Category: Literature

Literature, Philosophy, Politics

Book Review: On Violence

Posted on by Zach

Many, including me, have relied on Max Weber’s definition of a state as “the rule of men over men based on the means of legitimate, that is allegedly legitimate violence”. I thought that violence was synonymous with power and that the best we could hope for was a legitimate exercise of violence, one that was proportionate and used only as a last resort.

I have a blog post about state monopolies on violence because of Hannah Arendt. Her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was my re-introduction to moral philosophy. It, more than any other book, has informed this blog. To Arendt, thinking and judging are paramount. It is not so much, to her, that the unexamined life is not worth living. It is instead that the unexamined life exists in a state of mortal peril, separated only by circumstances from becoming one of the “good Germans” who did nothing as their neighbours were murdered.

This blog is my attempt to think and to judge. To take moral positions, so that I am in the habit of it.

It’s a vulnerable spot, to stake out a position. You must always live with the risk of being later proved wrong. Or, perhaps worse, having been proved wrong before you even set pen to paper (or pixels to screen).

In her essay On Violence, Hannah Arendt demolished the premises upon which I based my own essay on how states should use their monopoly on violence. It’s rare that I get to see my own work so completely rendered useless. I found the process both useful and humbling.

On Violence is divided into three sections. In the first, Arendt covers how violence has been used and thought about in the decade preceding her essay (it was published in 1969). In the second, she lays out new definitions and models for strength, violence, power, and authority and challenges the definitions use by the great thinkers of the past. In the final section, she re-examines the recent events of her time in light of her definitions and discusses the promise and danger of power and violence.

So, enter the end of the 1960s. The past decade has seen student sit-ins and protests at practically every university. It has seen the end of official segregation and the ongoing struggles of the civil rights movement. In Europe, a military coup toppled the French Fourth Republic and liberalization in Czechoslovakia led to an invasion by Soviet tanks. In Vietnam, America took up France’s failing war and found themselves unable to defeat a small cadre of revolutionaries.

Against this backdrop, Arendt remarks on the most dangerous fact of all: that through our artifice, we have attained the means (i.e. nuclear weapons) to destroy ourselves. There is, Arendt remarks, an age-old conflict between means and ends, in that means always threaten to overshadow the ends they seek to bring about.

Given that there is always an element of chance when it comes to attaining our ends, nuclear weapons mark the development of a new era, where means dominate ends because all means are so terrifying and all ends so uncertain. When you asked a youth in the 1960s where they hoped to be in the future, they would always preface an answer with “well, assuming I am still alive…”.

None of this was made more comforting by the many commonplace myths Arendt identified. Among the think tanks and the military industrial complex, she saw a tendency to transmute hypotheses into reality, to believe that possibilities identified using only reason (and no evidence) could become universal truths; the people in charge of the nuclear weapons did not believe their ends to be at all uncertain, despite all evidence to the contrary. Among the left, she noticed a glorification of violence that had no place in the texts of Marx (let alone in a movement supposedly built on freedom and compassion). The left, Arendt worried, was imbuing violence with all sorts of properties that it had never had, like ‘creativity’, or ‘the ability to heal’.

It is important to note that Arendt had no time for talk of violent revolutions. To her (as she claims, it was with Marx), “dreams never come true”; violence against an oppressor was just violence, not a transformative force capable of launching a new era. In this, she had the weight of recent bitter history on her side, as the communist revolutions were revealed to have brought about nothing but tyranny.

It is only after laying out this tortured landscape, full of pitfalls and dangers, that Arendt turned to the philosophy of violence, the main purpose of this essay.

The first part of this examination is an observation: philosophers and politicians, from the left to the right, have, for a long time, identified violence as a mere outgrowth or component of power. Arendt trots out a dizzying array of quotes, all as plausible as the Max Weber quote I opened with but coming from the likes of C. Wright Mills, Sartre, Sorrel, Jouvenel, Voltaire, von Clausewitz, Mao Zedong, John Stuart Mill, and Hobbes.

It is against all of these definitions, which equate power with violence (and especially coercive violence that propagates the will of whomever wields it) that Arendt stands. She instead seeks a positive power in the philosophy (seldom actually achieved) of the revolutions of the 1700s (and the earlier ideal of polis life, deeply flawed as it was in practice), which viewed government of “man over man” as no fit way to live. In this framework, she identifies power, as distinct from violence, with “the rules of the game”, the set of socially acceptable actions. If you step outside of these rules, power manifests as social consequences: entreaties to change, glares, angry words, and in the extreme case, shunning

This definition is not non-coercive. To social creates like us, social punishments are real punishments. They may not be violence, but they can still act to change our will; or even to shape what we can will.

What prevents the “rules of the game” from being a tyranny (albeit a tyranny with majority support) of another name is some sort of democracy, some ability for people broadly to gain power and push; the chance to have a hand in writing the rules we all must play by. To use the language of the great revolutions of the 1700s, this is “the consent of the governed”.

If you doubt the existence of power as Arendt defines it, I challenge you to go to some public place and violate its norms. Any sufficient violation of norms should see the public exercise their power on you and will probably force you to stop. It is intensely hard for us humans to go against the will of a group, especially if that group makes it displeasure known. And it rarely even needs to come to anything as overt as glares; power is invisible, until you sense its boundaries. It’s a rare person who can act, knowing that they will immediately face intense social censure for their actions. It’s recognizing this, when so few others have, that marks Arendt’s brilliance.

(Interestingly, if you were to complete this challenge, the norms that you violate would most likely be norms that you otherwise agree with. The rules of the game are supposed to exist to make us feel happy and satisfied, able to interact with each other without fear. Personhood is an interface that carries expectations in order to receive recognition.)

Power will always be less absolute than violence. You obey a criminal with a gun far more readily than you obey the law, because the criminal (or rather, the gun) has an immediacy that power does not possess. Therefore, a law without popular support can be enforced, but only at the barrel of the gun. The violence of the enforcement will overwhelm the power of the majority.

Note the use of majority here, because that word is important in Arendt’s conception; to her, power will always require a majority. From this and from the immediacy of violence, it follows that the only way a minority can enforce their will on a majority is via violence.

Once you conceive of power as “the simple rules of the game”, it is clear how much weaker the tyrant is than the body politic. Tyranny falls apart as soon its few enforcers refuse to wield the weapons necessary for its survival, because there is no back up, nothing else, that can maintain it. Power can survive the complete annihilation of the government, because the government is its mere outgrowth, not its heart.

That said, if we are concerned with the ability of tyrants to rule through violence, we should be fearful of the continual improvements we are making to the implements of violence. It is not, as you might think, simply that the implements have become more destructive. There is as much space between the knight and the peasant with a pitchfork as there is between the man with a rifle and the stealth bomber, which is to say that the tyrant has always outclassed the revolutionary.

The true danger is rather how modern implements of violence allow the tyrant to shrink their inner circle and yet still maintain their monopoly on violence. Automation has made violence more efficient, not yet to the pathological case where one man with a button and an army of robots can hold a whole nation in fear, but there is a sense we are fast approaching that terrifying state.

If tyranny shows how violence can unmake power, it is rebellions that show how power can overshadow violence. Rebellions are successful when the state has lost its grip on power, not when the rebels win on the battlefield. Armed rebellions are often made needless by the very fact of their existence, because rebels can only arm themselves when the gatekeepers of weapons decide they no longer wish to support the state. When the army refuses the demands of the strongman, the regime is already over. Armed rebellions succeed more because they erode the power of the state to the point where no one will back it than as a result of any decisive war of manoeuvres.

There is, of course, room for state violence outside of the extremes. Like in the case of tyranny, Arendt considers state violence to be the opposite of state power. It emerges only when power has failed (e.g. when power alone is not enough to keep a criminal “playing by the rules of the game”) or when power is breaking down (e.g. the police being called on to disperse protestors marching on the government). Because of this, Arendt believes that (democratic) states should not be defined by violence, which is only theirs in exigency.

The interaction between power and violence is a topic Arendt returns to over and over in this section. She also believes, that violence flips power on its head (“the extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All”) – and steadily erodes it. I’m not entirely sure what the mechanism is supposed to be here though; it could be that when everyone sees violence as the quickest way to their ends, the structures of power – the incentive to play by the rules of the game in order to change them – disappears. Or it could be that violence leads to violence in return, as everyone tries to protect themselves without being able to resort to power. Regardless, the outcome is the same.

Terror is the result of violence that destroys all power and then fails to abdicate. The Soviet government provides one of the clearest examples of terror. After it shattered society, it seeded it with informants. This meant that no one could seek out others to organize power, because there was always the fear that you might be conspiring with an informant. Russia, I think, is still grappling with this total destruction of all power. It is unclear to me if it is at all capable of returning to rule based on power, rather than (in some part, at least) violence.

Nonviolent resistance movements, like Gandhi’s, work only when the government is scared of the corrosive effects of violence. Sit-ins and salt marches would have been met with massacres if used against the Soviets or Nazis, but against a British government that feared the results of becoming reliant on violence, they were successful.

(The British were right to fear violence. After all, it was soldiers tasked with “pacifying” the colonies that launched the coup d’état that ended the French Fourth Republic. Arendt strongly believed that relying on violence abroad would erode power at home, probably as a result of this experience, not to mention the violence used to quell anti-war demonstrators in America.)

These ideas provide the conceptual framework for Arendt to re-examine what was then recent history and justify why the theorist still has a right to talk about these things.

Arendt pauses to explain that she feels the need to justify her right to speak on these subjects, because of what she claims is an ongoing tendency to explain human behaviour in terms of animal behaviour. Scientists, says Arendt, are increasingly expanding the scope of which behaviours should be considered “natural”, which is to say, the same as other animals would exhibit. Tied into this is a nascent and seldom spoken belief, that reason requires us to sever some of these vestiges of our animal nature.

Arendt disagrees strenuously with both the premise and the prescription. First, she believes that it is wrong to say that we are proved to be more and more like animals. Instead, it is more correct to say that animals are proved to be more and more like us. It is still us that has the singular faculty for reason, but it is certainly amusing and interesting to see all of the ways in which we are not as alone upon our pedestal as we once assumed.

(I think she makes this distinction because if we are like animals, then the study of human nature belongs to the biologist. But if animals are like us, then human nature is still the domain of the philosopher. It’s a subtle difference, but to her, a very important one.)

When it comes to removing human capacity – like for rage – Arendt sees nothing but dehumanization. Rage, she explains, can be rational. We rage when we suspect something could be done but it is not. Rage is turned not against the volcano, but against the heavens for failing to prevent it, or the government for failing to protect us.

(I have been known to view critiques of science like this, from non-scientists, with suspicion. I think Arendt gets a pass because it is clear that her disagreements with science aren’t based on a fear of science disproving one of her specific political positions. Arendt is good at this in general; in an appendix, she cautions against a scientific meritocracy without using any of the tired and silly arguments people normally resort to.)

Rage and violence can also be a rational reaction to hypocrisy (if reason is a trap, why step into it?), although Arendt is quick to point out that this can backfire in two ways (when seeking out hypocrisy becomes an end into itself, as during The Terror; when violence is used to provoke violence and therefore “reveal” a hypocrisy that never existed).

To be honest, I’m not sure many people are arguing that scientists should remove fundamental characteristics of people anymore. But it strikes me as the sort of thing people plausibly could have argued about in the past. And it seemed worth noting that Arendt sees a (limited) role for violence or anger in politics (although it is also worth noting that she views violence per se as outside of the political sphere, because it has nothing to do with power). And finally, I should mention that like practically everyone, she views violence in self-defence as justified.

But Arendt does find many justifications of violence to be foolish. She cautions against “natural” metaphors for power, those that associate it with outward growth and fecundity. Once you accept these, she believes, you also accept that violence has the power of renewal. Violence clears away the bounds on power and breathes new life into it by allowing it to expand again (imagine the analogy to forest fire, which clears away dead wood and lets a new forest grow). Given all of the follies and pains of empire, it is clear that even if this were true (and she is not convinced that it is), it is not recommended. Power, to Arendt, is perfectly content without expansion (and indeed, violent expansion, to her, always erodes power and replaces it with violence).

Nowhere does she find violence more dangerous then with respect to racism. On racist ideologies, she says:

Racism, as distinguished from race, is not a fact of life, but an ideology, and the deeds it leads to are not reflex actions, but deliberate acts based on pseudo-scientific theories. Violence in interracial struggle is always murderous, but it is not “irrational”; it is the logical and rational consequence of racism, by which I do not mean some rather vague prejudices on either side, but an explicit ideological system.

(To make it perfectly clear, she means “rational” here to read only as internal consistency, not external consistency.)

Luckily, power can overcome prejudices. The non-violent actions of the Civil Rights Movement are one of her best examples of the fruits of power, which broke apart segregation and ended (for a time) most restrictions at the ballot box.

That said, even here does Arendt see some role for limited political violence (I am using this to mean what it normally does, but should acknowledge Arendt would view this particular word combination as an oxymoron). She acknowledges that sometimes, it is only through the violence of the radical that the moderate is given a hearing. Unfortunately, beyond cautions that violence is useful only for short-term objectives and that it is indiscriminate in its ends (that is to say, it is a poor tool for systemic change, because it is as likely to gain token concessions as real change), Arendt offers no real framework with which to evaluate when violence might be justified.

Such a framework would be especially useful when evaluating violence against bureaucracy, a major theme of the last section. Arendt identifies bureaucracy as the force with which the student movements are fighting and claims that it is tempting to resort to violence when dealing with it because bureaucracy can leave you with no one to argue with and no avenue through which to gather and use power.

It is because of this that Arendt stands against the “progressive” goal of centralization and instead prefers federalism. This is interesting to me, because Arendt is normally identified as a leftist and her writing quotes Marx heavily. It is a testament to the contempt with which she holds bureaucracy (no doubt heavily influenced by her work analyzing the bureaucracy of the Nazis) that she views striking against it as more important than the progressive priorities that can be attained via centralization and bureaucracy.

Or perhaps it is just that Arendt’s leftist views are actually quite heterodox; there’s a certainly a way to read her that suggests hostility to the welfare state and a preference (perhaps for reasons grounded in a desire to promote virtue and human connection?) for communal charity on a more local scale as a replacement.

Arendt acknowledges that bureaucracy has made the “impossible possible” (e.g. the landings on the moon), but she believes that this has come at the cost of making daily tasks (like governing) impossible.

To this conundrum, she offers no answer. This, I think, is very characteristic of Arendt. It’s very easy to see what she opposes, but hard to find a model of government for which she advocates. I often find her criticism incredibly insightful, so this curious stopping short, her refusal to recommend any specific action, is often frustrating.

As it is, all I’m left with are fears. The trends she laid out – the dangers of our means overshadowing our ends and the ossification that comes with bureaucracy – have not gone away. If anything, they’ve intensified. And while this book gave me a new model of power and violence, I’m not quite sure what to do with it.

But then, Arendt would probably say there’s no point in trying to do something with it alone. Power can only come in groups. And her students are probably supposed to talk with others, to share our concerns, and to think about what we can do together, to keep the world running a little longer.

History, Literature

Book Review: The Horse The Wheel And Language

Posted on by Zach

The modern field of linguistics dates from 1786, when Sir Willian Jones, a British judge sent to India to learn Sanskrit and serve on the colonial Supreme Court, realized just how similar Sanskrit was to Persian, Latin, Greek, Celtic, Gothic, and English (yes, he really spoke all of those). He concluded that the similarities in grammar were too close to be the result of chance. The only reasonable explanation, he claimed, was the descent of these languages from some ancient progenitor.

This ancestor language is now awkwardly known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It and the people who spoke it are the subject of David Anthony’s book The Horse The Wheel And Language [1]. I picked up the book hoping to learn a bit about really ancient history. I ended up learning some of that, but this is more a book about linguistics and archeology than about history.

Proto-Indo-European speakers produced no written works, so almost all of their specific history is lost. The oldest products of their daughter languages – like the Rig Veda – date from well after the last speakers of the original language passed away.

Instead of the history that is largely barred to us, this book is really Professor David Anthony attempting to figure out who these speakers were and what their lives looked like, without the benefit of any written words. He does this via two channels: their language, and the physical remains of their culture.

Unfortunately, there is at least one glaring problem with each approach. Their language is thoroughly dead and there was (at the time of writing) no scholarly consensus on where they originated.

Professor Anthony is undaunted by these problems. It turns out that we can reconstruct their language and from that reconstruction, determine where they most likely lived. If both approaches are done properly, it should be possible to see archeological details reflected in their language and details of their language reflected in their remains.

The first problem to solve then is the reconstruction of PIE. How does one do this?

Well it turns out that all languages change in similar ways. The way we pronounce consonants often shift, with hard sounds sometimes changing into soft sounds, but very rarely the reverse. How we say words also changes. Assimilation occurs because we tend to omit difficult to pronounce or inconvenient middle syllables (this has led to the invention of contractions in English) and addition happens because we add syllables in the middle of difficult tongue movements (compare the “proper” and colloquial ways of pronouncing the word “nuclear” or the difference between the French athlète and the English athlete).

It would be very odd for an additional syllable to be added in an area where tongue movements aren’t particularly hard, or a syllable to be removed from a word that is typically enunciated. Above all, these changes are regular because they rely on predictable laziness.

Changes tend to happen to many words at once. When people began to hear the Proto-French tsentum (root of cent, the French word for 100) as different from the Latin kentum, they had to make a decision about how exactly it would be pronounced. They chose a soft-c, a sound Latin lacks, but that is easier to say. This change got carried over to every ts-, c-, or k-, that had previously made the same sound as kentum/tsentum, except those before a back vowel (like “o”), presumably because a soft sound there is actually harder to say [2].

There’s one final type of change that Anthony mentions: analogy. This is where a grammatical rule used in a single place (e.g. pluralization with -s or -es) is expanded to encompass many more words or cases (most English nouns were originally pluralized with other suffixes, or with stem changes like “geese”; it was only later that people decided -s and -es would be the general markers of plural nouns).

If you have a large sample of languages descended from a historical language (and with Proto-Indo-European, there really is no lack), you can follow a bunch of words backwards through likely changes and see if they all end up in the same place.

If you do this for the modern words for “hundred” from many PIE daughter languages, you’re left with *km’tom (an asterisk is used before sounds where there is no direct evidence). All words for hundred in modern descendants (as well as dead ancient descendants that we know how to speak) of Proto-Indo-European can be derived from *km’tom using only well-attested to and empirically observed rules of language change.

