I like being a reform Jew, and essentially an atheist, and it's been hard not to think about the tensions and frequent lack thereof between those two statements lately. A quick story helps explain much of the lack of contradiction: at Temple Sinai, where we are members, one of the rabbis was talking to the parents as part of the open house for the School for Jewish Life and Learning (aka Hebrew School). I forget the exact context, but she basically said at one point "...God... [pause] ... or the spiritual force in your life as you yourself understand it ..." and went on to finish her point. In reform Judaism, we don't just believe in the separation of church and state, we believe in the separation of church and church, apparently. I know of at least one case where both the president of a synagogue (Hi, Mom!) and the chair of its Ritual Committee (Hi, Dad!) were both non-believers and no one really cared.
If you surveyed the approach to belief and faith in your average reform synagogue, I'm not sure if believers would really be in the majority most places. It's certainly not an overwhelming majority, and the median belief in some places probably falls somewhere in the agnostic/deistic part of the spectrum. I fall a bit more to the "faithless" part of the spectrum than that, sitting into the atheist camp with a non-trivial degree of curiosity for "God the programmer of the simulation in which we live" a la Elon Musk and techies throughout the ages [1]. Of course, mechanical theories like that don't really yield a useful theory of morality; rather, they explain why we might be here but not at all what we should do about that fact. To answer the obvious question with the obvious answer: yes, like all atheists forever, I try to hold fast to the Inverse Golden Rule, do NOT do unto others as you would have them NOT do unto you, while living up to the Golden Rule to the best of my abilities.
An aside: I realize the Golden Rule is more aspirational than realistic for the average person, but still, it bears repeating that people who claim religious beliefs really shouldn't act like assholes. Like, ever. This is not the kind of thing where you get to act like a schmuck and then claim backsies. Even if people annoy you, or have different beliefs, it's not your right as a person whose beliefs are grounded in most religious/ethical traditions to act out about it. If you do, it is not hypocrisy in the sense of simple inconsistency, it is hypocrisy in a fundamental sense that impugns your very character.
Anyway, if I am particularly comfortable as a reform Jew, the biggest reason is almost certainly because the values that they emphasize match up nicely with my own, with a particular focus on social justice as the centerpiece of reform Jewish identity [2]. In some cases, even I am skeptical if the religious justifications for some policies, e.g., Reform Judaism's embrace of LGBTQ equality, actually fit within the claimed textual framework that are used as references; of course, as a non-believer, I'm completely happy with the ends and don't really care overmuch what literature citations people use to get there [3].
Another aside: Whenever I organize my books, I always put my Tanakh (Old Testament) collection in the section I create for Jewish fiction. I find this joke amusing. I can't help it.
To the extent I have a disagreement with many (most?) reform Jews, especially the older half of the congregation, it's almost certainly my feelings towards Israel -- I have no problem with the idea that Israel has a right to exist, but I'm pretty extremely dovish, basically J Street and then some [4]. Luckily, I haven't been able to determine if Reform Judaism even has an official policy, and voices dissenting on the dovish side of the spectrum are certainly growing in number rapidly [5].
So, why the tension? The tricky spot is, of course, the kids. How do you properly teach children both ethics and skepticism? I have to admit, I still find this tricky. Our daughter is fully aware of my non-belief, and our son still believes that Star Wars and Batman might be documentaries, so we'll work more with him later. Basically, I've come around to discussing ethics as the central question now, and belief vs skepticism later. This might make me a bad New Atheist, but since it seems like moral beliefs and religious faith are essentially uncorrelated traits amongst the American population, and I suppose the world as well, I'd rather work on the former with my kids and let the latter sort itself out over time.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/11/simulated-world-elon-musk-the-matrix
[2] http://www.reformjudaism.org/social-justice
[3] http://www.reformjudaism.org/practice/ask-rabbi/what-does-reform-judaism-say-about-homosexuality
[4] http://jstreet.org/
[5] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/06/10/failure-american-jewish-establishment/
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Man's Best Friend Outside of a Dog: The decade in review
The best book I read from the past decade was a Great American Novel, in the all-caps sense, even though very few people seem to call it that just because the author is originally a Brit. Even though it fails to top my list, I see no need to insult Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, which topped The Million's best books of the decade list. It was very good, and written in the serious-story-about-a-troubled-family mode that invites being called a "Great American Novel", but it just doesn't top my list. No, my favorite book written in the past decade is undoubtably Neil Gaiman's America Gods, published in 2001.
Gaiman's story, which basically casts Norse mythology onto modern-day American society is a fantastic rea, as all Gaiman's books are. More importantly, the perspective he brings to American Society as an outsider seems to have leant him a much better understanding of what makes this country tick. America is big, and it's strange in a lot of places, and many towns in Illinois and the rest of the Midwest are a little depressing for reasons that are hard to name but involve some combination of flatness and economic stagnation. Gaiman manages to somehow make a comic book out of middle America without turning it into an out-and-out caricature, identifying the quirks of the culture and the fact that our values are often centered not so much upon the God who created us in his image but rather the gods that we created to transmit images. Part fantasy, part road novel, and part musing on the nature of modern identity, it captures the spirit of the contry right before the Bush era that could have easily served as an afterword to the novel.
Others deserving mention that I've read:
The Known World, by Edward P. Jones: Set in Virginia in the decade before the civil war, this story of a black slaveowning family is a slice of history about which I knew nothing. Fascinating, and the parallels to modern society aremore than thoughtprovoking.
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz: One of the best new writers out there, this tale of life in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic has a strong narrative voice and a real joy for language.
The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon: Chabon is a much better writer when he writes about Jewish theme, and this counterfactual novel about a Jewish state set up in Alaska is his most complete work to date. His novella Gentlemen of the Road is also fantastic, for the same reasons.
The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri: Another novel in which seeing both India and America as an outsider has leant the author real insight into one's place in the world and the difficulty in establishing it. Her short story collections, Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, show her mastery of the genre, too.
Radiance, by Carter Scholz: The best book about scientists I've read in possibly forever, this talk of bureaucratic malfeasance at a national lab does a great and frequently hilarious job of contrasting the big pictures we all dream of with the more humdrum aspects of modern life.
Just to clarify the quote, Grouho Marx quipped that "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
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Now playing: U2 - In God's Country
via FoxyTunes
Gaiman's story, which basically casts Norse mythology onto modern-day American society is a fantastic rea, as all Gaiman's books are. More importantly, the perspective he brings to American Society as an outsider seems to have leant him a much better understanding of what makes this country tick. America is big, and it's strange in a lot of places, and many towns in Illinois and the rest of the Midwest are a little depressing for reasons that are hard to name but involve some combination of flatness and economic stagnation. Gaiman manages to somehow make a comic book out of middle America without turning it into an out-and-out caricature, identifying the quirks of the culture and the fact that our values are often centered not so much upon the God who created us in his image but rather the gods that we created to transmit images. Part fantasy, part road novel, and part musing on the nature of modern identity, it captures the spirit of the contry right before the Bush era that could have easily served as an afterword to the novel.
Others deserving mention that I've read:
The Known World, by Edward P. Jones: Set in Virginia in the decade before the civil war, this story of a black slaveowning family is a slice of history about which I knew nothing. Fascinating, and the parallels to modern society aremore than thoughtprovoking.
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz: One of the best new writers out there, this tale of life in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic has a strong narrative voice and a real joy for language.
The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon: Chabon is a much better writer when he writes about Jewish theme, and this counterfactual novel about a Jewish state set up in Alaska is his most complete work to date. His novella Gentlemen of the Road is also fantastic, for the same reasons.
The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri: Another novel in which seeing both India and America as an outsider has leant the author real insight into one's place in the world and the difficulty in establishing it. Her short story collections, Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, show her mastery of the genre, too.
Radiance, by Carter Scholz: The best book about scientists I've read in possibly forever, this talk of bureaucratic malfeasance at a national lab does a great and frequently hilarious job of contrasting the big pictures we all dream of with the more humdrum aspects of modern life.
Just to clarify the quote, Grouho Marx quipped that "Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
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Now playing: U2 - In God's Country
via FoxyTunes
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's assets
As a relatively recent homebuyer in Upstate New York, I'd like to think I'm pretty isolated from the worst of the housing bubble's bursting. Prices around here have been fairly flat for decades, failing to go up dramatically along with the rest of the country for the past 15 years, but also failing to drop much either. When looking for a mortgage, the most exotic option we considered was a 25-year fixed, but in the end the 30-year fixed just seemed like the better option.
Many people around the country were eiter not so fortunate, or not so wise. The government's efforts to help ease the crisis be encouraging banks to modify the interest rates on mortgages have been either ineffective or actively counterproductive, since, according to experts quoted by the NYTimes,
The solution popular among economists is to encourage banks to modify the principal amounts of mortgages gone bad, even if this is on the government dime. Needless to say, this is often unpopular, with frequent sentiments being echoed by CNBC's resident real estate blogger, Diana Olick:
Seriously, why? Perhaps some of it is corporate culture, in that every tax dollar we are forced to contribute is a dollar that we can't spend on a new electronic gadget that will revolutionize our existence as we know it (damn those underwater homeowners, now I can't afford Rock Band: Glockenspiel!). A lot of it, though, is simple acceptance of the "backhanded tenth commandment", which basically states "I will not covet my neighbor's possessions so long as I ensure that I have more than he does." It probably helps explain why so many people are often so stressed, harried, and generally unhappy:
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Now playing: Rusted Root - Food & Creative Love
via FoxyTunes
Many people around the country were eiter not so fortunate, or not so wise. The government's efforts to help ease the crisis be encouraging banks to modify the interest rates on mortgages have been either ineffective or actively counterproductive, since, according to experts quoted by the NYTimes,
desperate homeowners have sent payments to banks in often-futile efforts to keep their homes, which some see as wasting dollars they could have saved in preparation for moving to cheaper rental residences.Banks still have bad loans on their books, home prices are still being artificially inflated, and widespread foreclosures are damaging entire neighborhoods.
The solution popular among economists is to encourage banks to modify the principal amounts of mortgages gone bad, even if this is on the government dime. Needless to say, this is often unpopular, with frequent sentiments being echoed by CNBC's resident real estate blogger, Diana Olick:
The arguments are plain and simple: Bite the bullet to save the greater housing market or don't because the moral hazard is far too untenable. Anyone who's ever read this blog before knows where I stand. I would honestly rather see my home's value go down than see the guy next door (figurative: my neighbors are lovely and fiscally responsible) who made a poor/negligent financial decision get a mulligan at my expense.She's really fond of blaming both banks and homeowners, but especially the homeowners:
I'm sorry, but I'm just getting a little sick of all the onus being laid on the banks. Sure, they deserve half of it, but what about the borrowers?? We seem to excuse all their responsibility because the possibility exists that they could lose their homes. But realistically, many borrowers are sitting in said homes, rent free, actively refusing to take the help being offered because they'd have to admit they lied.Principal modifications have a lot of potential benefits, including lower payments for homeowners, and a higher chance for the bank that the borrower will keep repaying a loan. Becuae it instantly increases the borrower's equity stake, they become more mobile, able to seek out better job/life opportunities and increasing the chance that the house will pass on to a new buyer rather than into the hands of the bank. The problem is that even though banks and underwater homeowners are the responsible parties, we as a society end up getting stuck with the bill. It's not pleasant, but we're long since beyond pleasant. I get worried, at some point, by frequent moral hazard arguments that manage to basically exonerate corporate misbehavior while bringing down wrath on everyone else. The basic idea is that it's better to suffer a little oneself so long as those who were foolish suffer more. Is this really the best we can manage these days? While I appreciate that times are tough all over, it's stunning to see how much concern is paid to the idea that someone undeserving might get ahead in life. It underlies the affirmative action debate, the debates over welfare from the 80's onward, a good bit of the Teabagger/anti-tax crowd, and a shockingly large part of our political culture.
