Walter Lippmann

When I was ten years old, in the summer of 1956, I took a four-day train trip with my maternal grandmother from Los Angeles to Syracuse, New York, where my mother was raised. I can’t recall the thinking behind this trip, but it was memorable in many ways. 

Syracuse was memorable for being hot and not Los Angeles. I walked down my mom’s childhood street, East Genesee, where young Rod Serling (doo-doo-doo-doo/doo-doo-doo-doo) used to greet her. There were strange names of things, like Onondoga Lake, strange at least to me because L.A. has no lakes or onondogas. The city seemed small in my mind because I thought the size of L.A. was normal. 

I stood in front of Syracuse University and watched a young man throw rocks at the lights over the entrance, smashing some. He looked at me and said, “I’m just upset.” 

We stayed with my grandmother’s two surviving sisters, who were memorable for sure. More about them some other time. I’ll just say that Lithuania must have been some place! 

There was another memory- this one from the train ride back to L.A.- that was jiggled into my frontal lobe this morning while I watched a vintage Youtube clip of Noam Chomsky discussing Mikhail Bakunin, 19th century proponent of “collective anarchy.” Can you guess the connection between these random elements and the train trip with my grandmother? Give up? Well, in the Youtube clip Chomsky makes a reference to Walter Lippmann, American journalist prominent from the 1920’s to the 60’s, whom Chomsky refers to as a “progressive intellectual.” Long story longer, on the trip back to Los Angeles, Lippmann was on the train. 

I had been staring out the window at midwest flatlands when my grandmother, an accomplished schmoozer, rushed up to tell me that a famous journalist was on the train, and he wanted to meet me.  Of course I didn’t know Walter Lippmann from Adam, but I dutifully followed my grandmother through several cars, particularly relishing the rocking chaos and noisy intrusion of the elements in the connecting platforms. 

We stopped in the aisle in one of the cars and looked down at a well-dressed and groomed man in his 60’s who was sitting alone reading. My grandmother introduced me to Walter Lippmann, the first famous person I had ever met, though he was not famous to me. I felt the familiar pressure of not knowing how to respond to an adult. Lippmann looked fondly at me, but he did not say anything about progressive intellectualism, which makes sense because I was a dumb kid with no virtues beyond the sweetness of youth, and I would not have understood a word he said. 

I don’t remember what he did say. He probably asked me how I liked school. I would have found that question as hard as any other.  I was near mute in my responses. 

As I watched the Chomsky clip I remembered how frustrating and wasteful the encounter with Lippmann had seemed to young me.  If only I had known anything!   In later years the feeling of waste grew as I learned that Lippmann was a critical political interpreter for millions of people. He was behind President Woodrow Wilson's "14 Points" at the close of World War I.  He coined the term “cold war” and created the modern meaning of "stereotype" (formerly "relief printing plate").  Few people have this much impact on their language, and all I could do was stare at him.  

Well, through the magic of literature, I’m going to attempt something rather daring.  If you will bear with me, I plan to initiate a “wormhole” through which my mentality will travel back to that train in 1956 and infuse my prepubescent brain with the requisite knowledge for a decent conversation with Walter Lippmann.  That’s the theory.  I have a wormhole spell I picked up from a character of my acquaintance. Would you like to try it too?  Ok, here goes.   Repeat this with me and perhaps we’ll meet: 

I call you from a crevice near

Have no regret and have no fear

Oh wormhole mine forever dear

Collapse a distant past to here! 

Man, what’s happening?  Oh yeah, I’m entering the mind of ten year old me!  First observation: No wonder I was uncomfortable meeting Lippmann.  Talk about a blank slate!  My young brain is devoid of understanding or perspective on so many levels.  Any personality in there is a restless sea of emotion and longing.  There is no basis whatever for discourse with Lippmann. 

Now for the delicate operation, as I insert the "stereotype" and “cold war” material into my young head.  Upload complete!  Now to activate voice control.  I’m pushing metaphorical buttons.  Uh oh, something’s happening…did we just lose an hour?  Do you remember?  Here’s what I recall: 

Hello Mr. Lippmann, it’s nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you, Douglas. 

My grandmother is beaming.

Mr. Lippmann, how did you get everyone in the world to use the new definition of ‘stereotype’ that you made up?

I don’t know. I didn’t expect that to happen.

Did you expect everyone to start using ‘cold war’ too, after you made that up?

The phrase was from my book, ‘Cold War.’ It’s flattering that so many people found it apt.

Yes, it certainly was apt. 

Young me is getting into it, never suspecting where the useful knowledge is coming from.  Now young me’s enthusiasm for the new normal is taking an unexpected turn, as young me grows neurons which invade my adult mind, making permanent connections to my knowledge base.  The results appear bizarre if not disturbing, as my first more youthful questions are replaced with questions of a more adult cast. 

Mr. Lippmann, are you an elitist?

Hmm, Douglas, do you know what an elitist is?

Yes, it’s a person who thinks they’re better than everyone else.

I don’t think that I’m better than everyone else. Do you think you are?

I…well…. 

Strangely that question is as hard for adult me as young me.

I mean, I don’t know what’s better or not better, Mr. Lippmann, but you wrote that you don’t think the general public can run humanity’s affairs. 

My grandmother frowns. 

Is that so? You read on a high level for a ten year old!

I do? I mean, thank you. You wrote that when people watch the news they are not educated by it.  You said the news constructs a picture of reality that is 'imperfectly recorded,' and 'too fragile to bear the charge as an organ of direct democracy.'

Lippmann glances at my grandmother, who is in a suppressed rage. He looks back at me. 

Very good, Douglas, but you are conflating a critique of the media with a belief that elites should rule. 

I'm feeling something strange happening, a sort of merger of youth and age.  I'm not sure how to form my words.  Lippmann notes my hesitation. 

Douglas, do you know what ‘conflate’ means?

I think it’s when two people fart at the same time. 

