Sunday, March 17, 2024

Classical Education, or, the Fearless Pursuit of Which Truths?

The New Yorker has a story this week about "classical education", focusing on middle and high schools, which reminded me that I had something to say about the "classical" curriculum being offered at the new University of Austin. 

In middle and high schools, "classical" education doesn't have much to do with the Greek and Roman classics. Instead it is about a vision of order: uniforms, quiet hallways, classrooms where respectful students memorize poems, diagram sentences, and learn facts about history rather than, I don't know, composing raps about slave revolts. On the one hand this is almost the perfect expression of one of contemporary conservatism's main themes, the fear of disorder; nothing speeds around conservative Twitter/X faster than a story about students assaulting their teacher. But on the other, some schools of this type do very well in poor neighborhoods, because it turns out that what many kids raised in very disorderly environments need is more order.

Besides, I loved memorizing poems, diagramming sentences, and participating in spelling bees.

Of course some of the current interest in education based on old books and old methods is just a reaction to various progressive foibles, and what some parents who send their children to such schools want is for them not to read stories about gay and trans people. But I have been doing my best to ignore that kind of trivia for fifty years now and propose to keep ignoring it, because I find it so peripheral to what education should be about. Education is too important to be left to people who want to fight about Heather's Two Mommies.

When we move to a higher level, whether that is college or the sort of elite prep school where kids really do read the Iliad, there is much more going on. At this level, one goal of a "classical" education is to get students away from their own lives and worlds and induce them to think in a more abstract, generalized way. Once they learn to do that, the theory goes, they can then apply their generalized reasoning skills and broad understanding of themes like justice and liberty to their own situations. There is a great deal of evidence from both the European and Chinese traditions that this can work. We have seen many, many people who were educated by reading 2,000-year-old books and went on to careers as political reformers and even revolutionaries (Jefferson, Robespierre, Talleyrand, Disraeli, Lenin, Yau Lit).

The classical model of education was always opposed, at least in the west (and after 1840 in China) by people who thought it was a gigantic waste of time. Better, the competing theory went, to immerse yourself in actual contemporary problems. This was related to the growing importance of science and engineering, which to many people seemed more useful subjects of study than Plato's ethics.

Which brings me to the University of Austin, a new university that is being opened with the expressed goal of fighting the takeover of American higher education by woke leftists. Their vision of education is "classical" in the sense of trying to get students away from contemporary concerns and toward a higher, more theoretical plane. From their description of the freshman curriculum:

Seminars will examine (among other subjects) the foundations of civilization and political life; the importance of law, virtue, order, beauty, meaningful work and leisure, and the sacred; the unique vibrancy of the American form of government and way of life; and the character and consequences of ideological tyranny. What is knowledge, and how does it differ from wisdom? What does it mean to say that we are modern? What is technology, and what are its intellectual presuppositions, social conditions, benefits, and dangers? Why do we suffer? Does death negate the meaning of life? Works studied will range from Homer, Euclid, Genesis, the Gospel of John, Ibn Tufayl, and Confucius to Descartes, Tocqueville, Orwell, Douglass, and O’Connor.

What I wanted to say when I first read this paragraph is that it is riven with contradictions at the deepest level. Other than being famous, what do these authors have in common? Consider the work from this list I happen to have looked into most recently, Ibn Tufayl's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, which translates as something like "Alive, Son of Awake." This medieval Arab work tells the story of a feral boy raised by a gazelle on a desert island, who teaches himself the language of birds and discovers the truths of philosophy by reasoning. In particular, he reasons his way to belief in one supreme god. He also becomes humankind's greatest astrologer, although I got lost in that part and skipped most of it. One might be tempted to call this mysticism, since it implies that an uneducated child, removed from the corruption of society, can work his way to divine understanding more readily than a scholar with a library full of old books. On the other hand, it is full of old philsophical ideas, especially Plato's.

Taken literally, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, is not an argument in favor of "classical" education. It is closer to the opposite, a sort of hippie faith in the innate creativity and goodness of children. It is also ridiculous. One assumes, then, that it is not being taught as a text the students are supposed to believe. 

So why is it being taught? Why are any of these books taught? Once upon a time people said that we assigned them because you needed some familiarity with them to be considered educated, but that is certainly not true now. Is it because they are good texts for introducing students to big ideas? Because the impressive names get students to pay attention in a way that books by Bill Smith and Ralph Jones would not? Because they make for good discussions? 