(I occasionally got chills reading reconstructed words. It’s amazing how some words that our distant ancestors spoke thousands upon thousands of years ago are fairly well preserved in our modern speech.)

This is pretty cool, because it allows us to start seeing which words were common enough in Proto-Indo-European to be passed down to all daughters and which words were borrowed in.

With a reconstructed vocabulary of about 1,500 words, we can figure out some things that were important to Proto-Indo-Europeans. They seem to have words for relatives on the male side, but not the female side. This suggests that after marriage, the wife moved in with the groom. Less domestically, they seemed to have a word for cattle rustling, suggesting that they weren’t unfamiliar with increasing their wealth at the expense of their neighbours’.

That’s not all we can get from their words. Linguists also believe that Proto-Indo-Europeans had chiefs, who in turn had patrons. They worshipped a male sky deity and sacrificed horses and cattle to him. They formed warrior bands. They avoided speaking the name of the bear. They drove, or knew of, wagons. And they had two words that we could translate as sacred, “that which is forbidden” and “that which is imbued with holiness”.

(There are many more minor cultural touchstones scattered throughout the book. I don’t want to spoil them all.)

We also know the animals and plants they had words for. Reconstructed PIE has words for temperate trees, horses and cows, bees and honey.

These give us clues to where they lived, in the same way that knowing the words “shinney”, “hockey”, “Zamboni” and “creek” are spoken somewhere might help you make a guess as to where that somewhere is.

And while these words help us rule out the Mediterranean and the deserts, they don’t give us much in the way of a specific location without a when, which requires two different methods.

First, we can figure out the approximate death of Proto-Indo-European, the approximate century or millennium when it was entirely splintered into its daughters, by using what linguists have discovered about the rate of language change.

While most vocabulary changes rather quickly, making this a poor tool for dating very old languages, there are a group of words, the core vocabulary, that change much more slowly. The core vocabulary of any language is only a couple hundred words, but they’re some of the most important ones. Normally, core vocabulary includes the words for: body parts, small numbers, close relatives, a few basic needs, a couple of natural features or domesticated animals, some pronouns, and some conjunctions.

English, a prolific borrower, has borrowed 50% of its total vocabulary from the romance languages. It’s core vocabulary, however, is largely free of this borrowing, with only 4% of core vocabulary words borrowed from romance languages.

Core vocabulary changes by about 14-19% every thousand years depending on the language. It’s also known that once two dialects differ by more than 10% of their core vocabulary, they are more properly thought of as separate languages.

Here’s where written language comes in handy. By comparing written inscriptions with known creation dates in different daughter languages, we can make a guess as to when the languages diverged.

The oldest inscriptions in a PIE-derived language are in the Anatolian languages (which were spoken in what is now Turkey). However, Anthony chooses not to use these, because they entirely lack many grammatical innovations that are otherwise common in daughter languages. This leads him to believe that they split away much earlier than other daughters. The presence of later shared innovations means that at the time of the Anatolian split, Proto-Indo-European was probably still a living language and still evolving.

Better candidates are archaic Greek and Old-Indic, both of which have inscriptions dated to around 1,450 BCE. By comparing the differences in wording and grammar between these two and using known rates of change, Anthony dates the end of Proto-Indo-European at around 2,500 BCE. This means that after 2,500 BCE, it doesn’t make sense to speak of a single unified Proto-Indo-European language.

Second is the birth date, the other half of the critical window. To find it, Anthony looks for words that have a known date of invention, specifically “wool” and “wagon”. Getting broadly useful amounts of wool from sheep wasn’t possible until a mutation made sheep coats much larger. We know roughly when this mutation occurred, because sheep suddenly became a larger portion of herds around 3,500 BCE, displacing goats (which produce more milk). The only reasonably explanation for this event is the advent of wool producing sheep, which were very valuable as a source of clothes.

Similarly, wagons have left physical evidence (both directly and in preserved images) and that evidence has been carbon dated to 3,500 BCE [3].

Since all Proto-Indo-European languages outside of the Anatolian branch have related words for both “wagon” and “wool” that show no evidence of borrowing from other languages, it seems reasonable to conclude that some form of the language existed when wagons and wool first began to reshape the pre-historic world. That means the language had to exist by 3,500 BCE.

There is, I should note, one competing theory that Anthony outlines, in which PIE and Indo-Hittite languages split around 7,500 BCE. This theory requires several unlikely things to happen however; it requires the word for wagon to evolve from the same verb meaning “to turn” in both branches (five similar verbs existed), it requires the PIE speaking people to disperse over all of Europe and become the dominant culture then (this would have been very hard pre-horse domestication, when material cultures were small and language territories tended to be much smaller than modern countries), and all of this would have to happen while material cultures were becoming very different but languages (supposedly) weren’t evolving.

Anthony doesn’t give this theory much credence.

With a rough time-range, we can begin looking for our Proto-Indo-Europeans in space. Anthony does this by looking for evidence of very old loan words. He finds a set coming from Uralic, which also has a bevy of very old loanwords from PIE [4].

Uralic (appropriately) probably first emerged somewhere near the Ural Mountains. This corresponds well with our other evidence because the area around the Urals (where borrowing could have taken place) is temperate and home to the flora and fauna words we know exist in PIE.

The PIE word for honey, *médhu (note its similarity with the English word for a fermented honey drink, “mead” [5]), is particularly useful here. We know that bees weren’t common in Siberia during the time when we suspect PIE was being spoken (and where they were common, the people weren’t herders), but that bees were common on the other side of the Urals.

Laying it all out, we see that PIE speakers were herders (there’s an expansive set of words relating to the tasks herders must accomplish), who lived near the Urals but not in Siberia. The best archeological match for these criteria is a set of herder people who lived in what is now modern-day Ukraine and it is these people that Anthony identifies as the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

If this feels at all dry, I want to assure you that it wasn’t when I read it. I felt that the first section of the book was the strongest. Anthony provides an excellent overview of linguistics, archeology, and some of the crazy stuff he’s had to invent to help him in his studies.

For example, he believes that horses were ridden much earlier than was commonly thought, perhaps around or before 3,500 BCE. To prove this, him and his wife embarked on a study of how bits wear teeth in horses’ mouths, which culminated in empirical studies with a variety of bit types (including rope) done on live horses that had never been previously given bits, assessed using electron microscopy. The whole thing is a bit bonkers, but it has resulted in a validated test that allows archeologists to determine if a given horse was ever ridden, as well as vindication for Anthony’s chronology of domestication.

Unfortunately, a lot of the rest of the book was genuinely dry. There was a dizzying array of cultures inhabiting the Eurasian steppes in the period Anthony covers, each with their own house type, pottery type, antecedents, and descendants. Anthony goes through these in excruciating detail. It’s the sort of thing that other archeologists love him for – a lot of these cultures are very poorly described outside of Russian language publications – but it’s hard for a lay-person to follow. I may have pulled it off if I built a giant flow chart, but as it was, I mostly felt overwhelmed.

(Anthony has to go through them all to explain how PIE-derived languages ended up everywhere we know them to have. People of Europe don’t speak PIE-derived languages just because of Latin. Many people the Romans conquered spoke languages that were distantly related to the invader’s tongue. Those languages need to be accounted for in any theory about Proto-Indo-Europeans.)

This is disappointing, because the history started off so engagingly. Anthony outlines how the earliest ancestors of the Proto-Indo-Europeans had persistent cultural frontiers with hunter-gatherers on the Urals on one side and the farmers in the Bug-Dniester valley on the other.

The herding and farming economies required a moral shift from previous hunter-gatherer practices, one that would see agriculturalists harden their hearts to their own children starving, if the only thing that could assuage their hunger was their last few breeding pairs or their seed grain. This is the first time I saw someone lay out the moral transformation necessary to accept agricultural and having it laid out so starkly made it much easier to understand why not every pre-historic group was willing to adopt it.

(I had always thought the biggest moral change was accepting accumulation of wealth, but this one is, I think, more important.)

This is not to say that the herders and farmers were exactly alike; their different ways of life meant they were culturally distinct. In addition to their dwellings and material culture, they differed in funeral customs and probably in religion. Everything we know about early-PIE speakers suggest that they worshipped a sky god of some sort. The farmers who lived next door decorated their houses with female figurines, figures that never show up in any excavation of herder camps or grave sites.

I was also shocked at the amount of long distance trade and the wealth acquisition that was going on 6,000 years ago. There are kurgans (circular rock topped graves) with grave goods from Mesopotamia dating from that long ago, as well as one kurgan where someone was buried with almost 4 kilograms of gold ornamentation.

The herders and farmers didn’t live next door in harmony forever. Changes to their stable arrangement happened as a result of one of the Earth’s period historical climate fluctuations (which caused a collapse among many of the farmers and may have led to more raiding from the early-PIE speaking herders) and later the adoption of horse-riding (which made raiding easier) and wagons (which allowed herders to bring water with them and opened the inner steppes up to grazing).

Larger herds and changing boundaries led to clashes among the herders (we’ve found kurgans where the bodies bear marks of violent deaths) and to raids on agriculturalists (we’ve found burned villages peppered with arrows), although interestingly, never the farmers directly adjacent to the steppes. It may be that the herders didn’t want to disrupt their trading relationships with their neighbours and so were careful to raid dozens of kilometers away from their own borders (a task made easier with horses).

The farmers were no pushovers; some of their towns held up to 10,000 people by the third millennium BCE. These towns were bigger than the cities of Mesopotamia, but lacked the civic organizational features of the true cities of the Fertile Crescent.

And it was at about this point in the narrative where the number of cultures proliferated beyond my ability to follow and I began writing down interesting facts rather than keeping track of the grand narrative.

Here are a few that I liked the most:

  • About 20% of corpses in warrior graves (those with weapons and other symbols of membership in warrior society) whose gender is known are female. This matches the percentage in much later steppe graves. As Kameron Hurley said, women have always fought.
  • Contrary to popular stereotypes, the cultures of the Eurasia steppes weren’t reliant on cities for manufactured goods. They had their own potters and metalsmiths and they made many mining camps. In fact, by the 2000s BCE, it seems that Mesopotamian cities were dependent metal mined on the steppes,
  • In the early Bronze Age, tin was worth its weight in silver. When tin wasn’t available, bronze was made with arsenic.
  • Horses were probably domesticated because they winter better than the other animals that were available in Eurasia at the time. Cows will starve to death if grass is hidden by snow, while sheep and goats use their nose to move snow off of grass (which means that they’re helpless once it’s covered in ice). Sheep, cows, and goats are all unable to drink water that is covered in ice. Horses break ice and move snow with their hooves, making winter no real inconvenience to them. Mixing horses with cows can allow cows to eat the grass that horses uncover.
  • Disaffected farmers may have been attracted to the herding economy because wealth was much easier to build up. Farmland is hard to acquire more of without angering your neighbours, but herds given good pasture will naturally grow exponentially. A lot of the spread of the herding economy into Europe probably used some sort of franchise system, where locals joined the PIE culture and were given some animals, in exchange for providing protection and labour to their patron.

I’ve struggled through a lot of books that are clearly meant for people more knowledgeable in the subject than I am. It might just be a function of how interested I am in archeology (that is to say: only tolerably interested) that this is the first of them that I wish had an abridged edition. If you aren’t deeply interested in archaeology or pre-history, there’s a lot of this book that you’ll probably end up skimming.

The rest of it makes up for that. But I think there would be market for Anthony to write another leaner volume, meant for a more general audience.

If he ever does, I’ll probably give it a read.

Footnotes

[1] David Anthony is very sensitive to the political ends that some scholars of Proto-Indo-European have turned to. He acknowledges that white supremacists appropriated the self-designation of “Aryan” used by some later speakers of PIE-derived languages and used it to refer to some sort of ancient master race. Professor Anthony does not buy into this one bit. He points out that Aryan was always a cultural term, not a racial one (showing the historical ignorance of the racists) and he is careful to avoid assigning any special moral or mythical virtue to the Proto-Indo-Europeans whose culture he studies.

White supremacists will find nothing to like about this book, unless they engage in a deliberate misreading. ^

[2] This is why the French côte is still similar to the Latin costa. ^

[3] Anthony identifies improvements in carbon dating, especially improvements in how we calibrate for diets high in fish (which contain older carbon, leading to incorrect ages) as a major factor in his ability to untangle the story of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. ^

[4] Uralic is the language family that in modern times includes Finnish and some languages spoken in Russia. ^

[5] While looking up the word *médhu, I found out that it is also likely the root of the Old Chinese word for honey, via an extinct Proto-Indo-European language, Tocharian. The speakers of Tocharian migrated from the Proto-Indo-European homeland to Xinjiang, in what is now China, which is likely where the borrowing took place. ^

Literature

Book Review: Bad Blood

Posted on by Zach

Theranos was founded in 2003 by Stanford drop-out Elizabeth Holmes. It and its revolutionary blood tests eventually became a Silicon Valley darling, raising $700 million from investors that included Rupert Murdoch and the Walton family. It ultimately achieved a valuation of almost $10 billion on yearly revenues of $100 million. Elizabeth Holmes was hailed as Silicon Valley’s first self-made female billionaire.

In 2015, a series of articles by John Carreyrou published in the Wall Street Journal popped this bubble. Theranos was a fraud. Its blood tests didn’t work and were putting patient lives at risk. Its revenue was one thousand times smaller than reported. It had engaged in a long running campaign of intimidation against employees and whistleblowers. Its board had entirely failed to hold the executives to account – not surprising, since Elizabeth Holmes controlled over 99% of the voting power.

Bad Blood is the story of how this happened. John Carreyrou interviewed more than 140 sources, including 60 former employees to create the clearest possible picture of the company, from its founding to just before it dissolved.

It’s also the story of Carreyrou’s reporting on Theranos, from the first fateful tip he received after winning a Pulitzer for uncovering another medical fraud, to repeated legal threats from Theranos’s lawyers, to the slew of awards his coverage won when it eventually proved correct.

I thought it was one hell of a book and would recommend it to anyone who likes thrillers or anyone who might one day work at a start-up and wants a guide to what sort of company to avoid (pro tip: if your company is faking its demos to investors, leave).

Instead of rehashing the book like I sometimes do in my reviews, I want to discuss three key things I took from it.

Claims that Theranos is “emblematic” of Silicon Valley are overblown

Carreyrou vacillates on this point. He sometimes points out all the ways that Theranos is different from other VC backed companies and sometimes holds it up as a poster child for everything that is wrong with the Valley.

I’m much more in the first camp. For Theranos to be a posterchild of the Valley, you’d want to see it raise money from the same sources as other venture-backed companies. This just wasn’t the case.

First of all, Theranos had basically no backing from dedicated biotechnology venture capitalists (VCs). This makes a lot of sense. The big biotech VCs do intense due-diligence. If you can’t explain exactly how your product works to a room full of intensely skeptical PhDs, you’re out of luck. Elizabeth Holmes quickly found herself out of luck.

Next is the list of VCs who did invest. Missing are the big names from the Valley. There’s no Softbank, no Peter Thiel, no Andreessen Horowitz. While these investors may have less ability to judge biotech start-ups than the life sciences focused firms, they are experienced in due diligence and they knew red flags (like Holmes’s refusal to explain how her tech worked, even under NDA) when they saw them. I work at a venture backed company and I can tell you that experienced investors won’t even look at you if you aren’t willing to have a frank discussion about your technology with them.

The people who did invest? Largely dabblers, like Rupert Murdoch and the Walton family, drawn in by a board studded with political luminaries (two former secretaries of state, James friggen’ Mattis, etc.). It perhaps should have been a red flag that Henry Kissinger (who knows nothing about blood testing and would be better placed on Facebook’s board, where his expertise in committing war crimes would come in handy) was on the board, but to the well-connected elites from outside the Valley, this was exactly the opposite.

It is hard to deal with people who just lie

I don’t want to blame these dabblers from outside the Valley too much though, because they were lied to like crazy. As America found out in 2016, many institutions struggle when dealing with people who just make shit up.

There is an accepted level of exaggeration that happens when chasing VC money. You put your best foot forward, shove the skeletons deep into your closet, and you try and be the most charming and likable version of you. One founder once described trying to get money from VCs as “basically like dating” to me and she wasn’t wrong.

Much like dating, you don’t want to exaggerate too far. After all, if the suit is fruitful, you’re kind of stuck with each other. The last thing you want to find out after the fact is that your new partner collects their toenail clippings in a jar or overstates their yearly revenue by more than 1000x.

VCs went into Theranos with the understanding that they were probably seeing rosy forecasts. What they didn’t expect was that the forecasts they saw were 5x the internal forecasts, or that the internal forecasts were made by people who had no idea what the current revenue was. This just doesn’t happen at a normal company. I’m used to internal revenue projections being the exact same as the ones shown to investors. And while I’m sure no one would bat an eye if you went back and re-did the projections with slightly more optimistic assumptions, you can’t get to a 5x increase in revenue just by doing that. Furthermore, the whole exercise of doing projections is moot if you are already lying about your current revenue by 1000x.

There is a good reason that VCs expect companies not to do this. I’m no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that this is all sorts of fraud. The SEC and US attorney’s office seem to agree. It’s easy to call investors naïve for buying into Theranos’s lies. But I would contend that Holmes and Balwani (her boyfriend and Theranos’s erstwhile president) were the naïve ones if they thought they could get away with it without fines and jail time.

(Carreyrou makes a production about how “over-promise, then buy time to fix it later” is business as usual for the Valley. This is certainly true if you’re talking about, say, customers of a free service. But it is not and never has been accepted practice to do this to your investors. You save the rosy projections for the future! You don’t lie about what is going on right now.)

The existence of a crime called “fraud” is really useful for our markets. When lies of the sort that Theranos made are criminalized, business transactions become easier. You expect that people who are scammers will go do their scams somewhere where lies aren’t so criminalized and they mostly do, because investors are very prone to sue or run to the SEC when lied to. Since this mostly works, it’s understandable that a sense of complacency might set in. When everyone habitually tells more or less the truth, everyone forgets to check for lies.

The biotech companies didn’t invest in Theranos because their sweep for general incompetence made it clear that something fishy was going on. The rest of the VCs were less lucky, but I would argue that when the books are as cooked as Theranos’s were, a lack of understanding of biology was not the primary problem with these investors. The primary problem was that they thought they were buying a company that was making $100 million a year when in fact it was making $100,000.

