Higher Consciousness

Humans are programmed to survive, yet our survival looks doubtful because the very aggressive traits that have made us successful seem likely to cause us to destroy each other.  Perhaps there are two schools of human survival:

• The moral school-- We need to move to a higher level of consciousness, where concern for the species overrides concern for individuals.  This has perhaps happened evolutionarily as humans consist of trillions of individual cells (and bacteria), yet we consciously value the human more than the component cells.
• The survival of the fittest school-- Individuals need to kill off the competition from other individuals.  This doesn't seem practical to me as humans are social animals and no one can do much by him or herself.  The best that can be done in this regard is to be part of a group that is victorious over competing groups.  However, winning groups tend to be composed of individuals committed to the group, and so we are back to the need for a higher level of consciousness.

What is "God", if not a higher level of consciousness?  Religion may be irrational, but on the other hand there is an evolutionary imperative to get beyond individual consciousness. 

The NY Times likes Republicans and racist conservatives. Their "liberalism" is simply a marketing tool.

From Atrios:

I have no idea why the New York Times keeps elevating racist dumdums to the status of philosopher genius or why the fact that someone deemed worthy of such a portrait "reads books" is notable. He's super smart, and he reads books!
The Times has been doing this for years. At some point Occam's Razor applies in explaining why the Times covers things they way they do. They like Republicans. They like racist conservatives. Their "liberalism" is simply a marketing tool (not that I have ever really thought the Times was liberal over and above rich New Yorker liberalism which isn't really liberal, but their readers think it is).

 The link above is to this article, which is about as chilling an indictment as I have ever read, in which Nathan Robinson reviews Ben Shapiro's work, and wonders why the NY Times acts as if he's a serious intellectual.

Atrios has pointed out several other examples of this in just the last week.  Here's discussion of another example from
How to Interview a Nazi -- White supremacists should be challenged—not indulged:

balance is important. Nazis should not be ignored. They are dangerous. We need to understand where they’re coming from, what motivates them, and what their strategies are. Ignoring bigotry doesn’t make it go away. The basic principles of journalism still apply: They should not be misrepresented, lampooned, or caricatured. But neither should they be indulged. We should not inflate their importance, ignore their brutality, or enable their self-aggrandizement. They are not regular politicians. Violence is central to their method; exclusion is central to their meaning.  Instead, they should be confronted, challenged, and exposed. How we engage them—and why—is an issue of political morality. This is an imperative that sits uneasily with flaccid notions of journalistic objectivity...  You can’t weigh genocide against relatively stable democracy as though any reasonable person might disagree on the outcome... The Times article failed on most of these counts. Indeed, thanks to its obsession with the trivial details of the Hovaters’ daily lives, its effect was not to expose the obscenity of their views, but rather to underscore the normality of their existence. It offered this as a revelation, as though Hannah Arendt had never covered Adolf Eichmann’s trial...  This is essentially the same mistake that the British press makes every time it profiles a jihadi terrorist. The reporters marvel that the killer in question once supported Manchester United, ate fish-and-chips, drank in pubs, and had girlfriends.

I guess this latter case is really more incompetence on the part of the Times, as opposed to their really liking their Nazi subject.

Identity Politics and Ta-Nehisi Coates

Apparently, Ta-Nehisi book has a new book coming out, and he doubles down on identity politics.  Here's an advance rebuttal:  Racism May Have Gotten Us Into This Mess, But Identity Politics Can’t Get Us Out:

Coates takes it a step farther, casting those who focus on the role economic anxiety played in 2016 as disingenuous “apologists” who only emphasize class in order to avoid their own complicity... Coates is right to highlight how race affects the level of public sympathy for those who suffer...
Race is an important factor in this narrative, but centering it exclusively risks shifting focus away from those voter concerns that politicians can actually control. Personal prejudice, unfortunately, is not one of them.
Economic justice isn’t a panacea. Criminal-justice reform, immigration, and voting rights, for example, are all crucial progressive issues rooted in identity which would become less visible if we didn’t “see race.” But without a strong class-based argument, Democrats will be left to rely on the twin engines of demographic change and racial solidarity to win in the future. Unfortunately, neither is reliable.
Although identity can, at times, serve as shorthand for political views, it provides no more certainty than a stereotype. Racial groups are not monolithic — nor are their voting patterns written in stone. It is the height of hubris, for example, to assume that non-Hispanic immigrants and non-immigrant black Americans would be equally invested in immigration activism as are certain recently arrived Latinx communities...
My ultimate quibble with Coates’s piece is with its pessimism — the presumption that the union between rich and poor whites, forged in the heat of antebellum anti-black antipathy, is America’s destiny as well as its past.

