If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast here. Or if you want to listen to just this post:
The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success By: Ross Douthat
Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead By: Jim Mattis
The Lessons of History By: Will and Ariel Durant
The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes By: Donald D. Hoffman
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World By: Laura Spinney
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives By: David Eagleman
Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy By: Francis Fukuyama
Sophocles II: Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes, The Trackers By: Sophocles
It would be difficult to write about anything other than the coronavirus in a space dedicated to the events of the last month. Though this month we also had an earthquake, which I can assure you, as an eschatologist, is a bad omen. Though not one I would put much weight on. Mostly it was alarming right as it was happening, knowing nothing but that it was an earthquake (my first) and having no idea if it was a small one and I was on top of it, or a giant one far away. (Would I feel a 9 on the Richter Scale in Salt Lake if it happened in Portland?) In any event it’s been an interesting month, and things are likely to continue to be interesting for quite some time.
Returning to the coronavirus, what little I have in the way of unique advice I dispensed in my last post, and now all that remains are just a lot of questions:
- What is the actual number of cases? How many undiagnosed cases are there?
- What is the actual fatality rate? And why are rates so different between countries?
- The argument around the fatality rate mostly revolves around the argument over the number of undiagnosed cases, but what if there are undiagnosed deaths? Are there also people who died from it, but aren’t being counted in the official statistics?
- Most of these questions derive from extreme conditions experienced by Italy. Why have they been hit so hard?
- China claims they’re on top of things, and that for the last couple of weeks they’ve had almost no new cases can we trust their numbers?
- Will this whole business dramatically worsen US/China relations? (Which weren’t great before this happened.)
- Is it possible different populations will have significantly different fatality rates?*
- What are the chances it mutates into something worse?*
- Will there be multiple waves?*
- If there are multiple waves will they happen over the course of a year or two or will social distancing spread them out? In other words how long are we going to be fighting this?
- When will things return to “normal”?
- Will things ever return to “normal”?
Finally and most pressingly…
- Is my current reserve of 50 rolls of toilet paper going to be enough?
*These questions are based on one of the books I read this month, Pale Rider, by Laura Spinney, an examination of the Spanish Flu epidemic, and I’ll cover them in more depth when I get to my review.
I- Eschatological Review
The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
By: Ross Douthat
272 pages
General Thoughts
I vacillated for quite a while between reviewing this with all the other books and giving it it’s own post. But in the end I decided I didn’t want book review posts overwhelming everything else, and thus I decided to stick it here.
To start, any discussion of this book has to begin with Douthat’s definition of decadence:
In our culture, the word decadence is used promiscuously but rarely precisely—which, of course, is part of its cachet and charm. The dictionary associates it with “having low morals and a great love of pleasure, money, fame, etc.” which seems far too nonspecific—Ebenezer Scrooge was immoral and money loving, but nobody would call him decadent—and with cultures “marked by decay or decline,” which gets us a little closer, but also leaves a great deal undefined.
…
At the risk of being presumptuous, let me try to refine [the] definition a bit further. Decadence, deployed usefully, refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development. It describes a situation in which repetition is more the norm than innovation in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private enterprises alike; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, underdeliver compared with what people recently expected. And, crucially, the stagnation and decay are often a direct consequence of previous development. The decadent society is, by definition, a victim of its own significant success.
As it turns out, though Douthat is more focused on a discussion of our immediate problems and I tend to focus my discussion farther out, His definition of decadence is precisely the theme of this blog. Which, for those of you who might have forgotten it, is:
The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.
It is precisely this sense, that civilization reached its pinnacle recently but that now we’ve drifted into stagnation that characterizes both my theme and Douthat’s discussion of decadence. In many respects, this is the book I wish I had written.
Along with stagnation Douthat identifies three other elements of society, which, combined with stagnation comprise the Four Horsemen of Decadence. Together they are stagnation, sterility, sclerosis and repetition.
Stagnation might best be characterized by this quote from economist Robert Gordan, included in the book:
A thought experiment… You are required to make a choice between option A and option B. With option A, you are allowed to keep 2002 electronic technology, including your Windows 98 laptop accessing Amazon, and you can keep running water and indoor toilets; but you can’t use anything invented since 2002. Option B is that you get everything invented in the past decade right up to Facebook, Twitter, and the iPad, but you have to give up running water and indoor toilets. You have to haul the water into your dwelling and carry out the waste. Even at 3 am on a rainy night, your only toilet option is a wet and perhaps muddy walk to the outhouse. Which option do you choose?