Seriously, why? Perhaps some of it is corporate culture, in that every tax dollar we are forced to contribute is a dollar that we can't spend on a new electronic gadget that will revolutionize our existence as we know it (damn those underwater homeowners, now I can't afford Rock Band: Glockenspiel!). A lot of it, though, is simple acceptance of the "backhanded tenth commandment", which basically states "I will not covet my neighbor's possessions so long as I ensure that I have more than he does." It probably helps explain why so many people are often so stressed, harried, and generally unhappy:
Psychologists at the University of Rochester evaluated survey responses from 147 recent graduates, noting their achievements and their level of happiness over a period of two years. People's goals were divided into two categories: extrinsic (things like wealth, fame and personal image) and intrinsic (for example, meaningful relationships, health and personal growth). Achieving intrinsic goals led to higher self-esteem and a greater sense of well-being, the researchers statistical analysis revealed. But, in a snub for the American dream, attaining the extrinsic goals of wealth and fame led to anxiety and unhappiness.At some point, it would be good if the dominant political mindset of the chattering class, and perhaps that of the nation as a whole, was not that of a vengeful six-year old. As is nearly always true, the best advice comes from Raffi: "All I Really Need is a Song in my Heart, Food in my belly, and love in my Family" or, if you prefer a more stoned adult perspective, from Rusted Root: "All I need is food and creative love". Decrying the fact that your neighbors and fellow citizens are not losing their houses really won't help you achieve any of these.
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Now playing: Rusted Root - Food & Creative Love
via FoxyTunes
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Bang and Blame
Lord, please forgive Brit Hume, for he knows not what he does. The sanctimonious former Fox host made headlines a few days ago for suggesting that Tiger Woods come to Jesus:
In Judaism, to paraphrase, sins against God must be forgiven by God (Yom Kippur is the day of Atonement for this purpose), but sins against your fellow man require atonement from the aggrieved party. I don't fully understand the Christian policy as it varies from sect to sect, but it certainly seems as if God plays a potentially larger role in forgiving all of us. Because Christianity is faith-based to a larger degree than Judaism, faith is placed in a more central role for achieving forgiveness. Here is where we have to carefully follow the chain of giver and recipient:If person X has faith in God, defined in appropriately Christian terms, according to my best understanding of Christianity, then God will forgive their sins. This does not imply that for person X to forgive person Y, then person Y needs to have faith in JC. This is only a condition for God to grant forgiveness from God to person Y. Brit Hume and the others of his ilk seek to hold others to a standard they try to establish for themselves, and also take on the judgment role for others reserved for that higher authority. Their belief, even if they can't admit it to themselves, is that if person Y has faith in God, then they will forgive person Y. This is not an idle argument, as it has been suggested that Mike Huckabee essentially used this background logic for granting clemency while governor of Arkansas.
It is a dangerous game when people not only assume the role of a higher power in granting forgiveness, but also for passing divine judgment as well. George Bush, Tony Blair, Joe Lieberman, and a number of other religiously motivated folks seem to have a pretty good idea about who we should go about the world killing, and shockingly enough those on the receiving end always worship a different name of God. The group responsible for setting up the Death Penalty in the US recently "pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it." And yet, the death penalty is still widely popular, and even Obama supports its use in some cases. Why does the taste for blood run so deep? Why did 58% of people support torturing the underwear bomber in a recent survey, and why do we assume that torture should merely be limited to terorists? What about drug kingpins, child rapists, and billion-dollar embezzlers? It is because we embrace punishment, and relish it. We wish to inflict pain and suffering when it has been inflicted on us, the Golden Rule be damned.
In the end, forgiveness, to quote the Dalai Lama, comes from a sense of humility, and it is a bastardized version that emerges when we assume the divine mantle instead. Perhaps we are so used to being a hegemonic nation, a country blessed by the divine to lead the world, that we feel as citizens of the country that the divine rights fall to us all individually too. To quote a Bush advisor back in 2003:
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Now playing: R.E.M. - Bang And Blame
via FoxyTunes
He is said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger is, 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.Later, digging himself in deeper, he clarified to Bill O'Reilly:
Hume said that given Woods problems, he "needs something that Christianity, especially, provides, and gives and offers."As Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly points out, such beliefs hardly helped Gov. Mark Sanford (Adulterer/Hiker-SC), Sen. John Ensign (Adulterer-NV), David Vitter (John-LA), Larry Craig ("Wide Stance"-ID), and a host of others. In a beautifully written post, Ta-Nehisi Coates puts into words how forgiveness and redemption truly work:
We like to think about redemption in terms of getting past a sin, but we don't really think about the process as teaching us something.What Hume fails to understand in the slightest is who needs to forgive whom here. If Tiger Woods needs forgiveness from those around him, or the public at large, in theory he should make amends to the former and start leading by example for the rest of us. This obviously doesn't have to involve JC. If Tiger Woods needs to humble himself, I think it is fair to suggest that any number of religions offer means for self-humility. Quoting the Dalai Lama for instance,
As someone who's done his share of sinning, I think the striking thing about a serious process of redemption is how it humbles you. It isn't simply a process of exoneration, or making amends, it's a fundamental questioning of bone-deep philosophy. You learn about the ignorance of your certainty. Having been deeply wrong before, you come to know that as a flawed thing, you are subject to being deeply wrong again.
"The whole purpose of religion is to facilitate love and compassion, patience, tolerance, humility, and forgiveness."Perhaps Brit Hume lacks the humility both to learn the first thing about Buddhism before bashing it on national TV, or perhaps he can't forgive Tiger Woods because he views him as a heathen, even though, to quote JC in Mark 11:25:
And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.Why can't Brit Hume forgive Tiger Woods, and by his own internal projection, the rest of us forgive Tiger? At its heart lies one of the creeping sicknesses in American society.
In Judaism, to paraphrase, sins against God must be forgiven by God (Yom Kippur is the day of Atonement for this purpose), but sins against your fellow man require atonement from the aggrieved party. I don't fully understand the Christian policy as it varies from sect to sect, but it certainly seems as if God plays a potentially larger role in forgiving all of us. Because Christianity is faith-based to a larger degree than Judaism, faith is placed in a more central role for achieving forgiveness. Here is where we have to carefully follow the chain of giver and recipient:If person X has faith in God, defined in appropriately Christian terms, according to my best understanding of Christianity, then God will forgive their sins. This does not imply that for person X to forgive person Y, then person Y needs to have faith in JC. This is only a condition for God to grant forgiveness from God to person Y. Brit Hume and the others of his ilk seek to hold others to a standard they try to establish for themselves, and also take on the judgment role for others reserved for that higher authority. Their belief, even if they can't admit it to themselves, is that if person Y has faith in God, then they will forgive person Y. This is not an idle argument, as it has been suggested that Mike Huckabee essentially used this background logic for granting clemency while governor of Arkansas.
It is a dangerous game when people not only assume the role of a higher power in granting forgiveness, but also for passing divine judgment as well. George Bush, Tony Blair, Joe Lieberman, and a number of other religiously motivated folks seem to have a pretty good idea about who we should go about the world killing, and shockingly enough those on the receiving end always worship a different name of God. The group responsible for setting up the Death Penalty in the US recently "pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it." And yet, the death penalty is still widely popular, and even Obama supports its use in some cases. Why does the taste for blood run so deep? Why did 58% of people support torturing the underwear bomber in a recent survey, and why do we assume that torture should merely be limited to terorists? What about drug kingpins, child rapists, and billion-dollar embezzlers? It is because we embrace punishment, and relish it. We wish to inflict pain and suffering when it has been inflicted on us, the Golden Rule be damned.
In the end, forgiveness, to quote the Dalai Lama, comes from a sense of humility, and it is a bastardized version that emerges when we assume the divine mantle instead. Perhaps we are so used to being a hegemonic nation, a country blessed by the divine to lead the world, that we feel as citizens of the country that the divine rights fall to us all individually too. To quote a Bush advisor back in 2003:
"I think President Bush is God's man at this hour, and I say this with a great sense of humility."They keep using that word, but I do not think it means what they think it means. As painful as it is, we should probably try to forgive them, regardless of our religiuous beliefs, even though we should also point out their deluded idiocy when appropriate. Without sarcasm, let me suggest that their understanding of their own morals is so clouded that they really no longer understand the words coming out of their own mouths. It may be a product of their own willful ignorance, but they know not what they do.
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Now playing: R.E.M. - Bang And Blame
via FoxyTunes
Monday, January 4, 2010
I don't want the world, I just want your half
The strangest thing about US hegemony in the world isn't so much that some people support the idea, but rather that so few "respectable" people oppose it. Recent estimates of world military spending attribute over 40% of the world's total military spending to the US alone, and when you figure that it's pretty highly unlikely we'll get into a shooting war any time soon with the UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan, the US easily outspends all countries with whom we have any rivalry or even fairly neutral relations. China, the number 2 spender, is a factor of 7 behind us, and needless to say we have something of a head start. At the risk of being uncouth, this is frickin' insane, really. We can defend ourselves from all nations in the world for a fraction of the cost, and it appears we'll never be able to afford the cost of putting a stable, reputable government in Iraq or Afghanistan until we decide to pay off the entire populace: ($150 billion per year/36 million people = $4000 per person = 4-5 times the annual per capita income in either country). Heck, we could bribe everyone in both countries, and still cut costs in the short run!
Speaking as a fairly eager recipient of government funds myself, it's worth noting that not every military dollar we spend goes to waste: military salaries keep people employed and the defense industry afloat. Still, with a price tag for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq approaching $1 trillion, it's hard to attribute that to salary, and I think it's fair to say a decent bit of that money has gone to transporting people and stuff back and forth and blowing a lot of shit up, with little to show for in terms of infrastructure improvements in its wake, certainly not a rate of return with which we should be pleased. For comparison sake, this is more than the entire health-care bill at the moment, and that even pays for itself by most estimates. It is also sufficient to basically cure world hunger, or eliminate a handful of nasty diseases. And yet, if one suggests that perhaps these are reasonable goals, rather than hegemonic power, it's basically like shouting out that you are a crazed leftist.
