An anonymous death

These events were recounted to me by my wife, a county social worker.  For obvious reasons, I cannot use any real names, either of the persons or the specific institutions involved.  To avoid talking and thinking about a real person as an abstraction – which is precisely the sad circumstance I would like to decry – I will call the subject of this story Charlie.

Charlie was an old man in poor health.  A retired auto worker, he was not a rich man – but he was not a poor man either.  Charlie was, among many other things he may have been in his life, a Medicare recipient.  A little more than a month ago he went to his local hospital with an acute shortness of breath.  The diagnosis was a collapsed lung.

A collapsed lung is a serious condition but, in itself, it is by no means a death sentence.  In Charlie’s case the lung required periodic drainage, among other things, but given attention and reasonable care his prospects for recovery were good.  Charlie was in his seventies and had various other medical problems, but nothing about his state of health was immediately terminal.  He might have been expected to live some number of years with whatever quality of life he could manage for himself – the same sort of expectations you or I might have as living, breathing human beings.

I can only imagine that forty or fifty years ago Charlie could have expected a moderately long hospital stay, during which he would have rested, had his condition attended to at intervals by nurses in small white hats, and by the end of which he would have probably gotten better.  He would not have expected to have been bankrupted in the process – Medicare or no Medicare.  Things have changed.  In the last forty years we have invented new techniques and new diagnostic equipment, but you cannot stay in a hospital for weeks or days anymore unless you happen to be very very rich or very very comatose.  Thus, after a relatively short interlude of adequate care, Charlie was gently booted out the door.

Until very recently, a hospital that could no longer profitably treat a Medicare recipient’s serious but unresolved condition passed him or her on to the second line of defense – a long term care facility, usually a nursing home.  There, Medicare would pay the person’s expenses for the first 30 days.  This was not enough for everyone, but it was something.  It might have gotten Charlie over the hump.  A funny thing has happened lately though – a little bureaucratic fine point with enormous consequences – as the result of the passing of the Affordable Care Act.  Medicare still covers the thirty days of long term care if a person is admitted to a hospital in the normal way.  However, Medicare doesn’t cover this long term care if you are admitted for observation instead of being admitted normally.  Medicare now also pays a hospital more if it admits a patient for observation than would be paid if the patient were admitted normally.  In medical terms, there is no distinction between the two kinds of admission.  Patients get the same care in the hospital regardless of their admission status.  It is purely a bureaucratic distinction, channeling a person in one direction or another.  Hospitals are businesses and their administrators know a deal when they see one.  Charlie was admitted for observation – so no long term care for him.

Charlie was instead ushered gently to the third line of defense – home healthcare.  One cannot send a person home while they are still seriously ill, not without the promise that a home healthcare worker will come around from time to time to try to finish the work that the hospital didn’t do.  Charlie was given a choice of home healthcare providers, and he picked one he had experience with from a prior illness.  Unfortunately, the provider Charlie picked was not the one the Federal authorities preferred.  Again, hospitals get reimbursed for referring patients to a particular provider, and not to others.  A little competition might be nice to keep home healthcare agencies on their toes, but it is bureaucratically easier for both the hospital and the government to only deal with one.  Thus, somewhere in the bowels of the hospitals administrative apparatus Charlie’s unprofitable and inefficient request got shuffled to the bottom of someone’s in-box.  Charlie sat at home – wheezing and waiting.

Finally some concerned bystander to Charlie’s suffering contacted my wife – the last line of defense.  County social workers have rather limited resources to work with.  In general, they investigate – then wheedle, cajole, and bluff more powerful institutions into producing better outcomes.  My wife sorted out what had happened, and extracted a promise from someone at the hospital to complete the unprofitable paperwork to set up services with the provider Charlie wanted.  My wife is not empowered to hold a gun to anybody’s head, nor does she want to be.

In the end, no paperwork was sent – and no one came.  Four days after the hospital promised to resolve the issue, Charlie’s collapsed lung filled to capacity with fluid.  He died of a heart attack, brought on by the accumulated strain, while sitting on his toilet.  A dignified death under the watchful eye of the caring institutions of his society.

We may bicker and haggle about who ought to be doing what – about whether this public policy or that one is the more moral or humane.  Perhaps, as individual human beings, we should spend a little less time trying to be maximally high-minded and a little more time being at least minimally decent.  Everyone involved in this process got a good outcome – except for Charlie.  The people at the hospital didn’t lose any money doing things they couldn’t bill for, and neither did they suffer the embarrassment of having a patient expire on their premises.  The Federal government was a financial winner too, saving money which it will no doubt spend – in its nearly infinite compassion – on someone else the anonymous bureaucrats decide to bestow it on.  The system functioned as designed.  It did everything perfectly – except deliver healthcare.  And let’s not kid ourselves that Charlie’s miserable fate was the product of peculiar circumstances that, you understand, just happen now and then.  Charlie died as the result of policies that people put in place.  Policies that remain in place.  Whether those policies were the result of malice, incompetence, or mere indifference makes very little difference to the outcome.  Any way you look at it – a man is dead.

Further discussion on the state of art

I received some interesting comments on my previous essay from fuffle (a Hubski contributor) that deserve a serious and well-considered response.  A link to my original essay is included below (in case my blog’s scroll bar isn’t working or you got here some other way).  Below that are fuffle’s comment in full (in blue).

http://cadwaladr.blogspot.com/2014/03/art-for-no-ones-sake.html

I loved this, but to be fair to John Cage: some of his work requires, as you say, no inherent chops from the performers. But-

A) alot of his composition and prep-work was very... very impressive. In which case, isn't the work impressive for the underlying code, which illuminates technical complexity on the part of the composer if not the player?

B) 4 33 is just as much incidental music as anything else- wherein environmental response dictates the melody rather than the person on the stage. Schmancy? Yes, but I see very little difference between this and your assertion about perceiving the beauty of the sycamore. When attention is directed at the sounds in between sounds, people might just start to appreciate with more enthusiasm things that they'd otherwise ignore as just everyday drone.

