In Praise(-ish) of Conformity

David Sloan Wilson

In the school where I attended second grade, our classroom was two doors down from a kindergarten class. The kindergartners had to walk past our door to reach theirs. Several of my classmates had a favorite taunt they employed whenever the kindergartners wandered too close:

Kindergarten babies!
Stick your head in gravy!
Wash it off with bubblegum
and send it to the Navy!

I resisted singing along as long as possible. First, because it seemed just mean, running little kids down for being little. Hell, I'd been a kindergarten baby just two years earlier. Then, because I'd just moved into that area myself, and had as little in common with my classmates as with the kindergartners.

Yet before long, the dirty looks from my classmates became overwhelming. My silence marked me as an outsider. And be real, I had to interact with my classmates daily, while the kindergartners remained virtually strangers. What else could a kid with few friends do? To my later shame, I started singing along with the bullies’ taunt.

We're accustomed to thinking of “conformity” as something weak-minded people do, a zombie-like behavior. We often couple conformity with the word “mindless.” Yet evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, in his book Darwin's Cathedral, lists conformity as a necessary precondition to build human society. We can't get along unless we accord with others’ behavior and expectations.

Several benign actions serve to advance productive (rather than mindless) conformity. Small talk is one, though I cringe to admit it. Clichés in speech and writing are another, since they let speakers share a background of reference. As any football fan, science fiction convention-goer, or political party devotee knows, engaging in chants and songs is a powerful group-building act.

We see this in religious songs. When Lutherans sing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” or Methodists sing “O For a Thousand Tongues To Sing,” they confirm their group identity. These songs contain the germinal forms of their group theology, but for religious purposes, the lyrics are secondary. The point is, we sing them together.

Colin Kaepernick

Nobody would mistake “Kindergarten Babies” for secular hymnody, but it serves the same point. By singing it together, we confirmed we'd passed beyond the ignorance of infancy (“those who dwelt in darkness have seen a great light”). We also confirmed our identity as mature, diverse minds prepared for life's strange and dangerous exigencies. Duh, we were seven!

One of today's most inflammatory issues deals with the correct way to handle a national identity song. Must we all, as one side contends, stand to attention in absolute unison? Or may we, as the other side contends, kneel and pray as our conscience dictates?

This isn't a thought experiment. The two sides feud for control of how we express our group identity. One side says we're a martial people defined by our loyalty to the hierarchy (remember, the national anthem is a military song). The other says we're a people of morals and principle, and sometimes we're most American when we defy the American state.

Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her book Strangers In Their Own Land, interviews several people living in strongly conservative areas. She discovers that many have what, to her, sound like progressive values. Some are committed to environmental protection, others to economic fairness, others to their own causes. Yet in the voting booth, time and again, they vote for the party that opposes their pet issues.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

Hochschild, a scholar, avoids attributing intent to this disconnect. I have no such restraint. Like me, swallowing my principles to sing “Kindergarten Babies,” they'd rather get along with the people they have to live with every day, than be morally pure and lonely. This uniformity makes these individuals into a people.

But does it make them a people they'd like to live with?

The difference between productive conformity, and mindless conformity, is often visible only at a distance. I don't mean physical distance, outsiders standing around passing judgement. I mean time distance: I now regret singing “Kindergarten Babies” because I'm an adult who knows the difference between building community, and buying fifteen minutes’ peace. Once-popular actions like Operation Iraqi Freedom, mean something similar to the nation.

In short, we need conformity to survive. But we're lousy judges, in the moment, of the difference between productive and mindless conformity. We need constant guidance and reminders, and even that isn't foolproof. I have no answers yet. But I think I have better questions, and that's maybe more important than facile answers at this point.

Those Who Don't Learn From History

A march by right-wing German nationalist group PEGIDA. The banner reads:
"Nonviolent & United Against Faith Wars on German Soil!"
Notice the trash bin containing both an Islamic flag and a swastika.

Recent news coverage of anti-Islamic protests in Europe have begun trickling into America, possibly despite America's’ best efforts. Generally, if it doesn’t involve Downton Abbey or timeshares in Ibiza, it’s hard to get Americans interested in European events beneath the national election level. Yet recent rallies by Germany’s PEGIDA nationalist movement, or France’s frankly creepy Front National party, have disturbingly familiar textures. And they reflect worrisome prospects in America’s domestic politics, unless we keep watch.

Steve Wick’s The Long Night, a biography of pioneering journalist William Shirer, describes Shirer’s time in Europe after World War I. Arriving in Hemingway’s Paris, he knocked around, enjoying the same nightlife that America’s legendary expatriates recorded, while attempting to find stringer work for American newspapers. But sometime around 1930, Europe’s economy imploded. Shirer, working for Edward R. Murrow and NBC, watched the Europe he loved descend into street violence, serial blaming, and early fascism.

Wick, quoting Shirer, does better describing Europe’s decline than I could. But watching news arising from today’s EU, and its eerie parallels in certain American political sectors, the historical patterns defy easy dismissal. Lavish lifestyles, subsidized by hefty consumer debt, came crashing like Jenga pieces when creditors could loan nothing further. Those who profited from ill-considered acquisitions found what they’d acquired suddenly worthless. Seeking to shift blame off themselves, they sought a designated scapegoat class.

