Decline of Violence

The Decline of Violence:

I generally think there isn't enough of it; and perhaps I am right:

Steven Pinker is currently working on a book about the decline of violence through human history. We like to think that we are living in a very violent time, that the future looks dark. But the data says that violence has declined every millennium, every century, every decade. The reduction in cruelty is just astounding. So we should not focus too much on the violence that has marked the twentieth century. The interesting question is how we can continue that trend of decreasing violence into the future. What options are open to us to make the world more peaceful?

It's far too peaceful already, if you ask me; there are plenty of rude and miserable people running around abusing others, because of the lack of a good punch in the mouth as a counterweight.

However, I can't believe the statistics being forwarded are accurate. It seems more likely that we are living in a remarkable moment of peace than that violence is on some sort of permanent decline.

The major military powers continue the Great Nuclear Truce (GNT) that began in the 1950s, when Russia got nuclear weapons, and suddenly realized they could not afford to use them (without risking more destruction than past foes like the Nazis or Mongols inflicted). As more major powers got nukes, the "we can't afford to use them, but they're nice to have" attitude, and the unprecedented truce, persisted. There have been wars, but not between the big players, with the largest and most destructive conventional forces. A record was broken in 1986, as there had never before (since the modern state system developed in the 16th century) been so long a period without a war between a major powers (the kind that could afford, these days, to get nukes). Since the Cold War ended, there have been fewer wars (in the traditional sense) and more low level conflicts (rebellions, civil wars). Most people are unaware of this situation, because the mass media never made a lot of the GNT, it was something that was just there and not worth reporting. Besides, "nukes (bombs, power plants, medicine) are evil" sell, if you are in the news business. Calling any incident, with a lot of gunfire and a few dead bodies, a "war" has also been misleading. The fact is, worldwide violence has been declining since the end of the Cold War (1991) and the elimination of Russian subsidies and encouragement for pro-communist rebels and terrorists.

The end of the Pax Romana was the end of a similar period of peace; the end of the Pax Americana, if it comes, will bring more war and not less.

The Pax Americana is sustained by violence, but at the same time results in smaller violence than it puts out -- or, to paraphrase General McChrystal, we've killed an amazing number of people, but fewer than would have been killed otherwise. I think a similar importation of socializing violence into the system would be similarly healthy. We might have a more pleasant society if we were more empowered to deal with, say, Westboro Baptist Church in the gentle and honorable fashion that they merit.

Fun

Now This Sounds Like Fun:

When I was younger, I once ran down a deer until it turned to bay. It was only a baby. I let it go, of course -- I only ran it down to see if I could do it -- but the fact that I could do so in those days suggests to me that these guys are on to something.

The pronghorn is the second-fastest animal on earth, while the men are merely elite marathon runners who are trying to verify a theory about human evolution. Some scientists believe that our ancestors evolved into endurance athletes in order to hunt quad­rupeds by running them to exhaustion. If the theory holds up, the antelope I'm watching will eventually tire and the men will catch it. Then they'll have to decide whether to kill it for food or let it go.

Speaking of which, I hear from my sister the marathon runner -- who is staying at Grim's Hall while I am out on this little adventure -- that my dog ran down and killed a raccoon today, with the help of another dog. Well done, Buckaroo!

DEPT. OF "IF THIS HADN'T HAPPENED I WOULD HAVE BEEN FORCED TO MAKE IT UP"



Key graf:

The life size "Dungkey" introduces our custom made, one of a kind, large garden sculptures. There are three donkeys placed in gardens around Denver to welcome the DNC this August.

PLEASE KILL ME

...if I ever decide to do a DITY move again.

I'd Buy Tickets

I'd Buy Tickets

Westboro Baptist Church vs. the KKK.

H/t Daily Caller.