And my follow up comments:

Basically, there have been two Democratic perspectives on why Trump won in 2016:

1. Americans are racist.
2. Americans wanted a change in the economic status quo.

Obviously, there is some truth in each of these perspectives.  Ta-Nehisi Coates, a highly respected African-American intellectual, seems to place more weight on racism as the determining factor.  Briahna Joy Gray, the author of the article I forwarded, places more weight economics as the determining factor.  As she says:

Barack Obama’s two campaigns are a powerful model for what a presidential pitch centering economics, rather than race, sounds like. As Michael Gerson, a speechwriter for President George W. Bush and Bob Dole observed, Obama’s 2012 stump speech was “very much an FDR Democratic class-warfare speech … He’s very much running on economic populist themes in tough economic times.” Highlighting class, Obama was able to win decisive numbers of white voters in crucial midwestern states. Despite his own identity, he won. Twice. Democrats should not let Trump’s racism drive them away from that effective strategy.

On Self-Driving Cars

The following observations are based upon the following article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/09/magazine/tech-design-autonomous-future-cars-detroit-ford.html.  

Here's a passage that very well expresses my concerns:

A self-driving car has to correctly identify and label millions of objects, understand city layouts and traffic laws and operate in a variety of road conditions. It has to be taught to handle everyday driving hazards (high-speed merges) and rarer incidents (objects in the road), as well as issues that would never affect a human driver (a chunk of debris that flies up and knocks out a sensor).

 

In order to work properly, a self-driving car also has to understand how humans behave. It needs to know the difference between a car that is idling in the right-hand lane (in which case the autonomous vehicle should steer around it) and one that is about to parallel park (in which case the vehicle should stay in its lane, giving the other car some room). It needs to predict that the jogger running toward the corner will stop for traffic, but that the kid running to chase a basketball might not. It needs to be able to navigate a four-way stop, which in polite parts of the country involves lots of eye contact and you-first hand gestures. “This goes beyond just seeing and understanding the world,” Salesky said. “It means understanding what each of the actors in the world is going to do.”

 

In other words, driving isn’t just a mechanical task — it’s a social act, and in order to coexist with human drivers, self-driving cars will need to develop a level of social awareness

I'm dubious that they'll be successful with a flat out migration from the current system to a system dominated by autonomous vehicles.  Rather, Ford has it right as described in the article:

Ford, in particular, believes that the first generation of driverless cars will be limited, capable of traveling only in commercial fleets inside carefully plotted urban areas. Other cars will simply get smarter without being autonomous, with features like collision prevention and self-parking becoming more common. Self-driving technology will eventually be more sophisticated and will one day be capable of full door-to-door autonomy in every possible area and condition, but as Ford sees it, that’s not going to happen overnight, or even very soon.

As cars gradually get smarter, the nation's transportation infrastructure will adapt and eventually enable a constrained autonomous driving experience.

Ego and Evolutionary Psychology

Here's something I wrote (noticed and excerpted) in April 2017.  It seems to fit quite well with the evolutionary psychology books I read in September 2017...

Now for your intellectual stimulation, I bring you this excerpt from an article in the Archdruid Report:

Ethologists had discovered well before Jung’s time that instincts in the more complex animals seem to work by way of hardwired images in the nervous system. When goslings hatch, for example, they immediately look for the nearest large moving object, which becomes Mom. Ethologist Konrad Lorenz became famous for deliberately triggering that reaction, and being instantly adopted by a small flock of goslings, who followed him dutifully around until they were grown. (He returned the favor by feeding them and teaching them to swim.) What Jung proposed, on the basis of many years of research, is that human beings also have such hardwired images, and a great deal of human behavior can be understood best by watching those images get triggered by outside stimuli.

Consider what happens when a human being falls in love. Those who have had that experience know that there’s nothing rational about it. Something above or below or outside the thinking mind gets triggered and fastens onto another person, who suddenly sprouts an alluring halo visible only to the person in love; the thinking mind gets swept away, shoved aside, or dragged along sputtering and complaining the whole way; the whole world gets repainted in rosy tints—and then, as often as not, the nonrational factor shuts off, and the former lover is left wondering what on Earth he or she was thinking—which is of course exactly the wrong question, since thinking had nothing to do with it.

This, Jung proposed, is the exact equivalent of the goslings following Konrad Lorenz down to the lake to learn how to swim. Most human beings have a similar set of reactions hardwired into their nervous systems, put there over countless generations of evolutionary time, which has evolved for the purpose of establishing the sexual pair bonds that play so important a role in human life. Exactly what triggers those reactions varies significantly from person to person, for reasons that (like most aspects of human psychology) are partly genetic, partly epigenetic, partly a matter of environment and early experience, and partly unknown. Jung called the hardwired image at the center of that reaction an archetype, and showed that it surfaces in predictable ways in dreams, fantasies, and other contexts where the deeper, nonrational levels come within reach of consciousness.

The pair bonding instinct isn’t the only one that has its distinctive archetype. There are several others. For example, there’s a mother-image and a father-image, which are usually (but not always) triggered by the people who raise an infant, and may be triggered again at various points in later life by other people. Another very powerful archetype is the image of the enemy, which Jung called the Shadow. The Shadow is everything you hate, which means in effect that it’s everything you hate about yourself—but inevitably, until a great deal of self-knowledge has been earned the hard way, that’s not apparent at all. Just as the Anima or Animus, the archetypal image of the lover, is inevitably projected onto other human beings, so is the Shadow, very often with disastrous results.