Most VCs (and probably most of the dabblers, who after all made their money in business of some sort) may not understand the nuances of biotech, but they do understand that revenue that low more than a decade into operation represent a serious problem. Conversely, revenues of $100 million are pretty darn good for a decade-old medical device company. With that lie out of the way, the future growth projections looked reasonable; they were just continuing a trend. Had any investors been told the truth, they could have used their long experience as business people or VCs to realize that Theranos was a bad deal. Holmes’s lies prevented that.

I sure wish there was a way to make lies less powerful in areas where people mostly stick near the truth (and that we’d found one before 2016), but absent that, I want to give Theranos’s investors a bit of a break.

Theranos was hardest on ethical people

Did you know that Theranos didn’t have a chief financial officer for most of its existence? Their first CFO confronted Holmes about her blatant lies to investors (she was entirely faking the blood tests that they “took”) and she fired him, then used compromising material on his computer to blackmail him into silence. He was one of the lucky ones.

Bad Blood is replete with stories of idealistic young people who joined Theranos because it seemed to be one of the few start-ups that was actually making a positive difference in normal people’s lives. These people would then collide with Theranos’s horrible management culture and begin to get disillusioned. Seeing the fraud that took place all around them would complete the process. Once cynicism set in, employees would often forward some emails to themselves so they’d have proof that they only participated in the fraud when unaware and immediately handed in their notice.

If they emailed themselves, they’d get a visit from a lawyer. The lawyer would tell them that forwarding emails to themselves was stealing Theranos’s trade secrets (everything was a trade secret with Theranos, especially the fact that they were lying about practically everything). The lawyer would present the employee with an option: delete the emails and sign a new NDA that included a non-disparagement clause that prevented them from criticising Theranos, or be sued by the fiercely talented and amoral lawyer David Boies (who was paid in Theranos stock and had a material interest in keeping the company afloat) until they were bankrupted by the legal fees.

Most people signed the paper.

If employees left without proof, they’d either be painted as deranged and angered by being fired, or they be silenced with the threat of lawsuits.

Theranos was a fly trap of a company. Its bait was a chance to work on something meaningful. But then it was set up to be maximally offensive and demoralizing for the very people who would jump at that opportunity. Kept from speaking out, guilt at helping perpetuate the fraud could eat them alive.

One employee, Ian Gibbons, committed suicide when caught between Theranos’s impossible demands for loyalty and an upcoming deposition in a lawsuit against the company.

To me, this makes Theranos much worse than seemingly similar corporate frauds like Enron. Enron didn’t attract bright-eyed idealists, crush them between an impossible situation and their morals, then throw them away to start the process over again. Enron was a few directors enriching themselves at the expense of their investors. It was wrong, but it wasn’t monstrous.

Theranos was monstrous.

Elizabeth Holmes never really made any money from her fraud. She was paid a modest (by Valley standards) salary of $200,000 per year – about what a senior engineer could expect to make. It’s probably about what she could have earned a few years after finishing her Stanford degree, if she hadn’t dropped out. Her compensation was mostly in stock and when the SEC forced her to give up most of it and the company went bankrupt, its value plummeted from $4.5 billion to $0. She never cashed out. She believed in Theranos until the bitter end.

If she’d been in it for the money, I could have understood it, almost. I can see how people would do – and have done – horrible things to get their hands on $4.5 billion. But instead of being motivated by money, she was motivated by some vision. Perhaps of saving the world, perhaps of being admired. In either case, she was willing to grind up and use up anyone and everyone around her in pursuit of that vision. Lying was on the table. Ruining people’s lives was on the table. Callously dismissing a suicide that was probably caused by her actions was on the table. As far as anyone knows, she has never shown remorse for any of these. Never viewed her actions as anything but moral and upright.

And someone who can do that scares me. People who are in it for the money don’t go to bed thinking they’re squeaky clean. They know they’ve made a deal with the devil. Elizabeth Holmes doesn’t know and doesn’t understand.

I think it’s probably for the best that no one will trust Elizabeth Holmes with a fish and chips stand, let alone a billion-dollar company, ever again. Because I tremble to think of what she could do if given another chance to “change the world”.

Advice, Literature, Model

Sanderson’s Law Applies To Cultures Too

Posted on by Zach

[Warning: Contains spoilers for The Sunset Mantle, Vorkosigan Saga (Memory and subsequent), Dune, and Chronicles of the Kencyrath]

For the uninitiated, Sanderson’s Law (technically, Sanderson’s First Law of Magic) is:

An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.

Brandon Sanderson wrote this law to help new writers come up with satisfying magical systems. But I think it’s applicable beyond magic. A recent experience has taught me that it’s especially applicable to fantasy cultures.

I recently read Sunset Mantle by Alter S. Reiss, a book that falls into one of my favourite fantasy sub-genres: hopeless siege tales.

Sunset Mantle is what’s called secondary world fantasy; it takes place in a world that doesn’t share a common history or culture (or even necessarily biosphere) with our own. Game of Thrones is secondary world fantasy, while Harry Potter is primary world fantasy (because it takes place in a different version of our world, which we chauvinistically call the “primary” one).

Secondary world fantasy gives writers a lot more freedom to play around with cultures and create interesting set-pieces when cultures collide. If you want to write a book where the Roman Empire fights a total war against the Chinese Empire, you’re going to have to put in a master’s thesis worth of work to explain how that came about (if you don’t want to be eviscerated by pedants on the internet). In a secondary world, you can very easily have a thinly veiled stand-in for Rome right next to a thinly veiled analogue of China. Give readers some familiar sounding names and culture touchstones and they’ll figure out what’s going on right away, without you having to put in effort to make it plausible in our world.

When you don’t use subtle cues, like names or cultural touchstones (for example: imperial exams and eunuchs for China, gladiatorial fights and the cursus honorum for Rome), you risk leaving your readers adrift.

Many of the key plot points in Sunset Mantle hinge on obscure rules in an invented culture/religion that doesn’t bear much resemblance to any that I’m familiar with. It has strong guest rights, like many steppes cultures; it has strong charity obligations and monotheistic strictures, like several historical strands of Christianity; it has a strong caste system and rules of ritual purity, like Hinduism; and it has a strong warrior ethos, complete with battle rage and rules for dealing with it, similar to common depictions of Norse cultures.

These actually fit together surprising well! Reiss pulled off an entertaining book. But I think many of the plot points fell flat because they were almost impossible to anticipate. The lack of any sort of consistent real-world analogue to the invented culture meant that I never really had an intuition of what it would demand in a given situation. This meant that all of the problems in the story that were solved via obscure points of culture weren’t at all satisfying to me. There was build up, but then no excitement during the resolution. This was common enough that several chunks of the story didn’t really work for me.

Here’s one example:

“But what,” asked Lemist, “is a congregation? The Ayarith school teaches that it is ten men, and the ancient school of Baern says seven. But among the Irimin school there is a tradition that even three men, if they are drawn in together into the same act, by the same person, that is a congregation, and a man who has led three men into the same wicked act shall be put to death by the axe, and also his family shall bear the sin.”

All the crowd in the church was silent. Perhaps there were some who did not know against whom this study of law was aimed, but they knew better than to ask questions, when they saw the frozen faces of those who heard what was being said.

(Reiss, Alter S.. Sunset Mantle (pp. 92-93). Tom Doherty Associates. Kindle Edition.)

This means protagonist Cete’s enemy erred greatly by sending three men to kill him and had better cut it out if he doesn’t want to be executed. It’s a cool resolution to a plot point – or would be if it hadn’t taken me utterly by surprise. As it is, it felt kind of like a cheap trick to get the author out of a hole he’d written himself into, like the dreaded deux ex machina – god from the machine – that ancient playwrights used to resolve conflicts they otherwise couldn’t.

(This is the point where I note that it is much harder to write than it is to criticize. This blog post is about something I noticed, not necessarily something I could do better.)

I’ve read other books that do a much better job of using sudden points of culture to resolve conflict in a satisfying manner. Lois McMaster Bujold (I will always be recommending her books) strikes me as particularly apt. When it comes time for a key character of hers to make a lateral career move into a job we’ve never heard of before, it feels satisfying because the job is directly in line with legal principles for the society that she laid out six books earlier.

The job is that of Imperial Auditor – a high powered investigator who reports directly to the emperor and has sweeping powers –  and it’s introduced when protagonist Miles loses his combat career in Memory. The principles I think it is based on are articulated in the novella Mountains of Mourning: “the spirit was to be preferred over the letter, truth over technicalities. Precedent was held subordinate to the judgment of the man on the spot”.

Imperial Auditors are given broad discretion to resolve problems as they see fit. The main rule is: make sure the emperor would approve. We later see Miles using the awesome authority of this office to make sure a widow gets the pension she deserves. The letter of the law wasn’t on her side, but the spirit was, and Miles, as the Auditor on the spot, was empowered to make the spirit speak louder than the letter.

Wandering around my bookshelves, I was able to grab a couple more examples of satisfying resolutions to conflicts that hinged on guessable cultural traits:

  • In Dune, Fremen settle challenges to leadership via combat. Paul Maud’dib spends several years as their de facto leader, while another man, Stilgar, holds the actual title. This situation is considered culturally untenable and Paul is expected to fight Stilgar so that he can lead properly. Paul is able to avoid this unwanted fight to the death (he likes Stilgar) by appealing to the only thing Fremen value more than their leadership traditions: their well-established pragmatism. He says that killing Stilgar before the final battle would be little better than cutting off his own arm right before it. If Frank Herbert hadn’t mentioned the extreme pragmatism of the Fremen (to the point that they render down their dead for water) several times, this might have felt like a cop-out.
  • In The Chronicles of the Kencyrath, it looks like convoluted politics will force protagonist Jame out of the military academy of Tentir. But it’s mentioned several times that the NCOs who run the place have their own streak of honour that allows them to subvert their traditionally required oaths to their lords. When Jame redeems a stain on the Tentir’s collective honour, this oath to the college gives them an opening to keep her there and keep their oaths to their lords. If PC Hodgell hadn’t spent so long building up the internal culture of Tentir, this might have felt forced.

It’s hard to figure out where good foreshadowing ends and good cultural creation begins, but I do think there is one simple thing an author can do to make culture a satisfying source of plot resolution: make a culture simple enough to stereotype, at least at first.

If the other inhabitants of a fantasy world are telling off-colour jokes about this culture, what do they say? A good example of this done explicitly comes from Mass Effect: “Q: How do you tell when a Turian is out of ammo? A: He switches to the stick up his ass as a backup weapon.” 

(Even if you’ve never played Mass Effect, you now know something about Turians.)

At the same time as I started writing this, I started re-reading PC Hodgell’s The Chronicles of the Kencyrath, which provided a handy example of someone doing everything right. The first three things we learn about the eponymous Kencyr are:

  1. They heal very quickly
  2. They dislike their God
  3. Their honour code is strict enough that lying is a deadly crime and calling some a liar a deathly insult

There are eight more books in which we learn all about the subtleties of their culture and religion. But within the first thirty pages, we have enough information that we can start making predictions about how they’ll react to things and what’s culturally important.

When Marc, a solidly dependable Kencyr who is working as a guard and bound by Kencyr cultural laws to loyally serve his employer lets the rather more eccentric Jame escape from a crime scene, we instantly know that him choosing her over his word is a big deal. And indeed, while he helps her escape, he also immediately tries to kill himself. Jame is only able to talk him out of it by explaining that she hadn’t broken any laws there. It was already established that in the city of Tai-Tastigon, only those who physically touch stolen property are in legal jeopardy. Jame never touched the stolen goods, she was just on the scene. Marc didn’t actually break his oath and so decides to keep living.

God Stalk is not a long book, so that fact that PC Hodgell was able to set all of this up and have it feel both exciting in the moment and satisfying in the resolution is quite remarkable. It’s a testament to what effective cultural distillation, plus a few choice tidbits of extra information can do for a plot.

If you don’t come up with a similar distillation and convey it to your readers quickly, there will be a period where you can’t use culture as a satisfying source of plot resolution. It’s probably no coincidence that I noticed this in Sunset Mantle, which is a long(-ish) novella. Unlike Hodgell, Reiss isn’t able to develop a culture in such a limited space, perhaps because his culture has fewer obvious touchstones.

Sanderson’s Second Law of Magic can be your friend here too. As he stated it, the law is:

The limitations of a magic system are more interesting than its capabilities. What the magic can’t do is more interesting than what it can.

Similarly, the taboos and strictures of a culture are much more interesting than what it permits. Had Reiss built up a quick sketch of complicated rules around commanding and preaching (with maybe a reference that there could be surprisingly little theological difference between military command and being behind a pulpit), the rule about leading a congregation astray would have fit neatly into place with what else we knew of the culture.

Having tight constraints imposed by culture doesn’t just allow for plot resolution. It also allows for plot generation. In The Warrior’s Apprentice, Miles gets caught up in a seemingly unwinnable conflict because he gave his word; several hundred pages earlier Bujold establishes that breaking a word is, to a Barrayaran, roughly equivalent to sundering your soul.

It is perhaps no accident that the only thing we learn initially about the Kencyr that isn’t a descriptive fact (like their healing and their fraught theological state) is that honour binds them and can break them. This constraint, that all Kencyr characters must be honourable, does a lot of work driving the plot.

This then would be my advice: when you wish to invent a fantasy culture, start simple, with a few stereotypes that everyone else in the world can be expected to know. Make sure at least one of them is an interesting constraint on behaviour. Then add in depth that people can get to know gradually. When you’re using the culture as a plot device, make sure to stick to the simple stereotypes or whatever other information you’ve directly given your reader. If you do this, you’ll develop rich cultures that drive interesting conflicts and you’ll be able to use cultural rules to consistently resolve conflict in a way that will feel satisfying to your readers.

Literature, Politics

Book Review: Enlightenment 2.0

Posted on by Zach

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an academic over the age of forty must be prepared to write a book talking about how everything is going to hell these days. Despite literally no time in history featuring fewer people dying of malaria, dying in childbirth, dying of vaccine preventable illnesses, etc., it is very much in vogue to criticise the foibles of modern life. Heck, Ross Douthat makes a full-time job out of it over at the New York Times.

Enlightenment 2.0 is Canadian academic Joseph Heath’s contribution to the genre. If the name sounds familiar, it’s probably because I’ve referenced him a bunch of times on this blog. I’m very much a fan of his book Filthy Lucre and his shared blog, induecourse.ca. Because of this, I decided to give his book (and only his book) decrying the modern age a try.

Enlightenment 2.0 follows the old Buddhist pattern. It claims that (1) there are problems with contemporary politics, (2) these problems arise because politics has become hostile to reason, (3) there is a way to have a second Enlightenment restore politics to how they were when they were ruled by reason, and (4) that way is to build politics from the ground up that encourage reason.

Now if you’re like me, you groaned when you read the bit about “restoring” politics to some better past state. My position has long been that there was never any shining age of politics where reason reigned supreme over partisanship. Take American politics. They became partisan quickly after independence, occasionally featured duels, and resulted in a civil war before the Republic even turned 100. America has had periods of low polarization, but these seem more incidental and accidental than the true baseline.

(Canada’s past is scarcely less storied; in 1826, a mob of Tories smashed proto-Liberal William Lyon Mackenzie’s printing press and threw the type into Lake Ontario. Tory magistrates refused to press charges. These disputes eventually spiralled into an abortive rebellion and many years of tense political stand-offs.)

What really sets Heath apart is that he bothers to collect theoretical and practical support for a decline in reason. He’s the first person I’ve ever seen explain how reason could retreat from politics even as violence becomes less common and society becomes more complex.

His explanation goes like this: imagine that once every ten years politicians come up with an idea that helps them get elected by short-circuiting reason and appealing to baser instincts. It gets copied and used by everyone and eventually becomes just another part of campaigning. Over a hundred and fifty years, all of this adds up to a political environment that is specifically designed to jump past reason to baser instincts as soon as possible. It’s an environment that is actively hostile to reason.

We have some evidence of a similar process occurring in advertising. If you ever look at an old ad, you’ll see people trying to convince you that their product is the best. Modern readers will probably note a lot of “mistakes” in old ads. For example, they often admit to flaws in the general class of product they’re selling. They always talk about how their product fixes these flaws, but we now know that talking up the negative can leave people with negative affect. Advertising rarely mentions flaws these days.

Can you imagine an ad like this being printed today? Image credit: “Thoth God of Knowledge” on Flickr.

Modern ads are much more likely to try and associate a product with an image, mood, or imagined future life. Cleaning products go with happy families and spotless houses. Cars with excitement or attractive potential mates.

Look at this Rolex ad. It screams: “This man is successful! Wear a Rolex so everyone knows you’re that successful/so that you become that successful.” The goal is to get people to believe that Rolex=success. Rolex’s marketing is so successful that Rolex’s watches are seen as a status marker and luxury good the world over, even though quite frankly they’re kind of ugly. Image copyright Rolex, used here for purposes of criticism.

In Heath’s view, one negative consequence of globalism is that all of the most un-reasonable inventions from around the world get to flourish everywhere and accumulate, in the same way that globalism has allowed all of the worst diseases of the world to flourish.

Heath paints a picture of reason in the modern world under siege in all realms, not just the political. In addition to the aforementioned advertising, Facebook tries to drag you in and keep you there forever. “Free to play” games want to take you for everything you’re worth and employ psychologists to figure out how. Detergent companies wreck your laundry machine by making it as hard as possible to measure the right amount of fabric softener.

(Seriously, have you ever tried to read the lines on the inside of a detergent cap? Everything, from the dark plastic to small font to multiple lines to the wideness of the cap is designed to make it hard to pour the correct amount of liquid for a single load.)

All of this would be worrying enough, but Heath identifies two more trends that represent a threat to a politics of reason.

First is the rise of Common Sense Conservatism. As Heath defines it, Common Sense Conservatism is the political ideology that elevates “common sense” to the principle political decision-making heuristic. “Getting government out of the way of businesses”, “tightening our belts when times are tight”, and “if we don’t burn oil someone else will” are some of the slogans of the movement.

This is a problem because common sense is ill-suited to our current level of civilizational complexity. Political economy is far too complicated to be managed by analogy to a family budget. Successful justice policy requires setting aside retributive instincts and acknowledging just how weak a force deterrence is. International trade is… I’ve read one newspaper article that correctly understood international trade this year and it was written by Paul fucking Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist.

As the built environment (Heath defines this as all the technology that now surrounds us) becomes more hostile to reason (think: detergent caps everywhere) and further from what our brains intuitively expect, common sense will give us worse and worse answers to our problems.

That’s not even to talk about coordination problems. Common Sense Conservatism seems inextricably tied to unilateralism and a competitive attitude (after all, it’s “common sense” that if someone else is winning, you must be losing). With many of the hardest problems facing us (global warming, AI, etc.) being co-ordination problems, Common Sense Conservatism specifically degrades the capacity of our political systems to respond to them.

