I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted here, and I still don’t have a full post together.  But I would like to write briefly about a book I read recently, Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto.

In the book, Gawande advocates for the use of checklists as a means of improving outcomes in medicine.  He bases his analysis on three key cases:  The use of coordination checklists to ensure essential communication between the parts of a construction team, the use of “read-do” and “do-confirm” checklists (routine and contingency) in the airline industry (with a particular look at the case of US Airways Flight 1549, the recent “Miracle on the Hudson”), and the design and testing of the World Health Organization’s Safe Surgery Checklist.

The book is a great example of popular nonfiction:  The information is interesting, the narrative is compelling, and the argument is sound.  The tradeoffs involved in the WHO’s design process were also interesting to me as an engineer.  A checklist (in this use) isn’t an algorithm for amateurs, but a tool to help someone who already has a great deal of expertise.  The key is to identify the tasks where a reminder is of greatest benefit; maximize the product of the likelihood that a checklist item will avoid a task being missed by the magnitude of the consequences if it is overlooked.  Extremely high-level goals often end up omitted, since they won’t be forgotten in any case.  On the other hand, sometimes important things are easy to forget in crisis situations; the subject line of this post comes from a checklist for restarting a dead jet engine (the result, one hopes, of some embarassing simulator incidents).  When the tasks themselves are unknown, the key is identifying which communication tasks have the highest probability of identifying serious potential problems before they actually occur, so the risk can be mitagated.

If you’re intersted in medicine or engineering or like reading nonfiction in general, read it.

 

There’s a lot of talk about the US debt ceiling and whether that will be raised or not by the August 2 deadline.  The odd thing about this is that it’s always framed in terms of an impending default, when it’s not clear that will happen at all.  Especially when that’s expressly prohibited by the US Constitution (Amendment 14, Section 4):

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

Clearly, the amendment addresses debt in the context of the Civil War in particular, but it’s not unreasonable to read that as a blanket prohibition on a default on treasury bonds.  So on August 2, absent legislation, we’ll be in the following state:

1. Congress has said “no more borrowing”.
2. Congress has determined how money can be printed, and the answer is “not without more borrowing” (money is printed by the Fed and exchanged for new Treasury Bonds).
3. Congress has specified the amount of taxes to be taken in.
4. Congress has specified how much is to be spent and on what.  (But it’s a higher amount than the revenues provided for in 2!)
5. Treasury Bonds specify when they need to be repaid and for how much, and the Constitution says Congress can’t just decide to not pay those.  (There are also a few other obligations the Constitution says Congress can’t decide not to pay, including judicial salaries.)

That’s an odd state, as of yet untested under US law.  Clearly, something’s got to give.  The executive department must faithfully meet conditions 1-5, which is impossible.  The Constitution gives only Congress the authority to alter 1-4, and no one the authority to alter 5.

Since the debt ceiling law and the most recent budget are in some sense contradictory, and Congress is the one with the power to alter those conditions, I think the relevant question is how to interpret the actions of Congress regarding those laws.  I can think of a two reasonable possibilities:

One: The budget implicitly raises the debt ceiling to cover the difference between revenues and expenses, since otherwise that law would be requiring the impossible.  (Bill Clinton seems to take almost this view, but it’s a way better argument to suggest that Congress implicitly loosened 4 than to say the Constitution gives the president the authority to violate 1 in order to fulfill 5.  Both are required by the Constitution, it would be quite an ass-pull to say that Am. 14 Sec. 4 gives additional emergency borrowing powers to the Executive Branch.)

Two: The debt ceiling law, unless explicitly repealed, implicitly limits spending after the debt ceiling is reached to revenues taken in.  The budget didn’t amend that restriction, so the restriction still applies.  Unfortunately, the debt ceiling law doesn’t specify what spending to cut or how that should be decided.  But a reasonable assumption might be that the Executive Branch (the Secretary of the Treasury?) would have the authority.

That puts the power in the right constitutional place:  When Congress passed the last budget, they either intended increased borrowing or decreased spending, they can’t have both.  That’s what should happen.  Of course, it’s not ideal for courts to try to interpret laws that are either overly vague or logically impossible, but it’s not the courts’ fault that Congress failed to do at least one of those in this case.

