Does anyone else feel like politics are disconcertingly inconsistent?
Perhaps that the whole thing has come unmoored?
I was anti-war back in the early 00s, when the Left was anti-war. I marched in protest against the Iraq War. “Hey hey, ho ho, this racist war has got to go,” we chanted.
There was a lot of talk back then about how the US spends too much on the military and is over-involved in military expeditions abroad.
Of course, I was not an expert in international affairs, nor America’s military needs abroad. I might have been wrong. So might most of the other leftists who held similar opinions in those days. But “America is spending too much on the military, which is harming both brown people abroad and also Americans, who die in wars and have to pay for them. We would be better off spending that money on things that actually benefit Americans, like highspeed rail lines, education, health care, or just leaving it in people’s pockets and letting them use it however they want,” was absolutely a mainstream leftist position.
Today, Trump says something like he wouldn’t want to die in a war for Montenegro, and the Left responds that it is very important that Americans be willing to die for Montenegro.
Let’s step back and be rational for a second: No one wants to die for a foreign country. I don’t want to die for Australia, for Russia, for India, Japan, Montenegro, or Chad, and no one from those countries wants to die for America. Certainly there is a logic of “strength in numbers,” in which we are all safer because we create a credible, united front, but there is also logic in avoiding”entangling alliances,” which were blamed for creating the death machine known as WWI.
The question of whether Americans should die in defense of Montenegro (something we have been committed to without ever being asked,) ultimately depends on whether alliance with Montenegro makes us more or less secure here at home–a matter I haven’t seen any discussion about on Left or Right.
The only relevant argument I’ve seen is that various alliance-members have died “for us” in “our” wars in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, therefore we should be equally willing to die for them in their wars. The logic seems to be, “The government sent you to die in a stupid, racist war that destroyed the American economy and was a terrible idea all around, therefore you’re morally obligated to go die in Montenegro, too.”
Perhaps we should be asking whether dying in Iraq and Afghanistan was a good idea for anyone, not just taking it as some kind of obscene sunk cost that obligates everyone else to go die in random conflicts from here on out.
It seems like all of the talk about how “the military is too big” and “bombing countries like Iraq and Afghanistan is racist” was dropped as soon as people realized that massively cutting the military budget would mean… scaling back military obligations abroad.
I find a Left that suddenly pro-military spending and antagonistic toward Russia awfully disconcerting.
There are a variety of issues on the Right that I find it difficult to believe people *truly* care that much about–for example, I don’t think anyone actually believed that national policy should be determined by whether or not Bill Clinton had sex with an intern. “Bill had sex” is really just an excuse to try to force him out on technical grounds because they already didn’t like him. Similarly on the Left, I don’t believe any of the outraged commentators actually care whether the US flag touched the North Korean flag at the US/NK summit–the Left has never cared about proper flag etiquette.
These issues are transparently not things politicians, commentators, or other elites actually care about.
Was “America spends too much on the military/fights too many wars abroad” similarly nothing but a dumb rallying cry for the Left, something the upper muckety-mucks never actually believed? And what happened to all of the people who were once quite opposed to US “imperialism”?
I desired to read a good ethnography of Middle Eastern life in the 1800s, but not happening upon one, I settled for Our Moslem Sisters: A Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It, edited by Annie Van Sommer and Samuel M. Zwemer. (Published in 1907.)
Sommer, Zwemer, and the book’s other contributing authors were Christian (Calvinist) missionaries, and as such, we should keep in mind that much of the book is an explicit appeal for more funding–but they are also people who were on the ground and actually lived there, spoke the language, and befriended the locals, so their observations are not without merit.
Today’s excerpts begin with “Soudan,” which I do not think is the modern nation of “Sudan,’ but the French colony of Soudan, today Mali.
Fulani woman
“Soudan”
“The form of Islam seen in the large centres of population in the Hausa States is that of a virile, aggressive force, in no sense effete or corrupted by the surrounding paganism. It has had no rival systems such as Hinduism or Buddhism to compete with, and until now has not come into conflict with Christianity. The distinctive characteristics of the African have, however, tended to increase in it sensualism and a laxity of morals, and this has stamped, to a large extent, the attitude toward women and the character of women as developed under its system….
“It is now generally acknowledged that these people—Fulanis—originally came from Asia, or at least are Semitic.
“They are the rulers of all this great empire, and have for a hundred years exercised a tyrannical rule over the Hausas and the pagan peoples whom they had succeeded in enslaving before British rule in turn overcame them. The Fulani women are many of them olive-colored; some are beautiful and all have the small features, thin lips, straight nose, and long straight hair associated with the Asiatic. The Fulani rulers, following the Eastern fashion, have large harems and keep their women very secluded.
“The late Emir of Zaria was terribly severe to all his people, and cruel to a degree with any of his wives who transgressed in any way or were suspected of unfaithfulness. In one instance in which a female slave had assisted one of his wives to escape, both being detected, the wife was immediately decapitated and the slave given the head in an open calabash and ordered by the Emir to fan the flies off it until next night!
“I have been admitted into the home of one such family, the home of one of the highest born of all the Fulani chiefs, saw two of the wives and bowed to them, but the two little girls of seven and eight years came to call on me. On the whole I was struck with the cheerful appearance of the wife and the sweetness of the two little girls, but the husband was a particularly nice man, I should think a kind husband, and I know a kind father. …
“The ease with which all Hausa women, but specially those of the middle and lower classes, can obtain divorce for almost any reason; also the frequency with which they can obtain redress for cruelty from their husbands in the native courts, gives them power and a position in the community not to be despised. A man, for instance, in order to get a girl of sixteen years in marriage will pay her parents a sum of perhaps ten or twelve pounds.
“If at any future time she desires to leave him and marry another man, she can do so by swearing before the native courts that they have quarrelled and that she no longer wishes to live with him. But if that is all she merely gets a paper of divorce and either herself or her next husband has to refund to the aggrieved former husband the sum originally paid for her. If, however, she can prove violence or injury from her husband she has not to pay him anything, but may even in some cases get damages.
“A girl is usually given the option of refusing the man whom her parents have arranged for her to marry. This is not often done, but I have known of some cases in which the girl has availed herself of the privilege, and stated that she prefers some one else, in which case the engagement is broken and the new marriage arranged at once with the man of her choice. …
“The existence of a large class of pagan slave girls, who have been caught and brought from their own homes and carried into the Hausa country to become members of the harem of some of the Hausas, also complicates and intensifies the evil; for this mixture only tends to lower the standards and make the facilities for sin tenfold easier….
“The knowledge that a wife may leave at will, that less labor can be got out of a cruelly-treated slave wife, and that little girls can leave home and find a place elsewhere, all have tended to make women’s lives freer, and to some extent less hard in the Central Soudan than in North Africa.”
Arabia:
“The same men who themselves indulge in the grossest form of immorality become very angry and cruel if there is a breath of scandal against their women. In Bahrein, a young pearl-diver heard a rumor that his sister was not a pure woman; he returned immediately from the divings and stabbed her in a most diabolical way without even inquiring as to the truth of the matter. She died in great agony from her injuries, and the brother was acquitted by a Moslem judge …
“It is a common thing for us to be asked to prescribe poison for a rival wife who has been added to the household and for the time being is the favorite. Through jealousy some of these supplanted wives plunge into a life of sin. I do not know anything more pathetic than to have to listen to a poor soul pleading for a love-philter or potion to bring back the so-called love of a perfidious husband. Women, whether rich or poor, naturally prefer to be the only wife. … Some divorced women return to the house of their parents, while the homeless ones are most miserable and find escape from misery only in death. …
“A man may have a new wife every few months if he so desires, and in some parts of Arabia this is a common state of affairs among the rich chiefs. The result of all this looseness of morals is indescribable. Unnatural vice abounds, and so do contagious diseases which are the inheritance of poor little children.
“There is a very large per cent. of infant mortality partly on this account, and partly on account of gross ignorance in the treatment of the diseases of childhood. …
However
“Lady Ann Blunt, who has travelled among the Bedouins, says, ‘In more than one sheikh’s tent it is the women’s half of it in which the politics of the tribe are settled.'”