What is happening to me?  Is there a hint of smile on Lippmann’s face?  There is no such hint on my grandmother’s face.  I try to salvage the situation. 

Mr. Lippmann, do you think that elites should rule? 

Lippmann is looking at me the way you might look at a chess-playing chicken. 

That’s not a valid question, Douglas, because elites do rule, by definition. You might as well ask if birds should fly. 

Should they? 

 Lippmann laughs.  I feel clever.  I want more approbation, so I continue. 

Mr. Lippmann, you wrote in 1922 that ‘mass man functions as a bewildered herd who must be governed by a specialized class.’

Douglas, I’m just describing reality, not saying it’s good.

Have you heard of Noam Chomsky?

No. 

He said that you believe that 90% of the population are "ignorant, meddlesome outsiders," and that we need to be ruled by "the wise men…you know…the smart people."

Is that so, Douglas? Sounds like Mr. Chomsky is one of those smart people himself. 

He is a professor of linguistics at MIT.

So, is he a member of an elite?

I guess, maybe. 

Out of nowhere I have an intense need to pee, and I'm so restless I long to turn from Lippmann and my grandmother and skip down the aisle, push the heavey metal door open and step through, finally expressing my energies and maybe fluids in the interstitial madness of the coupling platform.  

But my grandmother has had enough. She thanks Lippmann profusely and demands that I shake his hand and thank him, which I do.  A quick glance into Lippmann’s eyes tells me that little harm has been done to the universe.  On the walk back to the restroom and our seats my grandmother is silent.  When we sit, she sighs. 

Dougie, sometimes I don’t understand you. 

I'm too busy trying to unplug the weird connections in my head to reply.  Through the window I see vast plains roll by. 

What controls us?

Why do people do the self-destructive things they do? Why is the human brain, so impressive in its versatility, overrun with dangerous and ill-advised impulses, inducing us, for instance, to build complex civilizations based on fantasies and wishful thinking, then compress ourselves into cramped, frustrating living spaces where we long for violent outlets?   We fancy ourselves to be exceptionally intelligent, as animals go, but much of the time we appear to have no more mental heft than the blindly self-destructive victims of parasites.

Parasites have been on my mind since reading Carl Zimmer's book, Parasite Rex which describes the perpetual struggle between large multicellular creatures like us and the parasites who feed off them. In the course of this struggle, parasites often employ mind control against their hosts.  Zimmer describes numerous instances where parasites invade the brains of their hosts to make them, for instance, forget their fears of natural predators, the intent being to get the host eaten so the parasite can embark on its next life-stage in the predator.  For the benefit of parasitic reproduction, fish float in front of herons, ants wait atop grass stalks for hungry birds, caterpillars leave the safety of their camouflage.  

Some parasites are multicellular, large creatures themselves.  The parasitic emerald wasp injects chemicals into a cockroach's brain that turn it into a "zombie slave," then lays one egg on the cockroach's underbelly.  The roache's brain has been changed so that all interest in caring for roach offspring is replaced with deference to the wasp larva.  As the larva grows, it burrows into the roach, eating its internal organs in a precise order ensuring that the roach stays alive long enough to function as a wasp womb.  After that, the young wasp tosses the shrivelled roach corpse away.

We have no evidence that familiar human compulsions are caused by parasites, but it's likely they are caused by something other than the human intellect.  What sort of intellect would go to war for no good reason, which our species will do on a dime. Desire for war on its own merits might be diagnosed as abnormal and suicidal by human medical practice, and those suffering from it could well be victims of mind control, whether by parasites or fellow humans (who themselves might be under parasitic control).

If we find however that our thralldom to irrational behavior does not derive from parasites, we might investigate transposons, mysterious genetic manipulators which originated, somehow, "outside" us, and have since taken up residence in our DNA. Geneticists don't know much about transposons, other than that they can edit our DNA and affect our basic structure.  There is conjecture that transposons account for the non-inherited differences between identical twins, and for significant non-inherited behaviors in everyone.  Exactly what those behaviors are and what purposes they might serve is unknown.

Transposon theory provides less explanation than parasite study, because at least with parasites we know the host is forced to serve the survival interests of the parasite.  We don't even know if transposons are alive, let alone promoting an agenda.  We only know they are there, influencing us.

Zimmer describes a theory of sex, including human sex, common among parasitologists, in which the purpose of sexual reproduction is to provide a continual reshuffling of host-species' genes, a process necessary to keep pace with and defend against parasitic evolution.  Reproduction is hardly a non-survival oriented activity- we only survive if we reproduce- but could the system be hijacked?  Our compulsion to sexually reproduce without resources to care for our young, with no concern about overpopulation, resulting in eight billion anxious, pessimistic humans trapped on earth to plot against each other, is clearly not the result of an intellectual process.

Our longing for war could very well grow out of a parasite enhanced obsession with reproduction, after which the parasites lead the resulting oversized human population to war and mass death.  The human die-off may then enable some further stage in the parasite's life cycle.

Our intellects are muffled and controlled by forces we can't see. These forces might emanate from parasites or transposons, or from members of our own species. Maybe our next step will be to truly elevate the human intellect, perhaps meeting parasites mind to mind and working with them. Or maybe we could continue to float on the surface waiting for herons.  

Our shrinking frame story

A frame story is a story within a story.  Maybe the most famous is One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales framed by a story about a sultan who, in order to relieve the pain of his first wife's infidelity, decides to marry a new virgin each day, sleep with her that night, then have her executed the next morning before she has a chance to cheat on him.  After a few years of the sultan's madness, the realm is almost out of virgins.  The court frantically wonders what to do, when Scheherazade, the daughter of the grand vizier and a virgin, offers herself to the sultan.  Her father objects, but she has a plan.  On the night of the wedding, after her deflowering, she beguiles the sultan with a compelling story.  It is too long to finish in one evening, so she promises to continue it the next night.  The sultan is so engrossed by his wife's endless story that night after night he implores her to continue, each time extending her life by one day.