Some have suggested that the debt ceiling law is unconstitutional because they view all spending as sacrosanct under Am. 14 Sec. 4.  There’s a good take-down of that argument by Professor Lawrence Tribe, here.  His counter-argument is sort of like my second case above, except he doesn’t claim that “bend 4 to satisfy 1-3” is implicit in the budget, he just cites legal precedent.  (I like my argument a bit better, but Tribe’s argument certainly beats Clinton’s, and I’m willing to defer to his expertise.)  I also agree with the caveat on his conclusion:

I do not mean to suggest that, if it becomes necessary for the President to prioritize expenditures, the President is free to use whatever priorities he likes. First, the Constitution itself requires giving some expenditures (such as the payment of judicial salaries, Art. III, § 1, or payments on the public debt, Amdt. XIV, § 4) priority over others. Second, even if circumstances make it impossible for the President to obey the anti-line item veto rule announced in Clinton v. New York, he must do his best to honor the principles animating that rule: namely, using the line item veto to give the President unbounded power over spending would allow the Chief Executive to reward political allies and punish political adversaries. The President may not, for example, prioritize spending in blue states over spending in red states. Within those constitutional boundaries, however, it is up to the President to determine how spending must be prioritized when it becomes impossible to comply with all of the President’s legal obligations simultaneously.

I don’t know if that’s a reasonable prediction of what would actually happen if the debt ceiling failed to be raised.  Obama would have the first move, so if he did something other than prioritize spending, the courts would have to react to that instead.

And it’s not clear that such a “default” (not actually a default!) will happen.  There are still possible ways to avoid that, including congress actually raising the debt ceiling, or harebrained schemes in which Congress restores the “out of power party futilely opposes the debt limit raise” status quo by handing over the raise-the-debt-limit power to the Executive, reserving for Congress enough power to oppose Obama’s decision but not enough to actually succeed.

(Also, if all this media default hullabaloo has you thinking about fleeing to gold or some such, you should find this Moldbug piece interesting.)

Recently, there’s been this human-interest story making the rounds about some parents who have decided not to disclose the gender of their latest child, Storm.  Unsurprisingly to me, the couple in question was influenced by X: A Fabulous Child’s Story, published in 1978.1  I’ve been a fan of that story since I first heard it in middle school and think it makes a good point:  Children don’t need everyone telling them what they should be doing (in relation to gender roles) for them to develop an understanding of who they are.2  In modern American society, at any rate, people care about the gender of young children with an intensity that makes little sense.  I once saw a video in a psych class where parents introduced their infant to strangers by differently gendered names, a small difference which colored the entire interaction so intensely that the resulting film was rather comedic.  What’s in a name, indeed?

However, that’s not the end of that case.  As Reddit commenter Majoribanks notes:

[…] it doesn’t actually sound like they ARE giving their kids such an unbiased choice. It sounds like they really really really want radical genderqueer show-off children to support their own worldview.

I mean, they say this: “What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It’s obnoxious” but then also this “The boys are encouraged to challenge how they’re expected to look and act based on their sex.”

The two are in direct opposition to each other. These kids don’t go to school, and don’t interact with people outside their family very much or for long amounts of time. Their parents “encouraging” them to “challenge” their gender expectations is basically tantamount to telling them “you should act like girls to please mommy and daddy!” I mean, if their sons ask for a pretty frilly dress and the parents respond with “of course! you look so wonderful in it!” but if they ask for a machine gun they get “do you really want to conform to expectations for boys to be so violent” instead, how is that any sort of meaningful choice?

That phrase seems to explain, to me anyway, why BOTH their sons want to have longer hair and wear pink and purple and glitter, when even their parents have short hair and don’t wear makeup. Most kids who DO play with makeup, girls included, do it because they see their mother and female relatives doing it.

That comment really reminded me of another blog post from earlier this year, written by Heather Soersdal:

So, here’s my mistake: I never should have written the post about my gender conforming kids in response to the posts about the gender nonconforming kids. […] What I know now is that I had no idea of the scope and scale of this my-son-acts-girly blogging phenomenon and just how truly offensive it is. I’m embarrassed to have taken any part in it.

As it turns out, there are a lot of blogs like this. Like, a lot. […]

They all have 2 things in common: they’re all about boys who act feminine, and the boys are all prepubescent and in some cases barely emerging from toddlerhood. Nobody’s concerned with girls who like boy things even though some of them could be gay, too (gasp) and anyone with a copy of What To Expect the Toddler Years ought to know better than to start a career writing about gender nonconformity in a child who is too young even to have any real solid idea of how to be gender conforming.

Girls aren’t an issue because girls acting like boys are considered to be expanding their horizons and even promoting themselves. Femininity in women isn’t assumed to be innate, but learned behavior (see: charm schools, every womens’ magazine ever). Therefore, masculinity in women is not assumed to be innate but as contrived as femininity and possibly semi-rebellious behavior that will probably get her far in life if cripple her chances of getting a husband. Boys acting like girls, however, are immediately assumed to be acting on innate feminine impulses that are probably connected to them wanting to date other boys. Mens’ genders are real, womens’ genders are faked. [… no seriously I’m omitting a lot here …] There’s no need to assume anything about a child’s sexual orientation and if anything there’s a need not to obsess over it. Planning this far into a child’s future simply does not make sense.

