In this lighthearted mood I made my way yesterday to the Zócalo, the main city square. The surrounding streets were packed with parked Army and National Guard vehicles, and the Zócalo itself was closed off to visitors. It was full of soldiers in parade order, listening to speeches. There was a row of howitzers and an enormous Mexican flag.

I learned that, on February 9, Mexican armed forces celebrate the March of Loyalty. On February 9, 1913, a group of cadets from a Mexican military academy escorted President Francisco I. Madero from his home, the presidential palace, to the seat of the federal executive, which is on the Zócalo. In American terms, this would be like West Point army cadets escorting the US President from Residence in the middle part of the White House to the West Wing.

At the time, Mexico was in the middle of a military coup, and Madero’s enemies had recently captured and then left the Zócalo. Madero made the march to rally other parts of the armed forces, keeping them loyal to his government.

The coup was part of the larger Mexican Revolution, one of many tumultuous periods in Mexico’s history, not to be confused with the War of Independence against Spain, begun by Miguel Hidalgo in 1810, nor the Second Franco-Mexican War, best remembered in the US for the Mexican victory in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, that is, Cinco de Mayo.1 The Mexican Revolution was a revolution against Porfirio Díaz. Originally a freedom fighter in the Second Franco-Mexican War, Díaz ruled the country from 1876 to 1911, eventually as a de facto dictator, winning rigged election after rigged election. Madero had organized the resistance against Díaz, deposed him, set up democratic elections, and won in a landslide.

Madero had difficulty uniting the country. He was liberal enough to get support from left-wing revolutionaries but moderate enough to alienate many of them once elected. The conservative elements who were in power under Díaz, including many businesses, parts of the armed forces, and the Church were always opposed to Madero’s leadership.

Enter Henry Lane Wilson, appointed by US President Taft as ambassador to Mexico. Son of the US ambassador2 to Venezuela, Wilson worked in business until he lost everything in the 1893 economic crash, at which point he took up his father’s mantle and became US ambassador to Chile, then to Belgium, and finally to Mexico.

Wilson personally never liked Madero, and he concluded that US interests, especially the interests of US businesses that had profited from amenable arrangements during the Díaz regime, would be better served if Madero were removed from power.

Wilson organized and amplified resistance to Madero, maintaining plausible deniability for every particular action but clearly a key force behind Madero’s eventual ouster. Wilson failed to broker a peace between the anti-Madero generals, but he did succeed in ensuring that Madero was killed, rather than allowed to live in exile as Díaz had.

In the meantime, back in the US, President Taft, who had appointed Ambassador Wilson, was succeeded by President Woodrow Wilson (of no relation). President Wilson was horrified by the actions of Ambassador Wilson and recalled him.

But the damage was done. Madero was succeeded by a general who lost the support of the US, leading to another round of revolution and counter-revolution. It’s not clear exactly when the Mexican Revolution ended: you could say as early as 1917, when the current Mexican constitution was established, or as late as 2000, when the party of the military quasi-dictators first lost the majority in the lower legislative house.

On February 9, Mexico celebrates respect for institutions, especially respect from the military for constitutional law. This makes me wish we in the US had a holiday to celebrate George Washington’s resignation as commander-in-chief.

Cannae was part of the second of three wars fought between Rome and the north African city-state of Carthage. Around 50 years before Cannae, the Roman and Carthaginian spheres of influence had collided in Sicily. Rome had done relatively well in the first war but was now faring very, very badly:

[...] the eyes of all were now turned to the Carthaginians, who had great hopes of even taking Rome itself at the first assault. The Romans on their part owing to this defeat at once abandoned all hope of retaining their supremacy in Italy, and were in the greatest fear about their own safety and that of Rome, expecting Hannibal every moment to appear. It seemed indeed as if Fortune were taking part against them in their struggle with adversity and meant to fill the cup to overflowing [...]

(All quotes are from Polybius’s Histories, via Bill Thayer’s LacusCurtius. This was Chapter 3, section 118.)

Hannibal never actually besieged Rome, but he actually didn’t need to, to achieve his overall strategy. Carthage wasn’t out to kill all Romans. They “just” wanted economic and military hegemony over the Mediterranean, specifically in north Africa, Spain, and Sicily. One way they could do that would be to convince cities in the Italian peninsula to ally themselves with Carthage, changing Rome from a leading superpower to one squabbling city-state amongst many.

It can be tempting to project our understanding of politics and war backward in time, thinking about Hannibal’s war as something like World War II, or maybe the American Civil War, or even the Napoleonic Wars, where nation-states conscripted their citizens and aimed to destroy the enemy’s war-enabling economic engine.

In fact, Rome and Carthage were not nation-states but city-states. At this point in history, the only Roman citizens were the people who lived in Rome.4 Other people in Rome’s sphere of influence were citizens of their individual cities, which were in turn allied with Rome. Allied cities maintained their own militaries that would, ideally, resist the Carthaginians.

Rome’s alliances were strong but not unbreakable.5 Hannibal didn’t need to burn the city of Rome to the ground. He just needed enough of Rome’s allies to desert so that Rome could no longer project power outside Italy.

In other words, Hannibal was out to win hearts and minds. His treatment of Romans and Roman allies after one battle exemplifies this:

Hannibal [...] kept the Roman prisoners he had taken in the battle in custody, giving them just sufficient to eat, but to the prisoners from the allies he continued to show the greatest kindness, and afterwards called a meeting of them and addressed them, saying that he had not come to make war on them, but on the Romans for their sakes and therefore if they were wise they should embrace his friendship, for he had come first of all to re-establish the liberty of the peoples of Italy and also to help them to recover the cities and territories of which the Romans had deprived them. Having spoken so, he dismissed them all to their homes without ransom, his aim in doing so being both to gain over the inhabitants of Italy to his own cause and to alienate their affections from Rome, provoking at the same time to revolt those who thought their cities or harbours had suffered damage by Roman rule. (3.77)

Hannibal wanted to fight Romans in battle and defeat them, not so much that the Romans themselves would give up, but so that the Roman allies would notice their weakness and change sides.

Hannibal [...] made a bold dash at Falernum in the plain of Capua, counting with certainty on one of two alternatives: either he would compel the enemy to fight or make it plain to everybody that he was winning and that the Romans were abandoning the country to him. Upon this happening he hoped that the towns would be much impressed and hasten to throw off their allegiance to Rome. For up to now, although the Romans had been beaten in two battles, not a single Italian city had revolted to the Carthaginians, but all remained loyal, although some suffered much. From which one may estimate the awe and respect that the allies felt for the Roman state. (3.90)

Unfortunately for Hannibal, the Romans kept their heads after Cannae, and their leaders doubled down on the war, and the allies held the line with them, with a few exceptions. Hannibal lost the initiative and ended up spending 16 years in Italy, always hoping but never quite able to drive a wedge between Rome and the allies.

Hannibal’s Italian campaign was only possible because of Carthage’s prior conquest of Spain, which provided the money and manpower Hannibal used. As the years wore on, Carthage started to take Spain for granted, and the Romans realized their own opportunity to drive a wedge between a superpower and its allies:

[...] two of the greatest princes in Spain […] were supposed to be the most trusty adherents of Carthage, but they had long been disaffected and were watching for an opportunity of revolt, ever since [Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian general governing Spain] had demanded from them the payment of a large sum of money and the surrender of their wives and daughters as hostages. Thinking that the present time was favourable, they left the Carthaginian camp with all their forces by night and withdrew to a strong position where they would be in safety. Upon this most of the other Iberians also deserted Hasdrubal. They had long been offended by the arrogance of the Carthaginians, but this was the first opportunity they had of manifesting their inclinations.

The same thing has happened before to many people. For, as I have often said, while success in policy and victory in the field are great things, it requires much more skill and caution to make a good use of such success. So that you will find that those who have won victories are far more numerous than those who have used them to advantage. This is exactly what happened to the Carthaginians at this period. For after having defeated the Roman forces [in Spain...], they regarded their position in Spain as undisputed and treated the natives in an overbearing manner. In consequence their subjects, instead of being their allies and friends, were their enemies. And quite naturally; for they fancied that there is one method by which power should be acquired and another by which it should be maintained; they had not learnt that those who preserve their supremacy best are those who adhere to the same principles by which they originally established it, and this although it is evident and has been observed by many that it is by kind treatment of their neighbours and by holding out the prospect of further benefits that men acquire power, but when having attained their wish they treat their subjects ill and rule over them tyrannically it is only natural that with the change of character in the rulers the disposition of their subjects should change likewise, as actually happened now to the Carthaginians. (10.36)

Rome sent its best general, Scipio Africanus, to Spain. He trounced the Carthaginians and “liberated” the locals. Scipio then went on to North Africa, where Rome had managed to get the Numidians, nomadic horsemen who lived in present-day Algeria, to defect from the Carthaginians. Carthage recalled Hannibal from Italy, but Scipio had sufficient military genius to defeat even Hannibal and his die-hard veteran soldiers.

In other words, the battles in this war were the leverage, not the force. Hannibal gambled that winning key battles would drive the allies away from Rome. This is perhaps the inverse of a proxy war: in a proxy war, the great powers fight each other via some lesser powers, like how the US and Soviet Union supported opposing sides in Afghanistan and Vietnam, or how the French supported American colonists in the American Revolution. But in this Rome-Carthage war, the great powers fought each other directly, in the hopes that they would convince a landslide of smaller powers to stick with them.

The inverse proxy war might seem irrelevant today, when great powers like the United States can project force over vast distances. The US can blow up a jeep, or apprehend a head of state, almost anywhere in the world.

But to actually occupy a place is really hard. That’s not about winning a limited number of battles but about maintaining a supply of fighters, weapons, and strength of will:

For [Hannibal’s] forces had been trained in actual warfare constantly from their earliest youth, they had a general who had been brought up together with them and was accustomed from childhood to operations in the field, they had won many battles in Spain and had twice in succession beaten the Romans and their allies, and what was most important, they had cast to the winds everything else, and their only hope of safety lay in victory. The circumstances of the Roman army were the exact opposite [...] These advantages of the Romans lay in inexhaustible supplies of provisions and men. (3.89)

Victory isn’t about killing all of the enemy; it’s about creating the environment you want to live in. Rome wanted an allied Italy; Hannibal wanted a fractured Italy. The result wasn’t decidedly on a battlefield like at Cannae, but in the hearts and minds of Rome’s allies.

How many times have you had to navigate the labyrinth of Interactive Voice Response systems? “Press 1 for something, 2 for something else, and go take a hike if you have an issue that doesn’t fit neatly into those categories. Want to talk to a human? Good luck figuring out what series of buttons to push!” Wouldn’t it be nice if an AI agent could do that hard work for you?

Enter goons.ai, my newest business venture, where our motto is, “My AI is bigger than your AI.”

Why “goons?” (Yes, I have heard it also means something else. Our marketing team thinks any publicity is good publicity.) The anthropologist David Graeber made a taxonomy of bullshit jobs that don’t help society. One of these is the goon, a person who harms or deceives on behalf of their employer, and who often only has a job because their employer’s enemy also has goons. “Goon” originally referred to thugs and mafioso types, but clearly many lawyers and customer service reps fall in this category too.

I’m honestly surprised no one has already done this. It’s no secret that companies algorithmically screen resumes. So how is there not a market for companies that help people make resumes that will pass those screens? It’s also no secret that customer service sludge is real. Why navigate it without our help? No one else will.

But customer service goonery is only the beginning. The whole internet is turning into AI slop. How will you know what to believe? The Luddites will tell you to develop personal networks of trusted experts. They’ll probably also tell you to learn how to farm wheat. Here at goons.ai, we think the solution to AI slop is yet more AI. If you think that sounds stupid, then I refer you to the award-winning science fiction novel Anathem, in which a parallel Earth’s internet fills with slop, and then the information technology caste uses AI to clean it up.

Of course, the existence of goons.ai will initiate an arms race. For now, the demagogues and clickbaiters don’t need to try that hard to trick you. But soon, with free-tier goons.ai, you’ll be able to identify this low-grade slop. So then they’ll upgrade to create more sophisticated and convincing slop. At which point you’ll likely want to upgrade to a paid subscription with us.