Do any of them contain some sort of truth that we want students to absorb?

Consider that the U. of Austin offers these two mottoes in parallel:

WE FEARLESSLY PURSUE THE TRUTH
At UATX, we recognize the existence of truth. We seek truth so that we may flourish.

WE CHAMPION ACADEMIC FREEDOM
At UATX, students, faculty and scholars have the right to pursue their academic interests and deliberate freely, without fear of censorship or 
retribution.

It seems to me that these two statements directly contradict one another. If you believe in the truth, and think that having it leads to flourishing, why do you tolerate falseness? And why do you assign classic works that nobody agrees with any more? Ibn Tufayl may be ridiculous (as I think), but he is far from the worst author in the "Great Books" curriculum. From Aristotle's defense of slavery to Lenin's preaching of violence as a sacred calling, the western tradition is really pretty awful. The Iliad is about how great it is to kill people. If the Gospel of John is true and promotes flourishing, what possible reason could there be to read the Iliad?

What if some student, professor or scholar thinks that the "American form of government and way of life" are not "uniquely vibrant," but monstrous and horrific? What if some student, professor, or scholar thinks contemporary America is a Satan-besotted doomscape due for righteous cleansing by God any day now? What if somebody is a woke Marxist?

Two contradictory visions of education are on offer here and, I think, two contradictory visions of America. In one there is the Truth, and we struggle to understand it and align our lives to it so that we may flourish. Everything else is, by definintion, false. This is the way Jesuit eduction used to work: yes, a fair amount of intellectual exploration, but always in the service of Catholicism. Some of the conservative intellectuals who have been in the news lately seem to share this perspective, like Sohrab Ahmari, who has argued that since freedom and democracy have made America a godless wasteland, we should discard them. 

You cannot, in a deep, philosophical sense, be for both unfettered debate and a nation that flourishes because it adheres to a certain truth. And you cannot, I submit, simultaneously value the western canon, believe fervently in free inquiry, and operate a university that has any real connection to modern conservatism.

To the extent that the UATX curriculum tries to straddle this divide, it is incoherent. Of course, it might still function ok; the whole program of American higher education is incoherent. But I wonder if UATX can maintain the enthusiasm of its supporters while pursuing both academic freedom and conservatism.

Which gets me back to the two visions of America I alluded to back in November. One kind of American patriotism maintains that there are good and bad Americans. The good ones stand for God, Country, Military Sacrifice, the Constitution, football, barbecue, driving big cars, and Standing On Your Own Feet. The bad ones, well, you know who they are.

I adhere to a different model of patriotism. I think America is great because it holds all kinds of people who agree about nothing. I like the country the way it is, and I would hate to see it evolve into anyone's idea of perfection. This extends to how I feel about education. I like assigning old books partly because they are full of ideas I find horrific. My own educational plan would include subjecting my students to Aquinas on why masturbation is worse than rape, Lenin on revolution, the Iliad or the Hagakure on war, and so on. I think education should shake people up.

But I would be the first to admit that I don't know the truth about the Big Questions, and that my way of teaching probably doesn't help anyone else work that out, either.

I have met various conservatives, going all the way back to Party of the Right guys at Yale, who told me that they celebrate unfettered debate because it inevitably leads to conservatism. I think that's nuts. So far as I can see, unfettered debate inevitably leads to disagreement. If UATX really pursues a policy of complete academic freedom, they are going to end up with Marxists, Maoists, Woke Liberals, Race theorists, Libertarians, and probably Holocaust deniers.

I submit that you cannot simultaneously value the western canon, believe fervently in free inquiry, and operate a university that has any real connection to modern conservatism. I mean, hardly any of the authors in either the UATX list or the similar list at St. Johns believed in democracy; most of them would have been frankly horrified by America. (On the other hand the curriculum for Directed Studies at Yale includes more democrats.)

I suspect that what the rich people backing UATX want is the middle school model, education that is orderly, patriotic, anti-hippie, anti-woke. Some of the professors involved probably do want genuine free inquiry, including taking Marxism or polyamory seriously as ideas. As I said, it is certainly possible that UATX can come into being and thrive despite this contradiction.

But to the extent that UATX really promotes the Fearless Pursuit of the Truth, it will promte, not order or conservatism, but violent disagreement.

