No new posts until November

We will be out of the country and out of reach of internet connections until early next month, so there will be no new posts until early November.

The importance of cultural context

There is a myth in the world that important things can be studied in the abstract. For example, there is a prevalent myth in the scientific world that scientific subjects like physics or mathematics or molecular biology can be studied in a “pure” form, unaffected by culture. The field of economics has been laboring for decades to build complex models that largely ignore culture. Our foreign policy in recent years has been pursued largely in ignorance of cultural effects.

I would argue that no human endeavor is free of cultural effects, not even pure science. Culture has significant effects in steering scientific research toward some areas and away from others – science is as driven by fads and prejudices and dominant “schools” of thought as any other human activity. Religion is certainly all about culture. And politics is all about culture, as is economics, which is why we are having such difficulty in exporting our political and economic systems to some other parts of the world.

Of course cultures are not synonymous with nationalities or ethnic groups. Families have unique cultures. Companies and corporations have unique cultures. Religions have unique cultures. All sorts of human groupings – teams, play groups, bridge clubs, army platoons, etc. – have cultural aspects. Newcomers to these groups have to learn “the way things are done” before they are fully accepted and integrated. Any married couple knows that the two sides of the family have cultural differences – for example a story that might be funny to one side of the family may be offensive to the other side, and woe betide the couple that doesn’t learn this quickly.

Indeed, I expect that most of the difficulties in cross-religion and cross-nationality marriages come from differing cultural expectations – on the proper roles of men and women, on the way to raise children, on the manner in which money is handled, on the acceptable ways to express closeness or anger, and thousands of other cultural aspects, most of them unspoken and even invisible to those within the culture – its just “the way things are done”.

So my argument is that the study of culture is fundamental to the study of just about anything else, and an awareness of these important cultural influences is central to understanding just about anything that matters, from science to economics to religion to politics to history to literature. To ignore the cultural influences that shape these enterprises is to miss the most important driving and shaping forces.

The Wisdom of History

The Teaching Company has put out another brilliant lecture series by Professor J. Rufus Fears (see my book list on the sidebar) entitled “The Wisdom of History”. Professor Fears argues that most of the really terrible things that have happened recently, such as World Wars I and II, Vietnam, and our current mess in Iraq could have been avoided had the nations involved only had leaders who had understood and learned from history. Or as Colin Gray has put it in the introduction to his book “Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare”: “[I do]…not argue that nothing changes, only that little if anything of importance does.” And of course the famous quotation from George Santayana also applies: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Working his way from Ancient Greece forward to the modern day, Rufus Fears shows that each age thought that “things were different” in their age, and the horrors of history couldn’t possibly be repeated in their time – an argument one hears yet again in our time. Surely democracies don’t fight wars with each other (in fact they do, and they are generally longer and bloodier than wars between tyrants), surely modern weapons have made all-out world warfare unthinkable (the same was said of the machine gun and the crossbow in their time), surely if we are all interconnected in a global economy we won’t have such wars (it has happened before, more than once). As usual, we all live in the midst of myths unsupported by history.

In fact, Fears argues, history shows that individual freedom is not a universal value, despite our current political rhetoric. Throughout history, the Middle East has been the graveyard of empires, a fact apparently unknown to the neoconservatives. History shows that nationalism (national self-determination) and religion are far more powerful and universal drivers of history, and that the lust for power is probably the single most durable and dependable human value across all societies. This will offend many who hold sacred our current American idealism, but his arguments and the lessons of history that support them deserve serious attention, if only because the history-blindness of our current political establishment will no doubt sooner or later put America on the “trash heap of history” along with all the great powers and empires of the past.

The neurobiology of the true believer

Recent work in neurobiology suggests the possibility that people who become “true believers” may in fact be mentally wired to believe things absolutely, or at least to be predisposed to believe things absolutely. I suspect they are predisposed to be uncomfortable with ambiguity, and so are easily converted to whatever political, social or religious dogma that happens by that offers them a sense of certainty and fits moderately well with their cultural upbringing. Which one of the many competing dogmas they latch on to is of course a matter of chance, of what culture they were born into and what people they chanced to meet and which dogmas they happened to be exposed to.

And I would guess that the majority of the human population is so wired, because the majority of the population seems to be predisposed to see things in black and white, to want simple answers, and to want to be “right” and even enjoy thinking they have the truth without looking for evidence, and that everyone else is wrong.

This conclusion, if correct, suggests to me two things:

1. If this tendency to be a “true believer” is really a built-in neurobiological characteristic of a great many people, there is little prospect of ever having the majority of the population behave rationally, and anyone who tries to build a workable political system needs to account for this.

2. If this tendency to be a “true believer” is really a built-in neurobiological characteristic of a great many people, the only thing that stands a chance of displacing irrational beliefs and dogmas is a competing dogma based on a more rational foundation, but still a dogma. I know that a “rational dogma” sounds like an oxymoron, but I don’t know how else to express the concept. What would such a dogma look like, I wonder?

It’s an interesting conjecture.

