It was a free country, wasn't it?

The only point Jack Balkin misses in his commentary on the "Patriot Act II" is that there doesn't seem to be anything in the proposed law to check the Attorney General's finding that any group is a terrorist organization, and then stripping all its members of citizenship. I could be wrong about this, but so far as I can see, if this became law, Bush could proscribe the entire Democratic Party.

So long as we're thinking along those somewhat paranoid lines: Suppose you are one of the leaders of a party which forms a government even though it received only a minority of the vote at the last election, after being out of office for most of a decade. Suppose, furthermore, that the party has a quite radical ideological agenda which most of the country consistently rejects (so much so that an important and explicit part of your propaganda is to lie about your own positions). Exactly what incentive do you have to not create a police state?

Pattern Formation in Cocktails

If this isn't the official drink of self-organization, it's only because nobody knows about it yet. The only thing which could displace it would be a drinkable chemical oscillator, which didn't exist, at least when I looked for one in graduate school. (From the Viridian mailing list.)

Temujin Displays His Adaptation

UPI (via Ideofact) reports on a population genetics study of Asia which concludes that some Mongol or another, living about a thousand years ago, has over 16 million living descendants in the direct male line, meaning that his reproductive fitness was about 800,000 times higher than average. (The calculation described in the UPI piece seems, if anything, to underestimate his relative fitness.) The most likely candidate is of course Genghis Khan. Brad DeLong, who would know, asserts that he was also probably the first man responsible for over ten million human deaths. Evidently he was making room for his descendants (who almost certainly include me). The UPI writer fairly swiftly descends into silliness about lost treasure and cloning, but the original paper sounds worth a look.

"Every biological invention is a perversion"

Melvin Konner on treatment versus enhancement in The American Prospect in 1999. Though Konner doesn't say it in so many words, this distinction --- between repairing defects that keep people from being normal, and enhancing normal people --- is a relic from when we couldn't do much of either, but it was more obvious we couldn't do much if you if you weren't broken. Of course, people would always like to be better adapted than they are, so there were always people (yogis, alchemists, Plato, etc.) claiming to be able to do it, but they were all bullshiting. We have no mores about human enhancement because we've never needed them. Almost.

I have to wear glasses to see even as far as this screen. I'm fat, weak, forgetful, gullible, easily distracted, clumsy, unperceptive and immensely ignorant. One on one, a teenage child from almost any foraging band could make mincemeat of me. Fortunately, I confront such people only as part of my society, which is a cunning, attentive, scheming, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-devouring death-machine. In fact, I'm helping this terrifying beast implacably consume the remaining foraging societies right now, as part of my job, in ways I barely even realize, and could easily ignore for the rest of my life. Collectively, we're all about being better adapted than primates have any right to be. I can't think of a single civilization which has persistently held that enhancing social power is bad. (This is not to say that people haven't rejected innovations which would've enhanced overall social power, because they wouldn't have gotten to wield it.)

Now that we actually have the start of a clue how our bodies and minds work, we can see how to improve them. This ability will grow as we get more clueful, and we'll become both more effective and more efficient. (Athletes are fairly effective at making their bodies do admirable, unnatural things, but they have to spend their whole life working at reshaping their muscles and cerebellum.) There are lots of reasons for not wanting people to use efficient, biochemical means of adaptation, but most of the common ones are pretty bad. "Going against nature" is absurd coming from any member of an industrial society (see above). The argument that it would set off an arms race, where previously normal people get pushed to the bottom of the heap, has more merit. But consider the counter-scenario (implicit in Konner's article). Someone develops a pill to make people taller, or faster studies, or improve their muscle tone, or expand their chests, or keep their hair, or whatever. The anti-arms-race position is that hose who are currently short (slow-witted, flabby, flat, balding, etc.) should continue to suffer, lest those who are now normal lose their superior relative position!

Cthulhu, Ancient Astronaut

The Argus-eyed Mitchell Porter points me to Jason Colavito's argument, in From Cthulhu to Cloning, that Lovecraft was a decisive influence on the ancient-astronaut wing of crank archaeology, and so on such modern movements as the Raelians. Which is obvious, in retrospect: Lovecraft has lots of bogums which came to Earth from Someplace Else, and were worshipped by human beings --- some of them are hinted to have made human beings, more or less as a joke. And this was not a common theme before him; it would be surprising if the ancient-astronauters hadn't gotten the idea from Lovecraft. But Colavito lays out positive reasons to think this happened, including amusing textual evidence.

Colavito doesn't seem to remark on it, but it's interesting to note how the myth has changed as it moved from person to person, and especially how it's become more comforting and conformable to mainstream religion. In Lovecraft, the Old Ones aren't even malign --- they are so alien that our moral terms no more apply to them than to hurricanes or solar flares. In the first generation of ancient astronaut writers, say von Daniken, the motives of the aliens are ambiguous, or are mixed, but they have motives. When one descends to the generation of Rael, not only are the aliens basically benevolent, they're wrapped up in the Christ story. (One of the first things I wrote for the Internet argued that Cthulhu was in part a satire of Christ. I still buy that, though I hope I don't write like that any more.) That is, the story been transformed by passing through minds brought up on Christianity. I'm sure there are more Lovecraftian variants circulating, but they're obvious vastly less fit, i.e., less popular.

Of course, just because something is a fantasy out of Lovecraft doesn't mean it can't happen. Insane cults performing weird yet pointless experiments on human beings deserves to be on the
Dystopian Millenial Checklist, but it happens every few years now. Maybe the Old Ones are coming.

Rootless Cosmopolites of the World, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but the Idiocy of Rural Life!

I read Tyler Cowen's Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures over the weekend --- it's a small book with big margins --- and came away half-convinced. Cowan frames matters as an argument about what "globalization" --- never precisely defined --- does to cultural diversity, also never defined. He concludes that it reduces the difference between cultures, but increases the diversity within any one culture. Therefore the effective cultural diversity available to most people will actually increase. This is an attractive argument, but pending those definitions, I'm not altogether convinced --- it's not even clear that diversity across cultures is comparable to that within a given culture. This probably deserves a full review...

Chris Mooney had a good profile of Cowen in the Boston Globe, but that's retreated into the pay section of the paper's archive.

While we're on the subject of "creative destruction" (am I alone in thinking it should be retired for a few years?), does anyone know what made the idea so attractive to people in Vienna between the wars? Schumpeter coined that phrase, but Popper uses nearly identical ones when expounding the idea that knowledge grows through conjectures and refutations, and I'm sure I've seen similar things in Hayek. Was there some intellectual reason they would all have been attracted to this notion simultaneously? Or was it some kind of emotional reaction to the all-hell-breaking-loose atmosphere of the place and time?