C) Cage may have once been considered weird, but his work has since influenced the output of mad composers, man. Electronic artists, contemporary classical guys, guitar legends, score-writers... His work may not be, uh, listenable, but his WORK has inspired plenty of people you've listened to.

D) He's not that weird. Have you heard Stockhausen's helicopter quartet? There is some gnarly, indigestible shit out there (see note). Cage just has the most brand recognition. And if he has brand recognition, his art can't be that inaccessible, can it?

Ultimately, though, E) It could reasonably be argued that Cage is more performance art than music, and there is a lot more leeway granted in performance art for eccentricity. Does any of this nullify your overall argument? No. But to say that classical music died with the advent of Cage is pretty unfair, especially since there have been perfectly decent classical composers since Cage, and he was certainly not the first experimental composer to sincerely fuck with the rules of the craft. Hildegarde Von Bingen. The Artusis and the Monteverdis. Gesualdo. Obligatory Stravinsky shout-out,

Anyhow, I badged, but then felt a pang of regret about readily accepting the cheap shot about Cage and music. Still a great read.

note: there's this one guy- wish I could remember his name- who put out an "album" that was just him stuffing a contact mic up his buttle and railing his girlfriend. That right thar is the example you should have used.

(fuffle has recanted this note:  "bfv corrected me last week in that the work I referred to (Nymphomatriarch by Venetian Snares and Hecete) isn't really just raw footage of them bumping nasties. They bumped nasties and then sampled those sounds for beats/tones. It's nowhere near as esoteric as believed/led you to believe."
- emc)

Yes, I savaged John Cage mercilessly and for the worst of motives – my own literary amusement.  Admittedly, he did not assassinate classical music single-handedly.  I’ve watched interviews with Cage and found him fascinating.  I even find his Zen perspective personally congenial.  I am acutely aware that there is a similarity between Cage’s perspective and mine – however they are not identical.  Cage considered 4’33” a musical composition; I do not consider my perception of a sycamore against a winter sky itself a work of art.  I assert that our appreciation of art derives from our appreciation of other things in the physical world.  Cage asserted, effectively, that there is no distinction between art and the physical world as perceived.  My assertion defines art within a broader context; Cage’s assertion does the opposite – it renders the word “art” practically meaningless.  By Cage’s definition, dog turds could be art.  You wouldn’t even have to put them under a spotlight at MoMA – you would just have to perceive them.  Perhaps I snarled at Cage unfairly, but Cage attacked my dearest friend – the English language.

I don’t doubt for a minute that John Cage was influential – that is, in fact, the crux of my critique.  Had he been unknown he would have been completely harmless.  Cage is not all that weird by what passes for contemporary standards, but he helped to lay the groundwork those who followed in his wake.  One can argue that many people before Cage were violating the rules of their time, but there is a difference between violating an art form’s traditional norms and violating its fundamental definition.  I may think that Pablo Picasso produced a large number of very bad paintings – but I have to admit that they are paintings.  On the other hand, if I say I-70 is my most recent painting (and I wasn’t the guy who painted the dashes down the middle) I am doing nothing more-or-less than obfuscating the word “painting”.

The history of culture rarely turns on single, pivotal events in the way that military history does.  The Post-Impressionists did not defeat the Impressionists decisively in the battle of Mont Sainte-Victoire.  What one sees instead are trends, influences, styles, and so forth.  Things move gradually.  Cage, if not decisive, was still significantly influential.  If what Cage delivered was not exactly a deathblow, it was, at least, a milestone.  I think what is important about Cage is that once he attacked the very definition of music, mere trifling with odd keys and rhythms seemed rather tame.

Consider the example cited above, of the musician making recordings with the microphone shoved up his rectum.  Things like this are what the avant garde must do when someone who came before has upped the ante.  In the 1930’s you could still be fashionably radical by banging away at a piano like George Anteil – but how is that even interesting after Cage?  But if you can no longer raise eyebrows by being merely discordant, you can at least still raise them by being blatantly disgusting.  Again, this is not a matter of taste or of degree.  It is a watershed distinction – a difference of kind.  I’d be willing to bet that a chimpanzee watching someone shove a microphone up his own ass would be disgusted, but it would be a toss-up whether the same chimpanzee would prefer Richard Wagner to George Anteil.

Here, really, I need to take a step back and talk about what separates the last century and a half or so from the entire previous history of the arts.  I think it is fair to say that the great majority of artists who worked prior to the late 19^th century were trying to achieve some standard of excellence.  From that point forward excellence has gradually waned in favor of the pursuit of originality.

Ancient Egyptian relief carvings, rigidly stylistic as they are, are beautiful.  They are beautiful because the artists who produced them had an idea of excellence.  Egyptian sculpture does not require the context of museum for us to recognize it as art.  One may or may not have a taste for ancient sculpture, but one knows that it is art regardless.  Drop a Roman statue into a landfill, and the garbage man would know that it does not belong there.  Toss half the contents of MoMA into a landfill and the garbage man would never notice.  You’d need an army of academics in rubber hip waders to sort it from the rest of the trash, and even then they’d probably be wrong at least one time in three.  By contrast, if you could have taken an average Vermeer to ancient Egypt I have little doubt that nearly everyone, high and low, would have marveled at it.  They may or may not have tried to copy its style.  They may or may not have found it somehow blasphemous.  They would have known it was art.  I have listened to some cutting-edge contemporary music and, frankly, if I heard it coming through the wall of my apartment I would not assume my neighbor had sophisticated tastes, but rather that he had a serious plumbing problem.  I only know it’s art if it is packaged as art.  And then, if you’ll forgive me, I still have doubts.