However, these parents insist they’re not planning this far into their boys’ futures. They insist and insist and insist on it. Oh, the insisting. They go on about how they know this is not a guarantee of a gay son. They have links all over the sidebar about GLBT causes and titles like “Raising My Rainbow” but don’t you dare forget, they know that this probably doesn’t necessarily mean they’re gay except in BoyGir’s case, where it necessarily definitely means he’s gay and genderqueer. They insist they do not care about whether their sons are gay or transgender. There are really only two conclusions I can think to draw here. Either these parents are struggling with their homophobia and overcompensating for their negative feelings toward their own sons in the same way you might buy an extra special gift for the in-law you hate to prove you don’t hate them, or they just really love the attention, Münchhausen’s style.

[emphasis mine, link also mine]

(I’ll just do that thing I do where after a lengthy quote I tell you to just go and read the whole post anyways.)

Okay, so that end is probably overly harsh, but I don’t think the criticism is inaccurate, or that a similar sort of thing might be going on in this story.  It’s easy (or at the very least, tempting to some) to cross the line between doing the right thing because it’s right and doing the “right” thing so you can wave some sort of political flag before an audience.  If you think that something shouldn’t be a big deal, making the most of the media coverage is probably undermining your point.

1. If that name is a comics pun, that’s quite a groaner.

2. In fact, there’s strong evidence that “confusing” someone about their gender identity is really hard.

In Boston last weekend, this happened.  And I was there.

The Boston SlutWalk was a response to the Toronto SlutWalk, which in turn was a response to a member of the Toronto police, who at a workshop on security York University college said “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized”.

People found that annoying for several obvious reasons:

1. “Like sluts” is a surprisingly fickle term, and that bit of advice reduces rather easily to a claim that women should be inconspicuous or else.
2. It’s stated in a way that’s overly simplistic: In fact, that advice would only apply to a small minority of rape or sexual assault cases (and even in the cases where it does apply, one wonders if there’s something self-fulfilling about law enforcement officers making statements like that, in terms of undermining legal deterrents).
3. That sort of advice pushes focus away from solutions that discourage perpetrators in absolute terms (non-zero-sum solutions that make life harder for perpetrators if followed by anyone, instead of just making one person a less-obvious target as compared to someone else).
4. Such advice is particularly troubling in the context of a crime where perpetrators do escape justice based on victim-blaming judges and juries, and particularly troubling coming-from law enforcement.

As always with such decentralized activism, the message of the march was a little incoherent.  However, the speech given by Jaclyn Friedman at the end of the march was an amazing and coherent piece of rhetoric, and you should read it here.  The key bit:

[…] make no mistake about it: we can be called sluts for nearly any reason at all. If we’re dancing. If we’re drinking. If we have ever in our lives enjoyed sex. If our clothes aren’t made of burlap. If we’re women of color, we’re assumed to be sluts before we do a single thing because we’re “exotic.” If we’re fat or disabled or otherwise considered undesirable, we’re assumed to be sluts who’ll fuck anyone who’ll deign to want us. If we’re queer boys or trans women, we’re called sluts in order to punish us for not fearing the feminine. If we’re queer women, especially femme ones, we’re called sluts because we’re obviously “up for anything,” as opposed to actually attracted to actual women. If we’re poor, we’re gold diggers who’ll use sex to get ahead. And god forbid we accuse someone of raping us – that’s the fast track to sluthood for sure, because it’s much easier to tell us what we did wrong to make someone to commit a felony violent crime against us than it is to deal with the actual felon.

There’s a word for all of this. And that word is bullshit. But there’s also a phrase for it: social license to operate. What that means is this: we know that a huge majority of rapes are perpetrated by a small minority of guys who do it again and again. You know why they’re able to rape an average of 6 times each? Because they have social license to operate. In other words: because we let them. Because as a society, we say “oh well, what did she expect would happen if she went back to his room? What did she expect would happen walking around by herself in that neighborhood? What did she expect would happen dressed like a slut?” [emphasis mine]

In other words, the question is what happens in the minds of bystanders, when they’re looking for a rationalization for not intervening in an ambiguous or sketchy situation?  What happens in the minds of jurors, when they’re looking for a reason not to convict?  Those may well be the same essentially-random people who see or hear about such “awareness-raising” activism.

Feminist blogger Hugo Schwyzer discusses the SlutWalk here and argues with some detractors who frame it as an effort to reclaim the word ‘slut’, and he makes an interesting point:

In their op-ed SlutWalk is Not Sexual Liberation, Dines and Murphy assert that

… the focus on “reclaiming” the word slut fails to address the real issue. The term slut is so deeply rooted in the patriarchal “madonna/whore” view of women’s sexuality that it is beyond redemption. The word is so saturated with the ideology that female sexual energy deserves punishment that trying to change its meaning is a waste of precious feminist resources.

