Month: January 2018

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Tree Farm Visit January 25, 2018

Went down to the tree farms, mostly just to look around.  Ted Garner, from West Fraser Timber, wanted to look at the farms. He read what I wrote about biosolids and wanted to see for himself. I am always happy to tell anybody willing to listen about the farms.

Trees are okay, although they are at their most unattractive at this time of the year. They have dropped all the needles that they will do and new ones are not yet grown in. Everything is a little dull for now but soon better.

Longleaf are looking good and you can see them more easily against the brown grass, as you can see in the picture. We will soon thin the 1996 loblolly nearby, so maybe next time I take this picture the longleaf will look the similar but the backgrounds will be different.

I did the usual vine pulling on the Chrissy’s Pond place. It is good exercise and gives me reason to be in woods.  Funny thing is that I “discovered” another stream management zone.  I mean, I knew it was there, but I never actually walked down there.  The CP place is 178 acres total, of which only 110 acres are loblolly pine. That leaves 68 acres of SMZ or wildlife plots. I have not explored all of the even now.

My pictures – the first shows the “new” SMZ. Next is the road out of CP, followed by the Brodnax farm, well thinned and ready to burn. After than shows a longleaf pine plantation. Unfortunately, other pines have grown in. A fire would rectify that.  Last is my Freeman longleaf pine stand.
 

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Green city Washington

Washington has become one of the world’s “greenest” cities in the last few years.  The city won a LEED Platinum rating last year, the first in the world, for its commitment to sustainability.  Being green means lots of things, but it generally is good management of buildings and land.

I went down to the National Building Museum for a program by Jay Wilson,  Urban Sustainability Administration at DC Department of Energy & Environment, who talked about some of the things Washington has done and will do.

Washington sits on the confluence of two rivers, the Potomac and the Anacostia, much of the area is covered with pavement or buildings and lots of the land is flat and low.  This means that storm water management is a key management concern.

Much of Washington’s sewer system was build a century ago.  They did a wonderful job back then, but their situations and goals were different.  For example, sanitary and storm sewers are combined.  This seems like a bad idea today, since rainwater is fundamentally different from sewage and why overload the system?  But the system was designed with horses in mind. In those days, streets were covered in horse manure. The rain washed this into sewers and so rain runoff in those days was not so different from sewage.  The combined sewage system made sense in those days.

Rain gardens and green roofs are important ways the District address storm water management today.  Both these examples of green infrastructure filter and slow water flow, making it available to plants, enhancing groundwater and mitigating overflow into the sewers.  Green roofs and rain gardens are also beautiful, provide wildlife habitat, and like most green infrastructure they are to some extent self-renewing.

Washington is trying to become more bicycle friendly and I can attest to the fact that they have done a good job.  I have been riding around the area for more than 30 years, so my opinion was based on experience.  However, improvements make people demand more improvement.  I don’t think that many bicyclists are quite as positive as I am.  Most bicyclists are younger than I am and may not remember how it was before and us old guys sometimes forget.

The National Building Museum is a good venue for programs like this.  This is the place where I got my first good look at Cross Laminate Timber, during the Timber City exhibit and heard some good lectures about it.  One of the great things about Washington is all these sorts of programs available free or at low cost.  A big part of quality of life for me is this kind of opportunity.

We have grey infrastructure, green infrastructure and intellectual infrastructure.

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The Year of the Fire

The year is up; the cycle finished. We burned the longleaf pine in February 2017. I have documented the changes over the year from what looked like a charred and dead mess, to a verdant summer bursting with life, to winter waiting the next growing season.

I have included all the pictures at the end except the first one above. Click on the picture if you want to read more. It is easier to see them in relation to each other if they are stacked. The pictures tell most of the story, but let me add a little background beyond what you can see.

Longleaf pine ecosystems were dominant on SE coastal plains for at least 10,000 years and precursors go back much longer. Scientist think that the original longleaf range was the coastal plain that extended dozens or hundreds of miles into what it now the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea when sea levels were lower during the ice ages.

Important to remember that a forest is more than the trees. The wonder of the longleaf ecology is the diversity of plant and animal life, not only the trees. A longleaf pine forest is more correctly characterized as a pine savanna, a grassland with trees. Grasslands tend to dominate where rainfall is insufficient for trees to dominate. There is more than enough rain in southeastern North America to support dense forests. The reason such forests did not dominate was fire that burned through the landscape every 2-5 years. These fires were caused by lightning and then set by Native Americans. Fire kept the forest open, allowing light to penetrate and forbs and grasses to grow. Longleaf pine is a dependent ecology, with its profusion of grass and wildflowers and will not thrive when fire excluded.

The longleaf pine trees themselves fire to compete. Longleaf sends down a deep taproot and grows down before it grows up. This makes longleaf pine very resilient to drought, but it also means that species the grow faster toward the sun will shade them out. Fire tips the balance toward longleaf.