The experiment is very illuminating because no one chooses option B. And you begin to realize how great stagnation has been when you start to imagine how far back would the technological cut off have to be before you would choose option B? What if we went back all the way to 1992? Or 1982? At what point would the amount of technology overwhelm just the single innovation of running water?
You can also run the experiment in the opposite direction. That quote was from 2012, but here we are 8 years later, and I don’t imagine anyone’s choice switched from A to B in that time. How far into the future would we have to be, and what inventions would have to come along before the majority of people preferred option B?
Sterility is merely the actual, literal sterility of the modern world. We’re not having kids; families are shrinking; and populations are dwindling. Here Douthat’s argument is less about whether it’s happening than whether it’s a bad thing. (Spoiler: It is.)
Sclerosis basically means resistance to change and Douthat primarily uses the term to cover modern, political dysfunction. And once again it’s not so much whether it’s happening, but why it’s happening. Why, as Douthat says:
[T]he same Washington that once won global wars and built the atom bomb and sent human beings moonward now can’t pass a normal budget; why a political system that used to produce reasonably durable governing coalitions now has wave elections constantly washing parties in and out of power.
Repetition is the final quality and maybe the one most likely to be noticed by the average citizen, especially as they look around the media landscape. We have largely stopped creating new, innovative art.
The easiest way, in Douthat’s opinion, to see this in action is to compare our era to one 20 years earlier. In the past such an exercise would have yielded dramatic architectural changes — compare the Empire State Building (30s) to Grand Central Station (10s) — or dramatic changes in the style of movies — compare A Clockwork Orange (70s) to On the Waterfront (50s) to It Happened One Night (30s) — or the changing styles of music — Nirvana (1992), Neil Young (1972), Patti Page (1952), Duke Ellington (1932). But what are the differences between music in 2012 (or even now) and music in 1992? Not many. It’s all a repetition and a form of stagnation, culturally our own day is virtually indistinguishable from the 90s and 2000s, and so on.
In laying this out I intend more to relay Douthat’s arguments than re-make them. If you feel inclined to disagree with any of the above, I would urge you to just read the book. I think he paints a very compelling picture of a nation and even a civilization which has essentially stalled out. But, before I move onto the next section, this idea of decadence brings an interesting ramification to the old debate between progressives and conservatives, one that Douthat himself seems unaware of.
Much of the debate between conservatives and progressive boils down to conservatives urging a respect of tradition and historical precedents, followed by the progressives saying, “Oh, you mean respect for things like slavery?” And that’s the end of that. But if progress has stalled, if civilization reached its peak several decades ago and has been stagnant ever since. Then it’s possible a conservative argument could be made that seeks not a return to the antebellum south, or a period before the institution of women’s suffrage, but just a return to a point before civilization stagnated. And indeed I think for many conservative pundits, Douthat included, this is precisely what they’re advocating.
To imagine the argument more generally. The same reasoning which says that conservatives are and have always been wrong. (Not my reasoning, but it is the reasoning of many.) Is valid only for so long as civilization is on an upward trajectory, but if things have changed recently such that civilization is stagnating or declining, then suddenly the same reasoning being used to conclude that they were wrong for so very long suddenly now makes them right.
What This Book Says About Eschatology
Most eschatologies are imagined to be both sudden and apocalyptic, qualities which are lacking from the eschatology of decadence and stagnation. Though it’s not clear that this lack should make us take it less seriously. An argument might be made that, in fact, it should be precisely the reverse. Spectacular end of the world scenarios must attract at least some attention from their “cinematic” quality , irrespective of their likelihood. The best example of this must certainly be all the attention paid to the genre of the zombie apocalypse, but which, despite the attention, must be among the least likely of all catastrophes to actually happen. Or to state it all more simply, when it comes to end of the world scenarios, the attention it receives and the probability of it happening are not correlated.