Unresistance

Unresistance

A book review of "Berlin 1961" (Frederick Kempe) in the Wall Street Journal describes the long-term damage that can result from callow young presidents who get in over their heads:

"Berlin 1961" revolves around the question of whether Kennedy's decision to countenance the erection of the Berlin Wall was, in Mr. Kempe's words, "a successful means of avoiding war, or . . . the unhappy result of his missing backbone." On those terms, the book is a scholarly history of the crisis that culminated on Aug. 13, 1961, when East Germany, convinced that its economic and political survival depended on stopping the hemorrhage of refugees to the West, cut the city in two with the Berlin Wall, thereby imprisoning its people for the next 26 years. Since 1945, 2.8 million, or one in every six East Germans, had fled their benighted country. . . . Mr. Kempe's point is that Kennedy's indecisiveness in the early stages of the crisis produced the wall itself, an exponential increase in East-West tension, and, in the half-century that followed, other fateful consequences that included the Cuban missile crisis — and, though Mr. Kempe doesn't say so, the Vietnam War, along with social and strategic spores that lodged in the American psyche and darkened world opinion with results yet to be revealed. It also provided, as Mr. Kempe puts it in the final sentence of this mind-shaking work of investigative history, an example "of what unfree systems can impose when free leaders fail to resist."

H/t Maggie's Farm

Scientific Tribalism

Scientific Tribalism

Assistant Village Idiot has linked to an article in The Week entitled "Made-Up Minds," about the distressing resistance of certain people to persuasion by facts of logic. What kind of people? Well, you know. The kind who can't be made to understand what's wrong with the free market, gun ownership, patriarchal families, restrictions on abortion, or global warming, all of whom are very similar to end-of-the-world fanatics who cling to their delusions even after the world doesn't end on the scheduled day. Although, in fairness, the problem is not 100% about them; there are also those prominent leftist believers in vaccines as the cause of autism. And now back to conservatives: aren't they funny?

Articles like this one, with its discouraging comment thread, tend to make me take stock of my own prejudices. Lord knows I'd never claim to be free of confirmation bias, but I've been known to change my mind even on firmly held beliefs, when mugged by reality. It does take more than someone screaming "Denialist!" or "Rethuglican!" at me. They have to be willing and able to answer questions to my satisfaction. Questions like: "Suppose you're right -- is your proposed solution likely to do more good than harm?"

A big problem with the idea of scientific proof, and the question whether liberals or conservatives are the worse offenders at ignoring it, is that most people have almost no contact with the proof in question. They're getting their facts from a cloud of popularizing sources, from which they derive the hazy notion that "all that stuff has been proved by someone somewhere." The recently popular phrase "peer-approved" is very useful shorthand for this approach. It's a naked appeal to authority, but it makes its users feel that they're members of the great priesthood of the rigorous, skeptical scientific method. You don't agree? Why, you're no better than the Church fathers who persecuted Galileo! In fact, you're a heretic, and should be burned.

Principles

Principles:

Dr. H. Mansfield speaks of Harvard's:

“Adjusting to change” is now the unofficial motto of Harvard, mutabilitas instead of veritas. To adjust, the new Harvard must avoid adherence to any principle that does not change, even liberal principle. Yet in fact it has three principles: diversity, choice, and equality. To respect change, diversity must serve to overcome stereotypes, though stereotypes are necessary to diversity. How else is a Midwesterner diverse if he is not a hayseed? And diversity of opinion cannot be tolerated when it might hinder change.

In the same way, choice in our curriculum is displayed in a dizzying array of courses that make it easy for students to indulge their whims and protect their leisure. Choice is best when it does not produce devotion and leaves one’s options open. A devoted student makes himself unready for change. Respect for merit remains, but it wavers and yields to the conventions of flattened self-esteem in which everyone is entitled to a point of view—and, need I add, a high grade. Thus equality is prized not because equality is good, but because nothing is good. Harvard is not so great either, though it’s not so bad. Perhaps our embarrassment at being there is sincere? No, that’s unlikely.

Things are getting better at Harvard, in spite of these remarks. It was only six years ago that they were mocking MIT for having a rifle team, having apparently disposed of their own; but these days, they have one again. The other thing they're welcoming back is ROTC.

The changing tide does not signal itself with a sudden surge.