It's now to the point where we are spending on toys that can only be really used against our toys, since no one else will ever be able to get in the game. As Matt Yglesias points out, we are designing laser cannons to use against enemy planes, but no one even attempts to challenge our Air Force with their own, since doing so is a quick way to eliminate one's Air Force as a useful fighting force.
Respected senators, or at least those like Lieberman who seem to have the respect of their peers for unknown reasons, call for us to consider attacking Yemen... but what exactly are we supposed to attack? One might think yet another desert conflict in a failing/failed state without a clearly defined objective might raise warning signs, but he wasn't exactly laughed off the set of Fox News Sunday. After Afghanistan, Iraq, blowback into the tribal areas of Pakistan, the collapse of Somalia, the ongoing collapse in Yemen, etc., one might think to reconsider the real gains from our hegemonic spending, but no, we're discussing whether to attack Iran and Yemen as a serious conversation. Quoting Matt Yglesias again, this isn't going to end well:
Consider Japan, if you will. Not perfect by any means, but they live longer than we do, spend considerably less on defense, and no one is attacking them on a regular basis! This includes al Qaeda, who currently rank between lightning strikes and roller skating accidents as a cause for death for Americans since 9/11, well behind falls in the bathroom and car crashes while texting. It also includes China, even though they are in the neighborhood and we spend 40% of the world's military budget defending against them.
The best test of an idea is often to bring it up out of context and ask if it stands in its own right or merely because it's always been the case. Imagine we were not the world's hegemon: how much would we as a nation wish to spend on the military? I have trouble that the answer is seven times as much as China and more than all the non-EU states in the world combined. The only reason it is considered reasonable is because we did it last year and the year before that and on backwards. It was almost certainly rather crazy back in the days of the Cold War, and it's only getting nuttier since.
Perhaps the problem is that we refer to it as the "defense" budget. Clue to those who haven't figured this one out: it doesn't cost this much to defend oneself. Many countries manage it for much cheaper. Who in the world is really going to attack us militarily at this point. The Navy and Air Force essntially own their respective domains, and the Army is unattackable. Why are we doing this? To the extent we are vulnerable, it is because of our hegemony, and the attackers are not states whom we can smash, but random people armed with explosives and hand-to-hand weapons. Throwing billions after billions isn't really getting us anywhere, maybe we could try spending a few billion less. After all, save a few billion here and a few billion there, and pretty soon we are talking real money...and healthcare...and an end to world hunger.
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Now playing: They Might Be Giants - Ana Ng
via FoxyTunes
Speaking as a fairly eager recipient of government funds myself, it's worth noting that not every military dollar we spend goes to waste: military salaries keep people employed and the defense industry afloat. Still, with a price tag for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq approaching $1 trillion, it's hard to attribute that to salary, and I think it's fair to say a decent bit of that money has gone to transporting people and stuff back and forth and blowing a lot of shit up, with little to show for in terms of infrastructure improvements in its wake, certainly not a rate of return with which we should be pleased. For comparison sake, this is more than the entire health-care bill at the moment, and that even pays for itself by most estimates. It is also sufficient to basically cure world hunger, or eliminate a handful of nasty diseases. And yet, if one suggests that perhaps these are reasonable goals, rather than hegemonic power, it's basically like shouting out that you are a crazed leftist.
It's now to the point where we are spending on toys that can only be really used against our toys, since no one else will ever be able to get in the game. As Matt Yglesias points out, we are designing laser cannons to use against enemy planes, but no one even attempts to challenge our Air Force with their own, since doing so is a quick way to eliminate one's Air Force as a useful fighting force.
Respected senators, or at least those like Lieberman who seem to have the respect of their peers for unknown reasons, call for us to consider attacking Yemen... but what exactly are we supposed to attack? One might think yet another desert conflict in a failing/failed state without a clearly defined objective might raise warning signs, but he wasn't exactly laughed off the set of Fox News Sunday. After Afghanistan, Iraq, blowback into the tribal areas of Pakistan, the collapse of Somalia, the ongoing collapse in Yemen, etc., one might think to reconsider the real gains from our hegemonic spending, but no, we're discussing whether to attack Iran and Yemen as a serious conversation. Quoting Matt Yglesias again, this isn't going to end well:
Today America is worried about chaos in Afghanistan, but there are also indications that al Qa’eda has found safe haven in Somalia and Yemen. Broken states, alas, are not all that rare. To suggest that the United States could succeed in its mission to vastly improve governance in Afghanistan, given enough time and money and manpower, hardly provides evidence that the task could be repeated in Sudan and Nigeria and Chad. If it’s true that the world’s security depends on eradicating every pocket of instability on Earth, then we really are doomed.Given all these problems, some of the cheaper options include not advertising quite so widely our overwhelming desire to torture people, since this really doesn't help our reputation overseas. It's been noted that the underpants bomber's father actually reported on him to US authorities, and that he might have had more qualms if he suspected we were going to torture his kid, seemingly just for the sake of inflicting pain given that it hasn't been reported that he's withholding important information from the authorities at the moment. Even cheaper, though, would be basically getting out of the game, or at least cutting back by about 75%, leaving us still hegemon but at least closer to the pack.
Consider Japan, if you will. Not perfect by any means, but they live longer than we do, spend considerably less on defense, and no one is attacking them on a regular basis! This includes al Qaeda, who currently rank between lightning strikes and roller skating accidents as a cause for death for Americans since 9/11, well behind falls in the bathroom and car crashes while texting. It also includes China, even though they are in the neighborhood and we spend 40% of the world's military budget defending against them.
The best test of an idea is often to bring it up out of context and ask if it stands in its own right or merely because it's always been the case. Imagine we were not the world's hegemon: how much would we as a nation wish to spend on the military? I have trouble that the answer is seven times as much as China and more than all the non-EU states in the world combined. The only reason it is considered reasonable is because we did it last year and the year before that and on backwards. It was almost certainly rather crazy back in the days of the Cold War, and it's only getting nuttier since.
Perhaps the problem is that we refer to it as the "defense" budget. Clue to those who haven't figured this one out: it doesn't cost this much to defend oneself. Many countries manage it for much cheaper. Who in the world is really going to attack us militarily at this point. The Navy and Air Force essntially own their respective domains, and the Army is unattackable. Why are we doing this? To the extent we are vulnerable, it is because of our hegemony, and the attackers are not states whom we can smash, but random people armed with explosives and hand-to-hand weapons. Throwing billions after billions isn't really getting us anywhere, maybe we could try spending a few billion less. After all, save a few billion here and a few billion there, and pretty soon we are talking real money...and healthcare...and an end to world hunger.
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Now playing: They Might Be Giants - Ana Ng
via FoxyTunes
Sunday, January 3, 2010
I'm looking through you
I'm pretty sure that it's not the correct quote nor the meaning of the correct quote, but it is hard not to think these days that "the media is the message", in that many of the stories that they dwell upon endlessly are basically the stories that only they feel the need to dwell upon endlessly. The shoe bomber sequel is perhaps the most recent example, in that the media is in a panic, Republican operatives are having a field day making attacks that they themselves would have called treasonous way back when in 2001 when Richard Reid tried the same exact thing, and honestly I'm not sure if anyone else really cares. By this point, if you haven't figured out that much of airline security is theater designed to make us feel safe, learn to love Teh Google, as there are 63,000 hits that can basically go over the concept for us. No, I think we all realize to some extent that while the government is good at retroactively preventing attacks that have already been attempted, there is inevitably a chance that someone will come up with a new way to attack a plane.
Quick aside: Like Kevin Drum in the following link, I think it is true that the fact al Qaeda always attacks planes and/or buses is a sign of weakness. Since 9/11, Afghan militants, Filipino militants, several African generals, and a bunch of other groups have figured out clever ways to slaughter the innocent. Al Qaeda likes to attack planes using shoes and underpants. They've tried twice in a decade, and failed both times, with the gravest injury being to the crotch of the most recent attempted bomber. As Nate Silver points out, airline travel is not just safe, it's ridiculously safe:
If you are content leaving home without a lightning rod in your pocket, you should probably feel ok to fly. Honestly, I think people already know this, and the media freakout is basically an orchestrated show for the right wing to land free potshots and the hyperventilators to show how panicked all the rest of us should be. Remember during the past decade, of course, when across America the government and media hypervintilated about terrorism and New Yorkers, the people hit hardest and most likely tobe hit again, almost universally said "Al Qaeda? Fuhgeddaboutit. Fuck 'em." and managed to live life while small midwestern city governments built concrete fortifications around obscure county buildings.
The situation is so bad that David Brooks of the NYT is being held up as a voice of reason for his New Year's column. While agreeing in part with him, I think he misses a key point:
Quick aside: Like Kevin Drum in the following link, I think it is true that the fact al Qaeda always attacks planes and/or buses is a sign of weakness. Since 9/11, Afghan militants, Filipino militants, several African generals, and a bunch of other groups have figured out clever ways to slaughter the innocent. Al Qaeda likes to attack planes using shoes and underpants. They've tried twice in a decade, and failed both times, with the gravest injury being to the crotch of the most recent attempted bomber. As Nate Silver points out, airline travel is not just safe, it's ridiculously safe:
Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.
If you are content leaving home without a lightning rod in your pocket, you should probably feel ok to fly. Honestly, I think people already know this, and the media freakout is basically an orchestrated show for the right wing to land free potshots and the hyperventilators to show how panicked all the rest of us should be. Remember during the past decade, of course, when across America the government and media hypervintilated about terrorism and New Yorkers, the people hit hardest and most likely tobe hit again, almost universally said "Al Qaeda? Fuhgeddaboutit. Fuck 'em." and managed to live life while small midwestern city governments built concrete fortifications around obscure county buildings.
The situation is so bad that David Brooks of the NYT is being held up as a voice of reason for his New Year's column. While agreeing in part with him, I think he misses a key point:
Resilient societies have a level-headed understanding of the risks inherent in this kind of warfare.
But, of course, this is not how the country has reacted over the past week. There have been outraged calls for Secretary Janet Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security to resign, as if changing the leader of the bureaucracy would fix the flaws inherent in the bureaucracy. There have been demands for systemic reform — for more protocols, more layers and more review systems.
We do have a resilient society, by and large. The outraged calls and demands are a product of the media, by the media, and for the media. The rest of us were singing Auld Lang Syne badly, watching football, and other similar pursuits.
That said, while I think those calling for random insulting ways to racially profile Muslims really have no grasp of what drives a lot of the hatred of the US, I have to say that the proposal to put in many more full body scanners in airports doesn't really bother me. Even the two year old is starting to learn the names for various parts of herself, and I hope it comes as no surprise that there really aren't that many variations in all our parts. To put it mildly, even though many of us spend way to much time obsessing over penises and boobies, I'm pretty sure that after an airline scan technician looks at a few hundred, most of the prurient thrill will be gone. Your first glimpse of unobscured anatomy is a thrill, the thousandth, not so much. If this is what it takes to make a few people feel better, I can live with it, as the idea of just having everyone fly naked is hampered by sanitary and climate control issues. For those worried about privacy, the big threat is not a full-body scan, it's google if you've ever posted a single detail about your life on the internet, or if someone else has (hint: someone else has, trust me). Between google, facebook, and all the other easily searchable ways to find out info about people, our private lives are rarely private these days. If you haven't done so recently, try googling yourself. The only hope any of us has for anonymity these days is not a high level of privacy, but rather a common name. Matthew Smith, you are in luck. Me, somewhat, as there are a few of me and my googlegangers to obscure exactly who is who and who did what. In light of this, I just have trouble getting worked up about the idea of an airline screener staring at the outline of my genitalia for three seconds in a day full of body after same generic body.
