Nathaniel launched Difficult Run in November 2012 and ran the website alone until August 2013, when he invited the first Difficult Run Editors to join him in adding content to the site.
Nathaniel has a background in math, systems engineering, and economics, and his day job is in business analytics. His real interests are science fiction, and theology, however. He is an avid runner, but not a very fast one. He is married to fellow DREditor Ro and they have two little children.
In addition to Difficult Run, Nathaniel blogs regularly for Times And Seasons and writes a lot of reviews on Goodreads.
Some General Conference talks hit me with such unexpected force that I can never be sure if there is something particularly forceful in the talk, something especially resonant in the hour, or some coincidence of circumstance that makes it stand out so clearly from the other (also good) talks of the session. I can’t explain it, but it’s what happened when I read Elder Marion D. Hanks’ talk, Trust in the Lord. I hope I can share a couple of reasons why I loved it so much.
The Lord delights to bless us with his love.
The idea that there is a God who not only does bless us with love, but who delights to do so is arresting. It reminds me of a quote from Jonathan Haidt that has always stuck with me:
Although I would like to live in a world in which everyone radiates benevolence towards everyone else, I would rather live in a world in which there was at least one person who loved me specifically, and whom I loved in return. (The Happiness Hypothesis, page 131)
Specificity is vital, and it goes both ways. God is not merely some generic, omnibenevolent abstraction. God is a title that refers to persons, like Jesus Christ and His Father, and they recognize and love each of us individually. This simple idea, that “The Lord delights to bless us with his love,” can pass by unnoticed like just another ornate phrase, but you should stop and really consider what it means. There is a person out there who sees you, who loves, and who is positively delighted to be able to bless your life.
But Elder Hanks’ talk is not all sunshine, and that is what made me love it all the more:
The power that remade Paul, that poured in love and washed out hostility and hate, did not save him from the great travails, from Nero’s dungeon or a martyr’s death. Christ lived in him, he said, he had found the peace of God that passed all comprehension. Nothing, not tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword, death, life, angels, principalities, powers, things present, things to come, height, depth, nor any other creature, could separate him from the love of Christ… Christ died on a cross, and won his victory; his disciples and followers also have been subject to the brute forces and foibles of this world, yet through enduring faith they have shared and will share in that victory.
The Problem of Evil is confounding, and yet I find that religion is never deeper, or more beautiful, or more vital than when it confronts this problem head-on. The idea of a loving God seems so absurd in contrast with a world full of tragedy, war, disease, and disaster. And yet, doesn’t the idea of a God being executed and hung on a cross seem just as absurd? The world mocked Christ and misunderstood His supreme victory as an ignominious defeat, confusing the end of His life with the beginning of our hope. This is a mistake we’ve made before.
Elder Hanks is not speaking theoretically, nor in the abstract:
I am not really thinking in the abstract, but I’m thinking of many noble souls who have met difficulties with courage, like my mother and many others who had little to rely upon—who had little but ingenuity and will and courage and faith. I’m thinking too of a more recent scene—a beautiful young face whiter than the hospital sheet upon which she lay, her sorrowing parents nearby grieving, as a relentless disease consumed her life. Comfort came to them in the quiet knowledge of the nearness of a Savior who himself had not been spared the most keen and intense suffering, who himself had drunk of the bitter cup.
It is awful what some of us are asked to go through. And—in terms of principles like fairness or justice—it is just as awful that so many of us are inexplicably not required to pay the same high price. I don’t think I could ever love or even respect any leader—including a God—who asked their followers to go through what they were not willing to do. But Jesus is not the kind of leader. Jesus did not shy from the shadows; he walked through the deepest shade.
This talk is more than a meditation on suffering and joy and darkness and light. It is a stirring and humble call to action:
We know that the Lord needs instruments of his love. He needs a Simon Peter to teach Cornelius, an Ananias to bless Paul, a humble bishop to counsel his people, a home teacher to go into the homes of the Saints, a father and mother to be parents to their children.
This is one of those talks that makes the General Conference Odyssey worth it for me. No matter how hectic and stressed my life becomes, my soul needs testimonies like these.
With the Sunday afternoon session of the October 1974 General Conference, we’ve come to the end of our eighth general conference. It’s hard to believe that we started this Odyssey way back in December 2015. There were several talks that I really liked from this session, but the one I’m writing about is President Spencer W. Kimball’s Ocean Currents and Family Influences.
The central metaphor is right in the title: “Currents have much more power to control its course than the surface winds.” President Kimball urges us to develop powerful currents in our homes:
I have sometimes seen children of good families rebel, resist, stray, sin, and even actually fight God. In this they bring sorrow to their parents, who have done their best to set in movement a current and to teach and live as examples. But I have repeatedly seen many of these same children, after years of wandering, mellow, realize what they have been missing, repent, and make great contribution to the spiritual life of their community. The reason I believe this can take place is that, despite all the adverse winds to which these people have been subjected, they have been influenced still more, and much more than they realized, by the current of life in the homes in which they were reared. When, in later years, they feel a longing to recreate in their own families the same atmosphere they enjoyed as children, they are likely to turn to the faith that gave meaning to their parents’ lives.
But here’s the line that stood out to me the most:
My brothers and sisters, the home is our peculiarity—the home, the family, is our base…family life, home life, children and parents loving each other and dependent upon each other. That’s the way the Lord has planned for us to live.
It connected two different themes: the family and being a peculiar people. In addition to President Kimball’s talk, President Hinckley’s talk (A City Set Upon a Hill) and Elder Victor L. Brown’s talk (The Blessings of Peace) also talked about being “a peculiar people.” In what sense are we becoming a peculiar people? Well, as the world goes in one direction, the Church will refuse to go along. And, apparently, a central point of divergence will be the family.
As usual, some of the best talks from this General Conference come from the Sunday session. In particular, I’m really developing an appreciation for President Hunter. He was only prophet for a very brief period when I was a young man (June 1994 – March 1994) and I’m sorry to say that my main takeaway at the time was a kind of disappointment. My father had often told me of how you developed a special connection to the prophet who was alive when you were developing your own testimony—often in your teens—and so I thought that President Hunter would be that man. When he died so quickly—before he could leave much of a mark of his own—I felt a tiny sense of betrayal.
I confess I haven’t thought a lot about him in the years sense, but that started to change when I taught Elder’s Quorum a couple of weeks ago using Chapter 21 of the manual based on his writings. I was shocked at how sophisticated the lesson was, and at how much time President Hunter spent dealing explicitly with one of my pet issues: the relationship between faith in science and in religion. For example:
Whether seeking for knowledge of scientific truths or to discover God, one must have faith. This becomes the starting point.
