Debt and Instant Gratification

One of the supposedly Christian values is to stay away from materialism. But America, the supposedly Christian nation, is extremely materialist, and France, the supposedly secular nation, is much less materialist. 

I just finished sending in my French tax statement. I have not paid the taxes yet, since the French government will figure out what I owe and take it out of my bank account. But I had to let them know how much I’d already paid in American taxes, for which they will not double-charge me. Last year my French tax was zero; apparently my American taxes were higher. I do not need to report interest from savings accounts; the banks automatically send this information to the French tax bureau.

Even if taxes are higher in France, something of which I am not convinced based on personal experience, life is really nice here. Many services are available to the public. I am glad to live here. Life just seems calmer here.

One indicator of this is credit card debt. I finally paid all my consumer debt off before I left America, and here in France, not only do I have none, but it is legally difficult to get in debt unless it is for a mortgage. Americans, averaging $5915 in credit card debt, have the highest debt levels in the world; France is number 18, with an average of $1616. There are many reasons for this, of which I will mention just two.

First, France has really good health care and virtually nobody has medical bankruptcy. In America, medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy, affecting (according to Forbes) 530,000 Americans a year. Americans usually charge their expensive medicines to credit cards (I did), and this adds up to quite a chunk of change. It is over $600 per person. Medicines are cheap in France; for one of my medicines, forty times cheaper even without government insurance.

Second, the French have less instant gratification than Americans. The attitude in America seems to be, I gotta git me one of them things, while in France it seems to be, For what would I need that thing? The French spend less on personal pleasures (except wine and cheese), and I see very few ostentatious cars. Their number one vacation destination is someplace else in France. Gasoline is more expensive here, but their cars are smaller and they drive less, especially when commuting. They save up to buy small houses. Only hunters have guns, and not very many.

In this second way, I think the French are less materialistic than Americans. They are satisfied with waiting, and with less.

Department of War

Most of us have grown up hearing about DOD (Department of Defense), and this is still how it is universally known. However, the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has decided to rename it the Department of War, and that is how you will find it on the official federal website. The index of departments and agencies still lists it as Defense, but its leaders consider it the Department of War.

 

 

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this change, to America, and in the eyes of the world.

Consider how one would evaluate the effectiveness of a federal agency. If it is the Department of Defense, the question we need to answer is, Is America being adequately defended? I am not including those tasks that have been assigned to the Department of Homeland Security. Since most Americans do not live in fear of foreign aggression, we could conclude that DOD is doing its job and the Secretary of Defense is doing his.

But if we call it Department of War, then this department has to be fighting a war somewhere, or else it is not doing its job. If America is not fighting a war, then the War Department is effectively inoperative. This is why Pete Hegseth believes that, at any given time, America must be fighting at least one war. Otherwise, Hegseth is not doing his job.

People often ask if there is an Iran exit strategy. If not, what is it that we are trying to accomplish? But that is not the right question. We need to have at least one war, and from this war we must not have an exit strategy. We must be permanently at war. In this sense, the cease-fire is blocking the department from doing its job.

This is what our supposed allies think when they see us. Here is the view from the UK. We are a nation that must be permanently at war. War is our identity. And we must find someone to conduct war against. Right now it is Iran. Who will it be next? Will it still be Iran five years from now? Or will we find another target? But we must have one or more targets or else we, as a nation, are failures.

That, at least, must be the view of Trump and Hegseth.

The Only Way to Stop the Tide of Illegal Immigration?

The tide of illegal immigration from or through Mexico slowed down just once in recent years, and that was during the 2009 economic collapse, which was caused entirely by selfish billionaires trying to trick their investors. The Big Short, we could call it, as in the movie. This suggests that if immigrants see that they won’t find work in America, they will stop coming.

That is, the only way American can stop the immigrants is by making itself infernal. Hellish.

Already, this is the view that many Europeans have of America. European tourism in America has declined precipitously for several reasons, including social disruption and the danger of disease and gun violence. Why would tourists want to come to America when they have to stand in line many hours to get on an airplane, where they might get shot by a gun, and when they might get a disease that Europe has eradicated within its borders?