We at goons.ai have no impression that we’re making the whole world a better place. We just think that you shouldn’t have to stand by while other people’s goons impede you, provided of course that you can give us more money than them.

And by “you” we also mean the American people. Eventually we will be doing cyberwarfare, and we’ll have gotten so good at fighting enemies domestic, that we’ll easily crush enemies foreign. Would you rather count on some government-employed hackers or a robust, capitalistic market force? (goons.ai of course will be unable to create a healthy peacetime domestic market for artillery shells, so we can’t guarantee we will win a kinetic war.)

I wish I were kidding.

I find this particularity absurd, in the existential sense. Of all the possible worlds we could live in, I live in one where the song I hear most often this year was one by Mariah Carey about hearts. I live in one where there is a thing called a church that has pictures of humanoids with wings and, for only one month per year, also has trees in it. I live in one where I was born into a religion whose sacred liquids are water, oil, and wine. What will we do when we go to planets that don’t have any of these things?

At Christmas I have a hard time doing what I call “delighting in the world that is.” My literary touchstone for this sensation are Tolkien’s elves:

The doom [i.e., fate, which in Tolkien’s archaic usage isn’t necessary bad] of the Elves is to be immortal, to love the beauty of the world, to bring it to full flower with their gifts of delicacy and perfection, to last while it lasts, never leaving it even when “slain,” but returning – and yet, when the Followers [i.e., humans] come, to teach them, and make way for them, to “fade” as the Followers grow and absorb the life from which both proceed. The Doom (or the Gift) of Men is mortality, freedom from the circles of the world.

The elves are part of the world. Even when they “die,” they go to another part of it: “dying they are gathered to the halls of Mandos in Valinor, whence they may in time return.” The souls of humans, by contrast, leave the boundaries of creation. (It is a mystery, even to all the gods except the creator, where humans “go” and what will become of the elves when the world ends.)

Sometimes I can live in this kind of embedded wonder. Back when I had a backyard, my partner jestingly accused me of “plantgazing.” I would do some kind of yardwork but then just silently look at the plants, and marvel, and be still. This is the same sensation I have any time I pet my cat. Even after picking him up for the thousandth time, I delight in his catliness.

I contrast this delight-in-the-world with the transcendental sensation that comes when viewing a particularly arresting sunset, or fragment of nature, or work of human art. Transcending is about leaving the boundaries of creation; delight-in-the-world is decidedly bounded up in it.

A surefire method for not delighting-in-the-world is to look at one’s phone. But that doesn’t mean looking up is always helpful. Unlike the elves, we rarely build our roads, homes, and cities with delight-in-the-world. They usually seem to be made with the opposite. Nothing is worse to me than a patch of hard-packed dirt, wedged between broken concrete slabs, speckled with some small pieces of trash, like one-time-use flossers.

Delighting in the world must also entail humanism. One cannot delight in the world except via the body, and that body must be loved for what it is. I’m one of those cerebral people who by habit thinks of themselves as a sort of brain in a vat with a bipedal motor system attached to it. It takes work to overcome that Cartesian dualism.

I expect it also takes work for cerebral people —who by habit think of human existence as a series of interactions in spheres, like economic spheres, and family spheres, and so forth— to value humans in and of themselves. Last Christmas, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople had this to say in his Christmas encyclical:

Today there is much talk about “the metahuman” and praise of artificial intelligence. [...] The concept of “the metahuman” is based on technological progress and his equipment with means previously unimaginable to human experience and history, through which humankind will be able to transcend currently valid human measures. The Church is not technophobic. It approaches scientific knowledge as “a divinely granted gift to human beings,” without however overlooking or suppressing the dangers of scientism. The Encyclical of the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church [...] also emphasizes the contribution of Christianity “to the healthy development of secular civilization,” since God “established human beings as stewards of sacred creation and His coworkers in the world.” [...]

The answer to the crucial question—namely, how can we preserve the “culture of personhood,” the respect for its sacredness and emphasis on its beauty, until the final “eighth day” in the face of the titanism1 and prometheanism2 of the technological culture, its evolution and transmutation, in the midst of anthropotheistic changes and exaggerations of humankind—has been given once for all in the mystery of Divine Humanity. God the Word became flesh [...]

Unsurprisingly, the head of a church says that the way out of the pickle of titanism and prometheanism is religion, specifically, by remembering that god became human.

The rest of us must find some other way. The closest I’ve come is via John Ruskin, foremost art and social critic of Victorian England. Here is part of his address for the opening of the Cambridge School of Art (now Anglia Ruskin University), which emphasized drawing:

[W]e shall obtain no satisfactory result, unless we [...] set ourselves to teaching the operative, however employed–be he farmer’s labourer, or manufacturer’s; be he mechanic, artificer, shopman, sailor, or ploughman–teaching, I say, as far as we can, one and the same thing to all; namely, Sight.

Not a slight thing to teach, this: perhaps on the whole, the most important thing to be taught in the whole range of teaching. To be taught to read—what is the use of this, if you know now whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak—but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think—nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.

Didius Julianus came from a good family and had climbed the political ladder, distinguishing himself as a general and administrator. His ascent was stymied by the previous emperor Commodus who, in the end, was drowned in the bath by a professional wrestler. (Commodus’s mistress had discovered that Commodus had planned to have her executed, and she hired the wrestler-assassin for a pre-emptive strike.)

Into the resulting power vacuum stepped the Praetorian Guard, an elite military group based inside the city of Rome:

[The Praetorians] made proclamation that the empire was for sale, promising to hand it over to the man who offered the highest price, and promising to conduct the purchaser safely to the imperial palace under the protection of their arms.

When they made this proclamation, the more august and respected senators, those who were nobly born and still wealthy, the scattered survivors of Commodus’ tyranny, did not go to [the Praetorians’ camp]; they had no desire to use their wealth basely and shamefully to buy the empire.

But the praetorians’ proposition was reported to a man named Julianus while he was giving a dinner in the late afternoon amid much drinking and carousing. This Julianus had already served a term as consul and was thought to be a very wealthy man; he was one of the Romans censured for an intemperate way of life.

Then his wife and daughter and a mob of parasites persuaded him to leave his dining couch and hurry to the wall of the [Praetorians’] camp to find out what was going on. All the way to the camp they urged him to seize the prostrate empire; he had plenty of money and could outbid anyone who opposed him.

And so, when they came to the wall, Julianus shouted up a promise to give the praetorians everything they wanted, assuring them that he had plenty of money, that his strongboxes were crammed with gold and silver. [...]

Lowering a ladder, they brought Julianus up to the top of the wall, for they were unwilling to open the gates until they knew how much he would pay for the empire.

When he came up, Julianus promised [...] to give each soldier more gold than he asked for or expected to receive.

Convinced by his promises and delighted with their expectations, the guard proclaimed Julianus emperor [...] Then, raising their standards, to which pictures of Julianus had been attached, they prepared to escort the emperor to the imperial palace.1

How did it come to this? Less than a hundred years before, Rome was in the middle of its golden age, and now the throne was being sold off.

Naturally the answer is “it’s complicated,” but I want to focus on just one element: the Praetorian Guard.

The word “praetorian” comes from praetorium, the word for the tent of a Roman general on campaign. Although there was an official system for soldiers in the legion to post guards at the praetorium, the general might have his own personally procured bodyguard, a “praetorian guard” in the literal sense.

In 40 BC, Octavian, the man who would later go on to become the first emperor Augustus, was co-ruling Rome with his two frenemies. In part to protect himself against his colleagues, he posted his praetorian guard inside the city of Rome.

This was an enormous breach of precedent. In Rome’s early history, legions were mustered for one summer of warfare against close neighbors and then disbanded. Later, Rome’s military became a professional, standing army, but soldiers were fighting wars throughout the empire and rarely came to the city of Rome itself.

Over Octavian-become-Augustus’s reign, his praetorian guard evolved into the Praetorian Guard, progressing from a bodyguard into a kind of military police and counterespionage unit. By the time the second emperor Tiberius quasi-retired from public life, the Praetorians had accreted so much power that the head of the Praetorians, Sejanus, was essentially in charge of the empire:

[Tiberius] warned the public by an edict not to disturb his retirement and posted soldiers here and there to keep off the throngs of townsfolk. But he so loathed the towns and colonies and, in short, every place on the mainland, that he buried himself in the island of Capreae which is separated by three miles of strait from the [mainland]. The solitude of the place was, I believe, its chief attraction [...] It commanded too a prospect of the most lovely bay, till Vesuvius, bursting into flames, changed the face of the country. [...] Tiberius had by this time filled the island with twelve country houses [...] Intent as he had once been on the cares of state, he was now for thoroughly unbending himself in secret profligacy and a leisure of malignant schemes.2

In 31 AD, Sejanus attempted a coup, which Tiberius defeated, in part by giving the Praetorians a “donative.” This word is an English translation of the Latin donativum, which literally means “gift” but which has come to refer specifically to the money given to the Praetorian Guard to buy their loyalty.

Starting with Tiberius’s donative, it became standard for new emperors to give the Guard a donative to ensure their loyalty. The one-time donative upon accession morphed into more regular “gifts.” From there it’s not too hard to see how we end up, 150 years later, with the auction won by Didius Julianus.

In summary, there are many potential problems with posting military units in the capital.3

I never got an answer I could really make sense of. So I went to the library, and I made a new friend: Joseph de la Vega. He wrote the first book about a stock exchange, the aptly named Confusion of Confusions.

De la Vega was a Spanish-speaking Portuguese Jew who lived in Amsterdam in the 1680s. He saw the hustle and bustle around the Amsterdam Exchange, where shares in the Dutch East India Company, or VOC,1 were traded. The VOC was the first publicly-traded company in the sense we understand it now.

In one sense, the Exchange in the book was much simpler than the stock exchanges we have now, since basically only a single stock was traded: shares in the VOC.2

And those shares were also relatively straightforward, at least in the early days of the Company: you put your money into a pool, the Company used that money to outfit a trading expedition to Southeast Asia, and then they paid out the profits of that expedition to shareholders as dividends.

So clearly the stock’s price was rooted in the profitability of the Company. More profits means more dividends means more expensive shares:

In order that you should not come to the conclusion that the movements of the stock exchange are inexplicable and that nothing is firm, take note and realize that there are three causes of a rise in the prices on the exchange and three of a fall: the conditions in India, European politics, and opinion on the stock exchange itself.

But dividends don’t explain that much of the variability in the VOC stock price, in part because of the high price of individual shares. Unlike today, where a typical price for a share in a typical company is about $100, the individual East Indian Company shares were very expensive: equivalent to about hundreds of pounds of pure silver.3

This high share price means that only very few people, who de la Vega calls “princes” and “financial lords,” can actually afford to own shares and live off the dividends. These people didn’t drive stock prices because they usually had no interest in selling off one of the most successful forms of passive income that had ever existed.

Instead, many people were “gamblers and speculators” who made bets on the changes in the price of shares. In a word, these people made futures contracts (as well as other derivatives like options).4

If you don’t know how futures contracts work, here’s an example: I’m a speculator who thinks the price of the stock will go up from its current value of 500 pounds,5 but I don’t have 500 pounds to buy a share. So I find a merchant, who has a share and wants money, and make this deal: on the first day of next month, I’ll give the merchant 500 ducats, and he’ll give me the share.

Luckily, as time goes on, the stock price goes up, so I find another merchant, who has money but no shares. With the second merchant, I make this deal: on the first day of next month, I’ll give you one share, and you’ll give me 510 pounds.

Then, on the first of the month, I pass the share from the first merchant to the second, and I pass 500 pounds from the second to the first, and I put the remaining 10 pounds in my pocket.6

Of course, if I had made the wrong bet, I might need to take 10 pounds out of my own pocket to make the deals work out. And this is where things get interesting, since the financial success of the speculators depends on what other people think the stock will be.

Maybe because there was only one stock to trade, traders and brokers aligned themselves into two camps: the bulls, who always wanted the price to go up, and the bears, who always wanted it to go down.

