It’s Five After

Five after thirteen, you might say—in annual time. Actually it will be five after in about a minute or so of clock time. The first month of the year is already over. In a swoosh and in a whirl. As we age, time speeds up, and a month is like five minutes, which is also arithmetically accurate. One twelfth is equal to five sixtieth, 8.333… percent.  Precision then breaks down a little. If a month is five annual minutes, one minute should be a week. Indeed this month had three full weeks but two others were but partial, the first beginning on a Tuesday, the last ending on a Thursday. The analogy disappears below that. The minute only has seven seconds; but those seconds at least have names: Monday, Tuesday, etc. Anyway—good enough for noodling on a pad…

Cursive's a Waste of Time to Teach?

The Last Are Departing

The death of fellow-blogger Montag’s father, reported on his site yesterday (link), set me to calculating the life-spans of the Greatest Generation. Montag’s father died at 92 and would have been 25 at the conclusion of World War II, a young Navy lieutenant. My own father, who fought on the other side—opposing Russian advances in Poland—saw the light of day in 1907 and passed (quite young by the life-expectancy these days) at 74 in 1981. Generations have long shadows that, of course, are almost invisibly dim as time passes. The last Civil War veteran died in 1956. He was Albert H. Woolson, 18 when that war ended. He died at age 109. We join Montag and his family in this leave-taking and wave our own farewells on the beach of the Greater Ocean.

The Leap to Direct Democracy

Those who exulted over the Arab Spring should now be in states of ecstasy. Egypt appears on the way of skipping over the cumbersome, so-yesterday form of Representative Democracy straight to Direct Democracy. They’re way ahead of us. We’re still struggling with inefficient forms of it, like ballot initiatives, that teach our governors and legislatures to become better contortionists. Hey. We already have the necessary institutions and technology. Why don’t we get with the program and embrace Facebook Democracy now. If we don’t innovate, Egypt will get ahead of us—and be the first to show the ultimate consequences of DD.

New Archetype in Sports

Humble beginnings. Breakthrough into the Big Leagues. Early Anointment as Comer. Young Starhood. Explosive Improvement in Performance. Celebrity Nickname. First Denials of Taking Performance-Enhancing Drugs. Denial of Having Used Drugs with Attitude. Sometimes Before Congressional Panel. Falling Silent. In Cloud of Suspicion. Hall of Fame-Not. Conversion. Public Confession Before Oprah. And beyond? Perhaps Hollywood Star. Perhaps Running for Governor. Perhaps even, you know, running for… [This with ht to a New York Times story about someone called A-Rod.]

Sapristi!

Son of a biscuit! It took me more than 75 years to discover the formal name for a practice that initially puzzled me when first I arrived in the United States at fifteen. Arrived in Kansas City. There I heard people say “Gal Dang it” and “Jeepers Creepers”—not having the slightest, you might say. I was then still concerned with elementary etymology, thus working on gunna, as in that splendid “She’s gunna git got.” An old lady, whom I actually asked to explain it to me, was baffled by my question and responded by repetition. “You know,” she said, “like in we gunna do that, we gunna finish.” I suppose she meant mowing the lawn, which is what I was then doing for her for a quarter. Yes. Those were the day. You could get a gallon of gas for that then.

Well, today I learned, in the course of tracing another wonderful word, that Gal-Dang-it belongs to a category called “minced oaths.” Minced? Well, oaths made ever so small, cut into little harmless sounds, thus euphemized, if that’s a verb. The root of this mincing is the third of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.” Exodus 20:7. Mincing is the art of retaining the emotional energy of an oath but changing the sound enough so that the speaker is not literally violating the commandment. With advancing secularization, the practice came to be applied to ordinary obscene words as well, and really fine mincing is provided in print, as in the phrase, which might be applied to my posts: “What in the            are you talking about?”

My last report on minced oaths was on a German phrase (link). I still did not know the name of the category then. I will add one today from the French—although it also has a German equivalent. The word is sapristi, usually rendered as Sapristi! It means, to translate it into another minced oath, Oh my gosh! The German version of that, derived from the French, is sapperlotti—in its shorter version sapperlot.