Yemen
“Called one day to see a Somali woman I missed the whip usually seen in a Somali’s house, and jokingly asked how her husband managed to keep her in order without a whip. She, taking her husband and me by the hand, said, “You are my father and this is my husband. Love unites us, and where love is there is no need for whips.”
“I was so pleased with her speech that I offered her husband, who was out of work, a subordinate place in our dispensary. Yet less than a month later I heard that he had divorced his wife and turned her out of doors….
“The following case will, I think, illustrate the usual attitude of the Arabs in the Yemen towards womankind:
“A man whose wife had been in labor two days came asking for medicine to make her well. My reply was that it was necessary to see the woman before I could give such a drug as he wished. “Well,” said he, “she will die before I allow you or any other man to see her,” and two days after I heard of her death.”
Lebanon:
“In Beirut, among the better classes girls are not married as young as they used to be, though occasionally you hear of instances, as in the case of a woman who had eight daughters and married two of them, twins, at the age of eight. She gained nothing by this cruel act as they were soon divorced and sent home.
“One reason for child-marriages among Mohammedans in Syria is the conscription which demands for the army every young man of eighteen. The one who cannot afford to escape conscription by paid substitutes or money may be exempt if he has a wife dependent upon him. When he is sixteen or seventeen his family send off to some distant town for a young girl who is a destitute orphan, and this child is married to the youth,—she may be ten years old, or nine, or even eight, and cases are known where a girl of seven has been married to a boy of sixteen. …
“Sad stories are told of those who are put out to service, especially when they go to Turkish families. It is not very common, fortunately, for there is always the fear that the men in the family, regarding them as lawful prey, will ill-treat them. Girls disgraced in this way have a terrible fate.
“A friend came to us one day, weeping because of a dreadful thing which had just come to her knowledge, too late, alas! for any help to be given. The daughter of a neighbor, a poor man, had been sent out to service, and the worst befell her. She was sent home in disgrace,—her father was obliged to receive her, but he would not recognize her or have anything to do with her till one day he ordered her to go out into the garden and dig in a spot he indicated. Each day he came to see what she had accomplished, till at last there was a hole deep enough for her to stand in, her full height. Her father then called his brothers, they brought lime, poured it over her, and then buried the child alive in the hole she herself had dug. She was only twelve years old! …
“I must not omit to say that in the smaller Mohammedan settlements where there is much intermarrying in families, there is almost no divorce, for even if a man wishes it, he must be very courageous to brave the united wrath of the whole circle of female relatives or of his enraged uncle or cousin, who resents bitterly having his daughter sent back to her home. …
Druze woman wearing a tantour, 1870s, Lebanon
“Among the Druzes, divorce is even more common than it is among the true Mohammedans, and the state of morals is very low. The Druzes are an interesting, even fascinating people. They live on the Lebanons and inland on the Druze mountains of the Hauran, and are a warlike independent race, of fine physique, and most polished, courteous manners. Some of their women are very beautiful and their peculiar costumes are most becoming and picturesque. … As was said before, they are classed with the Mohammedans although they have their own prophet, Hakim, and they take pride in having their own secret religion, which is little more than a brotherhood for political purposes.”
EvX: The book makes no mention of the Yazidis, but these days they post on Twitter about how matters stand between them and their neighbors, the Islamic State:
I was pregnant and taken as sex slave with my five years daughter by SuNn! Neighbors. After ISIS killed my husband and almost all members of our family I decided to suicide, I took poison but didn’t die, I lost my unborn baby. I was sold many times.
I woke up this morning with the realization that I needed to make a meme about Nongqawuse. (Context.)
These were the result:
In 1997, 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed suicide in order to reach a UFO they believed was accompanying comet Hale-Bopp.
In 1978, 918 followers of cult leader Jim Jones committed suicide by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid–the origin of the phrase, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.”
Mathematician Ted Kaczynski, unable to find a publisher for his manifesto, Industrial Society And Its Future, turned to mailing bombs to professors.
82 Branch Davidians, led by David Koresh, died when their compound burned down during a raid by the ATF. It appears that the Branch Davidians set the fire themselves.
The Thugs were an Indian cult that ritually strangled and murdered travelers.
Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in 1995 when he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, in what he claimed was revenge for ATF’s siege against the Branch Davidians.
Hong Xiuquan claimed to be Jesus’ little brother and lead the Taiping Rebellion, which resulted in the deaths of 20-30 million people.
Lee Harvey Oswald
Nongqawuse was a Xhosa prophet who convinced her people that if they sacrificed all of their cattle, the British would be “swept into the sea.” The Xhosa sacrificed their cattle, the British did not get swept into the sea, and mass famine resulted.
Charles Manson was a cult leader whose followers carried out 9 murders in the 70s.
Nike is giving terrible advice. Anyone who encourages you to sacrifice everything is probably a charlatan and actually wants you to sacrifice everything for them.
Believe in something sensible, true, and not likely to result in mass death.
Ray Kurzweil is arguably today’s most influential—and often controversial—futurist. In How to Create a Mind, Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilization—reverse engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines.
I recently finished three books on “big data”– Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier; Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet can tell us about who we Really Are, by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz; andBig Data At Work: Dispelling the Myths, Uncovering the opportunities, by Thomas H. Davenport.
None of these books was a whiz-bang thriller, but I enjoyed them.
Big Data was a very sensible introduction. What exactly is “big data”? It’s not just bigger data sets (though it is also that.) It’s the opportunity to get all the data.
Until now, the authors point out, we have lived in a data poor world. We have had to carefully design our surveys to avoid sampling bias because we just can’t sample that many people. There’s a whole bunch of math done over in statistics to calculate how certain we can be about a particular result, or whether it could just be the result of random chance biasing our samples. I could poll 10,000 people about their jobs, and that might be a pretty good sample, but if everyone I polled happens to live within walking distance of my house, is this a very representative sample of everyone in the country? Now think about all of those studies on the mechanics of sleep done on whatever college students or homeless guys a scientist could convince to sleep in a lab for a week. How representative are they?
Today, though, we suddenly live in a data rich world. An exponentially data rich world. A world in which we no longer need to correct for bias in our sample, because we don’t have to sample. We can just get… all the data. You can go to Google and find out how many people searched for “rabbit” on Tuesday, or how many people misspelled “rabbit” in various ways.
Data is being used in new and interesting (and sometimes creepy) ways. Many things that previously weren’t even considered data are now being quantitized–like one researcher quantitizing people’s backsides to determine whether a car is being driven by its owner, or a stranger.
One application I find promising is using people’s searches for various disease symptoms to identify people who may have various diseases before they seek out a doctor. Catching cancer patients earlier could save millions of lives.
I don’t have the book in front of me anymore, so I am just going by memory, but it made a good companion to Auerswald’s The Code Economy, since the modern economy runs so much on data.
Everybody Lies was a much more lighthearted, annecdotal approach to the subject, discussing lots of different studies. Davidowitz was inspired by Freakonomics, and he wants to use Big Data to uncover hidden truths of human behavior.
The book discusses, for example, people’s pornographic searches, (as per the title, people routinely lie about how much porn they look at on the internet,) and whether people’s pornographic preferences can be used to determine what percent of people in each state are gay. It turns out that we can get a break down of porn queries by state and variety, allowing a rough estimate of the gay and straight population of each state–and it appears that what people are willing to tell pollsters about their sexuality doesn’t match what they search for online. In more conservative states, people are less likely to admit to pollsters that they are gay, but plenty of supposedly “straight” people are searching for gay porn–about the same number of people as actually admit to being gay in more liberal states.
Stephens-Davidowitz uses similar data to determine that people have been lying to pollsters (or perhaps themselves) about whom they plan to vote for. For example, Donald Trump got anomalously high votes in some areas, and Obama got anomalously low votes, compared to what people in those areas told pollsters. However, both of these areas correlated highly with areas of the country where people made a lot of racist Google searches.
Most of the studies discussed are amusing, like the discovery of the racehorse American Pharaoh. Others are quite important, like a study that found that child abuse was probably actually going up at a time when official reports said it wasn’t–the reports probably weren’t showing abuse due to a decrease in funding for investigating abuse.
At times the author steps beyond the studies and offers interpretations of why the results are the way they are that I think go beyond what the data tells, like his conclusion that parents are biased against their daughters because they are more concerned with girls being fat than with boys, or because they are more likely to Google “is my son a genius?” than “is my daughter a genius?”