False Spring in Catonsville




We're still four weeks away from our expected last frost, and we have freezing temperatures in the forecast for this week, so it looks like a lot of stuff has bloomed too soon. But it has been a glorious week.



Friday, March 15, 2024

Links 15 March 2024

Marc Chagall, The Sun of Paris

World's oldest loaf of bread found at Çatalhöyük. It's roll-sized, made of barley, wheat and peas, and had been left out to absorb wild yeast and ferment for some time before a house fire aborted its trip to the oven.

Amusing street art by Frankey

Spectacular gold-filled tomb excavated in Panama.

The phrase "late capitalism" was coined in 1902 and has meant several different things since then.

Fascinating review of a new book on text-based amulets in medieval England.

Armies worldwide are equipping their elite infantry with special computerized gun sights that are supposed to let them shoot down small drones with rifle fire.

Remarkable Neolithic village site found in France with a large cemetery, wonderful. English at The History Blog, French original at INRAP.

Today's headline: Georgia Men Plotted to Have ‘Large Python’ Eat Woman’s Daughter, Feds Say.

NY Times headline about the upcoming election: A Nation Craving Change Gets More of the Same. As I have noted here before, the endless desire of Americans for some nebulous "change" never ceases to amaze me. I cannot recall any candidate ever saying, "Things are pretty good and I want to keep them that way."

Kevin Drum: We Are Living in a Golden Age of Light Bulbs

The brightest object yet observed in the universe is a quasar that shines 500 trillion times more brightly than our sun. 

Sabine Hossenfelder on one of the most exciting ideas in recent physics, Postquantum Gravity, 7-minute video. And Hossenfelder tries to bury String Theory, 25-minute video. Trenchant and amusing.

In 1940 Walter Benjamin committed suicide while fleeing from the Nazis. But he put off his flight from Paris until he had finished this 8-page manuscript, On the Concept of History. Benjamin was a key progenitor of the "woke" view that history is nothing but oppression, progress is a lie, and this should make us sad. Incidentally Marxist thinkers do not agree on what attitude Benjamin took here to "historical materialism," but it is certainly complex and not a clear endorsement.

Quick summary on Twitter/X of what is in the new AI Act just passed by the European Parliament.

The Squamish Nation owns a lot of valuable land in Vancouver. After years of protecting it from development, they have decided to partner with a major real estate developer to build a bunch of tall apartment towers. Because it's their land, the local planning authority has no say, and neither do the citizens of Vancouver, some of whom are shocked by this departure from their notion of native values. Via Alex Tabarrok.

Emanuel Macron on French TV, Thursday: "If Ukraine falls, our security will be at risk. If Russia continues to escalate, if the situation worsens, we must be ready, and we will be ready. . . . we will make the necessary decisions to ensure that Russia never wins." Macron is one of several senior European officials to have said lately that Russia is preparing for war with NATO. That seems crazy to me but then so did invading Ukraine.

Ukraine's naval drones have basically closed the Black Sea to Russian military shipping.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Iranian Fire Festival as Protest

Farnaz Fassihi in the NY Times:

Iranians have looked for opportunities in recent months to display defiance against the rules of the clerical government. In Tuesday night’s annual fire festival, many found a chance. Across Iran, thousands of men and women packed the streets as they danced wildly to music and jumped joyfully over large bonfires. . . . The police said the crowds were so large in Tehran and other cities that traffic came to a standstill for many hours. . . .

This is the festival called Chaharshanbeh Suri, part of the lead-up to Nowruz, the traditional Persian New Year, which falls at the Spring Equinox.

In many places, the gatherings turned political, with crowds chanting, “Freedom, freedom, freedom,” “Death to the dictator” and “Get lost, clerics,” . . . The dancing crowds were another example of how far a large part of Iran’s society, particularly the youth, has moved away from the ruling clerics.

In some apartment complexes in Tehran and other cities, DJs played Persian pop songs as a packed crowd danced and sang along. . . People circled the bonfire and held hands while singing “For Women, for Life, for Freedom” from the lyrics of “Baraye,” an anthem of the female-led uprising in 2022.

It's deeply moving to see people defying their oppressors in this joyful way, but I still see little chance that the regime will fall.

Heinrich Lefler

Heinrich Lefler (1863 – 1919) was an Austrian artist who did a bit of everything: painting, drawing, graphic design, and staging. He is one of those artists for whom there will never be a complete catalog, because for years he paid the bills by doing whatever came through the door. 