While not the only form a stagnant apocalypse could take, one that’s very likely is the idea of a catabolic collapse, an idea I stole from John Michael Greer, and which I’ve discussed before, though it’s been awhile. There are two types of metabolism, anabolic and catabolic. As a vast oversimplification, in an anabolic state you’re building reserves and muscles, while in a catabolic state the reverse is happening, you’re spending your reserves and breaking down muscle mass to use as energy. Applied to civilization, when it’s in an anabolic state we’re adding programs, building infrastructure and going to the moon. In a catabolic state we’re cutting spending on less critical programs and using the money to prop up essential programs. New infrastructure gets built less frequently and when it does it’s at the expense of maintaining older infrastructure, and eventually everything’s falling apart. Finally, instead of going to the moon, we’re bailing out banks, and passing “stimulus” packages.
If you expand the definition beyond things which have a dollar value, into drawing down accumulated reputational reserves, isn’t that precisely what’s happening with the massive amount of spending we just decided on? Isn’t this a drawing down of the sterling reputation of US government debt? Yes, we have a large reserve of that, and I doubt this latest crisis has drawn it down to zero, but it also seems like something that’s very hard to replenish, and where the actions required for that replenishment are ones we’re unlikely to take.
For me, this all leads to the question of where in the process are we? Has the decadence only been going on for a little while and it’s easily reversed or is the decadence quite advanced and already terminal? Assuming we agree that things have stagnated, how would we then go on to determine how far it has progressed? It’s hard to imagine it starting before the moon landing, given how often the book, and others, bring that up as a high point, but it’s also hard to imagine it starting much after Vietnam, and of course those both happened at the same time, so perhaps 1970? Which would mean we’re 50 years into it, but I still don’t know if that’s so long as to indicate that the condition is terminal or short enough to suggest that we still have plenty of time.
Rome’s Crisis of the Third Century is said to have lasted almost exactly 50 years. Until Diocletian came along, reunited the empire and fought off the barbarians and other nations which had, until that time, been threatening to swallow up the empire. It’s nice to imagine that we just need our own Diocletian to come along, and do the same. But the barbarians might be just as important to that story, and one of the fears is that in addition to lacking anyone resembling a Diocletian that we’re fresh out of barbarians as well. Which may be more important to breaking stagnation than we realize.
Douthat references a famous poem from 1904 called “Waiting for the Barbarians” by the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy. Which imagines an ancient city awaiting the arrival of the Barbarians, and it seems clear that their arrival will provide a focus for the city, something to do, and to unite around, and then something strange happens:
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home, so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
II- Capsule Reviews
Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead
By: Jim Mattis
320 Pages
I’m trying to remember the last time a non-fiction book genuinely made me angry. I say non-fiction because I get angry all the time when I’m reading fiction. I understand that you might expect it to be the other way around. But in my defense, if I’m reading a novel and something really dumb happens it’s easy to imagine a world in which it didn’t happen that way by just changing the actions of a single person, the author, who would just have had to write it differently. Change a few words, and the character doesn’t do that one ridiculous thing. But when it comes to a recounting of things which actually happened, generally lots of people would have to do lots of things differently for the outcome to be materially affected. As a consequence I’m generally far more sanquine about non-fiction. But that was not the case with this book. Reading it made me very angry. In fact I probably shouldn’t admit but I think this book made me angrier than Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Probably because while I felt some distance from that book in time and space, the events Mattis describes in Call Sign Chaos feel very close.
What was so upsetting you ask? Lot’s of things, but if I had to pick one, it would have been Mattis’ first hand account of how badly Iraq was bungled. I don’t want to get too deep into the details, but shortly after the occupation there were four security contractors who didn’t check in with the military first and as a result, ended up getting killed in Fallujah. They were hung and their bodies burned. Mattis was obviously upset, but he knew that this early into the occupation that he had to proceed cautiously. And that’s what his recommendation was. But the images had been broadcast all over CNN (more anger) and Bush and Bremer overruled him and said they had to teach the Iraqis a lesson, and instructed him to invade and pacify Fallujah
Mattis disagreed with this decision, but he also asserts, over and over again, the importance of civilian military control, and the supremacy of the Commander in Chief. Accordingly he was absolutely fine following that order, despite thinking it was a bad idea. But if he was going to do that Mattis had a new plea. He told them, fine, but please, whatever you do, once we get started we really need to finish things. So he invaded Fallujah and then, just as victory was in sight, the government couldn’t handle any more negative press about civilian casualties (mostly coming from Al Jazeera) and they called things off. Skillfully managing to create the worst possible situation out of all the various options. Reaping neither the rewards of caution by holding off, nor the benefits of decisively invading.