It might be useful to use an analogy of a top, a keystone predator to describe fire. Ecologists know, and even ordinary people can observe it in all the deer destroying their gardens, that if we remove the keystone predator, soon the balance is lost. Other species, not longer kept in check proliferate eventually enough to destroy the environment on which they depend. Aldo Leopold describe it more evocatively in his famous essay “Think Like a Mountain.” We can understand it in a homelier wisdom, “when the cat’s away, the mice will play.” Modern humans often removed fire and things got out of hand.
Let me finish by explaining that I try to see my land holistically.  A part is given over to longleaf and the fire regime, but I also have a lot of deep shade hardwoods near the streams that we protect from fire as much as I can. I love my longleaf forests and my groves of beech, maple and oak. It is great to be able to walk between them. The key to joy in ecology is diversity, lots of variety mixed and matched. I am grateful for those things that love fire and for those that do not.

Technical note – the trees were four years (four growing seasons) in the ground when we did the first burn, in the pictures. The site was prepared with fire in 2012, before being planted with longleaf. The longleaf are northern progeny from North Carolina, north of the Neuse River

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Getting the forestry message out

Persuasion

I am writing a presentation that I will deliver at one of the breakout sessions at the Tree Farm National Leadership Conference, in Albuquerque, New Mexico – January 31-February 2. The topic is “Using more wood for the love of forests: getting the message out.”  This is background for the “getting the message out” part. I am overdoing it a bit.
Don’t worry; this is not the text for the talk.

For anybody who plans to attend the session, don’t worry. I am NOT planning to deliver this in the talk and I will talk more about forestry. All this exercise is to build the background for a couple of slides and all this will be reduced to a few sentences. BUT … I will be ready for any questions and I wanted to put this up as reference so anybody interested in more background can read it.

My method for talk preparation is odd. I write all this kind of stuff and read a lot. Then on the day before or even the day of the event I write what I am going to say – long hand – in my pocket notebook. That makes it flow, since I leave out details. I often change the talk even as I am giving it, depending on audience reaction. This was a problem for me in State Department, since my text “as prepared” was often significantly different than my talk as delivered.

My PowerPoint Presentation The slides are included below. They will change before the presentation. It is heavy with pictures, since I don’t think PowerPoint should be text heavy. But that might make it download slower.

John-Matel-_Virginia_Tree_Farm_Foundation_presentatio_Jan-7Download

Everything is always becoming something else
We always have always and always will live in a dynamic environment. Our efforts to understand and act within it change it, so that we never really face the same challenges twice. There is no finish line; there is no stable end goal. Success means sustainable change.

Portfolio or Toolbox Strategy (for an uncertain world)
No technique or media tool will work in all situations. That is why we need to deploy the whole panoply of tools and techniques and know which combinations are best. This is more art than science.  The key is flexibility. Don’t get too enamored with any one thing or develop strategies around one platform. We don’t want a Twitter strategy. We want a strategy that may use Twitter as one of many tools. Carpenters don’t have “hammer strategies.”  They have building strategies that may involve hammers as one of the many tools in the box.

The human equation: bridging the last three feet
When I worked in public diplomacy, our patron saint was Edward R. Murrow, the famous journalist & the greatest director of the United States Information Agency. He observed that our communication technologies could span the globe, but the real persuasion took place in the last three feet – human contact. He lived in the days before Internet. IMO, internet can (although less easily than people think) create or at least sustain the kinds of engaged relationships Murrow was talking about, but we still must build those relationships. There is a cognitive limit to human engagement. We can only keep in real contact with a couple hundred people, although new technologies may expand that number, it does not reach into the millions or even the tens of thousands. That is why we must set priorities. We just cannot love everyone equally and any strategy designed to reach everybody will satisfy nobody.

There is no garden w/o a gardener  
We cannot outsource or compartmentalize our brains or our engagement. The person the communicating must be involved in decisions involving it. There just is no way around this. If we don’t get involved, we cannot make good decisions. Too often, we just try to hire consultants.  Many consultants are good and are worth the money we pay them, but others are like the guy who borrows your watch and then charges to tell we what time it is. If we outsource our decisions, we essentially outsource our intelligence. Then THEY know what we need to know. It is a lot like hiring a guy to look after your spouse. Even if it seems to make her happier, maybe you are not doing playing your part.

BTW – be very wary of pseudo-experts who claim to “speak for” large groups of people or have some kind of inside knowledge that cannot be replicated or properly explained.  If they cannot explain it to we even in broad strokes, they probably don’t understand it themselves and often they are just hucksters protecting their phony baloney jobs.  We have too many such people hanging around us not to trip over them occasionally.

Leverage existing systems and products
Speaking of gardens, we can have a great garden w/o the walls. There are existing communities where we can participate and after we have participated maybe invite others into our own system to participate with us.  Remember that there are always more smart people outside our group – any group – than within it.