I discovered Lefler through his calendars, which are all over the internet.



He also did well-known illustrations of fairy tales.




I like these, done for a chronicle of German history. I could look at pictures like these all day.

Steve Fraser, "The End of the Future"

In an interesting if ultimately irritating essay at Jacobin, Steve Fraser takes on one of my favorite questions: why are Americans so depressed about the future? Fraser is focused on politics, where no party holds out hope for anything both new and good. Conservatives, ok, one might expect them to decry change and try to reverse it. But liberals and even radicals, he argues, are the same, focused entirely on bringing back certain parts of the past. The Bernie Sanders campaign was all about brining back the New Deal. But this, says, Fraser, is not what radicalism used to be.

Historically, however, the Left was always about creating new worlds. Rather than restoring the past, it approached history as a platform for inspiring the future.

Yes, Sanders and his people realized that the New Deal had flaws, but: 

Criticizing the New Deal for its imperfections, even the most damning imperfections, is categorically different than reckoning with its vaunted achievements.

After all, what made the age a golden one — its unionized assembly line, its social security, its decent standard of living — came at a steep price: the soul-crushing monotony of that same unionized workplace; work surveilled, disciplined, and alien; political inhibition; pervasive social and sexual self-repression; bureaucracy’s iron cage (Weber’s “polar night of icy darkness”); the tutelary condescension of the social welfare apparatus; imperial domination masquerading as democracy; an insatiable appetite for consumer fantasies from which the heart grew ever more diseased; and an enervating decomposition of the social organism and its replacement by a narcissistic, anomic individualism. The New Deal was a peace treaty that, like many such settlements, left the underlying causes of war unresolved. 

If the New Deal was born, in part, out of revolutionary desires, resuscitating its corpse won’t rekindle those aspirations. Only a vibrant anticipation of a wholly new way of life, a renewal of the future, can do that. But the future is dead. How did that happen?

The answer, says Fraser, is that "capitalism" killed the future. This is an interesting point of view, but I'm not buying it. Fraser admits that capitalism had a big part in creating our longing for an ever brighter future. But capitalism has changed, he says, becoming that dreaded thing, "neoliberalism."

What is commonly referred to as neoliberalism might better be characterized from a materialist standpoint as the era of deindustrialization and disaccumulation, as an asset-bubble economy with little in the way of productive investment.

This kind of thing makes me crazy. Capitalism has many flaws, but a lack of "productive investment" is not one of them. Who created the personal computer? The internet? The cellular phone? Yes, all of these things relied on basic research funded by the government, but private firms have invested multiple trillions of dollars in these industries. Who is building solar and wind farms at such a staggering rate? Private companies; according to the White House, private investment in green energy and associated manufacturing has been half a trillion dollars since 2021. (They would be building even more if local governments were not fighting so hard to stop them.) Who is building electric cars? Efficient heat pumps? LED light bulbs? Who is experimenting with fusion reactors? And, sorry, if you don't think those things are "productive" in the same sense as steel mills, you're just a deranged tankie.

And then there is the question of "deindustrialization":

Deindustrialization was not only destructive but demoralizing. Whole ways of life went under. Industries, unions, towns, churches, fraternal societies, main-street businesses, local hospitals, schoolhouses, community centers, movie theaters, and dozens of social gathering places from restaurants to bowling alleys all died away or lingered on as ghostly remains. Beginning in the late 1990s, what one book has called “deaths of despair” became an epidemic. These fatalities from suicides, or suicides by drugs and alcohol-saturated livers, occurred disproportionately among middle-aged white people, those supposed beneficiaries of Progress: mainly working class, lacking higher education, often out of work, fearful of new information-age technologies, downwardly mobile, coming from failed marriages and broken families and shrinking social support networks.

Which, fine, it is true that many Americans are suffering, and that many communities are dying. But if you think struggling people and dying communities are new problems, you should learn more about the nineteenth century. And if you think the US is "de-industrializing," I invite you to glance at the graph of industrial production shown above. American manufacturing is booming. True, it is not the same as it was before; the labor intensive parts have mostly moved to Asia or Mexico, and what remains employs ever fewer workers. But manufacturing employs fewer workers everywhere in the world. And if you think we should be doing something to keep coal miners mining, like the Germans do, sorry, I disagree.