I don’t wish to insult anybody’s sensibilities here.  Well… actually I do – but I’m willing to throw myself onto the trash pile along with them.  I did go to art school, after all.  Put me in a museum and I will stare with rapturous solemnity at a nice Mark Rothko color field painting, knowing full well I could achieve a very similar mental state by going outside and staring at a random patch of sky.  I know when I stare at the Rothko that I am engaging in an art act, and that other people passing through the gallery will see me as an aesthete admiring something beyond the comprehension of the common herd.  Academia has created a group of people large enough to support nonsense.  If I stare at a random patch of sky, on the other hand, the same people will only think I’m off my meds.  Do I like the Rothko really?  I don’t know.  How could I know?  It depends on whether one believes my conditioned response to something is definitively me or not.  Did Pavlov’s dogs really like to salivate at the sound of the bell?  So it is with everyone.  We all have our own unique conditioning histories, dependent on where and when we were born, how we were educated, etc.  It is quite hard to overcome the impression that our particular place in the universe is absolutely normal.  It’s only relatively normal – really.

To get back to the distinction I raised earlier though, excellence and originality are very different kinds of goals.  The arts did change under the regime of excellence, but they did so in a gradual, organic way.  You could have swapped the romantic period in classical music for the baroque without the whole world exploding.  When the emphasis began to tip in favor of originality, however, art acquired a definite and self-destructive direction.  In the pursuit of excellence, one tries to express one’s concept of art to the of best one’s ability.  In pursuit of originality, one tries to destroy whatever concept of art happens to prevail.  The Impressionists made blurry paintings and that was fine – enough to irk the traditionalists of their day.  And then we got Matisse, who annihilated the third dimension and all the lovely refinements the Renaissance had achieved.  After that, Mondrian, et al, gave up on paint things altogether.  De Kooning and Pollock extirpated any meaningful requirement for skill.  Et cetera.  The worst thing you could say to an artist when I was in school was not that his or her work was crude, but that it was derivative.

Sooner or later, the quest for originality makes someone shoving a microphone up his ass inevitable.  People simply run out of other things to do.  Technology may delay the act for awhile by opening up other avenues of exploration, but sooner or later the microphone will find its way into the hands of some ass that has tried everything else.  It has been more than four decades since Chris Burden took a potshot at an airliner with a pistol.  He later had a friend shoot him in the arm.  Both incidents were widely accepted as art by the academics and critics who get the final say.  One wonders how the arts community would have reacted if Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had eschewed any religious or political motives for the Boston Marathon Bombing, and declared instead that his motives were entirely artistic.  Wouldn’t the curators at MoMA have had to take him at his word, and sought out photos and artifacts of the event to fill a gallery?  How could they do otherwise?  By what standard would they deem such a bold piece of self expression not art?

Personally, I dislike being called an artist.  I do not dislike art – that is, I do not dislike what I define as art in the inner recesses of my brain.  What I do dislike is being called something that, in current usage, has no coherent meaning.  Throwing me into a category that contains both Rembrant van Rijn and Chris Burden is little more meaningful than calling me non-broccoli.  You might as well just bark.  An artist is a person whose name is on the little plaque beside the random object under the spotlight at MoMA.

All of this matters because, as a society, what we call art is some indicator of what we value.  If what we value above all else is novelty, it is hard to see how we can have a culture at all.  A tradition of upheaval isn’t merely tiresome – it’s an oxymoron.

Art for no one’s sake

I used to be a sculptor. This is to say, I used produce in art in some recognizable, formal, and even credentialed sense. A spectacularly rude physicist once pointed out to me – quite correctly I might add – that having a degree in fine art is almost meaningless. It means that you paid your tuition, showed up, and were bright enough to get through your general education classes. I’m not sure why I did it or why anybody does. You cannot be arrested for producing art without credentials – not yet at any rate.

Art school wasn’t always undemanding. I remember reading that Adolf Hitler was refused admission into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Perhaps the rest of the art schools in the world took note after the war, and concluded that keeping nascent megalomaniacs occupied by waiving the requirement for talent was a low price to pay for the sake of world peace. It would be nice if the general slackening of standards had been the product of sound reasoning – or of any reasoning for that matter.

I have no idea what the weirdly self-regarding class of people who constitute the art world are doing now, nor do I really care to know. It doesn’t seem worth the negligible effort of a Google search. I am deliberately and obstinately disinterested. Long ago, I found myself in the Museum of Modern Art looking at a formless tangle of bailing wire in the middle of a gallery. There was a spotlight on it. It was painted green – not by the artist, but by the wire manufacturer. It occurred to me that my fine arts education had left me fully equipped to talk about the bailing wire in a sophisticated way – discussing the importance of line, the complexity of the negative space, and perhaps even to venture a few words about the cultural symbolism of a chaotic pseudo-random object juxtaposed against the ordered and traditional backdrop of the museum’s hardwood floor.1 It was not a moment of epiphany exactly. It was more one of those moments in which the weight of accumulated evidence catches up with you, and for awhile you stand teetering under its ridiculous weight – a clown balancing an elephant on a unicycle. Such realizations always pass. You go on to the next minute, and the next. You forget that you have spent four years acquiring skills that in any other context would amount to a psychosis. If “artist” isn’t in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, perhaps it ought to be…

297.1 Delusional Disorder - presence of one or more fixed delusions, but otherwise functioning usually is not noticeably impaired.

     Specify whether:
     Erotomanic type
     Grandiose type
     Jealous type
     Persecutory type
     Somatic type
     Mixed type
     Unspecified type
     Artist

Of course, a rigorous application of criteria like that would swallow up just about everyone. Delusions are what human beings do best. But really – is bailing wire art? A sane answer, I concluded, is that if an object needs the context of MOMA to make it recognizable as art, even to people who have undergone the cultural absurdity of being specially trained to recognize art, it isn’t art. If the definition of art includes “anything left under a spotlight at MOMA” we are done. I want some standards, however vague, even at the risk of hurting some potential megalomaniac’s self esteem and precipitating another world war. Art, whatever it is, might just be worth the risk.