This sort of bungling didn’t happen just this one time, it happens over and over again, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even once with Iran. Where somehow American military policy was to make the worst strategic level choice every time a choice was presented. You would expect that occasionally they might, even if it’s just by chance, make the right choice, but I got the impression that no, so deft and focused was their pursuit of short term gains that they adroitly avoided any decision with even the slightest hint of being a wise long term policy.
This seems to have continued through all the presidents Mattis served under, including Trump. And while Mattis has been gone for awhile, it appeared to happen again while I was reading the book in the recent peace deal with the Taliban, and who knows, the approach of that deal may have been why Mattis left, though he gives very little detail in the book about his time in Trump’s cabinet.
Mattis is an amazing individual, and you really should read the book, just because he’s so awesome, but I expect, like me, it will end up making you very mad. The only hope I was left with after reading the book is that perhaps Mattis might be convinced to run for President in 2020. Certainly he’s old, but he’s still younger than Trump and Biden.
128 Pages
The Durants are famous historians, but it’s entirely possible you haven’t heard of them if you were born after 1970. This book is a distillation of the lessons of history from their numerous books on the subject. And while in places it hasn’t aged well, it’s short enough and so packed with insight (some of which you may disagree with) that I would definitely recommend it.
To be clear, I didn’t actually read it, I listened to it, and the audio version had short snippets of interviews with Will and Ariel in between chapters. These snippets added a lot of additional insight, and because of that I’d recommend listening to the book as well. To give you a taste of these snippets I transcribed one of them. Perhaps you can tell why I liked it:
[Intellect] becomes an instrument for justifying impulse. If you become smart you can prove that what you really want to do, what you’re itching to do is what should really be done… The difficulty is that the intellect is an individualist. It learns how to protect the individual long before it ever thinks of protecting the group. That comes later, that comes with a maturing of the mind. A civilization controlled by intellectuals would commit suicide very soon.
It’s when they make broad pronouncements about the sweep of history that the Durrant’s are at their best. (Possibly because these broad pronouncements are harder to falsify?) When they turn from the general to the specific that’s when things get a little weird. After holding forth on all the things we can learn from history, they point out that many people’s next question is, “Well, what would you recommend.” They oblige by providing a list of 10 suggestions which is a weird mix of timeless wisdom with unusual policies, and other things that mostly haven’t aged well:
- Parenting as a privilege and not a right. People should have to pass physical and mental tests before being allowed to breed.
- Government annuity to parents for their first and second child if they’re married. Birth control should be provided nearly for free to married couples
- Unity of family and authority of the parents should be strengthened by giving parents control over what their children earn.
- Education should be provided to fit every high school graduate for employment. Along with an education in the humanities. A wide variety of protections for universities including protection from violent protests. A version of the BBC for the US which is controlled by the universities.
- Every religious institution should preach morality instead of theology and welcome everyone who accepts the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments.
- Morality, that is the cooperation of the individual with the group, should be taught every year from kindergarten through PhD. Including education on the effects of promiscuity, drugs, etc. For those who go astray significant prison reform in the direction of rehabilitation.
- Labor should be encouraged to organize as much as possible. Consumer protection made into a governmental agency.
- Be skeptical of revolution. It’s a monster that devours its fathers and children. Person’s over 30 should not listen to people under 30.
- A supervised election should be held to choose a government for South Vietnam which will be empowered to negotiate with the North. Recognize mainland China and admit it to the UN.
- A peaceful acceptance of death when it comes, no artificial prolongation of death.
Related to that last suggestion. Apparently Ariel and Will were so devoted to each other that when Will was admitted to the hospital, presumably to die (he was 96) Ariel stopped eating and actually died before him. Their daughter and grandkids tried to keep the news from Will, but he heard about it on the evening news and died shortly thereafter.
The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
272 Pages
This book was recommended to me by a reader. I’m not sure I will be forwarding that recommendation to the rest of my readers, mostly because the things I thought were useful I had heard elsewhere, and those things that I hadn’t heard generally felt far too speculative. To the point of being largely unbelievable.