A funny little thing happened this morning at the post office, when I was mailing my taxes to America (federal and state). For many years, I have written “Internal Revenue Service” in such a way that “Internal” was clearly written with a T but which, with a little imagination, you could read as an F. I asked for delivery confirmation. Europe has stopped delivery confirmation directly to the United States, but the UK still does it, so Europe sends delivery confirmation parcels to the UK. (Fortunately, as I told the clerk, pas d’urgence.) He printed out my receipt with the tracking number, then wrote by hand the place to which I was sending the letter: He clearly wrote, in capital letters. INFERNAL REVENU. Perhaps he realized what it meant; in French, hell is enfer.

So if Trump turns America into a dictatorship in which, from one moment to the next, even citizens do not know what their rights might be, the economy will collapse and the immigration problem will be solved, come hell or l’eau haute.

Sexual Selection and Music: Nannerl's story

Something to think about (music and sex) as spring arrives.

Back when I was taking music courses as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, everyone was wondering why the great musicians were male. Not all of them, of course; two female composers, Thea Musgrave and Emma Lou Diemer, were on our faculty. Clara Schumann, Robert’s wife, was an example from the nineteenth century. More recently, there was Dawn Upshaw. But this list is very short, compared to the list of famous male composers.

It is easy to attribute this solely to male oppression of females. Male domination in music is just another example of male domination of society in general.

But there is another factor at work. Males often show off to other males, and to potential female mates, in the hopes of increasing their mating opportunities, within or outside of a pair-bond, in humans as in many other animal species. While this often takes destructive forms, such as war and abuse, it can also take creative forms, especially in big-brained humans. Artistic or intellectual creativity is often a way in which males can show off. We all know of the spectacular paintings on European cave walls. But those same caves echoed the music of bone flutes and drums by which musicians (perhaps mostly male) enthralled their congregations.

This happens more often males than females because evolutionary fitness in males often results largely from the number of mates, while this is not true so much in females. For a man, reproduction can consist of a single sex act, while for a woman the whole process of pregnancy, childbirth, and raising children may be her burden alone. Thankfully, there are many of us men who are nurturing and faithful rather than rapacious. But a male can have hundreds of offspring (or thousands, for Genghis Khan) while no woman can have that many. The inevitable result of sexual competition is that some men have lots of offspring, while most of the others compete with one another for whatever women are left.

Women also compete with one another to have the best males as the fathers of their children. Also, women need to have musical ability in order to recognize it in men. Anna Schindler, herself only a passable musician, nevertheless recognized the genius of Gustav Mahler and maneuvered herself into being his wife. Nevertheless, sexual competition is stronger in men than in women.

Sexual selection must have chosen whatever genetic basis there is for musical ability, in men more than in women. But that genetic basis cannot be found only in men. Men have a Y chromosome, which is largely a lump of useless DNA. The genetic basis of musical proficiency must be found on either the X chromosome or the non-sexual chromosomes, and this means that it shows up perhaps just as frequently in girls as in boys. In the absence of ongoing sexual election, musical ability, even if it began as a male characteristic, would soon equalize itself between the sexes.

And this is why even spectacular musical ability shows up in females even if it started in males thousands of years ago.

Everyone has heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was clearly a musical genius. But did you know he had a sister who was perhaps just as gifted as he was? She was a superb keyboardist, and her father Leopold took her on concert tours throughout Europe at the same time as he took young Wolfgang. Audiences were perhaps even more impressed with the beautiful Maria Anna Mozart (nicknamed Nannerl) than with her little brother who could do musical tricks. But her father convinced her that her only chance for success was as a performer and teacher, and as a wife. While she continued teaching and performing until her own death, decades later than Wolfgang’s, none of her compositions survive. One movie I saw (of several that have been made) showed her, at about fifteen years old, sadly burning her compositions in the family fireplace. It turns out Wolfgang was a genius; but perhaps Nannerl was also. We will never know.