The irony of my realization is that one of my art history teachers actually warned me in advance. She made me read Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word, in which he made the case that art objects themselves had become inconsequential – and that what really mattered now (the “now” that he was writing about being 1975) was what the art intelligentsia said about them.2 The art itself could be not merely poorly executed and meaningless, but even wholly imaginary. It was just a prop – an incidental starting point for clever criticism. Everybody in my art history class nodded and accepted Wolfe’s assertion. They took the exam and passed. The art students in the class went on to whatever peculiar fates art students encounter when they meet the unavoidable parts of reality. The bored rich housewives in the class went on to add Tom Wolfe to the discourse they attempted to impress their friends with. A thoughtful person would have hanged himself with bailing wire on the spot.

This erosion, this bleeding of the life out of art, has not been confined to the visual arts. The culture of relativism has claimed many other victims. Classical music was alive and well deep into the 20th century, but died a horrible death at the hands of intellectuals – and was still dead as of my last inquiries. One can give the approximate time of death as 1952, the year in which John Cage composed 4′33″ (Four minutes, thirty-three seconds). This “composition” consists of any number of musicians holding any combination of instruments while sitting (or standing, or lying down) in complete silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. It may be an exercise in Zen, as Cage himself seems to have intended it, but to call it music annihilates the very concept of music. It is the ultimate exercise in relativism.3 A performance by the world’s most gifted pianist would be no better than that of a complete novice – or, for that matter, than that of a corpse. With the death of the last of the traditional classical composers, the genre then drifted into the mathematical, mechanistic subgenre of minimalism. While sound did return after Cage’s fatal silence, the life and humanity of classical music did not. When I listen to Aaron Copland’s Quiet City, composed in 1941 – before the fall, I am moved almost to tears. It is sublime. Something important about Copland the man lives on in my experience. It is timeless, beyond the need of any explanation. Through the music I know something more about what it is to be a human and alive. Listening to any of the works of Philip Glass, on the other hand, only give me a sense of what it is to be a washing machine. There is no scope for interpretation or virtuosity in Glass. There is only mechanical repetition and a steady sense of strain.4 Most of us who live in advanced societies live lives similar enough to those of washing machines already. We do not need to have our helpless sense of regimentation reinforced by art. I’ve occasionally seen Philip Glass albums in peoples’ record or CD collections. I have never met a person who had two such albums. One is enough to show people how refined you are.

It is mainly the formally educated who are susceptible to this particular kind of cultural disease. The average man or woman might have very narrow or unimaginative tastes, but they know a naked emperor when they see one. You can seduce them with the most vulgar sort of dreck, but you won’t see them displaying bits of bailing wire on their sofa end tables or watching with false interest as Yo-Yo Ma does nothing for four and a half minutes behind his cello. Religion is the opiate of the masses – the elites require newer forms of nonsense to underpin what passes for high culture.

Is anything art really? Yes. There are basically two senses in which something can be art. The first is the sort of thing I’ve been criticizing above – art as an emblem of one’s personal or cultural identity. If you say that bailing wire is art you’re not saying anything about it – you are only saying something about yourself. You are identifying yourself as an aesthete. Of course, one need not be a snob to experience art in this sense. I have a hard time imagining that the average head banger loves heavy metal music as a sensual experience. You could get more-or-less the same effect by standing close to any dangerously loud machine. I think head bangers like being identified as head bangers, just as aesthetes like being identified as aesthetes. The other way of experiencing art is simply to let it effect you without you affecting it. If we could use an MRI to see into the brain of a person looking at a painting full of interesting shapes and beautiful colors, we would see the brain making interesting shapes and beautiful colors too. Responses to different stimuli do vary from person to person (no doubt Philip Glass and five other people on the planet really do like Philip Glass music) but when it happens it is about nothing but itself. Identity art is about – identity. The other sort of art just is.

The material world, whether natural or man-made, abounds in things that move us – presuming we have not become too numbed by other concerns. Art is just the duplication and refinement by human beings of those stimuli we find elsewhere. If there is an evolutionary reason that we have an aesthetic sense in the first place, it eludes me. On the other hand, the beauty I perceive in a sycamore tree against a winter sky is not diminished by a lack of justification. The thing in itself suffices.

The trick of making art in this direct sense is to dissolve oneself in the process of creation without holding some fragment of one’s consciousness back to admire what one is doing. It is to be the process – to cease to be a bundle of concepts, identity, and noise. It is very simple, but it is not a capacity that life usually encourages.

_________________________________

1 I think it was hardwood. It might have been otherwise.

2 This is really just a corollary of the postmodernist definition of truth: Truth is just what an authority says it is.

3 This oxymoron was deliberate.

4 To be fair to Philips glass, his music does at least leave you feeling something. It does at least attempt to be listenable. The compositions of the rest of the minimalists are even more extreme, leaving one with no more than a sense of what it must be like to be a clock.

The Parable of the Magic Vending Machine (or where I disagree with Julian Simon)

Rather than attempt to summarize the late economist Julian Simon’s controversial ideas for the uninitiated I will refer those readers to the “Theory” section of the Wikipedia article below. An advocate of Simon assures me the article is a fair summary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon

The clearest way to illustrate my fundamental disagreement with Simon is with an analogy. Of course, no analogy is perfect, and this one does not map perfectly to the way any particular resource behaves – but I think it underscores the disparity in our views quite well.

--------

Imagine an apartment building in the middle of a boundless desert. It is occupied by Julian Simon, myself, and eight other demographically representative people. There are five males, five females, three children, and a couple of seniors. None of us know how we got there. We do know, somehow, that the desert cannot be crossed. For all intents and purposes, the apartment building and its immediate environs constitute our universe.