[…]

What Dines and Murphy share with the Toronto cop is a sense that women are fools for demanding a level sexual playing field with men. Like so many of my colleagues on the “anti-porn” wing of feminism, Dines and Murphy tend to mistrust (or ignore) young women’s efforts to pursue pleasure. Their concerns about premature sexualization are legitimate, and I share them. But I think they seriously underestimate young women’s potential to negotiate their way from unwanted sexualization to healthy, empowered sexual agency. That kind of journey can’t take place alone, of course. And that’s part of what the SlutWalk movement is about: creating a safe space for women to come together in public defiance of those who would define their sexuality for them. [his emphasis removed, mine added]

I agree with Schwyzer.  Though I’d say that last bit doesn’t just apply to women.

There’s more going on here than you might think:

That video is from a YouTube show called EpicMealTime, there’s an entire line of such videos.  See also thisiswhyyourefat, the Heart Attack Grill, the ffffffuuuuuuuuuuuud subreddit, etc., etc.

A few thoughts:

1. Competitive feasting has deep historical roots.  It’s hypothesized to be one of the reasons for the transition between hunting-gathering and agriculture.  Starving hunter-gathers presumably would not turn to agriculture, since that means burying grain instead of eating it and staying in a food-poor area instead of moving.  However, moving from gathering to horticulture to agriculture could be a way of turning a current surplus into a future even-bigger surplus at the expense of being tied down and vulnerable to future famine.

2. Robin Hanson is a fan of explaining modern trends in terms of the tendency of high-status industrialists/agriculturalists to live according to forager norms instead of farmer norms.  But he points out a hole in his hypothesis:

I hypothesize that the cultural pressures which long ago pushed folks from more natural forager ways into then-more-functional farming ways work better on poor people, so that rich folk less feel their pressure. If so, as folks get rich they would tend to revert back to the natural-feeling forager ways.

While this hypothesis may seem natural, I must point out that it has a gaping hole: it is far from obvious why the cultural pressures that made foragers act like farmers should weaken when folks get rich.  Yes poor farmers may have few other options, while rich folks have the luxury of acting more like foragers. But rich farmers could have instead used their wealth to act like hyper-farmers, moving even further from forager styles. Why exactly did rich farmers act more like foragers?

I wonder if competitive eaters lean more politically conservative or liberal than seemingly-similar individuals?

3. Is the kind of competitive feasting I highlight hyper-farmer or hyper-forager?  Well, forager modes of competitive feasting tend to allow high-status individuals to accumulate further status without them accumulating further material control or wealth.

Of course, not all the examples above are the same.  In the case of EMT, I suppose it depends on how the social pressures on Harley Morenstein and the other hosts work as they gain more wealth.  If it results in a dramatic increase in their personal income, agriculturalist.  If it results in the show containing ever larger / more expensive / more dramatically produced meals in such a way that it precludes extraordinary accumulation of wealth by the hosts, forager.

On the other hand, the structure of the feast is more agriculturalist (the “big man” is paying to obtain raw materials up front and people are (essentially) paying him for the result). And pretty much all the distribution of funds is going directly to industrial agriculture.  Distribution of actual food isn’t involved.

And no way a forager is going to get their hands on that much bacon per person.

4. Given the low price of many high-calorie food items, excessive food is in many cases very clearly framed as a celebration of “low culture”.  It hardly fits in with the “eats a healthier and well-varied” diet that’s the first item in Hanson’s description of foragers.  On the other hand, the exaggerated or ironic celebration of low culture is very SWPL.

No idea how to fit that into the farmer norms vs. forager norms framing.

5. Getting back to point 3, countering the accumulation of all wealth in the hands of a few high-status individuals is kind of key if you want to have a stable society.  Modern civilization has dealt with this almost entirely by expanding frontiers (or in globalization terms, “developing new markets”).  But we’re running kind of short on frontiers at the moment, and the need for labor is lower than ever due to technology.

Arguably, foreign aid programs are a sort of competitive feasting.  They redistribute wealth to accumulate status, both of which promote stability.  Given the role of food prices in recent revolutions (past and ongoing), that’s not been terribly effective.

On Friday, Japan experienced the worst earthquake in its recorded history (in world history, the fifth largest since 1900).

One thing getting a lot of attention is the situation at Japan’s nuclear reactors.  11 plants were shut down in the aftermath of the quake.  However, generators one and three Fukushima I have encountering coolant problems post-shutdown, and hydrogen explosions (from vented coolant) have blown off the roofs of the generator buildings (note: not the reactor containment vessels).   There are also worries of a meltdown at Fukushima I-2 and reported problems with several generators Fukushima II.)