 

Natural and sexual selection, drivers of human evolution, are not destiny. The adaptations they provide must be continually maintained by culture, as I explained above. As culture evolves, the forces of selection can change. Thankfully they are already doing so. When I was in high school, most brass players in school bands were boys, except the very competent Linda. The girls chose flute and clarinet. When I was in California State Honor Band in 1974, I was the last chair baritone horn player. The first chair player (in the concert band) was a black girl. She was really good. I admired her for her pioneering spirit on her instrument and for the way she represented her ethnicity. This was an important part of my development, coming as I did from a racist family.

There are forces that try to suppress opportunities for women. A few years ago, there was a scandal among the Southern Baptists because male leaders often seduced females without serious punishment. The church’s response? There were a few women in positions of Southern Baptist leadership. The church removed them and forbade women to be in such positions at all.

But even religion cannot completely hide female talent. Probably every church choir director has heard of composer Natalie Sleeth. Things look pretty grim for women in conservative religion, but I suspect things will never get as bad as a Margaret Atwood novel.

The Tortilla Curtain: Nightmares about Possible Worlds

A lot of alternative-future fiction is nightmares about what could happen if we project current trends forward into the future. We could also call these alternative-fiction nightmares “prophecies,” because that is what Old Testament prophecies were: they were not predictions about what would actually happen, but speculations about what might happen if current (to the prophets, sinful) conditions continued.

Rolando J. Diaz wrote a collection of stories in 2007 called Tales of the Tortilla Curtain. In his stories, set in the middle of the 21^st century, the Tortilla Curtain was an actual very high wall that ran along the entire border of Mexico and the United States, like an unhealable wound. It had every imaginable type of technological gadget for detecting anyone trying to enter the United States illegally from Mexico, and then eliminating them. This would include land mines and automatic machine guns that would pulverize anyone crossing the border without prior authorization. Most of the border enforcement was coordinated by Dusty, the name by which the Data Systems Tracker was known. It was an artificial intelligence that pretended to be friendly. (Diaz wrote before AI became an everyday term.)

 

 

In story after story, the reader starts to get inured to clouds of blood and piles of torn, rotting corpses. This was a nightmare reification of the animosity that conservative Americans felt, then as now, toward immigrants from Mexico, originally walled wetbacks because they would swim the Rio Grande. American seldom felt animosity against the equally illegal, though extremely rare, frostbacks from Canada. Rolando’s stories pose the question, just how far would we go to lash out against people we with would not come to America? Would we be willing to kill them and to leave their bodies for work crews to shovel into trash trucks? To (if we were Hispanic Americans) shoot our own relatives?

The immediate cause of Rolando’s nightmare was the reaction of white Americans against Arabic people after nine-eleven, as we now call it. If white Americans could so passionately hate Arabs, then might they also hate Mexicans?

Note that Rolando wrote and published these stories not only before the first Trump administration but before the first Obama administration. Rolando could not have imagined (or maybe he did, but could not have actually foreseen) that Trump would campaign on the promise of actually building such a wall—thousands of miles and billions of cubic feet of concrete, with advanced technology. Such a project was always impossible and unaffordable, and once Trump got what he wanted—election—he conveniently forgot his promise. It became a metaphorical wall, at most consisting of extra electronic surveillance along existing fences.

And now, during Trump II, the reality may be less violent than Diaz described in his nightmare—not as many piles of dismembered body parts—but is more pervasive. The anti-immigrant hatred is not just along the border. It extends throughout the country, even most infamously in Minnesota, where ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in case any of you do not know) considers detaining even legal immigrants, and shooting and killing even white American citizens, to be an acceptable cost of their war against illegal immigrants. The federal government, with Trump’s enthusiastic support, pays ICE agents very well, gives them lots of benefits, allows them to wear face masks to hide their identity, and then lets them do whatever they want (though pretending to disapprove), up through and including killing people. Diaz’s wall was bleeding violence along the Mexican border; the real Trump wall cuts right through the heart of America.

