In Which I Plump for þe Humanities…

& BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-01-20 Th

CONDITION: Inflation:

Oil prices do what they do. Meat-processing and such became much more dangerous occupations, without becoming more highly paid, during the plague. Moter vehicles… as I see it, the producers (save Elon Musk) decided that they would cartelize by accepting their chip allocations, rather than bid for more chips. A clear place, IMHO, where antitrust policy would more likely than not have made some difference for inflation.

I look at this graph, and I still find myself on Team Transitory and Team The-Fed-Has-Got-It…

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First: In Which I Plump for the Humanities…

Adam Gurri: My 2021 in Writing: ‘I finally put to bed the idea, towards which I once had a strong affinity, that we simply needed more education in the humanities rather than focusing on techno-scientific solutions. I discussed why the notion is appealing, and why the humanities are important sources of wisdom, but also why its proponents fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the problem that they think they can solve better than technocrats…

LINK:

My 2021 in Writing

Adam Gurri: No Solutions: ‘To the evangelist of the humanities, there is the temptation to believe that one can obtain practical wisdom from Homer, or Hume, or Hofstader. To the populist, all that is needed is for the people to truly assert their sovereignty…. One simply needs to get the right set of people on the task… The great and the good works of the humanities are not guidebooks for action. They provide a path to understanding… the possibility but not the guarantee of wisdom itself…. Engineers and scientists simply focus on a class of problems we can make clear, concrete progress on…. Moving beyond the naïveté of the technocrat does not mean turning to the humanities or to the masses; it means accepting that… human relations, like the human soul, always have some gaping hole…. We do the best we can with what we have, and hope that that is enough…

LINK:

No Solutions

Any kind of useful psychological theory is—at least today—crystallized narrative, whether fictional or nonfictional narrative. There may some day be other kinds of psychological theory useful for shedding light on how to accomplish the tasks of organizing humans, but at the moment we are not there yet.

Similarly, any kind of useful economic, political, or sociological theory is—at least today—and can be nothing other than crystallized history. Perhaps, again sometime in the far future, there will be other kinds of useful history, but we are not there yet.

Thus I think the very sharp Adam Gurri has it wrong here. He accuses humanists of being technocrats, with the only difference that being that the humanist technocrats they choos—people like Homer, Hume, and Hofstadter—claim to have a different kind of knowledge then do the high priests of engineering and cost-benefit analysis. In my view, knowledge of the people in the second class is indeed here is how we solve these certain classes of problems. The knowledge, however, of the people in the first class is of a very different order: it is, rather, here are psychological and historical narratives about the problems that people have faced, and how they have tried and usually failed to solve them. There is an important distinction here. It is the kind of thing that can lead someone to say that wall reading Benjamin Graham on principles evaluation was very useful for their financial sector job, reading analysis of texts written about mediæval witchcraft was even more valuable.

Turning to the humanities—to psychological and historical narratives—is indeed, a think, the Royal Road to characterizing the gaping holes in human relations and the human soul that so bedevil us.

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One Video:

Pat Gelsinger, David C. Brock, & Doug Fairbairn: Oral History of Pat Gelsinger <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTKkY2kZuEw>:

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One Picture: The Arming of Akhilleus:

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Very Briefly Noted:

• Timothy B. Lee: 18 Charts that Explain the American Economy <https://fullstackeconomics.com/18-charts-that-explain-the-american-economy/>

• The WE’LL: What is The WE’LL? <https://www.well.com/about-2/>

• Charlotte Hill & al.: Democrats Must Reform the Electoral Count Act & Pass Comprehensive Voting Rights Legislation <https://www.democracydocket.com/news/democrats-must-reform-the-electoral-count-act-and-pass-comprehensive-voting-rights-legislation/>

• Emily Badger: Upshot: Frenzy in Home Prices: ‘Something Has to Give in the Housing Market. Or Does It? There appears to be no quick reprieve coming for rising prices: “It’s not a bubble, it really is about the fundamentals… <https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?CCPAOptOut=true&emc=edit_up_20220120&instance_id=50825&nl=the-upshot&productCode=UP&regi_id=64675225&segment_id=80254&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2Fafd86f32-a65b-5b94-bc08-b5e110716d0c&user_id=8a3fce2ae25b5435f449ab64b4e3e880>

• Aaron Rupar: “Journalists Who Write About Fox News Don’t Watch Fox News”: ‘Professional Fox-watchers Matt Negrin and Bobby Lewis on the future of right-wing TV and the scary gaps in mainstream coverage of its excesses…

"Journalists who write about Fox News don’t watch Fox News"

• Jeet Heer: False Dichotomy in the Fascism Debate: ‘Both street violence and elite co-operation are on the path to fascist power…

False Dichotomy in the Fascism Debate

• Abdul El-Sayed: The Omicron Paradox: ‘What omicron should teach us about collectivism: what may be less severe for individuals has been more severe for society…

The omicron paradox.