Just like Scheherazade's, our stories interlock with frames that turn like gears, promoting the arrow of time with beginning, middle and hopefully end.

On December 26, 2004, my story was that I was camping in Death Valley, and the frame was the life in Los Angeles I had left behind, but when the car radio reported that a giant tsunami had killed 200,000 people near Indonesia, that became the main story of the world, framing mine and everyone's stories.

The opposite would have happened- my world would have shrunk- if Ubehebe Crater, a few miles from my camp, had erupted that morning, as it did thousands of years ago in a phreatic rage that dug a hole 777 feet deep.  The shock wave would have flattened the camp, eliminating the tsunami entirely from my frame, diminishing the world to a few local square miles.

There was frame shrinkage in Los Angeles after the magnitude 6.7 earthquake in 1994.  Earlier that week, an L.A. Times headline read, "Serbs' heavy weapons pound Sarajevo."  Before the earthquake, that seemed like a relevant topic; after the earthquake there was almost no consciousness of war in Sarajevo because our frame story did not extend beyond our city.

In the last few months a number of events have been powerful enough to attract worldwide attention and frame everyone's story.  Often these frames had the stage to themselves for a few days, so the whole world could think about them and decide what if any action to take.  Some were conflicts, e.g. Israel vs. Palestinians; Russia vs. Ukraine; Armenia vs. Azerbaijan; Myanmar, China and maybe all governments to varying degrees vs. elements of their own people.  Some were slow-moving but threatening, like climate change.  Some were medical tragedies, like India's lack of oxygen for covid victims; some were natural, like several powerful volcanic eruptions.  Each defined a global frame story.

Our minds are accustomed to alternating between global frame stories and local ones, but disasters of a type that formerly might have captured world attention are hitting the human sphere with such regularity and frequency that everyone's frame story is at risk of shrinking down to their immediate environment.  If the time comes when every place on Earth hosts a catastrophe such that everyone's frame story becomes local, we will experience mass, unconscious censorship.  

Such censorship happened in a limited way on January 6, 2021, when Business Weekly broke the news about possibly dangerous covid variants.  The story was urgent enough, you would think, to frame and reorder our lives, but because of the D.C. insurgency on the same day, covid news seemed trifling, out of the frame.

In most populated areas it wouldn't take more than a disabled Internet to shrink everyone's frame story down to their visible world.  Adding a few more calamities- like failure of a power grid or a new pandemic- could force a reversion to the provincialism of the agricultural Middle Ages, when most people stayed within forty miles of home their whole lives, and information about the world was rumor.  

The tendency of disasters to limit broader perspectives renders them useful to those who might want to curtail the population's worldview and ability to influence events.   Even earthquakes and hurricanes are suspect, at least if you believe magazines available in City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco which claim that the CIA has an earthquake producing machine and that China can control the weather.  I have not seen allegations that volcanic eruptions can be induced, but how hard could it be?

We seem poised to enter a period of increased catastrophes and shrunken world-views.  At its most extreme, a shrunken world-view translates to a total lack of influence on one's surroundings and society.  For now, through voting and regular pummeling of newspapers with letters to the editor, we have the illusion of influence.  The illusion may pass.

People will look for ways to stay sane as our frame stories shrink.  Some will find solace in religion and worship.  Some will read novels or watch movies.  Some will study their own dreams.  

In my case, I have a fantasy that there will be a new American political party based on the reality of our shifting world.  This party will expand people's frame stories beyond the purview of local catastrophe.  It will produce strong feelings of trust.  People will think the party is speaking to them, that it is authentic.    I know what you're thinking: "Don't hold your breath."  But I am holding my breath.  

The future of the alpha male

Early Hollywood films often featured cute baby chimpanzees who mimicked human behavior with infantile gestures, grimaces and clownish antics.  But, although there are plenty of adult lions, elephants and giraffes in early movies, there are no adult chimps.  Adults were retired to "reserves" far out of the city.  Chimp handlers knew why, but the general public did not.  

That changed over recent decades as a series of horrifying attacks by adult chimps on humans were reported in the media.  Adults can weigh up to 200 pounds and are generally twice as strong as the average adult human male.  The attacks entailed faces and genitals torn off, hands amputated and other targeted attacks that appeared designed, not necessarily to kill, but to permanently debilitate the victim both physically and psychologically.  The victims typically were taken by  surprise.  Often the chimp had been raised by the victim from babyhood, or the victim might be a friend of the owner who knew the chimp well, or thought so.  The trigger for many of the attacks appeared to be jealousy, or a sense of betrayal.  One woman brought a birthday cake to a captive adult chimp (removed from her custody for dangerous behavior) in the company of two other chimps.  One was so jealous of the cake that he bit off the womans lips and nose and destroyed one eye.  A man who brought a toy to a chimp he knew lost his genitals when he tried to take back the toy.  It is now illegal to own a chimp as a pet.

While our society was learning about the nature of adult chimps in captivity, scientists were learning about chimps in the wild.  Search "chimp attacks in Africa" and you'll find beautifully shot narratives by producers like Discovery and Planet Earth-BBC Wildlife depicting a murderous species, often out to expand its territory.  In one program, a band of adult male chimps, led by its alpha male (the dominant male animal in a particular group- Webster) silently creeps through the forest, stalking a neighboring colony of chimps.  The alpha, who not only determines the group's behavior but defines its virtues, deficits and moral tone, brings the group to a halt as the "enemy" comes within earshot.  The males huddle together in intense, intimate concentration.  The group attacks and manages to capture a baby chimp from the neighboring group, which they kill by pulling off its limbs, after which they sit in a circle, gnawing on the limbs and sharing them with each other. 

