Adapt or Die

 Noah Smith had a Substack post earlier this week unpacking the latest flare up in the perennial controversy about the academic job market—specifically, the lack of any academic job market for humanities PhDs. He was responding to a recent back-and-forth on Twitter that brought competing claims of discrimination and "reverse discrimination" in academic hiring (is it easier or harder to get an academic post as a straight white guy these days? You'll get very different answers depending whom you ask). 

Smith's ultimate conclusion was that these sorts of claims are unavoidable when there is so much scarcity in a particular job market in the first place. The real problem that humanities PhDs are up against is that the overall market for their services has shrunk—at least at the university level (smaller departments, fewer humanities majors, less funding). And when there are so few positions to go around, it's easy for people to get paranoid and allege bias when they see one person get a job and not themselves. 

Sleepwalking into Dictatorship

 Could we end up in a Trump dictatorship and not even realize it? This whole time, what has kept me going is the knowledge that—if all else fails and Trump becomes a dictator—I will at least be able to say "I told you so." Once Trump officially suspends the constitution and declares martial law, appointing himself president for life and decreeing the exercise of emergency powers, I could look around and say: there? See? Do you believe me now? 

But as we get closer by the day to this nightmare becoming reality, it is all too apparent that there would be no such moment of vindication. The parallel versions of reality would continue. The alternative epistemic universe would continue to have no overlap with our own. If Trump declared himself president-for-life, people would still say: Well, Biden was the real dictator first, by prosecuting Trump (reality check: Biden does not control the activities of the special counsel).

State and Market

 Franz Oppenheimer's classic book, The State (1908)—half-sociological treatise and half-polemic—is a deeply sympathetic work. Every page of it breathes heartfelt protest against human cruelty and exploitation. I can easily understand why it made such a big impact on the first generation that read it, therefore. The question, however, is whether the book's admirers took the right lessons from it—and whether, if they did, these lessons hold up in the light of subsequent experience. 

As I understand it, the book went on to have a large influence among American libertarians. The edition of the book I read this week, meanwhile, came to me under the imprint of an anarchist press, so it seems to have found favor with that school of thought as well. And it's not surprising that both libertarians and anarchists would find themselves drawn to it. The book is, after all, a great exercise in demystifying and denouncing the state—revealing the institution to be founded, at its core, on robbery and extortion. 

The Fates

 Joseph de Maistre was certainly no fan of the French Revolution. Indeed, he was the most famous counter-revolutionary writer of the era. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, he begins his famous Considerations on France with an extended argument that all of the attempts to prevent or halt the Revolution were doomed to fail. It was the will of Providence that the Revolution go forward, he argued—and this is what accounted for its otherwise baffling strength, the otherwise unaccountable catastrophes of its enemies. 

Maistre speaks in the voice of outraged opinion, as it contemplates this inexplicable onward march of evil and lopsided failure of good: "How then," he imagines them saying, "is it the guiltiest men in the universe who are winning? [...] Everything succeeds for the wicked! The most gigantic projects are executed without difficulty on their side, while the good party fails ridiculously in everything it undertakes[.]" (Lebrun trans.) Maistre then answers his own rhetorical questions: it is fated to be such. 

First, Do No Harm

 For many years running now, I've been a volunteer judge for an annual children's short story contest run by a friend of a friend. While we both pretend I'm doing it as a favor, the truth is I actually look forward to it every year. I find that every story, no matter how rife with misspellings or tortured syntax (and anyways, look at this sentence—I'm hardly one to talk), always contains some spark of creativity and individuality; and sifting this element out from the cuisinart of strange and at times (to me) incomprehensible pop culture references that typically surround it, is an exercise I treasure. 

When I first started reading for these contests, I found that the other judges wanted to provide more critical feedback and corrections. They encouraged the rest of us to cite specific examples of gaffes or structural problems in the story—such as the fact that many of them end abruptly, after introducing a central mystery or plot point, and long before it is actually solved—perhaps because the child-author was hoping that the solution would present itself as they wrote, and they wouldn't have to come up with it beforehand (and haven't we all been there?)

The Problem

 Reading Walter Pater's 1885 novel of ideas, Marius the Epicurean, this weekend, I found a number of passages that could have been written of a friend of mine—someone who went to divinity school with me, years ago, and who found there perhaps something closer to his true vocation than I did. 

Pater writes of his second century Roman protagonist that he has a natural proclivity toward the hieratic and the sacerdotal. Though never fully convinced himself of the various divine doctrines competing for his devotion in the age of religious tumult the novel concerns, he nonetheless is drawn irresistibly to the beauty of sacred places. He would be content to spend his days sweeping out ancient temples, or sitting through Catholic liturgies, even if he remained always an unbeliever. 