The Internet, thickly populated as it is by sites that enable the ignorant to instruct the challenged, at first would not yield anything, but eventually I found the family lineage of sapristi. It comes from an early pre-mincing, used in the same way, sacristi. That one is a contraction of Sacrum Corpus Christi from the Latin. Now German sites are not all in agreement. Some want to derive sapperlot from Sacré Nom de Dieu. Okay, the nom provides an O, absent is sapristi, but the sapperlotti suggests, to me, that the German form is just more mincing of the French.

Another way of mincing oaths is by the simple elimination of the holy name or names. In French Sacre nom, by itself, produces less scandal (as Catholics might say) than adding de Dieu. And the French also use, with exactly the same shocked surprise, the word Sacrebleu! Some call that a Marian oath in that The Lady wore a blue mantle; others go deeper and discover that bleu is a nicely minced substitute for dieu, and they hark back to such curses as morbleu (death of), corbleu (body of) and others.

Gee-whiz! What an ocean language is —and the fish in it are without number.

The Stealth Phenomenon

The stealth technology—its most “visible” form is military hardware—is also known as LO technology; LO stands for “low observable.” But observable by what? Well, radar and other mechanical sensors such as those that pick up differences in sound or thermal effects. The modern form of stealth technology was undoubtedly born right alongside the invention of radar (RAdio Detection And Ranging)—but the art was present long before that time as camouflage—blending into the terrain and thus remaining invisible: animals and plants practiced it long before humanity learned to hide itself in war—or peace.

For my purposes today, however, military stealth technology merely serves as an illustration. Why is it that we see virtually no Good News in the media—aside from a few “heart-warming” features served up sparsely in Sunday papers or, with slightly patronizing smiles, by the TV media? The reason I’d propose today is that significant ranges of social reality prefer to operate behind a kind of stealth technology for practical reasons as well as on principle. To remain invisible to the media, an institution must pass three tests: it must behave correctly at all times, it should produce genuine value for the public, and it must avoid drawing attention to itself. The naturally accruing attention from its constituency will be enough to help it operate effectively. The same goes for individuals.

One of the very first German sayings I learned as a boy, after World War II had carried us to Germany, was “Selbstlob stinkt”: “Self praise stinks.” Children would yell that when someone was trying to make himself/herself too big. That sort of thing, coming from your peers, had an educational effect. Attention was a by-product, and nothing more than that, of action—doing things right, not doing things to gain visibility.

All this came to mind recently when news came that Dell Computer was going private—and whenever that subject arises, the privately-held company—I always remember Cargill, Inc., the largest of these. Its headquarters were (still are) in suburban Minneapolis, where we once lived. I got to know Cargill rather well and hence developed an admiration for the privately-held company—in an age when “coming of age,” for a corporation, means “going public.”

The publicly held corporation, what with the commercial culture that has developed around it, is something of a corruption. The trading of its stock becomes the focus of attention—and works backwards to skew all decision making. It leads to all kinds of evils, like acquisitions and divestitures, short-term planning, mass lay-offs that cause the stock to jump, and the absurd notion that the corporation exists only to make stockholders rich rather than fulfilling missions stated at the time of its incorporation. Such entities avidly desire visibility—and also suffer from it. Selling stock to the public is an easy way to get large capital infusions—but I wonder if the benefit actually covers the eventual functional losses the public suffers from the process. If it’s easy—it is suspect.

Good institutions do not attract media attention. The good is taken for granted—the disturbing produces headlines, draws attention, and therefore sells ads. The glow of Good is local. I suspect that the Good or at least the Neutral is overwhelmingly more common than the sleazy—but the lenses of the world bring nothing but news of corruption, decay, and of collapse. What percentage of the total is it? We can only guess.