In evolutionary terms, the Shadow fills a necessary role. Confronted with a hostile enemy, human or animal, the human or not-quite-human individual who can access the ferocious irrational energies of rage and hatred is rather more likely to come through alive and victorious than the one who can only draw on the very limited strengths of the conscious thinking self. Outside such contexts, though, the Shadow is a massive and recurring problem in human affairs, because it constantly encourages us to attribute all of our own most humiliating and unwanted characteristics to the people we like least, and to blame them for the things we project onto them.

Bigotries of every kind, including the venomous class bigotries I discussed in an earlier post, show the presence of the Shadow.  We project hateful qualities onto every member of a group of people because that makes it easier for us to ignore those same qualities in ourselves. Notice that the Shadow doesn’t define its own content; it’s a dumpster that can be filled with anything that cultural pressures or personal experiences lead us to despise.

Another archetype, though, deserves our attention here, and it’s the one that the Shadow helpfully clears of unwanted content. That’s the ego, the archetype that each of us normally projects upon ourselves. In place of the loose tangle of drives and reactions each of us actually are, a complex interplay of blind pressures striving with one another and with a universe of pressures from without, the archetype of the ego portrays us to ourselves as single, unified, active, enduring, conscious beings. 

The full article is here: 
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-magic-lantern-show.html

Evangelical Unitarian Universalism

Evangelical Unitarian Universalism

1. There is a big overlap between religion and culture.  
2. It's not cool to force your culture on others.
3. Therefore, liberal religions such as Unitarian Universalism and Baha'ism have not spread to other cultures to the same degree as aggressively evangelical religions.

One religion that is not aggressively evangelical, and which has prospered, is Judaism.  In this era, at a time when other religions have long histories of forced conversions, Judaism has stopped all activity for active outreach to non-Jews who are not connected in some way with the Jewish community.  Judaism wants the world to be good and does not need the world to be Jewish.

Why do so many UU's desparately wish for people from other cultures to become UU?

Updated Take on the 2016 Election

By a narrow margin, Americans elected Donald Trump as president in 2016.  He represented a rejection of the economic status quo, and an endorsement of the old cultural status quo.  In other words, he was and is a populist Republican.

It is widely recognized that the most popular national American politician today (mid-2017) is Bernie Sanders, a populist Democrat.

To many it seems that the social fabric is disintegrating.  One of the main remaining planks of bi-partisan consensus is the need for fiscal responsibility -- i.e. balancing the budget over the long run.  Yet, as I have argued extensively elsewhere, this is an idea that needs to go.  Which populist faction will move forward by severing this thread of our remaining bipartisan consensus?

There has been extensive talk by the Republicans of moving forward with this, and it could catch the Democrats off guard.  Suppose Republicans pivoted on middle class tax cuts (e.g. payroll tax), Medicare-For-All, or some other such populist measure that would greatly improve life for the middle class.  Would Democrats oppose this on the grounds that the Republicans were violating an (yet another) unwritten rule of the bi-partisan consensus?

In addition to arguing against the desirability of fiscal prudence as conventional construed, I have repeatedly argued, and continue to believe, that a financial crash is in our near future.  If and when this happens, the populist pressure will soar.  Democrats should get in front of this and embrace economic populism sooner rather than later.  The cultural wars that Hillary's faction led will be reduced in significance.

The recent Democratic defeat in the suburbs of Atlanta is also relevant.  In this election, the Dems poured big money into the cultural (anti-Trump who is characterized as racist, misogynist, etc) as opposed to economic issues, but weren't successful.  This was a relatively prosperous suburb, and even the Dems were unsuccessful in winning by appealing to cultural and economic prudence.

I could be wrong.  The economy may continue to muddle along; people may tire of Sanders' economic populism; cautious centrism may become popular again with a youthful face such as Emmanuel Macron or Kamala Harris.  Stay tuned.

UPDATE:  The same day as I wrote this, Kate Aronoff published a similar take:  Don’t Fly Like a GA-06.  Excerpt:

One of Ossoff’s more well-circulated ads (entitled “Table”) found him sitting alone at a kitchen table, aping a line from Margaret Thatcher to bemoan how “both parties in Congress waste a lot of your money.” In the folksy imagery and call to reduce the deficit, he invoked a trope that’s been circulated for years by pollster Frank Luntz and other right-wing goons to justify painful spending cuts: if hard-working American families have to make tough choices about their finances, then why doesn’t Washington?

The line — as several economists have pointed out — is nonsense. Households do not have the power to set interest rates and print money; the US government does. But from a political perspective, the logic is even more troublingly misguided. That “fiscal responsibility” is a popular, common-sense stance widespread among voters is a prevailing myth of neoliberal economics, and one now embraced across party lines.