I make an effort to write comments on articles about forestry or fire. I am not usually very original or profound. I can usually use the same things over and over. It may seem banal to me, but for most of the readers it is the first time they saw it.

Give up some control
This goes with the above about using and sharing platforms. If you want to influence others, you have to be prepared to be influenced by them. My way or the highway works only in rare instances and if you demand what you think is perfection; you may soon find that you have that perfection all to yourself, since everybody else has wandered away from you.

Be platform flexible
Again speaking of platform sharing, your message is important, not the medium it is delivered on. You have to be flexible enough to choose the appropriate delivery mechanisms and not fall in love with any one of them. They pass quickly. Just ask Jeeves.

Try lots of things and know that most of what you try will fail, usually publicly, sometimes spectacularly
Revel in it. Embrace it. It is impossible to predict outcomes in the new media. Even if you had perfect knowledge of the current situation, it will change in unexpected and unknowable ways. The best strategy is a statistical one of spreading your bets and then responding to changes as they happen, rather than try to set out with certainty in advance. Those who try nothing, get nothing and it is small consolation that they are never wrong.
So, let me sum up before I move on. Technologies are new; human relations are old. Our “new” methods return to an earlier age when communication was engaged, individualized, personal, two-way and interactive. And the lessons of anthropology (people) trump technology (machines.)

How can we make this work?
Forget about mass marketing & advertising analogies. We are not selling something as simple as a can of soda (soda-pop, pop or Coke depending on your part of the country) and we do not have the resources to engage mass markets.

What I am talking about a mass networking proposition, where we build key relationships with opinion leaders and use leverage to allow/encourage others to reach out, who in turn reach out … We cannot reach THE common man (because he doesn’t exist) and we should be careful not to mistake A common man for THE common man.

There are thousands of books and experts who will point to the example of the obscure person who did something great. They are right; but it is easy to pick Bill Gates out of the crowd AFTER he has been wildly successful.  Then it is easy to explain why he succeeded. Of course, millions of others did similar things and did not become the richest man in the world.

They call this survivor bias. In many ways it is like a lottery. We can be sure that SOMEBODY will win the lottery, but we cannot tell who before the drawing. So, we have to play the odds and we cannot treat everybody who buys a lottery ticket like a potential millionaire.

Humans are social creatures who make decisions in contexts of their culture & relationships
We make a big mistake if we treat people as members of undifferentiated masses. Human societies are lumpy. There are relationships that matter more and some that matter less. And they are in a constant state of flux. People make most of their important decisions in social contexts & in consultation with people they trust. Later they might go to some media sources for confirmation or details. Probably the biggest decision we have ever made was buying a home. Did we just read some literature and make an offer? Or did we ask around and talk to people we trusted? How about our cars?  We like to explain our behavior rationally, but looking relationally will provide more reliable assessments.

Information is almost free, and a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention
We now must find or create social context for our message to get attention.  I always laugh (at least to myself) when I hear someone say that “we got the message out” or “We reached a million people”. I am going to start calling this the barking dog strategy, because like the dogs, we just shout “I’m here; I’m here; I’m here. It doesn’t matter what we say; it is what they hear that counts.  If our message does not say the right things, if it doesn’t fit into their cultural and socials contexts and if it is not delivered in an appropriate way, it doesn’t get through.

“Men do not think that they know a thing until they have grasped the ‘why’ of it.” – Aristotle 
Understand – Everything has rules and patterns
I mentioned Aristotle. Let’s go a bit farther east and think of Lao Tzu. He talked about the need to understand the “Tao”, the patterns and logic in all things. Understanding these things could make the most difficult tasks fluid and easy. There are usually easier and harder ways to do things. Sometimes we CREATE more resistance and make less progress by pushing too hard. We should try to understand before we try to persuade. If people have been doing things for a long time, there is a reason. Figure out what that is and persuasion becomes much easier. And always look for the links and relationships. People may not be aware of what drives their own behavior, but it is often linked to social acceptance, and a person’s outlook often changes more based on the perceived future than on the present reality. Aspirations often motivate more than current reality. Find common aspirations.
Let me digress with a fish story from my time in Iraq.  During the late unpleasantness, Coalition forces had to ban fishing on the Euphrates River to prevent insurgents from using the water as a highway. But fishermen didn’t return after the ban was lifted, even though the fish were plentiful and bigger given the no-fishing respite. We thought of helping them buy new boats, nets, sonar etc. But the reason that they weren’t fishing was much simpler – no ice. The ice factory had shut down and in this hot climate if we cannot put the fish on ice, we cannot move them very far or sell them. We helped the ice house back into operation and the fishing started again.

ENGAGE – influencing our community but also being part of it and willing to be influenced 
This story shows the importance of engagement. We also have to get out – physically – and meet people where they are.