Fortunately, those were not problems with the shutdown procedure itself, all the reactors were brought sub-critical.  However, even with no fusion ongoing, the decay of existent radioactive isotopes releases enough heat to require a functioning coolant system for several days to prevent the fuel rods from melting.  (Which would be a disaster: Newer Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs) have tertiary containment designed to contain a full meltdown (a “core catcher”), Fukushima I predates that design.)  Unfortunately, venting of coolant steam during emergency cooling can result in the release of some radioisotopes: Some Cesium and Iodine (byproducts from the fuel rods if primary containment (cover on the fuel rods) is breached, Nitrogen-16 (from the oxygen in the water), Tritium (Hydrogen-3; from the decay of Boron-11 or Boron-12, from the boric acid used to suppress the fission reaction), and Carbon-14).

While some prognosticators are predicting none of the 11 reactors will come back online ever (which would mean really interesting things for Japan’s long-term energy situation), I’d bet that all but Fukushima I (and maybe II) will be up again after inspections and repairs.  But that’s “relatively quickly” in nuclear reactor terms, so that still means that 20% of Japan’s current generating capacity is offline for months at least.

Further reading:  Here’s a lengthy description of the sort of safety devices / procedures implemented at a BWR like the ones at Fukushima I.  And here’s a more detailed analysis of the situation at Fukushima I specifically (I can’t verify the author’s identity or expertise, but the article makes some interesting (and specific) predictions; his assumptions about the worst-case scenario are too optimistic, though the post has now been moved to here and edited for correctness).

ETA: I may yet be forced to eat my words.  Units 2 and 4 at Fukushima I have evidently also had explosions, and those have suffered actual breaches to the containment.  Unit 4 wasn’t running before the earthquake, but it’s still filled with spent fuel.  And unit 2 is probably in the middle of a partial meltdown with a ruptured containment vessel.

(Update again: Word now is that the inner reactor vessel is ruptured, not the outer containment.  The design goes something like this:  Fuel rod, casing, reactor vessel (the inner part of the “double boiler”), containment (the outer part of the “double boiler” and the last layer designed to hold in the core), building (not really designed to keep anything in, mostly there to keep the weather out).  The fuel rods and casings are almost certainly damaged in reactors 1-3, the reactor vessel is damaged in 2, and the building is damaged in 1 and 3.)

The disaster is currently rated at INES Level 4 (“accident with local consequences”). Three Mile Island was 5, Chernobyl was 7. Earlier today, Intrade gave 50%, 38%, and 13% odds that it will be raised to 5, 6, and 7, respectively, before the end of March.  Now those odds are at 95%, 46%, and 20%.

Cheap video cameras are useful if you’re a researcher collecting data, a person archiving memories, or a parent directing obsessive focus on the details of their child’s life.  The subject of this TED Talk takes all of those trends to the next level.

The researcher, Deb Roy, wired every room in his house for video and sound, continuously recorded multitrack audio and video, and made sense of it all with some impressive analysis and visualization software.  He doesn’t just list the words his child learned (as my parents also did), he can track the word through past vocalizations to observe how the pronunciation develops.  (I felt like I could almost hear the interaction between the mechanisms of operant conditioning and mimicry!)  He records the abstractions of interactions (socialization represented as two-dimensional motion with the third access for time, superimposed on a quasi-3D view of the room).  Even recording those moments that are the bread and butter of parental home video, his system captures evocative details that would otherwise been confabulated or overlooked.

What hit me when I was watching this video is that this guy is “remembering” things in a way that is simply not normal for human beings.  Since the data belongs to his family personally, perhaps “public versus private” is not the right aspect to look at, though I’d find it odd were I a visitor in his home.  It seems clear at least that his sense of enduring versus ephemeral is wildly at odds with what would be expected in our society.  And none of the technology he’s using to do this is particularly obscure (still on the expensive side, but orders of magnitude cheaper than it would have been a decade ago).

The events in Egypt are interesting and have not been far off what I’d have guessed at the onset of the protests.  At this point, the Egyptian army has deposed Mubarak, suspended the constitution, disbanded the legislature, and established an interim government.  They’re creating a draft constitutional revision, to be followed (they say) by a constitutional referendum and free elections.  Meanwhile, they’re hoping to disperse the protesters and get trade and tourism back to normal.  The protesters, for the most part, seem happy to clean up and disperse.  This is what you’d expect from a transitional government or a military dictatorship in the making.