It also has no discernible base of support with actual voters. Beating the GOP will mean taking that message to heart, and giving voters a bold vision to support rather than status quo austerity politics and a madman to revile.

Proposed 8th Principle

In Black Lives of UU Organizing Collective Urges Adoption of 8th Principle in Unitarian Universalism, members of Black Lives of UU make the case for adopting the following as an 8th principle of Unitarian Universalism:

We, the member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association, covenant to affirm and promote: journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.

The points in favor of adopting this include the following:

1. White supremacy practices and antiblackness in the hearts of parishioners must be rooted out of the UU community.
2. Why would we not adopt the 8th principle, since it is a logical step toward the UUA’s thus far unfulfilled 1992 and 1997 resolutions to intentionally become a multicultural and anti-racist institution?  We need the 8th principle to bring accountability to our good intentions.

My Opinion

After reviewing the proposal and reviewing our current 7 Principles, I oppose the adoption of this additional principle, for the following reasons.

1. The principles are and should be universal and constructive.

• The proposed 8th principle focuses on one of many types of “isms”. Racism is the paramount form of oppression for some people, but not for others.  
• The call to accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions is more political than I believe is appropriate for a basic religious principle.  A principle should be personal and inspirational, as opposed to a call to action.
• There is no universal understanding of white supremacy practices.  Practices must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.  The hearts of parishioners must be given even more leeway for individual history and circumstance.  Thus, we’re better off letting people wrestle with their own deeds and innermost beliefs, guided by our principles of reason, tolerance, democracy, and compassion.

2. Multiculturalism should not necessarily be an end in itself for every congregation.

• For society at large, a multicultural perspective is critical.  Thus, the current 7 principles stress democracy, tolerance, human relations, world community, etc., with no mention of specific cultures.  The principles are the same whether everyone is of the same or different races, the same or different economic backgrounds, the same or different ethnic backgrounds, the same or different religious traditions.  We should not negatively judge a group solely on the basis of its cultural composition.
• The UUA as an institution is not the same as the UUA congregations which affirm and promote the Principles.  It might be appropriate for the institution, at the national level, to have a somewhat unique vision with regard to multiculturalism, including hiring practices.
• It is possible that the UUA made a mistake in focusing on race and cultural identity in 1992 and 1997.  It is good to welcome different cultures, and to encourage people of diverse backgrounds to join our religion.  However, there are good reasons why people may choose to spend their religious time with people from similar cultural backgrounds.  We can invite people of various cultures to join us, but should not necessarily be offended or overly self-critical if they choose not to.
• Accountability with regard to a general principle such as the proposed 8th is not best achieved in this manner, in my opinion.  If our previous efforts didn’t work out, why should we expect yet another such statement to be more successful?  We do not use the Principles to hold ourselves accountable so much as to focus our thoughts on what we hold most sacred.

Conclusion

The Principles are very high level, inspirational ideals. Fundamental religious principles should not be conflated with specific political agendas and action items.  The path of political resistance may not be right for all people, at all times. I’ll close with these thoughts from Sophia Lyon Fahs (responsive reading #657 in our hymnal -- It Matters What We Believe), which I find beautiful and relevant.

Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness, and the feeling of being especially privileged.

__Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies.

Some beliefs are like shadows, clouding children's days with fears of unknown calamities.

__Other beliefs are like sunshine, blessing children with the warmth of happiness.

Some beliefs are divisive, separating the saved from the unsaved, friends from enemies.

__Other beliefs are bonds in a world community, where sincere differences beautify the pattern.

Some beliefs are like blinders, shutting off the power to choose one's own direction.

__Other beliefs are like gateways opening wide vistas for exploration.

Some beliefs weaken a person's selfhood. They blight the growth of resourcefulness.

__Other beliefs nurture self-confidence and enrich the feeling of personal worth.

Some beliefs are rigid, like the body of death, impotent in a changing world.

__Other beliefs are pliable, like the young sapling, ever growing with the upward thrust of life.

NeoLiberal Democrats on the Economy

NeoLiberal Democrats on the Economy

Overview

Kevin Drum hates the term neoliberal.  Yet I find that it matches his brand of thinking very well, and is emblematic of the status quo (e.g. Hillary) wing of the Democratic Party.  This is where I come from, although I moved to the Bernie camp last year (progressive), and the two groups are having major arguments these days.

Drum has a large following at Mother Jones, and I am a regular reader of his blog, although I frequently disagree with the folks there and am something of an outsider now.  Anyway, in the last couple of days, he has made a couple of comments regarding the economy which are representative of my disagreement with Drum and his wing of the Democrats.

Financial Sector is Healthy

Drum:

On a variety of measures, financial sector performance is cranking along this year at the very-healthy-but-non-bubble values of 2003.  

Sources: Employment via Bureau of Labor Statistics; stock performance via Financial Select Sector SPDR Fund via Google Finance; earnings via Yardini Research.

My instinctive reaction, based upon long standing disagreements with Drum and the consensus, is that something is wrong in an economy where stock prices grow much faster than the economy.  Drum uses "employees" as a proxy for the economy, which is probably not the best choice.  To show that stock prices are reasonable, he shows that they are in line with earnings.  I also disagree with this logic.