The apartment building has a common basement area. The basement contains not only the usual washer, dryer and miscellaneous flotsam from previous tenants, but an enormous steel box in the form of a cube, two meters on each side. The box is freestanding on short metal legs so that is possible to see the empty space beneath it. The only thing that goes into the box, as far as anyone can tell, is electricity from an electric power cord which is plugged into the wall. Other than that, the box appears wholly self-contained. On the front of the box there are three large bar-shaped levers and a closed sliding door a half meter square. If the apartment building is a rather Spartan universe, it is at least a universe that B.F. Skinner could love.

As it turns out, there are working water taps in the apartment building but nothing at all to eat. Having nothing better to do, one of the more enterprising tenants (we will arbitrarily call her “Kay”) presses the leftmost bar forlornly and on the thousandth press the door slides open to reveal a few plain baked potatoes. Everyone eats. When we all get hungry again, we bar-press expectantly. Again, a few potatoes appear after a thousand presses. We become curious about opening up the giant box to save the trouble and indignity of bar-pressing like laboratory rats. It turns out that the box is impenetrable, at least by any of the simple tools at our disposal. Hammering reveals it to be as strong as a bank safe.

After a few days, the box ceases to deliver up potatoes. Julian tries alternating the pressing of two of the bars, and after only 900 total presses the box serves up some carrots and a large roast. We all eat our slightly better meal with gusto. Again, this pattern continues for several days before box stops responding to our inputs.

Julian and Kay take over the businesses of trying and recording new combinations of bar-presses. Over time, some general trends emerge. First, the patterns required to make the box deliver food become more and more complex, but require fewer total bar presses. Julian and Kay develop a kind of index of commands that will summon up specific foods. Over time, the food gets tastier, more varied, and more nutritionally complete. The box continues to stop producing specific items occasionally, but since there is now an index of items available we all worry less when this occurs. By common consent, the rest of the tenants take over whatever minor domestic duties Julian and Kay might have, freeing them to concentrate on the critical task of staying ahead of our food requirements.

Two years pass without much to mark their passage. An old woman dies. Two children are born. A third is on the way. Always the pessimist, I have grown more and more uneasy about our food supply. I express this concern to Julian. This is what he says:

“I’ve tracked the output of the box since the day two years ago when it produced its first potatoes. Over that time, month by month, it has produced more and better food with less and less actual physical effort. It has sometimes failed to produce something we wanted, but our imagination has never failed to coax from it something new to our liking. As items have dropped from our diet, Kay and I have always been motivated to find new items to maintain our status as food-providers, as well as to feed ourselves and the other tenants. Why should you think there is cause for concern?”

“It requires,” I say “about half a liter of food per day to sustain each of us at a meager level. At our original number of ten, we required about five liters of food per day as a group. The total volume of the box is about 8000 liters. Assuming its internal machinery is negligible in volume and that it began completely packed with food, it should have had a capacity to feed us for 1600 days. We have now consumed the contents of the box for 730 days. There are now eleven of us, and most of us are feasting on well more than half a liter of food per day precisely because you have been so successful in providing it.”

“You cannot accurately predict the day on which we might run out of food,” Julian objects. “You do not really know how many people the box can sustain. You do not know how densely its contents are packed, nor do you know anything about its internal workings. What you do know is that our ingenuity has coaxed from the box a better and better quality of life, and you have only theory to persuade me that the continued improvement of our situation is in jeopardy.”

“I know almost nothing about the internal conditions of the box,” I admit. “However, I know enough about the physics of the rest of our world to reasonably assume that its internal volume isn’t greater than its external volume. If food is packed more densely inside the box than I’ve imagined, it is nevertheless still finite if it obeys the ordinary laws of physics. To escape the scenario in which the box must run out of food in something less than a decade you have to believe that, somehow, your ingenuity not only extracts the food but somehow brings it into being. You have to believe, in essence, that the laws of nature are arranged for our success and that our record of success up to this point proves that conclusively. While I cannot prove you are wrong, it appears at least as likely that we have just been draining the box of contents it began with. Our facility in doing so has indeed improved our quality of life, but that is no guarantee whatsoever that the party will not end abruptly in a year, a month, or even tomorrow.”

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To justify my analogy, let me explain why I believe the material resources available to us are functionally finite. (Energy is a somewhat different matter, which I will deal with afterward.)

I have heard advocates of unlimited growth point out that the Earth is nearly 8000 miles across and that the untold mineral wealth of its deep interior remains untouched. This is true. The deepest hole we’ve ever drilled in the Earth is a little less than eight miles deep – about 1/500 of the distance to Earth’s center. However, it should be recognized that the deeper we drill, the greater the investment we must make in both money and energy. Beyond a certain depth, the value of anything we might extract must be less than the investment needed to extract it. While technology might continue to push that frontier deeper for a time, and perhaps find much of value, it is hard to imagine anything in the semi-molten material of Earth’s mantle will ever justify the cost of such a deep well.

We do little better reaching out into space. The cost of getting people and machines out of earth’s gravity well is enormous in both money and energy. We may eventually send human beings to Mars – but we will unlikely do so at a material profit. It is just possible we might one day profitably mine uranium or some other extremely high value material on the moon for export back to Earth, but it is hard to imagine how we could profitably mine iron, copper, or aluminum there. As with exploitation of the deep Earth, it is reasonable to assume that it will always be more efficient to extract our primary physical resources from materials on or near the Earth’s surface, even if the quality of those sources steeply declines from current conditions. To hope that our ingenuity expands these horizons is fine, but to just assume that it will do so is no better than writing a million-dollar check on Wednesday in the hope that you will be able to cover it with lottery winnings by the end of the week.

With the exception of the odd meteorite and occasional new lava flow, all of the matter at our disposal is contained in the top few miles of Earth’s crust, Earth’s oceans, and Earth’s atmosphere. It’s a big box of resources, to be sure, but it is still functionally a finite one.