I can think of a variety of alternative explanations. eg, society itself is crueler to overweight women than to overweight men, so it is reasonable, in turn, for parents to worry more about a daughter who will face cruelty than a boy who will not. Girls are more likely to be in gifted programs than boys, but perhaps this means that giftedness in girls is simply less exceptional than giftedness in boys, who are more unusual. Or perhaps male giftedness is different from female giftedness in some way that makes parents need more information on the topic.
Now, here’s an interesting study. Google can track how many people make Islamophobic searches at any particular time. Compared against Obama’s speech that tried to calm outrage after the San Bernardino attack, this data reveals that the speech was massively unsuccessful. Islamophobic searches doubled during and after the speech. Negative searches about Syrian refugees rose 60%, while searches asking how to help dropped 35%.
In fact, just about every negative search we cold think to test regarding Muslims shot up during and after Obama’s speech, and just about every positive search we could think to test declined. …
Instead of calming the angry mob, as everybody thought he was doing, the internet data tells us that Obama actually inflamed it.
However, Obama later gave another speech, on the same topic. This one was much more successful. As the author put it, this time, Obama spent little time insisting on the value of tolerance, which seems to have just made people less tolerant. Instead, “he focused overwhelmingly on provoking people’s curiosity and changing their perceptions of Muslim Americans.”
People tend to react positively toward people or things they regard as interesting, and invoking curiosity is a good way to get people interested.
The author points out that “big data” is most likely to be useful in fields where the current data is poor. In the case of American Pharaoh, for examples, people just plain weren’t getting a lot of data on racehorses before buying and selling them. It was a field based on people who “knew” horses and their pedigrees, not on people who x-rayed horses to see how big their hearts and lungs were. By contrast, hedge funds investing in the stock market are already up to their necks in data, trying to maximize every last penny. Horse racing was ripe for someone to become successful by unearthing previously unused data and making good predictions; the stock market is not.
And for those keeping track of how many people make it to the end of the book, I did. I even read the endnotes, because I do that.
Big Data At Work was very different. Rather than entertain us with the success of Google Flu or academic studies of human nature, BDAW discusses how to implement “big data” (the author admits it is a silly term) strategies at work. This is a good book if you own, run, or manage a business that could utilize data in some way. UPS, for example, uses driving data to minimize package delivery routes; even a small saving per package by optimizing routes leads to a large saving for the company as a whole, since they deliver so many packages.
The author points out that “big data” often isn’t big so much as unstructured. Photographs, call logs, Facebook posts, and Google searches may all be “data,” but you will need some way to quantitize these before you can make much use of them. For example, companies may want to gather customer feedback reports, feed them into a program that recognizes positive or negative language, and then quantitizes how many people called to report that they liked Product X vs how many called to report that they disliked it.
I think an area ripe for this kind of quantitization is medical data, which currently languishes in doctors’ files, much of it on paper, protected by patient privacy laws. But people post a good deal of information about their medical conditions online, seeking help from other people who’ve dealt with the same diseases. Currently, there are a lot of diseases (take depression) where treatment is very hit-or-miss, and doctors basically have to try a bunch of drugs in a row until they find one that works. A program that could trawl through forum posts and assemble data on patients and medical treatments that worked or failed could help doctors refine treatment for various difficult conditions–“Oh, you look like the kind of patient who would respond well to melatonin,” or “Oh, you have the characteristics that make you a good candidate for Prozac.”
The author points out that most companies will not be able to keep the massive quantities of data they are amassing. A hospital, for example, collects a great deal of data about patient’s heart rates and blood oxygen levels every day. While it might be interesting to look back at 10 years worth of patient heart rate data, hospitals can’t really afford to invest in databanks to store all of this information. Rather, what companies need is real-time or continuous data processing that analyzes current data and makes predictions/recommendations for what the company (or doctor) should do now.
For example, one of the books (I believe it was “Big Data”) discussed a study of premature babies which found, counter-intuitively, that they were most likely to have emergencies soon after a lull in which they had seemed to be doing rather well–stable heart rate, good breathing, etc. Knowing this, a hospital could have a computer monitoring all of its premature babies and automatically updating their status (“stable” “improving” “critical” “likely to have a big problem in six hours”) and notifying doctors of potential problems.
The book goes into a fair amount of detail about how to implement “big data solutions” at your office (you may have to hire someone who knows how to code and may even have to tolerate their idiosyncrasies,) which platforms are useful for data, the fact that “big data” is not all that different from standard analytics that most companies already run, etc. Once you’ve got the data pumping, actual humans may not need to be involved with it very often–for example you may have a system that automatically updates drives’ routes with traffic reports, or sprinklers that automatically turn on when the ground gets too dry.
It is easy to see how “big data” will become yet another facet of the algorithmization of work.
Overall, Big Data at Work is a good book, especially if you run a company, but not as amusing if you are just a lay reader. If you want something fun, read the first two.
I desired to read a good ethnography of Middle Eastern life in the 1800s, but not happening upon one, I settled for Our Moslem Sisters: A Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It, edited by Annie Van Sommer and Samuel M. Zwemer. (Published in 1907.)
Sommer and Zwemer were Christian (Calvinist) missionaries–as such, we should keep in mind that much of the book is an explicit appeal for more funding, since missionaries must eat and often don’t have much income.
There are common themes that show up in each chapter–divorce is commented on extensively in most. I shall try to avoid repetition in my choice of quotes; if you wish a fuller picture of the countries discussed, I recommend the book.
Today we begin with Tunisia (as usual, quotes will be in “” for readability):
“When I came to this country some twelve years ago, the thing that most struck me in visiting Arab houses was the cheerfulness and even gaiety of the women. I had a preconceived picture in my mind of poor creatures sitting within prison walls, pining to get out, and in utter misery.
“Nothing of the kind! What did I find? Laughter, chatter, the distraction of periodic visits to saints’ tombs, or that centre of social intercourse—the bath. Old women, the scandal-mongers of the neighborhood, go round to retail their news. (And it will be allowed that even in England there are many who take a deeper interest in the doings of their neighbors than in more elevated topics of conversation.)
“Here Jewesses, spreading out their pretty, silken goods to tempt purchasers, or neighbors who had “dropped in” by way of the roof for a gossip, not over a dish of tea, but a cup of black coffee. There Arab women, much like children, quickly shaking off little troubles and meeting greater trials with the resignation of fatalism, which finds comfort in the magic word, “Maktoob” (It is decreed), in a manner incomprehensible to the Western mind.
“Is it surprising that I almost accused my fellow-missionaries of misrepresenting the home life of the people? But I only saw the surface and had not yet probed the deep sore of Mohammedanism nor realized the heavy burdens which its system entails.
“Let me tell you of three of the heaviest of these burdens: Polygamy, Divorce, and the Ignorance which results from complete lack of education and walks hand-in-hand with its twin-sister, Superstition. …
“Divorce is, however, the great curse which blights ]domestic happiness, and words fail me to describe the misery it brings.
“The Moslem population of the city of Tunis is sixty thousand. Setting aside men and children there remain, roughly speaking, about twenty-five thousand women, and comparing my own experience with that of other lady missionaries we are agreed in affirming that the majority of these women in the middle and lower classes have been divorced at least once in their lives, many of them two or three times, while some few have had a number of husbands. In the upper class and wealthy families divorce is not nearly so common, and for obvious reasons.
“I have never known a man to have thirty or forty wives in succession as one hears of in some Mohammedan lands. A man once told my brother-in-law that he had been married eighteen times, and I heard of another who had taken (the Arab expression) twelve wives, one after another; but this last was related with bated breath as being an unusual and opprobrious act.
“When a woman is divorced she returns to her father’s house and remains dependent on him until he finds her another husband, her monetary value being now greatly reduced….