Why should we care? For the same reason Roosevelt cared -- Teddy, I mean, the real Roosevelt. These universities have networks that ensure that a vastly disproportionate number of their graduates will occupy positions of power and authority. Their culture is therefore of great concern to us, even if we doubt their prestige is deserved. The return of ROTC -- worth noting, this Memorial Day -- will subtly but powerfully change that culture, and for the better.

Our Hearts Were Touched with Fire

Our Hearts Were Touched with Fire

From a speech by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., on Memorial Day, 1884, from which my pastor quoted this morning:

[T]he generation that carried on the [Civil War] has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us. But, above all, we have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart.

Such hearts -- ah me, how many! -- were stilled twenty years ago; and to us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year -- in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life -- there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day:

This weekend we remember warriors fallen, and honor warriors living. RangerUp is doing so by donating a fifth of their profits for the weekend to Soldier's Angels, a group that needs no introductions here. I bought their memorial day shirt, which contains the famous St. Crispin's Day speech.



I'm not very good at these posts, but these are serious and solemn matters. We shall remember friends this weekend, and wish well to friends still in danger.

Hope

A Woman's Voice:

T99 had a post about women who sing; I suppose I might post up a particular favorite of mine. Her name is Hope: Hope Sandoval.



If you know her music, it is probably from this song, which was once famous.



As far as I know, though, she never did anything bad.





A particular favorite for long summer days:



Later she moved into more experimental music, but without losing the essential beauty.

Philosophy is All

The Roots:

Today's xkcd:

The alt text says: Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".

I haven't tried that, but I suspect it's really true. Philosophy underlies all forms of human knowledge, as is demonstrated by the career of one philosopher I know. I think I recounted this once in the comments, but it deserves a post of its own.

He began as a student of chemistry, but in the first class he was told, "Really, chemistry is all about physics. So we'll start with physics... and not that boring old physics, but quantum physics."

Well, he thought, if chemistry is all physics, I should just be studying physics! So he changed majors, and went into physics.

First class in physics, he came into class and the professor said, "Really, physics is all math. So we'll start with math...." My friend walked out, and changed majors that very day to mathematics.

The math department didn't tell him that math was 'really' anything else, as mathematicians are pretty self-satisfied. So, for a long time he studied math.

After a while, though, he began to notice that some of the bedrock principles of math weren't accounted for by the math itself. He asked his advisor why we were assuming these bedrock principles.

"Well," his advisor said, "our bedrock principles really come from philosophy."

I know another philosopher who teaches 'philosophy of math.' I saw him once fending off a bunch of very angry young students. I asked him afterwards what that was about, and he said, "Oh, they were all from the math or artificial intelligence programs, and had just finished their first paper. They all gave the same answer to the problem I raised for them: their findings proved that there is a fundamental contradiction in one of the bedrock principles underlying mathematics, but there can't be a contradiction because this is a bedrock principle of mathematics."

Such is the life of a philosopher.

Chick Voices

Chick Voices

I'm overcome this morning by the need for some of my favorite women singing. First, Sandy Denny in Richard Thompson's re-working of the old tune "Willie O'Winsbury":

Which leads me to Maddy Pryor, a song from the Jacobite Rebellion:

And Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing the third of the Four Last Songs:

States As Labs

States As Labs

This handy site lets you view the unemployment rates for one or more states over the last few years as a graph contrasting with the national rate.

My husband has been carrying on a debate all week with some online acquaintances, on the subject of the impact of oil prices on unemployment. Part of the discussion has been about differing states' attractiveness to business, with California (high unemployment) coming in last and Texas (low unemployment) coming in first. One of his interlocutors remarked: "The economy is too important to be left to businessmen." I just can't get over that.

Who Speaks to Us

Who Speaks to Us

I guess some graduating seniors get Winston Churchill or John F. Kennedy, while others get comedians who feel compelled to make jokes about their pitiful undergraduate sex lives. This site links twelve commencement speeches between 1941 and the present. I couldn't bring myself to watch Will Ferrell, but I was pleasantly surprised by David Foster Wallace. Nevertheless, I'll take Churchill any time: Never give in, never, never, never, except to honor and good sense.