Inform & Interpret – turn information into useful knowledge
Engaging is fun and essential, but if we are not doing what we set out to do if we don’t inform and persuade. Since information is almost free, what do I mean by inform? This means turning raw information into useful knowledge and narratives. Even simple facts must be put into contexts. What if we didn’t have any dresser drawers or hangers in our closet? What if we didn’t have any bookshelves or cabinets and all we stuff was just lying on the floor. It would be hard to find things and many things would not be useful.
Turning information into knowledge is like putting things in some order. This usually means framing and narratives.  People understand stories and until they have a story that makes sense, information just sits there, useless as the shirt we cannot find under the pile of dirty clothes. Analytical history, BTW, as opposed to antiquarianism or chronicles is depends almost entirely on framing. The historian must choose what to put in and what to leave out and that makes the story.

So, if we are talking about actual persuasion, it probably won’t help just to make information available. Providing information was a key to success in the past because accurate information was in very short supply. Today what matters is how that information is put together – the contexts, relationships and the narratives.

As persuaders we need to acknowledge what we know, what salesmen and marketers have long understood and what theories of behavioral economics are now explaining. We are not in the information business. Information and facts are part of our raw material, but our business involves persuasion that is less like a library and more like a negotiation paradigm and rational decision making is not enough to achieve success.

I mentioned framing, but I should say a little more. The frame is how we characterize information or events.  If we want to be pejorative, we can sometimes call it spin, but there is no way we can understand complex reality w/o some kind of frame. Most of our frames are unconscious, but that doesn’t mean they are not powerful or pervasive. Think of the ubiquitous sports frame. Describing something like American football, (i.e. centrally planned, stop and start with specialized plays and players) versus football other places (i.e. fluid, fast breaking with the players less specialized) makes a big difference to how it will be perceived. Or think of how we try to frame our presidents. We want our candidate to be in the frame with Lincoln and Washington, Warren G. Harding and Rutherford B Hayes, not so much.

Build a community & be part of a community
Figure out what we can contribute and do it. Remember people make decisions in the contexts of their relationships. Also make sure that we get something back.

The basis of almost all human relationships is reciprocity. All human societies believe in reciprocity. It has survival value. We want to be able to give to our fellow human and expect that he will do the same when we are in need. When that breaks down, so does civil society. It is probably a good idea to be SEEN to get something in return anyway, since if we don’t others will impute an ulterior motive anyway.

I know that this sounds crassly materialistic, but the reciprocity need not be material. We might help a person in the “pay it forward” mode, assuming that when he gets the opportunity he will help somebody else. The reciprocity might just be gratitude. But when a recipient is left w/o some way to reciprocate, a good person feels disrespected. At first, they are happy to get something for nothings, but they soon learn to despise their benefactor. And maybe they should, since his “generosity” is taking their human dignity.
A simple rule in persuasion is that it is often better to receive than to give. Let the other parties feel that they have discharged their social obligations, maybe even that THEY are the generous ones. We notice that the most popular individuals are rarely those who need or want nothing from others, even if they are very generous. And one of the most valuable gifts we can receive is advice and knowledge. Let others share their culture and experience.

Just a few more short points …

Inclusive & Exclusive 
Communities are inclusive for members and exclusive for others. We attract nobody if we appeal to everybody. We must earn membership in any community worth joining.

Personal – or at least personalized
Editors and marketers have tried for years to homogenize for the mass market. That’s how we got soft white Wonder bread and Budweiser beer. Niche markets – and social media is a series of niche markets – require personality.

Reiterate
Success is continuous learning – an iterative  process- not a plan – and a never-ending journey. As I wrote up top, we never get to the end. We must learn from our failures and our successes and move on. The best we can do is make our own ending worth of the start.

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Book Note: The Infidel & the Professor

David Hume and Adam Smith seem like a couple of decent guys. It would be interesting to talk with them, both for the profoundness of their ideas and for their easy-going personalities. Ben Franklin was part of their intellectual set, as was Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, although Johnson was not fond of Hume. That was rare. Evidently almost everybody liked Hume, even if a majority disliked many of his iconoclastic ideas.

Hume was not an atheist. He called himself a skeptic, just not concerned with metaphysics, since he said that there is nothing in this world from which we can infer anything beyond. When faced with the argument for God that the world was made with such perfection, he pointed out the that given the nature of how things work on this earth, one would question the perfection of the workmanship. It is not hard to see why this made his ideas unpopular with the devout.

The book I just finished, “The Infidel and the Professor,” is chocked full of interesting observations and funny stories that illustrate the lives and friendship of Smith and Hume. Adam Smith today is the better known of the pair, but this was the opposite during their lifetimes. Their ideas overlap. Since, Hume was twelve years older than Smith, was an earlier established author and that they were clearly in regular contact, we might postulate that Smith copied from Hume. But we also find some ideas first in Smith. When we think about their intellectual society, however, we may conclude that many of the ideas were widely discussed and that maybe each refined his ideas in that sort of community of knowledge. You recognize similar ideas in Franklin and Burke. Is it really possible for any individual to originate an idea?

