Nathaniel

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.

My Favorite Session So Far

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William Blake's color printing of God Judging Adam original composed in 1795. (Public Domain) This is *not* a view of the Fall as fortunate.
William Blake’s color printing of God Judging Adam original composed in 1795. (Public Domain) This is *not* a view of the Fall as fortunate.

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

I have to start out by saying: I loved this session. Definitely one of my favorite sessions since I started this Odyssey almost a year ago. There were quotable, thought-provoking lines in every single talk, starting with LeGrand Richards’ defense of eternal marriage in Revealed Truths of the Gospel, when he said:

Personally I would just as soon believe that death was a complete annihilation of both body and spirit as to think that I would have to live on forever and forever without a continuation of the love ties that bind my wife and me together, and our family and our loved ones here in this life. Heaven will only be a projection of our life here.

The last sentence—“heave will only be a projection of our life here”—is a pretty common sentiment, I think. If you haven’t heard that exact quote, you’ve heard one like it. But the earlier statement was more personal and much more arresting. It’s one thing to have a theological commitment to eternal families. It’s another to have such a visceral loyalty and love of the ideal that you’d prefer to walk into the abyss than live alone forever.

But Sterling W. Sil had even more eye-brow raising comments in his talk: A Fortune to Share. It was full of funny, irreverent real talk. “Someone has pointed out that if there is anyone who can’t buy happiness with money,” he stated, “it must be that he just doesn’t know where to shop.” And later: “Someone said, ‘Money ain’t everything,’ and his friend said, ‘Just name me three things that it ain’t.’” Funny lines for a General Conference talk, like I said, but in both cases he had a serious point to make. After the “he just doesn’t know where to shop” line, Elder Sil said:

We can build temples with money, we can send out missionaries with money, we can erect educational institutions, operate hospitals, and pay our tithing with money. We can feed and clothe our families with money, and in many ways we can build up the kingdom of God with money.

That’s not a joke. That’s just stone-cold pragmatism. And there are very few things I love more in life than someone who takes a look at realism, takes a look at idealism, and then says, “I’ll take both.” I’ll admit: I’m a little biased here. I have a pretty cynical view of academics and intellectuals and pundits because so often the emphasis is on rhetoric instead of substance, novelty instead of accuracy, provocation instead of truth. But that doesn’t mean I accept being pragmatic instead of being idealistic. I want both. I think a life well lived is, in many ways, a long series of stubborn refusals to abandon either one. To strive for idealism and efficacy is to live a life of integrity, never giving up on the battle to bring the two into correspondence.

And then after the “name three things it ain’t” joke, he went on to say:

Money is preserved labor, it is industry made negotiable, it is stored up accomplishment. It is the medium of exchange that we can trade for things that we can take with us and a great many of them we can actually send on ahead. We can take our families with us. We can take our education with us. We can take our great character qualities with us. And money is the medium that we can use to share the treasures of the earth with others who need our help.

I have to tell you that—as an economist—I swooned.

I haven’t included all the lines from this talk that are funny and yet also profound. There are more. Go read it yourself and you will find them.

Next up was Eldred G. Smith’s talk: Opposition in Order to Strengthen Us. Once again, not a really new theme, but definitely a lot more philosophical than I would have expected in a General Conference talk. Elder Smith goes right into the idea of the Fortunate Fall. In traditional Christian thinking, the Fall is only fortunate in that it provided an opportunity for God’s grace. That would be like saying that a car accident was fortunate because it let a surgeon use their full talents to save your life. It’s not what Mormons have in mind. For us, the Fall wasn’t just a terrible mistake with a grand resolution, but in itself was fortunate:

Adam and Eve had been in a state of stagnation: no progress—no growth—no reproduction. Without a change, they would have remained in that state forever. It was necessary for a change to take place.

The Fall is fortunate, for Mormons, because it was the only way to break the impasse of stagnation and allow us the possibility of growth and development. And—just as with Elder Sil’s comments—there’s a lot more in this talk I wish everyone would read. But I’m going to move on.

William H. Bennett’s talk began with one of those really emotional stories that we often hear in talks. The problem with those stories is that most of them we’ve already heard a million times. But, in “Which Way to Shore?”, Elder Bennett shared one that was new to me. I’m not going to share it. You’ll have to read it. Here is the passage I’ll share instead:

Let me say, my brothers and sisters, that if we want to save individuals, to save the souls of our Father’s children, we must be willing to get involved and to help others get involved in meaningful ways also.

We are addicted to grand, abstract, technical policy solutions. A blog post I’ve been nursing along for several months without finishing talks about this directly. The simple version? Ever since the rise of science and rationality we have grown to view the world as a machine (instead of, for example, a garden) and our role in it as mechanics (instead of gardeners). We have little patience for slow, indirect work, for subtlety and preservation. Instead, we see problems and we want solutions. And sometimes this is possible, but often times it’s not. What’s more, however, is that it tends towards a kind of impersonal charity, and that’s a thing that can never be. There’s truth to the stereotype that we’d rather raise taxes, have the government distribute the goods, and consider poverty “solved” than reach out to people in our neighborhoods or wards who need our help. Not policies and programs and bureaucracies, but personal involvement. And that’s what Elder Bennett’s talk reminded me of.

Next up was A. Theodore Tuttle’s The Role of Fathers, and I think I highlighted about 25% of that talk. One of the passages cut a little close to home for me:

There is yet another intrusion into the home that needs to be mentioned. It is an unwise father who carries to his family his daily business cares. They disturb the peace existing there. He should leave his worries at the office and enter his home with the spirit of peace in his heart and with the love of God burning within him.

This makes sense, but it presupposes that a father has an office where he can leave those business cares. Other than business meetings, I work from home 100% of the time. My office was a standing desk in the dining room in our last house. I have a designated room in this house, which is nice, but it’s still in the home. This is one of those times where I’m going to have to think about how best to apply the principle to my particular situation. And it’s one I need to work on. I often work much more than 8 hours in a day and—when the kids are on summer break especially—it is incredibly hard for me to successfully separate my work time from family time without being stressed and without projecting that stress onto my kids, which they don’t deserve. I’m working on it. Because I’d also like to live up to this injunction:

Fathers, draw close to your children. Learn to communicate. Learn to listen. This means giving a father’s most valuable commodity—time!… To the extent we become friends with our children in unconditional love, to that extent we become like our Heavenly Father.