The idea that faith plays a role in both faith and in science is one that bowled me over when I first read David Hume in light of Alma 32 as an undergrad. Since then plenty of people have made similar arguments—so I’m making no claims to originality—but I was still surprised to see the topic handled so directly by a prophet.
As it turns out, that manual was drawing from his talk in this session: To Know God. In the talk, he makes the case even more clearly than the manual, writing that “scientific research is an endeavor to ascertain truth, and the same principles which are applied to that pursuit are used in the quest to establish the truth of religion as well.”
Also, continuing that first quote from him, her references Hebrews and the idea that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,”[ref]Hebrew 11:1[/ref] and relates that directly to science as well:
The scientist does not see molecules, atoms, or electrons, yet he knows they exist. He does not see electricity, radiation, or magnetism, but he knows these are unseen realities. In like manner, those who earnestly seek for God do not see him, but they know of his reality by faith. It is more than hope. Faith makes it a conviction—an evidence of things not seen.
I’m a little embarrassed to ride my hobby horse this far off down a tangent, but—since I know that equating faith in religion and science is bound to tick off plenty of people and confuse even more—I’ll provide a succinct overview that, I hope, falls in line with what President Hunter is saying.
The first point comes from David Hume, and it’s a simple one: we don’t observe causation directly. We infer causation. The implications might not be immediately obvious so—just to give a sense of what a huge problem this was—consider that one of the most famous philosophers of all time (Emannuel Kant) “changed[ed] his entire career after he [read] Hume.”[ref]This quote, and most of the one to follow, are from Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It by Steven L. Goldman.[/ref]. Why? Because if causality must be assumed, then no amount of observation or experimentation can jump the chasm from a collection of facts about what has happened to have taken place in the past to certain knowledge about how the universe works.
Now, why does this matter? Because, of the “inextricably realist character that is woven into the rhetoric of science.”[ref] Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It by Steven L. Goldman.[/ref] In other words: science—the way it is discussed in the media and among scientists themselves—is the business of uncovering facts (certain knowledge) that are about the world. Which, if Hume is right, is quite impossible.
And, in fact, if you press philosophically sophisticated scientists on the topic (speaking historically), they’ll concede the point for the simple reason that nobody has found an adequate rebuttal to Hume. And so there’s a “parade of absolutely first-rate scientific thinkers who have insisted that science is not about an independently existing reality,”[ref] Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It by Steven L. Goldman.[/ref] but the reality is that nobody really has that in mind. When the Higgs Boson was discovered, everyone—from the physicists to the journalists to the general public—took the realist view for granted. There’s this idea of a particle-thingy and scientists have discovered it and so now we know that the particle-thingy is really out there, a part of an independent reality that exists beyond human mental constructs.
Professor Goldman goes so far as to call the scientific establishment “schizophrenic” in this regard. They plainly talk and act as though they are learning facts about the real world (that’s the realist view) despite the awareness—now centuries’ old—that this is impossible to do with certainty.
There are basically three solutions to this conundrum.
On the one hand, you can just give up on rationality entirely. I won’t say much for this course because, once you’ve decided to just abandon making sense, there’s nothing left to talk about. But I suppose—for the sake of completeness if nothing else—I ought to mention that you can try that course if you’d like. Hume proved that deriving certain knowledge of the world through experimentation and observation is impossible, but you can just pretend that he didn’t if that suits your fancy.
Now, if you’re not willing to jettison logic and reason, you have two remaining options. On the one hand, you can retreat. You can agree that—because causality is never observable—science is basically just a game where we invent explanations for our experiences, and no explanation is ever really “true.” Scientific theories and laws are more or less coherent with each other and with our experiences and they have varying degrees of simplicity or aesthetic beauty, but in the final analysis they are socially constructed and subjective and that’s that.
On the other hand, you can stand your ground and assert that science is about something objectively real. That there are things out there—matter and energy and laws governing them—that have a kind of independent and objective experience and that—no matter how imperfectly or partially—science is in the business of learning about those things. But if you want to take this view, you have to swallow the reality that science rests on faith. Faith, for example, that although we may not be able to see or observe something (for example: causality), it’s still there, undergirding our experiments and observations and building a faith-based connection between science and reality.
We’ve gone rather far afield at this point, so let me wrap it up. If none of the philosophy appeals to you: that’s fine. Let me just say that it’s exciting—and unexpected—that in reading old talks from the 1970s I’d come to such a greater appreciation for a man who served as President for less than a year while I was a teenager. This General Conference Odyssey has already covered some unexpected new territory in just the first year, and we have more than ten more to go.
A week or two ago, I saw something interesting and new going around on Facebook: PolitEcho. It’s a cool idea. The app[ref]It’s a Google Chrome extension.[/ref] analyzes the politics of your friends on Facebook–and your feed–and then answers the question, “is your news feed a bubble?”
So I thought it would be fun to ask the Difficult Run editors to run the analysis on their own Facebook profiles and send me the results so that we could publish a little post that showed the respective bubbles of the folks who write for Difficult Run.
Now, before we get to the results, I have to lower expectations just a bit. Like a lot of data visualization projects, PolitEcho doesn’t really live up to its guiding concept. The way it analyzes political affiliation is very, very rudimentary. Instead of doing anything cool like using the Moral Foundations Word Count tool to conduct sentiment analysis on that things that your friends actually post[ref]This is just one example of what I’d love to do, given time and resources that I do not have.[/ref], instead PolitEcho just looks to see whether your friends have “liked” a variety of pre-screened news sources on Facebook. If they like Breitbart, for example, they’re conservative. If they like DailyKos, they’re liberal. In other words, don’t read too much into this.
That said–and mostly for fun–here are what our political bubbles look like.
Nathaniel
Monica
Walker
Allen
So, that’s what our social networks look like, from one particularly naive political viewpoint.
When Russell Fox highly praised an article with the headline The Defense of Liberty Can’t Do Without Identity Politics, I knew I had to read it. Between his praise and the tagline of the site–“moderation in pursuit of justice”–I was fascinated to see what a fusion of classical liberalism and identity politics might look like. As it turns out, however, it’s not an alliance that I can see any hope for.
The first indication that things were going awry was author Jacob Levy’s dismissal of the Trump win as not even really needing an explanation:
Donald Trump received a smaller share of the popular vote than Mitt Romney did in 2012, but his Electoral College victory was so unexpected that it seems to call forth explanation after explanation.
The idea is that Trump’s apparently overwhelming victory is basically a figment of the peculiar nature of our voting system. In reality, it was about 80,000 votes in three states [ref]Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin[/ref] that proved decisive, and such a small number of votes “is susceptible of almost endless plausible explanations.”