These groups appear to be fairly organized and very devious. There were very few restrictions, legal or otherwise, on trading, so bulls and bears would create fake news, corner the market, exhaust the money supply, or do anything to get their way. De la Vega lists at least 12 bear strategies. For example:

[T]he syndicate [of bears] borrows all the money available at the Exchange and makes it apparent that it wishes to buy shares with this money. Afterwards, however, large sales are executed. Thus two birds are killed with one stone. First, the Exchange is supposed to believe that the original plan is altered because of important news [i.e., suggesting that external events will soon cause prices to rationally fall]; secondly, bulls are prevented from finding money for hypothecating [mortgaging] their shares. They are, therefore, compelled to sell, since they do not have the money to take up the stock [and prevent the appearance that no one wants to buy, which would further drive down prices …]

My personal favorite tactic is from the bulls:

Our speculators frequent certain places which are called [...] coffee-houses because a certain beverage is served there called coffy by the Dutch [...] The well-heated rooms offer in winter a comfortable place to stay, and there is no lack of manifold entertainment. You will find books and board games, and you will meet there with visitors with whom you can discuss affairs. One person takes chocolate, the others coffee, milk, and tea; and nearly everyone smokes while conversing. [...] while one learns the news, he negotiates and closes transactions.

When a bull enters such a coffee-house during the Exchange hours, he is asked the price of the shared by the people present. He adds one or two per cent to the price of the day and he produces a notebook in which he pretends to put down orders. The desire to buy shares increases; and this enhances also the apprehension that there may be a further rise [...] Therefore, purchase orders are given to the cunning broker. But, in order slyly to reach his own objectives, he replies that he has so many other orders that he cannot be at anyone else’s disposal. The naive questioner believes in the sincerity of the statement; his desire to buy becomes even more ardent [i.e., driving up prices...]”

But it doesn’t even take trickery per se for prices to swing. De la Vega notes that every piece of good news, such as information about a successful expedition, causes its own small bubble in the price:

The expectation of an event creates a much deeper impression upon the exchange than the event itself. When large dividends or rich imports are expected, shares will rise in price; but if the expectation becomes a reality, the shares often fall; for the joy over the favorable development and the jubilation over a lucky chance have abated in the meantime. [...] But as soon as the ships arrive or the dividends are declared, the sellers [i.e., the bears] take new courage. They calculate that for some months the purchasers —the bulls— will not be able to expect very propitious events. So the leaves tremble in the softest breeze, and the smallest shadow causes fear — and therefore no wonder that the shares fall, because they are abandoned by the one side and are attacked by the other.”

These stories gave me a lot of comfort. Clearly, somewhere, deep down, stock prices have some rational basis in the world. If a company is profitable, and they pay dividends, or I get a controlling share, then I can put some of those profits in my pocket. But for the most part, the value of a single share is whatever someone is willing to pay for it, even though they might also not be in a position to skim profits.

If 300 years ago, a stock market with a single stock could cause Confusion of Confusions, I shouldn’t be surprised that someone on the Internet can make GameStop’s stock price shoot up or down, nor that the global economic slowdown caused by the pandemic wouldn’t depress stock prices.

Instead, I should take de la Vega’s personal advice. First, don’t give advice about trading. Second, be happy with the gains you have rather than be sad about the gains you missed. Third, remember:

Profits on the exchange are the treasures of goblins. At one time they may be [gems], then coals, then diamonds, then flint-stones, then morning dew, then tears.

Before the penny, only one coin had been eliminated for its low value: the half cent. At that time, also 1873, the value of a dollar (and therefore also a cent) was 10 to 25 times higher than it is today. In other words, the last time we eliminated a coin for its low value, it was worth something in the range of a nickel or a dime. (And yes, I do think this means we should also be eliminating the nickel and the dime and rounding to the nearest quarter of a dollar.)

Aside from the ridiculously low value of the penny, it was also costing the American people money. It took about 3 cents to mint a penny, and we were minting about 5 billion per year, leading to a loss of about $100 million per year.1

All the proposed reasons for keeping the penny were either blatant special interest or painful ignorance. The blatant special interest came from the one company that manufactured the zinc blanks used to make pennies. The painful ignorance came from people not understanding how rounding would work if we eliminated the penny, or from convoluted arguments that it would hurt the poor.2

As an aside, I’ll also note that people —in the world generally, if not Americans— are grownups and can deal with change to their money. All the Euro countries converted to the Euro. In 1971, the UK converted from its delightfully insane pounds-shilling-pence system —where 1 pound had 12 shillings, and each shilling had 20 pence, so that 1 pound was 240 pence— to a decimal system where 1 pound is made up of 100 “new” pence. In 1998, the Russians simplified the ruble by cutting off three zeros: 1,000 “old” rubles equaled 1 “new” ruble.

So why hadn’t we already eliminated the penny? The US Mint’s FAQ answers with a simple “Until now, no Secretary of the Treasury had determined that the production of one-cent coins was no longer necessary to meet the needs of the United States.” Clearly, this doesn’t really answer the question.

To me, the penny was an example of what kind of inefficiency we are willing to tolerate in our political system. To a layperson, $100 million per year sounds like an enormous quantity of money. In the world of the federal budget, this is an amount barely worth talking about. Said another way, the opportunity cost for Congress members is to eliminate the penny was too high. It was not worth their time to develop a coalition to incrementally reduce the federal budget by opposing the pernicious special interest of a single company. They have other, better things to do.

I certainly celebrate the death of the penny. (Again, I would lobby to get rid of the nickel and the dime.) But if we were going to do it, I would want it to have come via Congress, because penny elimination had become so ridiculously necessary that it cut through Congress’s opportunity cost.

In other words, I would rather pay the cost of small inefficiencies like the penny to ensure a representative government. Democracies tend to outperform autocracies economically (and have many other, arguably more important benefits). I hypothesize that incremental accumulation of power in the American executive will set inefficient and otherwise unfortunate precedents, even if there are small wins like penny elimination or even more substantial, near-term gains.3 In this sense, the elimination of the penny may not actually be a win for efficiency.

And so I began some very idle speculation into a concept I call the capital correlation coefficient (CCC). As a tourist, the CCC would tell you how much of the “stuff” in the country you can experience if you visit only one city. As a citizen, there’s a potentially interesting network effect: if there’s really only one “good” city in your country, that’s where all the coolest and most interesting things and people will be, where “interesting” means arts, business, whatever.

A quick clarification: by “capital” I mean the leading city, which is not necessarily the legal capital. For example, the US’s “capital” in this sense is New York City, not Washington, DC. Other examples are Canada (Toronto not Ottawa), Australia (Sydney not Canberra), Brazil (Sao Paulo not Brasilia), and Turkey (Istanbul not Ankara).

As a first pass, I’ll use number of people as a proxy for amount of “interesting stuff,” and look at what percent of each country’s urban population lives in that country’s most populous city.

These data1 already reveal some of the patterns I expected:

United States. Unsurprisingly, the US scores low: a relatively small proportion of Americans live in New York City. The Los Angeles metro is about two-thirds the size of New York City, so even though New York is the largest metro area by a good margin, there is definitely no sense that New York “has all the stuff” or “is the only place” (unless you are a New Yorker).

Germany. Berlin is the largest city proper in Germany, with almost double the population of Hamburg proper. However, the Rhine/Ruhr metro region is about double the size of the Berlin metro region, and the Frankfurt metro has about the same population as the Berlin metro.

France makes an interesting pairing to Germany. The Paris metro is six times more populous than the second most populous metro (Lyon). I expect this is a result of France’s long history of centralization: France has been an integrated country since the medieval period, and Paris has been accumulating power, money, and stuff for about 800 years. Berlin, by contrast, took off only in the past 200 or 300 years: the Prussians made Berlin their capital in the 1700s, then in the 1800s the Prussians unified Germany, such the Industrial Revolution caused Berlin in particular to boom.

Japan. The Tokyo metro has twice the number of people as the next competitor (Osaka). But Tokyo and Kyoto are both the top destinations for tourists, which suggests to me that Kyoto has a disproportionate share of the interesting “stuff.”

In general, total population is anticorrelated with this concentration. China and India clearly stand out on the big end. The United States and Indonesia are the points closest to China and India, with large, unconcentrated populations. Germany and the Netherlands have notably small concentrations, while Egypt is exceptionally concentrated (with Cairo being more than triple the size of Alexandria).2

Population alone surely doesn’t tell the whole story. A lot of Japan’s interesting stuff is in Kyoto; I expect a lot of Russia’s interesting stuff is in St. Petersburg. The UK appears to have a relatively low concentration, but the London metro is five times the size of the Manchester metro, and I’m doubtful that Manchester can compete with London for cultural “stuff.”

Some other proxies might include more economics, like GDP by metro area, and cultural metrics, like education. For example, in the US, zero of our top 10 universities are in our top two metros; you need to go to our third city (Chicago) to get a top 10 university. Compare this against, say, Turkey, where three of the top 10 universities are in Istanbul and four are in Ankara.

I certainly love the idea of living in a highly concentrated country, where there wouldn’t be a trade-off between the most interesting jobs (for me, that’s Washington or Boston) against where the best arts and food are (New York City and Los Angeles). Presumably you could run into both of Iceland’s prime minister and its top pop singer on the streets of Reykjavik.

Why things can get better

I am fundamentally optimistic about the ability of museums to fix this problem, for three reasons. First, museums have the resources. This could be a time of declining resourcing for museums, but the kinds of improvements I’m thinking of only require a modest collection and some well-designed placards. I’ve been to museums that have really cool technological experiences, like the virtual reality experience at the Baths of Caracalla or the interactive language lessons at Planet Word, but these are the exceptions, not the rule. I don’t think people are disappointed that museums are full of things in cases with placards. The analog experience is part of the attraction.

Second, visitor are willing to do the work. I am perpetually astonished that, inside the magic locus that is the museum, people are willing to read difficult texts while standing up. For all our dismal crises about shortening attention spans, museums have some ambiance that makes people willing to put in the work to learn. So don’t blame the people for being too dumb or unwilling to learn.

Third, I believe curators can change. I hypothesize that the fundamental problem with museums is that curators design exhibits for other curators. In his book Bureaucracy, scholar James Q. Wilson (who I reference in a previous post) writes that, when it’s hard to tell if professionals are doing a complex task well, we use the approval of other professionals as a proxy for success. This is explicitly the case in academia, where academics decide which other academics deserve money and promotions. It is implicitly the case in the law, where judges decide what is “good” law based on what they think “better” judges in higher courts would think.

This dynamic, where professionals appraise each other’s work, is generally a good thing in the case of the law, because it keeps the law stable and buffered from the political interests of the day. I hypothesize that curators also form a professional class, talking to one another about how to do museums. And I say that we should take the power back.

Principles for making things better

Answer the f— question, by which I mean the “fundamental” question. Freeman Tilden, who wrote the National Park Service’s first practical and theoretical guide to ranger guiding, said that a tour should start by answering the first questions people will have. If you’re in front of the ruins of a paper mill on the banks of the Shenandoah River in Harpers Ferry, you need to answer questions like “why do you need a mill to make paper?” and “were there paper mills everywhere in America, or just here?” before you can try to tell any story about who owned this paper mill, in what years, etc.

Start high-level and allow people to dig arbitrarily deep. Here’s an idea: on each placard, have one or two sentences in big text that answers the fundamental question and is suitable for children and adults making a speed run; then medium-sized text for people who want to know a little more; then fine print full of jargon and technicality, speaking to professionals and amateur enthusiasts.

Here’s another idea: every single artifact has a QR code linking to the web catalog entry for that artifact. The web entry in turn has links to other relevant artifacts in the museum as well as resources for further learning. All professional museums have this kind of catalog, and they have a way to link pieces to that catalog. Why not have an intern print out these QR codes and put them in place? It would take them like a day and would improve the experience for so many visitors.

De-emphasize audio guides and human-led tours. I estimate that, in most museums, 5% of people use audio guides and 1% are on some kind of guided tour.1 That means 94% of people are relying solely on placards. I’m not saying audio guides are bad, and there are certainly people who will get more out of the museum because of them, but if 94% of people are only using placards, then you better be sure that the placards provide a really good experience. Guided tours are not the meat, nor even the gravy, but more like 15 grams of caviar.2

Learn from museums for kids. Every time I went to the Museum of Science in Boston, I interacted with an exhibit that children were interacting with, and I also learned or reinforced my understanding of a science concept. Consider the possibility that, if children couldn’t get something out of your exhibit, then it is also boring and difficult for adults.