The other problem is Jonathon Haidt. In practical terms, Haidt is much less of a problem than our increasingly hostile technology or the rise of Common Sense Conservatism, but he has spearheaded a potent theoretical attack on reason.

As I mentioned in my review of Haidt’s most important book, The Righteous Mind, Heath describes Haidt’s view of reason as “essentially confabulatory”. The driving point in The Righteous Mind is that a lot of what we consider to be “reason” is in fact post-facto justifications for our actions. Haidt describes his view as if we’re the riders on an elephant. We may think that we’re driving, but we’re actually the junior partner to our vastly more powerful unconscious.

(I’d like to point out that the case for elephant supremacy has collapsed somewhat over the past five years, as psychology increasingly grapples with its replication crisis; many studies Haidt relied upon are now retracted or under suspicion.)

Heath thought (even before some of Haidt’s evidence went the way of the dodo) that this was an incomplete picture and this disagreement forms much of the basis for recommendations made in Enlightenment 2.0.

Heath proposes a modification to the elephant/rider analogy. He’s willing to buy that our conscious mind has trouble resisting our unconscious desires, but he points out that our conscious mind is actually quite good (with a bit of practise) at setting us up so that we don’t have to deal with unconscious desires we don’t want. He likens this to hopping off the elephant, setting up a roadblock, then hopping back, secure in the knowledge that the elephant will have no choice but to go the way we’ve picked out for it.

A practical example: you know how it can be very hard to resist eating a cookie once you have a packet of them in your room? Well, you can actually make it much easier to resist the cookie if you put it somewhere inconveniently far from where you spend most of your time. You can resist it even better if you don’t buy it in the first place. Very few people are willing to drive to the store just because they have a craving for some sugar.

If you have a sweet tooth, it might be hard to resist buying those cookies. But Heath points out that there’s a solution even for this. One of our most powerful resources is each other. If you have trouble not buying unhealthy snacks at the last second, you can go shopping with a friend. You pick out groceries for her from her list and she’ll do the same for you. Since you’re going to be paying with each other’s money and giving everything over to each other at the end, you have no reason to buy sweets. Do this and you don’t have to spend all week trying not eat the cookie.

Heath believes the difference between people who are always productive and always distracted has far more to do with the environments they’ve built than anything innate. This feels at least half-true to me; I know I’m much less able to get things done when I don’t have my whole elaborate productivity system, or when it’s too easy for me to access the news or Facebook. In fact, I saw a dramatic improvement in my productivity – and a dramatic decrease in the amount of time I spent on Facebook – when I set up my computer to block it for a day after I spend fifteen minutes on it, uninstalled it from my phone, and made sure to keep it logged out on my phone’s browser.

(It’s trivially easy for me to circumvent any of these blocks; it takes about fifteen seconds. But that fifteen seconds is to enough to make quickly opening up a tab and being distracted unappealing.)

This all loops back to talking about how the current built environment is hostile to reason – as well as a host of other things that we might like to be better at.

Take lack of sleep. Before reading Enlightenment 2.0, I hadn’t realized just how much of a modern problem this is. During Heath’s childhood, TVs turned off at midnight, everything closed by midnight, and there were no videogames or cell phones or computers. Post-midnight, you could… read? Heath points out that this tends to put people to sleep anyway. Spend time with people already at your house? How often did that happen? You certainly couldn’t call someone and invite them over, because calling people after midnight doesn’t discriminate between those awake and those asleep. Calling a land line after midnight is still reserved for emergencies. Texting people after midnight is much less intrusive and therefore much politer.

Without all the options modern life gives, there wasn’t a whole lot of things that really could keep you up all night. Heath admits to being much worse at sleeping now. Video games and online news conspire to often keep him up later than he would like. Heath is a professor and the author of several books, which means he’s a probably a very self-disciplined person. If he can’t even ignore news and video games and Twitter in favour of a good night’s sleep, what chance do most people have?

Society has changed in the forty some odd years of his life in a way that has led to more freedom, but an unfortunate side effect of freedom is that it often includes the freedom to mess up our lives in ways that, if we were choosing soberly, we wouldn’t choose. I don’t know anyone who starts an evening with “tonight, I’m going to stay up late enough to make me miserable tomorrow”. And yet technology and society conspire to make it all too easy to do this over the feeble objections of our better judgement.

It’s probably too late to put this genie back in its bottle (even if we wanted to). But Heath contends it isn’t too late to put reason back into politics.

Returning reason to politics, to Heath, means building up social and procedural frameworks like the sort that would help people avoid staying up all night or wasting the weekend on social media. In means setting up our politics so that contemplation and co-operation isn’t discouraged and so that it is very hard to appeal to people’s base nature.

Part of this is as simple as slowing down politics. When politicians don’t have time to read what they’re voting on, partisanship and fear drive what they vote for. When they instead have time to read and comprehend legislation (and even better, their constituents have time to understand it and tell their representatives what they think), it is harder to pass bad bills.

When negative political advertisements are banned or limited (perhaps with a total restriction on election spending), fewer people become disillusioned with politics and fewer people use cynicism as an excuse to give politicians carte blanche to govern badly. When Question Period in parliament isn’t filmed, there’s less incentive to volley zingers and talking points back and forth.

One question Heath doesn’t really engage with: just how far is it okay to go to ensure reason has a place in politics? Enlightenment 2.0 never goes out and says “we need a political system that makes it harder for idiots to vote”, but there’s a definite undercurrent of that in the latter parts. I’m also reminded of Andrew Potter’s opposition to referendums and open party primaries. Both of these political technologies give more people a voice in how the country is run, but do tend to lead to instability or worse decisions than more insular processes (like representative parliaments and closed primaries).

Basically, it seems like if we’re aiming for more reasonable politics, then something might have to give on the democracy front. There are a lot of people who aren’t particularly interested in voting with anything more than their base instincts. Furthermore, given that a large chunk of the right has more-or-less explicitly abandoned “reason” in favour of “common sense”, aiming to increase the amount of “reason” in politics certainly isn’t politically neutral.

(I should also mention that many people on the left only care about empiricism and reason when it comes to global warming and are quite happy to pander to feelings on topics like vaccines or rent control. From my personal vantage point, it looks like left-wing political parties have fallen less under the sway of anti-rationalism, but your mileage may vary.)

Perhaps there’s a coalition of people in the centre, scared of the excess of the extreme left and the extreme right that might feel motivated to change our political system to make it more amiable to reason. But this still leaves a nasty taste in my mouth. It still feels like cynical power politics.

While there might not be answers in Enlightenment 2.0 (or elsewhere), I am heartened that this is a question that Heath is at least still trying to engage with.

Enlightenment 2.0 is going to be one of those books that, on a fundamental level, changes how I look at politics and society. I had an inkling that shaping my environment was important and I knew that different political systems lead to different strategies and outcomes. But the effect of Enlightenment 2.0 was to make me so much more aware of this. Whenever I see Google rolling out a new product, I now think about how it’s designed to take advantage of us (or not!). Whenever someone suggests a political reform, I first think about the type of discourse and politics it will promote and which groups and ideologies that will benefit.

(This is why I’m not too sad about Trudeau’s broken electoral reform promises. Mixed member proportional elections actually encourage fragmentation and give extremists an incentive to be loud. First past the post gives parties a strong incentive to squash their extremist wings and I value this in society.)

For that (as well as its truly excellent overview of all the weird ways our brains evolved), I heartily recommend Enlightenment 2.0.

1
Literature, Model

Does Amateurish Writing Exist

Posted on by Zach

[Warning: Spoilers for Too Like the Lightning]

What marks writing as amateurish (and whether “amateurish” or “low-brow” works are worthy of awards) has been a topic of contention in the science fiction and fantasy community for the past few years, with the rise of Hugo slates and the various forms of “puppies“.

I’m not talking about the learning works of genuine amateurs. These aren’t stories that use big words for the sake of sounding smart (and at the cost of slowing down the stories), or over the top fanfiction-esque rip-offs of more established works (well, at least not since the Wheel of Time nomination in 2014). I’m talking about that subtler thing, the feeling that bubbles up from the deepest recesses of your brain and says “this story wasn’t written as well as it could be”.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because about ¾ of the way through Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer, I started to feel myself put off [1]. And the only explanation I had for this was the word “amateurish” – which popped into my head devoid of any reason. This post is an attempt to unpack what that means (for me) and how I think it has influenced some of the genuine disagreements around rewarding authors in science fiction and fantasy [2]. Your tastes might be calibrated differently and if you disagree with my analysis, I’d like to hear about it.

Now, there are times when you know something is amateurish and that’s okay. No one should be surprised that John Ringo’s Paladin of Shadows series, books that he explicitly wrote for himself are parsed by most people as pretty amateurish. When pieces aren’t written explicitly for the author only, I expect some consideration of the audience. Ideally the writer should be having fun too, but if they’re writing for publication, they have to be writing to an audience. This doesn’t mean that they must write exactly what people tell them they want. People can be a terrible judge of what they want!

This also doesn’t necessarily imply pandering. People like to be challenged. If you look at the most popular books of the last decade on Goodreads, few of them could be described as pandering. I’m familiar with two of the top three books there and both of them kill off a fan favourite character. People understand that life involves struggle. Lois McMaster Bujold – who has won more Hugo awards for best novel than any living author – once said she generated plots by considering “what’s the worst possible thing I can do to these people?” The results of this method speak for themselves.

Meditating on my reaction to books like Paladin of Shadows in light of my experiences with Too Like The Lightning is what led me to believe that the more technically proficient “amateurish” books are those that lose sight of what the audience will enjoy and follow just what the author enjoys. This may involve a character that the author heavily identifies with – the Marty Stu or Mary Sue phenomena – who is lovingly described overcoming obstacles and generally being “awesome” but doesn’t “earn” any of this. It may also involve gratuitous sex, violence, engineering details, gun details, political monologuing (I’m looking at you, Atlas Shrugged), or tangents about constitutional history (this is how most of the fiction I write manages to become unreadable).

I realized this when I was reading Too Like the Lightning. I loved the world building and I found the characters interesting. But (spoilers!) when it turned out that all of the politicians were literally in bed with each other or when the murders the protagonist carried out were described in grisly, unrepentant detail, I found myself liking the book a lot less. This is – I think – what spurred the label amateurish in my head.

I think this is because (in my estimation), there aren’t a lot of people who actually want to read about brutal torture-execution or literally incestuous politics. It’s not (I think) that I’m prudish. It seemed like some of the scenes were written to be deliberately off-putting. And I understand that this might be part of the theme of the work and I understand that these scenes were probably necessary for the author’s creative vision. But they didn’t work for me and they seemed like a thing that wouldn’t work for a lot of people that I know. They were discordant and jarring. They weren’t pulled off as well as they would have had to be to keep me engaged as a reader.

I wonder if a similar process is what caused the changes that the Sad Puppies are now lamenting at the Hugo Awards. To many readers, the sexualized violence or sexual violence that can find its way into science fiction and fantasy books (I’d like to again mention Paladin of Shadows) is incredibly off-putting. I find it incredibly off-putting. Books that incorporate a lot of this feel like they’re ignoring the chunk of audience that is me and my friends and it’s hard while reading them for me not to feel that the writers are fairly amateurish. I normally prefer works that meditate on the causes and uses of violence when they incorporate it – I’d put N.K. Jemisin’s truly excellent Broken Earth series in this category – and it seems like readers who think this way are starting to dominate the Hugos.

For the people who previously had their choices picked year after year, this (as well as all the thinkpieces explaining why their favourite books are garbage) feels like an attack. Add to this the fact that some of the books that started winning had a more literary bent and you have some fans of the genre believing that the Hugos are going to amateurs who are just cruising to victory by alluding to famous literary works. These readers look suspiciously on crowds who tell them they’re terrible if they don’t like books that are less focused on the action and excitement they normally read for. I can see why that’s a hard sell, even though I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the last few Hugo winners [3].

There’s obviously an inferential gap here, if everyone can feel angry about the crappy writing everyone else likes. For my part, I’ll probably be using “amateurish” only to describe books that are technically deficient. For books that are genuinely well written but seem to focus more on what the author wants than (on what I think) their likely audience wants, well, I won’t have a snappy term, I’ll just have to explain it like that.

Footnotes

[1] A disclaimer: the work of a critic is always easier than that of a creator. I’m going to be criticizing writing that’s better than my own here, which is always a risk. Think of me not as someone criticizing from on high, but frantically taking notes right before a test I hope to barely pass. ^

[2] I want to separate the Sad Puppies, who I view as people sad that action-packed books were being passed over in favour of more literary ones from the Rabid Puppies, who just wanted to burn everything to the ground. I’m not going to make any excuses for the Rabid Puppies. ^

[3] As much as I can find some science fiction and fantasy too full of violence for my tastes, I’ve also had little to complain about in the past, because my favourite author, Lois McMaster Bujold, has been reliably winning Hugo awards since before I was born. I’m not sure why there was never a backlash around her books. Perhaps it’s because they’re still reliably space opera, so class distinctions around how “literary” a work is don’t come up when Bujold wins. ^

Biology, Ethics, Literature, Philosophy

Book Review: The Righteous Mind

Posted on by Zach

I – Summary

The Righteous Mind follows an argument structure I learned in high school debate club. It tells you what it’s going to tell you, it tells you it, then it reminds you what it told you. This made it a really easy read and a welcome break from The Origins of Totalitarianism, the other book I’ve been reading. Practically the very first part of The Righteous Mind proper (after the foreword) is an introduction to its first metaphor.

Imagine an elephant and a rider. They have travelled together since their birth and move as one. The elephant doesn’t say much (it’s an elephant), but the rider is very vocal – for example, she’s quick to apologize and explain away any damage the elephant might do. A casual observer might think the rider is in charge, because she is so much cleverer and more talkative, but that casual observer would be wrong. The rider is the press secretary for the elephant. She explains its action, but it is much bigger and stronger than her. It’s the one who is ultimately calling the shots. Sometimes she might convince it one way or the other, but in general, she’s buffeted along by it, stuck riding wherever it goes.

She wouldn’t agree with that last part though. She doesn’t want to admit that she’s not in charge, so she hides the fact that she’s mainly a press secretary even from herself. As soon as the elephant begins to move, she is already inventing a reason why it was her idea all along.

This is how Haidt views human cognition and decision making. In common terms, the elephant is our unconscious mind and the rider our consciousness. In Kahneman’s terms, the elephant is our System 1 and the rider our System 2. We may make some decisions consciously, but many of them are made below the level of our thinking.

Haidt illustrates this with an amusing anecdote. His wife asks him why he didn’t finish some dishes he’d been doing and he immediately weaves a story of their crying baby and barking incontinent dog preventing him. Only because he had his book draft open on his computer did he realize that these were lies… or rather, a creative and overly flattering version of the truth.

The baby did indeed cry and the dog indeed bark, but neither of these prevented him from doing the dishes. The cacophany happened well before that. He’d been distracted by something else, something less sympathetic. But his rider, his “internal press secretary” immediately came up with an excuse and told it, without any conscious input or intent to deceive.

We all tell these sorts of flattering lies reflexively. They take the form of slight, harmless embellishments to make our stories more flattering or interesting, or our apologies more sympathetic.

The key insight here isn’t that we’re all compulsive liars. It’s that the “I” that we like to think exists to run our life doesn’t, really. Sometimes we make decisions, especially ones the elephant doesn’t think it can handle (high stakes apologies anyone?), but normally decisions happen before we even think about them. From the perspective of Haidt, “I”, is really “we”, the elephant and its rider. And we need to be careful to give the elephant its due, even though it’s quiet.

Haidt devotes a lot of pages to an impassioned criticism of moral rationalism, the belief that morality is best understood and attained by thinking very hard about it. He explicitly mentions that to make this more engaging, he wraps it up in his own story of entering the field of moral psychology.

He starts his journey with Kohlberg, who published a famous account of the stages of moral reasoning, stages that culminate in rationally building a model of justice. This paradigm took the world of moral psychology by storm and reinforced the view (dating in Western civilization to the times of the Greeks) that right thought had to proceed right action.

Haidt was initially enamoured with Kohlberg’s taxonomy. But reading ethnographies and doing research in other countries began to make him suspect things weren’t as simple as Kohlberg thought. Haidt and others found that moral intuitions and responses to dilemmas differed by country. In particular, WEIRD people (people from countries that were Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Developed and most especially the most educated people in those countries) were very much able to tamp down feelings of disgust in moral problems, in a way that seemed far from universal.

For example, if asked if it was wrong for a family to eat their dog if it was killed by a car (and the alternative was burying it), students would say something along the lines of “well, I wouldn’t, but it’s gross, not wrong”. Participants recruited at a nearby McDonalds gave a rather different answer: “of course it’s wrong, why are you even asking”. WEIRD students at prestigious universities may have been working towards a rational, justice-focused explanation for morality, but Haidt found no evidence that this process (or even a focus on “justice”) was as universal as Kohlberg claimed.

That’s not to say that WEIRD students had no disgust response. In fact, trying to activate it gave even more interesting results. When asked to justify answers where disgust overpowered students sense of “well as long as no one was hurt” (e.g. consensual adult sibling incest with no chance of children), Haidt observed that people would throw up a variety of weak excuses, often before they had a chance to think the problem through. When confronted by the weakness of their arguments, they’d go speechless.

This made Haidt suspect that two entirely separate processes were going on. There was a fast one for deciding and a slower another for explanation. Furthermore, the slower process was often left holding the bag for the faster one. Intuitions would provide an answer, then the subject would have to explain it, no matter how logically indefensible it was.

Haidt began to believe that Kohlberg had only keyed in on the second, slower process, “the talking of the rider” in metaphor-speak. From this point of view, Kohlberg wasn’t measuring moral sophistication. He was instead measuring how fluidly people could explain their often less than logical moral intuitions.

There were two final nails in the coffin of ethical rationalism for Haidt. First, he learned of a type of brain injury that separated people from their moral intuitions (or as the rationalists might call them “passions”). Contrary to the rationalist expectation, these people’s lives went to hell, as they alienated everyone they knew, got fired from their jobs, and in general proved the unsuitability of pure reason for making many types of decisions. This is obviously the opposite of what rationalists predicted would happen.

Second, he saw research that suggested that in practical measures (like missing library books), moral philosophers were no more moral than other philosophy professors.