All of which is true. And all of which misses the point entirely. When someone as objectionable as Donald Trump performs about as well as your typical Republican candidate, that is not a reason to wave your hands dismissively. That is a matter for serious reflection, because Trump was far, far from a typical Republican politician. Levy seems to be saying that Trump did more or less as well–plus or minus an insignificant fraction of total voters–as anybody else would have: Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney, whatever. But that’s not an explanation of anything. It actually happens to be the very fact which demands an explanation!
The second misstep is fundamentally misconstruing the nature of political correctness. To hear Levy tell it, identity politics is basically indistinguishable from civility and common moral rectitude. Thus, Levy insists that Trump’s low points such as the attack on Judge Curiel or the Khan family or the Bobby Bush video, were all instances of Trump violating political correctness. Ergo, Trump did not rise when he contravened identity culture, but rather fell, and so you can’t credit any kind of anti-PC sentiment for his victory.
But to categorize these mistakes as exclusively or even primarily about political correctness makes little sense. The Khan family is a gold star family, and when has concern for the military ever been associated with political correctness or identity politics? Yes, the Khan family is also Muslim, but there’s no way to describe this as only or even mainly about political correctness. The same goes for the Bobby Bush tapes where–once again–Trump’s foul language and outright criminal behavior violated not only the norms of political correctness (for being misogynistic) but also of–as I said earlier–basic decency. The attack on Curiel was the only one that could fairly be categorized as substantially about political correctness and little else, and so it’s a fundamental mistake to draw the conclusion that whenever Trump violated PC norms his poll numbers fell. On the contrary, his penchant for trampling on political correctness were the defining attributes of his campaign.[ref]According to Pew, “By a ratio of about five-to-one (83% to 16%), more Trump supporters say too many people are easily offended. Among Clinton supporters, 59% think people need to exercise caution in speaking to avoid offending others, while 39% think too many are easily offended.” And that’s just one example.[/ref]
Speaking more broadly, however, Levy’s dismissive attitude towards the excesses of political correctness and identity politics fundamentally misapprehends what that movement is already about. On the issue of college campuses, he writes:
It turns out that 18-year-olds seized of the conviction of their own righteousness are prone to immoderation and simplistic views. (Who knew?)
But–as amusing as those stories are–he neglects the part where people lose their jobs as a result of these temper tantrums and how this very real threat has led to a climate of fear and paranoia.[ref]This is especially true when the protests and repercussions spill outside of college campuses. Go back to Brendan Eich and start from there.[/ref] Nor is that just a matter of anecdotes. In “Political diversity will improve social psychological science” a team of researchers[ref]José L. Duarte, Jarret T. Crawford, Charlotta Stern, Jonathan Haidt, Lee Jussim, and Philip E. Tetlock[/ref] substantiate the following claims:
Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years.
This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike.
Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking.
The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination
So much for the kids will be kids approach Levy favors. Undermining free speech and open inquiry on collage campuses and beyond strikes me as a legitimately concerning trend, not just a kind of cute overzealousness..
Levy also characterizes identity politics as starting and ending with any particular concern for a particular group of individuals. Anti-sodomy laws used to discriminate gays can be written in apparently neutral terms (with regard to sexuality) and America’s racist criminal justice system is ostensibly colorblind. In order to reform these discriminatory systems, Levy insists, we have to have identity-conscious politics that refuse to give up at the most superficial veneer of impartiality.
I agree with Levy on this point,[ref]See my review of The New Jim Crow for more info on why.[/ref] but what we agree on and what identity politics constitute are two different things. Take the criminal justice system, for example. The inequality is evident in statistics that indicate blacks and whites use drugs at roughly equivalent levels, but that blacks are more likely to be arrested, charged, charged with more serious offenses, and convicted. It is entirely possible to oppose this because you want blacks and whites to be treated identically. This is nothing new. It’s the same spirit–broadened and expanded–as “all men are created equal.”
But what does this have to do with the doctrine of intersectionality, a political idea rooted in the fundamental alienation of people based on categories of race, gender, and sexuality? How can a universal view of humanity where we’re all fundamentally alike–and should be treated that way–possibly coexist with a doctrine that takes as axiomatic the mutual incomprehensibility of our lives based on identity categories?[ref]And, even more sinister perhaps, seems to imply that the experiences of individuals within designated identity categories are fungible.[/ref]
What does this have to do with the stubborn insistence of contemporary social justice warriors–many of whom come from extremely privileged backgrounds (as their prevalence on elite college campuses renders obvious)–to insist we check our racial privilege while ignoring other forms of privelege that are at least as relevant but would indict them as well? (I’m looking at you, socio-economic class.)
Or, to expand things a bit more, let’s consider critical race theory which–according to its own proponents–“rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy.”[ref]UCLA School of Public Affairs: What is Critical Race Theory?[/ref] Levy argues that “the defense of liberty can’t do without identity politics,”[ref]I’m assuming he wrote the title, but even if an editor came up with it, it reflects his argument accurately enough.[/ref] but it turns out that the actual practitioners of identity politics think they can get along without liberty (at least: classical liberalism) just fine, thanks very much. Levy might think he’s on the side of the politically correct and the social justice advocates of identity politics, but I’m pretty sure the feeling’s not mutual.[ref]For more on the gap between identity politics and conventional notions of justice, see: When Social Justice Isn’t About Justice.[/ref]
Aside from these particular ideological incompatibilities between classical liberalism and identity politics, we also have research from Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning delving into the rise of “victimhood culture” as something genuinely new and unique, using the same kinds of instances Levy dismisses as insignificant to illustrate “large-scale moral change” and the rise of a distinct victimhood culture. The only other two moral cultures they identify are honor culture and dignity culture, so it’s not like we get a new one of these every decade or so. This shift is seismic.
In the end, Levy believes that identity culture and classical liberalism can be allies. And, insofar as what he means is that “the progress of freedom depends on those who know where the shoe chafes,”[ref]That’s’ the caption of the article’s photo, and I’m not sure if Levy wrote it or not.[/ref] then I agree. The trouble is that the identity politics of today–however they started–are effectively a method of entrenching socio-economic inequality by diverting attention away from the privileges of wealth and elite education with a myopic emphasis on race, gender and sexuality that–while sometimes vital in specific cases–becomes in its myopic form a tool of oppression rather than of freedom. Fundamentally, the project of contemporary identity politics both historically unique and essentially anti-liberal.
The coalition we need to build is not one between libertarianism and identity politics. On the contrary, the coalition we need today is between those who reject identity politics (whether they lean to the left or to the right) and those who embrace it (whether they lean to the left or to the right.)[ref]See also: Victimhood Culture Metastasizes[/ref] This coalition will not bring about a happy utopia because vital partisan differences will remain, but it will forestall the widening division and social dissolution that have wrought so much dysfunction and destruction on our political and social institutions in recent years.