Is such a step necessary to feel safe at the airport? Not at all! Driving in snow is a vastly bigger risk than a flight, and the biggest fear I have of air travel is having to sleep overnight in some of the country's lovely connecting airports after the restaurants have closed. Still, it's just not a big deal, and if it helps us as a society to get over some of our bizarre body issues, all the better. In the end, our genitals are our own, but they are basically like half of everyone else's too.
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Now playing: The Beatles - I'm Looking Through You
via FoxyTunes
Saturday, January 2, 2010
I'm just a bill, yes I'm only a bill
An incredibly hostile FAQ about healthcare reform (aka, HCR):
What is the key issue to remember when discussing HCR? That Congress is broken, and to the extent it works, it's generally to funnel money to the lawmakers themselves.
Wait, what about HCR? We're getting there, hold on a sec...
OK, why is Congress so broken? Well, one party acts like we have a parliamentary system, where party discipline is king and there is no need to negotiate across the aisle, whereas the other is famously disorganized, full of corporate sellouts, and actually does take no steps to maintain party discipline, as Chairman Lieberman can attest. The House passes stuff, but is full of idiots from both parties who don't even understand the work of the committee they chair, speak loudly without saying anything, and needless to say the one nuclear scientist in the room must often feel like he's talking to the furniture.
Wait, if they are so useless how do they pass stuff? Two answers: Nancy Pelosi and lobbyists. In Pelosi's defense, her job is to pass decent legislation, and the house does do so. To go into more depth, congresspeople don't write legislation, they put their names on lobbyists' legislation. Their job is to choose which lobbyists get to write it. I'm pretty convinced lobbyists earn their money not by being evil, but rather by appealing in broad ways to the interests of sitting legislators and then working in sweet deals fro their clients at the margins of bills. I can say for darn sure that the average house member has no concept whatsoever of the content of an average bill, even if they wrote it. Think of it like a university research time. The legislator (professor) is busy with meetings and other important functions, so they hire a team of aides (postdocs) who do know their stuff, but can't handle all the volume of what they have to do, so much of the grunt work is done by lobbyists (grad students), who work for peanuts (large comissions) and scrape by (live comfortably) based on leftover free food (hefty payments by their clients). See, it's a nearly perfect analogy (not a perfect analogy).
Anyway, what about the Senate. How does it work? Bribery. Mary Landrieu was bought off for $100 million, which is pretty cheap considering that they really needed her vote. Ben Nelson got such a sweet deal that he's now actually embarassed by it. Lieberman is just a prick.
So the bill is a product of corruption and idiocy? Yes.
So we should hope it goes down to defeat, right? WRONG!
We should support it, because it is a product of corruption and idiocy? No, as we established, all Congressional bills are like this, but this one happens to help millions of Americans get health insurance.
Why shouldn't they blow up the current bill and start from scratch on a better one? Naive sucker, Congress. Congress, naive sucker. It never gets better, it's Congress. It only gets worse over time. To draw a historical analogy of which my wife is fond, Lincoln was attacked viciously during the civil war because the Emancipation Proclamation was seen as overly compromised, not freeing all slaves in the country. I think his judgment looks OK in hindsight, because it was better than not doing anything.
Why should we make people buy insurance with an individual mandate? Because that's how social contracts work, people. The whole point of insurance is to have the healthy pay for the sick, otherwise, we wouldn't need it. Something has to make the healthy overpay, on the chance they might become sick, or otherwise the sick have to pay the full amount, and that's really not a good thing.
What about the increase in the stock prices for the health insurance companies? They think it's a great deal for them... The stock market is driven by people not much more accurate than Jim Cramer over the long run. They basically put a finger to the wind and then say to buy if some idiot on CNBC says he has a hunch. It's also been pointed out that food stamps are a great boon to supermarket chains and the tycoons of companies like ADM, who are hardly liberal heroes, but that doesn't argue for cutting off food stamps.
I still want Medicare for all. Why can't I have it? Congress! How many times now? It takes $100 million to bribe a powerful senator, and much less for the average congresscritter. For any issue that could cost an industry more than several billion dollars, they will generally be able to bribe their way into getting what they want, since it is in their economic interest to act that way.
Medicare-for-all pretty please? Look, I agree with you, which is why they should have pushed for lowering the eligibility age over time down to 55, maybe by 1 year per year or two. They didn't, and instead the public option was basically stripped of all its power in the house, then killed completely by jackass centrists in the Senate, and then Lieberman poked a stick in everyone's eyeby pushing for, then against, the Medicare buy-in option.
I'm depressed, we should blow up the whole system and rebuild something better from the ashes... This was actually the argument of a popular post at Daily Kos, arguing that the "technocrats" like Ezra Klein (who along with Jon Cohn and Nate Silver are the three people everyone should consult on this issue on a daily basis) were wrong about Iraq, while the Dirty F'in Hippies were right, and the same split is playing out on the left over Health Care reform. Unfortunately, the argument is backwards. As a general rule, it is very worrisome when people agree to risk immediate harm to others in return for some greater good in the future. In Iraq, we were fighting for some sense of security in the future (read: oil profits) that was never really at risk (read: oil profits going to other countries instead!). Those many deaths were traded for the broken and illusory promise of a brighter future, which remains a moral stain on our nation and will continue to do so long into the future.
With healthcare, we have the chance to make a tangible gain now, admittedly one that falls far short of what many of us would have liked to see. Blowing that chance up for some possible future healthcare panacea is just as immoral in a priori terms, as there are real people who will suffer while we place our trust in the American healthcare system to break down and then Congress to step in and fix it. Needless to say, while the former is certainly decent bet, the latter is pure fantasy. While imperfect, the current bill helps a great number of people, an that is the true standard on which it needs to be judged.
What is the key issue to remember when discussing HCR? That Congress is broken, and to the extent it works, it's generally to funnel money to the lawmakers themselves.
Wait, what about HCR? We're getting there, hold on a sec...
OK, why is Congress so broken? Well, one party acts like we have a parliamentary system, where party discipline is king and there is no need to negotiate across the aisle, whereas the other is famously disorganized, full of corporate sellouts, and actually does take no steps to maintain party discipline, as Chairman Lieberman can attest. The House passes stuff, but is full of idiots from both parties who don't even understand the work of the committee they chair, speak loudly without saying anything, and needless to say the one nuclear scientist in the room must often feel like he's talking to the furniture.
Wait, if they are so useless how do they pass stuff? Two answers: Nancy Pelosi and lobbyists. In Pelosi's defense, her job is to pass decent legislation, and the house does do so. To go into more depth, congresspeople don't write legislation, they put their names on lobbyists' legislation. Their job is to choose which lobbyists get to write it. I'm pretty convinced lobbyists earn their money not by being evil, but rather by appealing in broad ways to the interests of sitting legislators and then working in sweet deals fro their clients at the margins of bills. I can say for darn sure that the average house member has no concept whatsoever of the content of an average bill, even if they wrote it. Think of it like a university research time. The legislator (professor) is busy with meetings and other important functions, so they hire a team of aides (postdocs) who do know their stuff, but can't handle all the volume of what they have to do, so much of the grunt work is done by lobbyists (grad students), who work for peanuts (large comissions) and scrape by (live comfortably) based on leftover free food (hefty payments by their clients). See, it's a nearly perfect analogy (not a perfect analogy).
Anyway, what about the Senate. How does it work? Bribery. Mary Landrieu was bought off for $100 million, which is pretty cheap considering that they really needed her vote. Ben Nelson got such a sweet deal that he's now actually embarassed by it. Lieberman is just a prick.
So the bill is a product of corruption and idiocy? Yes.
So we should hope it goes down to defeat, right? WRONG!
We should support it, because it is a product of corruption and idiocy? No, as we established, all Congressional bills are like this, but this one happens to help millions of Americans get health insurance.
Why shouldn't they blow up the current bill and start from scratch on a better one? Naive sucker, Congress. Congress, naive sucker. It never gets better, it's Congress. It only gets worse over time. To draw a historical analogy of which my wife is fond, Lincoln was attacked viciously during the civil war because the Emancipation Proclamation was seen as overly compromised, not freeing all slaves in the country. I think his judgment looks OK in hindsight, because it was better than not doing anything.
Why should we make people buy insurance with an individual mandate? Because that's how social contracts work, people. The whole point of insurance is to have the healthy pay for the sick, otherwise, we wouldn't need it. Something has to make the healthy overpay, on the chance they might become sick, or otherwise the sick have to pay the full amount, and that's really not a good thing.
What about the increase in the stock prices for the health insurance companies? They think it's a great deal for them... The stock market is driven by people not much more accurate than Jim Cramer over the long run. They basically put a finger to the wind and then say to buy if some idiot on CNBC says he has a hunch. It's also been pointed out that food stamps are a great boon to supermarket chains and the tycoons of companies like ADM, who are hardly liberal heroes, but that doesn't argue for cutting off food stamps.
I still want Medicare for all. Why can't I have it? Congress! How many times now? It takes $100 million to bribe a powerful senator, and much less for the average congresscritter. For any issue that could cost an industry more than several billion dollars, they will generally be able to bribe their way into getting what they want, since it is in their economic interest to act that way.
Medicare-for-all pretty please? Look, I agree with you, which is why they should have pushed for lowering the eligibility age over time down to 55, maybe by 1 year per year or two. They didn't, and instead the public option was basically stripped of all its power in the house, then killed completely by jackass centrists in the Senate, and then Lieberman poked a stick in everyone's eyeby pushing for, then against, the Medicare buy-in option.
I'm depressed, we should blow up the whole system and rebuild something better from the ashes... This was actually the argument of a popular post at Daily Kos, arguing that the "technocrats" like Ezra Klein (who along with Jon Cohn and Nate Silver are the three people everyone should consult on this issue on a daily basis) were wrong about Iraq, while the Dirty F'in Hippies were right, and the same split is playing out on the left over Health Care reform. Unfortunately, the argument is backwards. As a general rule, it is very worrisome when people agree to risk immediate harm to others in return for some greater good in the future. In Iraq, we were fighting for some sense of security in the future (read: oil profits) that was never really at risk (read: oil profits going to other countries instead!). Those many deaths were traded for the broken and illusory promise of a brighter future, which remains a moral stain on our nation and will continue to do so long into the future.