The outcome is far from certain, but I wouldn’t rule out all going (approximately) according to the protesters’ plan.  As far as I can tell, the Egyptian military has three priorities:

1. The general political and economic security of Egypt.
2. Money for the officials’ families and connections, which mostly comes from tourism and trade dollars.
3. Future power and influence of the military itself.

The key to that third point is US military dollars, which might explain why the Egyptian military was willing to tolerate Mubarak long after they’d clearly stopped liking the guy.  But borrowing money to give foreign aid to a dictator who can’t even keep order is probably not going to be the most popular policy in America at the moment.  The optimal strategy for the army may be to actually hold free elections.  (And, probably, to (secretly) tell the Americans that they’re ready to take over at a moment’s notice if the wrong people are elected, so long as the money keeps flowing.)

One interesting article I read was this report, which notes (as Moldbug will be pleased to learn) that Mubarak ordered the military to fire on the protesters on January 30 and (as Moldbug will be dismayed to learn?) that they refused.  If that was the case, I’d say that the outcome was more or less settled then.  If you order troops to fire on the crowd and they say no, it’s probably time to pack your bags.

(Note: I wrote this ages ago but inadvertantly left it on the draft queue instead of marking it as published.  So here it is.)

In the weeks since my last post (before the time in which I was unduly delayed in posting this), one of the things I’ve done is taken Moldbug’s advice and read Froude’s The English in the West Indies: or The Bow of Ulysses.  The book, published in 1888, is a travelogue.  Froude builds on the work of Charles Kingsley (who published At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies in 1871) and Père Labat (who was living in and writing about the West Indies in the eighteenth century).  Much of the book is typical travelogue stuff (if very erudite; the book is scattered throughout with snippets of Greek and some Spanish and French, little of which Froude bothers to translate), and Froude writes a good travelogue; his descriptions are colorful, interesting, and sometimes funny.  The rest is political musings on the state of the British Empire, the (past) emancipation of British-held slaves, and (present and future) efforts to instate democratic, constitutional governments in the British colonies.

Historical Context

In Jamaica in 1865, the Morant Bay rebellion (Froude points out that this was a riot and not really a planned insurrection) was suppressed and George William Gordon was hanged under martial law outside of ordinary due process, since a speech of Gordon’s was a proximate cause of the riot. (Froude thinks that was questionable, since Gordon did not apparently do anything illegal; it’s not clear that Gordon planned or attempted to incite the riot.  Froude, rather, blames democracy, but in particular democracy with a black majority and white minority.)   In 1866, the Jamaican legislature was dissolved, turning Jamaica again into a Crown colony, and in the 1880s, an effort to return Jamaica to self-government was underway (full self-government was not achieved until 1962).

Haiti faced all sorts of political troubles from the 1789 revolution onwards (brutality on both sides during the turmoil of the revolution and massacres of whites in its aftermath), foreign embargo, coerced reparations, rebellions, civil wars, and all sorts of political turmoil.  Froude was writing his book during a brief lull in the storm of Haitian history (1874-1911), but as far as he’s concerned the Haitians have been busy eating babies and worshiping Satan from the moment they got out from under the watchful eye of white-people government.

Of course Froude, as a historian, tries to keep a sense of perspective when evaluating the veracity of such claims:

[…] Sir Spenser St. John, an English official, after residing for twelve years in Port au Prince, had in a published narrative with many details and particulars, declared that the republic of Toussaint l’Ouverture, the idol of all believers in the new gospel of liberty, had, after ninety years of independence, become a land where cannibalism could be practised with impunity. The African Obeah, the worship of serpents and trees and stones, after smouldering in all the West Indies in the form of witchcraft and poisoning, had broken out in Hayti in all its old hideousness. Children were sacrificed as in the old days of Moloch and were devoured with horrid ceremony, salted limbs being preserved and sold for the benefit of those who were unable to attend the full solemnities.

[…] Yet one had to set one incredibility against another. […] I reminded him of the universal conviction through Europe that the Jews were habitually guilty of sacrificing children also. There had been detailed instances. Alleged offenders had been brought before courts of justice at any time for the last six hundred years. Witnesses had been found to swear to facts which had been accepted as conclusive. Wretched creatures in Henry III.’s time had been dragged by dozens at horses’ tails through the streets of London, broken on the wheel, or torn to pieces by infuriated mobs. Even within the last two years, the same accusation had been brought forward in Russia and Germany, and had been established apparently by adequate proof. So far as popular conviction of the guilt of the Jews was an evidence against them, nothing could be stronger; and no charge could be without foundation on ordinary principles of evidence which revived so often and in so many places. And yet many persons, I said, and myself among them, believed that although the accusers were perfectly sincere, the guilt of the Jews was from end to end an hallucination of hatred. I had looked into the particulars of some of the trials. They were like the trials for witchcraft. The belief had created the fact, and accusation was itself evidence. I was prepared to find these stories of child murder in Hayti were bred similarly of anti-negro prejudice.