“Among the upper classes a girl does not often marry till about seventeen years old, but a poorer man is glad to get his daughters off his hands at a much earlier age, especially if he can obtain a good dowry in payment. …
Photo of Dorothy and Fatimah from the book
“The history of the two little girls in the accompanying photograph, shows clearly the contrast between the life of an English and that of an Arab child. It was taken about eight years ago at the birthday party of my little niece, who had been allowed, as a treat, to invite a number of Arab girls to tea, and was photographed with one who was about the same age as herself. The one, Dorothy, is now thirteen years old and still a happy, light-hearted schoolgirl, carefully sheltered from all knowledge of evil. The other, Fatima, to-day, sits in her father’s house, divorced, desolate, and soured in temper by her hard fate. And, indeed, her story makes one’s heart ache. …”
Remedies in the case of sickness
“If there illness in the house, a message is first sent to the “degaz” (soothsayer), who writes a magic paper, encloses it in a leather case, and sends it to the sick one with directions to fasten it on the head, arm, etc., according to the part affected.
“Another favorite remedy is to pour a little water into a basin on which passages from the Koran are written, and then either drink or bathe with it as the disease may appear to require.
“These powerful remedies failing to restore health, the invalid is next taken to the tomb of some celebrated “saint.” There, offerings are made and prayers recited. A favorite resort in Tunis is the Zawia of Sidi Abdallah, situated just outside the city wall. Here a black cock is sacrificed and a little of its blood sprinkled on the neck, elbow, and knee of the sufferer on whose behalf it is offered.
On the Potential for Education
“To begin with, the first glance will show their intelligence. Get an average ignorant Englishwoman of the peasant class to repeat a Bible story that she has never heard before. She will dully remember one or two salient facts. Go up to a mountain village here and get a group of women and talk to them, and choose one of them to repeat to the others what you have said. You will feel after a sentence or two that your Arabic was only English put into Arabic words; hers is sparkling with racy idiom. More than that, she is making the story live before her hearers: a touch of local color here—a quaint addition there. It is all aglow. And this a woman who has sat year after year in her one garment of red woollen drapery, cooking meals and nursing children, with nothing to stimulate any thoughts beyond the day’s need.
“And their powers of feeling: do their faces look as if these have been crushed out by a life of servitude? Not a bit of it. No European who has not lived among them can have any idea of their intensity: love, hate, grief, reign by turns. Anger and grief can take such possession of them as to bring real illness of a strange and undiagnosable kind. We have known such cases to last for months; not unfrequently they end fatally; and more than one whom we have met has gone stone-blind with crying for a dead husband who probably made things none too easy while he lived.
“And then their will power: the faces tell of that too. …
“The dark side lies in untrueness born of constant fear of the consequence of every trifling act, moral impurity that steeps even the children—wild jealousy that will make them pine away and die if a rival baby comes. Their minds are rife with superstition and fertile in intrigue.”
“The Pretender” Bou Hmara, 1903, Morocco
Morocco:
“The families in which daughters are allowed to read are few and far between: just an occasional one among high-class government officials, or a favorite daughter here and there who is destined to support herself and relatives by teaching the few privileged to learn among the rising generation. The little girl is seldom welcomed at birth. It is a calamity she was not a boy. A few years of half-freedom for the town-child and hasty neglect for the village maiden. Many a better-class woman enters her home as a bride, in the carriage which so carefully conceals her, and sees but four white washed walls for the remainder of her days, nor leaves their monotony until carried out in her coffin. …
“Divorce is fearfully common and easy. Plurality of wives is an awful curse. The chief features of home-life are quarrels, intrigues, attempted poisonings, and rankling bitternesses.
“Slavery is more common than in other countries so near the borders of civilization, and the possession of these human chattels denotes the measure of worldly prosperity. Occasionally they find a kindly master, but, more often, are inhumanly treated and regarded as so much property. We are frequently urged to treat the slave for illness and so increase her market value, while the wife, or wives, may suffer unnoticed and unassisted. …
“Some of the women figure in the weird orgies of religious sects of a private and public character. Their wild, dishevelled, and torn hair is prominent in the Satanic dance of the Aisowia Derwishes, and they vie with the men in its frenzied freaks, falling finally exhausted to the ground, unable to rise. But this class fortunately is not numerous.
“I was visiting in one of these houses last year in Fez. The occupants were strangers and had come pleading me to relieve one in very acute pain. The atmosphere of the room hung heavily over me, I knew not why. … Such uncanny sense of the immediate presence of the evil one, I have never experienced, as when under their roof, nor would wish to again. …
Sultan AbdulAziz, 1904
“We have found medical work a powerful handmaid to awaken interest in the Gospel story. To our great grief, however, the continued political unrest, due largely to the presence of the Pretender and rising of the tribes from time to time, during the past four years, has almost closed up this highly useful evangelistic and Christ-like work.
“The Northern rebellion would have ceased long ago had the present Sultan honest and energetic soldiers and leaders. Few, however, are impervious to foreign gold; and no one trusts another, unless he pay well for the interest in his affairs. The Sultan is a pleasant and enlightened person, but unable to cope with the surrounding lawlessness single-handed. Many a tale of bribery and wrong reaches us. The wild tribes know no other fear than that of seeing turbulent skulls and rebellious heads hanging upon the city gates.
“We went down to Fez four years ago, a few weeks after the violent and sad death of our dear friend and brother, Mr. Cooper. His only crime in the eyes of the violent tribesman, his murderer, was that of being a foreigner. Two weeks after our arrival in the city, Consuls ordered foreigners to the coast. We had to obey. Six weeks were spent in Tangier and then again we returned to our scene of labor, the large out-patient dispensary which treated over eleven thousand cases last year …”
EvX: Note that most of these missions are connected with medical care of some kind, which would otherwise have been unavailable for many people. It is not unlike Doctors without Borders.
“Two years ago orders again came to pack up and prepare for emergencies. The storm blew over and since then the main roads have been practically safe for ordinary traffic and merchandise. Even the foreigner can securely take his place in any caravan without fear of ill.
Mulai Ahmed er Raisuni aka Raisuli, Morocco, 1871-1925
“Raisuli’s capture of European and American citizens for hostages alarmed many, but he had sought the Government’s recognition of his lawful Kaidship, and when refused, wrongly determined to claim the same by force. The strong hand with which he now controls those wild tribes under his jurisdiction, proves his ability to govern. His justice, if semi-barbarous, is certainly ahead of that of most of his fellow Kaids. He reversed the decision of a Moorish tribunal which had wrung from a poor widow her lawful property, restoring that which had been unlawfully taken. A few such men in the highest circles would soon bring order out of chaos and strength to the throne.”
EvX: The Raisuli incident is interesting. According to Wikipedia:
Mulai Ahmed er Raisuni was born in the village of Zinat sometime in 1871.[citation needed] … He was the son of a prominent Caid, and began following in his father’s footsteps. However, Raisuni eventually drifted into crime, stealing cattle and sheep and earning the ire of Moroccan authorities. …
By most accounts, the formative event in Raisuni’s life was his arrest and imprisonment by Abd-el-Rahman Abd el-Saduk, the Pasha of Tangier, who was Raisuli’s cousin and foster brother.[citation needed] … He was sent to the dungeon of Mogador and chained to a wall for four years; … Raisuni was released from prison as part of a general clemency early in the reign of Sultan Abdelaziz ..
Raisuni was hardened by his imprisonment, and returned to criminality after his release. … With a small but devoted band of followers, Raisuni embarked on a second career: kidnapping prominent officials and holding them for ransoms.
Raisuni’s first victim was Walter Burton Harris, an Englishman and correspondent for The Times who already knew Raisuni. Raisuni demanded not money, but the release of several of Raisuni’s men held in prison; Harris was released after only three weeks captivity.