Zion in Context

Zion is a hill or mount on the north-western edge of Jerusalem. It derives from a fortification what existed on top of it, probably built by a Canaan tribe called the Jebusites. Its Hebrew origin is tzion or siyyon, meaning “castle,” echoed in the Arabic word sana, meaning “citadel.” King David took hold of that fortification in consolidating his power after the death of King Saul—and declared it as the City of David. And since then the Zion has been used to refer to Israel as a people as well as to Jerusalem as a city.

Zionism is a certifiably modern formation dating to about 1896 and to a newspaper called Selbstemazipation (Self-Empancipation) the editor of which, the coiner of the word, in German first, as Zionismus, was one Nathan Birnbaum (1864-1937) then writing as Matthias Acher. Birnbaum was an Austrian. In that same year one Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian, wrote Der Judenstaat (State of the Jews — state here meaning sovereign administration), another major influence on the Zionist movement.

I’ve consulted Google’s ngram (which tracks word usage over time in hundreds of publications). The ngram shows Zion suddenly shooting up and peaking in 1902, dropping again thereafter. Zionism begins to climb—although never as high as Zion—beginning just before 1900.

Zion is ancient, Zionism is today. Both are rooted in conquest—more or less by force.

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An earlier post centered on the modern process was “That Peculiar Relationship” (link).

In History a Last Resort

The images history brings us resemble the colored glass shards in kaleidoscopes. The same pieces are always present, although in ever-changing relationships. The difference is that the number of such pieces in history’s kaleidoscope are extraordinarily many. For this reason history has its share of cases where women have engaged in combat—albeit almost always as a last resort. This also holds, by and large, for women who lead wars as queens or generals. They did so by filling a vacuum produced by their husbands’ deaths. There is always an exception that proves the rule. In our case, in Christendom, it was the visionary Maid of Orléans, Joan of Arc.

At the level of leadership, command, and rule, females have distinguished themselves throughout history. But there is a difference between the grubby craft of war, where bodily differences matter, and the art of rule, where the heart and mind are to the fore. At that level, the more women the better.

If, in history, female combat appears sporadically as a last resort—when those prepared by chemical civilization to do the dirty work have failed—times of decadence have also uniformly produced, at the margins, a blurring of the male and female roles. Therefore we know that female gladiatrices were a feature in the Roman games—and know this because decrees survive attempting to ban such “occupations,” and Juvenal, the poet, in the first century, or thereabouts, refers to upper-class women training for the games.

The turn of the kaleidoscope in our times introduces a novel image—if with the same shards of glass. The horrors of war have now become a human right—and, should the draft be introduced again (which some think impossible but is, like all things that go around, probable—if not today), the horrors of war will also become a duty for young females. The New York Times’ headline this morning shows the confusion: “Pentagon to Open Combat to Women.” The phrasing suggests something desirable. Hearings in Congress castigating the Air Force for its sex scandals (training instructors sexually abusing the females they were training) competed with the good news about the “opening of combat” to the fairer sex.

What science has not as yet achieved—and our brave leaders therefore cannot as yet “open” for males—is something only women can do now. One headline is still in the future: “Health and Human Services to Open Childbirth to Males.” The agonies of childbirth seem to me the “war” women routinely engage in—without ever getting medals for it or appearances in the White House. Vive la difference.

Sophistication

If every age has its religion and, above it, its mysticism, then sophistication is the mysticism of the secular era, materialism its religion.

The Birds and the Omen

Today’s event, the Inauguration, nudged me to dig up the meaning behind that word. In the civilization that gave birth to ours, the Graeco-Roman, augurs consulted omens when great events loomed ahead. They did so by observing the flight of birds released on the occasion; they noted the path of the birds’ flight and then gave an interpretation. If the omens were favorable, the installation of a leader then took place.

One suspects that in their case, as in ours, the omens always managed to reflect the actual situation indicated by the balance of power. The bird-flight, in our world, is the popular vote. We are the birds whose flight-paths were consulted last November. And now comes the “installation with favorable omens.”  Vox populi, vox dei. No doubt the actual path taken by the birds sometimes produced an ambiguous result—and therefore controversy swirled around the augurs’ interpretation. We had such a case on the occasion of George W. Bush’s first term as president—when our augurs, the Supreme Court Justices of the United States, interpreted the flight of birds in Florida in GW’s favor.