It is possible that part of Trump’s Wall includes hostility toward other countries, not just our possible enemies, but also our allies. It seems to be part of his policy to make wild threats (We will take over Greenland! We will annex Canada!) against our friends. He backs off from them, but our allies have not forgotten. European leaders are still meeting to make preparation for a possible American takeover of Greenland, for example. This week, Marco Rubio is coming to France to discuss European support for the Iran War, which America started without even consulting our European allies. At the time of this writing, I do not know what might come from these meetings. It would be justified if the European leaders told Rubio, you started this war, you finish it, if you can.

In one of Diaz’s stories, an American citizen of Mexican origin was detained because he did not carry his passport with him when he happened to be arrested by federal agents. This raises an important question: do all Americans need to carry proof of citizenship (a driver’s license won’t qualify) at all times? Or, maybe, only if you have dark skin? (Which, incidentally, Diaz does not have.) This is starting to sound like the old Soviet Union, Comrade Trump.

Throughout Rolando’s book I found empathy. I would like to add one real story to Rolando’s fictional ones: the story of the little girl Josseline Janiletha Quinteros, who died in the desert in 2008 while coming to America to look for her mother. Alas her photo is no longer available.

Reading Diaz’s collection of stories made me shiver because his 2007 nightmare has elements that feel frighteningly like today’s news. An Old Testament style prophecy.

The Evolution of Wierdness

Weirdness cannot be defined, but whatever it is, it evolved, which means it provided an evolutionary advantage at many times during human evolution.

One reason it cannot be defined is that what one culture, in space or time, considers weird, another culture may not. One example is psychopaths. In most cultures, most people dislike psychopaths. They are very, very smart, and almost always use their intelligence and their charisma to advance their own interests. We tend to think of the psychopathic mass murderers and other criminals, but many psychopaths (who constitute about one percent of the population) pass as ordinary people and may be surprised by their own (often genetically-based) diagnosis. A lot of politicians and preachers are psychopaths, who cultivate the goodwill of others for their own financial or sexual benefits. And they also like to shame you for suspecting that they are committing acts of evil. It takes highly-developed social intelligence to recognize a psychopath. See the book by Kevin Dutton: The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us about Success. New York: FSG, 2012.

The success of psychopaths depends on the social situation. Adolf Hitler was a psychopath, and he got millions of people to follow him. After Germany lost World War Two, many Germans felt mentally liberated, and wondered, What were we thinking, to follow this jerk? Germany was not a nation of psychopaths, but maybe the Nazis were a party of psychopaths.

But there are many other ways of being weird. Most of us are a little weird in a few ways. But I mean clinical weirdness. One example is Williams Syndrome [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_syndrome]. People with Williams Syndrome have distinctive facial characteristics, and medical problems such as heart conditions. They have diminished intelligence, overall. They are extremely talkative, and effusively express their emotions. They are almost always cheerful. I have never knowingly met one but I get the impression that it would be really hard to not like them.

One word you would not associate with Williams Syndrome is suspicious. In order to become socially powerful, within your society, you have to be suspicious of the motives of other people in your society, and certainly of people in other societies. People with Williams Syndrome will walk right up to you and trust you. This is socially awkward. But openness and the willingness to trust is an essential component of altruism, of social bonding. It’s just that these people have too much of a good thing.

Another reason weirdness cannot be defined is that each kind of weirdness has its own social and genetic basis. Williams Syndrome is associated with a specific genetic deletion that affects a specific part of the brain. There is no set of terms in any language that exactly matches the symptoms of this deletion. And, in fact, characteristics resulting from mutations can be highly modified by upbringing and social circumstances. I am thinking of a person who acts as if she has Williams Syndrome, but who looks normal, and is brilliant.

Throughout human evolution, behavior patterns have sometimes been useful and sometimes not. Since each behavior has a different set of causes, human behavior has proven to be immensely variable. This has happened not because natural selection has done a bad job on human behavior, but because both the source and the target of human behavior is constantly shifting.

We can be glad we have empathy and altruism in the human species. And maybe Williams Syndrome is the price we pay for it.

Next, I will write about the evolution of nerds. Or not. Maybe I am a bit too close to the subject to be objective.