Triumphant, Broken America

Foreign Affairs is one of those publications for those who think that managing the world is their calling in life. They've published a piece by Michael Beckley, a Tufts University professor who is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute -- famously right-wing, AEI, but hardcore pro-immigration because robust immigration boosts American power (as well as suppressing American wages in ways that are helpful to their rich donors). There's a lot of talk about the virtues of immigration in this piece. That's not what I want to talk about. 

His basic thesis is that, in spite of all the problems facing America, the USA is still far and away the most powerful state and likely to remain so. There's a lot of pieces at work in that analysis, most of which I'm going to leave as exercises for the reader. What I want to discuss is his analysis of the rural/urban divide in America, which I think is the most important thing going in determining the future and character of the nation. He also sees it as a crucial problem.

I'm going to quote quite a bit of his analysis of this one problem and discuss it, leaving out the rest of his work, after the jump.

The Pleasure of Snow

Snowfall

 

It has begun. We're expecting, according to the weather service, somewhere between 2 inches and a foot of snow. Given how unpredictable the weather is in these mountains, I believe that delta is the best they can do. I spent the morning putting chains on trucks to get ready for possible emergency operations, but I hope to spend the weekend not going anywhere. Snow is a rare treat even in the mountains of the Southern Appalachians, so I hope that we will get to enjoy it. 

UPDATE: The snowfall accumulation wasn’t even two inches as it turned out. Quiet day though. People had the sense to take it seriously given how little infrastructure we have for dealing with snow and ice. 

Peaceful Coexistence

Just under sixteen minutes of myth-busting from a historian speaking against a fake claim by another historian (but a well-credentialed one).

Speaking of Horses

The little town where my mother, sister, and niece live has lost a locally famous one. Her name was Clementine. 

Magic and Chivalry

The real point of the article mentioned yesterday was to uphold the idea that some things are worth the time they take, most especially the development of persons and relationships. Shortcuts end up stealing the power and the value of these most valuable of things. Maybe they make them impossible to achieve at all.

What does it take to become a reasonably mature, reasonably wise, reasonably loving person? Inescapably, a great deal of time. Not just the years of cognitive and social development from infancy through adolescence into early adulthood—roughly 25 years from birth to the maturation of the prefrontal cortex. But also years of friendship, long hours of conversation, even the pause between hearing and speaking that marks the truly personal moment of really listening. In her 2011 book Alone Together, Sherry Turkle writes of the seven-minute mark at which conversations take a turn—the point when the usual opening gambits, pleasantries about weather or sports, have run out, there is a palpable pause, and someone has to take a risk. It takes seven minutes for a conversation, a real one, to even begin.

It is at the seven-minute pause, Turkle observed in her lab, that many people take out their phones, implicitly signaling to each other that the conversation need not go any further or deeper, an exit ramp before the unpredictable and vulnerable words beyond the silence. That, of course, was more than a decade ago. What are the chances that conversations last even that long these days?...

[W]e have let [technology] colonize places where not only is it of no use—there is no magical way to raise a child—but where it actively displaces and undermines the essential process of personal formation. We have let the magic of technology into the formative stages of life—infancy, childhood, adolescence—so that from very early on, many if not most children experience the seductive power of instant, effortless results delivered through screens and digital devices (and many battery-powered toys as well).

And while these stages of life are singular and essential, magic is equally disastrous at other formative moments. A friend of mine found himself seated on an airplane departing Los Angeles next to a couple en route to their honeymoon in Hawaii. He observed with growing horror as the newly-married young woman opened up TikTok on her phone, began scrolling and swiping through videos, and did not stop, even for a bathroom break let alone a word to her husband, until the plane landed five hours later. One can only wonder how the rest of the honeymoon unfolded. 

So we want to develop virtuous people -- the author says "reasonably mature, wise, loving." Development of any sort of virtue requires time spent doing the work. As Aristotle explains, virtue is a kind of habituation to doing the right thing that is achieved by doing it, over and over, until it is what you do because it is who you are. The reason that the US Army still trains its elite soldiers as airborne units is not because it plans to drop them out of airplanes into Europe or Asia. It is because Airborne school trains the virtue of courage. It takes courage to step out of an airplane into the wild air. Habituating soldiers to do that brings about courageous soldiers. 