Both PEGIDA and the Tea Party claim no racial motivation whatsoever, as Hitler and Mussolini did; yet they seek scapegoats easily recognizable by external characteristics. Jews, Gypsies, Arabs, Mexicans—regardless of particulars, the visible themes remain. The population that enjoys power perceives itself newly powerless, and seeks another population to blame. Problems always originate somewhere else. Importantly, they believe themselves oppressed by this otherwise powerless minority, whether it’s “Jewish bankers” or “illegals stealing our jobs.”

Tzvetan Todorov acknowledges that the last several years have seen a resurgence in European race-based bigotry. Yet he insists this doesn’t mean a return to Depression-era Fascism, but rather closing the book on that historical gulf. One wonders how that works. PEGIDA and the Front National are repeating behaviors familiar from world history textbooks, which doesn’t exactly suggest winding back the clock. Indeed, since familiar behaviors follow familiar precursors, it’s naive to expect different outcomes.

A Front National campaign poster from 2010. It reads:
"Enough Anti-French Racism, We're At Home!"

Lutz Bachmann, leader of PEGIDA, was recently shamed into hiding after a photo surfaced of him posing as Hitler. PEGIDA, to its credit, disavowed Bachmann altogether. Yet the underlying thinking was all too visible. Certainly, to joke about Hitler doesn’t make one secretly fascist; considering my occasional Hitler, Archie Bunker, and Old South wisecracks, I cannot cast aspersions. Yet Bachmann didn’t just make this joke; he preserved it. He was only ashamed at getting caught.

Britain elected David Cameron PM, and Germany retained Angela Merkel, despite their policies being massively unpopular. France voted out Nicolas Sarkozy, the first French President turfed out after one term since 1981, but that basically involved French voters holding their noses while name-checking the other guy. Marine Le Pen’s nationalist, anti-immigrant Front National, possibly Europe’s most overtly racist political force, came within ten points of final-round elections, reflecting French disaffection with the two mainstream parties.

On American shores, voters elected a wholly Republican Congress, while asking legislators to support policy platforms specifically opposite to the Republican agenda, apparently without irony. Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise continues trying to walk back sometime racist affiliations. Sarah Palin gets agitated whenever somebody points out far-right policies have lopsided racial implications, claiming anybody who notices racism is secretly racist. “States’ Rights,” that pre-Civil War shibboleth of people nerving themselves to treason, has seen uncanny resurgence.

For history readers, the pattern is unmistakable. Europe descended into fascism in the 1930s, and the principle enjoyed remarkable American popularity; the unabashedly pro-Hitler folk hero, Charles Lindbergh, was a presidential front-runner until the outbreak of European violence derailed him. The conditions that precipitated transnational fascism in 1933 exist today, in both Europe and America. The fact that similar responses have cropped up in multiple countries should persuade doubters that we have cause to worry.

History readers have the reassurance, though, that history is written. We know what happened before, and why; we know how similar circumstances have arisen today, and we have the capacity to say we won’t repeat yesterday’s disasters. Elected leaders, media professionals, economic touchstones, and ordinary citizens have the opportunity, and the responsibility, to stand fast against creeping fanaticism. We have the power to repeat, or resist, history’s tides. Our next steps depend entirely upon us.

A common Tea Party slogan. I shouldn't have to state the parallels.

Cry "Havoc!" and Let Slip

Richard Overy, A History of War in 100 Battles

Whatever you think of war and its social implications, one cannot deny its evolving social structures and lasting consequences. From Greeks with spears, to archers and lancers, to today’s digitally coded, technologically intense battlefield, war continues to hold prominence among forces shaping human society. British historian Richard Overy crafts a far-reaching, lavishly illustrated history of how war evolves with human society, and vice versa, utilizing one hundred dramatic examples of direct conflict and close combat.

Some of Overy’s choices are obvious: no thoroughgoing history of war could conscionably overlook the Spanish Armada, Gettysburg, or Guadalcanal. But Overy also describes obscure conflicts. Non-historians may consider Maipû, Solferino, or Omdurman esoteric, but Overy persuasively contends they embody war’s ever-evolving trends, and influence everything coming after. And though we may not easily recall the Milvian Bridge, Agincourt, and Dien Bien Phu, in Overy’s telling, their historical significance demands equal treatment and careful consideration.

Overy divides his list into six distinguishing categories: Leadership, Against the Odds, Innovation, Deception, Courage in the Face of Fire, and In the Nick of Time. The category titles are pretty self-explanatory: Nelson at Trafalgar was a superior leader, while the Athenians at Marathon beat superior forces by loud displays of courage. Within each category, Overy lists the battles sequentially, allowing patterns to develop across centuries and geography. Overy paints sweeping themes with poetic panache.

Particularly in battles before the Nineteenth Century, Overy admits, anything like modern record-keeping doesn’t exist. Not only in semi-mythical battles like Thermopylae or Troy, but ostensibly historical campaigns like Bannockburn or the Fall of Tenochtitlan, we must reconstruct events from legend and partial evidence. Battles like Roncesvalles, where Charlemagne’s champion Roland fell, or Lake Peipus, where Alexander Nevsky preserved Russia, emerge from  oral tradition. Ever the careful historian, Overy’s favorite expression is “open to conjecture.”