You’re not an art museum; you can tell people what to think. I hypothesize that, because a lot of art eludes a single, neat interpretation, art museums generally avoid explanatory placards. They talk about the facts of an artist’s life but generally shy away from telling you what an art piece means or how to think about it. Forget about that! You’re an educational institution, not an art museum.3 People need basic knowledge about the objects before they can advance to second-order subtleties and controversies. Ending the exhibit with a little room that says “What do you think?” on the wall and letting people write sticky notes is not empowerment but a sham.4

Display less stuff. More stuff isn’t necessarily more interesting. The displayed artifact is usually the culmination of a learning experience, not the start. Sometimes I can look at a piece and go “wow, what’s the deal with this? Better look at the placard!” But normally my experience is more like “OK, that’s yet another Greek vase.” I need some education about schools of painters or how vases were used before I can look at a piece and so “oh cool, this is just like what they were talking about on the placard!”

Have you ever met someone who has a hobby you don’t share and who then launches into inexhaustible and excruciating detail about it? This is how a lot of museums feel to me. A lot of stuff and not a lot of answering the fundamental question about why it’s interesting.

Display the most educational pieces, not the “best” or most beautiful. One of my favorite pieces on my Berlin trip was a broken pottery shard from Hellenistic Egypt with writing on it. This piece is not beautiful or, I imagine, particularly interesting for a professional archaeologist. But to me, it is such a wonderful piece. The writing shows a counting exercise, one number per line, starting with “39 thirty-nine” and ending with “52 fifty-two.” You see the human effort required to learn handwriting, alphabets, and numerals. You see first hand how pottery shards were “scrap paper” at a time when paper (well, papyrus) was rare and broken pottery was ubiquitous. This one unremarkable piece can teach so much about language, the scribal profession, and pottery.

Another example from the Neues Museum: hidden away on the top floor were some pieces of literal garbage, detritus from an Iron Age iron smelting furnace. Again, these are pieces that are decidedly un-beautiful and likely uninteresting to a professional archaeologist. But with good contextualization, it becomes a real gem: this little exhibit was the best explanation of early iron metallurgy I’ve ever seen.

If that sounds boring and useless, let me ask you: have you ever wondered why we humans even bothered with the Bronze Age, when bronze is weaker than iron and the raw ingredients for bronze (copper and tin, mostly) are found in smaller quantities and in fewer places than iron? No? Well, that’s because museums have failed to answer the fundamental question.

If people don’t get the chills, you’re doing it wrong. At Skara Brae, a Stone Age village in very northern Scotland, you go through the museum and through a replica Stone Age house before you go to the actual site. This way, the climax of the experience isn’t just looking at some holes in the ground. Instead, you can actually imagine what it was like to live in one of those buildings, what kinds of relationships you had with the people around you, and what kind of physical objects you used in your daily life. I’m getting the chills just thinking about it.

Here’s a contrasting experience: when I went into the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the thing that made me really awestruck wasn’t all the golden stuff but instead a piece of circular stone in the ground. This was the omphalion, ancient Greek for “navel.” The Byzantines considered this place the navel, or center, of the world. It’s the spot where, for a thousand years, the Eastern Roman Emperors were crowned. Because there was insufficient contextualization, only I knew that. While my travel companions snapped pictures, I was in a reverie, living through resplendent coronations that happened a thousand years ago.

I suspect this experience is fairly common, that it’s hard to get value out of a museum unless you have prior context. As a friend told me, if you haven’t served on a submarine or watched Das Boot, it’s hard to visit a museum submarine and have much deeper of a thought than “it’s cramped and has a lot of valves.” With a little more context, you can have a terrifying experience. Imagine being a young German man in the 1941. You are conscripted for the submarine service. You leave home, see the ocean for the first time, and go to sea in a submarine. In combat, you are squeezed into a torpedo room, waiting to be told to hit a lever and shoot that torpedo, hoping you aren’t first hit by a depth charge and drown in the dark. To me, it’s almost criminal to just have the dead object sit there, with no attempt to contextualize it.

Help people understand the museum process. How do exhibits get chosen? How do they get put together? Where does the money come from? Transparency isn’t the absence of obfuscation; it’s an active effort to reveal how you work to the people you are trying to serve.

Innovate. I don’t know exactly what needs to be done, only that there should probably be more experimentation.

For example, if you put those QR codes on every piece, then you would passively collect data on how many people read about individual pieces, which would help you know what stuff people find most interesting (or, potentially, most confusing). I’m not saying Big Data will solve museums’ problems, but it is the 21st century, and it’s inexcusable to not be thinking about passive data collection.

Here’s another question: What are other ways, beyond reading and looking, that people can interact with museum pieces?5 I’ve seen a number of experiments here, none of which seems to be a real success, but we should keep trying. (Again, to be clear, I think a little room at the end of an exhibit that asks you to answer “what do you think?” with crayons is a sham.)

I’m not a museum professional, and I’m sure the work is full of all kinds of constraints I don’t understand. But, as a museum-goer, I can say I’m shocked that the overall experience hasn’t changed that much over the past, say 25 years. I’m sure we can do better.

And if you run a museum, oh my gosh I’d be so happy to put my labor where my mouth is. Call me.

More times they did it wrong

If you visit the British Museum, you’ll likely walk past the Rosetta Stone. The Stone is one the of the more important artifacts in all of archaeology: it helped us decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics and thus unlock thousands of years of history. In the Museum, the Stone is in a case, by itself, prominently positioned at the intersection of two hallways, usually with a mill of people taking photos. The Stone has a little descriptive placard of about 200 words. And that is it. This piece could have an entire museum devoted to it, explaining how the decipherment happened and what it unlocked. (Indeed, there is such a museum in France.) Or, the many other hieroglyphs in the Museum could be linked to this piece. Or, the piece could have been contextualized: how did it end up in the Museum at all? But no. It just sits there, getting photographed.

Back in Berlin, I’m in the Altes Museum. I wander by a small, out-of-the-way case. In skimming the placards, my eye is caught by this sentence: “The Duenos vessel features the oldest Latin inscription.” I’m a big archaeology nerd, so I had a vague memory of the Duenos vessel, which led me into a stunned half-belief. I needed Wikipedia to confirm what this placard failed to communicate: the weird 3-inch piece of pottery in one corner of this display is the oldest Latin inscription, not in this case, not even in this museum, but in the entire world. And they have it just, you know, next to some other thing with writing on it that is so unimportant that it gets this description: “Plate with Inscription: Titeles. Caere (Italy), acquired in 1872. Clay, 500-480 BC.” What else would you want to know about either piece?

I’ll pause the anecdotes for a moment to observe that I can enjoy myself in museums like the British Museum and Altes Museum because I studied archaeology and I’ve learned about many of the pieces. It’s not a complete disaster to have me approach the contextless Rosetta Stone because I know what it is, know part of what it says, and have even learned how to read parts of it. I get the pleasure of seeing the real thing, appreciating its true size, shape, color, and detail, while also basking in its aura. But I’m really not sure how normal museumgoers are supposed to get any of that.

Still in Berlin, outside the Bode Museum, there are some flags advertising that the Museum is a “healing museum.” I’m honestly curious. Education is priority one, but there’s no reason a museum couldn’t also do some healing, or that healing might be a way to get people in the door to do education. After going through the whole museum, I conclude that the way in which the museum is a “healing museum” is that there is one smallish, moderately tucked away room with signs at either entrance announcing that, because the Bode is a healing museum, you are welcome to meditate in this room. There are a half dozen pillows, and that’s it. Two people are sitting and apparently meditating, which I find astonishing because I am so irritated by how patronizing this “healing” thing is. I’ve been to Denny’s franchises that have put more effort into “healing.”

I once had the privilege of attending a private event at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. I end up in the little room with the gems. I scrutinize some placards, trying to get oriented and make sense of what I’m seeing. Rather than doing my normal struggling and Googling, this time there is a museum employee, so I turn and ask: “OK, before anything else, can you just tell me what a gem is?” It turns out this person is the (junior) curator of this very gem collection, and therefore she knows everything about gems. After asking all my questions, I give my honest feedback, that the room is pretty but confusing and not very educational in its current state. She sighs and nods knowingly, and I infer she is waiting for the current (senior) curator to retire, so that changes can be made.

I’m in a national park in the American West. (I can’t remember where.) There is a giant hole in the ground, like someone took an ice cream scoop a mile across and just scooped out solid stone. What on earth happened here? I consult the placard. I can’t remember what it said, only that my travel partner and I, both PhDs, couldn’t make sense of (1) the geological terminology, (2) how the colored diagrams on the placard corresponded to that terminology, or (3) how either the diagrams or the terms corresponded to the giant hole in the ground. I consider that placard actively harmful, since its main message seems to be that I’m too dumb to understand geology.

I have a non-specific contempt for exhibitions in ethnographic museums that try to make their collections relatable by (1) abstracting away everything specific and relatable about their content and then (2) asking you to relate to the generalized categories. “Hello, museum visitor! Do you have a job and sometimes get sick? Then you’re probably also interested in the intersection of labor and illness in pre-contact Mesoamerica, right? They’re just like you! Doesn’t that make these photographs and random objects so interesting and relatable?”

A museum that does it right

One of my favorite museums in the world is the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge, UK. At a glance, this might be surprising. It is a small museum: the British Museum gets 400x more visitors per year). It also has no notable authentic pieces: almost everything is a copy, such as plaster casts of marble sculptures.

I love this museum because it does not “wow,” it educates. My memory is that the museum visit follows a single main circuit of ancient sculpture, arranged in historical and aesthetic order. You start with very old, stiff-looking kouroi and advance through changing patterns in ancient Greek sculpture. When you arrive at the famous Aphrodite of Knidos, you understand the (very possible true) stories about how men were so bewitched by the statue’s beauty that they broke into the temple at night and tried to copulate with it. You remember the name of its sculptor, Praxiteles, because his name is helpfully repeated and contextualized across multiple pieces, tracing his artistic innovations in subject matter and posture as they ramified through ancient Greece.

You continue on through the Romans, seeing the influence of the Greeks and the innovation on top of it, pausing at the Augustus of Prima Porta and then proceeding to learn how to roughly date busts of Roman emperors using their period-specific hairstyles, clothes, and facial representations. In an hour I learnt more than I have in years of going to museums since then.

I think this museum is successful in part because it is emphatically about education. You are supposed to walk in and learn about classical archaeology before you walk out. It does not have original pieces to negotiate with, and it is not trying to be hip or groundbreaking.

Of course, not every museum can be like this, with its rather arcane and fairly narrow subject matter. Not everyone wants this kind of dry education, even in a museum. And the “great” museums have the great pieces that present high risk and high reward in their display. But great museums must start from this educational nucleus and carry the challenge of their great pieces to educational triumph.

In the Part Three of this series, I’ll propose directions for museums, to make things better.

I got to see some of those things, but I also got a good dose of museum discontent.

This post is the first in a short series on what museums are doing wrong and how they can do better.

What are museums for?

My first thesis is that the primary purpose of public museums of history, archaeology, and anthropology is to educate the public. Museums certainly have other functions, like doing research and maintaining collections, but those other functions ultimately serve the purpose of educating the public.

This contention elides a lot of complexity, but its value is in contrast: my second thesis is that many, if not most, of the “great” museums of history, archaeology, and anthropology fail miserably at this educational goal.

My experience in most “great” museums is that they are not designed for the public, or even for amateur enthusiasts like me. Instead, I think most museums are designed by curators to please other curators. It is a conversation and competition between members of a profession, and any exhibits that seem to be speaking to “us” are a result of that professional conversation, which is, to a large degree, about how people like you and me will interact with their exhibits.

My rational argument

Think about the last time you walked into a “great” museum. You were likely awed and overwhelmed by its vastness. You consult a map, select a destination, navigate with some difficulty to some particular room, and then begin your museum experience.

You probably start by reading a wall of text, squinting and thinking hard, trying to make sense of what the exhibit is about, realizing that you are ignorant about many things the text treats as self-evident and about many things that the text treats as important but you find inscrutable. You then proceed to Look At Objects, each of which has a little placard that tells you very little that helps you know what to make of it.