Abandoning rationalism brought Haidt to a sentimentalist approach to ethics. In this view, ethics stemmed from feelings about how the world ought to be. These feelings are innate, but not immutable. Haidt describes people as “prewired”, not “hardwired”. You might be “prewired” to have a strong loyalty foundation, but a series of betrayals and let downs early in life might convince you that loyalty is just a lie, told to control idealists.

Haidt also believes that our elephants are uniquely susceptible to being convinced by other people in face to face discussion. He views the mechanism here as empathy at least as much as logic. People that we trust and respect can point out our weak arguments, with our respect for them and positive feelings towards them being the main motive force for us listening to these criticisms. The metaphor with elephants kind of breaks down here, but this does seem to better describe the world as it is, so I’ll allow it.

Because of this, Haidt would admit that rationalism does have some purpose in moral reasoning, but he thinks it is ancillary and mainly used to convince other people. I’m not sure how testable making evolutionary conclusions about this is, but it does seem plausible for there to be selection pressure to make us really good at explaining ourselves and convincing others of our point of view.

As Haidt took this into account and began to survey peoples’ moral instincts, he saw that the ways in which responses differed by country and class were actually highly repeatable and seemed to gesture at underlying categories of people. After analyzing many, many survey responses, he and his collaborators came up with five (later six) moral “modules” that people have. Each moral module looks for violations of a specific class of ethical rules.

Haidt likens these modules to our taste-buds. The six moral tastes are the central metaphor of the second section of the book.

Not everyone has these taste-buds/modules in equal proportion. Looking at commonalities among respondents, Haidt found that the WEIRDer someone was, the less likely they were to have certain modules. Conservatives tended to have all modules in a fairly equal proportion, liberals tended to be lacking three. Libertarians were lacking a whopping four, which might explain why everyone tends to believe they’re the worst.

The six moral foundations are:

Care/Harm

This is the moral foundation that makes us care about suffering and pain in others. Haidt speculates that it originally evolved in order to ensure that children (which are an enormous investment of resources for mammals and doubly so for us) got properly cared for. It was originally triggered only by the suffering or distress of our own children, but can now be triggered by anyone being hurt, as well as cute cat videos or baby seals.

An expanding set of triggers seems to be a common theme for these. I’ve personally speculated that this would perhaps be observed if the brain was wired for minimizing negative predictive error (i.e. not mistaking a scene in which there is a lion for a scene without a lion), rather than positive predictive error (i.e. not mistaking a scene without a lion for a scene with a lion). If you minimize positive predictive error, you’ll never be frightened by a shadow, but you might get eaten by a lion.

Fairness/Cheating

This is the moral foundation that makes us want everyone to do their fair share and makes us want to punish tax evaders or welfare cheats (depending on our political orientation). The evolutionary story given for this one is that it evolved to allow us to reap the benefits of two-way partnerships; it was an incentive against defecting.

Loyalty/Betrayal

This is the foundation that makes us rally around our politicians, community leaders, and sports teams, as well as the foundation that makes some people care more about people from their country than people in general. Haidt’s evolutionary explanation for this one is that it was supposed to ensure coherent groups.

Authority/Subversion

This is the moral foundation that makes people obey their boss without talking back or avoid calling their parents by the first names. It supposedly evolved to allow us to forge beneficial relationships within hierarchies. Basically, it may have once been very useful to have people believe and obey their elders without question, (like e.g. when the elders say “don’t drink that water, it’s poisoned” no one does and this story can be passed down and keep people safe, without someone having to die every few years to prove that the water is indeed poisoned).

Sanctity/Degradation

This is the moral foundation that makes people on the right leery of pre-marital sex and people on the left leery of “chemicals”. It shows up whenever we view our bodies as more than just our bodies and the world as more than just a collection of things, as well as whenever we feel that something makes us “spiritually” dirty.

The very plausible explanation for this one is that it evolved in response to the omnivore’s dilemma: how do we balance the desire for novel food sources with the risk they might poison us? We do it by avoiding anything that looks diseased or rotted. This became a moral foundation as we slowly began applying it to stuff beyond food – like other people. Historically, the sanctity moral framework was probably responsible for the despised status of lepers.

Liberty/Oppression

This moral foundation is always in tension with Authority/Subversion. It’s the foundation that makes us want to band together against and cast down anyone who is aggrandizing themselves or using their power to mistreat another.

Haidt suggests that this evolved to allow us to band together against “alpha males” and check their power. In his original surveys, it was part of Fairness/Cheating, but he found that separating it gave him much more resolving power between liberals and conservatives.

–

Of these six foundations, Haidt found that libertarians only had an appreciable amount of Liberty/Oppression and Fairness/Cheating and of these two, Liberty/Oppression was by far the stronger. While the other foundations did exist, they were mostly inactive and only showed up under extreme duress. For liberals, he found that they had Care/Harm, Liberty/Oppression, and Fairness/Cheating (in that order).

Conservatives in Haidt’s survey had all six moral foundations, like I said above. Care/Harm was their strongest foundation, but by having appreciable amounts of Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation, they would occasionally overrule Care/Harm in favour of one or another of these foundations.

Haidt uses these moral foundations to give an account of the “improbable” coalition between libertarians and social conservatives that closely matches the best ones to come out of political science. Basically, liberals and libertarians are descended (ideologically, if not filially) from those who embraced the enlightenment and the liberty it brought. About a hundred years ago (depending on the chronology and the country), the descendants of the enlightenment had a great schism, with some continuing to view the government as the most important threat to liberty (libertarians) and others viewing corporations as the more pressing threat (liberals). Liberals took over many auspices of the government and have been trying to use it to guarantee their version of liberty (with mixed results and many reversals) ever since.

Conservatives do not support this project of remaking society from the top down via the government. They believe that liberals want to change too many things, too quickly. Conservatives aren’t opposed to the government qua government. In fact, they’d be very congenial to a government that shared their values. But they are very hostile to a liberal, activist government (which is rightly or wrongly how conservatives view the governments of most western nations) and so team up with libertarians in the hopes of dismantling it.

This section, which characterized certain political views as stemming from “deficiencies” in certain “moral modules –, in a way that is probably hereditary – made me pause and wonder if this is a dangerous book. I’m reminded of Hannah Arendt talking about “tolerance” for Jews committing treason in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

It is an attraction to murder and treason which hides behind such perverted tolerance, for in a moment it can switch to a decision to liquidate not only all actual criminals but all who are “racially” predestined to commit certain crimes. Such changes take place whenever the legal and political machine is not separated from society so that social standards can penetrate into it and become political and legal rules. The seeming broad-mindedness that equates crime and vice, if allowed to establish its own code of law, will invariably prove more cruel and inhuman than laws, no matter how severe, which respect and recognize man’s independent responsibility for his behavior.

That said, it is possible for inconvenient or dangerous things to be true and their inconvenience or danger has no bearing on their truth. If Haidt saw his writings being used to justify or promote violence, he’d have a moral responsibility to decry the perpetrators. Accepting that sort of moral responsibility is, I believe, part of the responsibility that scientists who deal with sensitive topics must accept. I do not believe that this responsibility precludes publishing. I firmly believe that only right information can lead to right action, so I am on the whole grateful for Haidt’s taxonomy.

The similarities between liberals and libertarians extend beyond ethics. Both have more openness to experience and less of a threat response than conservatives. This explains why socially, liberals and libertarians have much more in common than liberals and conservatives.

Moral foundation theory gave me a vocabulary for some of the political writing I was doing last year. After the Conservative (Party of Canada) Leadership Convention, I talked about social conservative legislation as a way to help bind people to collective morality. I also talked about how holding other values very strongly and your values not at all can make people look diametrically opposed to you.

The third and final section of The Righteous Mind further focuses on political tribes. Its central metaphor is that humans are “90% chimp, 10% bee”. It’s central purpose is an attempt to show how humans might have been subject to group selection and how our groupishness is important to our morality.

Haidt claims that group selection is heresy in evolutionary biology (beyond hive insects). I don’t have the evolutionary biology background to say if this is true or not, although this does match how I’ve seen it talked about online among scientifically literate authors, so I’m inclined to believe him.

Haidt walks through the arguments against group selection and shows how they are largely sensible. It is indeed ridiculous to believe that genes for altruism could be preserved in most cases. Imagine a gene that would make deer more likely to sacrifice itself for the good of the herd if it seemed that was the only way to protect the herd’s young. This gene might help more deer in the herd attain adulthood, but it would also lead to any deer who had it having fewer children. There’s certainly an advantage to the herd if some members have this gene, but there’s no advantage to the carriers and a lot of advantage to every deer in the herd who doesn’t carry it. Free-riders will outcompete sacrificers and the selfless gene will get culled from the herd.

But humans aren’t deer. We can be selfish, yes, but we often aren’t and the ways we aren’t can’t be simply explained by greedy reciprocal altruism. If you’ve ever taken some time out of your day to help a lost tourist, congratulations, you’ve been altruistic without expecting anything in return. That people regularly do take time out of their days to help lost tourists suggests there might be something going on beyond reciprocal altruism.

Humans, unlike deer, have the resources and ability to punish free riders. We expect everyone to pitch in and might exile anyone who doesn’t. When humans began to form larger and larger societies, it makes sense that the societies who could better coordinate selfless behaviour would do better than those that couldn’t. And this isn’t just in terms of military cohesion (as the evolutionary biologist Lesley Newson had to point out to Haidt). A whole bunch of little selfless acts ­– sharing food, babysitting, teaching – can make a society more efficient than its neighbours at “turning resources into offspring”.

A human within the framework of society is much more capable than a human outside of it. I am only able to write this and share it widely because a whole bunch of people did the grunt work of making the laptop I’m typing it on, growing the food I eat, maintaining our communication lines, etc. If I was stuck with only my own resources, I’d be carving this into the sand (or more likely, already eaten by wolves).

Therefore, it isn’t unreasonable to expect that the more successful and interdependent a society could become, the more it would be able to outcompete, whether directly or indirectly its nearby rivals and so increase the proportion of its conditionally selfless genes in the human gene pool.

Conditional selflessness is a better description of the sorts of altruism we see in humans. It’s not purely reciprocal as Dawkins might claim, but it isn’t boundless either. It’s mostly reserved for people we view as similar to us. This doesn’t need to mean racially or religiously. In my experience, a bond as simple as doing the same sport is enough to get people to readily volunteer their time for projects like digging out and repairing a cracked foundation.

The switch from selfishness to selflessly helping out our teams is called “the hive switch” by Haidt. He devotes a lot of time to exploring how we can flip it and the benefits of flipping it. I agree with him that many of the happiest and most profound moments of anyone’s life come when the switch has been activated and they’re working as part of a team.

The last few chapters are an exploration of how individualism can undermine the hive switch and several mistakes liberals make in their zeal to overturn all hierarchies. Haidt believes that societies have both social capital (the bounds of trust between people) and moral capital (the society’s ability to bind people to collective values) and worries that liberal individualism can undermine these to the point where people will be overall worse off. I’ll talk more about moral capital later in the review.

II – On Shaky Foundations

Anyone who reads The Righteous Mind might quickly realize that I left a lot of the book out of my review. There was a whole bunch of supporting evidence about how liberals and conservatives “really are” or how they differ that I have deliberately omitted.

You may have heard that psychology is currently in the midst of a “replication crisis“. Much (I’d crudely estimate somewhere between 25% and 50%) of the supporting evidence in this book has been a victim of this crisis.

Here’s what the summary of Chapter 3 looks like with the offending evidence removed:

Pictured: Page 82 of my edition of The Righteous Mind, after some “minor” corrections. Text is © 2012 Jonathon Haidt. Used here for purposes of commentary and criticism.

 

Here’s an incomplete list of claims that didn’t replicate:

  • IAT tests show that we can have unconscious prejudices that affect how we make social and political judgements (1, 2, 3 critiques/failed replications). Used to buttress the elephant/rider theory of moral decisions.
  • Disgusting smells can make us more judgemental (failed replication source). Used as evidence that moral reasoning can be explained sometimes by external factors, is much less rational than we’d like to believe.
  • Babies prefer a nice puppet over a mean one, even when pre-verbal and probably lacking the context to understand what is going on (failed replication source). Used as further proof for how we are “prewired” for certain moral instincts.
  • People from Asian societies are better able to do relative geometry and less able to absolute geometry than westerners (failed replication source). This was used to make the individualistic morality of westerners seem inherent.
  • The “Lady Macbeth Effect” showed a strong relationship between physical and moral feelings of “cleanliness” (failed replication source). Used to further strengthen the elephant/rider analogy.

The proper attitude with which to view psychology studies these days is extreme scepticism. There are a series of bad incentives (it’s harder and less prestigious to publish negative findings, publishing is necessary to advance in your career) that have led to scientists in psychology (and other fields) to inadvertently and advertently publish false results. In any field in which you expect true discoveries to be rare (and I think “interesting and counter-intuitive things about the human brain fits that bill), you shouldn’t allow any individual study to influence you very much. For a full breakdown of how this can happen even when scientists check for statistical significance, I recommend reading “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” (Ioannidis 2005).

Moral foundations theory appears to have escaped the replication crisis mostly unscathed, (as have Tverskey and Kahneman’s work on heuristics, something that made me more comfortable including the elephant/rider analogy). I think this is because moral foundations theory is primarily a descriptive theory. It grew out of a large volume of survey responses and represents clusters in those responses. It makes little in the way of concrete predictions about the world. It’s possible to quibble with the way Haidt and his collaborators drew the category boundaries. But given the sheer volume of responses they received – and the fact that they based their results not just on WEIRD individuals – it’s hard to disbelieve that they haven’t come up with a reasonable clustering of the possibility space of human values.

I will say that stripped of much of its ancillary evidence, Haidt’s attack on rationalism lost a lot of its lustre. It’s one thing to believe morality is mostly unconscious when you think that washing your hands or smelling trash can change how moral you act. It’s quite another when you know those studies were fatally flawed. The replication crisis fueled my inability to truly believe Haidt’s critique of rationality. This disbelief in turn became one of the two driving forces in my reaction to this book.

Haidt’s moral relativism around patriarchal cultures was the other.

III – Less and Less WEIRD

It’s good that Haidt looked at a variety of cultures. This is a thing few psychologists do. There’s historically been an alarming tendency to run studies on western undergraduate students, then declare “this is how people are”. This would be fine if western undergraduates were representative of people more generally, but I think that assumption was on shaky foundations even before moral foundation theory showed that morally, at least, it was entirely false.

Haidt even did some of this field work himself. He visited South America and India to run studies. In fact, he mentioned that this field work was one of the key things that made him question the validity of western individualistic morality and wary of morality that didn’t include the sanctity, loyalty, and authority foundations.

His willingness to get outside of his bubble and to learn from others is laudable.

But.

There is one key way in which Haidt never left his bubble, a way which makes me inherently suspicious of all of his defences of the sanctity, authority, and loyalty moral foundations. Here’s him recounting his trip to India. Can you spot the fatal omission?

I was told to be stricter with my servants, and to stop thanking them for serving me. I watched people bathe in and cook with visibly polluted water that was held to be sacred. In short, I was immersed in a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society, and I was committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine.

It only took a few weeks for my dissonance to disappear, not because I was a natural anthropologist but because the normal human capacity for empathy kicked in. I liked these people who were hosting me, helping me, and teaching me. Wherever I went, people were kind to me. And when you’re grateful to people, it’s easier to adopt their perspective. My elephant leaned toward them, which made my rider search for moral arguments in their defense. Rather than automatically rejecting the men as sexist oppressors and pitying the women, children, and servants as helpless victims, I began to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent. In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, protecting subordinates, and fulfilling one’s role-based duties were more important.

Haidt tried out other moral systems, sure, but he tried them out from the top. Lois McMaster Bujold once had a character quip: “egalitarians adjust to aristocracies just fine, as long as they get to be the aristocrats”. I would suggest that liberals likewise find the authority framework all fine and dandy, as long as they have the authority.

Would Haidt have been able to find anything worth salvaging in the authority framework if he’d instead been a female researcher, who found herself ignored, denigrated, and sexually harassed on her research trip abroad?

It’s frustrating when Haidt is lecturing liberals on their “deficient” moral framework while simultaneously failing to grapple with the fact that he is remarkably privileged. “Can’t you see how this other society knows some moral truths [like men holding authority over woman] that we’ve lost” is much less convincing when the author of the sentence stands to lose absolutely nothing in the bargain. It’s easy to lecture others on the hard sacrifices society “must” make – and far harder to look for sacrifices that will mainly affect you personally.

It is in this regard that I found myself wondering if this might have been a more interesting book if it had been written by a woman. If the hypothetical female author were to defend the authority framework, she’d actually have to defend it, instead of hand-waving the defence with a request that we respect and understand all ethical frameworks. And if this hypothetical author found it indefensible, we would have been treated to an exploration of what to do if one of our fundamental ethical frameworks was flawed and had to be discarded. That would be an interesting conversation!

Not only that, but perhaps a female author would have given more pages to the observation that woman and children’s role in societal altruism was just as important as that of men (as child-rearing is a more reliable way to demonstrate and cash-in on groupishness than battle) have been fully explored, instead of relegated to a brief note at the end of the chapter on group selection. This perspective is genuinely new to me and I wanted to see it developed further.

Ultimately, Haidt’s defences of Authority/Subversion, Loyalty/Betrayal, and Sanctity/Degradation fell flat in the face of my Care/Harm and Liberty/Oppression focused moral compass. Scott Alexander once wrote about the need for “a solution to the time-limitedness of enlightenment that works from within the temporal perspective”. By the same token, I think Haidt fails to deliver a defence of conservatism or anything it stands for that works from within the liberal Care/Harm perspective. Insofar as his book was meant to bridge inferential gaps and political divides, this makes it a failure.

That’s a shame, because arguments that bridge this divide do exist. I’ve read some of them.

IV – What if Liberals are Wrong?

There is a principle called “Chesterton’s Fence”, which comes from the famed Catholic conservative and author G.K. Chesterton. It goes like this: if you see a fence blocking the road and cannot see the reason for it to be there, should you remove it? Chesterton said “no!”, resoundingly. He suggested you should first understand the purpose of the fence. Only then may you safely remove it.

There is a strain of careful conservatism that holds Chesterton’s fence as its dearest parable. Haidt makes brief mention of this strain of thought, but doesn’t expound on it successfully. I think it is this thought and this thought only that can offer Care/Harm focused liberals like myself a window into the redeeming features of the conservative moral frameworks.