An example that combines both of these attributes is his “Interface Theory of Perception”. Think of a computer interface where there’s an icon, for a file, but that icon has very little to do with the string of 1’s and 0’s which actually comprise the file at the lowest level. And more generally the idea that perceiving what’s real, and perceiving what assists you to survive are not necessarily the same thing, and any time they come into conflict, survival will win. That the brain has built an interface for survival, not an interface for reality. I had already heard this and it is indeed an important idea, but Hoffman:
[T]akes the well worn concept of our perceptual systems assembling only crude approximations of reality, and cranks it up to eleven. If you had assumed, like me, that, despite its approximate nature, our concepts of the world and the objects that inhabit it are at least somewhat veridical, think again! We are quickly disabused of the common sense notion that apprehending the truth of one’s environment is roughly compatible with maximizing genetic fitness. Instead, we are presented with the case that truth and fitness are mutually exclusive goals in our evolutionary trajectory.
That’s from a review I found on GoodReads that was too on the nose not to quote.
If anything, it gets worse when the book starts to dive into the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the controversial further extrapolation of that interpretation that things are constructed only when we perceive them. That, for example, when you’re not looking at it, the Moon isn’t there.
It’s not all bad, there is a lot of good stuff, it’s mostly that he’s just too ambitious. For example he definitely gets credit for bringing in supernormal stimuli, a long-time interest of this blog, and also a great example of survival warping perception. But this ends up being another example of overreach. I understand that supernormal stimuli makes certain things seem more attractive than they might be otherwise, and that I eat twinkies when I really should be eating low fat chicken breasts, but twinkies are still food. It’s not like I’m going to starve if I eat twinkies. In fact if anything it’s not our perception of reality that’s screwed up in this instance, it’s our perception of what will help us survive that’s screwed up.
In the end the biggest problem is that the stuff that’s true and useful in this book is already well known, and the stuff that’s speculative has no practical application even if it could somehow be verified which mostly it can’t.
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World
By: Laura Spinney
352 Pages
It’s impossible when reviewing this book to avoid talking about the current crisis. And while the history of the Spanish Flu has been picked over pretty thoroughly for advice on how to handle things now, there are still a few items I haven’t seen brought up, or if they have been brought up they haven’t been emphasized. The first and biggest would be patience. The era of the Spanish flu lasted for three full years over three different waves. And when people talk about flattening the curve the whole point of that is to spread out this period. I’m not making any predictions, a lot depends on whether COVID-19 mutates into something significantly different or more deadly and fortunately, there’s evidence that it’s not mutating very fast. But even so, this is not going to be something that’s over by June or probably even over this year. But let’s all hope I’m wrong.
Speaking of mutating, I think more people are aware of it now, but I had always kind of assumed that the first wave of the Spanish Flu was the worst, but it was actually the middle wave, and then there was a further third wave that was not as bad as the second but worse than the first. As I said there’s evidence COVID-19 isn’t mutating very fast, so that’s obviously a good thing, but I also think we need to be prepared for multiple waves of it.
Something else that the book brought up is that the Spanish Flu had a significantly different fatality rate depending on the population. Native Americans were particularly hard hit, and the flu wiped out whole villages of Inuit. I’ve yet to see any evidence that the same thing is happening with C19, and I doubt it’s the explanation for things like the fatality disparity between Italy and Germany, and it’s probably too early to be able to tell, but we definitely could see some of that, and it might be really bad for whatever population ends up being the most susceptible.
On the whole I’m not sure if I’d recommend the book right now. I think most of the useful insights it contains are already in the wild, and the rest of it will probably just depress you.
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
By: David Eagleman
128 Pages
This was a collection of short stories about the afterlife. Short vignettes, each with a different twist. It was enjoyable enough in the manner of most collections of speculative short stories, though there was nothing that knocked my socks off. There as an afterlife were Mary Shelley basically ran things because she was the only person who understood the fraught emotional relationship a creator has with their creation, and god spent all of his time brooding over her novel Frankenstein. Another story depicted an afterlife where you live out the eternities as characters in the dreams of those who haven’t died. And, yet another, where you died in the normal way, but eventually the universe reversed itself and you lived your life again,only in reverse and everything was much better. An idea he clearly stole from the Red Dwarf novels. (Though they may in turn have stolen it from somewhere else.)