With healthcare, we have the chance to make a tangible gain now, admittedly one that falls far short of what many of us would have liked to see. Blowing that chance up for some possible future healthcare panacea is just as immoral in a priori terms, as there are real people who will suffer while we place our trust in the American healthcare system to break down and then Congress to step in and fix it. Needless to say, while the former is certainly decent bet, the latter is pure fantasy. While imperfect, the current bill helps a great number of people, an that is the true standard on which it needs to be judged.
Friday, January 1, 2010
New decade, new post
So, somehow since this blog was last updated the decade managed to end. This is the point where I'm supposed to say how terrible it was, but despite the obvious issues we all had to deal with, I can't complain about the past ten years personally. Indeed, what with meeting the wife, fathering a small but energetic human child, getting what might become a longterm job, and buying a house, it was a fairly productive decade.
No, if there is something that needs to be complained about, it is not my own life but rather those who have managed to make so many others miserable for the past ten years, draining their investments (see point #2), driving them out of their homes, and creating all sorts of other problems. For once, I'm actually not talking about Republicans, who are currently out of power and seemingly intent on staying that way. No, as a new decade begins, I want to start it off, and restart this blog, by complaining about Baby Boomers, particularly the early cohort born between 1946 and 1955 (specific individuals, of course, are exempt, this is a generational thing I'm talking about). In the 70's, they gave us disco. In the 80's, greed was good. In the 90's, they didn't give us the internet boom, as the most useful development of my lifetime was the work of the much maligned Gen X. In the aughts, they gave us W. In '08, we gave them Obama. Is there really any debate on which side stuck it to whom?
Seriously, for all the attention paid to "Gen X slackers" a while back, you'll find very few as the CEOs of the banks that managed to crash the world economy, and Ben Bernanke is clearly a boomer. We do slack in our opposition to gay marriage, admittedly, but that hardly counts against us. The boomers can have their teabags, as far as I'm concerned, so long as we get to count Ta-Nehisi Coates in our column. Seriously, if you take the time to read this, you should take the time to read him.
And yet, with all that said about past generations, I'm a little concerned where the world is going to end up once we're in charge, since the kids these days, to put on my fogie hat, like a LOT of handholding and expect quite a bit of instant gratification I'm not really sure we'll be able to provide. At some point, they are not going to settle for being cast into reality TV shows and start to want results, like an end to global warming, and I hope we are up to the task...
In our next installment, I'll perform something of a feat for myself and describe what is was like to argue in favor of health care reform from the right side of the argument. Until, then, I'll leave you with this:
Happy New Year, everyone!
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Now playing: Green Day - My Generation
via FoxyTunes
No, if there is something that needs to be complained about, it is not my own life but rather those who have managed to make so many others miserable for the past ten years, draining their investments (see point #2), driving them out of their homes, and creating all sorts of other problems. For once, I'm actually not talking about Republicans, who are currently out of power and seemingly intent on staying that way. No, as a new decade begins, I want to start it off, and restart this blog, by complaining about Baby Boomers, particularly the early cohort born between 1946 and 1955 (specific individuals, of course, are exempt, this is a generational thing I'm talking about). In the 70's, they gave us disco. In the 80's, greed was good. In the 90's, they didn't give us the internet boom, as the most useful development of my lifetime was the work of the much maligned Gen X. In the aughts, they gave us W. In '08, we gave them Obama. Is there really any debate on which side stuck it to whom?
Seriously, for all the attention paid to "Gen X slackers" a while back, you'll find very few as the CEOs of the banks that managed to crash the world economy, and Ben Bernanke is clearly a boomer. We do slack in our opposition to gay marriage, admittedly, but that hardly counts against us. The boomers can have their teabags, as far as I'm concerned, so long as we get to count Ta-Nehisi Coates in our column. Seriously, if you take the time to read this, you should take the time to read him.
And yet, with all that said about past generations, I'm a little concerned where the world is going to end up once we're in charge, since the kids these days, to put on my fogie hat, like a LOT of handholding and expect quite a bit of instant gratification I'm not really sure we'll be able to provide. At some point, they are not going to settle for being cast into reality TV shows and start to want results, like an end to global warming, and I hope we are up to the task...
In our next installment, I'll perform something of a feat for myself and describe what is was like to argue in favor of health care reform from the right side of the argument. Until, then, I'll leave you with this:
Happy New Year, everyone!
----------------
Now playing: Green Day - My Generation
via FoxyTunes
Saturday, February 16, 2008
A Dying Breed
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27cow-t.html?_r=2&sq=ankole%20cattle&st=nyt&scp=1&pagewanted=all
GERSHOM MUGIRA COMES from a long line of cattle-keepers. His people, the Bahima, are thought to have migrated into the hilly grasslands of western Uganda more than a thousand years ago, alongside a hardy breed of longhorns known as the Ankole. For centuries, man and beast subsisted there in a tight symbiotic embrace. Mugira’s nomadic ancestors wandered in search of fresh pasture for their cattle, which in turn provided them with milk. It is only within the last few generations that most Bahima have accepted the concept of private property. Mugira’s family lives on a 500-acre ranch, and one sunny day in November, the wiry 26-year-old showed me around, explaining, with some sadness but more pragmatism, why the Ankole breed that sustained his forebears for so many generations is now being driven to extinction.
Ankoles play an important role among Uganda’s pastoral people, but they produce much less milk than imported breeds.
As we walked down the sloped valley path that led to a watering hole, we found a few cows lolling beneath a flat-topped acacia. They looked like the kind of cattle you might encounter in Wisconsin: plump and hornless creatures with dappled black-and-white coats. Mugira, a high-school graduate, was wearing a pair of fashionably baggy jeans and spiffy white sneakers. To a modern African like himself, he said, the most desirable cattle were the American type: the Holsteins.
In recent decades, global trade, sophisticated marketing, artificial insemination and the demands of agricultural economics have transformed the Holstein into the world’s predominant dairy breed. Indigenous animals like East Africa’s sinewy Ankole, the product of centuries of selection for traits adapted to harsh conditions, are struggling to compete with foreign imports bred for maximal production. This worries some scientists. The world’s food supply is increasingly dependent on a small and narrowing list of highly engineered breeds: the Holstein, the Large White pig and the Rhode Island Red and Leghorn chickens. There’s a risk that future diseases could ravage these homogeneous animal populations. Poor countries, which possess much of the world’s vanishing biodiversity, may also be discarding breeds that possess undiscovered genetic advantages. But farmers like Mugira say they can’t afford to wait for science. And so, on the African savanna, a competition for survival is underway.
Mugira was just about to tell me what made the Holsteins so valuable when suddenly, Dr. Grace Asiimwe, a veterinarian and my guide through western Uganda’s ranchlands, shouted, “The Ankoles are coming!”
In the distance, I glimpsed a bobbing line of white horns swooping down the hillside. Without a word, Mugira dashed down the dirt path, hopped over a fallen tree branch and disappeared around the side of a huge weed-covered anthill. “He has to keep them separated,” Asiimwe told me, lest the Ankoles gore the Holsteins. We found Mugira by the watering hole, whistling and waving a wooden switch called an enkoni, frantically trying to keep his Ankoles away. His herdsmen were supposed to bring the two contingents to the water at different times, but someone made a mistake.
“You know, in Uganda, we have to look for survival of the fittest,” Mugira said once he finished sorting out the confusion. “These ones, they are the fittest,” he went on to say, gesturing toward his Holsteins. In physical terms, there was really no contest between the tough Ankoles and the fussy foreign cattle, which were always hungry and often sick. But the foreigners possessed arguably the single most important adaptive trait for livestock: they made money. Holsteins are lactating behemoths. In an African setting, a good one can produce 20 or 30 times as much milk as an Ankole.
Mugira explained that, unlike most of his peers, he was holding onto some longhorns, mostly for sentimental reasons. His father, who died in 2003, loved his Ankoles. One of them wandered over and nuzzled Mugira, who placed his hand gently on its forehead. In the days before Christianity arrived in this part of Africa, the Bahima made offerings of milk to herdsman gods. Their language contains a vast catalog of cattle names, which refer to characteristics like color and hide pattern. This cow was called Kiroko, indicating it had some white patches on its face. The ideal Ankole, Mugira told me, has a lustrous brown coat and gleaming horns that curve out and then inward, forming a shape like a lyre. “They are naturally good,” Mugira said. “They are beautiful. In our culture we preferred these. But then we developed another culture, from Western culture.”
The Food and Agriculture Organization, an agency of the United Nations, recently reported that at least 20 percent of the world’s estimated 7,600 livestock breeds are in danger of extinction. Experts are warning of a potential “meltdown” in global genetic diversity. Yet the plight of the Ankole illustrates the difficulty of balancing the conflicting goals of animal conservation and human prosperity. An estimated 70 percent of the world’s rural poor, some 630 million people, derive a substantial percentage of their income from livestock. Increase the productivity of these animals, development specialists say, and you improve dire living standards. The World Bank recently published a report saying it was time to place farming “afresh at the center of the development agenda.” Highly productive livestock breeds, the World Bank asserts, are playing an important role in alleviating poverty.
“You do have local animals with various kinds of disease resistance and whatever other kinds of things you don’t want to do away with,” said Chris Delgado, an agriculture policy adviser at the World Bank. “But there’s a problem: They are kept by very poor people, and they don’t want to stay poor.”
Every cow in the world is the product of some human agency. The extinct feral ancestor of all cattle, the auroch, was a fearsome horned creature that could grow to be six feet tall. There are two theories about the taming of wild aurochs. The traditional view holds that it happened around 6000 B.C. in the Fertile Crescent. But recent archaeological and genetic evidence suggests that domestication may have first occurred in Africa 2,000 years earlier, in the then-lush plains of the eastern Sahara. Then, beginning around 2,000 years ago, Arab merchants introduced humped cattle of Indian origin to East Africa, which were crossed with the indigenous longhorns to produce breeds like the Ankole.
For millennia, changing a breed’s genetics through husbandry required a long trial-and-error process. But today it can happen in an evolutionary eye blink. Multinational breeding companies, many of them based in the United States, collect semen from prime bulls, freeze it and export it to the developing world. Official estimates say there are about three million Ankole cattle in Uganda and smaller populations in bordering nations. An unknown — though by all accounts large — percentage of them are in the process of being turned into something else. After one cross with a Holstein, the brown Ankole cow will produce a black calf with darkened horns. After two, the horns will shrink and a dappled coat will appear. The third generation will basically look like American dairy cattle. With each cross, the offspring will produce more milk. The World Bank estimates that 1.8 million small-scale farmers in East Africa are benefiting from such genetic changes to their cattle and that some 100 million cows and pigs are created through artificial insemination in poor countries each year. Those numbers substantially understate the extent of genetic interchange, because half the offspring produced by artificial insemination are male and spread their genes the old-fashioned way.
To see the evolution in Ugandan dairy cattle, I visited a farmer named Jackson Sezibwa, who lives down a reddish dirt path outside the central Ugandan town of Mukono. A weather-beaten man of 46, Sezibwa greeted me in a torn, muddy shirt. He showed me to the metal-roofed stall where he keeps his Holstein, Kevina.