Donald Trump was interviewing Mitt Romney for secretary of State in order to torture him… To toy with him.[ref]Via The Hill[/ref]
That might be all there is to it. Far be it from me to put pure pettiness past Trump. But whatever the motives, the move comes with an important fringe benefit for Trump. From now on, whenever Romney criticizes Trump, the Trump team can spin it nothing more than sour grapes.
I’m loathe to give Trump credit as some kind of political savant just because he won. I’m more inclined to give credit to larger political forces and sheer dumb luck. But that kind of sabotage doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility. It’s a petty, but useful, way to neutralize the most visible and respected #NeverTrump Republican.[ref]The fact that a lot of credulous people depicted Romney’s carefully-worded statements as sucking up to Trump is just another way to undermine a potent critic.[/ref]
We forget that we are not, and cannot be, totally independent of one another either in thought or action. We are part of a total community. We are all members of one family, as Paul reminded the Greeks at Athens when he explained that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth.” (Acts 17:26)
Although Elder Burton went in a different direction, that thought made me think about the talk before his, Elder LeGrand Richards’ What After Death?
I thought today that I would like to direct what I have to say to those parents who have lost children in death before they reached maturity and could enter into the covenant of marriage and have their own children here upon this earth. I reckon that there aren’t many families who haven’t had that experience.
Elder Richards was born in 1886. I wondered what childhood mortality rates looked like for him, so I checked a great site (Our World in Data), but data for the United States only goes back to 1933.
I added in the United Kingdom and then France to get an older data set.[ref]You can see from the graph that, while the lines are not identical, they follow a similar trend.[/ref] So, using France as a proxy, the kind of child mortality that Elder Richards would have been familiar was between 250 and 225 children per 1,000 dying before the age of 5.
By the time of this conference in 1974, the rate was down to about 20. For the most recent data (2013) the rate is about 4. In other words, the chances that a given newborn would die before age 5 have falledn from 25% to 2% to 0.4% from the time that Elder Richards was born to the time when he gave his talk to the time we are alive today. For a family with small children, the chance that none would die before the age of 5 was only 32% when Elder Richards was born. It was 92% in 1974. It is 98% today.
When he said, “I reckon that there aren’t many families who haven’t had that experience,” he was absolutely correct for his time, but the world has changed substantially since then.
The reason that I connect the two talks is that Elder Burton reminds us of how integral family is to our identity. As the saying goes: we’re social animals. And the first society is the family. This is a vital truth to who we are as human beings. I don’t think anything could possibly drive that lesson home than the unimaginable tragedy of losing a young child and having that family circle broken, at least temporarily.
I say “unimaginable” because to me it is. In my lifetime, having all your children survive to adulthood isn’t the exception; it’s the rule. But Elder Richards didn’t have to imagine it. As he discussed in his talk, two of his children died before they were old enough to be married.[ref]I realize my definition—dying before age 5—and Elder Richards’ definition—dying before being old enough to have married and have children—are not the same. I hope you can forgive the inaccuracy; I just went with the data I could quickly find.[/ref]
One thing Dolnick doesn’t understand, however, is how recently that has changed. Modernity may have dawned in the 17th and 18th centuries but—as the childhoold mortality figures show—disease and accident continued to make death a common, everyday experience well into the 20th century. Not long ago I read Samuel Brown’s incredible book, Through the Valley of Shadows. Althogh it’s a technical book in many ways, Brown sets up his main discussion (of living wills, advance directives, and intensive care units) with a discussion of “the dying of death.”
Before the Dying of Death, death was part of everyday experience. Death was recognized as horrifying, but people were able to understand it as part of the overall meaning of life and knew how to prepare for it when the time came. The understanding of death was broad enough to cross religious boundaries… By the end of the Dying of Death, Americans had contained the terror of death by simply ignoring it until the moment of crisis, but the sanctity of death had disappeared along with menacing presence. People found themselves newly unprepared when they came to die. Where many generations of humans had spent most of their lives preparing for their deathbed, modern Americans spent only hours to at most days, right in the their death agony, trying to come to terms with what was once called the King of Terrors… Since twentieth-century Americans had not generally spent their lives in the shadow of death, when they came to approach Death, as every human being inevitably does, they discovered just how culturally defenseless they were before it’s terrible power.[ref]Through the Valley of Shadows, page 27[/ref]
These changes occurred during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when basic understanding of the germ theory of disease led to incredibly advances in public health, but at that time there was still effectively nothing doctors could do to combat most diseases once they took hold. I was surprised at how recent this transition had occurred, but according to Brown, “physicians were mostly bad for your health until the recent past. The Baby Boomers are really the first generation born under the aegis of modern medicine.”[ref]Through the Valley of Shadows, page 32[/ref]
So, prior to the 1960s, doctors really couldn’t do anything at all to actively intervene in a wide variety of life-threatening medical emergencies. Since that time, however, our ability to postpone death has grown tremendously, to the point where ICUs frequently perform medical miracles. So, what has this newfound power achieved for us?
Well, it hasn’t all been good. Brown observes that “A major problem in contemporary society is that we combine our distaste for struggle or pain or disability with an unspeakable fear of death.”[ref]Through the Valley of Shadows, page 29[/ref] We have, in effect, stigmatized dying. As a result, “The dying–once celebrated as people with special wisdom who deserved the rapt attention of family and even strangers—[have] become America’s dirty secret.”[ref]Through the Valley of Shadows, page 29[/ref]
Additionally, ICUs—the frontlines in modern America’s war on death—have become places of trauma: “Many people leave the ICU with emotional scars as severe as those carried by combat veterans. Only a minority skate by without anxiety, depressing, or PTSD or some combination of the three.”[ref]Through the Valley of Shadows, page 167[/ref] This trauma is often the result of delusions, and rape delusions in particular: “it’s common for female patients to have memories of rape from urinary bladder catheters”[ref]Through the Valley of Shadows, page 140[/ref]. There are others, however:
The rape delusions associated with bladder catheters are haunting enough, but they don’t exhaust the list of terrible memories people often acquire in the ICU. Most of these frightening delusions relate to imprisonment, capture, or torture. Some feature aliens or homicidal doctors and nurses. More than a few incorporate the famous Capgras delusion, in which the important people in a person’s life are replaced by evil duplicates. These interpretations likely derive from the intense, paranoid attention that comes with high stress coupled with acute pain. The distressed brain tries to weave a meaningful narrative to explain why familiar faces (or people in professional gear and lab coats) are poking and prodding you as you are tied to a bed… some are frankly horrifying.