The Battle of Adwa, 1895 newspaper illustration
Click to enlarge

These battle descriptions aren’t meant to be either exhaustive or definitive. Overy dedicates three to four pages to each battle, regardless of exact circumstances. Gaugamela, which lasted an afternoon, and Austerlitz, which took a day, get equal coverage to Verdun and the Battle of Britain, which lasted months, and Desert Storm and the Six Day War, which were actually single military actions. Overy doesn’t pretend to comprehensive history; overarching patterns matter more than individual events.

But this mix of historical caution and synoptic storytelling defines Overy’s edge. Writing for generalists, Overy describes not only troop movements and map markers, but actual fighting conditions in adverse circumstances. Some armies, for instance, folded for want of drinking water. Entire wars turned on generals’ ability to communicate along geographically dispersed fronts. War, for Overy, isn’t a theoretical command structure (though he cites famed theoreticians like Frederick the Great); it’s dirty on the ground.

Reading Overy’s table of contents, his selected battles seem awfully Eurocentric. Even many non-European battles involve colonial armies suppressing native populations. But his introduction specifies that, while war transcends individual culture, what we call “battle” is distinctively Indo-European in culture. Indian tribal skirmishes and Mogol cattle raids aren’t battles; true battle, with customs of engagement and tactics of conquest, moves out globally with European colonial expansion; without empire, other peoples might’ve never discovered battle’s horrors.

But they did. The Japanese at Sekigahara, the Ethiopians at Adwa, or the combined tribes at Little Big Horn [sic] quickly adopted Western confrontational techniques, sometimes outplaying Western forces at their own game. This adoption of Western techniques to preserve non-Western cultural identity says something about history’s trends— something not everyone will like. (America’s long-running Indian Wars, which only latterly escalated to anything we’d call “battle,” get short shrift here. But that’s my personal issue.)

To his credit, Overy avoids philosophical rumination. The morality of conflicts like Rorke’s Drift or Hiroshima don’t concern him here, only the conduct of competing forces. This fact-based history, reserving analysis for audiences’ imaginations, permits Overy to maintain focus on particular circumstances. He needn’t comment on European colonialism, or racism, or national identity, because this book isn’t about that. It’s about how people fight and die. And sometimes, history doesn’t reward the players we favor.

Besides Overy’s historical arc, this book is visually gripping too. Oxford UP has a history of publishing lavishly illustrated histories for non-specialists, books which audiences can read privately or display, coffee table-style. With at least one illustration per battle (mostly paintings done later, though some photographs of more recent conflicts), this book rewards both casual browsing and thorough reading. I finished this book feeling informed, enlightened, and ready to learn more about history’s open secrets.

Why Gay Marriage Won't Lead To Legalized Incest

When the moderately conservative op-ed magazine The Week published an article in late September entitled How Liberals Are Unwittingly Paving the Way For the Legalization of Adult Incest, most audiences probably only noticed the absurdly long title, if they noticed it at all, and kept moving. We’ve all heard such sentiments before. Pro-gay marriage advocates have grown bored with such naked scare-mongering, while anti-gay marriage traditionalists nod stoically along, already aware such opinions are common.

I’ll paraphrase author Damon Linker’s argument. In an “anything goes” atmosphere, where we’ve progressively dismissed the taboo against homosexuality, we must inevitably accept all forms of non-coercive sex as essentially equal. This means, if blood relatives of consenting age engage in sexual relations, we’d necessarily treat their relationship like we’d treat a heterosexual marriage. The German Ethics Council, a non-binding government committee, has already endorsed this reasoning. In time, such libertarianism is an unavoidable consequence.

Damon Linker

If Linker’s argument sounds familiar, we’ve heard his core claims dribble from the lips of reactionary moralists before, from Rick Santorum to Laura Schlessinger. It was crap then, and it remains crap now. It relies on false equivalency, that all sexual expressions besides man-on-top heterosexuality are mere self-indulgence. By implication, it insists all change is decline, and in moral categories like sexuality, it makes all change into decadence. Linker aims to scare, not inform, readers.

Same-sex marriage has achieved widespread acceptance in developed countries today because we have sex for different reasons than in the past. In bygone days, when infant mortality was high, infectious diseases more commonly terminal, and economics dependent on constant resupplies of human labor, procreation had important social weight. Marriage established legitimate continuity of family authority, resource allocation, and work. Before second-wave feminism, marriage also helped establish social hierarchy: male privilege and work, versus female domesticity.

We marry, procreate, and have sex today for different reasons. First, and perhaps most important, we moderns marry for love. This sounds obvious, but that concept only extends backward to Victorian times. It’s a product of economic stability and confidence. And it corresponds with changing sexual mores: not just rising acceptance for homosexuality, but for women’s ability to divorce abusive husbands, a woman’s rights following rape, and her authority to decide whether to give birth.

By itself, we might suppose similar claims apply to sex between blood relations. Though healthy individuals cringe at the thought, we can imagine situations where adult siblings and cousins could experience romantic love. But besides reifying love, marriage serves another responsibility. Imagine society as a pyramid. Individuals form the foundation, which coalesce into families, then civic organizations (schools, clubs, congregations, etc.). These merge into local communities, then regional governments, and upward, to nationwide federal authority.

Stephanie Coontz

Marriage, whether heterosexual or same-sex, guides individuals outward, into society. Incest guides individuals inward, away from society. Incest jeopardizes rudimentary social structures by permitting individuals to retreat from their public, communal obligations. If I marry, or anyway sleep with, my sister, I don’t create new family relations, I simply perpetuate old ones. Same-sex couples wish to join public society, drive culture, and make families. Incestuous relations are cowardly, essentially fleeing contact with larger human community.

