheads, most of us (not all). They can't. If you are disdainful, consider that you may not feel the same pressure.  I have said jokingly that peer pressure is more intense as an adult because you have chosen those peers, but I meant it. In high school there are groups, and you can pick one and get a bit insulated from the others.  It is much harder for adults to grab isolation from all coworkers, or neighbors, or coreligionists, or other parents in our PTA.

We always said that as they moved into the workplace they would learn better manners, as 90% of every other graduating year since 1965 did. I don't think it has been working quite as well this time. They moved into the workplace and started enforcing the same crazy wokeness. Not all.  90% are sane children we would be glad to take a road trip with, even though they are infected with an initial and reflexive insistence that it's impossible to be in favor of both Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter. They can learn, after a few stops at Waffle House on your way out to Pasco, Washington. But because of the internet, the remaining 10% have much greater power now, and that 10% necessarily includes the most pathological, the personality disordered, the socially aspiring, most of whom assume they are the brightest or most moral or both.

That 10% can destroy your 90%, and the 90% know it, though they haven't quite figured it out yet.  They still have only nervousness about them and hatred for you, you bigoted retrograde eugenicist, but they aren't any stupider than we were, and most of us were pretty stupid. But most of those kids will be fine. I do worry about the damage the 10% can do, because I think the internet puts us in a horribly different place now.  The power to destroy is absolute power, as Paul Muad-Dib said. 

The class of 2018 went where? And what will happen now? 

I know the answer to that, and will make the prediction, though at 68 y/o I will not live to see its fulfillment. Who? Whom? 

2014, 2018, 2020, 2022. The online socialisation, in and of itself, may explain more than all our grand historical theories extending into discussion of the French Revolution, or Enlightenment, or Stonewall Rebellion.  The poor kids lived online and their deaths there were real, however much we scoffed.  A few of our generation (at the NYTimes or at Union Theological) tried to survive and a few outran them, but the kids we know went underground with polite woke statement over their shoulders. Have pity and do not criticise behaviors whose pressures we do not know.  I suppose we should at base also pity the perpetrators, responding to demons we have not met ourselves, but start with the innocents first.

Debt of Honor

I gave an ambiguous review of a Bob Dylan song over at my friend Charles Gardner's site (Maggie's Farm), and promised to do something nice for Bob in return.  Like Zimmerman needs it and I don't. 

There is a lot to see here if you want to dig deeper. "Remember me to one who lives there. She once was a true love of mine," is recognisable to people of my generation and is an echo of several songs from the Child Ballads, and Dylan claims to have been inspired by Martin Carthy on his trip to England in 1963 1962 for this song in particular. Carthy was a central, though intermittent member of Steeleye Span.

Critical remarks of the early Dylan, prior to Dylan Goes Electric! the Night That Split the 60s  might be in order, but... honor...promises. He was overrated from 1960-1970, underrated from 1970-1995, overrated from 1995-2010, and underrated from 2010-2020. He is 80 and overrated again as everyone worries he might die one of these days. I think he will in the end be regarded as anticipating his times, then simply reflecting his times, then transcending his times. I would consider it amazing if people thought the same of me, so I won't kick too hard.

Scottish Independence

There is an article over at Quillette that won't stay on the sidebar forever about the SNP and independence. I defer to him on many things because my Scots-Irish heritage is 200 years old and his information is considerably more important, however much I like the Wallace Tartan. Nostalgia is not reality, and the current Scots seem much farther left than I am comfortable with.

There is a long comment by someone named Geary Johansen that I found quite informative, though you should apply the usual discounts that 1) he has a site he is trying to get you to visit, and 2) seems to want to revert to discussing Scandinavia a bit quickly. Still, I liked it. As a person who follows the yearly PISA scores, I was particularly interested in the info about Finnish education.