Norms vs. Weeds

 I was listening to a news podcast today, and the hosts got around to a segment on the recent Wall Street Journal article—which also prompted some reflection from me earlier this week—about declining birth rates worldwide. There were four co-hosts in the discussion: two men and two women. And conforming, sadly, to what might be one's worst expectations, the debate over the news article essentially split along gender lines. The men thought that declining birth rates were a huge and obvious problem. The women suggested that we shouldn't rush to that conclusion. 

I (and let it be acknowledged up front, who am also a man) tend to think there is something concerning about these sociological trends—if only from an economic standpoint. This was also the point that one of the two male co-hosts emphasized the most: it creates an enormous fiscal burden on the state, among other things, to have an aging population without a growing pool of working age adults to replace them. The co-hosts did also acknowledge immigration as a fix to this problem—but if the birth rates truly decline all over the globe, this can at best only be a temporary patch. 

Trotter

 Wilfred Trotter is probably best known these days for two reasons. First, there is the wonderful mnemonic effect of his name. Who could ever forget, having once learned it, that "Trotter" was the man who popularized the concept of the "herd instinct" as a force in social life—especially when his surname evokes so well the gregarious quadrupeds to which he likens human society. 

Second, Trotter's chief work, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, is often recalled as one of a number of works from the same era (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) dealing with the psychology of human groups, often from a critical perspective. Along with with the works of Le Bon, Bernays, etc., Trotter is therefore sometimes seen as antidemocratic—and is even accused of paving the way, like these other writers, for the propaganda techniques of fascist dictators and their counter-parliamentary putsches for unilateral power. 

Zones of Transit

 I'm generally not a believer in the more apocalyptic projections for what our modern technology might do to us. The vision of generative AI gobbling up all jobs and slashing the value of human labor to zero strikes me as implausible, if we in any way accept the thesis that past is prologue. After all, every prior development in technology and automation has coincided with a long-term growth in employment—even if it caused temporary displacement to certain sectors along the way. 

Still less am I a believer in any neo-Malthusian alarmism about resource depletion and overpopulation. Just as with automation, history suggests that such concerns are always misguided. Economies tend to grow, the more they increase in population. Nations operate on an economy of abundance, not of scarcity. Population growth does not lead to a scenario in which there is "not enough to go around": to the contrary, the more people are contributing to the economy, the more there is to go around for everyone. 

Yee Bow

 I guess there is truly no corner of the American political psyche—no matter how dark or seemingly buried we thought it was—that Trump will not willingly exploit for his base political ends. Every form of vile prejudice from our national past—every stripe and permutation of racism, religious prejudice, and xenophobia—including all the types that we once naively thought were defunct—has been given new life at his rallies. It turns out, I guess, that these bigotries were never actually defunct—they were only lying dormant. Trump has discovered that all he has to do is nudge them back into waking life. 

Who would have thought a decade ago, say, that the nation's ugly history of anti-Chinese prejudice, the 19th century "Yellow Peril" canard, would come back? Surely we all agree now, I once thought, that the vicious "Chinese Exclusion Acts," etc., were a shameful chapter of our history. Yet, here comes Trump and his cronies, reviving all these same prejudices. As the Washington Post reported this morning, Trump at his recent rallies has exploited a reported uptick in the arrival of undocumented immigrants from China to push the ludicrous narrative that they are the entering wedge of an invading "army."

Shagpoke

 If there's a greatest novel of the 1930s prophesying the rise of a future fascist dictatorship in America, it would have to be Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here (1935). But Nathanael West's A Cool Million (1934) also deserves another look. Perhaps unexpectedly, it covers some of the same ground. And because it is steeped in West's mordant view of the world—even darker than Lewis's, for all that the latter is celebrated as a great satirist—it provides an even more acidic warning about our nation's future. 

I didn't come to A Cool Million expecting it to be a commentary on fascism, let alone a dystopian prophecy. I didn't really know what it would be at all. I picked it up because of the fame of the author; because I read Miss Lonelyhearts years ago and it made a great impression on me; and because it happened to share a slim volume with the author's first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Ah, I thought—here's a chance to kill two birds with one stone, all in the same weekend. 

Path Dependence

 In our current era of democratic backsliding, it's easy to give way to the despairing conclusion that despite superficial changes of official names and ruling parties, every major civilization in the world just ends up re-creating some version of the same government it has always had. Has this not been the story, in recent decades, with every major authoritarian power that we once thought was launched on a path to greater democracy and liberalization? Look at the People's Republic of China; look at Russia. Even India, celebrated for half a century as the world's largest democracy, now seems to be turning into something quite different. 

One is tempted mightily, therefore, to embrace some version of the "futility" hypothesis—which, Albert O. Hirschman warned, is one of the three legs of the stool of reactionary ideology. If we forget this for a moment, though, and allow ourselves to wallow in the pessimism and depression of the situation without hindrance, it may appear that countries really are doomed over and over again to replicate the same system of government. Putin is just a post-Soviet version of Stalin, after all, who himself was a Bolshevik version of the czars. Such men even acknowledge as much themselves: they have all lionized the previous links in the chain. Was not Stalin a great admirer of Ivan the Terrible? 