I hope to revisit this later, but for now I still disagree vehemently with Drum’s assertion that the financial sector is healthy.

Death of Malls

Drum:

For some reason, the death of malls is suddenly an obsession of newspapers everywhere. I’m not sure why

He goes on to point out that electronic commerce growth is accelerating.  I find it odd that he questions the newsworthiness of the death of malls.  Surely this is a big deal in terms of employment, use and value of real estate, and has many societal implications.

My Worst Nightmare

I'm not a big fan of the NY Times -- take a look at this and let me know what you think:  Lee Camp: How to Write Propaganda for the NY Times – As Demonstrated in an Article About Me

With regard to the specifics regarding Trump and the Republicans, my opinion is that they are both headed for electoral disaster.  As Leonhardt (Weak Trump, Strong Paul Ryan) and Chait (why Republicans won’t impeach Trump) make clear, Trump has abandoned many of his campaign promises to the relatively numerous working class.  Tomasky (the backlash in Kansas) points out that the Republican Kansas legislature has just overridden Governor Brownback's veto and passed a sizeable progressive tax increase.  And today we read that Austerity is over, May tells Tories:

Theresa May is poised to bring to a close seven years of austerity after Tory MPs warned that they would refuse to vote for further cuts.

Republicans and Tories like power, and generally this is attained by cozying up to the wealthy.  But, occasionally, maintaining power requires more populist measures.  We may find ourselves confronting big-spending Republican budget busters -- my worst nightmare.  While Dems are consumed (unproductively) with Russia, Republicans may take the political high ground.

So Leonhardt's missive is encouraging in the sense that Republican legislators seem to think that passing tax cuts for the wealthy is a winning electoral strategy, and they are probably wrong in that regard.

All opinions expressed above may well be wrong (c:

Progressive Tide About to Come In

Progressives are knocking on the door to governance in the U.K. (Corbyn), U.S. (Sanders), Spain, Italy, and France.  Trump is a last gasp for the conservatives, and the centrist social-democrats are weak everywhere (Clinton, UK Labour, French Socialists, etc.).  In my opinion, it's only matter of time before the dam breaks and change sweeps across the western world.

MMT in "The Nation"

While the mainstream media of the political center (New York Times, Washington Post) provides a platform to purveyors of false information leading to needless wars (see Iraq 2003) and climate change skeptics (see my previous post), The Nation offers more thoughtful alternatives to the conventional wisdom.  I'm not a regular reader, but am thinking of signing up.  Here's what most recently caught my eye.

Modern Monetary Theory -- The Sanders generation and a new economic idea

As James Galbraith says in the article: 

“The contribution of MMT is not the discovery of new facts,” Galbraith says. “It’s a teaching core of things which are factually uncontroversial.” But its implications can be radically humane.

 I highly recommend the entire article.

Bret Stephens in NY Times

As suggested, I read Bret Stephen's first column for the NY Times: Climate of Complete Certainty.  I have 3 serious problems with this column and with the NY Times for hiring Stephens as one of their columnists.  Some of my opinions are from this critical article: The problem with NY Times and climate change isn't what you think.  Anyway, here are my thoughts:

1. Stephen's column is largely a straw man argument.  Almost everybody would agree with his basic premise that we shouldn't always uncritically accept the conventional wisdom of the scientific community or other authority figures.  Obviously, there are a whole range of possibilities with regard to scientific consensus, from the odds that the sun will rise tomorrow, to the prospect that solar power will largely eliminate our need for fossil fuels by the year 2040.  But Stephens doesn't pick out any particular problem or opinion with regard to the climate change consensus.  So he's fighting against a position that no one is identified as taking.
2. The one concrete example he does give of the scientific consensus being wrong is wildly incomparable to the subject of climate change.  He suggests that because the pollsters were wrong about the 2016 presidential election, they could well be wrong about climate change.  But the polls have generally been correct in predicting election results.  The Trump victory over Clinton was an anomaly. Moreover, there are obvious technical reasons why polling is more difficult these days -- i.e. cell phones.  Study of climate change, on the other hand, has been going on for decades and the results, as far as I know, have been confirming the scientific consensus.  At any rate, political polling is quite a bit different from climate science.
3. The NY Times seems to think it is promoting a free and responsible search for truth and meaning by publishing this opinion / commentator who dares to speak against the conventional wisdom.  But the criteria for providing such a soapbox should be based upon something other than the popularity of the opinion amongst those who distrust the elite.  There should be some reasonable grounds for dissension, and so far none have been provided.  Rather, the oil companies and others with vested interests in denying climate change have already spent enormous sums trying to poke holes in the scientific consensus, just as the tobacco companies did back in the day.  Far from providing a forum to hear the views of the underdog, the Times is giving the vested interests a forum to muddy the waters.