Now, think about how it would be if you had a friend or teacher who wanted to educate you about the same topic. Where would they start? What questions would you ask? What things would help you learn fastest and most deeply?

I hypothesize that the things you would want to see and hear have almost no overlap with the things you saw in the museum.

My mini-screeds

I’d like to share some stories about times when a museum or museum-like experience disappointed me, when there was a missed opportunity for learning. (These stories are not necessarily the best ones to support my rational argument, but they are ones that stand out most firmly in my mind.)

I’m in the Bode Museum in Berlin. It is a vast and beautiful museum, mostly full of Medieval art. I wander around, hoping to find something that strikes my fancy. In one corner of one random little room, my eyes set upon a small, intricately carved piece. It seems special, but the placard merely informs me “Altarpiece, mother of pearl, some time, some place.” I puzzle for a moment. Well, if I can’t learn about the piece, I might as well remind myself what mother of pearl is. So I whip out Wikipedia to read the page on nacre (the technical name for mother of pearl), and on that wiki page, dear reader, the first example of artwork is literally exactly this piece I’m standing in front of. I am stunned. Now I really think this piece must be important, but I have almost no way to figure out if that’s true. So I wander off. The end.

I’m still in the Bode Museum. One of their treasures, highlighted on the map, is a mosaic from a church in the later Western Roman Empire. I hunt it down and am quite surprised by what I see. It looks like an Eastern Orthodox mosaic, and so must be an interesting example of East-to-West cultural flow, which seems to be a theme in some other pieces in this part of the museum (but which is not indicated anywhere). Mercifully, this piece has a placard with some explanation. But what does this placard tell me? About how this mosaic was, at some time in the past, taken off the wall at its original location and then imperfectly reassembled here in the Bode Museum. There is nothing about, you know, art or history.

Now I’m in the Neues Museum, whose most treasured piece is the Nefertiti Bust. The bust is closely guarded, in a room all by itself. You can only take a picture at a distance of about 30 feet. (Why? I could guess that it’s about ensuring that photo flash doesn’t damage the pigments, but who cares about educating the peasantry about archaeological conservation? Certainly not this museum.) I walk up close, admire the object, and then read the approximately 150 word placard, mostly talking about how Nefertiti is beautiful but also realistically portrayed (i.e., she has gentle wrinkles under her eyes). This is the museum’s single most prized piece, and they’re just like “Oh yeah, that thing? Let’s give it as much explanation as we do the random stuff down in the basement.”

I climb the stairs to the top floor of the Neues Museum. There are very few people, presumably because of the stairs but also because the first room you walk into is literally a bunch of dark, dusty cabinets. But I’m a nerd so I skim all the placards. I read one and am stunned: this is Virchow’s collection. Wait, that Virchow? Virchow, who I know from my biology and public health background is one of the founders of modern biology and medicine, was also an archaeologist? The placard says something oblique about this “medical career” but nothing else. I consult Wikipedia and find out Virchow was staunchly anti-Darwinist (purely on scientific grounds), anti-germ theory of disease (we would say in modern jargon that he considered social determinants of health the true cause of disease), and anti-racist (in part because of his scientific comparisons of human bodies). This dusty pile of bones in a case isn’t that interesting on its own, and the opportunity to link to this fascinating person is lost.

In the second part, I’ll share a few more screeds and then some actual constructive ideas.

The idea that our constitution is changing can be confusing for Americans, who use the word “Constitution” almost exclusively with a capital C, to refer to the written Constitution. I suspect this confusion comes from the fact that the US has the world’s oldest written constitution, one which we can amend (or, used to amend) but never changed wholesale via a constitutional convention. (Contrast this with, for example, the United Kingdom, which has no written constitution; France, which has had 16 written constitutions; and the Dominican Republic, which has had more than 30.)

How do we think about changes to the little-c constitution that aren’t formal amendments to the capital-C Constitution? To understand where things are going, let’s look back.

In an archaic sense, the constitution is how the body politic is constituted, how it is put together. It is the supreme law in the sense that it fills in all the gaps left by other kinds of laws. Even the word “law” can be thorny. Again, as Americans, we tend to have a narrow view of this word, reading “law” as federal statutes, specifically, the US Code, and the corresponding state and local statutes.

There are probably hundreds of definitions of “law” and “constitution,” but for our purposes here, think of “the law” as the socially accepted system for formal, nonviolent conflict resolution, and the “constitution” is the supreme law.

Consider a few crucial examples of our little-c constitution that aren’t part of our big-C Constitution. First, and most importantly, is the Supreme Court’s ability to declare laws unconstitutional. As a child, I learned that the Founding Fathers designed a government with three branches that had checks and balances against each other. This is a post hoc explanation. The Supreme Court’s ability to strike down Congress’s and states’ laws as unconstitutional is nowhere in the Constitution, not in the original text and not in any amendments. The Supreme Court itself decided, in a Supreme Court case, that it could declare laws unconstitutional, 14 years after the Constitution was ratified. The Court had to be clever about getting this decision enforced, navigating a conflict between political parties, coming to a decision that the party in power wanted to enforce, but for reasons that strengthened the Court. It was, in a sense, a mini-coup.

There are hundreds of more examples where Supreme Court or other case law are crucial, such as rules for federal executive decisionmaking from Chevron (overturned by Loper Bright) and for determination of unwritten constitutional rights from Roe (overturned by Dobbs).

Second, consider the House and Senate rules, which determine how Congress operates and thus have immense impacts on our lawmaking. Most notably, the filibuster, which essentially requires a supermajority for most laws to pass the Senate, is nowhere in the Constitution (beyond the part where the Constitution says that Congress can make its own rules). Congress has toyed with removing the filibuster for at least 20 years.

Third, there are countless examples of small things that are just “the way we do things,” things that UK lawmakers would firmly call part of their constitution but which we, as Americans, don’t know how to name. Defeated presidential candidates are expected to concede the election. Presidents are expected to release their tax returns and divest themselves of any remotely problematic investment. Federal agencies are expected to spend money that Congress has appropriated.

In a sense, each of these things —a Supreme Court decision, the Senate’s “nuclear option,” unprecedented Presidential actions— is a constitutional crisis. Some crises are more acute or more important than others, but they are all constitutional crises, even if they don’t directly involve someone directly flouting the Constitutional text.

I don’t use “crisis” in an alarmist sense. Again, looking back, “crisis” comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “decision.” The word originally came into English to refer to the deciding moment in the course of a disease, when a patient’s fever would either peak and fall, or not.

But while every crisis is a decision, not every crisis is life or death. Our constitution is clearly changing in a way that grants more latitude to the party in power with respect to unwritten constitutional norms and, potentially, with respect to actual written laws.

This need not signal immediate disaster. As an American learning about Greek politics, I was mortified to learn that, in the Greek system, the ruling party substantially changes election law with each major transition in power between parties, essentially gerrymandering the whole country. And yet, they have traded between relatively conservative and liberal parties multiple times since their civil war and subsequent junta.

Elections are still real, at least for now.

There’s some irony in this, because OSHA in its early days was criticized for focusing too much on worker safety, meaning avoiding accidents, and not enough on worker health, which includes things like minimizing exposure to toxic chemicals. James Q. Wilson, a scholar who studied bureaucracy, wrote that this was the unsurprising result an agency being given the choice of taking on relatively harder or easier tasks:

[OSHA] is charged by law with promulgating rules designed to improve worker safety and health. The organizations that pressed for this law were pretty much in agreement that industrial hazards presented a greater threat to worker health than to safety. From time to time workers may be injured by a machine lacking a safety feature or by a poorly designed ladder, but these risks, serious as they are, are not as grave as the prospect of thousands of workers becoming ill or dying as a result of exposure to toxic chemicals. [...]

Given these circumstances, one would expect that most of the regulations issued by OSHA in its formative years would address health hazards. Not so. [...] OSHA has done more to address safety than health concerns. The reason has nothing to do with insidious interest-group pressures or distorted personal values. Regulation-writers find it much easier to address safety than health hazards. [...] A worker falls from a platform. The cause is clear–no railing. [...] The directive is easy to write: “Install railings on platforms.” But if a worker develops cancer fifteen years after starting work in a chemical plant, the cause of cancer will be uncertain and controversial. [...] The solution will be hard to specify: One can write a directive that says “reduce exposure to chemical X,” but [questions will arise, such as] “Reduce by how much?” “Over what length of time?” “With what likely benefits?”

Many factors contributed to OSHA’s slow pivot from safety to health, but I want to draw attention to one in particular: Eula Bingham.

Bingham was an academic chemist who pioneered the study of chemical carcinogens. Her work garnered attention outside of academia, and she went from being just a scientist to a consultant, to an expert witness, to a government advisor to NIOSH, the Department of Labor, the FDA, and the EPA.

In Bingham’s time, the workplace could be very dangerous to health:

At one company, which used benzidine-based dyes, [Bingham’s research group] found that almost half the workers had some form of bladder cancer.1

Bingham reluctantly took on what would be her most important role:

In early 1977, Eula Bingham [...] got an unexpected call from the [President Jimmy] Carter transition team. Would she take over [as director of OSHA]? “I laughed at them,” Bingham said. “I said, ‘I couldn’t do that; I’ve got children.’ I was divorced.” The new labor secretary [...] talked her into it.2

Under Bingham, OSHA began regulating dangerous workplace hazards, things like lead, arsenic, benzene, cotton dust, pesticides, and toxic plastics. As Wilson notes, it’s hard to estimate the effects of these interventions, but they are considered substantial. Bingham gave many years of healthy life to many, many Americans.

“We were turning over rocks all the time,” she said. “Here would be a horrible disease, or people literally falling over. The five years before I went to OSHA, it was just zip, zip, zip, zip, zip. There was so much going on.”

But she wasn’t just pro-regulation. Bingham removed obsolete or ineffective regulations, most famously revoking a batch of 1,100 regulations that included things like the number of loops on workers’ belts, the design of toilet seats, the use of umbrellas to provide shade, and the precise height that a fire extinguisher should be placed on a wall.3 The regulations on the design of wooden ladders was cut from 12 pages to 2.

“We are proposing to revoke these standards to permit OSHA to concentrate enforcement in areas with the highest potential for serious illness and [illegible],” Dr. Bingham explained.4

By reducing the overall number of regulations, OSHA could spend more of its limited inspection budget on more important hazards. By relying on existing, broad regulations against workplace hazards, industry managers could design more workplaces that were both efficient and safe.

Bingham’s legacy is difficult to estimate. Jimmy Carter backed Bingham in most but not all conflicts with regulated industries. Reagan, who succeeded Carter, was very interested in the cost of regulations. Reagan’s OSHA reversed or refined many of the workplace health standards set in Bingham’s time.

Regardless of the outcomes in OSHA’s health standards, I’m fairly certain that everyone, both “pro-industry” or “pro-health,” prefers an OSHA that wrangles over the cost-benefit calculations of the most important hazards, rather than an OSHA that nit-picks unimportant nonsense. We might disagree about the precise levels of benzene or formaldehyde that should be permitted, over what timescales, but I’m fairly certain no one wants those 1,100 rules back. This, to me, is Bingham’s greatest legacy, and it’s a lesson for today’s pushes for governmental efficiency.

One appealing kind of answer is anacyclosis (literally ana “again” + cyclos “cycle”), the idea that generations of people follow recurring social patterns, leading to predictable patterns in history. In this theory, children react to the world their parents made, making a new world, that their children react to, and so on. After a certain number of generations, people recreate the kind of social structures their great-great-grandparents created. Those who know how to read these patterns have prophetic, or at least predictive, powers.2

There are whole books about anacyclosis. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. wrote The Cycles of American History. Strauss and Howe wrote The Fourth Turning (and the more portentously titled The Fourth Turning is Here).