The last talk in the session was from (then) Elder Ezra Taft Benson: Prepare Ye. The talk didn’t hit me as hard, spiritually, but it was definitely interesting for me to read the calls to food-storage and self-reliance that so heavily influenced my parents and, through them, shaped a lot of my childhood. Like a lot of Mormons out there, we had beds made out of a mattress on top of a sheet of plywood on top of dozens of buckets of wheat. Just as with Elder Tuttle’s talk, there’s also a lot one in this for me to live up to.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Modern Tribalism: Mythical Ideologies for Mythical Ancestors

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Bartolomeo_di_Giovanni_-_The_Myth_of_Io_-_Walters_37421
Bartolomeo di Giovanni recounts Jupiter ordering Mercury to rescue Io: an example of a cultural-creating myth.

In the past couple of years, I’ve read several books that deal with the origins of human society: Frans de Waal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist, Matt Ridley’s The Origins of Virtue, Francis Fukuyama’s Origins of Political Order, and Yuval Harari’s Sapiens are just a few examples.

One of the common themes in these books was that the leap from the band-level socities (usually capped at about 150 members) to tribal societies depended on the creation of mythological common ancestors. Tribal societies were successful because they could scale up in times of crisis. The bigger the crises, the more the individual groups would need to group together, so the farther back in time they would look to a common ancestor. A small crisis might entail a couple of tribes who were descended from a common, living grandfather. A medium crisis might require going back a few more generations to a long-dead (but possibly historical) great-great-grandfather. And a really large crisis might require going back even farther to mythical ancestors who may or may not have ever lived. The point was that–because they could always create an ancestor further back in time–tribal societies had truly immense ability to scale up (at least in the short term when faced with an external threat.)

Now, I’m very far from the first person to call modern American political discourse tribal. Basically everyone can see that our society is increasingly fracturing into diverse, ideologically pure and rigid social groups for whom politics is much more about creating and maintaining in-group solidarity than honest political differences.

If you’d like a recap, here’s a long but very awesome article about this: I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup. In the article, Scott Alexander[ref]a pseudonym[/ref] posits three main tribes in American society: red (conservative), blue (liberal) and gray (techno-libertarian). These are the top-level tribes, but each one is composed of a dense connection of sub-tribes, each smaller and more specific than the level above. For example, the gun-rights crowd is a sub-group in the red-tribe, and the open carry movement is a sub-group of that group.

Now, if you’d asked me last week, I would not have made any serious connection between the development of tribal societies in human prehistory and the rise of tribal politics in the United States. For the most part, the reason people make this analogy is that “tribal” has pretty negative connotations (e.g. insularity, xenophobia, and irrationality) that pretty closely match the behavior we’re seeing in American political society. So, a convenient connection but also a pretty superficial one.

But now I’m starting to think that the connection is actually much deeper than that.

Take a look at this image (one that a Facebook friend posted recently):

Mythological Ideology

Now, it’s got all the hallmarks of really obnoxious political memes, right down to the sloppy grammar. I’m looking at you, random lonely quotation marks.[ref]Is there a rulebook somewhere that says you have to include grammar mistakes in a successful meme? That was a joke at first. Then I realized that the folks replying to complain about the grammar would actually boost the meme’s stats in Facebook’s algorithms, so now I’m sad because I realize that it’s not a joke after all.[/ref]

Lonely Quotation Marks

Now, according to this meme “the same people” were fighting against women’s rights in the 1920s, against equal rights for blacks in the 1950s and 1960s, against women’s rights again in the 1970s, and are now supporting Trump in the 2010s. So, who are these mysteriously long-lived people? Who are all those folks showing up in Trump rallies today that were waving anti-enfranchisement posters nearly 100 years ago? Obviously: nobody. Because humans don’t live that long.

Then what does “the same people” refer to? Perhaps there’s an ideology that’s around today that’s been around for 100 years, and so it’s not the individual human beings but the ideology that is the problem. This is also unlikely, however. Not only do ideologies change and mutate over time, but the reality is that (to pick a couple of issues), most of the women’s rights activists of the 1920s were extremely pro-life and would have been campaigning against abortion in the 1970s. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has been pro-choice almost his whole life, only switched to pro-life recently, and didn’t even do a half-way decent job of being convincing about it. So–even if there were such a thing as ideological philosophies that were consistent over time frames of a century or more–there isn’t one that aligns with these issues.

So what’s going on?

In simple terms, Occupy Democrats is creating a mythological ideology in exactly the same way that ancient tribal societies created mythological ancestors. The idea of Romulus created a bond between Romans who might otherwise come from different families, neighborhoods, or tribes. The bond was real, even if the Romulus was not. In the same way, the blue tribe is inventing a narrative of centuries’ of struggle for equal rights that always had a “good side” for them to claim membership in. Of course that’s a comforting belief, but the most important function that it plays is to unify the various sub-groups within the blue tribe who otherwise might fall into internal squabbles.

So, the analogy to tribes goes much deeper than I first thought.

And of course, this isn’t something just the blue tribe gets up to. All tribes do it. They invent common ancestors or (in our ideological time) common ancestral ideologies. The red tribe has actually been at it far, far longer than the blue tribe, but they choose a different narrative. Instead of a battle over equal rights, the red tribe has a battle to preserve the ideals of the American Constitution, and so the Founding Fathers function as the mythological common ancestors and the Constitution as the mythological common ideology of the red tribe.[ref]Obviously the Founding Fathers are not mythological in the sense of being made-up. That’s not the point. They are mythological in the sense of being a holy narrative that contains symbolic truths which bind together a group of people who share reverence for the narrative.[/ref]

Now, if you’ve got any advice on how to get people to stop posting this kind of tribalistic nonsense, I’d love to hear it. I’m begging my friends not to do it anymore–because it makes me hate being on Facebook and is bad for the country–but the worst part is that the kind of people who post this sort of thing (on the left or the right) are precisely the kind of people who can’t conceive of any way in which they could be doing any harm. After all, they’re just telling it like it is, right?

The Kingdom or the World

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

I didn’t really understand the sadness other Mormons felt when Ezra Taft Benson passed away in 1994, but their obvious connection to the then President made me look forward to feeling the same kind of bond with the next man to take up that mantle: Howard W. Hunter. Sadly, his tenure lasted less than a year, and virtually all I remember is that his unofficial them was temples.

So it was particularly interesting to me that the talk that struck me the most from the Saturday morning session of the October 1973 General Conference was (1) by Elder Hunter and (2) not directly about temples at all. Instead, in Of the World or of the Kingdom?, he talked about the conflicts between the unchanging gospel and the transient philosophies and institutions of late 20th century America.

The warnings were familiar. For example:

In this day of increased knowledge, higher thought, and a modernization of the old, the simple has been overlooked and the profound sought after. The basic, simple, fundamental truths of the gospel are being ignored.