Let me explain why I’ve taking us on this long, long tangent. What I’m trying to explain is that as we’ve grown in our power to confront death, we have rediscovered an ancient truth: that power brings responsibility. This isn’t just about superheroes. It’s about ordinary men and women with no medical training and no preparation suddenly being told by doctors that it’s up to them to determine if their loved parent, or spouse, or child should live or die. But—precisely because death is so remote and even taboo—we’re completely and totally unprepared to shoulder this burden. As a result: many are crushed underneath it.
The majority of patients and families [emphasis added] come out of the ICU with post-traumatic stress, anxiety, or depression. They are more shell-shocked then combat veterans, according to an array of recent studies.[ref]Through the Valley of Shadows, page 5[/ref]
When it’s not about individuals staggering under the weight of responsibility they have no preparation for, it’s monstrous institutional inertia instead:
A friend’s elderly father, a devout Catholic, receive his last rites in a hospital. He struggled against the wrist restraints to create the sign of the cross in response to the priest’s gentle ministrations. The restraints intended to keep him from dislodging any medical equipment obstructed his desperate hunger to participate in the healthful rituals of the deathbed. He died later that day. It never occurred to the nurses and doctors to release the restraints for this final interaction with his priest. My friend and his family still remember that angry straining for divine connection, stymied by medical handcuffs.[ref]The Valley of Shadows, pages 137-138[/ref]
I share all this because if I just said, “Gee, now our children don’t die, and that’s weakened our appreciation for family,” it would sound banal (at best) or monstrously cruel (at worst). That’s not what I want to say. But I do want to illustrate how our medical prowess—despite absolutely being a blessing we should never surrender[ref]I don’t want any confusion on that point[/ref] has nonetheless presented us with fresh sets of problems we did not have to confront before.
When we stood powerless before death we had a kind of innocence. Now death seems to be far more contained, striking not children and spouses in their homes but the elderly in hospitals and hospices, and so we are all the less prepared to deal with it when it comes, as it surely must. That innocence is gone. Before we didn’t have to choose. Now—collectively and often individually—we do.
I feel like I need to say it again, and so I will one more time: I do not want to turn back the clock. I do not want to live in a world where having four children means probably having to watch at least one of them die in my arms. I want to live in a world where we can cure diseases and heal the sick. I thank God daily that my children are healthy and safe.
But this is a world that presents new and strange challenges. Elder Richards knew the pain of burying his own children, and this cemented in him a conviction of the importance of family relationships and the reality of life after death. He paid a high, high price for these blessings, one no parent would willingly pay.
The questions we have to ask are these: How are we going to acquire the wisdom and understanding to shoulder the responsibilities of technologically sophisticated modern medicine? How do we hold onto a fundamental understanding of the vital importance of family relationships in a world where—because death is so are—we so seldom have to learn through the painfully direct method of heartbreaking loss? How do we find the kind of life-sustaining, bedrock faith of Elder Richards without paying that staggeringly high cost?
I don’t know.
But I do believe that the best place to start is by understanding and cherishing the words and experiences of those who have paid that price before us, and then left bequeathed their words and testimonies to us who follow.
I guess it’s a work of political theory, but for the most part it reads as history with a dash of evolutionary psychology. In exploring the origins of political order, Fukuyama starts by going way, way back before pre-history to make his first essential point: biology matters. In this regard, he’s echoing Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, but the relationship here is fairly specific. According to Fukuyama, the primary problem with thinkers like Rousseau or Hobbes isn’t that they got the particulars of pre-social humanity right, it’s that the concept of “pre-social humanity” is an oxymoron. Humans, as the expression goes, are social animals. And that means we’re political animals. Politics didn’t come later–after the invention of writing or agriculture –but have been there from the beginning, inextricably intertwined with our development of speech. So, from this “biological foundation of politics”, Fukuuama draws the following propositions:
human beings never existed in a presocial state
natural human sociability is built around two principles, kin selection and reciprocal altruism
human beings have an innate propensity for creating and following norms or rules
human beings have a natural propensity for violence
human beings by nature desire not just material resources but also recognition
After laying this groundwork, Fukuyama than goes on to describe in broad strokes the evolution of human societies from bands to tribes to states. He invokes principles from biological evolution explicitly here, arguing that societies compete against each other in ways that are sometimes (but not always) analogous to competition between animals. This analogy shouldn’t be taken too far: there are treacherous debates about whether organisms or genes compete, for example, and about the viability of group selection, but Fukuyama’s primary concern is actually with the differences between biological and political evolution, and so those nuances are forgiveably overlooked.
As for the bands -> tribes -> states progression, the basic notion is that bands (groups of no more than 100 or so at the most) are held together by actual blood relation. Tribalism is a social innovation that allows bands to come together by claiming (real or fictitious) common descent. Two bands might have the same patriarch or matriarch, and so in the face of a common enemy they can rapidly coalesce into a single unit. This capacity means that it’s fairly easy for tribal societies to defeat band societies, because every time a solitary band and a band that’s part of a tribal society come into conflict, the latter can call upon as many tribal allies as needed to win the fight. As a result almost no band societies are left in existence.[ref]Those that do remain are in remote locations where the benefits of tribalism do not apply.[/ref]
But tribal segments are intrinsically unstable. Fukuyama cites an Arab expression: “Me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the stranger.” When there is no stranger to confront, the cousins go to war. When there is no cousin on the horizon, the siblings feud. And so states are yet another progression–as superior to tribes as tribes are to bands–because of their ability to support not only temporary, contingent cooperation but permanent, universal cooperation.[ref]Not that states are Utopias, of course, but simply that in a functioning state predation–murder, theft, and rape–are dangers the state opposes instead of relying on individuals to provide their own deterrence and defense.[/ref]
Another argument he makes–and this one seemed just a little tangential but it’s interesting enough to go into–can be summarized as: ideas matter. Fukuyama says, for example, that “It is impossible to develop any meaningful theory of political development without treating ideas as fundamental causes of why societies differ and follow distinct development paths” and that ideas are “independent variables.” He’s reacting to the idea–exemplified in Marx–that to understand history in general and political development in particular, all you need are the physical factors: how much stuff do people have and what do they need to do to get more of it? He’s right to reject this idea. It’s wrong. But I think that–along with lot of other folks these days–he drastically overstates the extent to which anybody actually believes this.
It’s true that Economists talk about Homo economicus (the model of human beings as perfectly rational, self-interested agents), but never without an ironic edge. They know[ref]Maybe I should say, we know, but I’m never sure if an MA in economics makes one an economist or not.[/ref] that this model is broken and doesn’t explain everything. That’s why the leading edge of critiquing human rationality intersects with economics: behavioral economics. Give economists some credit, they’ve already come up with bounded rationality as a fall-back, and you don’t do that unless you know that (unbounded) rationality is broken. Not that they’re satisfied with bounded rationality either, but economists are in the business of making models of human behavior and “all models are wrong.” Most of the folks who seem confused about this fact aren’t the economists, but the folks outside the discipline who don’t seem to be aware of the fact that economists are aware that their models are flawed.