Hegel Goes West

Hegel Goes West:

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a story on the perils of bad philosophy:

In 1856, a Prussian immigrant named Henry Conrad Brokmeyer retreated deep into the Missouri woods with a gun, a dog and a copy of “Science of Logic,” a philosophical text by Georg Hegel. Alone with Hegel’s thoughts over the next two years, Brokmeyer became convinced that this abstruse work by a German 25 years dead could save the nation from the very divisions about to lead it into civil war. It didn’t, of course....

It's an interesting story, all the same, of how one bad reading of Hegel led to an attempt to paint St. Louis as the great culminating point of history.

Which reminds me of a Chesterton quote:

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing -- say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved.

Or St. Louis, I suppose.

Speaking of Chesterton and A&L Daily, they had a charming biography of his lately also.

Neighborhood Curators

Neighborhood Curators

I've been a suburban gal most of my life, with brief forays into other modes. When I went off to college, for instance, I couldn't wait to experience something a little more exciting and urban. For many years, my husband and I lived with a number of friends in a slightly commune-ish adjoining pair of decrepit mansions on the edge of a still-respectable neighborhood of large homes near Houston's Medical Center. We were quite a thorn in our neighbors' side, with our ratty landscaping and excessive front-yard parking and loud parties. The local neighborhood association's petty grievances against us gave me a decades-long aversion to officious meddlers determined to keep up the neighborhood tone. On the other hand, we knew that our landlord was only marking time and that our commune would give way eventually to redevelopment, to our neighbors' delight.

Lately I keep reading articles agonizing over the dilemmas posed by gentrification. Maggie's Farm posted a typical example this week. Young, affluent gentrifiers express a common fear that they will be perceived as intrusive or condescending, or that improvements to the neighborhood will so boost rents and property taxes that long-time residents of more moderate means will be forced out. The long-time residents themselves seem torn between nostalgia and relief. After years of crime and failing businesses, the streets are beginning to seem more safe and prosperous, but are they destined to take part in the improvement? The linked article mentions a concept I've seen expressed before as a "zoo" mentality, but calls it "curating a neighborhood," which I think is even more to the point. There always is a fantasy that the few distinctive, funky aspects of a decayed neighborhood can be preserved in amber even after the new money rolls in and renovates the homes and businesses -- if only we're culturally sensitive, and impose enough rent controls. I wonder, though, about residents who witnessed decades of decline without grasping their own agency in the process, and who now view the neighborhood's re-birth with a similar lack of personal participation.

Back when we were the local commune, a bunch of impoverished students and post-adolescents, we often resented our prosperous, image-obsessed neighbors. What did we care? We were renting, not investing, and we could split any time we liked. We paid negligible rent in exchange for the duty to do almost all our own maintenance, but we mostly lacked the resources or the motivation to keep the place up to middle-class standards. Eventually, when our landlord sold the houses to a developer who put up a boring row of townhouses, our remaining community was displaced. Should we have been kept in a zoo, a museum to commemorate our countercultural experiment? In the event, most of us just got married and moved out to the suburbs.

Now, of course, my husband and I have fled the suburbs again, this time opting for rural rather than urban delights. A lot of people move here to retire. The friction between the established residents and the restless newcomers has a familiar ring. It's not quite the same as the gentrification dispute, fortunately; there's very little racial or class animosity. Some of us newcomers serve as a source of constant hilarity, with our obsessive concern for the wildlife and other city-bred notions. (Half the neighborhood seems to have taken to keeping chickens, but the fresher we are from the city, the more we tend to see them as pets.) And the worm turns: I have to laugh at my discomfort every time I see a new lot cleared for development, as I cleared my own before building: if only no one else would build after we moved here! But I can't afford to buy the nearest few square miles just to ensure that all the nearby woods stay woods. So I expect in time to become a disgruntled long-established resident grumbling over the newcomers and their changes.