Still, Elder Hunter’s specific views on the topic were like a unique improvisation on a familiar theme, with different emphases and nuances than what other leaders have said before. This is important, because we have to see the differences in order to recognize the commonalities, and the commonalities are the most important aspects of the General Conference talks.[ref]This is a fundamental reason for having the General Conference Odyssey in the first place: you can’t spot the commonalities and differences without a large sample size to work with![/ref]

So, here’s one paragraph that struck me as worth paying particular attention to:

I believe we can be modern and enjoy the fruits of a modern world and its high standard of living, and I believe we can have the benefits of modern scholarship and scientific advances without turning to the theories of the modernist. I believe the principles of the gospel announced by the Savior in his personal ministry were true when they were given and are true today. Truth is eternal and never changing, and the gospel of Jesus Christ is ever contemporary in a changing world.

I like the optimism here, and the dogged insistence that being “not of this world” doesn’t entail abdicating either the blessing of a “scientific advances” or “modern scholarship.” The tension between religious believers (of all traditions) and the larger society often leads to monasticism in one form or another, but Mormonism aims to engage with the world, not withdraw from it. It’s just up to us, I think, to articulate why and how “the gospel of Jesus Christ is ever contemporary.”[ref]As an aside, defining modernity is tricky. I’m used to the definition that says the early modern period started in the 1500s and the late modern period ended well before World War II (Wikipedia), which would make the 1970s post-modern instead of modern. But that’s not about right or wrong, just about consistency.[/ref]

And here’s another paragraph, near the end of the talk, that I liked a lot:

The knowledge explosion of which the world is so proud is not of man’s creation. It is his discovery of portions of the unlimited knowledge and information which is part of God’s knowledge. How we use it is determined by whether we are of the eternal kingdom of God or a part of the temporary understanding of the world. The question is simply this: are we seeking to find our place in the world in the realm of worldly thought, or are we seeking to find our place in the unchanging kingdom of God?

I’m definitely looking forward to reading more talks by President Hunter and getting to know better a leader that was not with us for long enough for me to get to know him in life.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Mass Incarceration is Not a Myth

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The New Jim Crow CoverIn the past couple of months, Walker and I both read The New Jim Crow and found Michelle Alexander’s arguments that the War on Drugs and the American criminal justice system are racist serious and credible. Then, today, we read and talked about a Wall Street Journal opinion piece making the opposite case: The Myth of Mass Incarceration. I called dibs, so I get to blog about it.

The most striking thing about the WSJ piece (by Barry Latzer) is that although he seems to be alluding to Alexander’s work (and has cited her book in his own work), he ignores the fact that she has already anticipated and rebutted his central arguments. According to Latzer, violent crime is the main driver of mass incarceration, not drug convictions, and to back this up he cites some data. For example:

Relatively few prisoners today are locked up for drug offenses. At the end of 2013 the state prison population was about 1.3 million. Fifty-three percent were serving time for violent crimes such as murder, robbery, rape or aggravated assault, according to the BJS.

The numbers are not in dispute, but they don’t mean what Latzer thinks they mean. Let’s see how this works with a simple (but unrealistic) illustration.

Imagine that in a single year 12 people are given 1-month drug sentences. One serves in January, one serves in February, one serves in March, etc. In the same year, 1 person is given a 1-year sentence for murder. If you take Latzer’s approach and go count the number of inmates in jail and see what they’re in prison for than–no matter what month you pick–you’ll find 1 person in jail for drugs and 1 for murder. You would concludes that 50% of incarcerations are for drugs, and 50% are for violent crime.

But of course that’s not really true. There were twelve drug convictions in our example, not just one. So in reality the proportion of drug offense wasn’t 50%. It was more than 92%. The number is artificially lowered because the drug offenders served shorter sentences, and so taking a poll in the prison year is misleading.

The numbers are invented for this example, but the effect is not. Drug sentences are generally shorter than violent crime sentences, and so taking a headcount of prisoners artificially increases the appearance of violent incarceration simply because those criminals spent more time in jail. Here’s how Alexander wrote about this in her book:

Murder convictions tend to receive a tremendous amount of media attention, which feeds the public sense that violent crime is rampant and forever on the rise, but like violent crime in general, the murder rate cannot explain the growth of the penal apparatus. Homicide convictions account for a tiny fraction of the growth in prison population. In the federal system, for example, homicide offenders account for 0.4% of the past decades’ growth in the federal prison population white drug offenders account for nearly 61% of that expansion. In the state system, less than 3% of new court commitments to state prison typically involve people convicted of homicide. As much as half prisoners are violent offenders, but that statistic can easily be misinterpreted. Violent offenders tend to get longer prison sentences than non-violent offenders, and therefore comprise a much larger share of the prison population than they would if they had earlier release dates.

Latzer also makes another claim that–while technically true–is misleading. And this one was also anticipated and rebutted by Alexander. He says:

Critics of “mass incarceration” often point to the federal prisons, where half of inmates, or about 96,000 people, are drug offenders. But 99.5% of them are traffickers. The notion that prisons are filled with young pot smokers, harmless victims of aggressive prosecution, is patently false.

The problem with this one is that prosecutors have incredibly wide discretion in which charges to bring against people and, on top of that, have virtually zero oversight in how they exercise that discretion. Writing in The New Jim Crow, Alexander points out that:

The risk that prosecutorial discretion will be racially biased is especially acute in the drug enforcement context , where virtually identical behavior is susceptible to a wide variety of interpretations and responses and the media imagery and political discourse has been so thoroughly racialized. Whether a kid is perceived as a dangerous, drug-dealing thug or instead is viewed as a good kid who was merely experimenting with drugs and selling to a few of his friends, has to do with the ways information about illegal drug activity is processed and interpreted in a social climate in which drug dealing is racially defined.

In other words, the exact same behavior (selling drugs) could easily lead to a simple possession charge for some people and a trafficking charge for others. We can’t just blithely assume that whatever charge a person ends up serving time for reflects accurately and fairly on what they did and what someone else did not do.

This is not to say that Latzer doesn’t make any valid point at all. He does. He points out that blacks are more likely than whites to commit violent crime. This is true, and in fact it’s a point that Alexander concedes in her book. So, if you’re focused on violent crime, there is a basis to say that the criminal justice system is fair: there are more blacks behind bars because more blacks commit violent crimes.