From our modern vantage point, it is hard for us to appreciate that what Hume & Smith were advocating was iconoclastic. Good to recall the general truth that all the great thinkers we respect today were breaking with the traditions and people around them. That is why we remember them. What Smith and Hume were saying was not intuitive to people back then.

Smith and Hume postulated that it was the capacity of people to create wealth was the true wealth of a country, not the gold and silver that governments could hoard. Beyond that, they said that it is good to have prosperous and rich neighbors and that everybody gets better off from exchange. This opposed common wisdom of the time, that held that people and individuals got rich by taking from others.

Another idea odd for the time is what we would today call the principle of emergence, that a balanced system (or economy) could emerge from the decisions of many people w/o formal coordination or planning from somebody above. This extended into metaphysical belief systems, hence Hume’s infidel problem, but it also impacted morality.

Both Hume and Smith though commerce could be a positive good. Again, this is something most of us accept today, but the idea was anathema for most of human history. Religion and philosophy tended to disparage and even condemn commerce. Certainly, the higher life involved more selfless pursuits, according to previous religion and philosophy (except maybe Epicurus). Hume said outright that the values of monks and religious asceticism, things like mortification of the flesh, were wasteful and negative. There was nothing intrinsically noble about poverty. You might have to endure it, but you should not impose it on yourself or others just to be good. (I am with Hume on this. I believe strongly that we should be willing to sacrifice and suffer to attain a goal we consider worthy, and comfort alone is not a high-level goal, but I just as strongly believe that suffering for the sake of suffering is pathological. I recall the story of one Simeon Stylites, whose claim to sainthood was that he went out into the desert and sat on top of a pillar for 37 years. While I respect his determination, it is virtue wasted and not to be admired.)

Hume was a skeptic about more than religion. He was also a skeptic about the power of reason. He wrote that we can use reason as a tool to achieve our values, but that our values are based on something other than our reason. This is a good formulation. There are limits to both. G.K. Chesterton, like Hume more famous in his own time than now, wrote “A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason.”

An interesting note on Smith. He is famous for “Wealth of Nations,” and so thought of a father of capitalism. But a strictly hands-off system is not what he advocates. He wrote that a strong and efficient government was necessary for prosperity. Government needed to provide security, protect that rule of law, promulgate reasonable regulation and help provide for those who could not provide for themselves. He simply points out through argument and example that governments are simply unable to make detailed plans for the economy or society. Government creates conditions by which people themselves can make decisions for their own prosperity.

Another interesting point is that Smith’s more famous work, and the one he edited until his death, was “Theory of Moral Sentiments.” It is a little hard to read the book today because of changes in language and style in the recent centuries, but this is a real advice book on living a good life. It is reasonable and useful. I would recommend this book, maybe in a modernized and abridged form. I also recommend “The Infidel and the Professor.” It is worth the time.

* Note – I acknowledge the contribution of my friend David R. Remer, who provoked me to read “Theory of Moral Sentiments” some many years ago.

amazon.com   The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought

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Year of Days January 2

Another uneventful day.  Very cold, cold enough to discourage walking outside.
I spent much of the day working on my presentation for the tree farm leadership conference, but made little progress.  This was not a complete loss or many not a loss at all.  As I prepared, I followed lots of side paths with very interesting factors.

Chrissy and I went to see a movie at Tysons – “the Post” about the Washington Post publishing the Pentagon Papers.  Good movie.

The Worms Crawl In
History up Close
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Year of Days – January 1