I simply don't buy simple economic explanations of our problems. The American economy is doing really well, better over the past 25 years than almost all other rich nations. Yes, a lot of our jobs suck, but as Fraser admits, lots of old industrial jobs sucked, too, and those jobs were a lot more dangerous than ours are. But in the US we have deaths of despair and Italy, where there has been no meaningful economic growth in a generation, does not.

I found this more interesting, about the failure of liberalism:

Liberalism, as it morphed into neoliberalism, had betrayed itself by abandoning the future. As Christopher Lasch pointed out decades ago, this entailed giving up on its own humanist tradition, its point d’honneur and the basis of its legitimacy in favor of an ill-kept promise to deliver the goods. It had become its own refutation; at once cheering on an extremist individualism, wreaking havoc here, there, and everywhere in the name of freedom, while simultaneously bemoaning the loss of community and the family that its own imperatives made inevitable.

I think there is something to this, and I would say that the sad demise of clubs and bowling leagues that Fraser blames on "deindustrialization" owes more to this than to economic changes. Not that I am blaming liberalism for this; MAGA might be the most hyper-individualist mass movement in history.

But if we are suffering from "extremist individualism," what are we supposed to do about that? Ban social media? Jail the Kardashians? 

And how would socialism help?

I still think all of this misses the basic point, which is the ocean of misery that seems to me woefully under-motivated. At Jacobin they devote a lot of energy to arguing that the problem of global warming doesn't change the basic economic issue they want to focus on, the need for socialism; besides "neoliberalism," the main idea they attack is "green capitalism." But it seems to me that saying we are doomed under capitalism is the same as saying we are doomed, period, because we are not going to have socialism. 

I think people like the writers at Jacobin are part of the reason we are so depressed about the future. Just like environmental doomsters and MAGA ranters, they fulminate nonstop about how bad things are, about how even things that actually look good on the surface are really disastrous underneath. THAT, to me, is precisely the problem, the unwillingness of any major group of contemporary intellectuals to see that the glass is half full. I don't think Fraser has an explanation for why that is so.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Daffodils and Orchids



Peak daffodils already, weeks early.



And a conjunction of reblooming orchids. Learning how to make this happen has been one of my greatest advances of the past few years.

Monday, March 11, 2024

A Day on the Potomac

I was "monitoring" today, which means watching other people work and hoping my learned presence deters them from damaging nearby archaeological sites. The work I was watching today went in fits and starts, so I had a fair amount of downtime. Which I used to explore.

In the morning I walked down a little stream to the Potomac River; after a very wet winter and heavy rains on Saturday, the stream was roaring along.

The Potomac was high

which blocked the trail loop I was hoping to walk.

But the river wasn't actually flooding, as you can see from the old flood gauge, still dry.

There were blubells down by the river.



Walking in the morning I saw no wildflowers in the woods, but as the afternoon warmed they opened up all around me.

When work died down again in the afternoon I walked off in a different direction, toward the ruins of the Leiter Estate. This was the country house of people whose Washington house has its own wikipedia page. Above is a plan of the estate in 1918.

One of the paths that cris-crossed their grounds happened to lead from where I was working up toward the house.

Garage.

House ruin, with the river in the background.

Some other ruin.

View up the old driveway.

Yes, I was really there.

Friday, March 8, 2024

Scott Siskind, Elizabeth Hoover, and What it Means to Belong

The New Yorker ran a weird story by Jay Caspian Kang a few weeks ago about Elizabeth Hoover, the latest "Native American" professor to be unmasked as entirely white. Scott Siskind was disturbed by it and wrote a long response. Siskind's essay is good in that he probes at important questions about identity in America; we put huge cultural and some legal emphasis on ethnic and other identies that mostly lack any clear definition, and that creates pain and suffering. But he misunderstands what it means to belong to a traditional community.

I'll let Siskind summarize the story:

A woman named Adeline Rivers drowned under mysterious circumstances in 1928. By the time her granddaughter Anita was growing up, family legend said that Adeline was a Mi'kmaq Indian who committed suicide to escape an abusive white husband. Anita leaned into the family legend and taught her own daughter Elizabeth to be proud of her Native American heritage.