The critic’s role

I had a project manager once who taught all of us on his staff never to bring him a problem without also proposing to him one or more viable solutions to that problem. I recall him dressing down a manager once (not me, thank goodness) for bringing just the problem. As he said, we were paid to think of solutions – if we were going to leave that to him then why was he paying us?

I think of this often as I listen to critics of the administration’s Iraq policy. There certainly is a problem here. Whatever we are doing doesn’t seem to be working, as the critics remind us daily. But where are the viable alternatives these critics should be proposing? I don’t see any.

Just packing up, declaring victory and pulling our troops out isn’t a viable alternative, popular as it may be with voters. It would just leave Iraq mired in sectarian bloodshed, a new safe haven for terrorist organizations, and a tempting target for Iran to expand its anti-American influence in the Middle East. A viable alternative has to account for these possibilities, and many others.

So I’m waiting for all these vocal critics to propose one or more viable alternative strategies. If they can’t propose viable alternatives, their criticism isn’t really worth much.

Political rhetoric

As we move into the political campaign season, with all its political rhetoric, it’s worth remembering some basic truths:

1. Politicians get elected by telling voters what they want to hear, not what is true.

2. Politicians get elected by reinforcing the myths and prejudices voters already believe in, not by showing them that their myths and prejudices are false -- indeed, they may well share those myths and prejudices.

3. Politicians get elected by addressing the issues voters happen to care about at the moment, not the issues that will affect voters most in the long run.

4. Politicians get elected by promising decisive action to fix problems, not by admitting that no one really knows how to fix those problems.

5. Politicians get elected by simplifying complex issues down to catchy tag lines, not by explaining the real complexity of issues (and most important issues are very complex indeed).

6. Politicians get elected by emphasizing what they are going to give voters, not what it will cost the voters.

7. Politicians get elected by looking competent, not by being competent – image is everything.

8. Politicians get elected by appealing to voter’s emotions, not to their rationality.

9. Politicians know that more people vote against a candidate than for their opponent. That’s why attack ads and negative campaigns work so well.

10. Successful politicians are good at getting elected, which is an entirely different skill set than that required to run a government effectively.

If you think that I am overly cynical. I can only suggest you watch the upcoming campaign with an open mind and judge for yourself.

The importance of oil

A good many Americans are aware by now that we use too much of the world’s oil to fuel our oversized SUVs and cars, and produce too much CO₂ as a byproduct. But few understand how completely dependent our entire way of life is on cheap petroleum.

Without cheap oil most of us wouldn’t have enough to eat. Oil is the source of the pesticides and fertilizers and machinery that make our farms about 10 times more productive than they were in pre-oil days. Vast amounts of oil are needed to make and fuel the farm machinery that allows less than 2% of the population to grow enough food for the rest of us, and yet more oil is used to transport that food throughout the country, and yet more oil is required to keep much of that food fresh with refrigerators. The average American corn field produces about 130-150 bushels per acre today. Before oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and modern farm machinery the average yield was around 14-16 bushels to the acre. (1) One acre of corn production in the U.S. requires approximately 140 gallons of oil (2) in the form of fuel, fertilizer and pesticides. To process 1 pound of coffee requires the equivalent energy found in nearly a quart of crude oil by the time it is grown, shipped, processes and packaged (3).

The pre-oil world supported about a billion people. We now support almost 7 billion people. Let’s be optimistic and assume that technology (genetic engineering and the like) might double our potential non-oil food production capacity, so that in a post-oil world we could feed 2 billion people. That means the lives of at least 5 billion people hang on the balance as we run out of oil. And some of those people will be in our own nation.

Without cheap oil most of us wouldn’t have electricity, and without electricity most of our economy won’t run. Although coal is the fuel that drives the majority (about 60%) of our generating plants, cheap oil is what makes it economically possible to manufacture and run the equipment used to mine and transport the coal, to build and maintain the generating machinery and electric transmission infrastructure, and to build all the electric devices we depend on, from furnaces and air conditioners and refrigerators to Ipods and computers and electric light bulbs.

Without cheap oil many products will disappear or become prohibitively expensive, since oil is the feedstock for many chemical processes, including most plastics.

Directly or indirectly cheap oil makes possible most of our industrial capability, most of our technological advances, most of our imports, most of our food, most of our environmental control (heating and cooling) most of our medical services, most of our sources of entertainment and recreation, most of our information infrastructure, and almost all of our transportation.

The current evidence is that we will run out of cheap oil over the next few decades as we are forced to recover oil from more remote regions and in more inaccessible forms (such as tar sands) – that ought to worry us and be a source of wide public and political discussion. That fact that it isn’t widely discussed, certainly not in the political arena, doesn’t bode well for the world’s future.

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1. Walter Youngquist, “The Post-Petroleum Paradigm -- and Population”, Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Volume 20, Number 4, March 1999
   

2. David Pimentel, Encyclopedia of Physical Sciences and Technology, September 2001
   

3. Chad Heeter, “The oil in your oatmeal - A lot of fossil fuel goes into producing, packaging and shipping our breakfast”, 25 Mar 2006, The San Francisco Chronicle