Before he received the cow, Sezibwa said, he was hungry and destitute. All he owned were some banana trees and a one-room house roofed with thatch. Then he and his wife were given Kevina by a charity called Heifer International. Founded in 1944 by Dan West, an Indiana farmer, Heifer’s mission is to take quality livestock to impoverished places. In Uganda, the cattle breed Heifer prefers is the Holstein. “The American cow,” said Dr. Margaret Makuru, Heifer’s deputy country director, “once you feed it, it is a factory.”
Like any factory owner, Jackson Sezibwa had to think about inputs and outputs. Making milk requires energy, which means eating grass. Holsteins require much more grass than Ankole cattle, but unlike Ankoles, which need to roam, Holsteins can be kept in pens. Sezibwa owned just a small plot of land, so the Holstein was perfect for him. All day long, Sezibwa refilled Kevina’s trough with feed, a mixture of elephant grass and protein-rich leaves and legumes that he grew in his field. Each time he milked the cow, he fed her a store-bought meal full of nutrients. Otherwise, his largest expense was medicine. Holsteins originated in Northern Europe and were taken to America in the 19th century. They don’t have any resistance to tropical diseases like trypanosomiasis — colloquially known as sleeping sickness — and East Coast Fever, which is spread by ticks.
With intense maintenance, Sezibwa’s cow functioned marvelously. Kevina churned out around six and a half gallons of milk a day. (A typical Ankole would have given him between a quarter and a half gallon.) His family drank some of the milk, and he sold the rest, netting around $100 a month after expenses. In a country where an estimated 85 percent of the population lives on less than $1 a day, that’s substantial income. The money finances school for Sezibwa’s six children. There were ancillary benefits too. Kevina was impregnated four times via artificial insemination. Sezibwa gave away her first calf to a neighbor, in keeping with Heifer’s philosophy of “passing the gift.” The next two — both males — he sold to farmers eager to acquire Holstein genetics, making enough profit to build himself a nice brick house. He kept the fourth calf, another female, for the future. Heifer also paid to install an underground system that harnessed methane from the cows’ manure to power gas burners and a light inside his house.
Jackson Sezibwa is just one man, but Uganda’s economy is made up of millions like him. Agriculture accounts for 30 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, and 10 percent of that comes from the livestock sector. The World Bank’s October report claimed that “G.D.P. growth originating in agriculture is at least twice as effective in reducing poverty” as other types of growth. The report pointed out that the industrialization of Europe and North America that began in the late 18th century was preceded by a period of farming innovation, and that the Green Revolution that took place between the 1940s and 1960s catalyzed Asia’s fantastic economic growth.
During the Green Revolution, scientists invented high-yielding strains of corn, wheat and rice and planted them around the third world, and they also promoted the introduction of better livestock. But then, broadly speaking, foreign-aid donors moved away from such interventions, which were viewed as meddling with the free market, and shifted financing priorities to areas like education and AIDS. Today, even after recent increases, the World Bank devotes less than 10 percent of its development assistance to agriculture, down from 30 percent a quarter-century ago. Recently, the notion of helping poor farmers by making farming more lucrative has been dusted off by a new generation of economists. And Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation have promised to finance a second Green Revolution. But governmental aid agencies have been slower to rediscover the importance of agriculture. Farming initiatives now account for just 4 percent of the assistance distributed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of the world’s most developed nations.
The U.S. Agency for International Development budgeted $392 million for agricultural programs last year, including a significant proportion to promote milk production. Crossbreeding is an important component of its strategy. In Uganda, where the agency recently completed a five-year, $8 million dairy-modernization project, about half the money went toward artificial insemination. One partner in the program was Land O’Lakes International Development, the aid arm of the Minnesota butter company. “We should be able to do farming as a business, not sentimentally,” said Dr. Paul Kimbugwe, the Land O’Lakes country manager. “Making money means you have to crossbreed. And crossbreeding means that you are doing away with the genetics of that cow,” meaning the Ankole, “which I also encourage.”
Not everyone in Uganda, however, agrees that the foreign breeds are an upgrade. President Yoweri Museveni once imposed a ban on imported semen. Museveni belongs to the Bahima ethnic group. When he was a baby, in a sort of Bahima baptism ritual, his parents placed him on the back of an Ankole cow with a mock bow and arrow, as if to commit him symbolically to the defense of the family’s herd. Museveni, now in his 60s, still owns the descendants of that very cow, and he retains a strong bond to the Ankole breed. Two years ago, I accompanied a group of Ugandan journalists on a daylong trip to one of the president’s private ranches, where he proudly showed us his 4,000-strong herd of Ankole cattle. At one point, a reporter asked if the ranch had any Holsteins. “No, those are pollution,” Museveni replied. “These,” he said, referring to his Ankoles, “the genetic material is superior.”
If the Ankole cattle are able to mount a comeback, it will be because circumstances have endowed them with a unique set of defenses, both evolutionary and political. Members of President Museveni’s ethnic group populate the upper ranks of Uganda’s government. Some prominent Bahima have started an organization devoted to preserving Ankoles, under the patronage of a one-eyed army general who spends his free time painting rapturous portraits of cows. One afternoon, at a pricey restaurant in Kampala, I had lunch with the organization’s chairman, Samuel Mugasi. Dressed in a dapper gray suit and a French-cuffed pale blue shirt, he told me he was a civil servant and part-time rancher.
“They have tasted the money,” Mugasi said of the farmers who switched to Holsteins. “They are excited about having these big earnings, and they are forgetting the cultural aspect.”
Kimbugwe, the Land O’Lakes representative, has a ready reply to such arguments. “Culture — fine, it’s good to have,” he said. “But first, the stomachs.” He views the Ankole as an atavistic indulgence for the country’s elite. Once, cattle were like currency, and the wealthy displayed their status by maintaining huge free-ranging herds. Competition for land is forcing cows onto smaller pastures. Uganda has one of the highest birth rates in the world, and despite its poverty and diseases like AIDS, the population has more than doubled since 1980. There’s a long history of tension between the Bahima and an agriculturalist ethnic group, the Bairu, which coexist in western Uganda, at times less than happily.
This is a common dynamic across Africa. In Rwanda, a similar ethnic conflict between cattle-keeping Tutsis and farming Hutus culminated in genocide in 1994. A number of experts say the “ethnic” war in Darfur is really a fight over grass. Uganda has not experienced that level of conflict, but the local newspapers are filled with stories of violent skirmishes between farmers and encroaching pastoralists. This is one reason that some say Holsteins represent the future. Rwanda, now ruled by longhorn-loving Tutsis but trying to address the causes of the genocide, is enthusiastically encouraging the breed’s introduction, with assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
One of the biggest dairy farmers in western Uganda, Kezekia Rwabuhenda, told me he was the first person in his area to adopt Holsteins, back in the 1970s. At the time, he said, many traditionalists maligned him, saying he was conspiring to “slaughter” the cattle they loved. “Afterwards, when they realized what the cross was producing, they started visiting me, asking for a bull,” he said through a translator. The elderly rancher still kept a hundred Ankoles, but they were for his wife, who was attached to them. He was sure that when he died, his children would dispatch them all to the butcher shop.
No one knows how many Ankole cattle exist. “We’ve been saying the Ankoles are 50 percent of the national herd, but I don’t think that’s true anymore,” said Dr. Denis Mpairwe, an animal scientist at Uganda’s Makerere University. “The crossbreeding the last five years has been so intense.” The International Livestock Research Institute predicts that if present trends continue, the Ankoles could go extinct within 50 years. But Mpairwe says he believes it could happen much sooner.
I went with Mpairwe to visit Uganda’s cattle country earlier this fall, along with Dr. Okeyo Mwai, a Kenyan biotechnology specialist who works for the livestock institute. I lived in Uganda between 2002 and 2004, and I couldn’t believe the change. Hillsides where graceful brown Ankoles once grazed by the hundreds were now dotted black and white. “Look at the calves,” Mwai said, as our pickup truck passed a herd. “Almost 100 percent are crosses.” He pointed up toward the hilltops, normally gently rounded and green, but now sandy in large patches from overgrazing. The two scientists are studying how high-producing cattle interact with the African ecosystem. If cows are like factories, you could say an Ankole is powered by a water wheel, while the Holstein requires a nuclear reactor.
The principle of the “tragedy of the commons,” perhaps the most famous metaphor in ecology, is a cattle parable. It was first described by a 19th-century British economist and popularized by the biologist Garrett Hardin in a 1968 Science magazine essay about human overpopulation. Hardin was trying to refute the view that an unregulated free market invariably produces beneficial outcomes. “Picture a pasture open to all,” Hardin wrote. The benefit of adding a single calf went to each individual farmer, while the cost of adding that calf (the grass it would consume) would be distributed to all pasture users. “Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited,” he wrote. The commons, he predicted, would inevitably be picked clean.
With the introduction of the Holsteins, something similar seems to be happening in Uganda. Farmers aren’t literally increasing the sizes of their herds, but they are creating herds that consume unsustainable amounts of dwindling resources. And something else is being obliterated: genes. Each time a farmer crossbreeds his Ankoles, a little of the country’s stockpile of adaptive traits disappears. It isn’t easy to measure genetic “dilution.” What is evident, however, is that the Ankoles possess much worth saving. For instance, their horns, often seen as ornaments, actually disperse excess body heat.
Holsteins don’t like heat. While a poorly adapted animal can survive for years in a harsh ecosystem, even a slight worsening of their conditions can have devastating effects. One rancher I met, John Kamiisi, told me that he’d lost his herd of Holsteins in a 1999 drought. He only avoided ruin because he kept some Ankoles, which could live on less water. Kamiisi told me he loved his sturdy Ankole bull “like my own life” but said he was starting to crossbreed again for financial reasons. Another elderly rancher said his whole Holstein herd died during Idi Amin’s dictatorship, when chaos and inflation made it difficult to buy the imported medicines the cattle needed. He started again with a few Ankoles his neighbors gave him out of pity.
“For countries on the equator, I think in almost all cases the Holstein is very poorly suited — maybe the least-suited breed,” says Dr. Les Hansen, a professor at the University of Minnesota and a leading expert in cattle genetics. Often farmers are making decisions that are informed not by science, he said, but by sales pitches devised by multinational breeding concerns. “As I travel the world,” Hansen adds, “my biggest challenge is countering all of the misleading marketing propaganda.”
The world market in cattle breeding is controlled by a handful of companies, several of them based in the United States. The companies maintain facilities where they extract semen from bulls, keep genetic databases, publish rankings and cultivate a sort of bovine star system. Two legendary Holsteins, Chief, born in California in 1962, and Elevation, born in Virginia in 1965, fathered tens of thousands of offspring in their lifetimes — and beyond, since their sperm was cryogenically frozen for future use.