I'm copying some friends on this email because, as we discussed at church, it is related to a discussion we've been having on the subject of scientific consensus and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 

Paradigm Shifts

Since my post referencing Jung was thoroughly trashed and then ignored, here is one that Jerry (and Stuart?) won't be able to resist.  (Jim's in Bali so he's off the hook this time.)  I ran across this in a discussion of the sorry state of conventional economic wisdom.

Three before their time: neuroscientists whose ideas were ignored by their contemporaries

I discuss three examples of neuroscientists whose ideas were ignored by their contemporaries but were accepted as major insights decades or even centuries later. 

1. The first is Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) whose ideas on the functions of the cerebral cortex were amazingly prescient. 
2. The second is Claude Bernard (1813–1878) whose maxim that the constancy of the internal environment is the condition for the free life was not understood for about 50 years when it came to dominate the development of modern physiology. 
3. The third is Joseph Altman (1925–) who overturned the traditional dogma that no new neurons are made in the adult mammalian brain and was vindicated several decades later.

Here's a good article if anyone wants to see how a similar situation is playing out in economics:  

MMT is what is, not what might be (warning, it's rather long).  Here's a relatively brief excerpt describing the general phenomenon of scientific revolutions:

Academic disciplines (such as, neurobiologists, archaeology, economists etc.) work within organised ‘paradigms’, which philosopher Thomas Kuhn identified in his 1962 book – The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – as “universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners”...

Rather, Kuhn said that dominant viewpoints persist until they are confronted with insurmountable anomalies, whereupon a revolution (paradigm shift) occurs. The new paradigm exposes the old theories as inapplicable, introduces new concepts, asks new questions and provides students with a new way of thinking with a new language and explanatory metaphors...

The work of Joseph Altman, Jacques Cinq-Mars, Barry Marshall and countless others across all discplines represented the potential for a paradigm shift and was resisted by the mob until change became ineluctable.

Not all novel ideas face this sort of brick wall. But when the professional bodies become trapped by Groupthink and, typically, there is status and money at stake (particularly, commercial edge) then resistance can be fierce and prolonged...

The following discusses the above with respect to economics, so you can ignore it if you've had enough (c:

The point to understand is that MMT is a system of thought that allows us to understand how a fiat currency monetary system operates and the central role that government can play in a modern monetary economy...

What is mostly ignored in mainstream economic commentary is that in August 1971, the monetary system agreed at the famous Bretton Woods conference in July 1944, which required the central banks of participating nations to maintain their currencies at agreed fixed rates against the US dollar, collapsed.

The system proved unworkable and when President Nixon abandoned the convertibility of the US dollar into gold, most nations moved to a fiat currency system...

Different nations (or blocs of nations) structure and use the capacity possessed by a fiat currency in different ways. The Eurozone Member States voluntarily ceded the capacity to Frankfurt and then imposed harsh rules on themselves with respect to net spending.

Other nations have evolved differently.

But the point is that every day, across every nation, monetary systems are in place that operate along the lines described and explained by MMT...

MMT, as a new powerful lens, makes things that are obscured by neo-liberal narratives more transparent.

It means that the series of interlinked myths that are advanced by conservative forces to distract us from understanding causality and consequence in policy-making and non-government sector decision-making are exposed.

There is much similarity with traditional religion, as I see it.

Regional Inequality and the Election of Trump

The election of Trump is part of an international reaction to neo-liberal economics.  Looking at the phenomenon more closely, we can see that increasing regional disparities caused by the decline of U.S. government anti-trust enforcement are a major component of the overall reaction.

Eliminating anti-trust has been good for profits of major American corporations.  The co-option  (co-opting) of the middle class through the ownership society and increasing participation in the profits of large corporations has no doubt been a major factor.  No doubt there have also been some beneficial effects for consumers.

The effects of neo-liberalism on regional economic equality are less well appreciated.  Thus, many of the owners of regional corporations are unhappy and have called for ever less federal government intrusion into the economy.  Ironically, however, these regional corporations are under attack from larger national and multi-national corporations, and lack the protection formerly provided by anti-trust laws.

Thus, Trump rode regional dissatisfaction to the presidency, boosted by anti-government business leaders in flyover country.  Their businesses, however, are not under attack from the government, but from global behemoths such as Amazon.com, Bank of America, or United Airlines.  Their irrational belief that too much government is responsible for the increasing regional disparities is manifest in the profoundly confused Republican economic platform.  Voters in flyover country know something is amiss with their local economies, but their leaders (Republican and Democrat) aren't giving them a reasonable explanation.  They've turned in the exact opposite direction of where they need to go.

These thoughts of mine are still half-baked.  For a more coherent discussion, please see Regional inequality is out of control. Here’s how to reverse it, by Phillip Longman (from 2015 -- i.e. written before Trump rose to prominence).  Here's the concluding paragraph of Longman's article:

Inequality, an issue politicians talked about hesitantly, if at all, a decade ago, is now a central focus of candidates in both parties. The terms of the debate, however, are about individuals and classes: the elite versus the middle, the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. That’s fair enough. But the language we currently use to describe inequality doesn’t capture the way it is manifest geographically. Growing inequality between and among regions and metro areas is obvious to all of us. But it is almost completely absent from the current political conversation. This absence would have been unfathomable to earlier generations of Americans; for most of this country’s history, equalizing opportunity among different parts of the country was at the center of politics. The resulting policies led to the greatest mass prosperity in human history. Yet somehow, about thirty years ago, we forgot our history.