On the other hand, if you’re looking at drug crimes, then there is a basis to say that the criminal just system is not fair. Blacks and whites use illegal drugs at roughly the same rates, but blacks are far, far more likely to face arrest, prosecution, and conviction than whites, as this chart (from Slate) illustrates:

When you look at this chart remember: blacks and whites use illegal drugs at roughly comparable rates. So why aren’t the arrest rates comparable?

But, even in the case of violent crime, there is fairly clear evidence of racism. Many studies have found that the justice system is fairly unbiased when it comes to the race of perpetrators of violent crime, but it is very, very biased when it comes to the race of victims of violent crime. In short, if you kill a black person then (whether you are white or black) your sentence will be relatively low. But if you kill a white person then (whether your are white or black) your sentence will be relatively high. Based purely on the data, one would say that our criminal justice system believes that all lives matter, but some lives matter more.

 

I’ve been planning a long post / review of The New Jim Crow for some time now, but I haven’t finished organizing my quotes and notes yet. So you can consider this a preview. And, along those lines, I’ll make one more point: the effects of conviction are far, far more general than the question of incarceration. This isn’t really a criticism of Latzer. He focused on incarceration, and so this falls outside the scope of his argument. But it’s something important for us to keep in mind. First, you don’t have to go to jail at all to get a felony conviction on your record. Second, that felony conviction is going to stay on your record long after you have “served your debt to society.” If the criminal justice system is unfair, it’s not just about incarceration. It’s about losing the right to vote. It’s about losing access to government programs like student loans or food stamps. It’s about the government banning your friends and family from supporting you (if they live in public housing) when you get out. And–most egregiously of all–it’s about a scarlet-F that will follow you to every job interview and ensure that long after you are outside the prison walls you are still practically barred from building a new life for yourself.

There’s  lot at stake here, folks, and it’s not just about violent crime.

Eternity Itself is Laid Bare

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"Family Hands" by melissafong
“Family Hands” by melissafong

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

I want to start this post by pulling out a few quotes from different talks that were given during the Friday afternoon session of the October 1973 General Conference

The Church has constantly stressed the importance of the home.

– There Is Need for Repentance by ElRay Christiansen

As children of God, we cannot afford to forget our origin and destiny if we desire the realms of celestial glory.

– The Path to Eternal Life by Delbert L. Stapley

[O]ne cannot forget mother and remember God. One cannot remember mother and forget God. Why? Because these two sacred persons, God and mother, partners in creation, in love, in sacrifice, in service, are as one.

– “Behold Thy Mother” by Thomas S. Monson

I believe the second two quotes explain the first. “The Church has constantly stressed the importance of the home.” Why?

More often than not—among members and non-members alike—I think the answer is a kind of superficial association of Mormonism with good, old-fashioned, American values. Part of the history of our faith is that after brutal persecution and a period of hostile, mutual alienation, the Church worked incredibly hard to integrate into American culture and society. So Mormons are so family-centric because families are part of American values, and Mormons (at least in America) bought into the whole American dream from apple pies to patriotism to capitalism to family values.

I’m not saying that the pendulum swing between alienation and integration isn’t real, but I will say it obscures the fact that Mormonism’s emphasis on family goes much, much deeper. Our commitment to the ideals of family and home is not an affectation, it is at the core of our theology and central to our concept of life on Earth and in eternity.

The origin and destiny that Elder Stapley refers to are impossible to separate from family. We came from a home, a home where we had a loving Heavenly Father and a loving Heavenly Mother. Family and home are central to our origin. We are headed back home, to live with our Heavenly Parents again and—through the grace of Christ—to become them. Family and home are central to our destiny.

Elder (at the time) Monson’s paragraph is one that I can’t stop thinking about because it is such an arresting violation of the parallel that you expect. “God and mother,” not Heavenly Mother but earthly mothers, are “partners in creation, in love, in sacrifice, in service” and are “as one.”

I think I’ll be working through the implications of this one for a long time, but what we can say immediately is that—once again—the entire Plan of Salvation is inseparable from the concept of home and family and that includes our sacred obligation here on Earth to emulate to the best we can the heavenly home we don’t even remember.

We’re members of the house of God. And here we are on Earth—blind, fallible, and broken—playing at house. Playing at god. Nothing could be more absurd. Nothing could be more serious.

I’ll leave with one more quote:

The Spirit of the Lord will not dwell nor abide in a home where there is constant bickering, quarreling, arguing, discord, or disharmony… A happy Home is where the wife is treated like a queen and the husband is treated like a king.

– There Is Need for Repentance by ElRay Christiansen

If that is the aspiration we’re striving for down here, then we can also understand this much about our hidden heavenly home: that’s what it was like. We all know that there was discord in Heaven on at least one occasion, but our home before this life was defined as a place where “[Heavenly Mother] is treated like a queen and [Heavenly Father] is treated like a kind.” That is how they regard each other. That is how they treat each other. That is the first home that we knew.

In those rare, beautiful moments of transient bliss when pure family love and harmony are revealed for a moment or two through a mundane, everyday experience, eternity itself is laid bare before us.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Your True Identity as a Human Being

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Your True Identity as a Human Being

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

President Harold B. Lee kicked off the October 1973 General Conference with a talk on Friday morning called Understanding Who We Are Brings Self-Respect. The talk was not what I expected at all. “My beloved brothers and sisters and friends who are listening by radio and television, may I now for a few moments make some comments about a condition which is of great concern to all of us today,” he began. And of course, you’re expecting something about wickedness. And, in a way, you’d be right. But he expressed it in a way that certainly brought me up short: “the shocking lack of self-respect.”

I stopped and thought for a while at the end of the first paragraph. And I decided it did make sense. After all, one of the examples of this lack of self-respect was “permissiveness.” As a parent, it’s easy to understand that just allowing your kids to do whatever they want is not a sign of love, or of respect, or of regard for them as human beings. As a parent, if you care for your kids than you try to erect structure and boundaries and routines to keep them healthy, to keep them safe, and to help them learn and grow. Discipline is a sign of regard. If for children, then why not for the self?

And if that’s true, than the kind of person who indulges in sating their every whim and desire is not, after all, acting out of high self-regard. They are, perversely, respecting their appetites at the expense of respecting their true selves.

So the talk won me over, but I couldn’t help but remain surprised all the same. At some points, the language about self-respect almost seemed Randian: the archest of right-wing avatars. And yet within paragraphs a quote like “The first thing to be done to help a man to moral regeneration is to restore if possible his self-respect,” would seem as bleeding-heart as they come. The talk even includes the phrase–not as common in the 1970s as it later became, I think–“self-esteem.”