Hansen’s research suggests that every Holstein is descended from Chief and Elevation, and that 30 percent of all the Holstein genes in the world are traceable to those two bulls. That has created a serious problem with inbreeding, which has adverse effects on fertility and mortality. But overseas markets like Africa are, so to speak, virgin territory. According to industry figures, American companies exported 10 million “doses” of cattle semen in 2006. In Uganda, a company called World-Wide Sires, the international marketing arm of two American breeding cooperatives, is working with aid agencies to increase dairy production.
“The proof is in the bucket,” said George Nuwagira, a dairy farmer who is also the World-Wide Sires sales representative for western Uganda. I met him one morning in the market town of Kabwohe. A stout, garrulous fellow, he was wearing a yellow baseball cap with a smiling cartoon cow on it. He ushered me into his insemination center, a narrow tumbledown storefront that also sold sodas. At one end stood a wooden counter that was decorated with a flier advertising a bull named Earl, “the Dairyman’s Dream,” which pictured Earl’s daughters posed in such a way as to accentuate their enormous milk-swollen udders. Behind the counter sat a metal tank filled with liquid nitrogen. Nuwagira unscrewed its cap, and a thick cloud of white vapor billowed out. He retrieved a cluster of brightly colored plastic straws filled with premium semen.
We were at the far end of the global semen supply chain. Nuwagira handed me an empty green straw. It was marked with the name “Theseus” and a long serial number, which indicated that the semen it had contained was collected at a facility near Plain City, Ohio, on Dec. 30, 2004. Three weeks before, he used Theseus’ semen to impregnate one of his own Holsteins.
Nuwagira took me to see the expectant mother. On the bumpy ride to his farmland in a breathtaking green valley, he told me that he was from the west’s agriculturalist ethnic group, not the Bahima. He didn’t care about the Ankole. “To me as a modern farmer, the horns don’t mean anything,” Nuwagira said. He didn’t name his cows like the Bahima but instead referred to them by numbers. He told me he owned just 35. “You know, it was used as a status symbol in the past, to have so many head of cattle,” he said. “Those who had hundreds wouldn’t sit with those who had less than 30. But these days, things have changed. When you talk of animals they don’t ask you the numbers. They ask you the production.”
Nuwagira’s biggest problem was getting his product to market. “You feed them, they will give you the volumes, but there are times when we find we are stuck having nowhere to sell it,” he explained. Milk is perishable, and Uganda is a country where roads are bad and refrigeration is rare. The dairy trade in rural areas is largely controlled by bicycle vendors who sell raw milk from aluminum jugs. There used to be a more sophisticated network of government-affiliated dairy cooperatives, but most of these were dismantled in the 1990s, during a World Bank push for market liberalization. The private sector was supposed to fill the gap but never did. Anyway, some Ugandan tribes don’t drink milk. They’re lactose-intolerant.
Crossbreeding follows the logic of the arms race. All the ranchers I met complained that Holsteins required expensive upkeep, and many didn’t want to abandon tradition. But they’ve had to change because their neighbors are changing. The volume of milk produced in Uganda doubled between 1993 and 2003, but in the absence of a surge in demand or improved delivery systems, the product has literally flooded the market. As the price per liter has fallen, dairy farmers have had to rearm with Holsteins just to maintain their usual profit margins. International organizations realize that increased productivity means little if it’s not accompanied by market growth. That’s why the U.S. Agency for International Development is spending millions across Africa to promote dairy cooperatives and pay for advertisements inspired by America’s famous “Got Milk?” campaign. But changing distribution and diets isn’t as easy as changing breeds. “A lot of consumers don’t understand how important milk is,” says Jim Yazman, a livestock specialist with the agency.
Economic forces can push a breed to extinction with frightening swiftness. In Vietnam, where pigs are the most important livestock species and the government has encouraged leaner foreign breeds, the percentage of indigenous sows has fallen to 28 percent from 72 percent since 1994, and 13 of the 15 local breeds are classified as either extinct or in danger. There were several million Red Maasai sheep in Kenya until the 1970s. Then, in just 15 years, indiscriminate crossbreeding with woollier imported sheep nearly drove them out of existence. But the wool sheep fared poorly in the Kenyan environment, in part because of intestinal parasites to which the Red Maasai were resistant. By the time that was discovered, though, purebred Red Maasai were almost impossible to find.
Many tropical breeds may possess unique adaptive traits. The problem is, we don’t know what is being lost. Earlier this year, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization released its first-ever global assessment of biodiversity in livestock. While data on many breeds are scant, the report found that over the last six years, an average of one breed a month has gone extinct. “The threat is imminent,” says Danielle Nierenberg, senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental group. “Just getting milk and meat into people’s mouths is not the answer.”
As the world’s climate warms, and the environment becomes more inhospitable to the major breeds, humanity might need the genes that allow animals like the Ankoles to flourish in the African heat. The challenge is to safeguard the resource. There are two possible approaches: putting the animals in cold storage, or changing the economic equation. Proponents of the first option desire something like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a doomsday depository for plant species that an international consortium is building in the Arctic Circle. But storing sperm and embryos is far more expensive and technically difficult. Biodiversity advocates say that it would be preferable, anyway, for breeds like the Ankole to go on living in their pastures. The most obvious way to do that would be to create incentives to entice farmers to keep them. But even those who want to save endangered breeds recognize that subsidizing unproductive livestock in hungry countries is problematic. In November, at a conference sponsored by the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, Dr. Edward Rege, the organization’s biotechnology director, gave a speech listing several “inconvenient facts” about conventional wisdom in the field, adding that conservation approaches can effectively amount to “saying that farmers should remain poor.”
The best hope for the Ankoles may reside at a modest, terraced complex on a breezy hillside in Uganda overlooking Lake Victoria in the old colonial town of Entebbe. It was constructed by the British in 1960, at the height of the Green Revolution, as an artificial-insemination center and a staging ground for introducing new breeds — animals that mostly died off during the subsequent wars and dictatorships. Now called the National Animal Genetic Resources Center and Databank, the facility’s new mission is to save indigenous animals like the Ankoles by giving them better care and selectively breeding them to compete in production. The center keeps a dozen bulls of different breeds, including two immense Ankoles that once belonged to President Museveni. Twice a week, technicians collect semen, which is used to inseminate cows at government farms or else packaged and sold directly to farmers. If it’s successful, the program could offer a model to other developing nations. If, on the other hand, the Ankole cattle can’t be saved even with such government support, it’s difficult to imagine how any threatened breed will survive.
“They can produce milk and they put on meat,” said Dr. Dan Semambo, the center’s executive director. “People don’t know what they have.”
Ugandans rave about the fresh milk out west, and every rancher I visited there served me a cup. It has a delicious sweet thickness. No matter how well nourished they are, though, the Ankoles probably can’t produce as much milk as the Holsteins. Instead, the breed’s salvation could lie in the slaughterhouse. President Museveni says he believes that Ankoles make exceptional beef cattle and wants to export their meat. Some studies suggest that Ankole beef is unusually lean and low in cholesterol. Mpairwe and his colleagues at Makerere University are completing a study in which Ankoles and crossbreeds were kept on nutrient-rich diets. In early December, the cattle were slaughtered and an “expert panel” of faculty and students conducted a taste test, with encouraging results.
Shortly before I left Uganda, I convened an expert panel of my own. We met one evening at Le Petit Bistro, a European-owned restaurant that serves Kampala’s best steak. While we waited for our orders, I went back to the kitchen to meet the cook, Everest Neretse, who was wearing a white chef’s jacket and flip-flops. He told me he came from the west. “Ankole cattle, they are the best,” he said. “I can tell in the tenderness.” I had my filet with a little garlic butter. When I cut into it, rich reddish juices spilled out, and the texture was so soft that I hardly needed to chew. It was almost as if you could taste the contentment of an unbounded life on the open range. The panel agreed: it was extraordinary, it was beautiful and in no time every trace of the Ankole was gone.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
To continue the theme of M&M's but bringing in Monkeys...
Go Ahead, Rationalize. Monkeys Do It, Too.
For half a century, social psychologists have been trying to figure out the human gift for rationalizing irrational behavior. Why did we evolve with brains that salute our shrewdness for buying the neon yellow car with bad gas mileage? The brain keeps sending one message — Yesss! Genius! — while our friends and family are saying,
“Well... ”
This self-delusion, the result of what’s called cognitive dissonance, has been demonstrated over and over by researchers who have come up with increasingly elaborate explanations for it. Psychologists have suggested we hone our skills of rationalization in order to impress others, reaffirm our “moral integrity” and protect our “self-concept” and feeling of “global self-worth.”
If so, capuchin monkeys are a lot more complicated than we thought. Or, we’re less complicated. In a paper in Psychological Science, researchers at Yale report finding the first evidence of cognitive dissonance in monkeys and in a group in some ways even less sophisticated, 4-year-old humans.
The Yale experiment was a variation of the classic one that first demonstrated cognitive dissonance, a term coined by the social psychologist Leon Festinger. In 1956 one of his students, Jack Brehm, carted some of his own wedding gifts into the lab (it was a low-budget experiment) and asked people to rate the desirability of things like an electric sandwich press, a desk lamp, a stopwatch and a transistor radio.
Then they were given a choice between two items they considered equally attractive, and told they could take one home. (At the end of the experiment Mr. Brehm had to confess he couldn’t really afford to give them anything, causing one woman to break down in tears.) After making a choice (but before having it snatched away), they were asked to rate all the items again.
Suddenly they had a new perspective. If they had chosen the electric sandwich press over the toaster, they raised its rating and downgraded the toaster. They convinced themselves they had made by far the right choice.
So, apparently, did the children and capuchin monkeys studied at Yale by Louisa C. Egan, Laurie R. Santos and Paul Bloom. The psychologists offered the children stickers and the monkeys M&M’s.
Once a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors of M&M’s — say, red, blue and green — he was given a choice between two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue and green, it was no longer an even contest — he was now much more likely to reject the blue.
The monkey seemed to be coping the same way humans do. When you reject the toaster, you could spend a lot of time second-guessing yourself, and that phenomenon, much less common, is called buyer’s remorse. (For more on that, go to www.tierneylab.com).
But in general, people deal with cognitive dissonance — the clashing of conflicting thoughts — by eliminating one of the thoughts. The notion that the toaster is desirable conflicts with the knowledge that you just passed it up, so you banish the notion. The cognitive dissonance is gone; you are smug.
Of course, when you see others engaging in this sort of rationalization, it can look silly or pathological, as if they have a desperate need to justify themselves or are cynically telling lies they couldn’t possibly believe themselves. But you don’t expect to see such high-level mental contortions in 4-year-olds or monkeys.
As the Yale researchers write, these results indicate either that monkeys and children have “richer motivational complexity” than we realize, or our ways of dealing with cognitive dissonance are “mechanistically simpler than previously thought.” Another psychologist, Matthew D. Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests it’s the latter.
“If little children and primates show pretty much the same pattern you see in adults, it calls into question just how deliberate these rationalization processes are,” he says. “We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that’s an outsider’s perspective. This experiment shows that there isn’t always much conscious thought going on.”