Here’s what the argument looks like:

Many years ago, western nations had a unified moral framework. This framework supported people towards making long term decisions and acting in a pro-social manner. There are many people who want to act differently than they would if left to their own devices and this framework helped them to do that.

Liberals began to dismantle this system in the sixties. They saw hierarchies and people being unable to do the things they wanted to do, so tried to take down the whole edifice without first checking if any of it was doing anything important.

This strand of conservatism would argue that it was. They point to the increasing number of children born to parents who aren’t married (although increasingly these parents aren’t teens, which is pretty great), increasing crime (although this has started to fall after we took lead out of gasoline), increasing atomisation, decreasing church attendance, and increasing rates of anxiety and depression (although it is unclear how much of this is just people feeling more comfortable getting treatment).

Here’s the thing. All of these trends affect well educated and well-off liberals the least. We’re safe from crime in good neighbourhoods. We overwhelming wait until stable partnerships to have children. We can afford therapists and pills to help us with any mental health issues we might have; rehab to help us kick any drug habits we pick up.

Throwing off the old moral matrix has been an unalloyed good for privilege white liberals. We get to have our cake and eat it too – we have fun, take risks, but know that we have a safety net waiting to catch us should we fall.

The conservative appeal to tradition points out that our good time might be at the expense of the poor. It asks us if our hedonistic pleasures are worth a complete breakdown in stability for people with fewer advantages that us. It asks us consider sacrificing some of these pleasures so that they might be better off. I know many liberals who might find the sacrifice of some of their freedom to be a moral necessity, if framed this way.

But even here, social conservatism has the seeds of its own undoing. I can agree that children do best when brought up by loving and committed parents who give them a lot of stability (moving around in childhood is inarguably bad for many kids). Given this, the social conservative opposition to gay marriage (despite all evidence that it doesn’t mess kids up) is baffling. The sensible positon would have been “how can we use this to make marriage cool again“, not “how long can we delay this”.

This is a running pattern with social conservatism. It conserves blindly, without giving thought to what is even worth preserving. If liberals have some things wrong, that doesn’t automatically mean that the opposite is correct. It’s disturbingly easy for people on both sides of an issue to be wrong.

I’m sure Haidt would point out that this is why we have the other frameworks. But because of who I am, I’m personally much more inclined to do things in the other direction – throw out most of the past, then re-implement whatever we find to be useful but now lacking.

V – What if Liberals Listened?

In Berkeley, California, its environs, and assorted corners of the Internet, there exists a community that calls themselves “Rationalists”. This moniker is despite the fact that they agree with Haidt as to the futility of rationalism. Epistemically, they tend to be empiricists. Ethically, non-cognitivist utilitarians. Because they are largely Americans, they tend to be politically disengaged, but if you held them at gunpoint and demanded they give you a political affiliation, they would probably either say “liberal” or “libertarian”.

The rationalist community has semi-public events that mimic many of the best parts of religious events, normally based around the solstices (although I also attended a secular Seder when I visited last year).

This secular simulacrum of a religion has been enough to fascinate at least one Catholic.

The rationalist community has managed to do the sort of thing Haidt despaired of: create a strong community with communal morality in a secular, non-authoritarian framework. There are communal norms (although they aren’t very normal; polyamory and vegetarianism or veganism are very common). People tend to think very hard before having children and take care ensuring that any children they have will have a good extended support structure. People live in group houses, which combats atomisation.

This is also a community that is very generous. Many of the early adherents of Effective Altruism were drawn from the rationalist community. It’s likely that rationalists donate to charity in amounts more similar to Mormons than atheists (with the added benefit of almost all of this money going to saving lives, rather than proselytizing).

No community is perfect. This is a community made up of people. It has its fair share of foibles and megalomanias, bad actors and jerks. But it represents something of a counterpoint to Haidt’s arguments about the “deficiency” of a limited framework morality.

Furthermore, its altruism isn’t limited in scope, the way Haidt believes all communal altruism must necessarily be. Rationalists encourage each other to give to causes like malaria eradication (which mainly helps people in Africa), or AI risk (which mainly helps future people). Because there are few cost effective local opportunities to do good (for North Americans), this global focus allows for more lives to be saved or improved per dollar spent.

This is all of it, I think, the natural result of thoughtful people throwing away most cultural traditions and vestiges of traditionalist morality, then seeing what breaks and fixing those things in particular. It’s an example of what I wished for at the end of the last section applied to the real world.

VI – Is or Ought?

I hate to bring up the Hegelian dialectic, but I feel like this book fits neatly into it. We had the thesis: “morality stems from rationality” that was so popular in western political thought. Now we have the antithesis: “morality and rationality are separate horses, with rationality subordinate – and this is right and proper”.

I can’t wait for someone other than Haidt to a write a synthesis; a view that rejects rationalism as the basis of human morality but grapples with the fact that we yearn for perfection.

Haidt, in the words of Joseph Heath, thinks that moral discourse is “essentially confabulatory”, consisting only of made up stories that justify our moral impulses. There may be many ways in which this is true, but it doesn’t account for the fact that some people read Peter Singer’s essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” and go donate much of their money to the global poor. It doesn’t account for all those who have listened to the Sermon on the Mount and then abandoned their possessions to live a monastic life.

I don’t care whether you believe in The Absolute, or God, or Allah, or The Cycle of Rebirth, or the World Soul, or The Truth, or nothing at all. You probably have felt that very human yearning to be better. To do better. You’ve probably believed that there is a Good and it can perhaps be comprehended and reached. Maybe this is the last vestiges of my atrophied sanctity foundation talking, but there’s something base about believing that morality is solely a happy accident of how we evolved.

The is/ought fallacy occurs when we take what “is” and decide it is what “ought” to be. If you observe that murder is part of the natural order and conclude that it is therefore moral, you have committed this fallacy.

Haidt has observed the instincts that build towards human morality. His contributions to this field have helped make many things clear and make many conflicts more understandable. But in deciding that these natural tastes are the be-all and end-all of human morality, by putting them ahead of reason, religion, and every philosophical tradition, he has committed this fundamental error.

At the start of the Righteous Mind, Haidt approvingly mentions those scientists who once thought that ethics could be taken away from philosophers and studied instead only by them.

But science can only ever tell us what is, never what ought to be. As a book about science, The Righteous Mind is a success. But as a work on ethics, as an expression of how we ought to behave, it is an abysmal failure.

In this area, the philosophers deserve to keep their monopoly a little longer.

History, Literature, Politics

Book Review: Origins of Totalitarianism Part 1

Posted on by Zach

[Content Warning: Discussions of genocide and antisemitism]

Hannah Arendt’s massive study of totalitarianism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is (at the time of writing), the fourth most popular political theory book on Amazon (after two editions of The Prince, Plato’s Republic, and a Rebecca Solnit book). It’s also a densely written tome, not unsuitable for defending oneself from wild animals. Many of its paragraphs could productively be turned into whole books of their own.

I’m not done it yet. But a review and summary of the whole thing would be far too large for a single blog post. Therefore, I’m going to review its three main sections as I finish them. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem set my mind afire and spurred my very first essay on political theory, so I’m very excited to be reviewing the section on antisemitism today.

(Reminder: unless I’m specifically claiming a viewpoint as my own, I am merely summarizing Arendt’s views as I best understand them)

Arendt’s history of antisemitism begins when religious pogroms against Jews ended. Arendt isn’t really interested in this earlier persecution, which she views as entirely distinct from later antisemitism. As far as I can tell, there are two reasons that underlie this distinction. The first is the lack of a political component to the earlier pogroms. Their lack of politicization – there was no one in Christendom who really spoke against them – made them almost by definition politically useless.

For antisemitism to become a rallying cry for a movement, it needed to be more than just antisemitism. It had to also implicate a whole host of people despised by the mob, people who could be expected to stand up against antisemitism, or people who could be compared to Jews so as to focus hatred on them (a practice which continues to this day). The unanimity of the Christian pogroms robbed them of any usage in power struggles between Christians, because any Christian could take up the banner of the pogroms and so divide support for their rivals.

Second, there was always one escape from the Christian pogroms: conversion to Christianity. This escape was notably lacking from later, political antisemitism. Jewishness became a racial stain carried down through the generations, not merely a different religion.

Nowhere is this distinction better seen than between the Vichy government and the occupying Germans. The Germans would ask the Vichy regime to exterminate Jews. And the Vichy government would wipe out foreign Jews, or Jews that didn’t have French citizenship, or Jews that weren’t willing to convert. The French were still somewhat in the old Christian mindset of “good” Jews and “bad” Jews. The Germans wished to exterminate all Jews and made no distinctions between good and bad.

Arendt analyzes this second distinction through the lens of vice and crime. To Arendt, a vice is a crime which has become accepted as inextricably linked to certain people, such that they cannot help but commit it. She describes this as similar to an addict being hooked on drugs.

When you accept that certain people have vices, you may excuse them some of their crimes. According to Arendt, in late 19th century/early 20th century society, a judge would face no opposition to giving a lighter sentence for murder to a gay man, or a lighter sentence for treason to a Jew, because these crimes were viewed to be a matter of racial predestination.

(This definition of vice cuts towards one of my most common annoyances with Arendt: she’s very prone to redefining common words to mean other things. This can leave incautious readers to jump to rather the wrong conclusion, as happened most famously with her definition of “think” in Eichmann in Jerusalem.)

The danger that Arendt identifies here is that this “tolerance” for murder or treason can be quickly reversed. And when this happens, it isn’t enough just to punish the traitors or murderers. Everyone who is racially or dispositionally inclined to these crimes must then be “liquidated”.

Hannah Arendt’s exact phrasing of the threat here is:

It is an attraction to murder and treason which hides behind such perverted tolerance, for in a moment it can switch to a decision to liquidate not only all actual criminals but all who are “racially” predestined to commit certain crimes. Such changes take place whenever the legal and political machine is not separated from society so that social standards can penetrate into it and become political and legal rules. The seeming broad-mindedness that equates crime and vice, if allowed to establish its own code of law, will invariably prove more cruel and inhuman than laws, no matter how severe, which respect and recognize man’s independent responsibility for his behavior.

Having separated modern antisemitism from earlier religious pogroms, Arendt also spends some time separating nationalism from totalitarianism. Nationalism, to Arendt, is always inward focused. It views one’s own nation as best and spurns contact with outsiders. Nationalism may be paranoid and bellicose, but it has no desire to expand, nor any desire to coordinate with foreign nationalists. Totalitarianism, on the other hand, is always focused outwards, its eyes set on world domination.

There were, of course, international organizations of both fascists and communists, the two totalitarian ideologies. But I wonder how nations like North Korea (with no real plausible path to world domination) and Eritrea (which as far as I know is entirely inward focused) fit into this framework. Both are definitely totalitarian, but they seem to falsify this important criterion. I’ll look for more on how to parse those countries when I get to the third and final part of this book, which covers totalitarianism itself.

Let’s pause for a second and ask why a book on totalitarianism is focused so much on antisemitism. One of the most enduring questions of 20th century history is “why were the Jews Hitler’s victims?” Why was this people singled out for destruction and not some other? Was it arbitrary? While Hannah Arendt may have some hindsight bias here, to her the attempt at extermination of the Jews was inevitable in light of the international focus of totalitarian ideologies and the international relationships of European Jews.

While banking may have become less and less Jewish dominated over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, European Jews (at least the best off) still had an international bent. Arendt relates an anecdote about the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871; apparently Bismarck’s approach to terms was basically ‘have their Jews work it out with our Jews’ and she says that this generalizes to the how other treaties were made at the time.

This international network of leading Jews [1] meant that an antisemitic ideology had to frame itself in international terms to attack Jews, or that an ideology could explain its international bent by attacking Jews. Therefore, by virtue of being a people without a nation (who instead lived in all European nations), European Jews became an excellent justification for an international and expansionist totalitarian power.

I think these rumours of international control were a cruel double bind for the Jewish people: any successful quashing of the rumours of Jewish domination would have just served as proof for the next round, while the failure to quash them, brought about by a very real lack of power, meant that they flourished, despite the fact that their continued existence should have itself been all that was required to prove them false.

The view of Jews as international and of one mind was fueled by the clannishness that came about as a natural result of the social discrimination Jews faced in European society. Anti-Semites could imagine that Jewish endogamy meant that all Jews were of one family and therefore had a single goal, which was normally considered to be “world domination”. If even one member of this global clan was left alive, then the anti-Semites believed that they would have failed.

Antisemitism was a useful tool for whipping up the mob because in early modern times, Jews were despised. Arendt again separates this from the earlier religious hatred and attributes it to Jews losing their old formal position (as the state bankers) but not their “privileges” [2] or (at least as far as visible Jews, like the Rothschilds were concerned) their wealth. This loss of formal position, but not the wealth it brought, is identified by Arendt as a particularly vulnerable and despised state – it is, she claims, the state the French aristocracy found themselves in before the revolution. Arendt even claims that no one hated the aristocracy so much when they were fulfilling the societal function of oppressing peasants, although I wonder if it might instead be possible that they were then just as (or more hated), but possessed a surer monopoly on violence and discourse, such that the earlier hate was better hidden.

Arendt believes that all of these fault lines were compounded by several strategies that were undertaken by Jews, strategies that had served them well in the old days of forced conversions, but that were extremely maladaptive when faced with modern antisemitism.

First, Arendt reckoned that Jews had a special relationship with the state. They had formerly served the state (not the body politic, mind you, but the state) as its bankers, finding the capital it needed to wage its wars and build its monuments. In exchange for this service, the bankers had won special privileges for themselves (although note that these privileges were lesser than those afforded to Christians who served the state as e.g. knights) and some modicum of protection by the state for their coreligionists.

(Because of this requirement for paternalistic protection, any loss of central power for a state was almost always a disaster for Jews; petty warlords certainly did need their moneylending services, but they were much less adept at providing protection in return.)

Arendt reckons that this may have made the Jews of Europe doubly despised, first via the general Christian antipathy that was dominant at the time and second because it meant that any who had reason to hate the state would also hate the Jews, because of their highly visible relationship with it.

That the state had mostly upheld its end of the bargain in this deal led to the second strategy that backfired: the Jews were complacent with mere legal rights, despite their despised status. They thought that legal rights could save them from any of the consequences of being despised [3]. In the modern era, the strength of this purely legal protection was first put to test in France, when the Dreyfus Affair erupted.

Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a French Jew who was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894. In 1896, new evidence came to light that showed he was innocent. The military suppressed this evidence and trumped up new charges against Dreyfus, but word leaked out and a scandal was quickly born.

It is said that while the affair was ongoing, nearly everyone in Europe had an opinion on it. Nominally, the Dreyfusards believed Dreyfus was innocent, while the anti-Dreyfusards believed he was guilty, but both positions quickly gained several ancillary beliefs. Dreyfusards became noted for their anti-clerical positions – including that “secret Rome” controlled much of global affairs [4]. The anti-Dreyfusards became authoritarian, nationalistic, and fiercely anti-Semitic. They believed that “secret Judah” controlled everything.

I want to stress how little importance people ended up putting on Dreyfus. La Croix, a Catholic newspaper at one point stated: “it is no longer a question whether Dreyfus is innocent or guilty but only of who will win, the friends of the army or its foes” [5]. It is impossible to explain how the discredited trial of a single military officer could lead to jack-booted thugs attacking intellectuals and crying for “death to the Jews!” without the understanding of the usefulness of antisemitism for whipping up the mob that this book engenders.

“The mob”, as distinct from “the people” is one of the key concepts in Origins of Totalitarianism. It’s Arendt’s most important example of the type of politics she despises and she returns to it again and again. She describes the mob as the “déclassé” and the “residue of all classes”; the mob are those people who are excluded from civil and economic opportunities by virtue of their education (or lack thereof), disposition, personality, or airs, and deeply resent this exclusion, to the point where they wish to destroy the society that excluded them.

Arendt claims that the representation of all classes within the mob makes it easy to mistake the mob as representative of the people in general. Since this argument can be used to disenfranchise basically any group seeking rights, Arendt suggests that the key difference between a mob and a genuine movement lies in what sort of demands the group makes. The people will demand to have their voices heard in government. The mob will demand a strong leader to fix everything (by ripping apart the society that has excluded them). In the case of the anti-Dreyfusards, these strong leaders enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the mob; they were all recovering esthetics and nihilists and saw in the mob a “primitive and virile strength”, something they found admirable and exhilarating.

Remember that there already was a perception that the Jews secretly controlled everything and that this theory was politically useful because it justified an international ideology and allowed for a polarization of society around attacking a hated other. With respect to the mob, Arendt gives a third reason why this sort of conspiracy theory might be useful as a rallying cry: it helps explain why the déclassé of the mob have been cast out of and abandoned by society. It is much easier for them to believe that there is some worldwide conspiracy then that there is some fault of their own.

(I trust that anyone reading this in 2018 sees why I found Arendt’s description of the mob so frightening. In the margin of the passage where she introduces the mob, I have written “MAGA voters?”)

Against the mob (and its steadily escalating violence) stood Clemenceau (then a journalist), Émile Zola, and a small cadre of liberal and radical intellectuals and their supporters. Arendt says that what made their position unique is their support for purely abstract concepts, like justice. If the rallying call of the mob was “Death to the Jews”, then it seems as if the rallying call of those arrayed against it was fiat justitia ruat caelum, or perhaps the old battle-cry of the French First Republic: liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Ultimately, the appeals of the intellectuals convinced the socialists, if not in the primacy of justice, then that their class interests were served by marching against the anti-Dreyfusards. And so the workers took to the streets and the campaign of terror of the mob was ended.

There was of course rather a large difference between ending open violent antisemitism and actually acquitting Dreyfus. Here the good and great of French society, the delegates of the representative assembly, were barely split: all but one opposed a retrial. The fight around a retrial was to simmer (largely outside of the chambers of government) for three years, between 1897 and 1900. During this time, Dreyfusards used the courts and the press to try and sway public opinion and force the manner, while the anti-Dreyfusards, the Catholic priests, and the army tried to launch a coup d’état (though Arendt mocks that whole endeavour to the point where I think they never got very close to actually seizing power).

Notable were the reactions of Jews outside of Dreyfus’s immediate family to the case. Arendt contends that they made such a deal of legal equality, that they believed that if Dreyfus had been found guilty in a court of law, he must be guilty or that if the verdict was false, it was just a legal error, not an attack against them as a people. Arendt is obviously speaking with the benefit of hindsight here; I wonder how obvious any of this could have been to a people used to discrimination, both social and official.