The North/South Movement of the Jet Streams

A study extending from 1979 to 2001 conducted by Cristina Archer and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Global Ecology, shows that the earth’s jet streams are moving toward the poles and also rising in altitude. This north and southward movement of the streams is proceeding at around 120 miles per decade.

Four jet streams exist, so named because they are wind movements at the level where jets normally fly (between 30,000 and 50,000 feet). Each polar stream is matched by a subtropical jet stream. They run west to east. In the region between the two subtropical jets are the north-easterly and the south-easterly trade winds, and the region where they meet, and often cancel one another out, are the horse latitudes.

I could not find a decent illustration of the other side of the image that I’m showing (from Wikipedia), but a look at the deserts of the world (also from Wikipedia here) suggests that the world’s greatest deserts are located in the regions bounded by the polar and subpolar jet streams.

The authors of the report suggest that the movement of the streams to the north and south will cause the tropical belt to grow and that the paths of storm will shift farther north; that second conclusion because the jet streams inhibit the formation of hurricanes—and, moving father away, will inhibit them less. Another important consequence, for us, is that precipitation will lessen in the South and in the Southwest, thus another Dust Bowl may be in the offing.

Archer and Caldeira are continuing their studies and are unprepared to link the broad trends that they’ve observed to Global Warming—although multiple global warming models have predicted that just this would be happening: the jet streams moving north and south. The jet streams are a relatively new discovery, initially noticed after the 1883 volcanic eruption of Krakatao in Indonesia. The streams distributed the ashes of this eruption, and their paths were first noted then and later. For this reason, we do not know how the jet streams moved in the past—and, indeed, whether they moved at all. But it is clear from records in the center of America that dust storms were a standard feature of farm life in the nineteenth century—although the dramatic Dust Bowl events are largely blamed on farmers plowing up the land.

Whatever the causes, something certainly is happening, and measurable. The new pattern of storms and of droughts can be traced to the movement of the streams, but linking those drifts back to human causation is not yet firmly established, only suspected.

Two news accounts that summarize Archer and Caldeira’s findings are here and here. Their own paper, published in Geophysical Reasearch Letters, is only publicly available as an abstract.

The Elephant Eater

A lim’rick I saw on a blog,

No—not about Katie the dog.

  So neat is that verse,

  Although it is terse,

It had me just reading agog!

The fellow who wrote it is neither

A poet, a prosist, nor healer.

  Comic books are his game,

  Striking the series’ name.

It’s called the Elephant Eater.

Herewith a link to the Elephant Eater website. The referenced limerick, however, appeared on Patio Boat as a comment. I can never read a limerick without being tempted to write one. That's why they proliferate.

Notes on the Muslim Reformation

Last October, when troubles in Mali first began to make the news, I suggested that “What is now proceeding in that region is, in fact, a conflict within the Muslim community.” I might also have said, more accurately, “a local conflict within a much wider revolution that is reshaping the greater Muslim community.” In the now very densely populated world, where technological modernity, originating in the West, overwhelmingly dominates everything, strands of influence and motivation are very difficult to isolate. Add to that the self-centered nature of every society, and when I do then it does seem as if phenomena like Al Qaeda and the Taliban are principally aiming aggression at the West. But a very plausible, and perhaps much more fundamental underlying motivation arises from within Islam itself aimed, in the first instance, at Islam, trying to reform it. The hatred of the West is a secondary byproduct of that, motivated in part because the West blocks this “Muslim Reformation,” principally to retain control over oil and mineral resources, and in part because hatred of the West is a handy motivator of the Muslim masses.

If we take the start of Christianity to be 29 AD, the beginning of Christ’s ministry, it took Christianity 1488 years before (in 1517), Luther launched the Reformation. It was, ultimately, a “back to the basics” movement. If we take the start of Islam to be 610 AD, the year Mohammad had his vision, 1402 years have passed since—time enough for Islam to have drifted roughly as far from the True Faith as Christianity had by Martin Luther’s time. In the Muslim world reform takes the form of a “return to Sharia.” It’s aim is to dislodge nominal Muslim but actual secularist authoritarian elites. At the core. Or thus, I suggests, we might view it. Another way to put it: Even if the West were suddenly to vanish from the globe, the Muslim Reformation would go right on.