It’s just another solid reminder that prophets–when they are speaking as prophets–don’t see the world the way we see it. We interpret the world according to our preconceptions and assumptions, and that means we can’t help but see what happens around us as part of a pre-existing narrative. Our politics, our tastes, our personal histories: none of us can prevent these things from traveling outside of ourselves and becoming a part of our perception of the outside world.

Prophets are human, too, and they have the same limitations. But when a prophet prophecies, I believe they catch a hold of a different vision and step outside of their individual perspectives. I think that’s part of what makes them so hard to understand, not to mention disconcerting. It’s also what makes them so important to listen to.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Going Along for the Ride

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

We’re covering the Sunday afternoon session of the April 1973 General Conference today, which means the General Conference Odyssey is wrapping up its fifth conference. There currently 51 general conferences on line—and two more get added every year—so you can see why we call this an “odyssey.”

The first and last talks from this session stayed with me. In the first talk, Elder Mark E. Petersen taught that “salvation comes through the Church” and that as a consequence, “if persons separate themselves from the Lord’s church, they thereby separate themselves from his means of salvation.”

This is one of those hard teachings for someone like me. I’ve never been a full-out spiritualist—the kind of person who says, “Why go to Church when you go be in nature?”—because it does makes sense to me that a religious life should be a communal life. We’re social animals. It’s in our (I believe) God-given nature to exist only in relationships with others. Whether or not you meet in a building is irrelevant, but meeting in groups is not. And, at its heart, that’s what the Church is: a group of people.

But the Church is also “a house of order,”[ref]D&C 109:8[/ref] and that’s the part with which I never feel comfortable. I have a problem with authority, and I don’t like large institutions. I don’t trust governments, I hate working for big companies, and I try to stay as far away from SLC and leadership callings of any description as I possibly can. I don’t want to have one myself, and I try to fly under the radar so that the people who do have them will basically leave me alone. As long as “order” is synonymous with “hierarchy,” it seems that my membership in the Church is going to be tinged with unease.[ref]Just to be clear: This is not a faith crisis. This is just life.[/ref]

President Harold B. Lee’s talk means a lot to me in this regard. It is called “Stand Ye in Holy Places,” which is a pretty profound way to make the point that I made earlier: for a group of people to share a cause and a faith they have to have a point (literal or metaphorical) at which they come together. As long as religions are communal, religions must have shared, holy places.

President Lee also makes this interesting point:

I call your attention to one of these requirements [of baptism], particularly that which has been stressed by direct and indirect words in this conference: “are willing to bear one another’s burdens that they may be light.” If I were to ask you what is the heaviest burden one may have to bear in this life, what would you answer? The heaviest burden that one has to bear in this life is the burden of sin. How do you help one to bear that great burden of sin, in order that it might be light?

What this tells me is that even our most personal struggles—our wrestles with our sins and weaknesses—can and should be communal in a sense. We should trust each other, help each other, and rely on each other.

President Lee made two more statements that I’m not sure are connected, but that I have not forgotten. First, he said “You cannot lift another soul until you are standing on higher ground than he is.” That’s another one of those statements that can grate on modern sensibility. When I was a kid I played a card game called Legend of the Five Rings. The game came with its own make-believe religion and spiritual text, the Tao of Shinsei, and I loved one of the quotes from that make-believe spiritual book from a card game for nerds: “One must bow to offer aid to a fallen man.” It’s a quote that hits the notes of egalitarianism and humility. It’s easy to love. President Lee’s quote, by contrast, does not have the same connotations. But it’s certainly just as true. You can’t help up someone who has fallen if you fall down next to them. Bowing is fine, falling over isn’t. Or, as President Lee said in his second quote, “You cannot light a fire in another soul unless it is burning in your own soul.”

So here are my two points:

First, the hard teachings are the most important teachings. What good is a religion that is comfortable in every way? It could, by definition, offer you no potential for growth. Being challenged by your own religion is not a bug. It’s a feature. We are disciples only to the extent that we are allowing an outside set of principles to act as a discipline on our lives.

Second, I don’t really understand why order requires hierarchy. I’m a complex systems guy. I’m all about emergence and spontaneous order. So I don’t really understand the leap from the necessity of having a Church—a group of people coordinating with each other to aid and support one another—to having a top-down, hierarchical institution like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I don’t get it.

But the goal of reuniting the human family is one I passionately believe in and I’m willing to get with the program based on faith. I don’t know why this is the road we have to take, but I know that the destination is where I want to be and I trust in God that He knows what He’s doing. And so, comfortably or not, I’m along for this ride.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

No One Would Listen by Harry Markopolos

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

This book got off to a kind of rough start for some of the same reasons that Harry Markopolos had such a hard time getting the SEC to investigate Bernie Madoff in the decade leading up to Madoff’s enormous Ponzi scheme finally publicly immolating: he’s kind of an abrasive character who comes across as arrogant, confrontational, and self-promoting. I’m glad I stuck with the book, however, for two reasons. First of all, the grating tone is smoothed out substantially as you realize that–while perhaps a little melodramatic–Markopolos seems to be entirely sincere in his intentions and oblivious to his abrasiveness. Second, because–as far as I could tell from the book, which is laden with supporting material and testimony–he was exactly right. He did determine early on that Madoff was a fraud, he did everything in his power to bring it to the SEC, and the SEC did absolutely nothing to follow up on his claims, even though there were incredibly quick and easy ways for the fraud to be validated.

One of the most interesting things about this book, however, is the way it interfaces with two other books I’ve read over the past month or so: Political Order and Political Decay and The New Jim Crow.

In Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama makes a vibrant, international case for the importance of strong state institutions. Although he is associated with the American right, Fukuyama eschews the conventional more/less government for an emphasis on quality rather than quantity of state institutions. He spends a lot of time looking at what is required to make state institutions effective: a delicate balance of autonomy and accountability. It’s impossible to have read that book recently and not see connections again and again to the SEC as described by Markopolos.

For example, Fukuyama emphasizes the importance of professionalism–often accomplished through objective, standardized testing–in helping state institutions retain independence (because rigorous testing confounds political appointments) and high morale (because the testing acts as a kind of filter to create a cohesive social group within the institution) in addition to the more obvious benefits of competence and knowledgeability.

Markopolos makes the exact same points although–lacking Fukuyama’s framework and context–he doesn’t quite connect all the dots. He notes that the SEC is staffed primarily by lawyers with no quantitative expertise or practical industry experience and that this makes the incompetent and overly deferential to the businesses. He also faults the SEC for being far too deferential to industry and afraid to do its job and go after major fraud and abuse. He doesn’t quite make the connection between the two, however, noting that the low standards for SEC employees not only lead to inexperience workers, but also foster the subservience and passivity of the SEC directly.