Laws regarding marriage state how society’s pyramid peak permits us, the foundation, to constitute the second level. For about seven generations, we’ve accepted that individuals form families based on love, though until recently, we’ve assumed love meant men and women. Permitting same-sex couples to legally wed asserts that love is our society’s fundamental organizing principle. Forbidding same-sex marriage associates marriage with procreation, limiting society’s foundation to its members’ sexual capability, the veriest definition of plebian.

Under that reasoning, society should retain the authority to forbid incest, even among consenting adults. When individuals have sex with blood relations, even discounting the genetic consequences, these individuals, and the families they perpetuate, essentially fragment from society. When we marry non-related individuals of either gender, we strengthen society’s bonds and build new families. With incest, we abrogate our responsibilities to common humanity. (See Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History for more detail in this direction.)

Conflating gay marriage and incest is a time-tested scare tactic, designed to silence debate. Reactionaries lob this one bomb into the public discourse and make somebody else clean the rubble. Essentially, it’s the opposite of discussing issues on their merits. Propagandists of ignorance like Damon Linker should be ashamed, except I doubt they’re capable of shame. Society isn’t changing, it’s already changed, and Linker’s pathetic histrionics signal allegiance to a cultural dynamic already long dead.

If War Is the Answer, What Was the Question?

Christopher Coker, Can War Be Eliminated?

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance.... In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.
            —George Orwell

Like other war-weary eras before ours, we’ve begun seeking alternatives to violence to solve our global problems. And like prior eras, we’ve begun realizing, however dimly, that alternatives aren’t exactly forthcoming. Christopher Coker, professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, seems a likely candidate to ruminate on humanity’s future military options. But speaking as a guy who’s marched for peace, I find his prognosis rather worrisome.

Briefly, Coker answers his title question early, and often: war persists because war makes us human. I repeat myself, as Coker does: war makes us human. Seriously. Screw art, philosophy, science, religion, industry, or even cuisine. We become human by killing others into agreement. This argument might’ve needed less defense (though probably more than Coker offers) before two world wars and the spectre of nuclear extinction reframed the debate.

Don’t mistake me: Coker isn’t some crypto-fascist warmonger somehow immune to the Twentieth Century’s lingering lessons. He adroitly demonstrates how anti-war advocacy has produced slovenly thinking, particularly among New Agers and similar utopians. Abjuring war will require radically transforming human global politics and public morals, which will come only with great difficulty, even with violence. Global disarmament isn’t on our horizon. War will remain common for now, because it’s familiar.

Coker has many valid points. He astutely describes how war reproduces itself, through myths of valor and in-group identity, in human culture. And he rightly faults war’s opponents for failing to define peace as anything besides “not war.” If that’s all peace is, then peace cannot exist without wars to oppose. But Coker’s inarguably accurate points don’t excuse strange, overstated assertions that dedicated newshounds and part-time Quakers could dismantle.

Even in the very early pages, Coker makes sweeping, easily refuted errors of fact. For instance, pitching war as an ever-evolving force, Coker cites UN missions to Congo encountering rape as a “new” weapon in 2010. But Newsweek reported on Bosnian military rape tactics in 1993, and Edwidge Danticat described rape as a weapon of Haitian civil repression even earlier. One could perhaps cite Vikings as pioneers of militarized rape.

Likewise, Coker quotes Edward Luttwak quoting the old maxim: “If you want peace, prepare for war; if you actively want war, disarm yourself and then you’ll get it.” One wonders, then, why nobody attacks Costa Rica, which abolished its army in 1949. Costa Rica is so peaceful, the Organization of American States (OAS) centers its Inter-American Court of Human Rights there. Likewise, Panama and Haiti disbanded their armies, and military coups mysteriously ceased.

Coker might counter that smaller countries enjoy American and international military defense, and there’s something to that. But William Blum observes that America has been involved in a shooting conflict with someone, somewhere, continuously, since 1946; we took a brief breather after WWII and dove back in. Advanced civilizations cannot keep large standing armies, with expensive military technology, and not use them. They get rebellious.

Throughout, Coker repeatedly declares that because war exists, war should exist, QED. He asserts this in ways great and small, correlating it with human evolution, societal norms, and religious dogma. (Coker seems strangely obsessed with religion. The Prince of Peace might take issue.) Logicians call this approach “the naturalistic fallacy,” assuming that whatever exists is, ipso facto, good, or anyway normative. Tell that to land mine amputees.

I could continue, but laundry-listing Coker’s logical omissions gets wordy. I could scarcely savvy two pages in this mercifully brief monograph without encountering something so intellectually unsteady, it felt disrespectful. Coker never subjects his assertions to evidentiary testing; he rejects what Peter Elbow calls “The Believing Game,” never assessing his ideas by viewing them from the opposite perspective. This leaves his thesis appallingly vulnerable to frankly rudimentary counterargument.

As I write, world powers stand poised before a possible second Crimean War. Watching Vladimir Putin bait NATO into an unnecessary battle nobody could possibly win, I have difficulty believing this great global pissing contest is merely, as Coker asserts, “a product of the social complexity of life.” The exigencies of unfolding history, unencumbered by faux Darwinian jargon, conspire to spit in Christopher Coker’s eye.