The rootings of this reformation are traceable to the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by one Hassan al-Banna, its aim the restoration of the Qur’an and Sunnah. That last word means “tradition,” and Sharia its most perfect form. This movement has proliferated since, and Osama bin Laden was the student of one of its later very prominent members, Sayyid Qutb, a secularist turned fundamentalist committed to government under Sharia.

In the West the Reformation has long since faded. In the intermediate period, “On Sunday the Bible [was their] ledger, and on week-days the ledger [was their] Bible” (link), but in these latter days only the ledger remains. We’ve lost even a remote memory of what it is like to live in a religious culture. Hence we imagine that the Muslims only desire democratic and market liberties to become normal citizens of the world. Therefore we face the Muslim Reformation with absolute bafflement and shake our head in incomprehension saying, “Why do they hate us?”

Adjusting Our View

Three pictures of places in the world—but where are they? Take a moment to ponder them before you read on—and clicking on the images will enlarge them and possibly give you a clue. But most likely not.

In order from the left, therefore: Beijing’s Business District, Lhasa in Tibet, the setting for Shangri La, and at the bottom Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia. The populations of these places are 19.6 million, 373,000, and 1.2 million. The images we’re accustomed to seeing are, respectively, the entrance of the Forbidden City (construction there began in 1406) with Mao’s image prominently visible; the Deprung Monastery and once the home of the Dalai Lama some miles from Lhasa; and for Mongolia, simple yurts with snowy mountains in the distance. Well, some Mongolians use elevators to get to bed.

This excursion was motivated by our seeing a Chinese film (too gross in content to record its title here) in which the earliest scenes showed us Beijing. Now these images shouldn’t have, but they did rather startle us, and afterwards, comparing impressions, we had to laugh: we are so influenced by stereotypes. And this came a day or so after a newspaper image from Mongolia had also startled us.

The world is changing. To be sure, there are still areas more or less untouched by modernity. Herewith I show a partial map of a city of 54,000 somewhere, along with an enlargement to prove that it is “modern.” The enlargement shows pictures of cars and trucks. 

This happens to be Timbuktu, in Mali, in Africa. And another image, closer to earth-level, reveals that Timbuktu looks pretty much like it might have looked when the Western world, in the person of France, proceeded to embrace it in 1883:

Faces and Forms

If my only information about humanity came from television programs, and I was then exposed to a sufficiently large number of ordinary people, it would be something of a shock. Television selects its professional presenters for looks and charisma, and the individuals are then further groomed and smoothened out—or it selects political figures who are always properly dressed and, very often, staged. And in the ads? Angels, heroes. Real people—and especially when they believe themselves unobserved—are quite another matter. Yesterday we were at the Secretary of State’s Office. In Michigan that means renewing your license plate registration or driver’s license: a cavernous hall filled with humans. Take a Number. Ours was 32; they were just then calling Number 2. Plenty of time for people-watching. On ceiling-hung flat-screen television panels images kept changing. They brought us wise driving propaganda interspersed with celebrity teases (“Hollywood Swoop”). Down below them the huddled masses displayed an incredibly variable mixture of ages, faces, and forms. Such masses sometimes briefly flash by on television too when they show Iraqis or Pakistanis or Palestinians surrounding some suicide bombing site or taking part in funerals. Not you, not you. You are beautiful and popular, a Business Professional, you’re a Maestro of Market Synthesis, and you rent your car from National.

Deontology

No, no! It’s not another variant of ontology, the last being a discourse or theory about being, in Greek onto. Therefore with ontology we have onto-logia. The word under my microscope today, however, parses apart a different way: deon-logia. Here the Greek word is deon meaning “that which is a binding duty.” Therefore deontology is the science of moral duty.