More recently, the Netflix documentary "Chimp Empire," directed by James Reed, presented a strikingly intimate look at Chimp society in which they appear to be types of people.In fact chimps are our closest relatives.  Human DNA differs from chimps' by only 1%.  In contrast, human DNA differs from dogs' by 75%.  The difference between apes (like chimps) and monkeys (like capuchins) is 7%, meaning that we are closer to chimps than chimps are to monkeys.

Chimps pre-date us by almost 5 million years, so we appear a spin off from them, appearing about 300,000 years ago. Maybe it was the chimps who drove us from the forest.

[Note: Our DNA is likewise only 1% different from the chimps' nearest relation, bonobos.  In the 70's and 80's, bonobos were touted as "flower-children chimps" because of their uninhibited displays of affection- including social conventions like handling each other's genitals or rubbing them together- and the lack of male combat.  The hippie association was dropped after researchers noticed that many males were missing thumbs, which had been bitten off by females in this matriarchal alternative to chimp patriarchy.]

As with humans, not all chimps are murderous.  A Discovery UK episode tells the story of two peaceable chimps, Hare and Ellington, who, though members of a large warlike group, spent their days together in tranquil strolls through the forest.  One day Ellington was beaten and mauled to death by members of the group.  Hare then wandered alone, depressed and distracted, finally finding his place taking care of baby chimps orphaned by his group.

Are we like chimps in behavior as well as DNA?  A study of human history suggests that we are.  Many anthropologists speculate that homicidal impulses in our ancestors explain the absence today of any other types of humans than our own.  There is fossil evidence that there were other types of humans, notably Neanderthals and Denisovans.  Genetic analysis indicates that we interbred with these humans, but we also witnessed their extinction.  There is no evidence that we intentionally eliminated them (an action we would now term "genocide"), but the question remains, where are they? 

We are proud of our hunting heritage, but unlike, say, lions, who after millions of years of hunting and eating impalas and giraffes, have not caused the extinction of those animals, human prey tends to disappear.  There is plenty of evidence that needless killing of fauna and megafauna has recurred throughout human history.  In a prehistoric example that is generally left unsaid in deference to a need to idolize early North American cultures (science writer Jared Diamond is one of the few to refute this idealization) all large mammals on the North American continent- like giant ground sloths and wooly mammoths- disappeared shortly after the arrival of the first humans, 10,000-12,000 years ago. The later settling of the American West by Europeans provides further examples of animals slaughtered in numbers far exceeding people's need to eat them.  When Europeans arrived in North America, passenger pigeons comprised up to 40% of the bird population, their migrations filling the sky.  "Sportsmen" would fire straight up and revel when dozens of birds fell to the ground.  From an estimated 3 to 5 billion pigeons when the Mayflower docked at Plymouth Rock, their numbers fell in two hundred years to zero.  The American bison (commonly called the "buffalo") numbered around 30 million before Europeans came.  Horace Greeley wrote in 1860 that, "Often, the country for miles in all directions had seemed quite black with them."  The railroads sold tickets for bison killing excursions to New Englanders looking for adventure.  When herds of bison ran across the prairies near the tracks, rifles were issued to passengers so they could shoot them from train windows.  The train did not stop to recover the mounds of carcasses for any sort of use.  Today the bison is designated "near threatened."  "How the West was won" should be rephrased as, "How the West was cleared of lifeforms that suggested humans are not the dominant species."

Back to genocide- the modern term for humans intentionally killing (or attempting to kill) entire groups of other humans- we often treat it as a recent aberration stemming from Adolf Hitler (the term "genocide" originated in the 1940's), but far from being unique to World War II, genocide (which continued after the war and is ongoing today) has occurred repeatedly since the dawn of humanity, starting, possibly, with the disappearance noted above of any other sorts of humans than us, the Denisovans going extinct about 80,000 years ago, the Neanderthals about 40,000.  

Moving forward, there is archaeological evidence that the Indo-Europeans (from whose language group almost all current European languages derive) committed genocide in the course of their expansions starting around 4,000 BC. 

Something genocidal appears to have struck ancient Britain, as there is genetic evidence of a 90% population turnover in the 3rd millennium BC.  This could help explain how genetic analysis of "Cheddar Man," a 10,000 year old skeleton found in Somerset, England, could suggest that he had "quite dark skin and blue eyes" (The power of archaeology and genetics, NewScientist Magazine, 5/29/21).  We've been wondering for a long time who built Stonehenge.  Surprise!

In historical times, both the Athenian city-state and the Roman Empire, to take two examples, achieved much of their stature through genocide.  The list of genocides after the Romans is long, covering all continents.

The quest for empire and hegemony- straight from the chimpanzee playbook- seems a prime factor in human genocide.  Since the advent of large civilizations around 3,000 BC, it's been one alpha male ambition after another, producing brutal, genocidal empires that are then toppled by the next empire-building alpha, which is toppled by the next.  It seems never to have occured to people that one might just live happily munching leaves, replacing glory and bloodlust with the simple pleasures of a satisfied existence, not unlike the lifestyle of another of our close ape relatives, gorillas (whose DNA differs from ours by 1.75%).  

In fact the idea of just existing is repulsive to many people; we call it "vegetative," as if we know what it's like to be a plant.  We think we are supposed to manage everything, maybe even dominate everything, as our choice of comic book "superheroes" shows.  

I see the tendency in myself, at least in my childhood taste in fictional heroes, such as those from the TV series Star Trek.  Was it the spectacle of James T. Kirk, captain of the starship Enterprise and cutting edge of the human race, landing on one planet after another, subduing its inhabitants, always winning?  Or First Officer Spock (half-human, half-alien, a hybrid alpha) who matched Kirk's ability to dominate the environment but went beyond it by also dominating his inner self?   Of course Kirk and Spock were depicted in each episode as gaining the moral high ground by adhering to Starfleet's "Prime Directive," that none of the ship's missions would interfere with indigenous cultures.  That's why it's called science fiction.