The energy economy of Earth is rather different. Like the box in my parable, the Earth is not entirely a closed system. The box used external electric current from a power cord, and the Earth takes in a steady flow of electro-magnetic radiation from the sun. Life did all sorts of impressive things with solar energy before we evolved into the curious, inventive, and amusing animals that we are. One of the things life did was store a huge amount of energy in what we call, collectively, fossil fuels. Using that storehouse of energy, we have spent the last two hundred years reorganizing much of the rest of the matter at our disposal to our liking. This, in itself, is neither a good nor a bad thing. It is simply what humanity has done. While the human ingenuity that Simon extols so enthusiastically should not be dismissed, it should not be overstated either. We could not have created the global society we have, with all of its abundance, technology, and incredible physical mobility, without a potent source of energy to exploit. The Romans and ancient Chinese were ingenious people too – but there is only so much one can do with wind and water power.

A new energy economy based chiefly on Earth’s continuous allotment of sunlight isn’t going to be sufficient to maintain the rate of energy consumption fossil fuels have allowed. Many have pointed this out, and I believe their reasoning is sound. Advocates of solar and wind talk about covering huge tracts of Earth’s surface with solar plants or windmills, but such schemes themselves expose the degree to which we take cheap energy (and cheap building materials produced with cheap energy) for granted.1 Windmills do not grow from seeds. They are manufactured at an enormous cost in energy, especially when you take the extraction, refining, and transportation of the materials they are made from into account. Globe-altering engineering projects requiring forests of such machines are problematic undertakings for nations teetering under the economic burden of chronically high fuel costs. I don’t believe, like some alarmists, that we are headed for extinction – but I am entirely confident that the rest of nature isn’t organized to maintain a particular energy intensive way of life that we happen to be fond of.

It is at least imaginable that enough additional fossil fuels will be found to prolong current (or increased) levels of energy consumption for the foreseeable future. There are problems with this expectation however. The first is that the different forms of fossil fuels are not particularly fungible. Gasoline can be made from coal, but it’s a dirty inefficient process that produces rather low quality fuel. Likewise, you are unlikely to find a $50 kit at Walmart that will adapt your car to run on natural gas. Transition from one fossil fuel to another is not pain free. The second problem with new fossil fuel discoveries involves the EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested) concept. We have been scouring the globe for fossil fuels (particularly oil) for more than a century. There may be some deposits we haven’t discovered, but we aren’t likely to find another Texas or another Saudi Arabia, with a huge reserve of high quality oil cheaply accessible near the surface. The current oil booms in places like North Dakota are not the result of new discoveries at all, but simply the result of reliably high prices justifying expensive extraction techniques. Score one, I freely admit, for Simon’s market forces. Still, there are limits to squeezing out these dregs. Extracting oil from the Canadian tar sands consumes the equivalent of one barrel of oil to steam three to five others out of the muck. This is not an attractive proposition compared to Texas gushers that once shot oil out of the ground under its own pressure for an energy return of something like 100-to-1. Once an EROEI drops to 1-to-1 (and biodiesel is already close to that rate) the process isn’t worth doing. Energy sources that take as much energy to extract as they themselves produce are functionally not energy sources at all.

It needs to be understood, too, that energy is a special kind of resource. With a few miniscule, irrelevant caveats, our global box of resources contains just as much iron, copper, gold, and other metals as it ever did. Some of the iron is now on the bottom of the sea in the form of rusting shipwrecks, but if we had a large enough supply of cheap enough energy it might eventually be profitable to salvage all the world’s shipwrecks for their iron. Energy is the resource that lets us extract, refine, manipulate, and transport every other resource. With enough energy, one can ultimately recycle practically everything else. Without enough cheap energy, on the other hand, one begins to encounter limits. The “ore” we now extract copper from is mined in such deep pit mines and is of such poor quality that it wouldn’t be worth extracting or refining without cheap energy. Here, really, is my core disagreement with Simon. Commodities have gotten cheaper in the last two hundred years because we have had an abundance of cheap energy available to extract, refine, manipulate, and transport those commodities with. It is true that clever human beings have made the machines that utilize this abundant energy ever more capable and efficient – but energy sources have been steadily consumed during the process. Machinery runs on energy – not imagination.

Having bludgeoned Simon to the best of my ability, I will now lift him up, dust him off, and shower him with the measure of praise I think he’s due.

Few ideas, whether economic, scientific, sociological, or otherwise, come to us without an associated ethos of values and beliefs. No one is exempt from the assumptions of his or her own culture. I think it is fair to say that Simon was a happy member of that culture that believes in free markets and the power of human beings to accomplish great things under their own direction and using their own initiative. You cannot listen to an interview of Simon without getting a strong sense of the admiration he had for a general human capacity to solve problems. Many of Simon’s detractors (though not all – and not I) are creatures of a different worldview altogether. To them, human beings left to their own devices are corrupt, mean, and wantonly destructive – and the only hope for humanity is to put it under the gentle yoke of a group of right-minded planners who will shepherd us along until the sun gives out. I think Simon’s worldview was naïve – but the worldview of many of his detractors is loathsome. People vary greatly in ability, but most of them are born with great potential and are capable of much. To be shielded from life’s struggle is a tragedy. I believe that it is better to fail, even catastrophically, than to live out a long but empty existence under the eternal parental oversight of others.

In my parable, you will note, I did not offer up any solutions to the predicament I prophesied. The first solution of the person who believes in central planning would have been to strip the rest of the tenants of any say about how to proceed. If the planner thinks the box might run out, he takes it upon himself to ration the output down to some minimal level in the name of social good. Eventually, planners might even start deciding who does or does not eat at all. The planning committee, history shows us over and over again, always eats first. This state of affairs, in my opinion, is far more objectionable from a moral perspective than simply letting the box run out. If I had carried my parable further, I would have informed my fellow tenants of my views, suggested a search for alternative methods of food production, and left them to reach their own consensus and solutions – or to fail nobly while trying. Better to die a sovereign human being than to live as anything less. Julian Simon, I think, would have agreed.
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1 It is amusing, too, that the same people who believe a few additional ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere might tip the balance toward runaway global warming are unconcerned about the environmental consequences of covering some substantial fraction of Earth’s surface with energy collectors of various kinds. Maybe they too believe that good intentions exempt some human projects from the laws of physics.