There was a passage here that felt particularly relevant even now. Arendt suggests that society at the time saw every Jew, however penniless as a potential Rothschild (and therefore unworthy of any protection or “special treatment”). Clemenceau, she says, was one of the few true friends the Jews had because he saw them, all of them, even the Rothschilds with their vast fortune, as members of one of Europe’s oppressed people. To this day, despite the Holocaust, the Jew quotas, the cries of “none is too many” by now-dead bureaucrats or “the Jews will not replace us” by a tiki-torch wielding mob today, and the high rate of antisemitic hate crime, it is hard to find many people who will stand up and say that Jews face systematic prejudice and oppression.

The end of the affair reversed Marx’s famous maxim of history, in that it was the farce that presaged tragedy. Appeals to justice failed. The popular hatred of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie failed. Zola and Clemenceau’s appeals all failed. But a threatened boycott of the Paris Exposition of 1900 succeeded. The anti-Dreyfusard government was censured, and Dreyfus was pardoned [6].

It was only much later, via an illegal retrial, that an exoneration was achieved.

The fallout of the trials was far reaching. Rights for Catholics, including Catholic schools, were curtailed. Arendt bitterly remarks that this was a failure of politics; instead of the simple republican principle of equality for all, there was “one exception for Jews, and another which threatened the freedom of conscience for Catholics”.

The trial of Dreyfus occupies more space than any other single incident in the volume on antisemitism. It allows Arendt to introduce the idea of “the mob” and the conspiracy (here Jewish domination) that motivates it. But its centrality is mostly, I think, because Arendt views it as the only harbinger of what was to come; the first incident of true violent antisemitism (remember, Arendt views this as in a separate class from the ubiquitous Christian Jew hatred which characterized pre-modern Europe), as opposed to the “mere” social discrimination Jews faced in European society.

I was shocked by how modern this social discrimination was. Jews were consistently exoticized (some of which must have come from fascination with their “vice”, as Arendt defined it). She recounts a review of a Jewish poet from the 19th century, that laments at the normality of the poetry (the reviewer expected something other from normal human poetry).

This exoticism was both a social curse and a key. It was a curse in that it always set Jews apart and that the spectre of social discrimination, of being so exotic that one became the other, was always present. It was a key in that for certain “exceptional” Jews, Jews that society agreed “weren’t like the others”, the fact of their exception could lead to social climbing. These “exceptional” Jews were alternatively welcomed by, showed off almost like exhibits, or excluded by high society, depending on their rarity, their own merits, and the strength of antisemitic sentiments.

As Jews became more normalized in European society, it became harder and harder to be the exception, while the shadow of social discrimination never lifted. Therefore, increasing normalization led to less acceptance in society, not more. Arendt disagrees with the (she claims) commonly held notion that it was primarily Christian antipathy that kept Jewish communities from dispersion and assimilation in the Middle Ages, but thinks that social discrimination became an important limit on dispersion just as assimilation became possible.

This made me wonder about the nature of assimilation and safety. It’s certainly true that the Irish in America are now obviously safe beyond the reach of any Know-Nothing. But it’s clear that they had to give up something to attain that safety. For assimilated Irish (or assimilated Scots or Germans, the stock of my family), there is little of the old culture and none of the old language left.

The central political question of a multi-ethnic democracy might be “how can we ensure safety, without the need for total assimilation?” And certainly, I do not wish to suggest that assimilation is the surest of safeties. It did not save the assimilated German Jews. I wonder if there is in fact a critically dangerous period during very act of assimilation, where a people is vulnerable and dispersed just as social backlash against their increasing rights reaches a fever pitch.

Here, Arendt has no answers for me.

There might be those who question whether reading about antisemitism from Hannah Arendt is like letting the fox guard the chicken coup; One of the most enduring controversies of Hannah Arendt’s life was her alleged antisemitism. Her romance with the noted philosopher and Nazi Heidegger (although note that their relationship preceded his conversion to Nazism and she did not have contact with him while he was a Nazi), her criticism of Jewish leaders in her coverage of the Eichmann trial, and her criticism of historical Jewish attempts to find safety in this section of The Origins of Totalitarianism are the evidence most often given in support of her supposed “self-hating” nature (as she was herself a Jew, and moreover a German Jew who fled the Nazis).

I think it is certainly true that she was an often-harsh critic of some things that Jews had done and that she wrote perhaps unfairly and with the benefit of hindsight. I think it is also undeniable that she was biased against certain Jews (her cringe-worthy and horribly racist description of Ostjuden and middle-eastern Jews opens Eichmann in Jerusalem).

But I think the evidence for her “antisemitism” is often overstated and mainly comes from misreading her works; I mentioned above just how careful a reader must be if they don’t want to be tripped up by her redefinitions of common words. The criticism that she “defended” Eichmann as “just following orders” and not really culpable can be dispelled simply by reading Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book which ends with her calling for his death and features a section where she systematically dismantles the argument he was just following orders [7].

On the other side of the equation, we have her pioneering work on antisemitism which is fiercely critical of anti-Semites and all who enabled them, her work to resettle Jews in Israel, her work in Eichmann in Jerusalem systematically documenting the extent of the Holocaust, and her fierce and rousing defense of the holocaust as a crime against humanity perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people (from her biopic: “because Jews are human, the very status the Nazis tried to deny them”).

Arendt had standards that were impossibly high and I think she held Jews to higher standards than any other group. She may have been secular, but I think she also still believed that the Jews were God’s chosen people, chosen to be a light among the nations. When others said “we must not judge that, we were not there” about the Jewish leaders and their actions during the Holocaust, Arendt built a system of political theory around the act of judgement, a theory she thought that would be inimical to tyrants and Nazis.

She was assuredly arrogant. She assuredly burned bridges. A set of lecture notes she once prepared said:

For conscience to work: either a very strong religious belief—extremely rare. Or: pride, even arrogance. If you say to yourself in such matters: who am I to judge?—you are already lost.”

There is very little positive said in Part 1 of The Origins of Totalitarianism, which is to say that it doesn’t give us very much idea of what we can do to prevent totalitarianism and barbarism. But if we could ask Hannah Arendt, the great political theorist of the 20th century, the lost child of the French Revolution, she might say something like: “find your principles and stick to them; think about what is the right thing and do it; defend liberty always.”

Or, if I can for a second steal the speech her biopic puts in her mouth:

Since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself. In refusing to be a person Eichmann utterly surrendered that single most defining human quality: that of being able to think. And consequently, he was no longer capable of making moral judgements. This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the likes of which have never been seen before.

It is true, I have considered these questions in a philosophical way. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge, but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.

Increasingly, it seems like this might be one of those moments where the chips could be down. I shivered when I read some of Arendt’s descriptions of the mob, because I knew it wasn’t a hypothetical. I’ve seen it, on social media and at rallies. With tiki-torches and with weapons, I have seen the mob. And I hope reading this book and others like it and thinking will give me the strength to act to prevent catastrophe if I am ever so unlucky to have to.

Footnotes:

[1] I want to make it clear that Hannah Arendt (and I) don’t believe the old canard about Jews controlling the world. She specifically mentions this lie being baffling, because when it was started, it was true that a rather small group of European statesmen essentially did control the world. But none of those statesmen were Jewish and all of them were so at cross-purposes that no coordination occurred.

When Arendt talks about internationalism in the European Jewish community, she is simply saying that there were many ties of family and friendship among Jews of different countries, which meant that privileged Jews were more likely to have close associates in countries other than the one in which they resided, even compared to similarly privileged gentiles. ^

[2] “Privileges” here being “were treated the same as gentiles and weren’t discriminated against legally”. I am reminded forcefully of David Schraub’s excellent essay about the recent tendency to equate the Holocaust and occupation of the west bank. I think Arendt unearths reasonable evidence for the claim David makes, that “gentiles believed that superiority over Jews was part of the deal that they were always offered”, such that loss of that superiority feels like a special privilege for Jews. ^

[3] Given that Christian and secular hatred of Jews was without reason, it’s unclear what they could have done to be less despised. ^

[4] There have been several times in history when its looked like conspiracies against Catholics would reach the same fever pitch as those against Jews, but this has never quite materialized. Catholics in North America are still more likely to face hate crimes than other Christian denominations, but the number and severity of these crimes pale in comparison to the crimes conducted against Jews.

Even if the internationalism of the Catholic Church and its occasional use of the confessional for political gain (although the latter has not been seen in recent times), make it an appealing target for conspiracy theories, it offers much less in terms of racial theories. In Germany at least, racial theories would have been much less effective if the target was Catholicism, since essentially all Germans had been Catholic before the reformation and associated wars of religion. That said, Christianity arose from Judaism, so I’m not sure if the targeting of Jews rather than Catholics can be explained by religious lineage alone. ^

[5] How’s this for a case study on politicization, or a toxoplasma of rage? ^

[6] Zola hated the pardon. He said all it accomplished was “to lump together in a single stinking pardon men of honour with the hoodlums”. ^

[7] This was very important to Arendt, because she needed to show the totality of moral collapse in “respectable” German society in order to prove her point about the banality of evil. She recounts that Eichmann actually ignored Himmler’s orders to stop killing Jews, because within the context of the third Reich, they were unlawful orders that went against the values of the state. She then goes on to present distressing evidence about just how far this moral rot extended and just how easy it was for Hitler to cultivate it. ^

1
Literature

Book Review: The Managed Heart

Posted on by Zach

[16 minute read]

Content warning: reading this book left me in a low state of existential panic and unable to respond appropriately to other people’s emotions for about a week. You have been warned.

If you’ve followed my blog for any amount of time, you probably know that I’m a big fan of the sociologist and feminist scholar Professor Arlie Russell Hochschild. Previously I have reviewed her books “Strangers in Their Own Land” and “The Second Shift“. I’ve also published a practical guide to sharing housework, inspired by reading “The Second Shift”. Today I’m going to review The Managed Heart the book that first brought Professor Hochschild to mainstream attention.

But before I begin the review, I’d like to talk about words.

Words are handles to grasp concepts. These handles (like the concepts they evoke) are by necessity blurry and fuzzy. They change. Is Pluto a planet? It depends on what “planet” means to you. If you’re an academic astronomer, you might answer this differently than one of the kids who sent Neil deGrasse Tyson hate mail.

Language must necessarily grow and evolve. I’ve given up trying to police the meaning of literally (although you’ll have to take the Oxford Comma from my cold, dead hands). That said, I really wish that every subculture dominated by people under thirty took one fucking second to do a fucking lit review before they grab academic sounding words for their HuffPo think pieces or blog posts.

(I live in a glass house here. I am loosely associated with the Rationalist Community, a group of people who have based their whole philosophy on the literal arch-enemies of the rationalist philosophical tradition. “Empiricist Community” didn’t sound as smart or clever, so it lost out as a name despite the fact it was far more accurate.)

Technical words mean specific things and their definitions are policed so that academic disagreement (and more rarely, agreement) can happen at all. Academics need to have a clear(ish) view of what concept-handles they’re playing with and clear(ish) boundaries on those concepts, lest they spend all of their days arguing about definitions, like a Clinton caught in a lie. Currently we filter that sort of person out of the general academic discourse by letting them go study Hegel, but there’s always a risk of that spilling over, to disastrous effect.

Worse, when a technical word is stolen for general vocabulary it often comes to mean what people think it should mean, rather than what it originally meant. Those concepts, which were important enough that they needed names, are now left to float, handle-less. For example, “market failure” is at risk of coming to mean “weird consequences of markets”, not “markets that are trapped away from the Pareto-frontier, such that they have an opportunity to make someone/some metric better off without making anyone/anything else worse off that cannot be realized”. The technical definition is not evoked as well by the phrase “market failure” and so is at risk of being elided in popular discourse.

A subsequent consequence of this is that academic debate becomes meaningless, confusing, or incomprehensible to ordinary people (as their ability to police the language they use for discussions results in inevitable linguistic drift when those same terms are misused elsewhere). Non-academics assume that academics are using the colloquial term, when in fact they’re saying something else. Switching terms like this often has serious consequences for the veracity of arguments!

When an economist says “a minimum wage can lead to market failures”, many people think the economist is saying “it would be better if people could be payed less”, where they might actually be saying “when a minimum wage exists, a company may fail to hire a low productivity worker (say a high school graduate, or someone who doesn’t speak the dominant language very well) while forcing another worker to work overtime; if no minimum wage existed, the company could hire that worker, making both the hired worker and the existing employee (now freed from overtime) better off, while leaving the company no worse off”.

All this is to say that “emotional labour” is a key concept from The Managed Heart. It was termed in this book. And as near as I can tell, it has literally never been used properly in a blog post or think piece.

So before I talk about what emotional labour (in the academic sense) is, I’d like to give several examples of what it isn’t.

Emotional labour isn’t the mental load that women have to carry when managing the chores and children of a household. Infuriatingly, this subject was covered by Professor Hochschild in another book. It has a whole chapter devoted to it! Properly termed, it would be “responsibility for managing the second shift” or something like that.

Emotional labour isn’t women helping men process and figure out their feelings without compensation. Under the framework introduced in The Managed Heart, I’d suggest that it could be called “feeling rules promoting asymmetric empathizing”, which I will admit is much less catchy.

Emotional labour isn’t even the work women do to manage their feelings in a relationship so that men feel supported and validated. That comes up in The Managed Heart and is one subset of “emotion work”.

I am not claiming that any of these other contenders for the term “emotional labour” do not exist, are not real problems, or do not deserve academic study of their own. I believe that they do exist, are real problems, and deserve study (much of which has been done by Professor Hochschild). But I am also going to ignore them, pretend they don’t exist, and talk only about emotional labour as it was defined by Professor Hochschild: “the commercialization of our capacity to influence our own feelings”.

Unpacking that seemingly simple definition will provide fodder for most of my review.

First, what are feelings?

Professor Hochschild carefully charts the development of theories of emotion. There’s Darwin’s physical theory of emotion, that holds that emotions are the evolutionary vestiges of certain acts. Teeth barred in a rictus of anger is, to Darwin, the evolutionary vestige of actually biting. Anger emerges as the remnant of what would have been aggressive action and shows up in situations where our ancestors might have been aggressive.

Freud had some nonsense about dammed up libido (I have a policy of ignoring everything Freud said that involves the words “libido”, “oedipal”, and “fixation”, and I’m not going to break it just for this review). William James held that emotions were signifiers of physical change; to James, the emotion of anger was merely what we feel when our body prepares to fight and is solely a consequence of underlying physiological processes.

Later theorists, like Gerth and Mills, situated emotions in a social context. They talked about how culture might influence emotions and how inchoate emotions might be made understandable when others interpreted them for us. For example, if a bride cries when left at the altar on her wedding day, her mother’s explanation “you must be furious” gives name and focus to her roiling emotions. The bride may come to believe that she is crying because she is angry, and that the roil of emotions in her belly is anger. Had her mother instead suggested that she was feeling “sorrow”, then perhaps that would have been the name she chose.

Professor Hochschild builds on these definitions (and many others) to get one she’s satisfied with. To her, emotion is a sense, like proprioception or touch. It allows us to sense how we relate to others actions or to developments. Emotion in a Hochschildian framework doesn’t just lead to action (e.g. I was angry so I attacked him), it also leads to cognition (e.g. I paused to wonder why I was so sad).

Professor Hochschild holds emotion up as one of the most important senses because it acts as a signal function. There is the tautological sense in which emotion lets us know how we feel about something, but there is also the sense in which it warns us. We talk about a twinge of jealousy or a sinking dread. These emotions help us realize that all is not right.

Emotions can be consonant with a situation (e.g. I feel so happy on my wedding day), or dissonant (e.g. I should be happy at my wedding, but I’m really just scared). Dissonant emotions are most often the ones we seek to change, but as emotion becomes commercialized, we are increasingly asked to change our consonant emotions as well.

What do we do when we can’t change our emotions? And how do we effect a change?

Surface acting is one way we can deal (in a socially acceptable manner) with “feeling the wrong thing”. In surface acting, we change our countenance or face, but make no attempt to change how we feel. We might grin through pain, wear a fixed smile, or hide that we want to cry. We may not fool anyone else and we certainly don’t fool ourselves, but sometimes surface acting allows us to pay our emotional dues to those around us.

Surface acting can feel exhausting; you can’t rest or relax while you are presenting a fake face to the world. Therefore, it is often beneficial for us to be able to engage in deep acting.

Deep acting is the sincere attempt to engender an emotion that you are currently not feeling. There are two ways that you can attempt deep acting. In the first, you can try and chivy and talk yourself into feeling what you desire. When someone says they are trying to fall in love, or conversely trying not to fall too hard, they are engaging in this first form of deep acting.

The second form of deep acting shares much with method acting. Method acting encourages the actor to bring in emotions from other parts of their life and use them to animate the emotions of their character. In deep acting, you push on your emotions by using memories of other emotional states. Deep acting might look like “I was unhappy on the day of my wedding, so I brought up memories of things I like about my partner until I was smiling“.

Society imposes on us many feelings rules, which we interact with by doing the emotion work of deep acting or the feigning surface acting. Here’s a simple feelings rule: it is considered impolite to feel anything other than happiness for a friend’s promotion. If you instead feel jealous, there will be a strong societal expectation that you show none of it. Instead, you must transmute the jealousy into joy via deep acting, or hide it via surface acting.

You might think that feeling rules only apply when you aren’t interacting with the people you’re closest with. Professor Hochschild disagrees. She believes that feelings rules bind us especially tightly when we are with our closest friends or our romantic partners. She talks briefly here (and at depth in “The Second Shift”) about the economy of gratitude that exists in a relationship and how it requires constant emotion work to maintain. You expect your partner to be excited on your behalf when you get a promotion or self-flagellating and apologetic if they cheat. Closeness acts like a filter; only people who instinctively manage their emotions in a way that is pleasing to you (or, in the case of partners who try and “win someone over”, put in a lot of effort) end up close to you, so the reality of the emotion work underlying close relationships is often obscured. Part of Professor Hochschild’s purpose in studying emotion work at work was to pull back this curtain and view emotion work that wasn’t so unconscious and unthinking.

There certainly can be a gendered dynamic to emotion work. Professor Hochschild believes that men are trained to expect a certain amount of emotion work from women: fluffing of the ego, soothing of the temper, etc. She also believes that emotion work is unevenly spread because women are better trained in it and men tend to be better off. Within the context of a heterosexual relationship, this often manifests in the unconscious deal of a man providing physical security through his more highly paid work, in exchange for a woman’s emotional labour and her labour around the house (this idea is more thoroughly dissected in “The Second Shift”).