Francis Fukuyama Professor of International Political Economy at the KUB University of Braband at Tilburg Netherlands Photo: Robert Goddyn/UPA Photo
Francis Fukuyama Professor of International Political Economy at the KUB University of Braband at Tilburg Netherlands Photo: Robert Goddyn/UPA Photo

One of Fukuyama’s broader points is that, in the arena of modern liberal democracies, the United States has always lagged behind in terms of quality of state infrastructure. This is mostly because our democracy emerged before our institutions modernized, which historically is a recipe for disaster. The US was able to right the ship in the second half of the 19th century when a wave of progressive reforms professionalized the federal civil service and we ended up with fairly respectable institutions, although still nowhere near the quality (in terms of professionalism and efficiency) of states like Germany or Japan that modernized before they liberalized or states like the UK that–due to unique class structure–were able to fairly painlessly push through reforms in a matter of years that took the US a major national movement and decades to emulate.

The SEC was not one of the agencies that Fukuyama chose to focus on, but it could have been. His analysis would have fit perfectly with Markopolos’s, both in terms of the content and also in terms of the conclusion: America’s national institutions are once again in a period of deep corruption, inefficiency, and impotence.

One of the key points that Michelle Alexander makes in The New Jim Crow is that mass incarceration is primarily the result of the War on Drugs (rather than violent crime):

As numerous researchers have shown, violent crime rates have fluctuate over the years, and bear little relationship to incarceration rates, which have soared during the past three decades regardless of whether violent crime was going up or down. Today, violent crime rates are at historically low levels, yet incarceration rates continue to climb.

Moreover, whites and blacks violate drug laws at basically equal rates, but it is the black population that bears the overwhelming burden of suspicion, policing, prosecution, incarceration, and life with a criminal record while the white population–equally as likely to consume drugs–is blissfully ignorant and immune to the pointy end of the War on Drugs.

The question is: why? The laws and policies that constitute the War on Drugs are colorblind, not racist. One possible explanation is sheer racial animus: the police and prosecutors and legislators who enact and define the War on Drugs hate black people, and they deliberately–but covertly–use the War on Drugs to attack them. This is not plausible, however, and instead Alexander focuses on unconscious racism and incentives.

For example, the federal government–in an effort to win points by looking to be tough on crime–through massive resources into encouraging the War on Drugs by offering money to police departments that showed high numbers of drug convictions. And so:

It is impossible for law enforcement to identify and arrest every drug criminal. Strategic choices must be made about whom to target and what tactics to employ. Police and prosecutors did not declare the War on Drugs, and some initially opposed it, but once the financial incentives for waging the war became too attractive to ignore, law enforcement agencies had to ask themselves, if we’re going to wage this war, where should it be fought and who should be taken prisoner? That question was not difficult to answer, given the political and social context.

Michelle_Alexander_2011_02
Miller Center of Public Affairs flickr page, Charlottesville, VA

The incentives made it clear that arrests would happen. The question was just: where would they take place? And the answer, inevitably, was “among populations with the least ability to fight back politically.” Thus, the War on Drugs is not an effect of pre-existing racism as much as it is a cause of racism. This does not make the War on Drugs unique, however. If there’s one thing I’ve come to learn from studying the history of racism in the US, it’s that racism is always instrumental. The first consideration is always power. Racism is a servant of that quest for power. And this goes back to the very beginning. The slave trade was initially not very racist, in that the gap between white indentured servants and black slaves was fairly minimal. Slavery was, for example, not hereditary. A black child was born free, not slave. After Bacon’s Rebellion, however, when white servants and black slaves rose up together to fight against the elites, slavery was reformed as an institution to make it racially defined. Why? Because that allowed elites to split the coalition of poor whites and poor blacks. So: the quest for power created the racial aspect of slavery which, in turn, created race.

The point is that power and class warped the War on Drugs so that affluent (predominantly white) neighborhoods are left in peace and poor (predominantly black) neighborhoods are treated like warzones. There’s crime everywhere, but it only gets enforced where it makes political sense to do so.

White collar crime is the mirror image of the War on Drugs, and that’s where the connection to No One Would Listen comes in. Markopolos makes it clear that Madoff was far from unique: the entire financial sector is riven with dishonest and blatant criminality. Here’s one example:

My younger brother had had similar experiences. At one point he was hired by a respected brokerage firm in New Jersey to run its trading desk. On his first morning there he walked into the office and discovered that the Bloomberg terminals that supposedly had been ordered hadn’t arrived. Then he found out that the traders didn’t have their series 7 licenses, meaning they weren’t allowed to trade. And then he learned that the CEO had some regulation 144 private placement stock which legally is not allowed to be sold. But the CEO had insider information that bad news was coming, and he wanted to sell the stock. My brother explained to the CEO, “You can’t sell this stock. It’s a felony.” The CEO assured him he understood. My brother went out to lunch with the Bloomberg rep to try to get the terminals installed that he needed to start trading. By the time he returned to the office, the unlicensed traders had illegally sold the private placement stock based on insider information. My brother had walked into a perfect Wall Street storm.

He called me in a panic, “What do I do?” I said, “These are felonies. The first thing to do is write your resignation letter. The second thing you do is get copies of all the trade tickets. Get all the evidence you can on your way out the door. And the third thing you do is go home and type up everything and send it to the NASD.” That’s exactly what he did. The NASD did absolutely nothing. These were clear felonies, and the NASD didn’t even respond to his complaint.

So Markopolos’s brother witnesses felonies, gathers the evidence, and alerts the NASD and then… nothing. Just as Markopolos realized what Madoff was doing, gathered the evidence, and alerted the SEC and then… nothing. He sent them at least three or four major document dumps over a decade. Later on, he put together 20 other whistleblower cases, tied them up with a bow, and delivered them to the SEC for prosecution and again: nothing. Every one was rejected.

Poor blacks are convenient targets. Police departments and municipal governments essentially extort them by unequal application of laws. Rich white investment bankers are inconvenient targets. Gov’t agencies assigned to regulate and monitor them essentially act as their servants by unequal application of laws. As Markopolos points out, the SEC and other agencies would go after fraud cases now and again, but only small fish. They’d never touch the big guys, the rich guys, the influential guys.