Decline II

Recently, I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant waiting for a carryout order. Since I was waiting near the counter, I passed the time idly watching the other customers come and go. In the middle of a family-like group of three adults and four children, I witnessed a noteworthy exchange. An average looking kid about twenty or so said something to an average looking boy of about twelve. What he said was:

“I could slice your face off if I wanted to.”

Such a charming claim couldn’t fail to pique my interest. The kid proceeded to show the child a knife blade that he had sewn into his coat, the point protruding slightly at the elbow. The kid then made a kind of gesture with his arm, showing how he might perform his clever face-slicing on an unsuspecting victim. The child reached up and felt the hard edge of the blade underneath the dirty fabric. The child seemed unimpressed and unafraid. The two women in the group, one of whom appeared to be the mother of the children and the girlfriend of the would-be American ninja, took no notice. The mother looked about forty. Her expectations of her slightly acne-speckled boyfriend apparently did not include adult behavior in anything but the most animal sense of the term. Disgusted as I might have been, I admit I saw no actual harm done. No doubt I am out of step for being so judgmental.

In the end, the alternative to being judgmental is simply not to have standards. I remember the late George Carlin saying that the world is a freak show and if you are born in America you have a front row seat. George made a career of being angry about what he saw happening around him. Rebel though he was, he was raised with standards. What he may not have fully realized is that you can only recognize a freak show if you’ve grown up in something other than a freak show. I don’t think the kid with the knife stitched into his coat saw himself as an antisocial deviant. His girlfriend’s child wasn’t scared of him. Likewise, for the girlfriend’s child, the fact that his mother was sleeping with someone who was only a few years older than himself and scarcely any more emotionally mature was probably as normal as the sun coming up in the morning. How could it have been otherwise? Thank God (if you will forgive a quaintly obsolescent phrase) that we have cast off the stultifying moral rigidity of our grandparents and emerged into such an open, free, and non-judgemental new world. Breathe deep. The freedom is so thick that you can almost cut it with a knife.

The popular media reeks with the consequences of several decades of moral nihilism. In the space of a few days Justin Bieber was in trouble twice – first for taking drugs and then for punching a lowly driver in the back of the head. How can this surprise anyone? Could we really expect anything better? What more could we hope for from a creature whose every waking minute has been directed toward the production of whining, vapid songs and to staring at cameras with a certain pouty, helplessly defiant expression – an expression guaranteed to melt the hearts of thirteen-year-old girls and forty-eight-year-old pedophiles everywhere? People who watch meat being shoved into a sausage grinder shouldn’t be surprised when sausages come out. Publicists, agents and media executives are not good molders of the human soul. They just make sausages – at both ends of the machinery. And therein lies the magic. The worthless, valueless, antisocial deviant in front of the television can watch the worthless, valueless, antisocial deviant on the television and see both a reflection and a guide. If you live in a freak show, your role models will probably be freaks.

American teenagers of my day wanted to be rock stars or teachers. Now, as likely as not, they want to be werewolves. Even the werewolves of today have that pouty, helplessly defiant expression though – at least while they are not in wolf form. Peter Pan is now a pitiable victim, even if he has grown an impressive set of teeth. The kid who murdered twelve people and shot up seventy others at the Century movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, wanted to be “The Joker” from Batman. Life, you know, imitates art. I suppose George Carlin never said the front row seat we get by default would be either comfortable or bullet proof.

The young have always, and will always, look to their culture for answers about how to be and how to live. It isn’t good to tear those answers up in front of them, park them in front of a movie, and imagine that by ignoring them you are doing them a favor. The kid I saw with the knife sewn into his coat sleeve clearly wanted to be somebody. The problem was that he just couldn’t find any heroes among real human beings.

(see: Decline )

Evolution in reverse

There is nothing encouraging or uplifting in the case I am about to make. I think it reflects reality, but I take no pleasure in it.

Throughout most of human history the great majority of people lived and died pretty much as any other animals lived and died. Prior to the industrial age civilization produced only the thinnest surplus of food and goods, and the population ebbed and swelled as that surplus (primarily the food surplus) ebbed and swelled. While humans lived a bit more comfortably than most other animals, the factors that determined both the survival and reproductive success of other animals were nearly as decisive for human beings. We died of the combined effects of hunger and disease. We were prolific in proportion to our health and our capacity to provide sustenance for our offspring. The merciless engine of natural selection culled the weakest and least adaptable members from the human population, just as it might thin a herd of African wildebeests in a bad year. This, to the best of my ability to determine such things, is a plain, historical fact.

The state of medical care in pre-industrial times was a primitive one. To have access to a doctor of some sort improved one’s odds of surviving a serious disease only modestly. Many ancient treatments were as dangerous as the diseases they purported to cure. Thus, as in the case of hunger, people survived or succumbed to disease largely in proportion to the combination of their own genetic robustness and their particular nutritional circumstances. The blind hand of evolution acted on human beings more-or-less as it acted on all the other species in the animal economy. Perhaps we were special to one another, but we were not then – and are not now – given any special dispensation by the processes of nature.

In this broad biological context at least, Nietzsche was quite right – that which does not kill us makes us strong. Left in conditions of relative scarcity, natural selection breeds true the healthiest and most adaptable individuals in any population.