I am interested here in the phenomenon of the SNP appealing to very old sentiments in order to sell a new idea. I learned from CS Lewis many years ago*, though I did not believe it at first, that this is usual.  The CPUSA had a specific training of using the tunes from old Christian hymns and modifying the words just a bit to get folks singing along to socialist ideas. Think Pete Seeger, with at least two dozen examples, beginning with "Down By the Riverside" and continuing to "We Shall Overcome." But to get back to the Scots, I think we in America can guess at it immediately.  The SNP is saying "Bagpipes playing 'Scotland the Brave!' Kilts! The cursed English, and remember Robbie Burns!" We see it easily in others, not so well in ourselves. I have suspected all along that independence was a bad idea for the Scots, but he makes the case most strongly.  Of course, I also believe that groups have the right to make rules about their governance even if they are wrong.

*Our business is to present that which is timeless (the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow) in the particular language of our own age. The bad preacher does exactly the opposite: he may think about the Beveridge Report and talk about the coming of the kingdom. The core of his thought is merely contemporary; only the superficies is traditional. But your teaching must be timeless at its heart and wear a modern dress. ("Christian Apologetics" 1945) You should write this on your wrist and on your brow and place it like a mezuzah on your doorposts, for it is the great danger of the 20th and 21st C of the church.  Racism? Pah. Consider who is putting our focus on that third-level problem of the Church. Come back to Lewis and this thought in one month and one year and every year thereafter. This is where we are usually fooled.  Mostly liberals, but conservatives also in a different way, and if you do not apprehend that, take a long walk to figure out where that might be.  Or read more CS Lewis, which is the answer to all modern problems.

Southern Dinner

Grim was inspired by Frost's accent in the last post and put up Lewis Grizzard about the older southern accents, not quite gone.  That reminded me of a piece by Roy Blount Jr from his book Save Room For Pie which I heard him recite on an NPR game show, likely "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" perhaps a decade ago. It took me a while to find it, but it starts at the 37-minute mark, which I hope I have successfully accomplished. All families talk about the food some at table on holidays, but I don't think either side of my family ever displayed this kind of single-mindedness. Farm families might do it more. Perhaps he exaggerates for effect.

Accents are fascinating things because they don't stay put. The boundaries slowly move, new people move into one side of it and different folks move into another, and pronunciations just seem to change on their own everywhere in the world, especially the vowels. I always thought that while my mother still had a slight coastal New England accent, saying idear, datter, and the like, that I had none.  A few years ago my cousin showed me a Thanksgiving video when I was 13 - his father was Rte 128 high-tech and had a house full of things like video cameras and his own weather station even in 1966 - and I showed out a clear NH accent on a few words.  I lost it somewhere, possibly by training in theater and/or going to school in Virginia.

Stopping By Woods

 

That accent is not yet gone up here, but it is much less common. He sounds about like my grandfather. Gramps had him for freshman English at Pinkerton Academy in 1910, and didn't think much of him. This is not surprising. Frost had moved back to take care of his mother's farm and wasn't happy about it. He took the teaching job for the cash money, but 9th-grade boys are no treat. He liked teaching college in Vermont better.

I read this to my granddaughters a few times a year.

Come O Thou Traveler Unknown

Maddy Prior (longtime centerpiece of Steeleye Span) has an unusual voice that fits joy, humor...and a haunting quality appropriate for an old hymn about Jacob wrestling with an angel of the Lord. Her version is the first I had heard.

Daum Quote

 Meghan Daum "You know how they always said the Trump was a poor person's idea of a rich person? It's more like a person who has never lived in an authoritarian society's idea of an authoritarian...of a dictator. (laughs) He's an American's idea of a fascist."

I don't know if she'll ever become a conservative or libertarian, but she is already an ex-liberal. She has good guests and is fun to listen to, even when she's wrong and still doesn't quite get it.

The Cold Equations

For those who grew up on science fiction The Cold Equations (full text here) was a jarring read. Although it was an artificially-created scenario, unlikely to bear analogy to any real events even out of spaceships, most readers recognised a core truth.  Sometimes reality does not do what we want it to, and it is we who have to adjust, because some realities are unbending. Wishing won't make it so, the grandmothers used to say. Social science, and because of that politics, is increasingly about people wishing to make it so.

Maybe we should blame Bobby Kennedy for that.

Canix

Cat: Am I even allowed to say this these days? I just don't like dogs that much.