Putting together Markopolos, Fukuyama, and Alexander doesn’t lead to a cheery or rosy view of the state of the United States, but I do think it’s a useful view. And besides, one lesson of Fukuyama is that political decay can be reversed. Institutions can be revitalized. One lesson of the Civil Rights is that human dignity can be broadened and justice can move forward. And–while Markopolos did not succeed in convincing the SEC to stop Madoff before he his scheme had ballooned from $7B to $60B, he did become a professional fraud-fighter after that, and so even in his case there is the potential for good to come out of bad situations. I think we all sense that the nation is not in a good place, but having an accurate understanding of what is wrong is the first step to finding truly effective solutions, and these books–to me–seem to work together to provide a substantial piece of that understanding.

We Are Children of God

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Rembrandt - Return of the Prodigal Son CROPPED
Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

Elder Marion G. Romney’s talk, Man—A Child of God, dove straight into some very Mormon teachings: “The truth I desire to emphasize today is that we mortals are in very deed the literal offspring of God.”

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints accept this concept as a basic doctrine of their theology. The lives of those who have given it thought enough to realize its implications are controlled by it; it gives meaning and direction to all their thoughts and deeds. This is so because they know that it is the universal law of nature in the plant, animal, and human worlds for reproducing offspring to reach in final maturity the likeness of their parents.

They reason that the same law is in force with respect to the offspring of God. Their objective is, therefore, to someday be like their heavenly parents.

The emphasis on becoming like our Heavenly Parents is one of Mormonism’s most distinctive and controversial beliefs. Because it is so easy to misinterpret, we are often rather sensitive about it, and we take pains to point out that the belief has solid basis in scripture.

“The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit,” wrote Paul, “that we are the children of God.”[ref]Romans 8:16[/ref] Referring to Psalm 82, which states “ye are gods, and all of you are children of the most High,”[ref]Psalms 82:6[/ref] Jesus asked, “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?”[ref]John 10:34[/ref]

We also often emphasize that early Christians held similar beliefs. I have a few quotes from an old PowerPoint presentation that my father put together years ago:

  • “Let the interpretation of the Psalm [82] be just as you wish, yet thereby it is demonstrated that all men are deemed worthy of becoming gods.” – Justin Martyr
  • “Yea, I say, the Word of God became a man so that you might learn from a man how to become a god.” – Clement of Alexandria
  • “The Word was made flesh in order that we might be enabled to be made gods.” – Athansius
  • “But he himself that justifies also deifies, for by justifying he makes sons of God. ―For he has given them power to become the sons of God‖ [John 1:12]. If then we have been made sons of God, we have also been made gods.” – Augustine

This is a good approach, but as I read Elder Romney’s talk, I had a different thought, which is this: How can we know our own theology if we don’t read these talks? What I mean by that is simply that I’ve seen fairly frequent debates about which beliefs are really doctrinal, which beliefs are core and essential, and frequently those debates refer to the Standard Works. And that is right and proper, but it is not enough.

If we believe in an open canon; if we believe in continuing revelation; if we believe that we are led by prophets, seers, and revelators (i.e. if we believe what we say we do), then the question of marking out the contours and landmarks of our faith is not an intellectual exercise for academics and scholars. It is a question of divine authority.

I’ll give you one specific example: there are those Mormons who take a very dim view of The Family: A Proclamation to the World. They will tell you that it is not canon (which, in fairness, is true), that it was written by lawyers, and so forth to argue that it’s not really Mormon. All well and good as intellectual debates go, but this is what I say in reply: go and start reading the General Conference talks and see how consistently, how prominently, how steadfastly the family is preached. You can’t go one session, it often seems, without at least a couple of paragraphs about the family as it relates to God’s plan for us. Any unbiased reader of the General Conference talks who was asked to list the most important topics would, without any ambiguity, list Jesus Christ and the Atonement first, and then families second. In that context, the critiques of The Family ring hollow.

As a Church that professes to be led by continuous, dynamic revelation it is impossible to understand our own faith without paying close attention to the ongoing stream of teachings. The Standard Works are the roots and foundation of our doctrine, but the branches and leaves are the General Conference talks.

And so, to return to Elder Romney’s talk, the idea “that man is a child of God is the most important knowledge available to mortals.” He concluded by bearing his own witness that “I know that I am a son of God, and that you, my beloved listeners, are individually a son or a daughter of God, and that this knowledge implemented in our lives will lift us back into his presence through the atoning sacrifice of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

According to Amazon, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a best-seller. It’s not hard to see why. This deeply interesting book is also a deeply flawed book, and all of the flaws are calculated to make the book more sensationalist and provocative than the underlying research truly allows.

First of all, Harari is all-in for the hypothesis that the Agricultural Revolution was a colossal mistake. This is not a new idea. I’ve come across it several times, and when I did a quick Google search just now I found a 1987 article by Jared Diamond with the subtle title: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. Diamond’s argument then is as silly as Harari’s argument is now, and it boils down to this: life as a hunter-gatherer is easy. Farming is hard. Ergo, the Agricultural Revolution was a bad deal. If we’d all stuck around being hunter-gatherers we’d be happier.[ref]Sometimes they go farther and argue that disease had a hard time spreading when population densities were low, so hunter-gatherer societies were also healthier.[/ref]

The primary problem with this argument, philosophically, is its naked hedonism. I’m pretty sure I’d be happier if I just stayed in a perpetual, drug-induced high. And yet I don’t see Harari or Diamond (or any ostensibly sane person) standing outside of drug rehab facilities wearing a sandwich board warning heroin addicts that they’d be better off just staying high. Could it be conceivable that there’s more to life than minimizing the amount of time we spend procuring a bare minimum of resources to sustain life? The most frustrating thing about replying to this line of argument is that it’s absurd to even have to spell these things out. Isn’t the human penchant for dissatisfaction one of our noblest attributes? We’re not satisfied, and so we go out and we invent. Discover. Explore. Build. And, while we’re at it, plant and harvest.

Of course, it’s possible to take that to an extreme. Ideally, we find some way to balance the capacity to enjoy what we have–to live in the moment and to be accepting of the past–without giving up on our noble ambitions and desires to better ourselves, those around us, and the world we inhabit. The fact that this just might involve working more hours per week doesn’t automatically make it a bad idea, and the fact that I have to explain any of this to folks like Diamond or Harari is just plain silly. Their arguments are not insightful or provocative. They’re just childish.

Sadly, since this is one of the first arguments that Harari makes, he starts out by digging a deep credibility hole that he never really climbs back out of. He compounds it with other silly fad-arguments like the idea that we didn’t domesticate wheat, wheat domesticate us! Thus:

The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice, and potatoes. These plants domesticated homo sapiens rather than vice versa. Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the standpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the Earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe’s surface, almost 10 times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?