As a kid, Anita would take Elizabeth to pow-wows (Native American ceremonial gatherings) where she would play with all the other young Native girls. As she grew up, many of her closest friends were Natives, and she practiced Native American dance. By the time she was a teenager, she had taken a Mi'kmaq name, wore Native clothing, and was involved in Native political causes. In college, she wrote a thesis on Native American issues in the US, then got a PhD in anthropology, where she studied Native American affairs, then got a professorship at Berkeley teaching about Native American culture. She married a Crow Indian and went on trips to various Indian reservations where she studied and wrote papers about the problems they faced, and she was informally adopted by one of the Native families she stayed with. . . .

At some point, maybe after going to the Mi'kmaq reservation during grad school to hunt down family members, Elizabeth must have noticed holes in her family legend; it seemed that her great-grandmother wasn’t really Native American, just some ordinary white woman who drowned for unclear reasons. Although nobody knows for sure, it seems like after realizing this, Elizabeth tried to hide it - maybe from herself, but at least to others. She kept claiming Native ancestry, and even writing about her (nonexistent) Native relatives.

After Elizabeth Warren and other high-profile cases brought the issue of fake Indians ("Pretendians") into the spotlight, some people from the Native community started going after Professor Hoover, challenging her to prove her Native descent. Over time the challenges got louder and louder, and eventually she had to admit she wasn’t Native after all. Some of her students wrote an open letter demanding that she resign, which said:

We find Hoover's repeated attempts to differentiate herself from settlers with similar stories and her claims of having lived experienced as an Indigenous person by dancing at powwows absolutely appalling. [She has] failed to acknowledge the harm she has caused and enabled.
At which point Hoover's life fell apart.

Siskind has a long history of siding with victims of the cancel mob, so he immediately identified with Hoover and felt that attacks on her were unfair. I had the same gut feeling; by the moral code of a gentle modern soul like Siskind or me, the attacks on Hoover are barbaric. But I know enough about traditional communities to understand what happened here.

First, after a short discourse on what race means in our world, Siskind notes that the key variable seems to be "lived experience":

Although race doesn't exist biologically, it exists as a series of formative experiences. Black children are raised by black mothers in black communities, think of themselves as black, identify with black role models, and face anti-black prejudice. By the time they're grown up, they've had different experiences which give them a different perspective from white people. Therefore, it’s reasonable to think of them as a specific group, “the black race”, and have institutions to accommodate them even if they’re biologically indistinguishable.

Siskind's main mistake is assuming that this post-modern sort of definition applies to a traditional community like an American Indian tribe. What defines membership in such a community is not "lived experience" in some generalized sense; it is personal, family ties to other members of the community.

This comes across very clearly in the New Yorker story. When Hoover tells Mi'kmaq Indians that she is Mi'kmaq, they don't ask how many pow-wows she has been to; anybody can to go a pow-wow. They ask, "Who are your kin? Where are they?" As Siskind suspects, this is where Hoover's story fell apart. Confronted with these questions, she looked, found that she had no such connections, and realized that by the Mi'kmaq definition she was not and could never be one of them. If Hoover's family legend had been true, she might have found some of her relatives, and if they had welcomed her (as they probably would have) she could have begun the process of becoming a member of the Mi'kmaq community.

There is a ton of anthropology about how this works, and I read a significant swath of it while writing my dissertation. Consider that in many languages, there is no common word for "friend." You call your best friends "brothers" or "sisters" and your secondary friends "cousins" and your more distant friends "kinsmen." That is the paradigm under which many Native American tribes have historically operated.

This does not necessarily have anything to do with blood; many Native tribes have strong traditions of adoption. But if you are adopted into a tribe, and really want to be thought of as a member, you have to work at it. First, you work on really joining the family that sponsored you, and then your work your way out into the broader community. If you don't build up those personal ties, your formal membership will not count for much. (Unless somebody in the tribe wants something from you.)

To most Indians, whether you wear Indian clothes and take an Indian name and dance at pow-wows is of no real importance; Indian wannabees have been doing that for a century. What counts is your personal, family ties to community members.

(For tribes with membership rolls, formal membership is also important, but in the first place those lists were really built up from family ties, and in the second your formal membership will not avail you much if you don't know anybody else in the tribe.)

The second point I would make concerns the viciousness of the attacks on Hoover:

Her graduate students stopped working with her and switched advisors. Her department tried to prevent her from attending meetings, and made her promise not to do work on any Indian reservations. The entire academic and Native American communities are giving her the cold shoulder. She wrote an apology letter saying that she had "put away my dance regalia, ribbons skirts, moccasins, and Native jewelery . . . I've begun to give away some of these things to people who will wear them better," but privately described her life as being in “ruins".