Returning to the real world, President Trump was lauded by his tribe as the mean alpha, jumping up and down, hooting and fulminating throughout his four years as the dominant male of America.  The other night, when people watched President Biden address the nation about his $1.9 trillion covid relief plan, there was widespread relief that Trump had been replaced by Hare/Biden, the gentle chimp who cares about children. Of course Biden is a facade; the wheels of war turn more quietly now, but as relentlessly as under Trump. [In his second term, Trump has attained an enhanced status as alph male, now directing much more hostility and destruction towards perceived rivals.]

Where does the chimp and human animus come from?  What happened in the ancient forests of Africa, to us and to chimps?  As William Blake phrased the question (though addressing a tiger):

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Scientists are not asking that question, but they are tangentially finding out interesting things about alpha males, in particular that there is a correlation between alpha males and a high level of the "flight or fight" drug serotonin, produced in a cluster of cells in the human brainstem called the raphe nuclei.  When the raphe nuclei send a large dose of serotonin into the amygdala- a brain center that controls our emotional state- the amygdala directs us to become alphas and run the show.  Submissive mice have been transformed into alpha's after injections of serotonin, and alphas have been demoted when their serotonin is decreased.  

Interesting, but the question becomes, why did the ancient raphe nuclei feel the need to squirt so much serotonin into men's amygdalas?  We get a shitload, which is probably why we can't stand a sky full of pigeons.

There's not much evidence to explain what the raphe nuclei were so afraid of, so once again we must guess.  My guess is that we and our chimp cousins feared non-belonging.  The forest had rejected us in some fundamental way.  We did not fit.  Chimpanzees reacted to this ostracism by terrorizing each other into a structured existence.  People fought back by becoming smarter and more resourceful.  Some of the response was practical, bringing development of improved hunting implements and use of fire.  Some was psychological, as when ancient Egyptians built giant pyramids to inflate the standing of the ruling alphas and humble the slaves.  Some was suicidal, as when, in our time, we learned how to blow up and poison the planet, threatening the alphas along with everyone else.  Perhaps we secretly hate the Earth and resent Creation for sending us here.  

Genesis tells the story metaphorically.  After Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, the Earth was revealed as inhospitable, requiring people to build artificial environments lest they starve and freeze.  We're not the only creatures who have to do this: birds build nests; beavers build dams.  But humans need to reconstruct the whole forest, the whole world. 

There is growing understanding that our quest to reform the Earth under the guidance of the alpha male (and an enabling Eve) has gone awry.  As the dream of a compatible Earth flounders, we turn to space- with its endless planets full of monsters to defeat, hellscapes to terraform and indigenous cultures to leave in pristine condition- hoping the effort out there will go better than it has here.

The question this essay asks is, what is the future of the alpha male who has guided us to this point?  We are acquiring biological tools that will enable us to recreate ourselves.  Through CRISPR technology we will be able to assemble our DNA into any combination of characteristics we want.  If we envision a new way, one that seeks co-existence rather than dominion, we could, if we choose, phase out the alpha male and seek a softer, more cooperative humanity.

The fly in the ointment is that the people in charge of our re-creation will likely be alpha males (and alpha females, since we fluctuate now between chimp and bonobo) who are motivated to make vast fortunes and dominate the humans around them.  The chimps will be in charge, driven by their terror of not being in charge.

What can we do about this?  Cut off the supply of serotonin?  It's unclear.  Stay tuned for Part II of this post: How to ensure that the new humanity is not as homicidal and generally berzerk as the current one.

Boundary waters

In early August my wife and I took a trip through North Dakota and Minnesota.  We found recurring themes of boundaries and borders, of centers and outliers.  

For starters, North Dakota features the geographic center of the North American continent, in Center City, where you can stand on the spot.  We did not go to Center City.  Our trip started with a flight from Los Angeles to Denver, where we boarded a twenty-seat plane to North Dakota's capital, Bismarck, about 50 miles southeast of Center City (and 150 miles southwest of Rugby, the geographic center of North Dakota).  When I was born there, Bismarck's population was 8,000.  It is now 77,000.

A word about why we began our trip in Bismarck: Herman, my paternal grandfather.  He left Ukraine at age 14 after his father was killed in a pogrom.  He was the second in his family to leave after his older brother Sam, who went into the fur business in the Dakota's.  Sam helped Herman get a leg up in Bismarck, where, in 1925, Herman built a two story brick structure downtown on the corner of Fifth and Main, across from the glitzy Patterson Hotel and kitty corner from the train station.  The building housed, at various times, a men's clothing store, a liquor store and a pharmacy.  My grandfather's family lived above the store.  When he was five, my father watched from his bedroom window as the local Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in front of the building.  He recognized the ringleader as the chief of police (and husband of his kindergarten teacher).  On a Fourth of July, when he was a little older, my dad fired a rocket from his window that crashed through a window of the Patterson.  I lived my first two years in the same second floor rooms, until we made the big jump to Los Angeles.  

We learned that the building still exists and is designated a historic structure, and we wanted to visit it.  Thus our first stop in the rental car was the "Lasken Block," as the old cornice proclaims it to be.  Standing across the street, I gazed at the second floor windows and wondered what rights my brief sojourn there gave me now.  Could I go upstairs, knock, and tell whoever answers, "I entered the world in these rooms.  May I come in and look around, meditate, maybe find a morphogenetic field and channel my lost and barely remembered ancestry, like in Dune?"  I felt the correct answer would be No, that my connection, if it was one, did not afford me passage across the boundary between longing and property rights.  Or maybe I was afraid that if I did visit, nothing would happen.  I would see some nondescript walls and maybe a linoleum floor while the people who lived there watched me and noted the futility of my search- and it would be, well, nothing, not a science fiction or ghost story, or any kind of story.  Ironically, not going up those stairs is a story.