I came across this word by what may seem a highly indirect route. Michelle is studying therapeutic hypnosis in a course sponsored by the hospital where she is a midwife. And she sent us a paper, in which that word occurs in the abstract†. The sentence:

This common definition of therapeutic hypnosis needs updating in order to enable the therapists who offer it to their  patients to adjust their relational aptitudes to the scientific, deontological, and ethical needs of the contemporary therapeutic relationship.

The word is most closely related to Kantian ethics, characterized as focused on the actions and will of the agent rather that the consequences of an action. Deontology is therefore associated with the rules of absolute morality—on inputs by the agent rather than the outputs of the action (ht to Charles D. Kay). Therefore deontology is contrasted to pragmatism.

Now it amused me that in a recent post, before Michelle’s link arrived, I was committing deontology (in “Virtue and Time” link) without knowing that I was doing it. And it amuses me further than in a highly scientific context, the author would point to fundamental morality by using a very scientific-sounding word. But when it comes to reality—like really healing people—it turns out that morality is indispensable.

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†Eric Bonvin, Therapeutic hypnosis: a relational art using attention with the intention to treat (link).

Up Against The Wall

Reading a truly excellent science popularization, Stephen S. Hall’s Mapping the Next Millennium, made me aware of developments in astronomy of which the first, the discovery of The Great Wall, had first alerted me in the early 1990s that major changes were afoot.

Back in the 1950s, theories about the universe as a whole had a pleasingly simple duality. The universe had but one ultimate fate: it would end in total heat death after continuous expansion until all energy had been exhausted—or the universe would begin contracting at some point, the galaxies converging again, until it all ended in the Big Crunch. In this view what mattered was the velocity of the expansion. If the velocity of the expanding universe was less than “escape velocity”—meaning that gravity would prevail over the outward impulse—expansion would halt and then reverse. Observations then (of the universe’s mass, of the velocity) were not precise enough to determine which was more likely—but the ratios of mass to velocity were close enough so that it could go either way. The out-in, out-in sequence appealed to me then. You know: Vishnu breathing.

Both models, to be sure, crucially depended on observations, credited to Edwin Hubble, that the universe, now, was definitely expanding—and had done so ever since the Bang. Indeed the Big Bang theory was the consequence of Hubble’s observations. If the universe is expanding now, that expansion had to have a start, and reading the observations backward—after all galaxies were moving away from every other galaxy in a uniform pattern—then in the beginning there must have been a great explosion from a mere point.

News of the first problem with that theory were published in 1989 by astronomers Margaret Geller and John Huchra, she a theorist, he an observer. A survey (or map) of the Nordic sky produced the first image of The Great Wall, usually and more humbly called Cf2A. That stands for the (Harvard-Smithsonian) Center for Astrophysics; the 2 stands for “second survey.” The great wall is a very massive, thick clustering of galaxies, thus a great structure. It challenges the theory of a uniform distribution of matter in the universe. The formation of such a wall also takes a huge amount of time—far more time than would seem to have elapsed since the Big Bang, thus approximately 14 billion years ago. Then, in succession others, in essence replicating the work of Geller and Huchra, discovered a number of other walls in turn, the largest of all being the Sloan Great Wall, named after the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Half a dozen such walls have now been mapped.

At around that same time (1986), but based on work conducted in the 1970s, seven astronomers, known as the Seven Samurai†, discovered that the Milky Way itself, along with all 39 galaxies of our Local Cluster (prominent in that list ourselves, Andromeda, and Triangulum), were themselves in uniform motion toward a distant spot. Other surveys later followed showing other galactic clusters also heading towards an enormously dense region (difficult to see because it is shadowed by our own galaxy’s clouds). That region is itself part of one of these walls. It was named The Great Attractor by one of the Samurai, Alan Dressler. After that arose the prediction that if one attractor has been found, others may exist as well. And the work goes on.