You get the idea. And while they were all clever none of them seemed better or more logically constructed than the typical religious doctrine of the afterlife. In a sense this would be surprising, if some fiction writer managed to best the collective imagination of billions of people over thousands of years. But in another sense isn’t that the whole argument of people like transhumanists, that they can in fact come up with something better? I understand I’m probably putting too much weight on this book if I use it as evidence in that debate, but neither should it fill anyone with optimism either.
By: Francis Fukuyama
672 Pages
First off I owe Francis Fukuyama an apology. On more than one occasion I brought up his idea of the “end of history” as something which had been proven so obviously wrong that neither I nor anyone else needed to take it seriously.
What’s worse is that this is a well known failure mode, you should always try to understand an argument before dismissing it. (Though I understand there’s only so much time in a day.) Additionally this might also be an example of a failure of oversimplification, where a phrase is simplified so much in people’s perception that it’s connotation is not very close and may in fact be the exact opposite of the true meaning the author was going for. (Other examples include Taleb’s idea of Black Swans, and Nietzsche’s contention that “God is dead”.)
For myself, and I assume most people, the phrase “end of history”, invoked the idea that humanity had won. That we had banished wars, come up with the best system of government, and passed into a new age where big dramatic catastrophes (the kind of stuff you learn about when you study history) would no longer occur. But Douthat claims in his book The Decadent Society that Fukuyama was arguing something very similar to Douthat’s own thesis, that liberal market-based democracy had banished it’s ideological rivals. But rather than this being a glorious triumph, it was more likely a stagnant plateau. Now I feel like I need to read Fukuyama’s End of History and the Last Man and see what he’s really arguing, but, as you might have noticed, that is not the Fukuyama book I read, so I should really move on.
Coincidentally, this book seems to tie in to many of the other books I read this month, and books I’ve read in the last few months as well. I already mentioned the tie in to The Decadent Society, but of all the connections, the greatest is to the previous book in the series Fukuyama’s book The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution which I finished in November and just as in that book his big emphasis is how difficult the formation of a stable well functioning state really is, or as he calls it “getting to Denmark”. This brings in another connection to the Mattis book with all of the difficulties he describes in both the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns.
Beyond that Fukuyama seems very much in the camp of people who feel that war is an important component in the creation of states, and particularly in the creation of nations, those superpowered states that can call on nationalistic unity (i.e. patriotism) in the event of a threat. A process I talked about in a previous post when I discussed War! What Is It Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots.
Finally it’s connected to the book by the Durant’s in that it covers much the same territory. In fact if you were going to either read Lessons of History or The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay I would definitely encourage you to read the latter. The caveat being of course that those two books together are over 1300 pages, while Lessons of History is a tenth of that. Also the styles are very different. The Durant’s are far more narrative, while Fukuyama is more comprehensive jumping from one example to the next in service of a particular point.
There’s obviously a lot more to the book, but this post is already really long, so I’ll just leave you with just one final take away from the book. Fukuyama argues fairly persuasively, that it’s better to start with an effective state, and then add democracy than to attempt things in the reverse order.
Sophocles II: Ajax, The Women of Trachis, Electra, Philoctetes, The Trackers
By: Sophocles
172 Pages
As I may have mentioned, I read all of the Greek tragedies when I was young during my initial attempt to make it through the great books of the Western World. I may have also mentioned that I didn’t end up retaining much from that first read through, though that’s not to say I don’t remember anything, and one of the things I definitely remembered was the play Philoctetes, because it was around this time that I started to realize that Odysseus, far from being a heroic role-model was actually sort of a horrible individual. The details of why are too complicated to get into, and it’s more than just this play, but trust me, Odysseus was a jerk.
The pandemic continues, and I hear that people stuck at home are reading a lot more books. If you come across something great let me know. And if my reviews help you find something to pass the time with, consider donating, mostly I’ve always dreamed of getting paid to read, and donations make it seem like that’s what’s actually happening.
Answers for your virus questions:
Number of cases is higher than what is reported because many people are not being allowed to have tests. Also there are people with no symptoms who aren’t asking for tests. There is an upper limit on this. For example, if everyone has already gotten it then new cases will vanish in 2 weeks or so since there’s no one new to infect.