Dealing with the Trump Phenomenon

I've run across a number of excellent discussions of the Trump phenomenon and how to deal with it:

• Is Economic Despair What's Killing Middle-Aged White Americans?, by Alana Semuels
• What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class, by Joan C. Williams
• No Sympathy for the Hillbilly, by Frank Rich
• 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump, by Dale Beran

Together, these articles form a coherent narrative and way forward.  I'll provide short summaries of each to illustrate.

Is Economic Despair What's Killing Middle-Aged White Americans?, by Alana Semuels

Ms. Samuels discusses the declining fortune of white, working class Americans.  Her approach is descriptive, not political.  I'm tempted to quote at length from this article, because it's power is in the accumulation of credible academic surveys and evidence that the economic and sociological problems of the white, working class Americans are real and significant.  But you can see the evidence yourself at the link, so I'll just highlight here what I see as an important observation:

in a new paper, economists Case and Deaton explore why this demographic is so unhealthy. They conclude it has something to do with a lifetime of eroding economic opportunities.  Case and Deaton see a large uptick in deaths from suicides, poisonings, and alcoholic liver disease among whites with lowest levels of educational attainment... They divorce or have trouble finding a marriage partner because of their poor economic prospects...  low income and low job opportunities, after a long period of time, tears at the social fabric  

This is in contrast to Europe, where people of all educational backgrounds are living longer... Case and Deaton theorize that this trend is not happening in Europe because of the social safety net there. 

What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class, by Joan C. Williams

Ms. Williams is empathetic.  She points out the problems faced by the white working class, and the reasons they have been resistant to reason from the liberals' perspective.  She provides five guidelines for dealing with the predicament that is the white working class in the U.S.

1. Understand That Working Class Means Middle Class, Not Poor
2. Understand Working-Class Resentment of the Poor
3. Understand How Class Divisions Have Translated into Geography
4. If You Want to Connect with White Working-Class Voters, Place Economics at the Center
5. Avoid the Temptation to Write Off Blue-Collar Resentment as Racism

No Sympathy for the Hillbilly, by Frank Rich

Frank Rich, in my opinion, reacts poorly to the Trump phenomenon.  His conclusion is to let Trump voters live with their decisions.  Liberal empathy and argumentation isn't likely to change the minds of Trump voters, and we just risk compromising our values, as well as wasting our time and energy, if we indulge these spoiled brats.  Here are a couple of quotes:

The notion that they can be won over by some sort of new New Deal — “domestic programs that would benefit everyone (like national health insurance),” as Mark Lilla puts it — is wishful thinking

 Perhaps it’s a smarter idea to just let the GOP own these intractable voters. Liberals looking for a way to empathize with conservatives should endorse the core conservative belief in the importance of personal responsibility.

First of all, I think he's wrong about the impact of "some sort of New Deal".  

Secondly, I don't think it's smart to just ignore the voters in the areas where Trump is popular.  Rich may be right that many of these voters are intractable, but many others may not be.  

Rich presents a false dichotomy:

Listen and be Empathetic OR Be Resolute in our Liberal Convictions

Of course we can do both.

Thus we should propose domestic programs that would benefit everyone (like national health insurance) because we believe these will be good for our country, including our suffering citizens in areas that voted for Trump.  Personal responsibility should not be conflated with guilt by class or place of residence.

Politically, Sun Tzu had a point when he said, in The Art of War, 

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Listening, being empathetic, and proposing more programs to solve working class problems in rural, rust belt, and even southern areas is the strategic, as well as moral, imperative.  

4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump, by Dale Beran

Dale Beran takes the above discussion one step further by comparing a Trump voter to a child having a tantrum.  I'm a firm believer in letting a child work through his or her tantrum.  There's no point in trying to reason with someone who is trying to gain attention by being unreasonable.  On the other hand, it would be foolish to ignore the conditions underlying the tantrum.  The correct response is to ignore the nonsense and deal with the underlying issues.

With regard to Trump voters, that means we don't ignore the real issues.  Does that mean we run the risk of wasting our time trying to reason with the unreasonable?  That is something we can control, to a large extent.  We can minimize the impact of the nonsense by treating it as such, without dismissing whole groups of people or regions of the country.  

Rich suggests that we "hold the empathy and hold on to the anger".  I agree that we should hold on to the anger, as that gives us energy to maintain our focus.  But that is only half the battle.  The other half is having a plan to succeed in dealing with the very real problems of the working class in the U.S.

Neo-Liberalism Revisited

A contentious debate has erupted amongst Democrats regarding the term neo-liberal.