I could never participate in such a shunning. Which is another way of saying that I have no strong community allegiances at all.

Real world communities only endure if they viciously defend their boundaries. Think of the scorn that many groups have heaped on wannabees and poseurs, or, in reverse, they lengths to which people will go to fit in to their chosen group, changing their speech, clothing, etc. For our tribal species, community membership is of extreme importance.

One of the ugliest such fights going on in the world right now is between trans women and so called "TERFs", feminists who want to police the boundary of womanhood and keep out the poseurs and the wannabees. There is nothing mysterious about this; if you think membership in your group is important, you pretty much have to defend its boundaries, and TERFs are not at all unusual in their willingness to be cruel about it. 

Or consider how many Americans who think of "American" as an import category feel about people sneaking across the border.

Yes, race in America is really weird right now. I am dismayed by the whole apparatus of "Native" scholarship and the like, which I find bizarre. Universities are western institutions rooted entirely in western values, and their attempts to accommodate Native American or African "perspectives" are always going to be fraught. I find it offensive to say that no white person should teach Native culture or African history. I place much of the blame for stories like Elizabeth Hoover's on the academic valuation of ethnic belonging, which I don't think has any place in a university setting.

But as long as people value their ethnic groups, they are going to police the boundaries of those groups, and so far as I can tell Elizabeth Hoover really was on the other side of the line than she claimed to be.

Links 8 March 2024


Arch from a church in southern France, 12th century, now in the Met

Interview with Scott Siskind/Alexander; the most interesting part is at the end, his reponse to the question "Who are you?"

Despite the dangers, thousands of Russians showed up for the funeral of dissident Aleksei Navalny; many chanted "No to war." (NY Times, NPR)

Red-crowned and lilac-crowned parrots are threatened in their native Mexico, but feral populations established by escaped pets are thriving in Los Angeles.

Amazing collection of underwater photographs.

Why have two recent lunar spacecraft tipped over? Well, for one thing, the lower gravity makes tipping much easier. (X/Twittter, NY Times)

Review of a new biography of the painter Gaugin, oft-cancelled for his colonialism and fascination with Polynesian girls.

Philosophers are looking to expand their canon, to which Abigail Tulenko asks, why not considier folktales as philosophical texts?

Kevin Drum on Yondr, a system for keeping schools phone-free.

Winners of the 2023 Bulwer-Lytton contest.

Via Tyler Cowen, a Tweet wondering why Taylor Swift – a "good girl" who says she adores her parents and dates a football player – is perceived as leftist, while Lana del Rey, who sings about being a drug-abusing whore, is perceived as right-wing. These words have acquired strange meanings. 

One Ukrainian export that's popular in the rest of Eastern Europe is socks depicting the Kremlin on fire.

Study of ten skeletons from one Mesolithic community in coastal France finds little evidence of inbreeding, suggesting that they had cultural mechanisms to bring in outside spouses and avoid marrying relatives.

According to this article, antidepressant prescriptions for young Americas are way up, even though they are trending downward for young men, which means antidepressant use among young women is soaring.

Fabulous Tyler Cowen post on which Europeans say their culture is superior to others.

And Cowen on big firms in small countries, like Nokia in Finland or Novo Nordisk in Denmark. On the one hand, they are great for the economy, but on the other that's a lot of eggs in one basket and that may give those firms great political power.

While they were still part of the Warsaw Pact, Poland supplied weapons to the mujahedin who were fighting Russia.

According to this story, Albania is planning to use ChatGPT to rewrite its legal code to EU standards, to speed its EU entry.

Of the seven most valuable companies in the world, six are American tech firms. I just saw the list because Nvidia has passed the only non-American firm on the list, the Saudi oil company Aramco, for third place.

German archaeologists investigating a Roman fort from the first century AD found sharpened stakes still in place at the bottom of the surrounding ditch.

What was in a package seized by the Royal Navy form a Danish ship during the Napoleonic wars.

Videos showing another Russian ship sunk by Ukrainian naval drones, the small patrol ship Sergei Kotov. And a video shot from the landing ship Cesar Kunitov during its attack by drones on February 14; you can see that at least one drone was destroyed by fire from the ship, but several others got through.