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Paragraphs:

Bret Devereaux: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part I: Words: ‘At the same time, writers in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries did not stop writing (or stop reading). Much of the literature of this period was religious in nature, but that is no reason to dismiss it (far more of the literature of the Classical world was religious in nature than you likely think, by the by). St. Augustine of Hippo was writing during the fifth century; indeed his The City of God, one of the foundational works of Christian literature, was written in response to the news of the sack of Rome in 410. Isidore of Seville (560–636) was famous for his Etymologies, an encyclopedia of sorts which would form the foundation for much of medieval learning and which in its summaries preserves for us quite a lot of classical bits and bobs which would have otherwise been lost; he also invented the period, comma and colon. Pope Gregory I (540–604) was also a prolific writer, writing hundreds of letters, a collection of four books of dialogues, a life of St. Benedict, a book on the role of bishops, a commentary on the Book of Job and so on. The Rule of St. Benedict, since we’ve brought the fellow up, written in 516 established the foundation for western monasticism…

LINK: <https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/>

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Henry Farrell (2015): A Brief Theory of Very Serious People: ‘Being a Very Serious Person is about occupying a structural position that tends to reinforce, rather than counter, one’s innate biases and prejudices…. VSPs face less incentive either to second guess their errors as they are making them, or to think through their errors after they have made them, because collective structures reinforce their tendency to think that they are right in the first instance, and their tendency to think that they ought to have been right (if it weren’t for those inconvenient facts/specific and contingent circumstances that meant that things didn’t go quite as predicted just this once) in the second…. Democracy when it works… harnesses mulishness and rancorous dispute to reveal… information… latent in the disagreements…. When certain people’s perspectives are privileged, the value of democracy is weakened…. Vicious feedback loops of self-satisfied yet consequential ignorance (as in the Iraq war)…

LINK: <https://crookedtimber.org/2015/07/22/a-brief-theory-of-very-serious-people/>

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Jason Snell: Google Has It All Wrong. Apple’s iMessage Is Actually a Failure: ‘iMessage’s role is to provide a solid, end-to-end encrypted service for the Apple ecosystem that (secondarily) can coexist with SMS messages…. It works. It’s better than anything Google has attempted. The problem is, it’s not good enough…. The reason that I consider iMessage more of a failure than success is all about its slow pace of development and poor choices, especially compared with the WhatsApps and WeChats of the world…. Apple recently introduced replies and mentions to iMessage. They’re… not great? But I appreciate the attempt. I hope Apple is working on new tweaks to improve the experience–but my fear is that it will just walk away from that feature, too, and it’ll sit there being not-quite-right for all eternity. Which is not to say that Apple hasn’t had its successes with iMessage. Apple Pay Cash (again, only available in the U.S.!) is pretty great, and I use it all the time. And Tapbacks might be Apple’s single best iMessage feature ever. But even when Apple gets a clear iMessage win, it ends up muddy…

LINK: <https://www.macworld.com/article/606152/imessage-google-green-bubbles-sms-rcs.html>

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Josh Barro: Here’s What I Mean When I Say Biden Should ‘Focus on the Economy’: ‘Here are some things the president is doing, and some things he should be doing or should be doing better, to address the supply crunch, bring prices down, and make goods and services more available in a short enough time frame to matter politically: Issue visas for more workers…. Remove Trump’s trade restrictions…. Improve port capacity and domestic goods transportation capacity…. Look for dumb regulations that are creating shortages or raising prices…

LINK:

Here's what I mean when I say Biden should 'focus on the economy'

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Frederick Douglass as the Apostle of American Nationalism

I posted this piece early this Thursday morning: Frederick Douglass’s pro-immigration pro-assimilation speech from 1869:

READING: Frederick Douglass (1869): Our Composite Nationality

The ‘nut ‘graph:

Our greatness and grandeur will be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality…. Gathered here, from all quarters of the globe by a common aspiration for rational liberty as against caste, divine right governments and privileged classes… it would be madness to set up any one race above another, or one religion above another, or proscribe any on account of race color or creed…. Though they come as the waves come, we shall be stronger if we receive them as friends and give them a reason for loving our country and our institutions…. The points of human difference, great as they, upon first sight, seem, are as nothing compared with the points of human agreement. Such contact would remove mountains of prejudice…. The voice of civilization speaks an unmistakable language against the isolation of families, nations and races, and pleads for composite nationality as essential to her triumphs…

This is a perfect example of what I call the Massachusetts strain of American nationalism.

Another example is to be found in George Kennan’s article on The Sources of Soviet Conduct:

The possibilities for American policy are by no means limited to holding the line and hoping for the best…. It is rather a question of the degree to which the United States can create among the peoples of the world generally the impression of a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power, and which has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time…. The palsied decrepitude of the capitalist world is the keystone of Communist philosophy…. Exhibitions of indecision, disunity and in- ternal disintegration within this country have an exhilarating effect on the whole Communist movement….

Thus the decision will really fall in large measure in this country itself. The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the over-all worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation. Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this…. The thoughtful observer… will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.

LINK: <http://slantchev.ucsd.edu/courses/pdf/Kennan%20-%20The%20Sources%20of%20Soviet%20Conduct.pdf>

And I have a perfect example of the Kentucky strain of American nationalism—that only frontiersmen who reject urbanity, civilization, and book-larnin’ for the survivalist arts of self-reliance are really Americans: <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/02/the-kentucky-strain-of-american-nationalism-from-j-william-ward-andrew-jackson-symbol-for-an-age/comments/> <https://archive.org/details/andrewjacksonsym0000unse>.

But I do not have a good example of the Virginia strand—the strand that is neither A Holy People Building Utopia Together Here in the New World nor A Special People Trained by the Frontier, but rather the Dammit I Can Do What I Want and Nobody Else—No Government, No Neighbor—Can Stop Me.

Any suggestions?

I very much want to write an article on these three strands of American nationalism, and I will be unable to write a good one—or even to give a good American-nationalism lecture—until I find a good example and representative for the Virginia strand.

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UPDATE: glc comments:

Patrick Henry? " With respect to that part of the proposal which says that every power not granted remains with the people, it must be previous to adoption, or it will involve this country in inevitable destruction. ... Among ten thousand implied powers which they may assume, they may, if we be engaged in war, liberate every one of your slaves if they please…”