Many of Raisuni’s other victims of this time were Moroccan military and political officials; his men only rarely kidnapped Europeans. In between kidnappings, Raisuni extorted ‘tribute’ from villagers in territories controlled by his followers, executing those who refused to pay. He also periodically maintained a small fleet of boats for seagoing piracy; …
Raisuni had a mixed reputation. He became known for his chivalry and respectful attitude towards his hostages; he pledged Ion Perdicaris that he would defend him from any harm …
However, towards those who were not worthy of ransom, emissaries of the Pasha and the Sultan, or those disloyal to him, he was known for cruelty. …
In 1904, Raisuni was propelled onto the international stage when he kidnapped the Greek-American expatriate Ion Perdicaris and his stepson Cromwell Varley and held them for a ransom of $70,000.[citation needed] American President Theodore Roosevelt, then running for re-election, made political capital out of the incident, sending a squadron of warships to Morocco to force Abdelaziz’s compliance with Raisuni’s demands, famously proclaiming “Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead!”[citation needed]
After a near-confrontation between the government of Morocco and troops of the United States of America, Raisuni received his ransom money and concessions; he was appointed Pasha of Tangier and Governor of Jibala province, and all of his imprisoned followers were released. However, Raisuni was ousted from the post in 1906 due to corruption and cruelty to his subjects; a year later he was again declared an outlaw by the Moroccan government.[citation needed] …
For years, Raisuni continued to antagonize the Moroccan government, even after Abdelaziz’s forced abdication.[citation needed] He briefly regained favor with the Moroccan government, by siding with Mulay Hafid‘s overthrow of Abdelaziz, and was restored again as Pasha of Tangier. However, at the instigation of the Spanish government, the Sultan removed Raisuni from his post in 1912.[citation needed]
In 1913, Raisuni led several Rif tribes in a bloody revolt against the Spanish, and continued a sanguine guerilla conflict against them for almost eight years. …
In September 1922,[8] and after an interview with Colonel José Villalba Riquelme he submitted to the Spanish authorities and subsequently joined forces with the Spanish army in the Rif War of the 1920s. …
In January 1925, Krim’s followers attacked Raisuni’s palace, killing most of his guards and capturing Raisuni.[citation needed] He was jailed in Tamasint (near Al Hoceima), where he died by the end of April 1925, … He is still regarded as a folk hero by many in Morocco, although his reputation is mixed at best.[citation needed]
Back to the book:
“The English missionary has had the great advantage of being favorably received by the people on account of his or her nationality. It stood, to them, for integrity, strength, and honor. Whatever changes may have taken place during the last four years to lessen this trust in her, England has still much favor with the majority. Hers were the pioneer-missionaries, for where no man would have been trusted or allowed to reside, her lady workers penetrated.”
EvX: It is a common complaint in Anthropology that older anthropologists had neglected the female side of humanity, due to themselves being primarily male, and thus not really allowed into women’s spaces and confidences even when they remembered to think of them, but the missionary literature contains plenty of accounts from female missionaries, who were quite thoughtful and allowed into female spaces. Today, though, this missionary literature seems to be all but forgotten.
Hello and welcome! Today I realized that the blog has just reached 800 posts (slightly more than 800 by the time you read this.
Here’s the full article the graph to the right hails from–Productivity Growth in Global Agriculture Shifting to Developing Countries. (PDF). The right-hand axis shows agricultural output per worker–most countries in most parts of the world have seen gains in output per worker over the past almost-60 years. The left-hand axis shows output per hectare of land–the sort of improvements you get by adding fertilizer.
If one farmer on one hectare doubled his output, (again, suppose fertilizer) he and his land would move up at a 45 degree angle. If one farmer doubled his output by using a tractor to farm twice as much land, he would move directly to the right on this graph. If the land became twice as productive, and so each individual farmer cut back and farmed half as much land, then you’d see a line heading straight up.
So what do we see? North America and Oceana are producing the most food per farmer. Oceana gets very little food per hectare, though (“Oceana” here means New Zealand and Australia, which has some rather large sheep ranches.)
Northeast Asia–that is, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, even though Taiwan isn’t really in the north–gets the most food per acre. These are very densely populated countries. Europe hovers in the middle, perhaps having already achieved rather good productivity per acre before the study began and having recently improved more in productivity per farmer.
Africa and South Asia (India and Pakistan?) are notable for trending upward more than rightward–in these areas, improved agricultural production has allowed existing fields to be sub-divided. This suggests that, while population growth is being accommodated, farmers lack the ability to benefit from selling excess produce (hence why they do not bother to farm more than their own families eat) and people are not moving into other, non-subsistence occupations.
Anyway, how are you, my faithful readers? As we celebrate 800 posts, what would you like to see more of in the future? Less of? Any books you’d like to see reviewed or blog features expanded (or contracted)?
I am thinking of collecting and editing some of my best posts into a book; which posts have you enjoyed?
I’d like to thank you all for all of the great and interesting comments over the years; after all, if it weren’t for readers, this blog would just be me shouting into the void. Readers make all of this effort fun.
Student leaders at Manchester University declared that Kipling “stands for the opposite of liberation, empowerment, and human rights”.
The poem, which had been painted on the wall of the students’ union building by an artist, was removed by students on Tuesday, in a bid to “reclaim” history on behalf of those who have been “oppressed” by “the likes of Kipling”.
In lieu of Kipling’s If, students used a black marker pen to write out the poem Still I Rise by Maya Angelou on the same stretch of wall.
There’s a word for this: vandalism.
I am not a good judge of poetry, and in general, I think most people are no longer interested in poetry one way or another, so I am not going to judge the poems on their relative merits. I think a reasonable person could like either one. (Note: I have have in the past compared Shakespeare and Audre Lorde.)
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise. …
Neither of these poems is a clear winner on merit, but they weren’t chosen on merit. Kipling’s poem was chosen to decorate the student center at a British university because Kipling is one of Britain’s most beloved and respected writers and this particular poem was voted one of Britain’s very favorites. Further, it contains practical life advice of the sort you normally aim at students.
Maya Angelou, by contrast, isn’t British. She’s an American.
According to Sara Khan, “Liberation & Access Officer” of the Manchester Student Union, majoring in English:
We, as an exec team, believe that Kipling stands for the opposite of liberation, empowerment, and human rights…
Well-known as author of the racist poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’, and a plethora of other work that sought to legitimate the British Empire’s presence in India and de-humanise people of colour, it is deeply inappropriate to promote the work of Kipling in our SU …
As a statement on the reclamation of history by those who have been oppressed by the likes of Kipling for so many centuries, and continue to be to this day, we replaced his words with those of the legendary Maya Angelou, a black female poet and civil rights activist.”
It takes some special variety of gall to major in English at a British university and then complain about reading one of Britain’s most famous poets–and a great deal of stupidity to put up with it.
Angelou’s words were written in a specifically American context, responding to the way she and other African Americans were treated here in the US. Her poem has nothing to do with Kipling or things Kipling or other Brits have done. It was selected in this perverted sense that all whites are equivalent and interchangeable, as are all non-whites. Any non-white poet will do for replacing white poets.
Maya Angelou’s poem was not selected to replace Kipling’s because the students think it is better on technical, poetic grounds, nor because it reflects an important part of British literature, but for its subject and the author’s identity: a black woman. The message is not, “Here’s a lovely poem; we think students will enjoy it.” The message is, “Fuck you to Kipling and everyone who loves him; we are wiping you off the walls, removing you from our spaces, and replacing you with our own poem about how we are rising up against you.”
Incidentally, for an “English major,” Sara is oddly ignorant of the fact that Kipling’s poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” was not written to justify British colonialism in India. (I guess she is not a very good English major.) It was actually written to encourage the US to colonize the Philippines.
Kipling also seems to have been ambivalent about the whole endeavor:
Take up the White Man’s burden —
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard —
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light: —
“Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”
I desired to read a good ethnography of Middle Eastern life in the 1800s, but not happening upon one, I settled for Our Moslem Sisters: A Cry of Need from Lands of Darkness Interpreted by Those Who Heard It, edited by Annie Van Sommer and Samuel M. Zwemer. (Published in 1907.)
Sommer and Zwemer were Christian (Calvinist) missionaries–I don’t know much about Sommer, but Zwemer‘s story is interesting:
After being ordained to the Reformed Church ministry by the Pella, Iowa Classis in 1890, he was a missionary at Busrah, Bahrein, and at other locations in Arabia from 1891 to 1905. He was a member of the Arabian Mission (1890–1913). Zwemer served in Egypt from 1913 to 1929. He also traveled widely in Asia Minor, and he was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of London.
In 1929 he was appointed professor of missions and professor of the history of religion at the Princeton Theological Seminary, where he taught until 1937. He had married Amy Elizabeth Wilkes on May 18, 1896. … He founded and edited the publication The Moslem World for 35 years.
The book itself is a collection of essays written by missionaries working in different countries, from Morocco to Bulgaria, Turkestan to Indonesia, on the subject of women in Islam. Much of it is an explicit appeal for more funding, since missionaries must eat and often don’t have much income. As such, the authors have a certain interest in emphasizing that “conditions here are very bad and only through more funding for our missionary work can matters be improved.”