Courage is the model virtue for Aristotle because it's one that is easy to get as an example. Habituating wisdom (or lovingness) is harder to visualize, but it works the same way. The author has a good point here: we have to do the work, because it is only by doing the work that you develop the habits. Even if a technology came into being that made it easier to connect with and understand another -- perhaps some sort of mind-meld technology that let you experience the world from their perspective, thus shortening the process to understanding -- you'd still have to spend time doing it, and then time understanding and integrating what you'd experienced. You'd have to do this because they were worth it to you, and because you decided it was worth doing.

What this reminds me of most strongly is the old writing I did back when I rode horses a lot on the virtue of chivalry. This virtue, like lovingness, is about building the kind of character in yourself that can sustain a respectful relationship. This one requires spending time with horses.

What does it take to tame a horse? It takes courage, not recklessness, but that kind of disciplined and developed courage that comes from learning to fear being thrown, and getting on horses again. It takes self-mastery, because the horse is a prey animal that will amplify your fear. You must learn to ride through it, until even you don't really feel the fear in the same way anymore.

It takes gentleness. A horse responds to the slightest touch. You must be sensitive to its movements, its breathing, the language of its body.

What does it take to ride a horse to war? It takes trustworthiness. The horse must believe in you to charge into the smell of blood.

It takes honor. You can't ride alone. You must build relationships with other men like you, who know they can count on you while there is blood in your body. There is your self-sacrifice, even to death.

What does it build in you to do these things? Some of the things have been said. You get the virtues you practice, as Aristotle teaches in the Nicomachean Ethics. You must have some courage to begin, but you will build courage as you do. You must have some self-mastery, but you will become the master of yourself. You must be gentle, and able to understand another very different kind of living being through touch alone. You will become moreso.

The habit of keeping your word is like any other habit. After a while, it becomes part of you. The habit of honor likewise.

Can you do without chivalry? I don't know. Can you do without men like this?

That post closes by pointing out that the real question is not whether you can do without it, but whether you can build it without the horse. The author here is pointing to a similar question about other virtues, humane virtues like maturity and wisdom and being a loving person. It may be that you can capture these qualities in other ways. It may also simply prove to be true that you need the horse or the other people to get the virtue. If so, making a society where we spend time with people at the right stages and moments of life may be a necessary condition to building a life worth living, or people worth living with -- worth living for.

Good Luck to the Firefighters

All our best to the brave men and women of the LAFD as they risk their lives today.

Honors in Absence of Virtue

There is a distinction between honor and honors, the latter being ways of showing appreciation and respect and the former being the quality that really deserves such demonstrations. As Aristotle holds, honor is the quality that allows the best kind of person -- the magnanimous -- to achieve the fullest expression of virtue by rational reflection on what most deserves honors, and then doing that thing to the degree that most fully deserves to be honored. In this way, virtue and honor are properly connected.

Yet it is quite possible for honors to be deployed separately from the things that properly merit them, or refused to those who indeed do merit them. A system can honor those without virtue, in other words; it can also refuse to honor those whose virtues deserve it. This is why Aristotle rejects honor as the end of ethics: the true end has to be something internal to the person, not something that other people (who may not themselves be virtuous) ultimately control.

This kind of counterfeit use of honors was on display last week with the ridiculous conveyance of the Presidential Medal of Freedom (even with Distinction) on some very unworthy persons (though not all of the awardees are absurdities). The award itself is a little absurd; the medal with Distinction in particular is meant to ape the heraldry of a Knight Grand Cross, and exists only so that certain American elites don't have to feel like poor relations when they are rubbing elbows with European royalty. Those orders too have drifted from their roots in knightly virtue, and are now granted for reasons of high birth or social cachet rather than from merited service. 

American culture generally rejects such things. Unlike the Congressional Medal of Honor, which most Americans would know from exposure to war movies that themselves are honors paid to martial distinction, almost no Americans have ever even seen the Presidential Medal with Distinction displayed by one of our alleged grandees. The military medal, like the ancient orders of knighthood, has its basis in real virtue. Americans deeply respect it. The counterfeit medal no one dares even to wear in American company, not though our own government issues it. 

Another attempt to use honors without virtue as if they were not thereby counterfeit occurred this week when Denmark attempted to reinforce its claim to Greenland. Responding to offers of money and protection should Greenland declare its independence and join the United States, Denmark's king altered his coat of arms to include a polar bear (and also a ram symbolizing the Faroe islands, lest they get any ideas). They are trying to do with honors alone what the Royal Danish Navy, three squadrons strong, could never do with courage and virtue.