The biggest problem here is that the very first thing that Harari argues for in his book is the distinction between “humans” (a term that covers many species) and “homo sapiens” (a term that refers to just one particular species). He puts all kinds of emphasis on this distinction, including making it the title of his book! And yet, in the passage above, he treats “wheat” as just a plant. Yet, according to Wikipedia, wheat is a term (like human) that refers to nearly 2-dozen distinct species. Again, it’s a hit for his credibility to be so sanctimonious about a technicality in one case, and then so cavalier about it in another. More than that, however, it substantively undermines his argument. Because the reality is that in domesticating various plants and animals, humans were engaged in slow-motion genetic engineering. The result, from the various species of wheat to animals like dogs and chickens, is a species that is genetically distinct from their ancestors. This matters a lot. Because if Harari wants to define a species genetically (which he does) then the domesticated wheat species is not the same thing as the wild wheat species from which it was derived over tens of thousands of years of selective breeding.

To clarify this mistake, imagine that he tried to argue that humans were domestictaed by wolves instead of vice versa. And so now wolves live in the houses of their domesticated humans, right? Well, no. Dogs have domesticated humans, but dogs (Canis familiaris) are not the same things as wolves (Canis lupus, Canis rufus, Canis lycaon, etc). And so you can’t say “wolves domesticated humans” because man’s best friend is no longer a wolf. Similarly, the wheat that we grow for food everywhere isn’t the same creature as its wild ancestor. Once again, this isn’t just wrong, it’s silly. When you see memes on the Internet about how cats own humans, that’s funny. When you see someone trying to turn the exact same Internet joke into a serious scientific point in an ostensibly non-fiction book, it’s just sad and a little pathetic.

Harari’s book suffers a lot from this kind of sloppy sensationalism. In addition to these examples, he also spends a lot of time ironically stating that there are no objective values on the one hand and then–often within mere sentences–making sweeping claims about how modern society is better than ancient society in this or that particular respect. Better, according to which values? It’s just another example of the utter failure of ostensible relativists to actually enact the relativism they claim to believe in. If there are no objective values, then there’s no basis for making statements like that.

So, enough of the criticism. What’s good?

Well, for starters, his separation of ontological concepts into three categories: objective, subjective, and inter-subjective is actually quite useful. He is sloppy about conflating “subjective”, “myth” and “false” (these terms are not synonyms, but he think they are), but the definition of inter-subjective as distinct from mere subjectivity is really quite good:

An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs. Radioactivity, for example, is not a myth. Radioactive emissions occurred long before people discovered them, and they are dangerous even when people do not believe in them. Marie Curie, one of the discoverers of radioactivity, did not know during her long years of studying radioactive materials, that they could harm her body. While she did not believe that radioactivity could kill her, she nevertheless died of aplastic anemia, a disease caused by overexposure to radioactive materials. The subjective is something that exists depending on the consciousness and beliefs of a single individual. It disappears or changes if that particular individual changes his or her beliefs. Many a child believes in the existence of an imaginary friend who is invisible and inaudible to the rest of the world. The imaginary friend exists solely in the child’s subjective consciousness, and when the child grows up and ceases to believe in it, the imaginary friend fades away. The intersubjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. If a single individual changes his or her beliefs or even dies, it is of little importance. However, if most individuals in the network die or change their beliefs, the intersubjective phenomenon will mutate or disappear. Intersubjective phenomena are neither malevolent frauds nor insignificant charades. They exist in a different way from physical phenomena such as radioactivity but their impact on the world may still be enormous. Many of histories most important drivers are intersubjective: law, money, gods, nations.

I also liked a lot of his later theories. As much as he made a hash of the Agricultural Revolution, his argument about the interrelationship between imperialism and science, for example, was really quite fascinating.

Scientists have provided the imperial project with practical knowledge, ideological justification, and technological gadgets. Without this contribution, it is highly questionable whether Europeans could have conquered the world. The conquerers returned the favor by providing scientists with information and protection, supporting all kinds of strange and fascinating projects, and spreading the scientific way of thinking to the far corners of the Earth. Without imperial support, it is doubtful whether modern science would have progressed very far. There are very few scientific disciplines that did not begin their lives as servants to imperial growth and that do not owe a large proportion of their discoveries, collections, buildings, and scholarships to the generous help of army officers, navy captains, and imperial governors.

This is a genuinely insightful argument, and it’s one I’d never heard before. It’s not hard to see why. Our culture–especially our intellectual culture–continues to treat science with a great deal of deference and respect. The mere existence of the term “social science”–combined with the embrace of statistical and other formal mathematical techniques in economics, psychology, etc.–all show how deeply ingrained this deference is. But imperialism? That’s practically a bad word in academic settings. Imperialism is pretty close to the Original Sin, as far as anyone residing in the Ivory Tower would believe. And so obviously it’s incredibly uncomfortable to suggest that imperialism and science are linked or even, not going quite that far, that historically science got a significant boost from imperialism. This is an embarrassment to modern Western sensibilities, and so the only kind of person who will bring it up is someone like Harari who seems intent on offending every conceivable member of his audience. The only time when mockery is really called for is in response to power, and so it is deployed appropriately in this case, and that is where the same penchant for kind of immature provocation turns from an annoyance (as with his silly theories about the Agricultural Revolution or wheat domesticating humans) into something important and serious.

Along these lines, I was also really struck with his argument about the consumerist-capitalist ethic. Here goes:

How can we square the consumerist ethic with the capitalist ethic of the business person according to which profits should not be wasted and should instead by reinvested in production. It’s simple. As in previous eras, there is today a division of labor between the elite and the masses. In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally minding every penny. Today the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments while the less well-heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don’t really need. The capitalist and consumerist epics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is “invest”. The supreme commandment of the rest of us is “buy.” The capitalist-consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal: they were promised paradise, but only if they cultivate compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideas that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ. Most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha. And most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist-consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free reign to their cravings and passions and buy more and more. this is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How, though, do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television.

Given his frequent borrowing of ideas I recognize from other sources, I suspect this is not original to Harari[ref]I had the audiobook, so I have no idea if he’s got footnotes.[/ref], but it is fascinating to me.

There are several more examples of these kinds of points Harari makes that are contrarian and interesting. Some I was already familiar with (such as the nonsensical notion that primitive humans lived in harmony with their environment, something that approaches farce once you actually look at the global swathes of mass extinctions that actually followed the spread of homo sapiens around the globe) and others were either new or particularly well-reasoned (such as his explanation of corporate personhood and intersubjective reality via Peugot). For those reasons: I do recommend reading this book. Just take everything in it with a grain of salt.