The Psychology of the Flop

 The New York Times ran a business news article over the weekend about the latest Hollywood bluckbuster-that-wasn't. This one—a Ryan Gosling action-romance-date-night extravaganza called "The Fall Guy"—opened to a dismal first-week performance, despite seemingly having every chance of success. The film is kicking off the summer blockbuster season, when families typically have more time to see movies. The critics apparently adored it. Yet it flopped. 

Now, I have not actually seen the movie (just like the rest of America, it would seem). But I'm willing to take the critics' word for it that it is pretty good. Why, then, does this not translate into box office success? Because quality and the response of the public are two very different things. 

Epitaph to a Dog

 There's a real "could we be the baddies?" vibe when a Republican politician spends their week defending a decision to kill a pet dog. Now, admittedly, when I first heard that there was some controversy about this stemming from Kristi Noem's upcoming memoir, I assumed that this was all the result of some unfair politically-motivated smear. I assumed that the dog in question had been old and sick, and that Noem had decided to put it down herself with a rifle, rather than having it be euthanized behind closed doors at a vet's office. And I couldn't see why—apart from some class-based or anti-rural bias—people would draw a major moral distinction between the two. 

But no—the dog seems to have been perfectly healthy at the time it was dispatched with a bullet. And the worst part of all is not only that Noem decided to do this, but that she did it with a strange degree of malice toward the animal. In subsequent interviews, Noem has tried to defend her choice by saying that the dog had bitten people and was a danger to others. Which, fine—fair enough—that's an arguable and morally ambiguous point. Noem should have left it there, in the book. But, apparently, she did not. According to the New York Times, Noem also added salt to the wound: "I hated that dog," she apparently wrote. That, surely, was the unkindest cut of all. 

Starting Points

 In his classic book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann tries to show us that most of our political conflicts around the globe stem not so much from disagreement as to basic facts—but rather from disagreement as to when exactly we are starting the clock. 

Lippmann's purpose throughout the book has been to show that "public opinion" is not something that merely burbles up of its own accord from an objective assessment of "the facts"—but this is not because there are no such things as objective "facts" about a given conflict. Rather, it is because people are selecting and emphasizing these facts differently in order to support their cause. It is this selection process, more often than outright falsehood, that gives a certain tendency to the stories we tell. And one of the classic modes of selection is to be very precise as to what time we designate as the "start" of our story. 

The Leaders of Crowds

 My reaction to reading Gustave Le Bon's classic study on group psychology, The Crowd, is very similar to my reaction to reading Pareto (who, it must be said, was influenced by Le Bon). In other words, here is yet another classic book that is often depicted in recollection as either a pioneering work of social science, or a political screed of the hue of darkest reaction. Yet, just as with Pareto, I found it to be neither. 

For one thing, Le Bon's book does not resemble anything we would accept as an empirical scientific treatise—even by the looser standards of the qualitative social sciences. He does not multiply examples, and indeed many of his assertions about crowd psychology stand alone as bare affirmations, unsupported by any examples, logical argument, or case histories (which, oddly, is exactly the same unreasoning procedure he attributes to the demagogic leaders of crowds). 

The True Light Again of Savagery

 Did you hear that, just now? That was the sound of a Rubicon being crossed. The leading blights of the MAGA gang just decided to give away the game. For months, if not years, they have flirted with outright antisemitism. But tonight they took the plunge. There is no going back now. Marjorie Taylor Greene said the quiet part out loud. Tonight, she publicly denounced the House's new bill to combat antisemitism—because, she said, it would get in the way of peddling the medieval canard that the Jews killed Jesus. 

Immediately afterward, the rest of the MAGA right followed suit. All the big names jumped in to declare their own support for the myth of Christ-killing. Matt Gaetz backed Greene's core claim that the Gospels tell a story of Jews killing Jesus (never mind that the historical Jesus was a Jewish prophet who would be appalled by the posthumous cult that worships him as a god; that's an argument for another day). Charlie Kirk leapt in to back him up. So did Tucker Carlson. It's all there in the New York Times piece. You can just imagine the spectacle. 

The Great Fear

 The years of the Biden presidency have in many ways been a tale of a widening gulf between public perceptions and reality. People are outraged about the state of the economy—yet, the economy has only grown in recent years; the much-dreaded recession never materialized; and, by comparison with what most other countries have been through since the pandemic, our economy has been the envy of the world. 

Likewise with crime. The national statistics on crime show that rates of victimization have fallen since the pandemic. Yet, Americans are more afraid of crime than ever. So too with immigration. Federal Reserve officials and countless economic reports have shown that increased immigration and asylum-seeking saved the U.S. economy and helped slow inflation over the past year. Yet Americans are outraged about it.