January 01, 2018
Resolved to make notes every day plus find previous notes and post.
No matter how prosaic, every day.
This new years day I worked on my presentation for the Tree Farm Leadership Conference at end of the month.  the going is slow.  I am making slides for the 50 minute presentation.  I have too many things to write and cannot make it fit.
It was very cold today, the kind of day when the wind hurts.
Went to the gym today and ran on the machine for around 30 minutes or 500 calories, while watching “the Great Courses” on Turning Points in Middle Eastern History.
Had  Digiorno pizza for both lunch and supper, leftover the second time.
January 01, 2014
Stickin it to the Man
I have been complaining about how independent-minded people cannot get along in the big bureaucratic organizations as long as I have been working in big-bureaucratic organizations. It is getting to thirty years now and I have been getting along reasonable well in big-bureaucratic organizations. For an even longer time, I have been reading books about independent-minded reformers bucking the system to change the paradigms and make meaningful changes.
I always identified with the plucky outsiders. Most of us do. It is the American way. You can easily see it in the plots of so many movies and books. A group of misfits is picked on and oppressed by the powerful and/or popular people. They continue to do things their way and by the end of the movie are vindicated. As I said, most of us identify with the underdogs and misfits.
It can’t be right. There are more than 300 million Americans and ALL of us are rebels? If all of us are a little different and a little rebellious, who are we rebelling against? And if the group of misfits comes out on top, don’t they become the in-group. Maybe it is the nerds and the theater kids oppressing the jocks.
I have been reading another of those business-management-behavior books that gives another set of examples about the rebels working on their own turning the tables on the established and powerful. But, as I wrote, I have been reading these sorts of books for a long time. The names are changed and the exact circumstances are different, but the stories are the same. My study of old books tells me that this story has been going on for as long as people could write. Each of the new renditions makes it seem like it is a new discovery, but maybe this is just the way it is, has been and ever will be.
In my own lifetime, I have seen many of “rebels” turn into the establishment that needs to be overturned by new rebels. These erstwhile rebels in general did not “sell out.” They simply solved the problems presented them. Yesterday’s solutions are often today’s problem, which implies that today’s solutions will be tomorrow’s problems. This seems depressing at first glance and it could be, but I don’t think it is. It is simply a matter of growth and change.
Many of the problems of my youth have indeed been solved and the world is generally a much better place than it was back in 1973. Our generation actually did pretty well. I have reasonable confidence that it will be a better place in 2053 than it is today, i.e. the kids will be all right too. But people will still complain, because people complain. We can always imagine better.
I have been complaining about how hard it is for independent-minded folks like me to make it in the organization. People like me like to “stick it to the man.” But in the course of all my complaining, suffering and strife, I realize now that I have become the man, or at least one of them. People see me like I saw my bosses of the past. I now understand that my old bosses too were surprised by their own apotheosis or demonization, depending on who was doing the taking and when. These successful folks were – in their own minds – the plucky outsiders who had to push open doors and make the system change. Some were right.
It is a little deflating but nevertheless comforting to realize that we – we plucky outsiders – we are the system, maybe too much to say bricks in the wall but not too much to say links in a chain. It is a great strength of our American system that we can easily absorb good people and ideas from outside the current establishment. We actually live in a state of constant revolution, but w/o the nasty bits associated with those things that happened in France or Russia.
It doesn’t work in spite of us but because of us. We “rebels” sometimes don’t admit it or even see it. The system works with us and we work with it.  The energy of our discontent is part of its lifeblood. We never get all we think possible because we can envision better than anyone can achieve and it is a moving target. As soon as we get to a place we thought impossible, we start thinking it is normal, deserved and maybe not enough.
Well, looking around on this first day of 2014, I see that things are pretty good. Can I envision better? Of course I can. Is it better than I envisioned by in 1974? Hell yeah. We solved the energy crisis, brought down world communism, reduced absolute poverty by 80%, cut cancer deaths, greatly improved water and air quality, brought back species such as wolves & eagles; the population bomb fizzled; Lake Erie turned out not to be dead and we even got rid of disco & leisure suits. Those were things I worried about back then, I thought there were no good solutions; fortunately, I was wrong.
And still can stick it to the man. Take a look at this clip.
 