Perhaps amusingly, the idea of anacyclosis itselfs recur over generations. Before Strauss, Howe, and the Schlesingers there was Carlyle, Machiavelli, Cicero, and, my favorite, Polybius.3

Polybius, born around 200 BC, wrote a 40-volume work, his Histories, that analyzed the Roman Republic’s rise to global power. He explains Rome’s constitution, trying to understand how their political organization connected to their military success. Along the way, he lays out a theory of anacyclosis, the relevant cycle being six types of government.4

First comes a primordial strong-man leadership he calls (1) monarchy. Monarchy evolves into a kind of benevolent despotism he calls (2) kingship. However, as rulership is passed from father to son, the kings eventually forget their virtues, and kingship decays into (3) tyranny:

In old times, then, those who had once been chosen to the royal office [...] were exempt from all vituperation or jealousy, as neither in their dress nor in their food did they make any great distinction, they lived very much like everyone else, not keeping apart from the people. But when they received the office by hereditary succession and found their safety now provided for, and more than sufficient provision of food, they gave way to their appetites owing to this superabundance, and came to think that the rulers must be distinguished from their subjects by a peculiar dress, that there should be a peculiar luxury and variety in the dressing and serving of their viands, and that they should meet with no denial in the pursuit of their amours, however lawless. These habits having given rise in the one case to envy and offence and in the other to an outburst of hatred and passionate resentment, the kingship changed into a tyranny[.]

The “noblest, most high-spirited, and most courageous” citizens band together, topple the tyrant, and take charge, creating (4) aristocracy, literally aristo “best” + kratos “state,” that is, the rule by the best kind of people.

Just as hereditary succession causes a kingship decays into tyranny, so aristocracy decays into (5) oligarchy (literally oligo “few” + arche “rule”, that is, rule by the few), which the people overthrow to create the final kind of government, (6) democracy:

Next, when [the people] have either killed or banished the oligarchs, they no longer venture to set a king over them, as they still remember with terror the injustice they suffered from the former ones, nor can they entrust the government with confidence to a select few, with the evidence before them of their recent error in doing so. Thus the only hope still surviving unimpaired is in themselves, and to this they resort, making the state a democracy instead of an oligarchy and assuming the responsibility for the conduct of affairs.

Because people remember the problems of monarchy-kingship-tyranny and aristocracy-oligarchy, they set up a new system, which is immune to the problems caused by hereditary rule. It is, however, susceptible to the limited memory of each generation:

Then as long as some of those survive who experienced the evils of oligarchical dominion, they are well pleased with the present form of government, and set a high value on equality and freedom of speech. But when a new generation arises and the democracy falls into the hands of the grandchildren of its founders, they have become so accustomed to freedom and equality that they no longer value them, and begin to aim at pre-eminence; and it is chiefly those of ample fortune who fall into this error. So when they begin to lust for power and cannot attain it through themselves or their own good qualities, they ruin their estates, tempting and corrupting the people in every possible way. And hence when by their foolish thirst for reputation they have created among the masses an appetite for gifts and the habit of receiving them, democracy in its turn is abolished and changes into a rule of force and violence. For the people, having grown accustomed to feed at the expense of others and to depend for their livelihood on the property of others, as soon as they find a leader who is enterprising but is excluded from the houses of office by his penury, institute the rule of violence; and now uniting their forces massacre, banish, and plunder, until they degenerate again into perfect savages and find once more a master and monarch.

… I’m getting chills…

Anacyclosis is an attractive theory. It explains, for example, why the middle-aged Greeks and Spaniards I’ve known are so politically relaxed. It’s not because Mediterranean people are constitutionally more chill than Americans; instead it’s because Greece and Spain had authoritarian regimes through the mid-1970s, and the current ruling generation, who grew up under authoritarianism, prefer to live in mildly dysfunctional countries rather than give power to authoritarians who promise to undo that dysfunction. The United States, by contrast, has never had an authoritarian regime, and we must go further back in time, to the 1960s or even 1940s, to find points in history where Americans truly feared authoritarianism. Our ruling generation has forgotten the dangers of kingship-tyranny and aristocracy-oligarchy, so we are about one generation “ahead” of the Greeks and the Spaniards in terms of political crisis.

Polybius believed you could design government in a way that would mitigate anacyclosis: if a constitution mixes monarchical, oligarchic, and democratic elements, then each element will constantly decay into another, making a kind of dynamic equilibrium that never collapses. The American Founding Fathers, having just expelled a literal king, and being well-read in ancient philosophy, were interested in “mixed” forms of government. The separation of powers in our Constitution draws directly from these ideas.

If anacyclosis is a good theory, and “mixed” government is in fact sufficient to prevent political collapse, then the question is whether our federal government’s separation of powers is a sufficiently good implementation of “mixed” government.

If it’s not a good theory, then I guess that’s one less potential crystal ball.

Johnson had a curious work style. Under pressure, he could produce content incredibly quickly. He compiled the famous dictionary in 9 years, with only a small team of assistants. In comparison, the comparable French dictionary had taken 40 top scholars 40 years.1

But when he wasn’t under pressure, he was, at least by his own estimation, very lazy. We have written records about how, throughout his life, often multiple times a year, he would make resolutions and sacred vows to get up early and work without stopping. We also have the records about how he broke those resolutions over and over again, until he died.

And from Johnson’s unique life, we end up with one of the finest essays on laziness in the English language, Rambler #134. The Rambler was a periodical produced by Johnson, physically similar to a newspaper, but closer in character to a modern Substack: it came out twice a week and consisted of just one essay per issue.2

As Johnson alludes to in the text of #134, he didn’t start writing #134 until the courier, who would take the completed text to the printer, showed up at his house. Johnson told him to wait, and he dashed off this incredible essay in one go, likely without reviewing the text even once.3

My experiment for this post is to adapt Rambler #134 into contemporary idiom, quoting the most delicious aphorisms and aiming to keep the elevated sentiment while simplifying the convoluted grammar and 18th century vocabulary.

—

I sat yesterday trying to decide what to write about in this post. I looked through my backlog of potential topics, imagining all the possible posts I could write, but failing to settle on any one topic, I wasted time until the moment I realized that, if I did not start writing now, I wouldn’t finish a post before my friend would pick me up at the airport and I would lose internet access.

This Substack covers such a wide range of topics that it isn’t a challenge to find something to write about, and so I started blaming myself for “having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of which every moment’s idleness increased the difficulty.”4

“The folly of allowing ourselves to delay what we know cannot be finally escaped is one of the general weaknesses which [...] prevail to a greater or lesser degree in every mind [...]” Even if you don’t yield to laziness, you will always feel its temptation.5

It is a good thing to treat the present moment as immensely precious, and so it is wise to discount the future to some degree. But treasuring the present can lead us to the irrational hope that future moments, which will also be precious, will somehow solve our present problems, without any present effort.

Taking out loans against the future also puts us at risk for making the worst investment, which is to make no investment at all. If you put off to tomorrow what could be done today, but then do nothing else today, then you have lost something and gained nothing.

Mindfulness and its focus on the present moment is all the rage, but “[i]dleness never can secure tranquillity; the call of reason and of conscience will pierce the closest pavilion of the sluggard, and, though it may not have force to drive him from his [home], will be loud enough to hinder him from sleep. Those moments which he cannot resolve to make useful, by devoting them to the great business of his being, will still be usurped by [...] remorse and vexation [which will] forbid him to enjoy what he is so desirous to appropriate.”

“Thus life is languished away in the gloom of anxiety, and consumed in [making resolutions we break the next day]; in forming purposes which we scarcely hope to keep, and reconciling ourselves to our own cowardice by excuses which [...] we know to be absurd.” The only resolution we seem able to keep, is to stay in the vicious cycle of worry, inaction, self-reproach, and fear. Procrastination is all the pain of pulling the bandaid off bit by bit, but with none of the actual accomplishment of getting the bandaid off.

This pain leads to fear that we won’t finish what we start, that we’ll deserve more self-shame for attempting to start than for attempting nothing at all. Constant fear creates a special capacity for unnecessary suffering, a “perspicacity of cowardice” that “imbitter[s] life not only with those miseries by which all earthly beings are really more or less tormented, but with those which do not yet exist [...]”

I expect many of my readers would identify as “high-achieving,” and I expect that for them, it’s difficult to identify with concerns about “laziness.” For these people, with “active faculties and more acute discernment,” idleness comes in special flavors. One is analysis paralysis: “[h]e to whom many objects of pursuit arise at the same time, will frequently [...] change his course as new attractions prevail, and harass himself without advancing.”

Another is overplanning: “[h]e who sees different ways to the same end, will, unless he watches carefully over his own conduct, lay out too much of his attention upon the comparison of probabilities and the adjustment of expedients, and pause in the choice of his road, till some accident intercepts his journey.”

Another is overthinking: if someone is smart enough to predict problems that could arise down the line, and can come up with many ways to improve on a simple plan, then he “will not easily be persuaded that his project is ripe for execution; but will superadd one contrivance to another, endeavor to unite various purposes in one operation, multiply complications, and refine niceties, till he is entangled in his own scheme, and bewildered in the perplexity of various intentions.”

Another is overvaluing optimization and undervaluing opportunity cost: he who tries to find a single life, job, and house that has all good things he wants and none of the bad he doesn’t “must waste his life in roving to no purpose from province to province.”

Another, and my personal bugbear, is a combination of perfectionism and overinflated ego, which leads to castles in the air and no stones on the ground: “He will attempt a treatise on some important subject, and amass materials, consult authors, and study all the dependent and collateral parts of learning, but never conclude himself qualified to write. He that has abilities to [imagine] perfection will not easily be content without it; and, since perfection cannot be reached, will lose the opportunity of doing well in the vain hope of unattainable excellence.”

In defense of ambivalent career choices, I hear people say that life is long and can have many chapters. That may be true, but “the probability that [life] will be much shorter than nature allows, ought to awaken every man to the active prosecution of whatever he is desirous to perform.” Nothing in life is guaranteed except your own efforts, and “he who is cut off in the execution of an honest undertaking has at least the honor of falling in his rank, and has fought the battle, though he missed the victory.”

And thus, I post, without further editing.

Henry Adams, born 1838, had high expectations for himself. He came from a family of wealth and prestige. His great-grandfather was John Adams, Founding Father and second US President. His grandfather was John Quincy Adams, the sixth US President. His father would go on to become Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to the UK. He went to Harvard and trained to be a lawyer. He appeared to have every privilege in education and family position.

But over his life, which ended in 1918, the world changed dramatically. His traditional, classical education prepared him for debates in a US Senate composed of elder statesmen, but it did not prepare him for the technological and sociological upheavals of the later 19th and early 20th centuries. He felt adrift, a creature of a prior age with no place in the present one.

We know how Henry Adams felt because he wrote an autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, focused on the overall theme of how his original education failed him and how we tried to self-educate to better adapt to the changing world. (Why on earth would one read such a dull-sounding book, you might ask? Because it was on more than one list of top 100 books in English.)

Henry Adams spent a lot of time at the 1900 exposition in Paris, where he puzzled over new technologies like electricity. To me, it is shocking that, not only does Adam fail to understand electricity, he doesn’t even have a framework with which he could begin to understand electricity:

Until the Great Exposition of 1900 closed its doors in November, Adams haunted it, aching to absorb knowledge, and helpless to find it. He would have liked to know how much of it could have been grasped by the best-informed man in the world. While he was thus meditating chaos, [his friend and renowned scientist Samuel] Langley came by, and showed it to him. At Langley's behest, the Exhibition dropped its superfluous rags and stripped itself to the skin, for Langley knew what to study, and why, and how; while Adams might as well have stood outside in the night, staring at the Milky Way. [...]

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. Adams had looked at most of the accumulations of art in the storehouses called Art Museums; yet he did not know how to look at the art exhibits of 1900. He had studied Karl Marx and his doctrines of history with profound attention, yet he could not apply them at Paris. [...]

Adams is particularly flummoxed by the hall of dynamos, large wheels of magnets and wires used to convert mechanical motion, such as from a coal-powered steam engine, into electric current. Run in reverse, a dynamo becomes a motor, turning electric current into mechanical motion. Dynamos were the immediate predecessor of the technology we use today to turn mechanical motion into electricity (and vice versa).

Adams can tell there is some kind of power or force at play here, but his only metaphor is a religious “moral force”:

Then he [Langley] showed [Adams] the great hall of dynamos, and explained how little he knew about electricity or force of any kind, even of his own special sun, which spouted heat in inconceivable volume, but which, as far as he knew, might spout less or more, at any time, for all the certainty he felt in it. To [Langley], the dynamo itself was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal hidden in a dirty engine-house carefully kept out of sight; but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As [Adams] grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheely revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power—while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force. [...]