The primary marketplace and arena of emotion work is “emotional bowing”. Emotional bowing encompasses two types of exchanges, improvisational and straight. In a straight exchange, you are following the rules and exchange rates of society. When you repay advice from a senior colleague with sincere gratitude, you are engaging in a straight exchange.

When the gratitude is feigned, obviously false, or the advice given grudgingly, you are still trying to play out the straight exchange, but you are quibbling about the exchange rate. Similarly, when you brush aside gratitude and claim the advice you gave was “my pleasure”, you are making a rather different point about the exchange rate and showing kindnesses and graciousness – and perhaps making something clear about the emotional tone you expect at your workplace. Even kindness can become a demand for future emotion work.

Many disagreements, especially among close friends and lovers are caused by different notions of the exchange rate between actions. In these close relationships, emotion work is just one way that we can repay others, but it is often the one that breaks down in response to problems, when we suddenly realize the thing we “should” be feeling takes actual work to feel.

In an improvisational exchange, the feeling rules themselves are called into question, often using sarcasm or irony. A man may jokingly tell a crying male friend “remember, men never cry”. By ironically referencing the feeling rule (that men cannot show emotion), he gives his friend permission to violate it. This sort of exchange requires clear knowledge and understanding of how everyone involved interprets feelings rules, so is uncommon except in close relationships.

When the crying man rejects the toxic masculinity that causes men to disown their emotions, referencing the feeling rule might cheer him up, as he is reminded that even his sorrow is a radical act in line with his values. But if he instead embraces that conception of masculinity, referencing the feeling rule might add to his grief and make him feel a failure. Only his friends would know which is likely to occur, so only his friends would risk an improvisational exchange.

This particular part of the book brought on my existential crisis, as I found myself unable to respond to emotional displays with anything other than attempts to calculate what was given, expected, and owed. I do now wonder if this is a common experience, or if my response was somewhat atypical? In either case, a warning before I (potentially) inflicted this on anyone else seemed prudent.

Anyway, all of this background brings us to emotional labour, the true topic of this book. Emotional labour is when emotion work is removed from its normal place in the home and in broader society, and starts to become part of someone’s economic responsibilities. Physical labour has long been commoditized and therefore made anonymous – that is to say, it does not matter which particular person manufactures your car, because any other labourer could have done it approximately as well. While emotional labour has long existed, it is only recently (with a decline in manufacturing jobs and increase in service jobs) that it has become commoditized and therefore gone mainstream.

Professor Hochschild takes a somewhat Marxist approach to the dangers of emotional labour. In the same way that Marx worried about labourers being alienated from the physical products of their work, Professor Hochschild worries about the effects of labourers being alienated from the emotional products of their work.

Like all of Professor Hochschild’s books, The Managed Heart is in some sense an ethnography. The subjects of this book are bill collectors (who are required to do the emotional labour of avoiding sympathy or pity) and flight attendants (who must do the emotional labour of providing a cheery, relaxed façade). In both of these cases, these required emotions (and the feeling rules that produce them) might be variously consonant and dissonant with what the worker may wish to feel.

Earlier, I said that workers are being increasingly asked to avoid consonant feelings. Take as an example the bill collector, moved by pity or charity to seek to find a repayment schedule that works for their client or a flight attendant furious at a customer who is repeatedly belittling them. In both of these cases, emotions are correctly functioning (both as a signal function, and in accordance with societal feelings rules), but economic realities demand that the worker feel something else. Corporate requirements impose a new set of feelings rules, which may clash with extant ones, potentially grinding up workers in the process.

Acting in response to these alien feeling rules can be exhausting. For flight attendants, Professor Hochschild identified three stances they can take towards their work, each with its own risks:

In the first, the worker identifies too wholeheartedly with the job, and therefore risks burnout. In the second, the worker clearly distinguishes her- self from the job and is less likely to suffer burnout; but she may blame herself for making this very distinction and denigrate herself as ‘Just an actor, not sincere.” In the third, the worker distinguishes herself from her act, does not blame herself for this, and sees the job as positively requiring the capacity to act; for this worker there is some risk of estrangement from acting altogether, and some cynicism about it– “We’re just illusion makers.”

No job is entirely without risks (both physical and psychological), yet work must get done. I would have like to see Professor Hochschild better engage with this fact. Her potential solution (to give workers more control over the emotional labour they are required to do) is not as free of costs as she seems to think it is. For whenever it is not universal, all those companies that refuse to give control of emotional labour over to their employees may find themselves at a steep advantage. The threat of this (if emotional labour is indeed a competitive advantage) might be enough to keep whole industries scared of allowing any worker control, absent a mechanism for perfect coordination.

(It seems like the best way to free people from emotional labour would be to prove that it is not important. But we are social animals and so I doubt such a proof is forthcoming. Or possible at all.)

Still, there is often something deeply troubling about how emotional labour is framed. Professor Hochschild gives the example of a seminar about “reducing stress and making work more pleasant” at the flight attendant recurrent training centre. Belying the messaging, it seemed like the real purpose of the seminar was to convince the flight attendants to sublimate any anger they might, in the future, feel at passengers into emotions less risky for the company. A pleasant working environment was secondary to the corporate goals.

In the model of emotion-as-signal-function, anger is important. Indeed, it seems that negative emotions (specifically the negative affect/fear cluster) are particularly important to living a safe life. There seems to be something deeply wrong and dangerous to workers in telling them that all anger in their professional life is their own problem, to be appropriately handled, rather than occasionally indicative of a customer who is seriously overstepping lines.

Regardless of the right or wrong of it, the flight attendants interviewed in the book had to manage their anger and they talked about several strategies they had developed to do so (some of which were taught to them at recurrent training). They might put themselves in the angry customer’s shoes and try and imagine that person as suffering from some life events that explained and excused their behaviour. Or they might remind themselves that they only had to deal with the customer for a little while, allowing them drive out their anger and replace it with relief. Asking other co-workers for emotional support was officially discouraged, because it might lead to anger spreading. Flight attendants who could help their colleagues feel the officially sanctioned emotions (e.g. by diffusing anger with light-hearted joking) were valued members of teams.

Professor Hochschild suggests that we are trained for emotional labour from a young age. Or rather, that some children are. She suggests that working-class children are prepared to have their actions governed by rules, while middle-class children are prepared to have their feelings governed by rules. Note that this isn’t necessarily explicit. I recall receiving no specific training on emotion management, but I know that I picked it up somewhere and that I’m somewhat disturbed by people who seem unable or unwilling to practice emotion management.

One way that emotion work is taught (or not) is by family dynamics. Professor Hochschild suggests that many working-class families use a positional family control system, while middle-class families use a personal control system. In a positional family, authority is derived from a certain mixture of age, gender, employment status, parenthood, etc. Those with authority make decisions within their spheres of authority and the other members of the family must act in accordance with these decisions, although they don’t have to like it.

In a personal control system, control is achieved via appeals to the emotions of a child. Because all decisions of the child are framed as a choice (but with an obvious correct answer), this can lead to a maddening chain of explanations. Whenever the child states their preference, the parent will explain the decision in more detail and explain why the child should feel differently, such that they’ll have the “correct” preference. I can’t remember if this was explicitly mentioned, but it seems to me that this would also serve the purpose of inculcating in the child a strong understand of normative feeling rules.

There is also a relationship between these control systems and discipline. Professor Hochschild cites research that middle-class parents are more likely to sanction intent, while working-class parents are more likely to sanction actions. The working-class parent sanctions the child because of the results of a temper-tantrum. The middle-class parent sanctions the child because they lost their temper.

Professor Hochschild suggests that the sum of this is three messages sent to a (middle-class) child:

  • Feelings in others, particularly their superiors, are important and worth trying to understand.
  • Their own feelings are important and a valid reason for making decisions.
  • Feelings are meant to be managed, controlled, and yoked to rules.

It’s clear that because of this education, feelings rules are a gender and class issue. First, the feelings rules learned in childhood act as a middle- and upper-class shibboleth, making it clear who was raised outside of those classes. Working-class members looking for upwards mobility will have to do catch-up work that is entirely invisible – except in lapses – to those they are seeking to blend in with.

Second, in a world in which the higher ranks of government and corporations are biased towards men, women are given a particular incentive to be sensitive towards the feelings of men, while men have no corresponding requirement to be sensitive towards the feelings of women. Combine this with a toxic masculinity that leaves men little room to acknowledge or talk about feelings and you’re left with a situation where many men will seriously lack the capacity to understand – or even the knowledge that they should be trying to understand – the feelings of women in their lives.

Professor Hochschild frames the intersection of class and feeling rules somewhat more bluntly than I have:

More precisely, the class messages that parents pass on to their children may be roughly as follows. Middle class: “Your feelings count because you are (or will be) considered important by others:’ Lower class: “Your feelings don’t count because you aren’t (or won’t be) considered important by others:’

Note that this was written in the 80s and Professor Hochschild did suggest that orientation towards controlling emotions might soon (after the time of publication) cut across class lines due to the advent of automation. To an extent I think this has been borne out, but I feel like there is also an aesthetic element here. Class determines what emotions are acceptable to show (although of course this relationship is complicated and fickle, much like fashion), which also determines what people are raised to be able to do.

For a book that was supposed to focus on emotional labour, remarkably little of this book concerned actual interviews with labourers. The case studies here were much less in depth than in “The Second Shift” or “Strangers in Their Own Land”. This necessarily made the book harder to read and more academic and dry in tone. Ethnography often gives me the thrill of meeting (vicariously) interesting people (and of discovering that people I haven’t given much thought to are shockingly interesting!), but I found that distinctly lacking in this book.

(It’s much more theoretical than practical and I have to say that I prefer Professor Hochschild’s more practical books.)

That’s not to say the book wasn’t interesting or thought provoking. On the contrary, I often found thinking about it overwhelming. It introduced me to powerful models in areas of my life where I’d previously done little modelling.

If you want to better understand emotion, I recommend this book. If you want to read an entertaining ethnography, or see in depth case studies of how emotional management ties in to work, I’m less certain that you should. If you want an introduction to Professor Hochschild’s work, I also recommend skipping this one until you’ve read “The Second Shift”; that book is much more focused and somewhat better written.

Really, I think that my view of The Managed Heart illustrates a common problem, known to anyone who goes back and reads the earlier (and less polished) work of a beloved author. People grow, change, and develop. I can see some of the things I loved about Professor Hochschild’s later work here, but many other parts were missing.

Luckily Professor Hochschild has written several other books and they undoubtedly have more of what I like most about her. My ambivalence for the style (although not the contents) of this book have not at all dulled my resolution to read more of her work. Expect to see more reviews of Professor Hochschild’s books here in the future.

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Data Science, Literature, Model

Two Ideas Worth Sharing From ‘Weapons of Math Destruction’

Posted on by Zach

Recently, I talked about what I didn’t like in Dr. Cathy O’Neil’s book, Weapons of Math Destruction. This time around, I’d like to mention two parts of it I really liked. I wish Dr. O’Neil put more effort into naming the concepts she covered; I don’t have names for them from WMD, but in my head, I’ve been calling them Hidden Value Encodings and Axiomatic Judgements.

Hidden Value Encodings

Dr. O’Neil opens the book with a description of the model she uses to cook for her family. After going into a lot of detail about it, she makes this excellent observation:

Here we see that models, despite their reputation for impartiality, reflect goals and ideology. When I removed the possibility of eating Pop-Tarts at every meal, I was imposing my ideology on the meals model. It’s something we do without a second thought. Our own values and desires influence our choices, from the data we choose to collect to the questions we ask. Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.

It is far too easy to view models as entirely empirical, as math made form and therefore blind to values judgements. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s value judgements all the way down.

Imagine a model that tries to determine when a credit card transaction is fraudulent. Fraudulent credit cards transactions cost the credit card company money, because they must refund the stolen amount to the customer. Incorrectly identifying credit card transactions also costs a company money, either through customer support time, or if the customer gets so fed up by constant false positives that they switch to a different credit card provider.

If you were tasked with building a model to predict which credit card transactions were fraudulent by one of the major credit card companies, you would probably build into your model a variable cost for failing to catch fraudulent transactions (equivalent to the cost the company must bear if the transaction is fraudulent) and a fixed cost for labelling innocuous transactions as fraudulent (equivalent to the average cost of a customer support call plus the average chance of a false positive pushing someone over the edge into switching cards multiplied by the cost of their lost business over the next few years).

From this encoding, we can already see that our model would want to automatically approve all transactions below the fixed cost of dealing with false positives [1], while applying increasing scrutiny to more expensive items, especially expensive items with big resale value or items more expensive than the cardholder normally buys (as both of these point strongly toward fraud).

This seems innocuous and logical. It is also encoding at least two sets of values. First, it encodes the values associated with capitalism. At the most basic level, this algorithm “believes” that profit is good and losses are bad. It is aimed to maximize profit for the bank and while we may hold this as a default assumption for most algorithms associated with companies, that does not mean it is devoid of values; instead it encodes all of the values associated with capitalism [2]. Second, the algorithm encodes some notion that customers have freedom to choose between alternatives (even more so than is encoded by default in accepting capitalism).

By applying a cost to false positives (and likely it would be a cost that rises with each previous false positive), you are tacitly acknowledging that customers could take their business elsewhere. If customers instead had no freedom to choose who they did business with, you could merely encode as your loss from false positives the fixed cost of fielding support calls. Since outsourced phone support is very cheap, your algorithm would care much less about false positives if there was no consumer choice.

As far as I can tell, there is no “value-free” place to stand. An algorithm in the service of a hospital that helps diagnose patients or focus resources on the most ill encodes the value that “it is better to be healthy than sick; better to be alive than dead”. These values might be (almost-)universal, but they still exist, they are still encoded, and they still deserve to be interrogated when we put functions of our society in the hands of software governed by them.

Axiomatic Judgements

One of the most annoying parts of being a child is the occasional requirement to accept an imposition on your time or preferences with the explanation “because I say so”. “Because I say so” isn’t an argument, it’s a request that you acknowledge adults’ overwhelming physical, earning, and social power as giving them a right to set arbitrary rules for you. Some algorithms, forced onto unwelcoming and less powerful populations (teachers, job-seekers, etc.) have adopted this MO as well. Instead of having to prove that they have beneficial effects or that their outputs are legitimate, they define things such that their outputs are always correct and brook no criticism.

Here’s Dr. O’Neil talking about a value-added teaching model in Washington State:

When Mathematica’s scoring system tags Sarah Wysocki and 205 other teachers as failures, the district fires them. But how does it ever learn if it was right? It doesn’t. The system itself has determined that they were failures, and that is how they are viewed. Two hundred and six “bad” teachers are gone. That fact alone appears to demonstrate how effective the value-added model is. It is cleansing the district of underperforming teachers. Instead of searching for the truth, the score comes to embody it.

She contrasts this with how Amazon operates: “if Amazon.​com, through a faulty correlation, started recommending lawn care books to teenage girls, the clicks would plummet, and the algorithm would be tweaked until it got it right.” On the other hand, the teacher rating algorithm doesn’t update, doesn’t look check if it is firing good teachers, and doesn’t take an accounting of its own costs. It holds it as axiomatic ­–a basic fact beyond questioning– that its results are the right results.

I am in full agreement with Dr. O’Neil’s criticism here. Not only does it push past the bounds of fairness to make important decisions, like hiring and firing, through opaque formulae that are not explained to those who are being judged and lack basic accountability, but it’s a professional black mark on all of the statisticians involved.

Whenever you train a model, you hold some data back. This is your test data and you will use it to assess how well your model did. That gets you through to “production” – to having your model out in the field. This is an exciting milestone, not only because your model is now making decisions and (hopefully) making them well, but because now you’ll have way more data. You can see how your new fraud detection algorithm does by the volume of payouts and customer support calls. You can see how your new leak detection algorithm does by customers replying to your emails and telling you if you got it right or not.

A friend of mine who worked in FinTech once told me that they approved 1.5% of everyone who applied for their financial product, no matter what. They’d keep the score their model gave to that person on record, then see how the person fared in reality. If they used the product responsibly despite a low score, or used it recklessly despite a high score, it was viewed as valuable information that helped the team make their model that much better. I can imagine a team of data scientists, heads together around a monitor, looking through features and asking each other “huh, do any of you see what we missed here?” and it’s a pleasant image [3].

Value added teaching models, or psychological pre-screens for hiring do nothing of the sort (even though it would be trivial for them to!). They give results and those results are defined as the ground truth. There’s no room for messy reality to work its way back into the cycle. There’s no room for the creators to learn. The algorithm will be flawed and imperfect, like all products of human hands. That is inevitable. But it will be far less perfect than it could be. Absent feedback, it is doomed to always be flawed, in ways both subtle and gross, and in ways unknown to its creators and victims.

Like most Canadian engineering students, I made a solemn vow:

…in the presence of these my betters and my equals in my calling, [I] bind myself upon my honour and cold iron, that, to the best of my knowledge and power, I will not henceforward suffer or pass, or be privy to the passing of, bad workmanship or faulty material in aught that concerns my works before mankind as an engineer…

Sloppy work, like that value-added teacher model is the very definition of bad workmanship. Would that I never suffer something like that to leave my hands and take life in the world! It is no Quebec Bridge, but the value-added teaching model and other doomed to fail algorithms like it represent a slow-motion accident, steadily stealing jobs and happiness from people with no appeal or remorse.

I can accept stains on the honour of my chosen profession. Those are inevitable. But in a way, stains on our competence are so much worse. Models that take in no feedback are both, but the second really stings me.

Footnotes

[1] This first approximation isn’t correct in practice, because certain patterns of small transactions are consistent with fraud. I found this out the hard way, when a certain Bitcoin exchange’s credit card verification procedure (withdrawing less than a dollar, then refunding it a few days later, after you tell them how much they withdrew) triggered the fraud detection software at my bank. Apparently credit card thieves will often do a similar thing (minus the whole “ask the cardholder how much was withdrawn” step), as a means of checking if the card is good without cluing in the cardholder. ^

[2] I don’t mean this as a criticism of capitalism. I seek merely to point out (that like all other economic systems) capitalism is neither value neutral, nor inevitable. “Capitalism” encodes values like “people are largely rational”, “people often act to maximize their gains” and “choice is fundamentally good and useful”. ^

If socialist banks had ever made it to the point of deploying algorithms (instead of collapsing under the weight of their flawed economic system), those algorithms would also encode values (like “people will work hard for the good of the whole” and “people are inherently altruistic” and “it is worth it to sacrifice efficiency in the name of fairness”).

[3] Dulce et decorum est… get the fucking data science right. ^