I think the fatality rate is a social construct. By that I mean it is probably something like 0.6% if things are ‘normal’. That means you have well run hospitals with supplies and if you need a ventilator you are put on it promptly and monitored by people familiar with respiratory medicine. If the hospital system is collapsing it can be more like 5-10%. On top of that a collapsed hospital system means other people will die even fi they don’t have the virus. In other words, the virus is like a denial of service attack. On top of that, there’s some evidence if you get the virus from patients in a hospital who are really sick, it will hit you harder than if you get it ‘normally’, even if you are younger.
There are people who have died without getting tested who almost certainly had it.
In a discussion with someone on FB regarding Italy. He was claiming a supermajority of people who died in Italy were over 80, hence no big deal. When I looked at his article I realized it was from a few weeks ago when the death toll was half what it would become. Imagine it’s 6 AM. In come an 80 yr old, 70 yr old, 60 yr old, 50 yr old and 40 yr old and all go on ventilators. By noon the 80 yr old is dead. That does NOT mean only 80 yr olds die. It simply means they die first. Until the dust settles, nothing is really known about these statistics. In the spirit of Taleb, I would proceed as if these are unknown entities therefore the assumption that they are really bad is warranted.
China is a deceptive country on multiple levels. The top lies but the bottom lies to the top. Things have to be verified indirectly. For example, if they claim they are up and running, do satellites show parking lots filled in factories? Do tourists report they can go places? Are orders being filled? Who knows if they truly have no current cases. Even they can’t really test everyone every day after all. They probably have it controlled though, if they didn’t we’d know soon enough.
Beats me about China-US relations. If they are up and running it would be nice for them to export a few billion masks.
Yes obviously different age populations have different fatality rates. Might it be higher in China but lower in S. Korea but higher yet in Italy? Possibly I suppose but you have to divorce that from the social construction side. If we ‘ran the clock over again’ and Italy made sure they had the PPE to keep their health care professionals protected, might they have a lower rate? Maybe.
Viruses tend to mutate to become less worse, not more. This one seems very sneaky. By spreading when there’s no symptoms and there’s some reports that at the end of the illness there’s a deceptive “I beat it” feeling before it comes back for a final punch. Just enough for people to run out and spread it some more. Maybe this virus found a way to be evolutionarily successful without getting nicer? Good thing though is that this virus mutates slowly so vaccines should be able to eventually target it.
I would hope we could blunt additional waves by finally getting testing going at the level it should. Assume we never get a cure or vaccine, the virus in order to keep going has to infect at least one person every 14 days or else it goes extinct him humans. How many people are infected in each ‘pass’ is defined as R*. R*>1 means more people are getting infected than die or resolve the illness in each pass. If we are socially distant, R*<1 which means the virus eventually dies out in humans. We could see waves with flare ups but I really think sooner or later testing has to come online and we can snuff it out even if a vaccine never gets here.
No I don’t thinks will return to normal but abnormal may not be so different. Many Asian nations got burned by outbreaks going all the way back to 1918. They have mask and socially distancing culture but also things that are ‘normal’ to us like concerts, movies, clubs, and sit down eating rather than take out.
We probably need to be able to understand how to do a shutdown and if nothing else part of this cost is learning. I ask people who harp on economic downturn versus ‘only’ saving X number of lives, what would happen if a virus appears that has 4 weeks of incubation but a mortality rate of 40%? No one has shown me any ‘law’ of biology that says such a thing can’t arise.
Most of my company is based in Shanghai. I was just talking to someone who lives there and asked him how things are in China. He said they still have some precautions they’re taking, but most people are back to work at this point. The people in our lab are working again, and have been for a few weeks now. It all got shut down from end of January through February.
One of our founders was in the US, taking her family to Disneyland, when it all hit. We chatted in LA and at the time she was watching all the news reports and fretting about catching a plane back home. It took her until around late February to get something so she could take her kids back to China. Then finally she got back just in time to start watching the US numbers start climbing. If you want to avoid this kind of thing on both ends, I guess that’s how you accidentally do it?
Not sure what’s going on with the official Chinese numbers, but the people I regularly interact with in Shanghai report that things are mostly back to normal – minus some lingering precautions. On conference calls they’re calling in from the office, not separately from their homes.
Can’t speak to the rest of the country, of course.
Mark, thanks for the more direct report about things in China. One hopes they’ve got it mostly under control, though I am seeing stories about new flare-ups… Which is something we have to look forward to, and which will probably be worse.