What are we to conclude? One conclusion may be that galactic expansion has already stopped—and what we see out there is in a much more distant past. The cosmos may already be in process of gathering its errant sheep—and that that gathering is very, very ancient. Those wall are very old, and yet still in formation. Pondering such discoveries not only enlarges my understanding of the cosmos but also of the nature of science. Young tendrils of it are exposing new knowledge—while the orthodoxy grimly clings to exciting news a hundred years old.

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†David Burstein, Roger Davies, Alan Dressler, Sandra Faber, Donald Lynden-Bell, Roberto J. Terlevich, and Gary Wegner.

The first image, from Wikipedia (link), shows some of the walls, including the largest, the Sloan Great Wall. In astronomical terminology, these are called filaments. And it turns out that the universe is quite thick with them—as shown in the second image (link), taken from a YouTube film produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico.

Staunchly Materialistic?

Once or twice every year (early for the first time this year), one particular aspect of modern culture makes me smile. We are so staunchly materialistic, yet we do not pay a whole lot of attention to the material dimension when our greed for insubstantial money comes in conflict with substantial materiality. The trigger today was an article Brigitte had left me overnight entitled “The Great Oil Swindle: Scaling the Peak of Fossil Fuel Scarcity,” by Nafeez Masaddeq Ahmed (link, it’s slow to load). Much of it concerns shale oil and gas, and, at the end describes looming problems there. That in turn reminded me of a post on LaMarotte where I had looked at the physical problems of shale. After writing that post, which makes one somewhat dubious about the supposed great bonanza of shale, I have been enduring a torrent of hopeful, indeed triumphant articles based on the boom mentality. Forget your troubles, baby, never mind that has-been, Peak Oil. All will be well as, for the next eternity or two, the U.S. of A. becomes the Saudi Arabia of Shale. Every now and then comes a contrarian drop in this downpour, and the article I cite is one such.

Materialistic humanity is always falling for mirages. The tulip mania comes to mind. It peaked in February 1637 in Holland. In that year some single tulip bulbs, Wikipedia informs me, “sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman.” Okay. Let’s translate that. Let’s put the annual income of a skilled craftsman today at $65,000. A tulip bulb for $650,000? Why not? Anything is possible when you are a Shale Sheik.

Feedback and Convergence

E.F. Schumacher, in A Guide for the Perplexed, contrasts two kinds of problems: convergent and divergent. The first category includes those where people find it easy to solve a problem because they are agreed upon the goal. Technological problems are of this nature; it is the better mousetrap problem. There is no disagreement on the values involved: no part of the team working on the project represents mice or holds that a household filled with them is better.

Divergent problems are those where at least two camps are present and the problem concerns values. Divergent problems are ideological in character. To solve them requires not to find a better mechanism, physical or social, but transcending the conflict by appeal to a value higher than each side holds. Finding those transcending values is very difficult. Hence divergent problems are always with us.

One difference between these two is that convergent problems lend themselves more easily to isolation in experimental settings—and to experimentation. Therefore feedback can be rapid and its results can be recursively introduced into a modified draft solution. If the man leaping from the top floor of a 30-story building dies, maybe his arms—or maybe his wings—weren’t strong enough. Back to the drawing board—after the funeral. Experimenting with value systems is much, much more difficult. Entire communities must be isolated, its members cooperating willingly. And how do we know that the experimental community was large enough to be representative? Did it have an urban as well as a rural component? Did it have industry as well as agriculture? And did it have enough of each currently valued ethnicity? And what about the duration of the experiment? And how do we measure its success? By economics? Reproduction? Education? Crime rates? Some want more, some less of any or all of these. And is there a single matrix measuring happiness that could be applied, a matrix each side would accept?

Testing value systems by feedback throws some light on the problem I touched upon in my recent post on “Virtue and Time”—and on my stoic comment about the slow grind of God’s mills. Virtue is an assertion of value by action. But it is a value—finding its expression to a large extent in a society. Its long-term consequences are almost infinitely complex—whereas Boeing 787’s electrical system problems will be nailed quite soon. If virtue or lack of it could be measured rapidly—never mind its legal expressions, which never capture the whole phenomenon—we would rapidly begin to converge on that seemingly unreachable Good Society.