Dog. Don't call me a dog. I identify as canix.

Perhaps the Opposite Is Also True

Steven Pinker jokes that the irony of progressives is that they deny progress.  It's a sharp observation, but I wouldn't call it an irony. It's the point. If there is progress, they are out of a job. While I think that many people go in for progressive ideas and advocacy because they believe in the cause and want to help, there is a secondary motive of being a progressive. Some of that is seeking the appearance, yet I think the desire for identity is stronger for most of them. This secondary motive grows over time. It has been true for decades that young people go into journalism because they "want to make a difference."  A difference about what? While many can give some answer if pressed, these are usually a bit vague and unsatisfactory.

The artist/photographer Angel Eduardo was uncomfortable and even a bit appalled to be at a gathering of young filmmakers, and every one of them wanted to "be woke as f***" making films to create political change.

The standard idea is that the election of Barack Obama activated all the white racists to come out and found things like the Tea Party to resist change. What if that's projection?  What if it is the various leftist radicals that got activated, increasingly working to prevent change and convince us that there has been no change?  Progress has to be denied or redefined or both - or they are gradually going to be out a job.  Worse, their status and importance will diminish consistently while this is happening. So many traditional things are being dismissed as merely socially constructed.  What if that is primarily true about new ideas being put forth to replace them instead? Every age has its biases and we need to account for that when studying history.  Yet how if it our own age that is the most biased, the most socially constructed?

College Diversion

The idea of college for all has been terrible for many whites, Asians, etc, but it has been disastrous for African-Americans.  Robert Cherry notices that there is only a 20-25% success rate, meaning that the rest have failure at some level, some painfully so. He asks why we would want to give kids one more failure in life, often with debt attached. He recommends jobs and job training first for most. His biggest opponents are educators, who accuse him of selling black kids short by not insisting that any one of them that can get into a college should give it a try.  But that is a self-serving value for the education tribe, not just because it means more teachers have jobs, but also because it reassures them that what they do is what's really important for young people. It's strokes for them. That doesn't make them any worse than a hundred other professions, but it's not any better, either.

An anecdote: a young friend who teaches at a wealthy suburban high school in Mass brought in people from differrent professions to speak to her classes.  This included a few tradesmen and women who jobs did not require or even much care about getting a college degree.  She was told by the principal to never do this again because - as you may have guessed - they didn't want to be selling their kids short. Not that they're snobs or anything.

In mental health the push toward jobs in and of themselves being good for people increased throughout my career.  I wasn't much involved myself, dealing mostly with acute situations, but we learned to be highly protective of a patient's ability to hold onto their job and get back to work. We made more effort to get them the phone numbers they needed, the filled out forms for insurance or HR, and increasingly took the risk of releasing people more quickly, even when they looked shaky, in order to hold on.  It could sometimes go bad, as a person not ready went back into work and screwed up or offended others and lost the job, so we did not just take any patient's word for it that they had to, had to, had to get out now to keep their employment. But we loosened up considerably over the years, and the numbers from many studies kept reassuring us that the risk were paying off.  Once you have a job, much of it becomes automatic even when you are compromised. Maybe you can't skate forever, but you can do a lot until you get better.

It's good to be needed somewhere, a hard-to-measure benefit that is likely even more important than the oft-praised "structure," or "acquiring work skills."  Those are good things, but the sense of accomplishment and value is better. 

You may remember the story of Jon Ponder from last summer, the ex-con who has a jobs program for offenders that has a remarkable success rate: 64% found stable employment, only 6% reoffended, and that is with one of the groups it is hardest to find jobs for.

Animal DNA

We have a new tool for studying human prehistory, studying the DNA of the animals we were in close contact with. We can infer much about migrations from looking at where the dogs came from.  Because the Przewalski Horse is only 3% of the other modern horses, we know that it's ancestor the Botai horse was separate from the one the Yamnaya herded and rode, even though those tribes were close by.  From that we know that they domesticated the horse independently.  They may have gotten the idea from elsewhere, but they didn't pick up domesticated horse from the Botai.

The lineages of cattle and sheep tell us what peoples were in contact with each other.