Our next stop in Bismarck was the capital building, two miles north, through pleasant residential streets.  Along some of them grew American Elms (the state tree) that had escaped Dutch elm disease- tall, beautiful, brave trees.  The capital building is referred to locally as a "skyscraper," though it's only 14 stories high, a mere bump in L.A.  But it was as imposing this time as it was the last time I saw it, at age 8.  Standing atop a long grassy rise, it is a good 12 stories taller than any other structure within hundreds of miles (with the exception of distant wind turbines and grain elevators).  The 30's era art deco design, plus the phallic layout (a broad base of two buildings, housing the state legislature and governor's office, with the fourteen stories rising in the middle) gives it the aura of the Emerald City of Oz, with its palace of the Great Wizard.

As luck had it, the quarter mile loop running around the sloping lawn in front was occupied that Saturday by the annual North Dakota craft fair.  Stall after stall featured stunningly wrought items of wood, glass, paint and fabric.  Here was a boundary between bias and reality.  My bias, barely known to me, was the idea that humans are more self-aware and artistic on the coasts than in the Midwest.  No such difference exists.  Thoughtfulness, concentration and skill characterize North Dakotans.  Film at 11!

All the people we saw were white.  Perhaps we were at the white center of North America.  These are the people who are endlessly ridiculed and vilified these days in most American media and much university pontification. They are deemed undeserving because life has been so easy for them, and because they suck life out of non-whites.   I personally saw no one sucking life out of anyone, near or far.  Nor did I see signs that life is easy in North Dakota.  Many striking paintings in the craft fair evoked angst and alienation.  None evoked any kind of "supremacy."  

In 2016, Donald Trump won 63% of North Dakota's vote; Hillary Clinton won 27.2%.  Here was the boundary between red and blue.  I was in a red state.     

When we left Bismarck, heading east on I-94, we found more boundaries in the content of radio shows and billboards.

Over some stretches it was difficult to find NPR on the car radio, though there were many evangelical stations.  It must be lonely sometimes on the North Dakota plains, when the only company might be a man telling you about your soul, that you have one, and that it is important for the universe and will last forever.  Why not?  If I'm from a blue state, a blue person, does that mean I can't believe in the soul?  Not that I'm certain the soul exists.  It is a compelling idea, that we aren't just reflections, flashing for a few moments then gone- memory, identity, time, space...all gone.  You can argue that our evanescence is too awful to be true, that the soul is necessary to give existence a point.  You can argue anything. 

The billboards often conveyed political content.  Every half-hour we passed an anti-abortion message.  Here was a boundary made intense by the language used by politicians and other "leaders" on both sides: If you support abortion rights, you support murdering babies; if you oppose abortion rights, you support harms to women.  The formulations eliminate nuanced boundaries, creating two simplified stories of good against evil, one for each side.  

Both formulations recognize a conceptual boundary between a newly fertilized egg and a more developed fetus with a heartbeat.  There is agreement that these are both living things, but do they both have souls?  I don't know if a fetus with a heartbeat has a human consciousness or a soul.  Maybe it does, and maybe we should care; I'm just guessing, like everyone else.  It seems unlikely that a newly fertilized human egg would have a human consciousness, or a soul.  It's a single cell, with no developed brain tissue.  It would make more sense to believe that the soul is attached later, when there are elements of human consciousness.  None of this is proven, or can be proven, of course.  The question becomes: if none of the essential considerations about abortion can be proven or known, how can anyone argue about it?

Such thoughts occupied many soporific hours driving across the plains, but there was also the news, which on this trip was dominated by shootings in El Paso and Dayton, especially horrific because they happened on the same day.  The radio presentations suggested an America coming apart, with violence ready to erupt at any time or place.  Of course that's not even remotely what is happening.  The number of mad killers as a percentage of the population is small, and would be negligible if assault weapons were not so easy to procure and if any homicidal lost soul couldn't get worldwide attention from a media that thrives on their crimes.  

It was a disconnect to hear over and over about the violence while driving through hundreds of miles of wheat fields, where the violence is microscopic, involving insects and chemicals.  No crazed person acts-out here, swinging wildly with a machete while railing against mono-culture.  That's why wheat fields are not in the news.  

In the evening we arrived in Fargo, on the Minnesota border, and got a room at the Radisson Hotel near the Red River, in the historic downtown, where socioeconomic boundaries are mixed.  There were depressed areas with homeless people and local teenagers defending turf, alongside art galleries and stately mansions.  

We saw "Rocketman" at the vintage (and well kept) Fargo Theater, in which Elton John invites us to contemplate one of our favorite subjects: the pain famous people feel when they discover that not only are they as lonely as they were before they were famous, but it's a new kind of loneliness, even more brutal and cosmically empty than the loneliness before.  Elton John was able to survive his ordeal.  There is a boundary between people who can handle fame and people who can't.  Rock singers seem to have the worst of it.  Politicians generally do ok with fame.  Why is that?  

Next stop was the Twin Cities, where my wife's family lives and mine used to.  We stayed with my wife's sister and brother-in-law in St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis which is within Minnesota's fifth congressional district, represented by Ilhan Omar.  She is intensely opposed by much of her district.  Omar put herself on the political map with statements like, "Israel has hypnotized the world; may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel."  Omar crosses the boundary between church and state when she invokes deity to fight enemies, suggesting that she envisions herself operating in a theocracy.  Interestingly, she does not follow her logic to invoke Allah against America because it took land by force from people who were here first.  On the contrary, Omar seems comfortable living and prospering on formerly Native American lands.  She feels differently, it seems, when the sin is hers.

We saw a family of wild turkeys strolling around my in-laws' house, digging up gardens in the front and back, crossing the boundary between human and animal.  Another animal crossed a boundary at my wife's parents' place in St. Paul: a bat flying around in the lobby.  In order to get out, the bat needed two doors opened at once (the two doors enclosing the warm-up space typical of Midwest lobbies).  My wife held one door open while I held the other.  A trapped bird would have taken minutes to figure out that there was an escape route, but the bat figured it out immediately using echolocation.