In pre-industrial times, some of the least fit human beings (those least exposed to normal evolutionary processes) were the people at the pinnacle of society – the royalty, and, to a lesser extent, the nobility. While I’m not aware of any systematic study of the health of royal families relative to the rest of the populations of their respective countries, there are plenty of examples of European rulers from the Roman era through the early 20th century who were subject to all sorts of genetic liabilities. The spastic emperor Claudius, a host of frail or feebleminded kings and emperors, Kaiser Wilhelm with his withered arm, and the hemophiliac heir to the Russian throne are but a few examples. Inbreeding can account for some of these problems, but it cannot be ignored that these were all people who were well fed on the best available food, lived in the most comfortable accommodations, and were the least prone to suffer lethal consequences from their infirmities. The idiotic, half-blind son of a peasant might be deprived of adequate sustenance during a particularly desperate year, but the son of a King was a royal heir no matter how miserable and unfit he happened to be. His highest risk of death was probably from court intrigue of one kind or another – but that could as easily strike down the fittest as the least fit. Royalty were bred to fill political niches, and were protected, as much as was humanly possible, from the ordinary evolutionary pressures to which their subjects were exposed.

In industrial times, and especially in the 20th century, the eternal rules of the game have been gradually overturned. Consider the common problem of poor vision. Wearing eyeglasses isn’t even something we consider an infirmity now – yet in the middle ages being unable to see without an artificial aid would have been a major handicap. It probably wouldn’t have been fatal – typically, society would have found some work for the myopic – but, unless they were of royal blood, poor vision would have greatly reduced their marriage prospects. In traditional societies, the right to legitimately produce children was closely tied to the ability to take care of them. An infirmity like poor vision would have made a person a marginal worker, and therefore unattractive as a marriage partner. To the extent to which poor vision is a heritable condition, a kind of sexual selection would have repressed it. Families with myopic genes would have tended to produce fewer offspring. The cheap availability of eyeglasses from the 19th century on has, in practice, made poor vision common by making it not an immediate problem.

Readers with a knowledge of modern history will see where I am going here. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the eugenics movement made precisely the sort of argument that I have made above. The human impulse to be as charitable as possible toward individuals that a heartless natural world would weed out produces, after some number of generations, a real and predictable physical weakening of the species. As awful as this assertion sounds, I don’t see any way for an intellectually honest person with a general understanding of evolution by natural selection to refute it. One would need to have a magical belief, religious or otherwise, that the rules that govern the characteristics of all other species somehow don’t apply to us. To be clear, I am not advocating a renaissance of the old eugenics movement, with all of its biases and its appalling devolution into noxious race theories. I am asserting, rather, that the core thesis of the eugenics movement – that the weakening of evolutionary pressures weakens the human species in the same way that it would weaken any other species – is not only still valid but practically irrefutable.

Imagine a farmer who managed the care and breeding of his pigs in a way analogous to the way most industrialized societies prioritize the care and breeding of people. The farmer would adopt a sort of no-piglet-left-behind mentality with regard to veterinary healthcare. Piglets born with serious health problems would be given a maximum of care, and put into the reproductive pool to pass on their defective genes. Generation by generation, veterinary costs would increase as more and more unhealthy pigs were born and more and more interventions became necessary. Eventually, almost all the pigs in the herd would be dependent on artificial medical support to live at least tolerable piggy lives.

Thumbing one’s nose at evolution has consequences – as is amply shown by real examples of selective breeding. Animals bred for show – with exaggerated characteristics the breeders find appealing – are notoriously prone to health problems. Mutts are usually healthy dogs; Shar Pei require surgery even to open their eyes.1

I can think of no good way to get out of this dilemma – this conflict between compassion and the processes of nature. Negative eugenics, as practiced in the United States, Great Britain, and parts of Europe in the early 20th century is not a very endearing public policy. Under such a scheme, people’s genetic merits were assessed by order of the state, and those human specimens found most lacking were summarily sterilized. While I personally don’t get dewy-eyed about every low-functioning person’s right to make equally low-functioning copies of himself or herself, I do get quite nervous about the state impinging that deeply on anybody’s freedom. People who claim the right to decide whose genes are worthy and whose are not are prone to all sorts of abuses. The eugenics movement itself went rapidly from the goal of weeding out the worst physical specimens to the goal breeding ideal ones. Human beings are neither wise enough nor impartial enough to conduct such an enterprise benignly. If a society is willing to sterilize a person involuntarily it is hard to imagine any other individual rights such a society would long feel bound to respect. The Nazis, of course, engaged in the ironically named positive eugenics of killing first the mentally and physically handicapped and ultimately the deviant, the politically undesirable, the Gypsies, and the Jews. The counterforce of human compassion produced the inevitable backlash. After the horrors of the holocaust, the world, for the most part, turned uncomfortably away from eugenics for moral and emotional reasons. The broad argument of the eugenics movement has never been refuted scientifically – it has simply been made undiscussable by the specter of the gas chamber and the crematorium.

Recently, methods of correcting genetic problems at a cellular level have begun to become feasible. Currently, this would not correct a genetic defect in the individual who already has it, but would modify a gamete cell to prevent the disorder from occurring in an offspring. Perhaps this will solve the problem of genetic decline brought on by a more forgiving life, but there are reasons to be skeptical. First, practically all reproductive interventions are expensive. While such genetic manipulations would probably be cost effective in the long run, complex and expensive procedures would have to be paid for now by a healthcare system that is already overwhelmed with basic care. Such treatments, in the foreseeable future, will probably be restricted to those that can afford them. Were they made cheap, widely available, or even mandatory, there is always the concern that manipulations would not stop at eliminating disease per se. Were it possible, isn’t it likely some well-meaning planner would eventually ask the obvious – “Why not splice in the genes for certain desirable physical or mental traits as well? Or suppress certain undesirable ones?” What eugenicists of all stripes could only imagine accomplishing in many generations might soon be accomplished in only a few. A brave new world of perfectly engineered, monotonously similar semi-persons. Nazism – without the death camps. It is a near enough possibility to merit our concern.

In uncovering the facts of nature science is a powerful and useful tool. We shouldn’t delude ourselves, though, that it illuminates nothing but the sunny path to a better and better world. As often as not, the practical application of our knowledge alleviates one form of suffering only to produce another.


1 An argument, incidentally, against misguided notions of racial purity.

Oops

I just accidentally deleted a very civil comment I had overlooked. Damned touch screen device...