Thanks for answering the questions, I did glean a few additional bits of insight, but mostly they’re not merely questions I have, but questions everyone has, and I thought that podcast you sent over:
https://peterattiamd.com/michaelosterholm/
Had some of the best info I’ve seen. And I think that combined with other stuff I’ve been reading convinces me that Germany is probably the closest to a true fatality rate if everything can be brought to bear, and last I checked they were at 1.2% But as the Doctor pointed out on the podcast the fatality rate is far more sensitive to missing deaths than missing diagnosis, as in one missed death moves the percent far more than one missed diagnosis, and both are obviously happening.
One final point, I think you may have misunderstood what I meant about different populations, I was saying is it more deadly to say, Native Americans (like smallpox and the 1918 Flu), than say western europeans.
Decadence –
You might want to connect Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It sounds like a major element of what is defined as decadence is ‘normal science’ in Kuhn’s view. You have a major paradigm such as Newtonian mechanics that acts as a revolution but then follows a period of ‘puzzle solving’ or building out the theory and applications. Flip phone to iPhone is a paradigm shift, those periodic updates are ‘normal’…. Interestingly everyone knows about Kuhn from college but few people ever read him. Errol Morris, NJ film maker known for The Thin Blue Line, was a philosophy major and wrote a book called The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality) about the time Kuhn threw an ashtray at him…..anyway…
First, in given the choice between A and B, suppose you were offered the universe of Star Trek? To be honest no running water and outhouses is a tough sell even if you gave me warp drive, transporters and replicators. Of course it would be hard to imagine why you couldn’t just replicate running water with Star Trek tech. but the point remains.
Second, there is the issue of whether new discoveries will ever have actual application. For example, particle physics has broken down protons and other particles into quarks but there doesn’t seem to be any actual application for this knowledge. Could one build different types of atoms from the particles of the standard theory? Not sure.
The first issue, though, leads to consumption exhaustion…..I think a lot of us on the East Coast are realizing that. The random things we want at random moments do create a hedonic treadmill where desires arise faster and faster. The effect is like being a kid and going to an arcade or fair. So much activity packed into such a small place increases the desire for more and more transactions, which the economy creates. However, when you grow up the arcade isn’t as fun anymore and if you go once in a while you’ll only play a game or two.
If you are well fed, clothed, and have access to books, media etc., your desire for more stuff should go down. My father-in-law observed this in the garbage business. When he had a town contract, the poor and middle class put out a lot of bags and cans every week.
I think a certain mellowing of consumption has to come as part of human development because our ability to consume is inherently finite because we can only take in experiences through our 5 senses. At that point you have an economic crises that is only in appearance. If you measurement metrics are based on the older paradigm, it will look like the world is collapsing. Is that the right metric though?
I remember Youtube/Facebook measure themselves by ‘engagement’ but Apple is recently putting in features that encourage less screen time. The engagement metric makes sense up to a point. The guy that owns the arcade, no doubt, cares about quarters earned per minute. But ultimately it reaches an exhaustion point. People aren’t going to watch their screens 24 hours a day and if they did you would then be confronted with a point where growth stops.
Defense of Reality
I agree reality has to be hierarchical. Meaning our faulty perception of reality must on some level reflect some aspect of true reality. But this is only in a very limited reference frame. Something maybe a poison, but the reasons why we perceive to be so (it’s smell, taste, look, color, feel, etc.) may have nothing to do with it. If someone pulls out a plant and says “Look this plant tastes great but it copied all those other traits to try to fool people into thinking it was the poison”, we would shrug, there goes evolution again add one more to the textbook.
But consider Flatland. The 2-D residents have a view that seems very much like reality to them. The 3-D visitors, though, are able to easily defy the ‘natural laws’ of their view. The ‘reality’ is not that their natural laws are wrong but they are missing a larger picture (the 3rd dimension opens up things their laws of movement permit that are not permitted in 2-D). At first glance this may seem to be an opening for religion and mysticism, except it’s not quite. The 3-D visitors might try to play themselves as gods but with sufficient knowledge, the 2-D residents would realize nothing supernatural was afoot.
I think the usefulness of the argument is that we should not be too wedded to our concept of ‘ultimate reality’ based on our perceptions. This might be old news for some but still we may be closing ourselves off to more possibilities than we realize.