Honor is thus one of the most important things in ethics, but only when it is the internal quality. Doing what is worthy of honor, even when it receives no honors, is the mark of the best sort of person. Accepting unmerited honors is a hallmark of the scoundrel; awarding such honors, a mark of corruption among the powerful.

Frosty Morning

Magic and Alchemy

James linked an interesting article on magic and the modern world, one that deserves some commentary. 

To be modern, almost by definition, is to live without putting much stock in a supernatural “beyond” to the world. And yet, nearly every time a new technology is introduced, its promoters reach back to the ancient idea of magic to capture its significance...  Even more surprising is how often we still talk about a specific magical tradition: the practice of alchemy. For centuries, alchemists sought to transmute all metals into gold, to escape the conditions of mortality, and perhaps even to create new forms of life that would answer to our command—all summed up in the quest for the substance known as “the Philosopher’s Stone.”

Now, if to be modern is to largely disbelieve in magic, surely to be modern is to know that the alchemists’ quest failed. If we think of alchemy at all, we think of it in contrast with a proper science like chemistry. The alchemists were wrong about the natural world—the chemists, after much trial and error, were right.*

* Significantly, though, the early “natural philosophers" spent at least as much of their time on what we would call alchemy as what we would now call chemistry. Indeed, many celebrated figures now remembered for their scientific contributions—like the physician Paracelsus and the mathematician Isaac Newton—spent far more of their time on alchemy (and in Newton’s case, astrology) than on anything resembling modern science, and made no clear distinctions between them. You might almost say that we now use alchemy for the approaches to the natural world that didn’t work out—while science is the name we give, in retrospect, to the approaches that did work out.

I think what a modern philosopher might know about alchemy is not that it failed, but that it proved to be a lot more involved than Newton could imagine without a knowledge of subatomic particles. Lead has three more protons than gold, and an electron shell that is substantially different in character. To transmute one into the other is a technical feat that is still beyond us, but we understand better why it is, and it isn't obvious that it can never be done. It might not ever be worth the substantial trouble involved; or possibly we will develop a technology that will make it trivial to dis- and reassemble subatomic particles however we want, something like a replicator in Star Trek. That would be alchemy in the literal sense, not now "magic" but "science fiction." It might someday become fact. It might even be effortless, at least from the perspective of the technology's end user, as it is when Picard orders a tea and finds that the glass as well as the tea simply appears.

Thus, the connection he is finding between ideas of magic and emerging technologies is not as strange as he suggests. It's a fairly sensible way to proceed.

Alchemy failed as science, but it succeeded as a dream. Magic doesn’t “work,” in the sense that science works, but it does work as a dream. And technology is, after all, applied science. Applied to what? To a dream that was there long before science, the dream of magic.

Think of magic, for the moment, as the quest for instant, effortless power—the ability to get things done without taking time and without requiring labor or toil. In the absence of magic (or technology), getting anything done requires some amount of time, sometimes a great deal of time. But what if you could get results without waiting?

So, again, it doesn't work yet: but this is a reasonable description of how it might work. If I want hot water, instead of having to build a fire and smelt iron to make a pot (or build one out of clay, then fired in a kiln), and then fetch water from the stream, and then.... no, I just turn on the hot water faucet. Or I put water in a microwave, where a magnetron generates an electromagnetic bombardment that gives me boiling water in a minute while I wait.  The reason to imagine it this way is because this is how it works. Parts of it don't work yet, but other parts work now that our ancestors would have regarded as plain magic (and that, to be sure, many moderns don't understand either -- a joke in Oceans 13 was that a security system could only be defeated with a magnetron, "And you know what a magnetron is, don't you?" The joke was that the filmmakers could be reasonably sure that few in the audience would know that one was heavily involved in their microwaved popcorn).

That isn't what the article is about, but it impacts the frame of what it is about. Talking about how we have entered a new era in the last hundred years is likewise simply wrong: a similar thing was happening in the long middle ages with the invention and refinement of water-based technologies like grain mills. The author makes a point about how until recently everything has proceeded at the speed of digestion, as we used organic labor to create effects; but water mills could run day and night. Wind power also: witness how it drove ships across the wide world while men slept below decks, save for the night watch. It's only the speed that has increased. 

What the article is actually about is how to make good people and good relationships, and why hardship and time are important for that. That deserves a separate post, but I think this helps reframe us for that discussion. 

The Breaking of a Mighty Oak

We got that big oak I mentioned a few posts below cut into sections and off my neighbor’s fence today. It needed a tractor and a square-body Chevrolet to roll it enough to finish the cuts, one chain, four men, and two Husqvarna chainsaws. But then it didn’t take very long. 