More animal encounters occurred when we traveled north to the Boundary Waters area.  En route we spent a night and a morning in Duluth, on Lake Superior, which was filled with lovely butterflies and aquatic birds.  Another boundary appeared in the Skyway, an elevated passage, unventilated and very stuffy, between our hotel and the canal area along the lake.  The passageway was empty of all people but us.  We checked a side passage that led to a movie theater showing Tarantino's "Once upon a time...in Hollywood."  We thought of seeing it, but it was scheduled too late. When we re-entered the Skyway and turned left towards the canal, there was a tall, lean young black man reclining against the wall, watching our approach.  He was wearing a baseball cap and jeans that hung below his waist, exposing an inch of boxer shorts.  His tank top revealed long, sinewy arms.  There was no one else around.  As we advanced and looked his way, he hopped forward five inches, held his arms out and said, "Ha, ha."  It was funny, in a theoretical way, crossing at it did a racial boundary in which he knew what stereotypes might rule us, and we knew that he knew, and he knew we knew he knew.  Ha ha, indeed.

We didn't go to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (within Superior National Forest), so called for its proximity to the Canadian border, but toured areas to its south.  Birch and pine forests extended to the horizon.  We stayed at a lodge near the town of Bibawic, which features a fiberglass moose near the bandstand in the park.  We walked all of Main Street at night, encountering no one.  Everything was closed except several bars hosting locals who were nursing drinks and talking with people they had known for years.  We could have gone into one of the bars, crossing the boundary between people we know and people we don't, creating perhaps intimacy with the other, but we didn't.  



On the trip home we crossed one more boundary- that between moving by your own power, and moving via advanced technology.  I refer to the two flights, starting at Lindbergh Airport in Minneapolis, and connecting in Phoenix, that got us home to Los Angeles.  The flights were similar: each left on time, and each included lengthy periods waiting on the tarmac after landing while a gate was secured.  These waiting periods were stressful, as people sank into thoughts of busy schedules now messed up, and perhaps into deeper waters about the meaning of modern life, perhaps concluding that a life spent in joyless cylinders waiting for release belied an existence without meaning.  On the other hand, the flights landed safely, we did not die, and we were able to have ten days of experiences we wouldn't have had without air travel.  The final boundary, then, is the one between what we're grateful for and what we're not grateful for, and the final lesson is that we're grateful and not grateful for the same things, in the way that we support and oppose the same things.

Pandemic peace

Pier, Ventura, Ca.

California in pain and anger

It's 6:30am, Saturday, November 10, 2018.  The winds have died down in Woodland Hills, and the "Woolsey" fire, attacking now in Calabasas to our immediate north, has slowed, so at present we don't have to evacuate.  That could change later in the day.  The cold air smells nice, like a wood fire (last night the Santa Ana winds blew the smoke out to sea), but the meaning of the smell is dire.  The gym at my school down the street is filled with refugees.  At the Ralph's, displaced newcomers look for alternatives to Red Cross pizza.

The news media is correct that this fire is unlike any other Southern California fire we've experienced, partly because of its breadth and ferocity, and partly because of two other things: its timing after a mass shooting near its origin and its proximity to a midterm election that left the U.S. in crisis.

I found a strange perspective and further meaning to the fires in a local news report.  A man from Camarillo whose house burned down told a reporter, "I still count myself lucky- I didn't have to go through what they did in Thousand Oaks."  He was referring to the shooting, in which a crazed man with an assault weapon- which he finally used on himself- killed 12 people at a music club. 

Right after the shooting, within a few miles of it, the fire started.  The man with the destroyed house had combined, in his mind, the two catastrophes, so that the shooting in Thousand Oaks and the fires were parts of one attack that struck differently in different places.  After the man spoke in the clip, the news anchor remarked, "Yes, the people of Thousand Oaks experienced the shooting right before this fire erupted around them," understanding what the homeowner had said.  In her mind, too, the shooting and the fires were connected, even as one story.

A BBC reporter who had covered other mass shootings in the U.S. had this observation about Thousand Oaks: "The chilling difference I'm finding here is that, unlike in past shootings, there is no sense of surprise.  It's as if people feel, 'Yes, this is what happens.'"

The resignation and despair plus the blending of the shooting and the fires- and perhaps the sense of uncertainty after the midterm- have induced, I think, an "act of God" feel to the catastrophes, invoking in some, perhaps, a Biblical guilt: What have I done to deserve this?, and in others a guilt infused with assertiveness and anger: Why have I allowed myself, my family and friends to accept a society that has no power over itself, that cannot control weapons or crazy people or much of anything? 

President Trump this morning threw more anxiety into the mix when he insulted hundreds of thousands of distressed Californians by stating that the Woolsey fire and the Camp fire (in Northern California, with over 1,000 dead) were caused by the state's "gross mismanagement," and that the penalty for this should be "No more Fed payments!," an abusive statement reflecting his anger that California refuses to knuckle under to him.

Yet I counsel against putting much energy into anger at Trump, because it won't do any good.  He thrives on it.

Instead, let's take our anger and guilt and direct them at a vacuum, the vacuum where a political party should be.  Democrats and Republicans are done.  They are phantoms floating past the carnage in California, using outrage at each other to mask their ineffectiveness.  We need a new political party, and we need it by 2020.   We should put our anger and/or guilt into that goal.

 

The debate game

[This essay made the shortlist in the NewPhilosopher Magazine writing contest, August, 2018.]

The engaging articles in the Summer 2018 NewPhilosopher Magazine, the Play edition, are relevant to my job, which for the past fifteen years has been coaching high school debate (I retired from teaching English in 2009).   The issue explored the dual nature of play, as exercise without purpose beyond itself, and as exercise with extended purposes, and inspired me to revisit two long-pondered questions about academic and political debate:  Do they lead to truth, either for students or politicians running for office, and do they result in accurate ranking of students’ or candidates’ abilities? 