Special issue of the British Army Review with a detailed looked at what they call the Battle of Irpin River, which kept Russia forces from reaching Kyiv in February-March 2022. Most detailed analysis I have seen. How did the first troops at the Irpin get ready to receive a Russian attack? "If a position had a Javelin, one soldier dug a hole while the other watched a YouTube video on how to fire it." The Russians' fundamental problem was that they expected to drive into a city already at least partially controlled by their airborne and special forces, so they were not, at first, prepared to assault strong Ukrainian positions; by the time they understood what they were up against the Ukrainians had broken dams, flooded the countryside, blown the bridges, and brought up reinforcements.

Thursday, March 7, 2024

What if one Twin is Abused and the Other is Not?

Ellen Barry in the NY Times:

Their study of 25,252 adult twins in Sweden, published in JAMA Psychiatry, found that those who reported one or more trauma in childhood — physical or emotional neglect or abuse, rape, sexual abuse, hate crimes or witnessing domestic violence — were 2.4 times as likely to be diagnosed with a psychiatric illness as those who did not.

If a person reported one or more of these experiences, the odds of being diagnosed with a mental illness climbed sharply, by 52 percent for each additional adverse experience.

One story:

Take Dennis and Douglas. In high school, they were so alike that friends told them apart by the cars they drove, they told researchers in a study of twins in Virginia. Most of their childhood experiences were shared — except that Dennis endured an attempted molestation when he was 13.

At 18, Douglas married his high school girlfriend. He raised three children and became deeply religious. Dennis cycled through short-term relationships and was twice divorced, plunging into bouts of despair after each split. By their 50s, Dennis had a history of major depression, and his brother did not.

Some years ago I read about a story, passed on as I recall by an Indian novelist, about a boy who was abused once, for less than 20 minutes. He never told anyone, sliding deeper and deeper into depression and shame, until the suicide note he left after killing himself on his wedding day.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Coca-Cola in Africa

There's a new book about Coke in Africa by Sara Byala, and I just read the review by Barnaby Phillips in the TLS. According to this book, Coca-Cola is the largest private employer in Africa; it and its bottlers, distributors, etc. provide 750,000 jobs. 

During the intense politicking that led up to the end of Apartheid, Coke played both sides, working with the existing white government but also reaching out to the ANC; the first time Nelson Mandela came to America he flew in a jet provided by the Coca-Cola Company. Mandela was among other things a gifted flatterer, and he thanked Coke by writing, "When the history of our struggle is reviewed, the world will fully understand your catalytic role." From the review:

South Africa is one of the most straightforward countries in which to do business, thanks to its (until recently) reliable infrastructure and relative wealth. But Coca-Cola has flourished just about everywhere on the continent. The Coca-Cola factory still operated in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, during the most lawless periods; likewise, in the ruined city of Huambo during the worst days Angola's civil war, the Coca-Cola factory was pretty much the only remaining building without a single bullet hole. So too is Asmara, at the end of Eritrea's war of independence. For Coca-Cola, "Political unrest does not preclude money-making."

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Excavating a French Abbey

French archaeologists have completed the excavation of Beaumont Abbey near Tours in the Loire Valley, which was a Benedictine nunnery for 788 years. Excavation leader Philippe Blanchard gave an interview about the project that is posted on the INRAP web site. (In French but Google Translate is good at French.)

What is extraordinary is that we excavated the entirety of a medieval and modern abbey. On other sites, we will excavate part of the refectory, the church, the cemetery or a kitchen, but here, we have the whole thing: the church, the cloister, the gardens, the cemeteries, the wall enclosure, and this, from the origins, from the foundation of the abbey in 1002, until 1790, when the Benedictines were expelled. We have even unearthed older remains of the village of Beaumont dating from the 9th -10th centuries , located under the abbey. This is the first time in Europe that the entire space of an abbey, including the gardens, has been excavated in one go.

Beaumont was an aristocratic place; one abbess was a granddaughter of Louis XIV. In the 1500s about 60 nuns lived there; at its closure in 1790 46 cloistered women still called it home.

Much of the archaeological effort focused on burials, of which 1040 were excavated. They span the whole history of the nunnery. In a favored spot like the Lady Chapel (above), the burials would be wealthy people interred in stone sarcophagi, but the site also included hundreds of humbler graves.

Carving on one sarcophagus.


Figurines found under the nave of the church.


Truly a remarkable project.