The End of the World

The End of the World

I don't know, maybe the world really did come to an end this weekend. The Texas legislature not only came to an agreement on a $165 billion two-year budget to address the state's $27 billion deficit, but it did so by raiding only 30% of its $10 billion rainy-day fund, and without raising taxes, while slashing the previous two-year budget by over 12%.

Still on the legislature's near-term agenda, especially in light of the cuts in education spending: a bill to address our crazy school-finance system. The Texas Constitution requires the legislature to fund a "free" and "efficient" public eduction system. (The legislature's only other constitutional mandate is to pass a budget.) A decade ago, a judge ruled that the traditional reliance on local ad valorem taxes did not pass constitutional muster, apparently because the word "efficient" turned out on close inspection to mean "uniform statewide, unrelated to the resources or desires of local populations." Because the Texas Constitution also prohibits a statewide ad valorem tax, and because there has never been any appetite here to fund schools via any other variety of statewide tax (we have no income tax here, for instance), the powers-that-be crafted a universally reviled mechanism known as the "Robin Hood" school finance system.

Robin Hood doesn't simply require rich school districts to donate all tax revenues over some average per-student level to poorer districts. Instead, it is a confusing wealth-based system in which "excessive tax wealth" is defined by taxable property within each district divided by the number of students attending public school there. If a district has lots of commercial property, or expensive vacation or retirement residential property, it can reach Robin Hood status despite having a higher-than-average proportion of low-income students, and in fact without any regard to its actual level of tax revenues. The Houston and Dallas districts, for instance, have both long since crossed the Robin Hood line even though more than 3/4 of their student bodies are considered economically disadvantaged. Districts in this unenviable position find themselves sending anywhere from a few percent to over half of their school tax revenues to the state for redistribution among "poorer" districts. (The formula is so confusing that, although I've been trying to read up on it for the last week, I am completely at a loss.) Nor can a Robin Hood district escape its status by lowering its taxes; only a devaluation of its total taxable property could achieve that aim. A tax cut would reduce the amount of tax income subject to redistribution, but not the percentage confiscated by the state.

One possibly unintended result: when real estate buyers no longer see a strong link between location and a secure source of funding for excellent local schools, property values drop:

[T]he Robin Hood system is anything but financially efficient. Robin Hood does not just move money from rich school districts to poor school districts. It does so in a way that destroys far more wealth than it transfers, and that erodes the tax base on which school funding depends. . . . ''Our estimates suggest that Robin Hood caused Texas to lose a net of $27,000 per pupil in property wealth,'' . . .

My little county (the smallest in Texas) is a Robin Hood district on the strength of its vacation and retirement housing stock. Our voters have just approved a $26 million bond to fund repairs to crumbling school buildings; in the last six years, we've lost $36 million in local ad valorem tax revenues to the Robin Hood system. A quirk of the system is that taxes earmarked to repay construction bonds are immune to confiscation. Unfortunately, there is no prospect of a decrease in our local ordinary ad valorem school taxes to defray the tax hike we'll need to repay the bond.

Changes in the law in 2006 ameliorated the Robin Hood problems to some degree and transferred a portion of the funding burden to statewide business taxes. Will the newly slimmed-down Texas budget hurt education here? I'm not convinced of the link between spending and good results in this field. In fact, I'm not completely sure there isn't an inverse relationship. Texas ranks 46th in spending among the states, but 4th- and 8th-grade math and reading proficiency levels are all above average. Where Texas does lag, apparently, is in SAT and ACT scores, a result that may say more about the ethnic composition of its students than anything else. The Texas Education Agency figures for 2008-09 show that Hispanic students (including many recent immigrants) account for 48% of public school enrollment and 65% of kindergarten enrollment. Texas still fares better than the national average in each ethnic group. Not bad for a porous-border state.

Apocalypse yet?

Harold Camping:



That undead preacher from Poltergeist:



Coincidence?

I think not.

Kemosabe

Who's this 'We,' Kemosabe?

National Geographic says:

We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.

"We"?

Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place." They gained their morality by guarding their religion. They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the shrine, and found they had become courageous. They did not cultivate cleanliness. They purified themselves for the altar, and found that they were clean.