While we must therefore be cautious of the authors’ motives, there remains a remarkable consistency between different accounts (Islamic divorce law is cited as problematic in most nations) and with more recent ethnographies I have read.
For example, some years ago I read Lila Abu-Lughod‘s Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, published in 1986. This is one of the saddest books I have read that is not about genocide. In it, the women, who are not supposed to publicly express notions like “I love my husband but he married a second wife and now I am heartbroken,” turn to poetry and song to give voice to their sadness.
We have, as well, the rather obvious conditions of life in Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as areas controlled by groups like ISIS and the Taliban.
On the flipside, of course, we have women like Benazir Bhuto, Prime Minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996. The US, meanwhile, has not had a female head of state. I have also known Muslims personally who were very warm and loving toward their families.
But without further ado, let’s jump into the text (as usual, quotes will be in “” for readability):
Egypt:
“The seclusion of the Harem is more or less rigid according to the caprice of some exacting husband or mother-in-law. As far as the younger married women’s experience goes it is mother-in-law rule literally, for seldom is a man permitted to take his wife to a home of his own. The sons and even the grandsons must bring their brides home to the father’s house and all be subject to the mother. A household of fifty is no uncommon thing. … Often she rules with a hand of iron, probably to make up for her own hard life in her younger days, intermixed with an honest desire to preserve and promote the honor and dignity of her house. For the honor, dignity, and aristocracy of a family are often estimated according to the rigor of the seclusion of its women-folk. …
“Among the strictest people a young woman is not permitted to be seen by even her father-in-law. Nor is it allowable for her to be seen by any male servants except eunuchs. Under such conditions it might be wondered how a woman could keep her domestic machinery in running order, but as one woman said, who had never seen the face of her cook although he had been employed in her house for thirteen years, when asked the question, “How do you tell him what you want for dinner?” “Oh, he knows my wants, but when I wish to give a particular order, I tell the maid servant, she tells the little boy servant, and he conveys the message to the cook!”
“It seems like the irony of fate that these women who are kept in such strict seclusion should be so extravagantly fond of society. They welcome in the most hospitable manner any visitors of their own sex. It is pitiful to see how they love to have glimpses of the outside world. A missionary lady tells of a woman whom she often visited, who had never been outside of her house since her marriage, forty years before, and who begged her to tell her something about the flowers, saying, “Ah, you are happy women, free to go here and there and enjoy life!” …
“It seems part of the nature of the Egyptian to distrust his womenfolk and to believe them capable of any misdemeanor. Therefore they must be carefully watched and kept in check. This distrust reacts upon the nature and character of the women, often making them truly unworthy of trust, but many of them are very sensitive on the subject and feel keenly this unfair position into which they are thrown.
“What has been said about the strict seclusion of Egyptian women refers chiefly to the middle and upper classes, for the poorest women, those of the peasant class, have the greatest freedom. They go about unveiled and manifest a character of marked independence and self-reliance, but they are ignorant beyond description, such a thing as books and schoolroom being unknown quantities to them, and their lot is a life of drudgery.
“Many of the village women labor in the fields from early morning to late at night, especially during the cotton season, seven or eight months of the year.
“During the cotton-ginning season many women and girls work from 4 o’clock A.M. to 9 o’clock P.M. in the cotton-ginning mills. Those in the vicinities of larger towns are vendors of fruit, vegetables, milk, cheese, and butter. On market days great troops of village women can be seen on the country roads, their wares in big baskets on their heads, their babies perched astride their shoulders, wending their way to town. Those who live in the larger towns are often employed as hodcarriers for masons. …
“Unhappy marriages are a natural result of the seclusion of women in Egypt. It would be highly improper for a man to see his bride until after he had married her. He has not even had the privilege of choosing her. His mother did that for him, and it goes without saying that the young man is not always suited. …
“Frequent divorce is a natural result of these unhappy marriages. Divorce in any land is a social evil but in Egypt it is especially so, because the divorce laws are such that in a peculiar way woman is degraded by them.
“It is difficult to obtain exact figures regarding the percentage of divorce, as all cases are not recorded. There are some who say 50 per cent. of marriages end in divorce, others say 80 per cent… An experienced missionary when asked her opinion, said, “Divorce is so common that to find a woman who lives all her life with one husband is the exception.”
“In fact it is such an exception that it is a subject for remark, and a visitor in a house where such happy conditions exist never fails to be told about it.
“Many women have been divorced several times, and a woman of twenty years of age may be living with her third husband.
“A native Bible woman who had worked among Mohammedans for fourteen years when asked, “How many men or women of twenty-five years of age she thought likely to be living with their original partners?” said, “Do you mean that they should have kept to each other and that neither has been divorced or married anybody else?”—”Yes.” She laughed and said, “Perhaps one in two thousand.” …
“The question has been asked what is the condition of the children of divorced parents. According to the law the mother is given an allowance by her former husband on which to bring up their children to a certain age; then they are his. If they are girls they often are allowed to become servants to the mother’s successor, although there are fathers who do have enough natural affection to give the daughters of a former wife the proper place in the house. The allowance given a divorced woman when she has children is most often a mere pittance and too often she never gets one at all. She marries again and the children live with grandparents or other near relations or even alternate between the houses of the remarried father and mother, thus becoming mere little street waifs who have no definite abiding place. They certainly do suffer from neglect, but seldom are they victims of deliberate cruelty, although such cases are not unheard of. …
“Yet even among Mohammedans polygamy is a dying institution. … Among the middle classes the difficulty of supporting more than one wife at a time is decreasing polygamy. But by no means is polygamy an unheard-of thing, even if it is going out of fashion. Fashion is always slow in reaching the country places, and it seems to be in the country villages that polygamy seems to be more generally practised. Two brothers, representative country-men, wealthy and conservative, were known to have very extensive harems, each one having twenty-four wives and concubines. …
“Child-marriages have always been considered one of the curses of the East. In Egypt thirteen is about the average age at which the girls are married, but one is constantly meeting with cases of marriage at a much earlier age. A woman of twenty-five, prematurely old, seemed to take great delight in telling of her marriage when she was only seven years old, about as far back as she could remember. Another often tells the story how she escaped being married when she was only eight years old. The guests were all assembled, the elaborate supper had been enjoyed by all, the dancing women had been more than usually entertaining; the time for the bridal procession came around, but where was the bride? Her father searched all through the house for her. At last he found her lying asleep in the ashes in the kitchen. His father heart was touched and he said to those who followed him, “See that baby there asleep! Is it right to marry her?” At the risk of bringing great disgrace upon himself, he then and there stopped the marriage and the next day started her off to school. …
“The evangelical community has the reputation of being the best educated class of people in Egypt. The last census of all Egypt showed that only forty-eight in one thousand could read. A special census of the native evangelical community showed that three hundred and sixty-five in one thousand could read. The census also brought out the fact that in the evangelical community female education has taken a great step in advance, showing that while in all Egypt only six women in one thousand could read, in the evangelical community two hundred in one thousand could read.”
EvX: Throughout the book, missionaries in different countries (with a few exceptions, like China,) aver that divorce is a source of greater suffering than polygamy, since only a few people could really afford to have many wives at the same time. In an area, for example, there might be very little prostitution, but a rich man could marry a poor girl, keep her for a week, then divorce her, marry another poor girl, keep her for a week, divorce her, etc. For the men, divorce appears to have no real effect on social or economic status, but for the girls it could be very problematic.
Welcome to our final discussion of Auerswald’s The Code Economy. Today we will be finishing the text, chapters 13-15. Please feel free to jump in even if you haven’t read the book.
After a hopefully entertaining digression about Peruvian Poutine and Netflix’s algorithms*, we progress to the discussion of Bitcoin and the Blockchain. Now, I don’t know anything about Bitcoin other than the vague ideas I have picked up by virtue of being a person on the internet, but it was an interesting discussion nonetheless.
Auerswald likens blockchain to an old-fashioned accountant’s ledger; the “blocks” are the rectangles in which a business’s earnings and expenses are recorded. If there is any question about a company’s profits, you can look back at the information recorded in the chain of blocks.
The problem with this system is that there is only one ledger. If the accountant has made a mistake (or worse, a theft,) there is nothing else to compare it to in order to determine the mistake.