d by Broadnax at 08:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
January 01, 2012
How Violence Has Declined & Why we Didn’t Notice
Stephen Pinker is my favorite living philosopher of society.  Some would correct me and say that he is a scientist and not a philosopher, but the two can overlap extensively.  With all due respect to the ancient philosophers that I read and loved, many of the questions that perturbed them are now just “simple” matters of science.  For example, philosophers argued back and forth for years as to whether humans were “blank slates” influenced only by their environments or whether they were determined by physical or genetic factors. Recent advances in science have made this argument mute.
People are born pre-programed.  A variety of talents, abilities, habits are inherited to some extent.  On the other hand, within these constraints human behavior and preferences are highly mutable.  (Science proved what any perceptive parent of more than one child already knew.)  I take this to mean that you can have a lot of freedom to change things if you recognize and work with nature, its gifts and constraints.
That is what I liked about Steven Pinker’s book the Blank Slate when I read it about ten years ago.  At first you might feel a little discouraged.   Pinker points out that human propensity to violence, intolerance & sloth were bred into us during evolution.  Humans of the stone age who didn’t react quickly and violently to threats didn’t usually live long enough to become our ancestors.   The good news is that institutions of civilization and social constraints can (and have) made us behave in ways that are – well – more civilized and socially acceptable.
I just started reading Pinker’s recent book, the Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.  I suppose that good intellectual rigor would dictate that I actually finish the book before commenting on the ideas, but I have read several reviews and I just finished reading an interview with the author in Veja that got me thinking about this.  There is a good recent interview here.  The best quick background is Pinker’s TED talk.  (BTW – TED lecture are really interesting in general.)
Pinker studied statistics on violent deaths. Of course, there are no statistics on Stone Age people in the actual Stone Age, but it is possible to study more modern Stone Age people. It turns out that murder rates among primitive people about which we have records are astronomical. It is a myth that people were good and later corrupted by civilization. Civilization civilizes, and it is better than the alternative “natural man.”
Historical records are spotty at first, but it is clear that life was much more dangerous and violent in any ancient or medieval period we study. Death was a penalty for all sorts of minor crimes. And was often inflicted in the cruelest way possible. Torture was common. Entertainments were cruel and bloody. But things improved, at least in the west.
Despite the great wars and murder on an industrial scale, the 20th Century has been the least violent in history.  Of course, more total numbers of people have been killed, but that is because there are more total people.  The proportions are way down.
Most people can vouch for this, if they think about it for even a short time. It is only in recent times that most of the population could expect to live a long-life w/o ever being the victim of the deadly violence that was common to all humankind in the past.
Pinker has to take a lot of crap for pointing out the truth.  One reason is simply because most people like to think they live in the most challenging times.  Beyond that, we have much better reporting.  If a couple people are killed in nasty ways anywhere in the country and increasingly the world, we get graphic and memorable details on the news.
A counterintuitive reason might be that things are actually improving so quickly that it makes the remaining problems seem that much worse.  We repent much more sorrowfully the fewer acts of terrible violence because they seem more personal.   “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic,” is as quote attributed to Stalin, who understood how to kill individuals and millions. It is nasty, but perhaps accurate. We get inured to lots of violence and more afraid of a little.
Pinker also has to face what we might call the miserly industry.  Politicians selling programs and NGOs seeking donations need to paint the in the direst colors.   Pinker is a brave man to take this on.
Of course, why violence has declines is important. What goes down in human behavior could go back up.  Pinker does not think the explanation is that humans have improved, or human nature has changed. He is too much a scientist to think these things.  He does not try to make a comprehensive explanation, but he mentions some possibilities.  The first is the rise of stable states.  He doesn’t use the word strong, but prefers competent in the sense of keeping order and satisfying the basic needs of its people. Competent states must be strong, but not all strong states are competent. Nazis & communists had strong states.
Another explanation is free trade.  In one of the interviews, Pinker quoted that “we can’t bomb the Japanese because they make my minivan.”  Free trade goes with communications. The more we see people are being like us, the less likely we can treat them as sub-human.
We may be less violent because there is less incentive. Hunter-gatherers are always ready for violence. They sometimes commit violence because they fear violence from others and sometimes just to rip off their neighbors, which is one reason everybody fears violence from others.   War used to be profitable, at least for the winners.  Not so much anymore.  Finally, there is a prosaic reason of habit. Many of us have lost the habit of using violent solutions.
I don’t think violence or war will ever go away, but we have seen less of it.  I have never been a victim of serious violence. I felt it personally when Alex was a hate crime victim. This is the kind of senseless thing you cannot purge. His attackers didn’t know him or try to rob him. They merely acted out of the dark demons of human nature. I saw war in Iraq and like many observers, I was stuck by the banality of violence.  I saw violence drop not because of persuasion but mostly because the Marines and our Iraqi allies established predictable order.
Violence and disorder always lurks under our veneer of civilization. The threat never is gone. We have to work all the time to channel the primitive passions and animal desires.  I say “channel” not suppress. These impulses are sources of our energy and creativity.  The uncivilized human is not evil or sinful, as was widely thought in some religious circles, but neither is there any such thing as a noble savage.  Both these notions have caused great misery, as have the ideas that human behavior is determined by genetics or that humans are blank slates on to which society can stamp any design.
Life provides us with a never-ending series of constrained choices. It is certainly not true that anything is possible, but making good choices can expand our contentment as well as our ability to make more good choices. Some human problems are intractable, and some “problems” are not really problems in the sense that they cannot be solved. If we ask the wrong questions, we will come up with the wrong answers. We will never achieve a society where everybody is equal because people are not equal.  We will never achieve a society w/o violence because people have propensity to selfishness which sometimes leads to violence.
But if we recognize constraints, we can achieve better results. “Going back” to a more primitive society is not an option. It would add to misery. Life was nasty, brutish and short in earlier periods.  Going “forward” to a utopia is also not possible.  Life is actually pretty good for most people in our Western market democracies and it is getting better for those in the developing world. Maybe we will just have to manage with what we have.
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January 01, 2011
Bean Soup
My father subsisted on pea soup and bean soup, more or less, for the last twenty years of his life, those things plus some Polish sausage and almost ripe tomatoes. Making them is easy and cheap. The biggest challenge is remembering to soak the beans/peas overnight. You can use leftover ham as a base, or the parts of the ham that you didn’t want to eat because they were too fat or too hard to pick off the bone. You can see why this is such a wonderful peasant food.  It stays good for a long time. In fact, it improves with age.  Nothing is wasted.  You can also toss in whatever vegetables were laying around.  It all turns into a kind of thick gruel that tastes pretty good if you put in a little pepper and salt.
I don’t make these soups as much as I did when I was in college. Back in college pea soup and bean soup were among the foods that had the three attributes I craved: they were cheap, reasonably nutritious and I could make them. That is probably why my father ate them all the time too.  But my kids don’t like either, so they cannot form the basis of a family meal.  As I recall, I didn’t like them either when I was a kid. I learned to like them when I was in college. No doubt under my father’s influence, I made it from scratch, the less expensive and better way, rather than buying the pre-made stuff in cans.
You can get pea soup at some nice restaurants, but it is kind of a specialty not common most places.
We had ham for supper and we have ham bone left over, so today I made bean soup.  In a couple of days, I will make some pea soup with what still will be left of the ham.  This week, we will dine like the old man taught me.
Oh yeah, he used to make cabbage soup too. I haven’t made that for a long time. No matter how much of this kind of food you try to eat, you really cannot get fat on it.  These kinds of food fill you up before they can fill you out – the original diet food.
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January 01, 2009
Unity & Sweet Liberty
We will never again be as united as we were in 1965.   It was a time of an unusual confluence of factors.   The older generations had the unifying experiences of the Great Depression, New Deal and World War II.   Think of what those things did.  Millions of young men and women came together in a common cause such as the CCC in the 1930s and the military in the 1940s.   Never before and never since have so many people shared such intimate similar life-changing experiences.