Debate coaches and media networks promoting election debates sometimes suggest that debate entails a search for truth.  We hear about its roots in Socratic dialogue and Enlightenment debate societies, which, in theory, existed to stimulate critical thinking and draw out ideas and underlying assumptions.  However, while formal argumentation may at times display truth, the modern game of debate is not designed to do that; it is designed to determine a winner and loser.  

The winner’s arguments are not deemed “true,” but better argued; the loser’s arguments are not deemed “false,” but not argued as well.  Competitive debate is a sport, a verbal boxing match in which each side pummels the other with “facts” and “evidence,” and a judge then decides who did this with the most facility (debate derives from Latin battere, to fight). Thus, there is never an epiphany on one side in which a debater sees the wisdom of the opponent’s view- in fact that would constitute a loss for the agreeing side.   There are clear benefits to debate- it sharpens important life-skills and brings to light much information and many points of view- but the imperative to disagree impedes its potential function as a search for truth.

The imperative to disagree is also the default mode in public discourse.  Consider the current gun control debate in America.  Below is an exchange using the arguments we hear in the news, as they might be expressed in one of the popular high school debate events, such as Lincoln-Douglas or Public Forum, starting with a resolution, followed by a back and forth between the Affirmative (Aff) and Negative (Neg):

Resolved: In light of recent mass shootings using automatic weapons with high capacity ammunition clips, combat weaponry should be banned from civilian use.

Aff: There is no legitimate purpose in civilian life for automatic weapons.  Such weapons are necessary only for police and military use.

Neg: The founders wrote the Second Amendment to make sure the population has the right to bear arms. Restricting assault weapons is the first step in a slippery slope leading to prohibition of all firearms. The larger question is protection of freedom.

Aff: We are not talking about restricting all firearms. People would still have the right to arm themselves both for personal protection and for recreational uses such as hunting.

Neg: The ultimate purpose, however, is to ban all firearms from the population.

Aff: No it isn’t.

Neg: Yes it is.

Aff: No it isn’t.

Neg: Yes it is.

Of course the last four statements would not be made, but their equivalents would, ad infinitum.  There is no end to the debate.  Although formal rules force closure, the two sides go at it for an implied eternity.

High school debate at least attempts to approach truth through the requirement for "clash," the precise rebutting of an opponent’s argument (referred to also as "hitting").  The public debate on gun control has reached the pointless point, not only because it is at the “Yes it is/No it isn’t” level, but because the Neg, in this case the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its supporters avoid clash.  If the current national gun control debate were a formal academic debate at a high school tournament, the NRA would lose by virtue of its avoiding clash.

For instance, in an academic debate, if the Neg alleged that civilians need combat weaponry to protect against a hypothetical tyrannical government (a common argument), the Aff could counter that our heavily armed citizenry has already given up its 4th Amendment right to private communication without a shot fired.  Such an Aff response would constitute clash, as it directly addresses the Neg point. If the Neg then responded by ignoring the point, which is what the NRA does, then the judge would give the win to the Aff because it clashed and the Neg did not.

Unfortunately in political debate there is no judge to monitor and award points for clash.  One wishes the general public would be as observant to detail as the average parent/judge at a high school debate tournament. 

My second question about debate concerns our use of it to determine the quality of the speakers, whether they are students vying for first place or candidates seeking votes.  How reliable and appropriate is this use?

My observation, from judging debate rounds at many tournaments, is that at preliminary tournaments- the novice and opens- there is substantial validity to ranking students in numerical order of achievement, because at these levels there are large differences in technical proficiency.  At the final rounds of qualifiers the appropriateness of ranking is less clear.  Finalists in a qualifier are highly polished.  There will be differences, but they are harder to spot.

The real problem is in the final rounds of state tournaments, or the national tournament.  In these rounds there is often no observable difference between the top several students.  The rankings first, second and third can be meaningless, generated in the minds of exhausted judges trying to avoid a tie.  When the rankings are announced at awards, however, they are treated as 100% valid. The situation seems unfortunate in a culture where the overriding goal in all competitions is to place first.   I say this as a coach whose students have placed first and second in state.  I certainly wouldn’t petition the league to invalidate those rankings.  My students were awesome and it’s a rush to win big.  But the process is unreliable.

Ranking political candidates based on their performance in public debate is unreliable as well.  After a presidential debate in the U.S., commentators try to decide who "won," as judges do in high school debate, but how would anyone know who won when there is virtually no clash?  The media formula for identifying the winner of a political debate appears to be an estimate of which candidate was most likeable.  Not that there's anything wrong with being likeable, but if that's all the debate shows, it's a formula for picking demagogues, as they tend to be likeable.  

Several of the articles in the NewPhilosopher Play edition look at the contradiction between the playfulness of play and its seriousness.  For instance, in “Being outside yourself,” Simon Critchley and Nigel Warburton consider the exaggerated sense of meaning felt by fans after their home football team either wins or loses, in the context of the essential meaningless of either winning or losing.  Debate too is a mix of play and serious ambition.  To me as a coach, debate is more play than serious, but I would rather not leave it at that.  

Perhaps we can take another look at debate as play, and see how it might serve serious purposes, both academic and public.  Can we structure debate rules to avoid deadlocks of “Yes it is/No it isn’t”?  Do debaters have to insist they are right?  Are “win” (from Gothic, winnan, "to suffer") and “lose” (from Old English, losian, "to perish, be destroyed"} sufficient outcomes?  Must there be first, second and third places that force judges into subjective and even random decisions?

Hopefully such questions will not become moot.  Academic and public debates are indications of a democratic society.  Recent totalitarian trends, if fulfilled, could mark the end of all but cosmetic debate.  If we can hold on to debate in its current, relatively uncensored form, it might be worthwhile to upgrade the rules and goals with deeper understandings of play and its purposes.