Coker’s title implies he’ll investigate the debates surrounding a powerful, world-defining issue. But he essentially answers his own question in the preface: “No.” Then he spends about 110 pages (plus back matter) explaining why there is no debate. War is important enough to justify a broader, more even-handed discussion. Coker instead proffers a manifesto so lopsided and easily rebutted, informed readers will find it insulting.

In the Land of Invisible Morals

Lee Van Ham, Blinded by Progress: Breaking Out of the Illusion That Holds Us

Informed Americans know we’re using Earth’s resources faster than Nature can replenish itself. We burn carbon, squander water, generate waste, and denude land at rates unprecedented in natural history. We know we’re doing it, but feel powerless to stop, and don’t know why. Philosopher Lee Van Ham suggests we’re beholden to an ethical edifice we can’t even see.

Van Ham proposes two competing philosophies: MultiEarth thinking, which consumes resources and people like we’ll never run out, and OneEarth thinking, which endeavors to live in harmony with Earth, human nature, and ecology. We cannot live right, he asserts, until we live aware of our moral shackles. We must shatter the illusions concealing our morality from ourselves.

Readers familiar with Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, or Julia Butterfly Hill will recognize Van Ham’s themes. But they won’t recognize his reasoning, not superficially, anyway. Though much environmentalist and anti-plutocratic writing has an innate spiritual component, Van Ham applies intensive exegetical considerations to the topic, reflective of his prior ministerial career. He particularly finds, in the story of Cain and Abel, a parable of modern society.

Abel, Earth’s roaming steward, and Cain, Earth’s settled owner, could never have lived peaceably. The relationship between those who follow Earth’s ever-changing movements, and those who try to shackle Earth to their whims, will inevitably turn violent, as they forever cross purposes. Van Ham sees a late anti-urban allegory here, much like Jacques Ellul, and his exposition of two ultimately incompatible systems permeates his book.

This moral vision differentiates Van Ham from the numerous voices already propounding similar messages. While Wendell Berry, for instance, shares Van Ham’s faith, Berry frequently avoids current events, focusing on transcendent, almost mystical themes. McKibben, though a professed Christian, prefers scientific arguments, using spirituality sparingly. Van Ham’s moral catholicity claims the broad middle ground between these visions, the domain where most Americans live, but where environmentalists fear to tread.

Van Ham spends the largest part of his book discussing what he terms the “Five Big MultiEarth Practices Holding Us In Illusion.” These practices correspond with important issues I’ve noticed, but haven’t yet voiced as clearly, especially “Giving Primary Religious Devotion to Economics” and “Disguising Corporatocracy as Democracy.” Van Ham’s breakdown alternates between the shock of familiarity and deep, suppressed detail.

Economics’ religious structure, which most capitalists would probably deny, become obvious when considering the rituals attendant to, say, Monday NYSE openings. But Van Ham explores subterranean corners of modern economic practice, demonstrating how business insider liturgies and CNBC hymnody conceal a deeper moral landscape, one most Americans never see, but inevitably share. His discoveries, as current as the morning news, are frequently chilling.

Now, many writers publish many books explicating how society rationalizes damaging humans and the Earth, while mortgaging our own future, for wasteful short-term gains. Van Ham distinguishes his book by mixing objective fact with personal writing. Not just a book of science or morality, Van Ham offers a memoir of his own struggles with eco-unfriendly living, and how he transitioned from short-term profligacy to mindful living.

Much as I appreciate Van Ham’s premises, and mostly support his arguments, his exegesis remains frustratingly one-sided. In discussing MultiEarth philosophy, he characterizes it entirely in his own terms, not terms his opponents would comprehend. Consider this early characterization of his MultiEarth frenemies: “Human species strives for lifestyles that use more resources than available on one planet.”

Does anybody really strive for that? Or do people enamored of earthly wealth simply believe Earth’s resources so vast that we cannot possibly deplete them? When approaching his opposite numbers, Van Ham might consider attempting what rhetorician Gerald Graff calls “the believing game”—attempting to state counterarguments in terms true believers would accept. Because right now, MultiEarth adherents could accuse him of Straw Man arguments, and dismiss him.

Therefore, I recommend this book primarily for people who essentially already support Van Ham’s central thesis. His reasoning will give us tools for debating technocratic zealots, and allows us to bolster our own beliefs with reason and facts. Once we’ve persuaded others to take our positions seriously, and only then, let’s push copies of this book into Old Order followers’ hands.

Van Ham describes this as the first of a trilogy. In this volume, he primarily establishes the moral foundation of MultiEarth and OneEarth philosophies; he promises in future volumes to address actual plans to fix the socioeconomic Frankenstein we’ve created. If he maintains his personal, moral, and dryly humorous tone, I’ll anticipate those coming volumes with giddy fanboy hope.

The End of Everything Ain't What It Used To Be

Tracy Spiridakos and Billy Burke anchor the ensemble on NBC's Revolution

In the fourth episode of NBC’s well-meaning apocalyptic drama Revolution, after listening to a bandit whine about the looters who took the medicine that could have saved his daughter, series lead Charlie Matheson (Tracy Spiridakos) says breathily: “I’m so sorry. I am. But people just aren’t like that anymore.”