Now, to Fukuyama’s main point: are ideas “independent variables”? I don’t think so. If Newton hadn’t figured out gravity, would some other clever chap have come along and figured it out by now? Probably so. I think that in most cases if you take out one particular genius, some other genius sooner or later comes to the same–or a very similar–realization. There’s no way to test it, but that’s my hunch. In fact, the whole business of a singular genius inventing this or that is often a delusion to begin with. Most of the really big breakthroughs–evolution and calculus come to mind first, but there plenty of others–were invented more or less simultaneously by different people at similar times.[ref]It turns out there’s a name of this: multiple discovery theory. I love Wikipedia so much.[/ref] This is strong evidence to me that something about the historical context of (for example) Darwin and Wallace or Newton and Leibniz strongly directed people towards those discoveries. Which, if true, means that scientific discoveries are emphatically not independent. I have a hunch that’s what’s true of science is probably true to some degree of non-scientific ideas as well. If Marx had never been born, would we have Marxism? Probably not, but we’d probably have something pretty darn similar. (After all, we’d still have Engels, wouldn’t we?) It’s not like collective ownership is a new idea, after all. We’ve had the Peasant’s Revolt and the Red Turban Rebellion and many, many more. Take that basic idea, throw in a little Hegel (Marx just retrofitted Hegelianism) and presto: Marxism. If Marx hadn’t done it, and Engels hadn’t either, someone else would probably have done something similar. Maybe even using Hegel.
I don’t want to overstate my rebuttal to Fukuyama’s overstatement, so let’s pull back just a bit. I’m saying it’s probable that–in a world without Marx–someone else invents an ideology pretty close to Marxism. But does it take off? Does it inspire Lenin and Stalin? Does it lead to Mao and Castro? Do we still have the Cold War? I have no idea. And, while we’re at it, I’m not saying that if you didn’t have Shakespeare, someone else would have written Romeo and Juliet. I think that’s pretty absurd. My argument has two points: first, there’s interaction between ideas and physical contexts. Neither one is independent of the other. Second, human society is a complex system and that means it’s going to have some characteristics that are robust and hard to change (stable equilibria) and others where the tiniest variation could give rise to a totally different course of events (unstable equilibria). Maybe there was something inevitable about the general contours of socialism such that if you subtract Marx, and then subract Engels too, you still end up with a Cold War around a basically capitalist / socialist axis. Or maybe if even a fairly trivial detail in Marx’s life had changed, then Stalin would have been a die-hard free market capitalist and the whole trajectory of the post World War II 20th century would have been unrecognizable. I don’t know. I just do know that–just as ideas aren’t merely the consequences of physical circumstances–they also aren’t uncaused lightning bolts from the void, either. Ideas and the physical world exist in a state of mutual feedback.
But the primary concern of the book is this question: how do political order arise? For Fukuyama, political order has three components:
State building
Rule of law
Accountable government
His account is contrarian basically from start to finish, but never (to my mind) gratuitously so. He argues, for example, that instead of starting with the rise of liberal democracy in the West, the key starting position is ancient China, the first society to develop a state in the modern sense. On the other hand, China never developed a robust rule of law. It was rather rule by law, a situation in which the emperor was not constrained by the idea of transcendent laws (either religious or, later, constitutional) and therefore China’s precocious, early state became as much a curse as a blessing:
[P]recocious state building in the absence of rule of law and accountability simply means that states can tyrannize their populations more effectively. Every advance in material well-being and technology implies, in the hands of an unchecked state, a greater ability to control society and to use it for the state’s own purposes.
Fukuyama’s historical analysis is far-reaching. He spends quite a lot of time on India and the Middle East as well. At last he turns his analysis on Europe where–quite apart from the conventional East / West dichotomy–he goes country-by-country to show how the basic problems confronted by states in China, India, and the Middle East also sabotaged the development of most European states. France and Spain became weak absolutist governments with state building and rule of law, but no accountability. Russia became a strongly absolutist government. The difference? The central rules of Spain and France managed to subvert their political rivals (the aristocracy), but only just barely. In Russia, the czars completely dominated their political rivals, ruling with more or less unchecked power.
Fukuyama spends a lot of this time on England, specifically, which he holds up as a kind of lottery winner where all sorts of factors that went awry everywhere else managed to line up correctly. And the story he tells is a fascinating one, because he inverts basically everything you’ve been taught in school. Here’s a characteristic passage where he summarizes a few arguments that he makes at length in the book:
[T]he exit out of kinship-based social organization had started already during the Dark Ages with the conversion of Germanic barbarians to Christianity. The right of individuals including women to freely buy and sell property was already well established in England in the 13th century. The modern legal order had its roots in the fight waged by the Catholic church against the emperor in the late 11th century, and the first European bureaucratic organizations were created by the church to manage its own internal affairs. The Catholic church, long vilified as an obstacle to modernization, was in this longer-term perspective at least as important as the Reformation as the driving force behind key aspects of modernity. Thus the European path to modernization was not a spasmodic burst of change across all dimensions of development, but rather a series of piecemeal shifts over a period of nearly 1,500 years. In this peculiar sequence, individualism on the social level could precede capitalism. Rule of law could precede the formation of a modern state. And feudalism, in the form of strong pockets of local resistance to central authority, could be the foundation of modern democracy.
It’s a fascinating argument–just because it’s original and well-argued–but I also found it convincing. I think Fukuyama is basically correct.
So a couple more notes. First, there are basically two problems that Fukuyama sees consistently eroding political order, and both of them go back to the biological foundations of politics. The first is what he calls repatrimonialization. To keep things simple, let’s just say “nepotism” instead. The idea is that the band-level origins of human nature never go away, and the temptation to use the state’s authority to enrich one’s own kin is omnipresent. His discussion of the Catholic church’s invention of the doctrine of celibacy to successfully stave off this threat (bishops kept trying to pass on their callings to their children before that doctrine was created) and the unsuccessful attempts of the Mamluk Sultanate to use slave soldiers to stave off this threat (eventually the slave soldiers grew so politically powerful that they “reformed” the prohibitions against passing on property) are some of the most historically illuminating in the book.