In the modern, distributed version, there are many copies of the blockchain. If on most of these copies of the chain, block 22 says -$400, and on one copy it says +$400, we conclude that the one that disagrees is most likely in error. Like the works of Shakespeare, there are so many copies out there that a discrepancy a single copy cannot be claimed to be authoritative; it is the collective body of work that matters.
“Blockchain” is probably going to get used here as a metaphor for “distributed systems of confirming authority” a lot. For example, “Democracy is a blockchain for deciding who gets to rule a country.” Or “science is a blockchain.”
In Rhodes’s “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” he recounts the process by which something becomes accepted as “true” (or reasonably likely to be true,) in the scientific community. Let’s suppose scientist M is the foremost authority in his field–perhaps organic LEDs. Scientists L and N are doing work that overlaps M’s, and can therefore basically evaluate M’s work and vouch for whether they think it is sound or not. Scientists J, K, O, and P do work that overlaps a lot with L and N and a little with M; they can evaluate M’s work a little and vouch for whether they think L and N are trustworthy. The chain continues down to little cats scientists A and Z, who can’t really evaluate scientist M, but can tell you whether or not they think B and Y’s results are trustworthy.
This community of science has both good and bad. In general, the structure of science has been extremely successful at inventing things like computers, atomic bombs, and penicillin; at times it creates resistance to new ideas just because they are so far outside of the mainstream of what other scientists are doing. For example, Ignaz Semmelweis, a physician, discovered that he could reduce maternal deaths at his hospital from around 10-18% to 2% simply by insisting that obstetricians wash their hands between dissecting cadavers and delivering babies. Unfortunately, the rest of the medical establishment had not yet accepted the Germ Theory of disease and believed that disease was caused by imbalanced humors. Semmelweis’s idea that invisible corpse particles were somehow transferring corpse-ness from dead people to live people seemed absurd, and further, blamed the doctors themselves for the deaths of their patients. Semmelweis’s tragic tail ends with him being stomped to death in an insane asylum. (His mental ill-health was probably induced by a combination of the stress of being rejected by his profession; and syphilis, contracted via charity work delivering babies for destitute prostitutes.)
Luckily for mothers everywhere, medical science eventually caught up with Semmelweis and puerperal fever is no longer a major concern for laboring women. Science, it seems, can correct itself. (We may want to be cautious about being too eager to reject new ideas–especially in cases where there is clearly a lot of room for improvement, like an 18% death rate.)
Niti Aayog is working with Apollo Hospitals and information technology major Oracle on applying blockchain (decentralised) technology in pharmaceutical supply chain management to detect spurious drugs, Chief Executive Officer of NITI Aayog Amitabh Kant said here today.
Addressing a gathering through video-conferencing at the inaugural session of International Blockchain Congress 2018 for which Niti Aayog was a co-host, Kant said the organisation was working on applying the blockchain technology to pressing problems of the country in areas such as land registry, health records and fertiliser subsidy distribution m among others.
Blockchain technology can enable India to find solutions to huge logjams in courts …
With two-thirds of all civil cases pertaining to registration of property or land, the country’s policy think-tank is working with judiciary to find disruptive ways to expedite registrations, mutations and enable a system of smart transactions that is free of corruption and middlemen.
… There are three crore cases currently pending in Indian courts, including 42.5 lakh cases in high courts and 2.6 crore* cases in lower courts. Even if 100 cases are disposed off every hour without sleeping and eating, it would take more than 35 years to catch up, he said. …
On transforming the land registry system using blockchain, Niti Aayog is in advanced stage of implementing proof of concept pilot in Chandigarh to assess its potential to solve the problem of India’s land-based registry system. …
“It’s powerful because it allows multiple parties to collaborate and come to consensus without any need of third party,” he said.
*A crore is an Indian unit equivalent to 10 million.
I probably do not need to review Auerswald’s summary of Bitcoin’s history, as you are probably already well aware of it, but the question of “is Bitcoin real money?” is interesting. In 1875, Jevons, “cofounder of the neoclassical school in economics,” wrote that a material used as money should have the following traits:
“1 Utility and value
2 Portability
3 Indestructibility
4 Homogeneity
5 Divisibility
6 Stability of value
7 Cognizability.”
I am not sure about all of the items on this list; cigarettes and ramen noodles, for example, are used as currency in prisons, even though they are very easy to destroy. It seems like using a currency that you are going to eat would be problematic, yet the pattern recurs over and over in prisons (where perhaps people cannot get their hands on non-consumable goods, or perhaps people simply have no desire for non-consumable ornaments like gold.)
Gold–the “gold standard” of currencies–is a big odd to me, because it has very few practical uses. You can’t eat it. You can’t plant with it, cure parasites with it, or build with it. Lots of people talk about how you’d want a hard currency like gold in the case of societal collapse in which people stop accepting fiat currency, but if zombies were invading, the gas stations had run out of gasoline, and the grocery stores were out of food, I can’t imagine that I’d trade what few precious commodities I had left for a pile of rocks.
People argue that fiat currency is “just paper,” but gold is “just rocks,” and unless you’re a jeweler, the value of either is dependent entirely on your expectation that other people will accept them as currency.
Auerswald writes:
For the past 40 years the world’s currencies have been untethered from gold or any other metal. National “fiat” currencies are nothing more or less than tradeable trust, whose function as currency is based entirely on government-enforced scarcity an verifiability not tethered to its intrinsic usefulness.
I think Auerswald overlooks the role of force in backing fiat currencies. We don’t use Federal Reserve Notes because we trust the government like it’s our best friend from the army who pulled us out of a burning foxhole that one time. We use Federal Reserve Notes because the US government has a lot of guns and bombs to back up its claim that this is real money.
Which means the power of a dollar is dependent on the US government’s ability to enforce that value.
As for Bitcoin:
Bitcoin… satisfies all the criteria for being “money” that William Stanley Jevon set forth… with on exception intrinsic utility and value. That does not mean that Bitcoin will grow in significance as a means of exchange, much less achieve any position of dominance. But with digital transactions via mobile phones–Apple Pay and the like–becoming ever more command the concept of a digital currency not backed by any government gaining rapid acceptance, the prospect of one or another digital currency competing successfully with fiat currencies is not nearly as far-fetched today as it was even three years ago.
The biggest problems I see for digital currencies:
Keeping value–if people decide they won’t accept DogeCoin, then what do you do with all of your DogeCoins?
Ease of entry into the market makes it difficult for any one Coin to retain value
Most people are happy using currencies not associated with illegal activity
You mean you can just make more of these things? Mugabe is brilliant!
The upside to digital currencies is they may be a real blessing for people caught in countries where local fiat currencies are being manipulated all to hell.
Anyway, Auerswald envisions a world in which blockchains (with coins or not) enable a world of peer-to-peer authentication and transactions:
By their very structure, Peer-to-peer platforms start out being distributed. The challenge is how to organize all of the energy contained in such networks so that people are rewarded fairly for their contributions. …Blockchain-based systems for governing peer0to0eer networks hold the promise–so far unrealized–of incorporating the best features of markets when it comes to rewarding contribution and of organizations when it comes to keeping track of reputations.
In other words, in areas where economies are held back because the local governments do a bad job of enforcing contracts and securing property rights, “blockchain”-like algorithms may be able to step into the gap and provided an accepted, distributed, alternative system of enforcement and authentication.
(This is the point where I start ranting to anyone within earshot about communists not recognizing the necessity of secure property rights so that people can turn their property into capital in order to start businesses. Without that seed money to start a business, you can’t get started. Even something simple, like driving for Uber, requires a car to start with, and cars cost money. If you can’t depend on having money tomorrow because all of your property just got confiscated, or you can’t depend on having a car tomorrow because private property is for bourgeois scum, then you can’t get a job driving for Uber. If no one can convert property to capital and thus to businesses, then you don’t get business and you have no economy and people suffer.
Communists see that some people have property that they can convert to capital and other people don’t have said capital, and their solution is to just take everybody’s stuff away and declare the problem fixed, when what they really want is for everyone to have enough basic property and capital to be able to start their own business.]