The new results jibe with those of a dissonance experiment that Dr. Lieberman and colleagues did with amnesiacs, people with impaired short-term memories, who were asked to rank an assortment of paintings. Then they chose among selected ones and ranked the whole group again. By the second time they ranked the paintings, they couldn’t consciously recall their earlier rankings or their choices, so they presumably didn’t have a psychic need to rewrite history.
Yet they showed as much new disdain for the paintings they’d rejected as did a control group with normal memories. Apparently, the rejections registered in some unconscious way, so that the amnesiacs rationalized their decisions even though they couldn’t remember them.
The compulsion to justify decisions may seem irrational, and maybe petty, too, like the fox in Aesop’s fable who stopped trying for the grapes and promptly told himself they were sour anyway. But perhaps Aesop didn’t appreciate the evolutionary utility of this behavior for humans as well as animals.
Once a decision has been made, second-guessing may just interfere with more important business. A fox who pines for abandoned grapes or a monkey who keeps agonizing over food choices could be wasting energy better expended obtaining the next meal.
And if you are the owner of a yellow gas-guzzler, you might as well convince yourself that the sensible blue car you passed up was an ugly bore. Aesop may call it sour grapes; you can call it moving on. Maybe your unconscious realizes you don’t have time for buyer’s remorse. You’ve got car payments to make.
Sunday, November 4, 2007
I can't claim this as my own.... but I still found it amusing.
Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species.
To this end, I hold M&M duels.
Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger,I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them cracks and splinters. That is the "loser," and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.
I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theatre of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.
Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.
When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to: M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc. Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3x5 card reading, "Please use this M&M for breeding purposes."
M&M Evolution theory
Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species.
To this end, I hold M&M duels.
Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger,I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them cracks and splinters. That is the "loser," and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.
I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theatre of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.
Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.
When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to: M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc. Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3x5 card reading, "Please use this M&M for breeding purposes."
Sunday, September 16, 2007
The cat's in the cradle...
So, one week into fatherhood, and everyone seems to have survived the experience relatively unscathed. We've had our first visit from the grandparents, our first bath (and second one, for that matter),
our first walk around the neighborhood, and our first Jewish holiday. For even more photos and videos, you can always go to our flickr and youtube pages, respectively.
So, you ask, how is fatherhood? Honestly, it's great, and the only issue whatsoever has been the lack of sleep, which is slowly getting better itself. I realize that my wife is doing most of the hard work, just like she's been doing since the pregnancy began, but from my perspective, fatherhood is wonderful. The baby is adorable, she cries at times but not really that loudly yet, and she's just ridiculously adorable at times:
It's just a really rewarding experience, and I am more than happy to trade a few hours of sleep per night for it. That said, having family in to help out is probably a crucial element of my current sanity, since nothing really compares with years of accumulated experience. My mom couldn't stop laughing at how much I bought into the rules they drilled into us at the hospital, since I just didn't know which were critical and which were more along the lines of useful guidelines. I'm sure I'll get better at this, and I'm sure there will be more difficult times, but I have to say that while you can't inherently prepare for fatherhood, if you do try to prepare yourself, it's really great.
Most surprisingly useful item: Our battery-powered multi-event timer. My mom couldn't stop teasing me about measuring how long we took between feedings, diaper changes, and my wife's pain meds (tylenol, BTW!) , but honestly at this point I no longer trust my memory enough to remember what happened several hours ago at all times. This way, the baby doesn't go all day between diaper changes (she takes care of reminding us to feed her), and the wife doesn't have to go all afternoon without at least taking the edge off the discomfort. This is not to put down all the other things we got that we knew would be useful, just a note about the one whose importance we hadn't realized in advance. The runner up is the super-fuzzy Baby Elmo blanket (available at Kohl's), which Leila just adores.
Is fatherhood lonely? Maybe someday, but certainly not yet. It's busy certainly, especially given that I'm getting spectacularly inefficient at doing things, but the few moments I've had to myself the past week have been fine. In the end, there's now double the nuclear family members to spend time with, and that's fine with me.
We get it, you're tired...: Having just seen the movie The Lookout, I've noticed that fatigue over a few days seems to mimic the symptoms of a light-to-moderate traumatic brain injury. My attention span is significantly lower than normal, and sequencing out multi-step tasks has gotten to be a non-trivial issue. I see why they recommend that new parents try not to do too much. It's not just about exhaustion, it's also a matter of safety, in that undertaking complex tasks means that they might not be accomplished fully, and are best left untried. Thankfully, sleep seems to cure these problems, and I'm already feeling a bit more up to speed now tat Leila is coming much closer to sleeping through the night but for feeding breaks/diaper changes.
Is there an evolutionary reaction where babies are just so adorable that you have to protect and care for them? Yes.
What about when they cry? I suppose this will get much worse when her lungs develop, but for now, it's still too cute for words when Leila is upset, and since she generally stops before too long, usually because we alleviate the problem, it just doesn't upset us at all when she cries.
Parents vs. non-parents? We undertook this whole process well aware of what we were getting into, and I'd recommend that when possible. Babies are a ton of work, and she's only eight days old. If someone doesn't want to have kids, they have my full blessing. It's a completely valid choice, and I place no stock in the idea that we must always give in to our evolutionary drives. Still, since parenthood is built into our genes, I really don't have any respect for the position that the society has no responsibility for taking care of what parents voluntarily bring on themselves. Parenthood is tough, and society benefits by making things easier on people. The Family and Medical Leave act is only a bare minimum, in that it allows for 12 weeks of unpaid leave, forcing many people to go back to work while there children really still need fulltime care. Just like the young pay social security so that the elderly may lead happier lives, so should society ensure that children lead happier lives. It's not a responsibility to the parents, but to the children, who otherwise have no say in the matter. Frankly, it's a moral obligation, and I just can't think of a way to construct a counter-argument that wouldn't leave me speechless. Remember, be good to kids, because they are going to grow up and be in a position to decide our fate. Mutually assured destruction is no way to deal with generational issues. More soon, once I sleep some more...
PS- What about poop? Needless to say, she poops a lot. In the hospital, I got to watch her first poop live, commenting that it was the most bizarre combination of disgusting yet fascinating I had ever seen. Thankfully, baby poop doesn't smell if a baby's diet consists entirely of breast milk. Not even a bit. Because of this, diaper changes are really no worse than cleaning up any kind of liquid spill. Of all the issues that new parents have to deal with, diapers are far easier and more pleasant that I would have imagined. Honestly, the only thing is that diaper changes take a lot of time, as do feedings, baths, and everything else involving a baby. Nothing is fast, but most things aren't as bad as one might have otherwise thought, I suppose.
our first walk around the neighborhood, and our first Jewish holiday. For even more photos and videos, you can always go to our flickr and youtube pages, respectively.
So, you ask, how is fatherhood? Honestly, it's great, and the only issue whatsoever has been the lack of sleep, which is slowly getting better itself. I realize that my wife is doing most of the hard work, just like she's been doing since the pregnancy began, but from my perspective, fatherhood is wonderful. The baby is adorable, she cries at times but not really that loudly yet, and she's just ridiculously adorable at times:
It's just a really rewarding experience, and I am more than happy to trade a few hours of sleep per night for it. That said, having family in to help out is probably a crucial element of my current sanity, since nothing really compares with years of accumulated experience. My mom couldn't stop laughing at how much I bought into the rules they drilled into us at the hospital, since I just didn't know which were critical and which were more along the lines of useful guidelines. I'm sure I'll get better at this, and I'm sure there will be more difficult times, but I have to say that while you can't inherently prepare for fatherhood, if you do try to prepare yourself, it's really great.
Most surprisingly useful item: Our battery-powered multi-event timer. My mom couldn't stop teasing me about measuring how long we took between feedings, diaper changes, and my wife's pain meds (tylenol, BTW!) , but honestly at this point I no longer trust my memory enough to remember what happened several hours ago at all times. This way, the baby doesn't go all day between diaper changes (she takes care of reminding us to feed her), and the wife doesn't have to go all afternoon without at least taking the edge off the discomfort. This is not to put down all the other things we got that we knew would be useful, just a note about the one whose importance we hadn't realized in advance. The runner up is the super-fuzzy Baby Elmo blanket (available at Kohl's), which Leila just adores.
Is fatherhood lonely? Maybe someday, but certainly not yet. It's busy certainly, especially given that I'm getting spectacularly inefficient at doing things, but the few moments I've had to myself the past week have been fine. In the end, there's now double the nuclear family members to spend time with, and that's fine with me.
We get it, you're tired...: Having just seen the movie The Lookout, I've noticed that fatigue over a few days seems to mimic the symptoms of a light-to-moderate traumatic brain injury. My attention span is significantly lower than normal, and sequencing out multi-step tasks has gotten to be a non-trivial issue. I see why they recommend that new parents try not to do too much. It's not just about exhaustion, it's also a matter of safety, in that undertaking complex tasks means that they might not be accomplished fully, and are best left untried. Thankfully, sleep seems to cure these problems, and I'm already feeling a bit more up to speed now tat Leila is coming much closer to sleeping through the night but for feeding breaks/diaper changes.
Is there an evolutionary reaction where babies are just so adorable that you have to protect and care for them? Yes.
What about when they cry? I suppose this will get much worse when her lungs develop, but for now, it's still too cute for words when Leila is upset, and since she generally stops before too long, usually because we alleviate the problem, it just doesn't upset us at all when she cries.
Parents vs. non-parents? We undertook this whole process well aware of what we were getting into, and I'd recommend that when possible. Babies are a ton of work, and she's only eight days old. If someone doesn't want to have kids, they have my full blessing. It's a completely valid choice, and I place no stock in the idea that we must always give in to our evolutionary drives. Still, since parenthood is built into our genes, I really don't have any respect for the position that the society has no responsibility for taking care of what parents voluntarily bring on themselves. Parenthood is tough, and society benefits by making things easier on people. The Family and Medical Leave act is only a bare minimum, in that it allows for 12 weeks of unpaid leave, forcing many people to go back to work while there children really still need fulltime care. Just like the young pay social security so that the elderly may lead happier lives, so should society ensure that children lead happier lives. It's not a responsibility to the parents, but to the children, who otherwise have no say in the matter. Frankly, it's a moral obligation, and I just can't think of a way to construct a counter-argument that wouldn't leave me speechless. Remember, be good to kids, because they are going to grow up and be in a position to decide our fate. Mutually assured destruction is no way to deal with generational issues. More soon, once I sleep some more...
PS- What about poop? Needless to say, she poops a lot. In the hospital, I got to watch her first poop live, commenting that it was the most bizarre combination of disgusting yet fascinating I had ever seen. Thankfully, baby poop doesn't smell if a baby's diet consists entirely of breast milk. Not even a bit. Because of this, diaper changes are really no worse than cleaning up any kind of liquid spill. Of all the issues that new parents have to deal with, diapers are far easier and more pleasant that I would have imagined. Honestly, the only thing is that diaper changes take a lot of time, as do feedings, baths, and everything else involving a baby. Nothing is fast, but most things aren't as bad as one might have otherwise thought, I suppose.
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