The second problem is human conservatism. Fukuyama doesn’t mean in the partisan sense. He’s referring to our tendency–a universal aspect of human nature–to invent and then follow norms and laws. The problem here is that once we invent our laws, we stick to them. And when circumstances change, the norms/laws (and institutions) should change too, but humans don’t like to do that. So one of the #1 causes of the downfall of political order is a historically successful state proving incapable of reforming institutions to meet a changing environment due to sheer inertia. The classic example is pre-revolution France, and here Fukuyama finds a convention with which he has no quarrel:
We have seen numerous examples of rent-seeking coalitions that have prevented necessary institutional change and therefore provoked political decay. The classic one from which the very term rent derives was ancient regime France, where the monarchy had grown strong over two centuries by co-opting much of the French elite. This co-option took the form of the actual pruchase of small pieces of the state, which could then be handed down to descendants. When reformist ministers like Maupeou and Turgot sought to change the system by abolishing venal office altogether, the existing stakeholders were strong enough to block any action. The problem of venal officeholding was solved only through violence in the course of the revolution.
The second note I wanted to make was about partisanship. First, it’s important to note that although Fukuyama celebrates the rise of modern liberalism in England, he’s not promoting English exceptionalism. He spends a lot of time talking about what he calls “getting to Denmark.” His point there is that Denmark is also a widely-respected stable, modern, prosperous democracy and it didn’t follow the trajectory of England. The point is that he’s not saying: everyone, copy the English. Although he traces the origins of liberalism the farthest back in time in England, he specifically notes that if Denmark could find its own way into liberalism without retracing that path: so can other nations.
This is an important point, because Fukuyama is dealing in comparative politics, and he has no problem drawing rather sweeping (albeit justified, in my mind) generalizations when contrasting, for example, India and China. This is the kind of thing that anyone in my generation or younger (young Gen-X / Millennials) has been trained to reflexively reject. If you compare societies, it’s because you’re a racist. Given that Fukuyama is comparing societies–and that he arguably has the most praise for the English in terms of the philosophical origins of modern liberalism–there is no doubt in my mind that he’s going to be (has been) attacked as a kind of apologist for white supremacy, etc.
And that’s not true. First, because as I said he’s adamant about the fact that other nations can (and have) found their way to liberalism without imitating all aspects of English (let alone European) culture, society, or politics. Second, because he has plenty of non-European success stories. (Unfortunately, those are mostly from his second volume, since this one only goes up to the French Revolution and so doesn’t cover the explosion of democracy world-wide since that time.) Third, and finally, because he’s more than willing to look at pros and cons of differing systems. For example, going back to China and their problem with despotism, here’s a comment he makes towards the end of the book:
An authoritarian system can periodically run rings around a liberal democratic one under good leadership, since it is able to make quick decisions unencumbered by legal challenges or legislative secondguessing. On the other hand, such a system depends on a constant supply of good leaders. Under a bad emperor, the unchecked powers vested in the government can lead to disaster. This problem remains key in contemporary China, where accountability flows only upward and not downward.
This is the kind of clear-eyed, open-minded analysis that I think we need more of, not less of. It’s hard to argue, for example, with the success of S. Korea in leap-frogging from despotism to liberal democracy. There’s no reason–in principle–that China could not do something similar. (Other than problems of scale, that is.)
So here are my final thoughts. First: this is a fascinating book and it’s a lot of fun to read. It’s full of interesting history along with interesting theorizing. Second: I am convinced by Fukuyama’s arguments. And lastly, I have a lot of respect for his approach. He’s a centrist, and so he’s going to tick some people off for praising the kinds of things that radicals like to attack. If you think liberal democracy is the devil, Fukuyama is an apologist for Satan. On the other hand, it would be entirely wrong to dismiss him as a partisan hack. He interacts with Hayek a lot, for example, but this includes a mixture of praise on some points and also staunch criticism on others. He’s willing to laud capitalism (as the evidence warrants, I might add) but also to tip some of the rights sacred cows. “Free markets are necessary to promote long-term growth,” he says, but finishes the sentence with, “but they are not self-regulating.” He also savages the small-government obsession of the right, arguing that if you like small government, maybe you should move to Somalia. He’s not just ridiculing the right in that case, however, but pointing out that:
Political institutions are necessary and cannot be taken for granted. A market economy and high levels of wealth don’t magically appear when you “get government out of the way”; they rest on a hidden institutional foundation of property rights, rule of law, and basic political order. A free market, a vigorous civil society, the spontaneous “wisdom of crowds” are all important components of a working democracy, but none can ultimately replace the functions of a strong, hierarchical government. There has been a broad recognition among economist in recent years that “institutions matter”: poor countries are poor not because they lack resources but because they lack effective political institutions. We need therefore to better understand where those institutions come from.
In other words–and he returns to this point in the second volume–Fukuyama is dismissive of arguments about the quantity of government in favor of arguments about the quality of government.
His ideas are interesting, they are relevant, and they are compelling. I highly, highly recommend this book.
Just like Walker, the talk that stuck out to me from this session[ref]the Saturday morning session in October 1974[/ref] was Elder Ashton’s talk: Who’s Losing? His answer? Nobody.
All of us, young and old, will do well to realize that attitude is more important than the score. Desire is more important than the score. Momentum is more important than the score. The direction in which we are moving is more important than position or place.
I think this is fantastic, empowering, encouraging, and maybe even consoling advice. But I also think that there’s a particular application of his counsel that might surprise people. That comes a couple of paragraph later, when Elder Ashton says, “Proper attitude in this crisis-dominated world is a priceless possession.”
The juxtaposition of “proper attitude” with a “crisis-dominated world” seems even more relevant to me today in 2016 than in 1974.[ref]That might be easy for me to say, however: I wasn’t alive in 1974.[/ref] If there’s one thing that seems to dominate so much of our conversation in person and social media it is fear. Fear of terrorist attacks. Fear of a Donald Trump Presidency. Fear of racism and oppression. Fear of political correctness and the stifling of free speech. The nation—at least from my perspective—is crazy-drunk on fear.
Some of these threats are very real. Some of them less so. But it doesn’t really matter, because the answer to both kinds of fear—the rational and the irrational—is “a proper attitude.” Calm, resolved, pragmatic optimism is the best way to dispel the fears that are not grounded, to find solutions to the problems that are real but also solvable, or to face with dignity that fears that are real and also insurmountable. “We need to lead with good cheer, optimism, and courage if we are to move onward and upward.”
One of my favorite books of the New Testament is the first epistle of Peter. At a time when the struggling, nascent Christian faith was facing persecution and ridicule, Peter wrote:
13 And who is he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that which is good?
14 But and if ye suffer for righteousness’ sake, happy are ye: and be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled;
15 But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:
This is what I mean by “pragmatic optimism.” There’s no false hope or blind refusal to see problems when Peter talks, quite frankly, about “suffer[ing] for righteousness’ sake.” I think vs. 15 gets quoted a lot, and people forget the context. If your life is going well, then there’s no reason for people to ask why you have hope. It’s only when your hope is inexplicable that there’s any cause to justify “the hope that is in you.” Optimism doesn’t deny the darkness. Optimism shines in the darkness. Thus:
We constantly need to build hope in ourselves and those about us. We need to personally make dark days bright ones. Isn’t it a joy, a lift, a light to see someone with heavy challenges and burdens moving forward to victory in the only contest that really matters. Hope makes it possible for us to know that even in temporary failure or setback there is always a next time, even a tomorrow.