They and the younger generation were further tied together (homogenized) by the miracle of television.    The limited choice among TV channels ensured that large percentages of the population watched the same things at the same times.   (Not many baby boomers know words to the “Star Spangled Banner” but most can sing the theme song to “Gilligan’s Island.”)  America had also had successfully digested the waves of immigrations that hit our shores in the early 20th Century.  Immigration restrictions and the Great Depression had limited new immigration and so America has a smaller percentage of immigrants among its population than at any other time in its history.  Other “unity” things were also strong.  Church attendance was very high.  Most adult males had connections to the VFW.   Membership in industrial and trade unions has never been higher.  It seemed a golden age for the “ordinary guy.”

American dominance of the world was unique.  We bounced out of the Depression after WWII at a time when most of the other world economies were in ruins.  At some points, the U.S. produced around half of ALL the world’s production.  Nothing like like that had ever been possible before and is unlikely to ever happen again anywhere.  It resulted from the perfect storm of industrialization, depression and war.  Communist domination of large parts of the world ensured that many places remained uncompetitive and backward for longer than necessary.   Speaking of communism, we cannot forget the Cold War.   The threat of nuclear annihilation focused the minds of those generations and facing a benighted, yet dangerous enemy together leads to shared identify.
When we look back at the two decades after WWII, we sometimes see stifling conformity and we unavoidably cast our glance forward to the divisive and challenging times to come.   But we still look l back to the lost feelings of comfort and community and imagine how we could recreate it along with today’s diversity and options for individual expression.  This is an impossible dream.

Above is Union Station in Washington DC.  Such self-conscious permanence in public building is less common now.
First of all, the conditions that created the post-war unity were unique.   They cannot be recreated and nobody would advocate going through the suffering of depression, war and totalitarian threats to try to foster the preconditions.   Periods of growth following challenging ordeals are often pleasant, but you might not want to throw yourself into a pool of ice water just to feel the pleasure of warming up again.
But most important is that we don’t want it.   Unity and diversity are both good things, but they are in tension.   As in those economics curves, there is a point where you can maximize both, but you do have to trade them off against each other.   We have chosen less unity than we used to want back in 1965.   This has implications.
More choice creates more innovation and economic growth.   But making reasonable predictions about the future becomes harder.   It also complicates provision of insurance & welfare benefits, as diversity lessens trust.   In a homogenous community, people understand each other.   Homogeneous communities are also usually relatively small, so people can monitor and balance abuses.  They are reasonably certain that their social outlays are, if not well spent, at least decently targeted.  It is no coincidence that the most successful welfare states are/were in homogeneous Scandinavian countries and that they have begun to breakdown in the face of globalization and immigration of new and different people.
Talking about a “caring” (i.e. one that takes care of you as an individual) government in a place as big and diverse as the U.S. is an oxymoron.    We gave that possibility up long ago and we should stop pretending that is what we want.  Our choices have made that impossible.   What we have demonstrated we want through the choices we have made is a government that ensures reasonable justice and the rule of law, provides for the common defense and provides options.     If you want to put this into more beautiful language you might say, “… in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity …”   it is astonishing how long that formula has remained viable.
So in this new year when it looks like we will be asking a lot from our government, we should pause to remember that we should not ask too much, and it is not only because we should ask not what our country can do for us, but ask what we can do for our country.   Let’s not grab for that remembered unity that we never can recreate or ask for guarantees of prosperity that nobody can provide.  If you give government the power to grant all your wishes, you also give it the power to take them away. It is tempting to trade liberty for security, but w/o liberty sustained security is impossible.
Happy 2009!
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