Yet the dynamo, next to the steam-engine, was the most familiar of exhibits. For Adams’s objects its value lay chiefly in its occult mechanism. Between the dynamo in the gallery of machines and the engine-house outside, the break of continuity amounted to abysmal fracture for a historian’s objects. No more relation could he discover between the steam and the electric current than between the Cross and the cathedral. The forces were interchangeable if not reversible, but he could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith. Langley could not help him. Indeed, Langley seemed to be worried by the same trouble, for he constantly repeated that the new forces were anarchical [...]

Adams desperately wants to make sense of this new world, to be part of it, but he feels that the gap between the old world and the new world is so great that he cannot bridge it. His metaphor for this gap is a religious one: he compares the invention of electricity to the Roman emperor Constantine’s adoption of Christianity as the state religion in the 300s AD:

Copernicus and Galileo had broken many professorial necks about 1600; Columbus had stood the world on its head towards 1500; but the nearest approach to the revolution of 1900 was that of 310, when Constantine set up the Cross. The rays that Langley disowned, as well as those which he fathered, were occult, supersensual, irrational; they were a revelation of mysterious energy like that of the Cross [...]

(The rest of the chapter is speculation that, since Constantine’s time, the world had been dominated by a feminine, “virgin” energy related to the Virgin Mary, an energy which was being displaced by the “masculine” energy of the dynamo.)

This chapter from Adam’s autobiography is a cautionary tale about metaphorical thinking, about trying to reason about a new technology without actually learning about the new technology. Don’t pray to the dynamo; learn physics.

Source of the text: Smithsonian Library, Chapter 25

This seems like a simple question. I was raised, implicitly, to believe that some things were legal and some things were not. If it wasn’t clear to me as a lay person if something I wanted to do was legal or not, I would ask a lawyer, who would tell me the answer.

Clearly “legal” isn’t black or white. But even more than that, I don’t even think “legal” is a property of a thing. The legal system isn’t a scientific enterprise dedicated to classifying things as legal or not; it’s a conflict management system. “Legal” isn’t black or white, or even the act of painting; it’s the process by which people come to stop asking what color something is.

To illustrate my point, let me tell you about the Icelandic sagas. These are written stories about medieval Iceland, roughly spanning the years 1200 to 1300 AD. For most of this time, Iceland was a “commonwealth.” There were something like 50,000 people on the whole island. There were no cities and no state. People lived on individual farming compounds, interacted with their neighbors or traded with other countries, and had little assemblies where they would do things like settle disputes and arrange marriages.

The plot in many of the sagas is driven by a feud: someone insults someone else, the insult escalates into a killing, and the first killing escalates to a cycle of revenge. With feuding comes law, and many of the sagas turn on legal events and legal procedures. The climax of one of the most famous sagas occurs when a man, who has been lawyering from afar because his leg has an infection, becomes so enraged by his opponent’s legal maneuvers that he picks up a spear, lances the boil that prevented him from walking, and strides across the assembly to his opponents and starts slaying.

Murder was of course illegal in the Icelandic Commonwealth, but the interesting thing, as a contemporary reader, is the system of enforcement. The two parties in the feud could negotiate a settlement, and the movement of money from the perpetrator’s family to the victim’s family could prevent further conflict. If there was no settlement, someone would probably be outlawed. An outlaw had to leave Iceland, either for three years or for life. If they did not, they could be killed, by anyone at any time, and the outlaw’s family would have no legal recourse. (I wrote in a previous post about the unbearable pathos of an Icelander who chooses to hasten his own death rather than leave his farm for three years.)

In both medieval Iceland and the contemporary US, murder is illegal. But what “illegal” means has such different outcomes. In medieval Iceland, it meant that the victim’s family would assemble a posse and try to kill the killer, who would either flee the country or savagely fight back. The bigger and stronger your family, and the more allies you had, the more likely you were to get a favorable outcome. In the US, it usually means that law enforcement officers —professional agents of the state— will pursue the killer, quickly or slowly, imprison them, and —I will read the carceral system generously— try to reform the killer before returning them to society. In the US, the more money you have, and the more connections, the more likely you are to have a favorable outcome. So “the law” isn’t just what is “permitted” or not, or even what consequences a person could face, but it’s the reality of what they do face, and how that comes about.

Let’s zoom ahead from medieval Iceland to my first job out of academia, at a fecal microbiota transplantation nonprofit. Fecal microbiota transplantation, or FMT, is the process of taking stool from a healthy donor and transplanting it into the intestines of a sick person. FMT is recognized in the medical community as a very effective treatment for a very specific kind of infectious diarrhea, recurrent C. difficile. (There has been substantial interest in other kinds of diseases FMT might treat, and some elements of the broader wellness community like the idea of balancing the microbiome, but the only disease for which the risk-reward balance is even remotely close, for now, is recurrent C. difficile.)

High quality donor stool is hard to find. Most of us carry some kind of pathogen which, although harmless in our intestines right now, could be deadly if transplanted into a very sick person. Also, most people aren’t that interested in donating their stool. The logic of this nonprofit was to find the small number of people whose stool was “clean” enough to pass medical-grade testing and who were crazy enough to routinely come into an office and deliver their stool to strangers. That material could then be processed and shipped around the country to the many people who needed it but who didn’t have the resources to find this kind of donor, or have a donor’s stool tested and processed to FDA standards.

The FDA is where things get really interesting. Was this treatment “legal”? Clearly, lots of medical practices are legal. It is legal for a pharmaceutical company to manufacture, advertise, and sell a pill, with a defined substance inside, so long as the substance has been rigorously tested in clinical trials and the manufacturing and advertising follow strict guidelines. It’s also perfectly legal to distribute human-derived products like blood, again with lots of careful restrictions about how it’s done.

But was FMT legal? There was no law saying yes or no. Instead, Congress had passed laws saying that FDA got to decide, via regulation, whether stool should have to follow the rules used for drugs (because the bacteria in feces were the active ingredient of a pharmaceutical?), for blood donation, for cord blood donation (which is a whole different thing), for organ donation, and so on. FDA chose to regulate FMT mostly like a drug, meaning that, to use FMT legally, you would either need to conduct a multimillion dollar clinical trial proving its safety and efficacy —a feat that multiple for-profit companies failed to accomplish— or you would need to apply for a special case-by-case exception, the sort of thing used to allow for a drug to be used in a clinical trial in the first place.

But then the FDA said even one more thing: it would exercise “enforcement discretion.” Whether it was “legal” or not, if you followed certain rules when performing FMT, the FDA wouldn’t come after you. And this wasn’t a wink and a nudge. The words “enforcement discretion” are written in the Federal Register.

So was FMT “legal?” (The PR people at the nonprofit looked at me like I had three heads when I appeared confused by this question. Of course it was legal! they almost shouted at me.) To be honest, I still don’t know the answer to the philosophical question. But now I have a new philosophical question: what is the difference between something being legal, versus something being illegal but having no legal consequences? What if medieval Icelanders called murder “illegal,” and declared killers to be outlaws, but had no way to assemble a posse and enact revenge?

Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the most important lawyers in US history, in an essay that the Supreme Court gift shop calls “the single most important essay about law ever written” (and also, incidentally, “the perfect gift for anyone who ever entered law school”), put it this way:

Take the fundamental question, What constitutes the law? [...] The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.

So is something “legal?” This is tantamount to asking “what will the courts do in fact?” I am not a lawyer, whose job and expertise is to speculate on such matters.

12 million immigrants were processed at Ellis Island, primarily between 1892 and 1921. Before 1890, immigration was handled by the several states, principally New York, which was the country’s main port for incoming immigrants. New York state was processing immigrants at a facility at the southern tip of Manhattan, but Ellis Island became the first federal immigration facility because the federal government suspected that New York state was not running the facility up to code and wanted to take things over.

Ellis Island lost importance when immigration was substantially restricted by the Emergency Quota Act and subsequent legislation that ended the era of mass immigration to the US. Furthermore, immigration processing was pushed “upstream,” from Ellis Island and to the ships that people came in on, and eventually to the current system, where immigration is intended to be processed before people physically come to the United States.

The idea that Ellis Island clerks changed people’s names on the spot, either out of ignorance or out of paternalistic goodwill, is a myth. (The NPS placard more diplomatically called it “part of many families’ oral history.”) In fact, the immigration officials carefully cross-referenced the names that immigrants gave for themselves against the names listed in the customs manifest provided by the steamship companies. A mismatched name was a sign that you weren’t who you said you were, which jeopardized your chance of entering the US.

It was very possible that names were misspelled by steamship clerks or that immigrants intentionally gave different names to put on the steamship manifest. Many immigrants also changed their names after entering the US. So yes, immigrants’ names did often change, but they did not change in the short liminal period that people were on Ellis Island.

Most people spent only a few hours on Ellis Island. For an experience that seems to loom so large in the American consciousness, it was generally a quick one. If your paperwork checked out, you weren’t suspected of being a criminal or “likely to become a public charge,” and you weren’t diagnosed with a disease, you were in and out in a few hours.

However, if your paperwork didn’t check out, or you were suspected of being a criminal, or you were, say, a single woman without family in the US, then you were pulled aside. Contemporary immigration law did not allow these kinds of people into the US. Immigration officials literally wrote the letters “SI” on people’s clothes using chalk to indicate to other officials that the marked person needed a “special inquiry.” Most people made it through the special inquiry, and those who didn’t mostly made it through appeal.

All told, 98% of immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island were permitted in. Some were turned around and sent back to their ports of origin, for medical or other reasons. A small number languished in limbo, some for months, as they waited for family to pick them up, or for some clarification of their immigration status. History does often rhyme.

“Picture brides,” which we now more crassly call “mail-order brides,” was a real thing. Watch Brides sometime; it’s set on the ship that is the historical touchstone for this phenomenon.

In some cases, a single woman without family couldn’t leave the island, being likely to become a public charge, so the fiancé would take the ferry over, the couple would get married, and the US government was content that she was a man’s charge and not a public one.

A sure-fire way to get sent home was to say you had a job waiting for you. The US had a law against “contract labor,” to prevent US companies from overtly bringing cheaper immigrant labor into the country. Immigrants had to thread a fine needle, you couldn’t have (or admit to having) a job lined up, but you also couldn’t seem unable to find work, which would make you “public charge” risk.

Another way to get sent home was trachoma, a then-untreatable infectious disease that causes blindness. The bacteria Chlamydia trachomatis, the same one that causes chlamydia, can infect the eye and slowly deform the eyelid in a way that causes the eyelashes to scrape against the cornea, which in turn clouds over. Medical inspectors would flip each immigrant’s eyelid inside out, to look for the characteristic bumps caused by the infection. We diagnose the disease the same way today. (Now, a single course of antibiotics can cure trachoma, in the same way we can cure chlamydia, although poor sanitation means that trachoma remains a neglected tropical disease. Don’t confuse trachoma with river blindness, the second-largest cause of blindness after trachoma. River blindness is caused by a parasite that can be effectively managed with ivermectin. Yes, that ivermectin; this is one of the things doctors use it for.)

The medical staff at Ellis Island were part of the Public Health Service, which descended from the Marine Hospital system, set up in the late 1700s to care for American coast guard, naval, and merchant marine personnel. The PHS of the Ellis Island era was a forebear of the CDC and also of the Public Health Commissioned Corp, the “army” led by the US Surgeon General.

We narrowly saved Ellis Island as a historical site. After mass immigration ended and immigrants were processed on their passenger liners, Ellis Island was used variously as a hospital, a naval base, and a prison. It was essentially abandoned in 1955. For about 10 years, there were various proposals to turn it into something super-chic, either very fancy homes or a very fancy marina/resort. The idea to turn it into a park was approved in 1964, but only in 1976 were tourists first brought to the island, and only in 1990 was the site fully reopened as a restored museum, thanks in large part to philanthropic donations.