“They’ve always been like that,” he growls back, staring through brows heavy and grey with years of loss.

Bonhoeffer noted, decades ago, that humans cannot comprehend true beginnings, because we seek what came before. Creation ex nihilo evades our limited thinking. The same applies to ends. Science fiction has long traded on post-apocalyptic scenarios, because we always believe that something must come next. But our expectations about that succession have grown distinctly more bleak in recent years.

Though set fifteen years after a yet-unexplained catastrophe caused electricity to fail worldwide, apparently taking hydrocarbons with it, Revolution depicts a world in which anarchy reigns. Feral dogs and roving rapist wolfpacks make overland travel a fatal proposition, and the ad hoc government is little better than a well-armed street gang. Charlie’s exchange with her bandit could serve as a thesis for the show.

This makes a radical change from past apocalypses. Movies like The Terminator and books like Stephen King’s The Stand may not showcase the best in human nature, but they show people organizing some form of civil order. Revolution, by contrast, indicates that only our glossy technology stands between humankind and our base impulses. Light bulbs and TV, not the social contract, keep us from killing each other, implies creator Eric Kripke.

The ensemble pose, evidently mandatory in TV promo packages

In the pilot episode, the heroine and her family live in a circle of houses apparently built around a small cul-de-sac. Inside is so safe that children run and play in the former traffic circle, but outside, soldiers and bandits rove freely. Charlie’s father and his common-law wife repeatedly lecture her on why the world is dangerous and offers nothing she could want. It’s the suburban white parental terror come true: if you wander off our street, somebody will kill you.

Therein lies the problem: though Earth has suffered changes that should transform civilization, Kripke offers only a caricature of today’s world. And not even today’s world, but what comfy white Americans stereotypically think of as today’s world. From a bucolic nucleus of rural truck patches, the characters venture into cities that are not meccas of opportunity, but decaying cesspits. Nothing shields the clean, Caucasian countryside from the cities but miles of trackless waste.

In this world, everybody you meet has your harm in mind. Parents have always cautioned children about strangers, but kids learn that most people behave honorably if given the chance. Here, though, your mama’s worst warnings prove true: literally everyone Charlie meets when venturing away from home wants to kill, rape, or rob her. Only well-placed violence keeps her alive.

Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, asserted that humans must learn, from parents, states, churches, and others, not to indulge our desires for domination through violence and sex. This thesis is roundly rejected by current psychologists, yet remains influential in pop culture. This series takes that further, implying that nobody is teaching our kids to restrain themselves. Take away our electronic distractions, and our animal sides will run wild.

One of the show's trademark landscapes. Squint closely
for a glimpse of creator Eric Kripke's fleeting optimism.

Beneath this bleak present, the characters keep glancing over their shoulders at the past. An enigmatic artifact evidently restores electricity (from where? Don’t overthink things), and the monomaniacal general running the East Coast strives to turn the power back on. A band of rebels wants to “bring back the United States.” These characters seek solace, not from what they can build, but from rebuilding what others already tore down.

This longing for the status quo ante reflects a certain brand of American conservatism. Not the principled conservatism of George Will and Bill Buckley, but the reactionary reflexivity of believing that things used to be good, and now they’re not. By excoriating the decadence of the present, and lionizing the idealized past, Kripke showcases a vision of America that says only: we used to be better than we are.

In the 1990s, The X-Files taught that two zealots could “fight the future.” In Revolution, it’s too late. The Disaster is already upon us. The transition is much broader than two titles (witness the gulf between Terminator 2 and Terminator 3), and it’s risky to attach cause and effect, but differing apocalypses in different decades speak to wild, rapid changes in Americans’ view of ourselves and our prospects.

William Shirer—Journalism's Guiding Light

Edward Murrow (left) and William Shirer pioneered
journalistic techniques that remain standard today

William Shirer’s pioneering radio journalism deep inside Hitler’s Berlin didn’t just pioneer how Americans received their news. He revolutionized how Americans perceive war. With live reports from Anschluss, the French surrender, and Berlin under heavy British bombing, he transformed journalism from gathering facts to recreating experiences. Shirer’s fingerprints, alongside those of his colleague Edward Murrow, linger throughout journalism today.

Steve Wick’s The Long Night: William L. Shirer and the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich appears as more than a memoir of a person. It reads like an indictment of current journalism: why do today’s news gatherers lack Shirer’s courage? While the presidential press corps eats anything appointed spokespeople spoon up, and business writers unquestioningly repeat corporate news releases, audiences long for difficult stories gathered deep in the trenches.

Fired from a prestigious European correspondent job deep in the Depression, Shirer was days away from losing everything when Edward Murrow hand-picked him to start CBS Radio’s second European bureau. His appointment coincided with Germany’s stirring aggression, and as a journalist in a police state, Shirer accepted a very difficult job: telling the truth in a nation where truth came from the state, not from reality.

Faced with the choice of repeating inane propaganda, as many of his colleagues did, or being ejected from Germany, Shirer undertook an elaborate tapdance. His journalistic loyalties lay with the truth, not with expediency, and he risked his safety (and his Austrian wife’s life) to ensure the world saw the real Germany. But the state did everything in its power to bring Shirer to heel.

Reading this harrowing story, I remember complaints from embedded American reporters at least as early as Operation Desert Storm. By keeping journalists close by, and beholden to the military for even basic supplies and information, officers and the state they represented could control what facts the people knew. Reporters conducted intricate subterfuge to smuggle information out of the war zone.