But back to Auerswald:
Earlier… I alluded to the significant advance in democracy, science, and financial systems that occurred simultaneously during …the Age of Enlightenment. That systems of governance, inquiry, and economics should have advanced all at the same time… is no coincidence at all. Each of these foundational developments in human social evolution is, at its core, an algorithm for authentication and verification. …
It is only because of the disciplinary fragmentation of inquiry that has occurred in the past century that we do not immediately perceive in the evolved historical record the patterns connecting systems of authentication and verification in politics, science, and economics as they have jointly evolved. … Illuminating those patterns has been the point of this book.
Chapter 14 begins with a history of Burning Man, which the author defends thus:
Still, it makes for an interesting case study in the building of cities (and why laws get enacted): Like everything about Black Rock City, the layout is the product of both planning and evolution. Cities are what physicists refer to as dissipative structures: highly complex organisms worse existence depend on a constant throughput of energy. If you were to close down all bridges and tunnels into New your City … grocery stores would have only a three-day supply of food. The same is generally true of a city’s other energy requirements. All cities are temporary, and they survive only because we feed them. …
The evolution of Black Rock is for urbanists what a real-life Jurassic Park would be for a Paleontologist. We really have no idea what the experience of living in humanity’s first cities might have been–whether Uruk in Mesopotamia or Catalhoyuk in Anatolia. And yet all cities also have elements of planning. Where Black Rock City has its Larry Harvey, London had its Robert Hooke and Washington, D.C., had its Pierre L’Enfant. Each had a notion of how to bound a space, build symmetry and flow, and in so doing provide a platform where the human experience can unfold.
I have a somewhat dim view of “Burning Man” as a communist utopia that’s only open to rich people, filled with environmentalist hippies leaving an enormous carbon footprint in order to get high with a close-knit community of 70,000 other people, but maybe my sight is obscured from the outside.
The question remains, though: will code be a blessing, or a curse? What happens to employment as “traditional” jobs disappear? Will blockchain and other new platforms and technologies make us freer, or simply find new ways to control us?
The advance of code reduces individual power and autonomy while it increases individual capabilities and freedom.
So far, Auerswald points out, there has been good reason to be optimistic:
In 1990, a staggeringly high 43 percent of people in the “developing world,” approximately 1.9 billion people, lived in extreme poverty. By 2010, that number had fallen to 21 percent. …
For the past two centuries, the vehicle for that progress has been the continual capacity of economies to generate more and better jobs. … “Gallup has discovered that having a good job is now the great global dream … ‘A good job’ is now more important than having a family, more compelling than democracy and freedom, religion, peace and so on… Stimulating job growth is the new currency of all leaders because if you don’t deliver on it you will experience instability, brain drain, sometimes revolution…
There is something concerning about this, though. “Jobs creation” is now widely agreed to be in the hands of national leaders, not individuals. Ordinary people are no longer seen as drivers of innovation. People can start businesses, of course, but whether those businesses survive or fail depends on the government; for the average person, jobs are no longer created by human ingenuity but awarded by an opaque power structure.
Thus the liberal claim that “structural racism” (rather than “individual racism”) is the real cause of continued black impoverishment and high unemployment rates. In a world where employment is granted or withheld by the powerful based on whether or not they like you, not based on your own innate ability to make your own economic contribution to the world, then it is imperative to make sure that the powerful see it as important to employ people like you.
It is, in sum, an admission of the powerlessness of the individual.
Still, Auerswald is hopeful that with the rise of the Peer-to-Peer economy and end of traditional factory work, not only will work be more interesting (as boring, repetitive jobs are most easily automated,) but also that people will no longer be dependent on the whims of a small set of powerful people for access to jobs.
I think he underestimates how useful it is to have steady, long-term employment and how difficult it is for individuals to compete against established corporations that have much larger economies of scale and access to far more relevant data than they do. Take, for example, YouTube vs. Netflix. Netflix can use its troves of data to determine which kinds of shows customers would like to watch more of, then hire people to make those shows. This is pretty nice work if you can get it. YouTube, of course, just lets pretty much anyone put up any video they want, and most of the videos are probably pretty dull, but a few YouTubers put up quality material and an even smaller few actually make a decent amount of money. YouTuber PewDiePie, for example, holds the record at 61+ million subscribers, which has earned him $124 million. But most people who try to become YouTube stars do not become PewDiePie; most earn very little. And why should they, when most of them are amateurs low-budget amateurs with no data on what audiences are interested in going up against other TV options like Orange is the New Black, Breaking Bad, and yes, PewDs himself?
I have a friend who is a very talented amateur clothing designer and dressmaker. I have encouraged her to open a shop on Etsy and try sell some of her creations, but can she really compete with Walmart, The Gap, or Nordstrom? Big Clothing has a massive lead in terms of factories mass-producing clothes for sale. (Her only hope would be to extremely upscale–wedding dresses, movie costumes, etc.)
So what does the future hold?
In the next round of digital disruption, tasks that can be automated (the “high-volume, low-price” option resulting from ongoing code-driven bifurcations…) will yield only small dividends for most people. The exception is the relatively small number of people who will maintain the platforms on which such tasks are performed…
The promising pathway for inclusive well-being is humanized work (the “low-volume, high-price” pathway resulting from ongoing code-driven bifurcations…) this pathway includes everything about value creation that is differentiated, personal, and human.
In his Conclusion, Auerswald writes:
To be human is to think critically. To collaborate, to Communicate. To be creative. What we call “the economy’ is one extension of these activities. It is the domain in which we develop and advance code.
From Ray Kurzweil
But the singularity approaches:
We are not at the center of our cognitive universe. Our own creations are eclipsing us.
For each of us, redefining work requires nothing less than redefining identity. This is because production is not something human beings do just to consume. In fact, the opposite is true. We are living beings. We consume in order to produce.
Well, that’s the end of the book. I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have. What do you think the future holds? Where do you think code is taking the economy? What are the best–and worst–opportunities for growth? And what (if anything) should we read next?
*An Aside On Netflix and the use of algorithms to produce movies/TV:
…consider the fate of two films that premiered the same night at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. … One of these films, What Happened, Miss Simone? was a documentary about singer and civil rights icon Nina Simone. That film was funded by Netflix, whose corporate decision to back the film was based in part on insights algorithmically gleaned from the vast trove of data it has collected on users of its streaming video and movie rental services. The second film was a comedy titled The Bronze, which featured television star Melissa Rauch as a vulgar gymnast. The Bronze was produced by Duplass Brothers production and privately financed by “a few wealthy individual” whose decision to back the film was presumably not based on complex impersonal algorithms but rather, as has been the Hollywood norm, on business intuition.
I’ve often wondered why so many terrible movies get made.
A documentary about a Civil Rights leader might not be everyone’s cup of tea (people like to say they watch intellectual movies more than they actually do,) but plenty of people will at least abstractly like it. By contrast, a “vulgar gymnast” is not an interesting premise for a movie. Vulgarity can be funny when it is contrasted with something typically not vulgar–eg, “A vulgar mobster and a pious nun team up to save an orphanage,” or even “A vulgar nun and pious mobster…” The humor lies in the contrast between purity and vulgarity. But gymnasts aren’t known for being particularly pure or vulgar–they’re neutral–so there’s no contrast in this scenario. A vulgar gymnast doesn’t sound funny, it sounds rude and unpleasant. And this is the one sentences summary chosen to represent the movie? Not a good sign.
As you might have guessed already, What Happened, Miss Simone, did very well, and The Bronze was a bomb. It has terrible reviews on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes. As folks have put it, it’s just not funny.
Davidowitz notes in Everybody Lies that the industries most ripe for “big data”fication are the ones where the current data is not very good. Industries where people work more on intuition than analysis. For example, the choice of horses in horse racing, until recently, was based on pedigree and intuition–what experienced horse people thought seemed promising in a foal. There was a lot of room in horse racing for quantification and analysis–and the guy who started using mobile x-ray machines to measure horse’s heart and lung sizes was able to make significantly better predictions than people who just looked at the horses’s outsides. By contrast, hedge funds have already put significant effort into quantifying what the prices of different stocks are going to do, and so it is very hard to do better data analysis than they already are.
The selection of movies and TV pilots to fund fall more into the “racing horses picked by intuition” category than the “extremely quantified hedge funds” category, which means there’s lots of room for improvement for anyone who can get good data on the subject.
Incidentally, “In 2015… Netflix accounted for almost 37 percent of all downstream internet traffic in North America during peak evening hours.”
evolutionistx 