Clearly I got a lot out of my visit, but I was disappointed that there weren’t more attempts to link the space with contemporary experience. I literally walked the same route some of my great-grandparents did, and stood in the same rooms where they stood, on one of the most momentous days of their lives. That emotional experience was the perfect leverage for me to devour some information about the past, but there was not much attempt, as far as I experienced the museum, to relate those feelings to thinking about immigration in the present.

The museum did have an exhibit about post-World War II immigration, which had a lot of poignant material about the causes of that immigration, but I was literally reading a book on the ferry over about how US Cold War interventionist policies were the root cause of the geopolitical instabilities that caused these heartbreaking situations, and so it was a bit nauseating and I quickly fled the room. It was also down a long hallway, far from the great hall, and the few of us who were down there had the sheepish look of nerds who can’t tell if the bonus hallway full of knowledge they’ve found is actually off-limits.

My favorite example of what might be called “corporate greed” is the elixir sulfanilamide disaster of 1937. Sulfanilamide, one of the first antibiotics, had been sold up to that time in tablet and in powder form. Market research by the pharmaceutical company S. E. Massengill showed that some people would prefer to take the drug in liquid form. Massengill’s chief chemist found a liquid that would dissolve sulfanilamide as well as a raspberry flavoring that would allow them to better market the liquid drug to children. In September 1937, after positive taste tests, the company started selling liquid sulfanilamide to the general public.

Within a month, it became clear that many people who took liquid sulfanilamide had died. It turns out that the liquid that the chemist used to dissolve sulfanilamide was diethylene glycol, a deadly poison which we now use as antifreeze. All told, around 100 people died, including many children.

The head of Massengill didn’t really see any problem. “We have been supplying a legitimate professional demand and not once could have foreseen the unlooked-for results,” he said. “I do not feel that there was any responsibility on our part.” The chemist, for his part, committed suicide.

Massengill’s statement that the company could not have foreseen the results was not strictly true. It was not known at the time that diethylene glycol was poisonous, and unsophisticated animal testing might not have revealed this. Slow and careful human testing, like we do now for new drugs but which was not expected at the time, would have caught this effect.

Massengill’s statement that the company bore no responsibility was also legally false. There were many civil suits against Massengill, and the company had to pay money to people it had harmed.

Clearly, Massengill took actions that killed children. I’m not sure “corporate greed” is a useful concept here. I know what it means for a person to be greedy, but what does it mean for a company to be “greedy?” How would invoking “corporate greed” help prevent another company from doing something similar?

Maybe it seems like I’m splitting hairs, but consider this: while what Massengill seems reprehensible, and although they were subject to civil penalties (i.e., they got sued), they had almost no criminal liability. At the time, there were no requirements for safety tests before selling a new drug to the general public.

In fact, Massengill could only be prosecuted for a single crime: mislabeling. The company labeled their product “elixir sulfanilamide,” but “elixir” was a specific technical term for a drug that has been dissolved in ethanol. Technically, Massengill had produced a “solution,” a more general term than “elixir” that refers to a drug that has been dissolved in any liquid. For this crime, the company received a fine equivalent to about $400,000 today.

I’m certain Massengill was excoriated in the press and at the dinner table, but thankfully, something happened more than blame or accusations of greed being piled on a single company. Instead, US lawmakers pressed the president to sign legislation that created our modern FDA, which started applying strict safety testing rules before new drugs could be sold to the public. When you take a prescription drug today, you can be assured that an incredible amount of effort went into testing the drug for safety.

In other words, whether Massengill was “greedy” is beside the point. What needed to happen was to change the rules of the game, so that good business practice would include things like animal testing before releasing a new drug. Rather than blame an individual company, we should ask if a company is behaving according to the rules. If so, and we still don’t like the results, then we need to change the rules.

If you don’t like that Apple or Google is reselling your data, but you don’t want to get rid of your smartphone and email accounts, then I think it’s wiser to advocate for privacy protection laws than to say the corporations are “greedy.” Right now the system gives us two choices: become commodities in a data economy, or opt out of nearly everything digital, including many crucial professional and social networks. In this system, it’s clear why we make the choice we do. So if everything is proceeding according to the system we laid out, whose fault is it? If pharmaceutical companies compete to maximize shareholder returns rather than societal good, is it the corporation’s “fault” for not acting charitably, or our fault for not changing the system? We should not expect organizations to demonstrate healthy, law-abiding self-interest and then call it greed.

Furthermore, I’m not even sure what it means for a corporation to be “greedy.” I know what it means for a person to be greedy, to further their own interests in a way that harms others. A person can use a corporation as an instrument of their greed by, say, breaking laws. And clearly a group of people could be greedy. If a corporation is made up of ten people, and all of them are greedy, that group of people is greedy. But what does it mean for the corporation per se, apart from the people who compose it, to be greedy? A corporation, as a legal person, can be legally accountable for the behavior of its human employees, but what would it mean for greed to exist in the corporation, but not in the people who make up the corporation?

Philosophers debate the concept of “collective responsibility,” the idea that moral blame can lie outside of individuals humans but inside groups of humans. In some cases, this idea might feel self-evident. It feels reasonable to blame corporations and nations, which are well organized and have clear decision-making systems that are a surrogate for an individual human’s moral intent.

What about in looser cases? Can white Americans alive today who did not own slaves be held responsible for the effects of slavery? Or, consider a hypothetical group of bystanders in a village who see an innocent person get stoned to death but have no power to stop what’s happening. Are they responsible for not anticipating the stoning and organizing a resistance?

Again, some corporations have done some terrible things. But I worry that blaming “corporate greed” is mostly ineffective for changing how things work while simultaneously singling out certain kinds of groups and behaviors as morally blameworthy. If we as a society expect corporations to hold to certain kinds of moral compass, then we should probably ask more of other organizations and even entire swaths of people.

There is a crisis, or multiple crises, around male identity. Christine Emba writes persuasively about the absence of a commonly-held, positive image of positive masculinity, and about how the manosphere is filling that vacuum:

To the extent that any vision of “nontoxic” masculinity is proposed, it ends up sounding more like stereotypical femininity than anything else: Guys should learn to be more sensitive, quiet and socially apt, seemingly overnight. It’s the equivalent of “learn to code!” as a solution for those struggling to adjust to a new economy: simultaneously hectoring, dismissive and jejune.

There is something appealing, too, about the idea of gender neutrality — or at least rejecting gender essentialism — as a social ethos. After all, attaching specific traits to men will redound to women, too. If we say “real” men are strong, does that mean real women must be weak? If men are leaders, are women destined to follow?

I acknowledge that I’m thinking and writing about masculinity from a position of tremendous privilege: I’m a white, upper-middle, cis-gender male, living in a coastal city, with a white collar job. I have a good relationship with my father, my brother, and my uncles.

But I still feel a twinge when I hear the phrase “men suck” uttered casually at a cocktail party, and I have the personal sense that masculinity is an ever-shrinking platform that becomes harder and harder to balance on.

I want to pick up where Emba left off. “The old script for masculinity might be on its way out. It’s time we replaced it with something better.” What form could that script even take?

But before asking about the form of the script, we should pause and ask, why do we even need a script? Why not, as Emba says, reject gender essentialism? Why not assert that there is no such thing as masculinity, or femininity? I think this is totally possible, even if it would take a long time. Things that might seem essentially socially gendered, such as physical strength or child-birthing, are in fact essentially biological: someone can walk and talk and look and act like a man while actually having child-birthing organs.

Even essentially biological things are not the exclusive purview of one sex. Not all females have child-birthing capabilities or are willing to use them. Males might be better at certain feats of physical strength on average, but my maleness doesn’t mean I would be competitive against any Olympic female athletes, or any all-state female athletes, or really any female athlete at all.

Sure, the world’s fastest swimmers and cross-country skiers might be mostly male, but they are a very tiny slice of the general male population. They are mostly men, but the things that make them exceptional –including bizarre physiques and superhuman blood– is something aside from masculinity.

Emba reasons that a positive script for masculinity is a moral good because it would help men today be better people. I agree. However, even aside from the sociological utility of a new script for masculinity, I would be sad if we rejected gender, just for its own sake. It would mean a less rich, less diverse world to live in. I love, for example, bilingual road signs. It’s a tragedy when we lose languages, cultures, and religions to globalization.

Why should we be happy about losing gender? Maybe erasing gender is more like erasing nation-states, but patriotism is not the same thing as jingoism. There is surely some baby in that bathwater.

I’m also increasingly skeptical of the classical liberal notion that we all have intrinsic preferences, that we all know which actions to take to maximize our utils with respect to those preferences, and that we will, in the absence of interfering constraints like gender roles, maximize our utils. So much of our meaning and joy as humans comes from the structures and relationships we inherit and build on and struggle with.

I’m certainly not for oppressive strictures that cause harm and limit people’s potential. But I’m hopeful that we can write a better script for masculinity that is worthy unto itself, even without the motivation of mitigating the manosphere.

So if we are going to keep masculinity, what form could it take? Thinking like an engineer, I ask: what are the design constraints?

First, let’s restrict ourselves to two genders. This means that to be a man must be one thing, and to be a woman must be something else, and the two things must be different. If, in our hypothetical script, men are like X, then women are like not-X.

This bipolarity is certainly not a given. Many cultures have more than two genders (and there is a good Star Trek: Enterprise episode about a species with more than three sexes). I’m not trying to disrespect or erase nonbinary people. My point is that the shape of the script is clearer if men are from Mars and women are from Venus and we leave Uranus out of it. There is less wiggle room, and we must confront the question of gender divides head-on.

Second, let’s assume gender is something we can assign to “blank slate” babies, in fifty-fifty proportions. Historically, this assignment has been based on biological sex (when it could be confidently categorized at birth, and assigned arbitrarily when it could not), but we have systems of randomly assigning people to types regardless of any biological meaning. My favorite is the horoscope. Because I was born between September 23 and October 22, I’m a Libra, which means that I am diplomatic and dislike conformity (both of which are true).

I’m not saying we couldn’t assign initial genders based on biology; I’m only saying that the things we assign to each gender should not have anything intrinsically biological. This is already true of so many traits that we consider masculine or feminine. For example: drink preferences. Men are supposed to prefer dark beers; women, white wines. I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with this, for the purposes of a new gender script. If someone calls me, a man, gay because I’m drinking a white wine, that would be a problem of homophobia, not of white wine being considered a woman’s drink.

To be clear, I’m not saying we would have a law requiring people to drink their gender’s preferred drinks; instead I’m saying that a gender-bending drink choice is a move in the social game that makes gender an interesting and enjoyable social game to play.

There are many other random-at-birth assignments, but they are correlated strongly with family or geography. Where I grew up, you preferred bagels to barbecue and the Yankees to the Mets. Gender is so special because it is not tied to geography or socioeconomics. The two genders are everywhere, across social strata, in equal proportions.

The third constraint, and the real trick, is to avoid associations with labor roles. I believe this is key to a non-oppressive gender system. So long as the jobs with more power or more pay are going to one gender or another, you risk oppression. We shouldn’t write a script in which, for example, men are better at machines than women, because working with machines will either be a position of power, like it is today, or a position of relative servility, like it was 400 years ago. (This also avoids situations when jobs are re-gendered according to their prestige. When airplanes first started taking passengers, it was a high class job, and airline attendants were all male. The script flipped to “airline stewardess,” and now back to gender-neutral “attendant.” When computers first came out, they were seen as tedious machines, and the jobs were all for women. Now we have “tech bros.”)

(Personally, I find it fairly mysterious that so many cultures organize labor around gender. Even if males are stronger and faster on average, why should it be men that go hunting giraffes, rather than the strongest and fastest people? Even if the only people who are giving birth and lactating are females, why should it be the women —fertile or infertile, pregnant or not pregnant, strong or weak— that manage the gardens? I agree that if we had to divide labor by gender, that the division we see might optimize overall economic output, but I don’t agree with the implicit premises that we need to divide labor by gender or that any human society organizes itself around the optimization of economic output. This will be the subject of the third post in this series!)

My hypothesis is that if we stay within these constraints —assignable at random in equal proportions, and not related to labor— we can find some path forward.

Although, to get really meta, my Boy Scout troop’s unofficial motto was “suck it up and deal,” which makes for an elegant, closed logical loop: if being manly means dealing, then our message to men could be: be a man and deal with how it can feel hard nowadays, to be a man.