However, he seems happy to repeat the same claims without this veneer of skepticism later in the book.

Froude on Race

As a lead-in to the former topic, Froude talks about meeting the Chief Justice of Barbados, which leads to a bit of discussion about Froude’s views on race in general:

Before my stay at Barbadoes ended, I had an opportunity of meeting at dinner a negro of pure blood who has risen to eminence by his own talent and character. He has held the office of attorney-general. He is now chief justice of the island.  […]  Having heard the craniological and other objections to the supposed identity of the negro and white races, I came to the opinion […] that whether they are of one race or not there is no original or congenital difference of capacity between them, any more than there is between a black horse and a black dog and a white horse and a white dog. With the same chances and with the same treatment, I believe that distinguished men would be produced equally from both races, and Mr. _____’s well-earned success is an additional evidence of it. But it does not follow that what can be done eventually can be done immediately, and the gulf which divides the colours is no arbitrary prejudice, but has been opened by the centuries of training and discipline which have given us the start in the race. We set it down to slavery. It would be far truer to set it down to freedom. The African blacks have been free enough for thousands, perhaps for tens of thousands of years, and it has been the absence of restraint which has prevented them from becoming civilised. Generation has followed generation, and the children are as like their father as the successive generations of apes. The whites, it is likely enough, succeeded one another with the same similarity for a long series of ages. It is now supposed that the human race has been upon the planet for a hundred thousand years at least, and the first traces of civilisation cannot be thrown back at farthest beyond six thousand. During all those ages mankind went on treading in the same steps, century after century making no more advance than the birds and beasts. In Egypt or in India or one knows not where, accident or natural development quickened into life our moral and intellectual faculties; and these faculties have grown into what we now experience, not in the freedom in which the modern takes delight, but under the sharp rule of the strong over the weak, in of the wise over the unwise. Our own Anglo-Norman race has become capable of self-government only after a thousand years of civil and spiritual authority. European government, European instruction, continued steadily till his natural tendencies are superseded by a higher instinct, may shorten the probation period of the negro. Individual blacks of exceptional quality, like Frederick Douglas in America, or the Chief Justice of Barbadoes, will avail themselves of opportunities to rise, and the freest opportunities ought to be offered them. But it is as certain as any future event can be that if we give the negroes as a body the political powers which we claim for ourselves, they will use them only to their own injury. They will slide back into their old condition, and the chance will be gone of lifting them to the level to which we have no right to say that they are incapable of rising. [emphasis mine]

One thing that surprised me about the book: Despite Moldbug’s recommendation, Froude is not a reactionary.  He’s very clearly a conservative.  That is, he believes in progress, but thinks that progressives, in their rush forwards, will screw things up.  Froude’s views on slavery follow a similar course:

The negroes who were sold to the dealers in the African factories were most of them either slaves already to worse masters or were servi, servants in the old meaning of the word, prisoners of war, or else criminals, servati or reserved from death. They would otherwise have been killed; and since the slave trade has been abolished are again killed in the too celebrated ‘customs.’ The slave trade was a crime when the chiefs made war on each other for the sake of captives whom they could turn into money. In many instances, perhaps in most, it was innocent and even beneficent.  Nature has made us unequal, and Acts of Parliament cannot make us equal. Some must lead and some must follow, and the question is only of degree and kind. For myself, I would rather be the slave of a Shakespeare or a Burghley than the slave of a majority in the House of Commons or the slave of my own folly. Slavery is gone, with all that belonged to it; but it will be an ill day for mankind if no one is to be compelled any more to obey those who are wiser than himself, and each of us is to do only what is right in our own eyes. There may be authority, yet not slavery: a soldier is not a slave, a sailor is not a slave, a child is not a slave, a wife is not a slave; yet they may not live by their own wills or emancipate themselves at their own pleasure from positions in which nature has placed them, or into which they have themselves voluntarily entered. The negroes of the West Indies are children, and not yet disobedient children. They have their dreams, but for the present they are dreams only. If you enforce self-government upon them when they are not asking for it, you may turn the dream into a reality, and wilfully drive them back into the condition of their ancestors, from which the slave trade was the beginning of their emancipation. [emphasis mine again]

 To comment on those highlighted sentences:

1. Froude’s spectacles seem to be a particularly high-powered shade of rose on that particular issue.
2. Okay as a hyperbolic rhetorical claim.  But I wouldn’t take him at his word on that one, Froude (like most people) does not seem like he would actually be happy as a slave under any circumstances.
3. Since his criticism is directed towards white liberals and he (evidently) doesn’t view blacks as having much moral agency at all, it’s tempting for him to mischaracterize pro-democracy movements as being entirely driven by minorities and outsiders.