Writers like Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber described President Bush’s press corps as possibly the most cowed ever. Reporters who deviated from the administration’s official line reported that they often found themselves locked out of important scoops. Despite promises of increased transparency, President Obama has treated journalists little better. Recall how dismally he handled the Wikileaks affair.

Shirer remained unable to forgive the
German people well into his eighties

Too many journalists today attend journalism schools, earning specialist degrees in how to gather news as it’s always been gathered. Like business degree holders, who seldom make successful entrepreneurs, journalism degree holders repeat successful formulae of the past, rarely breaking new ground. Shirer, by contrast, had an English degree. Upton Sinclair never completed his university degree, and Nellie Bly never even began hers.

People in power never want the full truth told. History proves this time and again, although journalists who want official commendation court politicians, generals, and capitalists. Yet how many journalists enjoying insider status make significant breakthroughs? Shirer sat across the table from Goebbels and Ribbentrop, both of whom offered access if he would only report their propaganda unquestioningly. Shirer had the integrity to refuse.

American newspapers founder under the weight of their credentialed, university-taught writers’ stables, complaining that TV and the Internet have dealt their deathblow. Audiences roll their eyes, knowing that journalistic timidity, not technology, has rendered our news toothless and bland. What journalist today would say, with Ambrose Bierce: “We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over”?

Shirer’s experiences in Berlin, and his journalistic acumen, helped him craft his classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. While scholars flinched from addressing the greatest event of their generation, Shirer culled thousands of documents, and his own diaries, to recreate for Americans the social circumstances that permitted the Nazi atrocity. His book remains the definitive call to stand fast against extremism and obdurancy.

It would be a mistake to compare today’s situation to Germany in 1932. Yet consider how many matching traits apply: economic uncertainty, belief in a unitary executive, and a populace that prefers security to liberty. When Steve Wick describes the inflammatory rhetoric and violence Shirer observed in Depression-era Paris, it’s hard not to draw parallels to the political sharpshooting that enforces such a sharp division between Right and Left today.

History is an ever-patient teacher, yet her pupils remain recalcitrant. One could hope that the lessons Shirer learned in his generation could penetrate the popular mind today. Cynicism is a cheap excuse not to get involved, yet it has become hard to remain optimistic.

People Who Buy and Sell People

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am unable to present a new book review this week. Until next week, enjoy this 2009 classic from my newspaper days.

Rachel Kushner’s Telex from Cuba offers a whirlwind tour of pre-Castro Cuba. Her insights into U.S. dollar imperialism are educational and reveal how people treat humans as commodities to be expended. A mass ensemble occupies United Fruit’s empire in verdant Oriente Province like American pharaohs. They buy presidents, sell workers, and insulate themselves from consequences.

K.C. Stites was born in Oriente. A true company son, his youthful eye sees Cuba’s whites grow squalid, even as he enjoys his life of Yanquí privilege. Everly Lederer moved to Oriente as a girl. She shifts from Treasure Island fantasies to an unruly youth, running wild with the boys and romancing a Haitian servant. In Havana, a French gunrunner falls for an enigmatic dancer. He loses himself in her radical ideals even as she becomes Cuba’s own Mata Hari.

The story runs from 1952 to the revolution of 1958. It draws historic figures like Castro, Batista, Christian de la Mazière, and Earl Smith into a vast portrait of United Fruit’s decadent decline. She lets them present themselves, the bad with the good, in all their waning glory. Not every plot thread is treated equally. Some are soap operatic, feeling quick and crude.

Those few readers who still revere la revolución may not appreciate Kushner’s frank handling of the Castro brothers. She hangs some pretty blunt terms on them. But overall, Kushner draws an interesting image of decay in a world that will never exist again.

Valerie Martin’s parable of human commerce is more explicit in Property. She shows that owning people makes owners into small, filthy wrecks of humanity.

Manon Gaudet marries for money, and gets Sarah as her house slave in the bargain. Then her odious husband makes Sarah his mistress. To amplify the insult, Manon cannot give her nameless husband children. Sarah has the only son in their house.

As Manon survives epidemics, slave revolts, and her vulgar husband, her world narrows to focus wholly on Sarah. An umbilical of hatred links the women. When violence leaves Manon widowed and alone, her only joy comes in tormenting Sarah. She becomes poisonous, spewing self-hatred outward onto her slave. Property is an ironic tragedy. The more wronged Manon thinks herself, the more abusive she becomes.

Manon survives lies, humiliation, and violence, to emerge a smaller person. Everything she touches turns to ash, as she blames anyone but herself. This book is a necessary antidote to the romanticism of Gone with the Wind. It reveals the antebellum South as no showcase of posh gentility. But its pious tone implies the author thinks she is writing another Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Martin takes a stand against a life that hasn’t existed for nearly 150 years. Why?

In fairness, Manon is more nuanced and realistic than Simon Legree. And Sarah’s willfulness is a good counterpoint. They are intriguing characters in a perversely attractive story. But it says nothing readers don’t already know. It’s just a new angle on an old story.

Kushner and Martin tell languid literary tales of human trafficking. Russell Whitfield aims for adventure in Gladiatrix.