The world says, “All I do is win,”[ref]Actually, it’s DJ Khaled, specifically, but it’s not like the song’s message is unique.[/ref] and the world is talking about money and fame. For a Christian—especially one who is persecuted or facing tragedy—to talk about winning makes no sense. Paul understood that, too. “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.”[ref]1 Corinthians 1:18[/ref] But it only looks like foolishness from this side of the veil. We have hope that there’s more to the story. We know to “Fear not,” because “they that be with us are more than they that be with them.”
We believe that nothing is lost in Christ. We believe that when we lose our lives, we live. We believe that even as we die, all we do is win.
In Hungary, the absolutist project initially failed because a strong and well-organized noble class succeeded in imposing constitutional limits on the king’s authority. The Hungarian Diet, like its English counterpart, made the Hungarian king accountable to itself. Accountability was not sought on behalf of the whole realm but rather on behalf of a narrow oligarchic class that wanted to use its freedom to squeeze [373/374] is own peasants harder and to avoid onerous taxes to the central state. The result was the spread of an increasingly harsh serfdom for nonelites, and a weak state that ultimately could not defend the country from the Turks. Freedom for one class, in other words, resulted in a lack of freedom for everyone else and the carving up of the country among stronger neighbors.
We are taking the time to consider the Hungarian case for t simple reason: to show that constitutional limits on a central government’s power do not by themselves necessarily produce political accountability. The “freedom” sought by the Hungarian noble class was the freedom to exploit their own peasants more thoroughly, and the absence of a strong central state allowed them to do just that. Everyone understands the Chinese form of tyranny, one perpetrated by a centralized dictatorship. But tyranny can result from decentralized oligarchic domination as well. True freedom tends to emerge in the interstices of a balance of power among a society’s elite actors, something that Hungary never succeeded in achieving. (374)
This seems like a particularly useful lesson for Americans, who often view questions of government power as simply “How much?” without thinking carefully about the fact that there can be multiple, competing nexuses of political power. Historically, you had at least three:
A centralized state (usually a monarch)
An elite class (usually aristocrats, which are absolutely present in modern meritocracies)[ref]Suppose intelligence corrrelates with income. Suppose intelligence is heritable. Suppose people like to marry other people of similar intelligence. If all three of these reasonable conjectures are true, then a perfectly fair meritocracy would be indistinguishable in practice from an aristocratic society or even a caste system. How’s that for privilege?[/ref]
Everybody else
Seems to me, a lot of conservatives and liberals either can’t or don’t want to keep track of three separate groups and collapse things into just two.
Speaking in broad strokes, conservatives take the side of #3 against #1 and #2, which they see as basically interchangeable. Thus, you get terms like “crony capitalism” and “the establishment.” Liberals take the side of #1 and #3 against #2. Thus, you get lots of advocacy for new rules, regulations, and agencies to stand up against #2 on behalf of #3.
The reason the Hungarian case is so important, then, is to remind us of how dangerous it is to simply conflate the three groups into two for convenience. The familiar failure mode of a centralized, despotic regime (Fukuyama mentions ancient China above, but he’s about to talk about czarist Russia as well) is not the only failure mode available. In Hungary, the centralized state was limited, but instead of freedom the result was serfdom and ruin.
In Fukuyama’s reading of history, it took an incredibly delicate balance of three forces for liberal democracy to actually arise in England, and an overabundance of any one segment led to disaster. It was only due to that tradition that the American Revolution was spared the fate of virtually all other popular uprisings–like the French or the Russian–that, when they didn’t fail outright, merely served as object lessons in how mob rule and despotism are two sides of the same coin. The supremacy of #1 in France under the late monarchs led to the supremacy of #3 during the French Revolution which in turn led back to the supremacy of #1 in Emperor Bonaparte. Same basic deal in Russia, see-sawing back and forth from Czar to people’s revolution, to Lenin and Stalin.
Unfortunately, I don’t think this approach is going to be palatable to anyone in America. Both the left and the right seem so enamored with populism of late (Sanders or Trump, take your pick in this regard), that any nuanced talk about the importance of stabilizing elites is likely to fall on deaf ears.
Right now I am reading 
I’m writing this review 6 months after finishing the book for a pretty simple reason: I had precisely 100 notes to transcribe into Evernote before I was ready to write my review. That should tell you how much I got out of the book, by the way. There are a only a few books–
As for the bands -> tribes -> states progression, the basic notion is that bands (groups of no more than 100 or so at the most) are held together by actual blood relation. Tribalism is a social innovation that allows bands to come together by claiming (real or fictitious) common descent. Two bands might have the same patriarch or matriarch, and so in the face of a common enemy they can rapidly coalesce into a single unit. This capacity means that it’s fairly easy for tribal societies to defeat band societies, because every time a solitary band and a band that’s part of a tribal society come into conflict, the latter can call upon as many tribal allies as needed to win the fight. As a result almost no band societies are left in existence.[ref]Those that do remain are in remote locations where the benefits of tribalism do not apply.[/ref]
Now, to Fukuyama’s main point: are ideas “independent variables”? I don’t think so. If Newton hadn’t figured out gravity, would some other clever chap have come along and figured it out by now? Probably so. I think that in most cases if you take out one particular genius, some other genius sooner or later comes to the same–or a very similar–realization. There’s no way to test it, but that’s my hunch. In fact, the whole business of a singular genius inventing this or that is often a delusion to begin with. Most of the really big breakthroughs–evolution and calculus come to mind first, but there plenty of others–were invented more or less simultaneously by different people at similar times.[ref]It turns out there’s a name of this: 
Fukuyama’s historical analysis is far-reaching. He spends quite a lot of time on India and the Middle East as well. At last he turns his analysis on Europe where–quite apart from the conventional East / West dichotomy–he goes country-by-country to show how the basic problems confronted by states in China, India, and the Middle East also sabotaged the development of most European states. France and Spain became weak absolutist governments with state building and rule of law, but no accountability. Russia became a strongly absolutist government. The difference? The central rules of Spain and France managed to subvert their political rivals (the aristocracy), but only just barely. In Russia, the czars completely dominated their political rivals, ruling with more or less unchecked power.
That was the first note (what are the threats that political order must overcome), and we get into those in a lot more detail in his second volume: 