Tennyson, Gladstone, and Froude

One bit of the book that caught my attention was the story that frames Froude’s departure:

The morning papers were occupied with Lord Tennyson’s new ‘Locksley Hall’ and Mr. Gladstone’s remarks upon it. I had read neither; but from the criticisms it appeared that Lord Tennyson fancied himself to have seen a change pass over England since his boyhood, and a change which was not to his mind. The fruit of the new ideas which were then rising from the ground had ripened, and the taste was disagreeable to him. The day which had followed that ‘august sunrise’ had not been ‘august’ at all; and ‘the beautiful bold brow of Freedom’ had proved to have something of brass upon it. The ‘use and wont’ England, the England out of which had risen the men who had won her great position for her, was losing its old characteristics. Things which in his eager youth Lord Tennyson had despised he saw now that he had been mistaken in despising; and the new notions which were to remake the world were not remaking it in a shape that pleased him. Like Goethe, perhaps he felt that he was stumbling over the roots of the tree which he had helped to plant.

The contrast in Mr. Gladstone’s article was certainly remarkable. Lord Tennyson saw in institutions which were passing away the decay of what in its time had been great and noble, and he saw little rising in the place of them which humanly could be called improvement. To Mr. Gladstone these revolutionary years had been years of the sweeping off of long intolerable abuses, and of awaking to higher and truer perceptions of duty. Never, according to him, in any period of her history had England made more glorious progress, never had stood higher than at the present moment in material power and moral excellence. How could it be otherwise when they were the years of his own ascendency?

Here’s the poem in question (which, of course, follows this poem; if you prefer your poetry in audio form, you can listen to both here).  Gladstone’s essay is here, and his journal article did indeed get attention in the news at the time.

Froude continues:

[…] I will not despond with Lord Tennyson. To take a gloomy view of things will not mend them, and modern enlightenment may have excellent gifts in store for us which will come by-and-by. But I will not say that they have come as yet. I will not say that public life is improved when party spirit has degenerated into an organised civil war, and a civil war which can never end, for it renews its life like the giant of fable at every fresh election. I will not say that men are more honest and more law-abiding when debts are repudiated and law is defied in half the country, and Mr. Gladstone himself applauds or refuses to condemn acts of open dishonesty. […]

[…] The periods where the orator is supreme are marked always by confusion and disintegration. Goethe could say of Luther that he had thrown back for centuries the spiritual cultivation of mankind, by calling the passions of the multitude to judge of matters which should have been left to the thinkers. We ourselves are just now in one of those uneasy periods, and we have decided that orators are the fittest people to rule over us. The constituencies choose their members according to the fluency of their tongues. Can he make a speech? is the one test of competency for a legislator, and the most persuasive of the whole we make prime minister. We admire the man for his gifts, and we accept what he says for the manner in which it is uttered. He may contradict to-day what he asserted yesterday. No matter. He can persuade others wherever he is persuaded himself. And such is the nature of him that he can convince himself of anything which it is his interest to believe. These are the persons who are now regarded as our wisest. It was not always so. It is not so now with nations who are in a sound state of health. The Americans, when they choose a President or a Secretary of State or any functionary from whom they require wise action, do not select these famous speech-makers.  [Not at that point, anyways.]  Such periods do not last, for the condition which they bring about becomes always intolerable. [paragraph break mine]

I do not believe in the degeneracy of our race. I believe the present generation of Englishmen to be capable of all that their fathers were and possibly of more; but we are just now in a moulting state, and are sick while the process is going on. Or to take another metaphor. The bow of Ulysses is unstrung. The worms have not eaten into the horn or the moths injured the string, but the owner of the house is away and the suitors of Penelope Britannia consume her substance, rivals one of another, each caring only for himself, but with a common heart in evil. They cannot string the bow. Only the true lord and master can string it, and in due time he comes, and the cord is stretched once more upon the notch, singing to the touch of the finger with the sharp note of the swallow ; and the arrows fly to their mark in the breasts of the pretenders, while Pallas Athene looks on approving from her coign of vantage. [emphasis, as always, is mine]

Incidentally, that last, I think, is one of the reasons why Moldbug favors this book:  The Bow of Ulysses is not a metaphor for conservatism.  It is a wonderful metaphor for reaction.

What happens when the entire world’s demand for goods and services can be satisfied by a fraction of the world’s population?

What happens when there are many people who can’t do any job more cheaply than a machine or robot?

Do either of the above questions relate to the concept of a “jobless recovery”?

(Musing mostly based on someone linking back to this post.  The title is an overstatement, obviously.)