Lysandra is a Spartan warrior priestess until chance makes her an arena slave. The daily struggle to survive gains new implications on the bloody sands of the Roman sports ground. A gladiatrix is a mix of athlete, warrior, and porn star. Lysandra’s fierce, sexually charged tale transforms her from a green recruit into the Danica Patrick of ancient Anatolia.

Whitfield’s First-century Roman setting is a field where history doesn’t know much. This gives him room to build his narrative so that it doesn’t seem like a museum display. This novel lavishes readers with violence and sex. Wall-to-wall arena brawls are the order of the day, with excruciatingly detailed injuries and deaths.

The sex is pretty explicit. Forbidden to sleep with men, Lysandra has a tempestuous affair with a fellow gladiatrix, with every step of their lovemaking spelled out on the page. A lesbian once told me there are two kinds of lesbian porn: porn for lesbians, and porn featuring “lesbians” for straight men. Lysandra’s liaison is the latter.

High art this ain’t. In places, despite clever historic reconstructions, it's downright dumb. But it's also gobs of fun. At root, this is a boys’ action-adventure story. The twist is, the action-adventurers are women. Whitfield keeps it from feeling like a mere twist, though. For all its genre predictability, this book is a rousing romp through historic sports.

Gladiatrix is speedy, cinematic, and multi-dimensional. Nobody will mistake it for great literature, but it’s full of slick, audacious storybook fun.

Incivility and its Discontents—In Defense of Rebecca Black

Image by wordscraft via FlickrSigmund Freud’s monograph Civilization and Its Discontents claims that humanity remains doomed to unhappiness because, to function, society creates rules constraining our desires.  Civilization must act to prevent incest, murder, and violent theft of power.  All rules, religions, and social philosophies exist to prevent humans indulging our animal natures; but, because we frustrate ourselves, we can never know complete fulfillment.

Rebecca Black posted her music video “Friday” to YouTube on February 10th, 2011, and for the first month, it went virtually unnoticed.  Black recorded the song on a lark, and both the song and its video were a labor of love for Black, her family, and several friends.  Like most homebrew YouTube videos, nobody watched it but the people who appeared in it.

Then in the week following March 11th, the song went from 3000 views to 18 million after Daniel Tosh mocked it on his blog.  Since then it has continued to grow.  When I viewed it, its viewer count approached 67 million, and since I write well before deadline, when you see it, the numbers will probably reach much higher.

Admittedly, I dislike the song.  The inane lyrics (“Kickin’ in the front seat, sittin’ in the back seat / Gotta make my mind up, which seat can I take?”) and throbbing pop-rap leave me cold.  The video looks like somebody bought a tricked out camcorder and took it for a spin.  But I’m not in her target audience.  Like Britney Spears, Rebecca Black records for kids her own age who like sugary pop songs.  Adult standards don’t apply.

But some people refuse to steer clear of what doesn’t belong to them.  Satirists have recorded covers, some with seeming respect, others with open derision.  Like teen idols worldwide, Black—who is thirteen years old—draws more than her share of disdain from adults who treat kids as essentially colonies for adult values.

Some people aren’t content to stop there.

YouTube’s comment feature is its greatest virtue and its greatest risk.  Student filmmakers, actors, musicians, and other artists present their work to get meaningful feedback.  Some people have answered Black with constructive comments; some viewers call the song danceable, and Black herself both promising and beautiful.

But whenever people share ideas and viewpoints without censorship, especially when they share anonymously, they risk flaming.  Following Black’s commenters would be more than a full-time job, since at peak hours, more than thirty comments roll in per minute.  And they have been overwhelmingly negative, even spiteful.  Consider, for instance:

I want to punch her in the face.  Her parents bought her whole music career and it's pathetic.

At least that one comments on the music, even if injuriously.  More important, it exemplifies the tone of many comments.  Threats run rampant:

she needs 2 get hit by a Bus!!!!!!

if rebecca ever gets raped im sure we will all know it was the usher wanna be

The “usher wanna be” is co-writer Patrice Wilson, who delivers a brief rap near the end.  Many comments threaten sexual violence against Black—who, again, is only thirteen years old.  I will not repeat the most telling comments, which are too vile for a general-interest blog.  At least, despite their revolting attitude, these comments were coherent.  Some become so addled with rage that they devolve into free association:

What the big ass shit piss slut bad fuck

Some commenters, unsatisfied with attacking Black, turn their vitriol on other viewers:

The people who are thumbing down are the smart ones
The people who are thumbing up are faggots.

Britney Spears attracted similar contempt with her first single, “Baby One More Time.”  I confess to dropping disparaging comments.  But in 1998, the Web remained very asymmetrical.  The read-write Web 2.0 hadn’t dawned yet.  This left the “information economy” lopsided, but prevented certain unacceptable behaviors.

Perhaps comedic derision from Daniel Tosh and Conan O’Brien provides a shield.  If TV stars can openly mock a child, people may think, my comments won’t hurt much.  But these comments display mob mentality.  When anonymous Internet handles permit people to issue death threats and walk away, something has gone deeply, seriously wrong.

Social networks like LinkedIn and FaceBook demand users identify themselves by name, and not coincidentally, lynch mob behavior is extremely rare.  When users feel free to attack children under the aegis of anonymity, society’s rules collapse.  YouTube users’ vile threats to attack, violate, and kill Black don’t just threaten her.

I fear we’re seeing a glimpse of what happens when civilization fails.