Leftists (such as myself) use the term derisively to indicate that the Democratic party has become Republican-lite.  The Dems, according to this view, compromised too much since the time of the Reagan Revolution. Bill Clinton ended welfare as we know it and declared the era of big government over.  The power base of the Dems shifted from unions to Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood.

Centrists argue that there is still significant space between the Democrats and Republicans.  Democrats still believe in Keynesian economics, and the role of government to regulate the economy, and stimulate the economy in times of recession.

In discussing these views, I was recently informed of an essay by Charles Pierce from 1982, entitled A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto.  I think it captures the essence of neo-liberalism, as neither a totally positive nor totally negative phenomenon.  It was well-intentioned, but not successful as the Republicans got what they wanted in terms of more unbridled capitalism, but surrendered nothing with regard to the economy.

In reviewing Pierce's analysis, the one thing that stands out to me (naturally, given my economic world view) is his "seriousness" regarding government finances:

Another way in which the practical and the idealistic merge in neo-liberal thinking is in our attitude toward income maintenance programs like Social Security, welfare, veterans' pensions, and unemployment compensation. We want to eliminate duplication and apply a means test to these programs. They would all become one insurance program against need.
As a practical matter, the country can't afford to spend money on people who don't need it... as liberal idealists, we don't think the well-off should be getting money from these programs anyway -- every cent we can afford should go to helping those in real need... We are, after all, determined to be practical, not to be the kind of liberal who spends without regard to income.

Politically, this turned out to be a disastrous approach.

1. The Republicans gave only lip service to the deficit, while Dems were more fiscally responsible.  The effect was that Dems provided less stimulus than the Republicans with their multiple tax cuts.
2. By means testing government programs, the Dems lost much of the middle class.  "Every cent we can afford should go to helping those in real need" may have been a noble idea, but practically it was not necessary, raised legitimate questions regarding incentives, and led to unnecessarily complex programs such as "ObamaCare".

I still like the Pierce's idea of neo-liberalism for the most part, but the emphasis on fiscal prudence at the expense of broad government programs (helping the middle class as well as the poor) should be changed.

EPILOGUE
A few additonal of Pierce's neo-liberal thoughts that have not fared well based upon the test of time:

Our hero is the risk-taking entrepreneur who creates new jobs and better products. "Americans," says Bradley, "have to begin to treat risk more as an opportunity and not as a threat."

My observation:  Entrepreneurial "heroes" have too often poisoned our society, whether it be the literal poisons of the fossil fuel folks (e.g. Koch brothers) or the financial poison that has come to dominate our economy.

Note also how poorly many of the cited 1982 neo-liberals have fared.  The Democratic politicians uniformly fared poorly and had little impact on the political landscape (Hart, Babbit, Tsongas, Bradley), while several of the journalists seem to have lost their way  (Kaus, Kinsley).  Charley Pierce himself seemed to devolve into something of a ranting crank.  Of all those mentioned, only James Fallows has my admiration.

Don't be Frozen Like a Deer in the Headlights -- Embrace Socialism

From my perspective, the world is spinning out of control.  I went to read my favorite blogs today, and all was gloom, doom, and, above all, disdain for others.

In desperation, I turned to Steve Randy Waldmann www.interfluidity.com, and was not disappointed.  Steve without fail writes thoughtful and constructive posts, without gratuitous name calling.  His post today commented on Ezra Klein's gloomy discussion of political polarization in the U.S.  Ezra concluded his post as follows:

Polarization is going to get a lot worse before it starts getting better.

Waldmann points out some fundamentals of our political system that underlie the increasing polarization noted by Klein,  Professional politicians emphasize issues which differentiate the parties, while downplaying potential wedge issues such as immigration and trade.  Eventually, a politician like Trump comes along and hits on the populist issues which have been overlooked by the mainstream politicians.  

Commenters on Waldmann's post point out that the U.S. is not alone in experiencing increasing polarization these days.  So it's not plausible to assign all the blame to the U.S. political system and our rampant gerrymandering.

I agree that polarization is a global phenomenon, with, for example, Corbyn and Hamon demonstrating leftist strength in Britain and France (also Beppe Grillo in Italy). On the other side you have Putin in Russia and Duterte in the Philippines. Populism is the single underlying factor. To put it in crasser terms, it’s the economy, stupid.

Capitalism makes the economy paramount, so it’s not surprising that our neo-liberal, capitalist global consensus is churning in favor of popular demand for ever increasing economic strength. The right wants to deliver by removing all impediments to national prosperity, despite the obvious need for many of the impediments (fairness, environmental protection, compassion, maintain peace). The socialists want to derail the train whose momentum is heading to the competitive abyss.

Ezra Klein and other centrists hand-wringers seem to see where the train is headed, but remain frozen like deer in the headlights. In my opinion, we all should join with Sanders, Corbyn, Hamon, the Pope, and other socialists and deal with pressing human, and populist, human needs.  There is a significant movement, heavily weighted toward youth, that is leading the way.