Finding Warmth in January

You wouldn’t think that you could have a winter storm and a raging fire at the same time, but a little after midnight we managed it. Kerosene heaters are pretty safe, but not perfectly so. No one was harmed in the ensuing blaze. 

You usually only get biker photos of me, but here’s one our acting public information officer snuck last night as we were winding up. 

We had mutual aid from a neighboring county, including one of the guys with whom I’d done the long Technical Rescue general and rope rescue courses. I brought a ladder over to their unit to get them up with a chainsaw to cut a ventilation/attack hold in the eaves on that side. 

One of the guys who didn’t know me remarked that I was carrying the double ladder by myself, and the officer who trained with me said, “Yeah, I know him. Strong as a bull, can’t tell him ****, can’t teach him anything.” Then we laughed and he went up the ladder while I stabilized it in the mud. 

I’m proud of my son, who was on the interior attack last night. I think I mentioned that he finished his live Fire training late last year, and last night he put it into action. 

A Funny Story

 Scottish musician KT Tunstall tells a funny story here.

She's not our usual fare here, so maybe a couple of introductory tunes are in order.

Bleak Midwinter

The Worst Month

We are currently experiencing the first of what are said to be three Arctic blasts, accompanied by a great deal of rain locally. Snow might at least be beautiful; cold rain and attending mud are not at all. It turns to ice in the freezing nights, but the days stay just a degree or two above freezing. The air at 34 degrees with high humidity and cold wind is far worse than the air at 28 with the water frozen out of the air. The skies are grey almost every day somehow. The few hours of sunlight is veiled, the lumens lowered by the lowering clouds.

Plus it's Dry January now, an event that I participate in every year because of the rational wisdom associated with it. It is an opportunity to prove my freedom to myself on Kant's terms, by which he meant doing what you least want to do because you ought to do it. Instead of just waiting out the month with a glass of ale, every year I add abstinence to the rest of the miseries of January. Thereby, perhaps, I improve my health; certainly I improve my discipline, and demonstrate my freedom from the control of base desires and appetites. All the same, it is entirely unpleasant.

There's a chance that I will get to ride sometime before February, but so far it's not looking good. I last rode on New Year's Eve, and it is starting to look like it may be St. Brigid's Day before there's another fit chance, if indeed one comes so soon as that. 

February isn't all that much better, but at least it brings back beer and daffodils. For now, all one can do is wait and endure, and try to fit in some maintenance projects. This month I'd like to go and repair my hand-built ford, which is still functional after Helene but worse for wear; other parts of the road to the old country cemetery that our governor decided to allow to rot, leaving it to the labor of individual citizen volunteers; and help a neighbor with a massive tree trunk that fell on his fence in the hurricane. We cleared the most of the tree the same day, as well as the road to his  home, but the bulk of the tree is thousands of pounds and will require a tractor and several of us with chainsaws. This neighborly effort has been being put off until after the holidays, which are now upon us. I went out and looked at it yesterday, shortly joined by one of those neighbors bundled up like a mummy, who averred that we might wait until the current cold snap passes... and the one after... and the one after that.

Sleep and Memory

The link between good sleep and a sound mind may have to do with the way that dreams deal with memories. One might think that the engagement of the imagination with memory that occurs in dreams is a better way of processing hard memories than the wakeful obsessing over them; but the scientists say maybe the real benefit is just that the parts of your brain that suppress memories are better-rested.

Eighty-five healthy adults attempted to suppress unwanted memories while images of their brain were taken using functional MRI. Half of the participants enjoyed a restful night of sleep in the sleep lab before the task, whereas the other half stayed awake all night.

During memory suppression, the well-rested participants showed more activation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex -- a brain region that controls thoughts, actions, and emotions -- compared to those who stayed awake all night. The rested participants also showed reduced activity in the hippocampus -- a brain region involved in memory retrieval -- during attempts to suppress unwanted memories.

Among the participants who slept in the lab, those who spent more time in REM sleep were better able to engage the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during memory suppression, pointing to a role for REM sleep in restoring prefrontal control mechanisms underpinning the ability to prevent unwanted memories from entering conscious thought.

It strikes me that REM sleep is supposed to be when dreams occur, so maybe the more natural hypothesis is (also?) correct. Dreaming may help process the memories so they aren't so upsetting; rest may help the brain deal with the need to wakefully suppress old thoughts.