Touch lightly Nature's sweet Guitar

Touch lightly Nature's sweet Guitar

Unless thou know'st the Tune

Or every Bird will point at thee

Because a Bard too soon—

—Emily Dickinson

Paradigm Shift Overload

Because I'm tired of biographies at the moment, I thought that I would instead write about how I see the current malaise that seems to be affecting people, especially in the U.S. The phrase "paradigm shift" was coined by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Although that's really just a fancy way of saying that scientific models change over time, you can extrapolate from it that most conceptual models generated by humans change over time, and sometimes they are completely replaced by new models. A simple example is the change from the geocentric model of the solar system to the heliocentric model. Scientists are constantly attempting to explain the universe, and occasionally one theory completely replaces another. Sometime theoretical fissures last for many decades, and there has been a dual model in physics where gravitational theory operates independently from quantum theory, and the two models seem incompatible. This state of affairs has been around since Einstein, and he was unable to reconcile the two systems. Other conceptual models in science can become problematic over time, and, as Sabine Hossenfelder laments in Lost in Math, some physicists have recently become so enraptured by mathematical aesthetics that they seem to have lost interest in experimental data, which is the basis for empirical models.

The reason why I'm bringing this up is that, as an observer of people, it is fairly obvious to me that a rapid increase in the number of public conceptual models employed by people in the developed world is causing a higher level of stress than that which occurred during earlier historical periods. Broadly speaking, humans have evolved to live in groups, and, historically, that required the members of each group to operate on similar ideologies and worldviews. When the world population was much lower, ideological conflict between groups was less common than it is today, because groups simply didn't run into each other as often as they do now. With a much larger world population, and with most religions evolving into various sects, individual countries may have conflicting ideologies both internally and externally. Probably that kind of conflict was rare two-thousand years ago in the individual lives of people, but it has gradually increased and accelerated in the last two-hundred years. In the preceding colonial period, Europeans simply traveled to North and South America and took whatever they wanted, and if the natives caused too much trouble, they just killed them. A similar attitude was adopted more recently in the American South, where slaves were considered personal property until after the Civil War. The gist is that, within a long-term historical context, people didn't recognize belief systems that differed from their own, and, even up until the late nineteenth century, it was often thought that indigenous populations were subhuman species.

What has changed since the end of the last century is a partial migration of group identities from regional cultures to social media cultures. There have been many negative consequences to this, and I'll discuss some of them here. Before the internet came into existence, people often had face-to-face encounters with people who lived in their areas, and this was the primary source of their worldviews and was supported by local news media and local governments. Unfortunately, as I've mentioned before, the internet has gradually taken on an important role by replacing traditional TV programming and news with material that can be produced anywhere, with content and ideas that did not originate locally. This phenomenon has been influencing local ideas for over twenty-five years now, and some of the perspectives that have arisen in particular locales do not represent the historical ideas of a region. One of the effects of this change has been the rise of various opinion leaders and politicians whose careers would have been impossible fifty years ago. The best example that I can think of is the disgrace and resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974 compared to the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024. In Nixon's case, indications of bad character alone forced him to resign or else be removed by impeachment. In Trump's case, although his behavior has been considerably worse than Nixon's – he is a convicted felon and a known rapist – he won reelection by a margin. In the culture of 1974, that could not have occurred.  

In recent years, many individuals have mobilized on social media for their personal benefit. They are now able to reach groups that were invisible a few years ago and seed them with propaganda that places them in the role of opinion leaders without having to face any consequences. They can convince people that the shooting of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax or that they are successful executives when they are not. If you think about it, it is truly astounding that Donald Trump was reelected after several members of his own administration, including Vice President Mike Pence, stated publicly that he was unfit for office. While there are probably false ideas floating around most of the time, there have never before been as many as there are now. If you look at this from the point of view of human cognition, many people are unable to navigate an environment like this on their own. Few people are able to form opinions independently from a group that they identify as their peers. Unfortunately, the people whom they think are their peers may just be internet hucksters these days. It is possible that new regulations will correct this in the coming years, but that is certainly unlikely to occur under the new Trump administration. Trump has been one of the most successful corrupt abusers of social media. 

When I see people viewing their cell phones in public constantly, they are starting to resemble addicts in need of a fix. It seems that some sort of therapy could be developed for these people, but I'm not sure that it exists now. I think that the core of the problem is that humans in general have not adapted to an environment in which numerous worldviews, which are often incompatible with each other, are presented to them. 

Diary

I had planned to begin commenting by now on a biography of Gustave Flaubert that I've been reading, but I just got sick of it and gave up. Several years ago I read a shorter biography, and I thought that this one might be more informative. However, I found the author's writing style too distracting with respect to the elements that are important to me. I like to focus on family background, upbringing, early influences, personality, interpersonal relationships and career. This book does include that information, but, unfortunately, because the author is an academic, he has to throw in the the history of Rouen, where Flaubert was born, and the history of French medicine, since Flaubert's father was a doctor. The author is an American academic, and this may work in American academic circles, but, as I've said, I generally dislike academic writing styles. As an alternative, I've ordered a biography of Ottoline Morrell, and will probably be reporting on that soon. I'm not especially interested in the Bloomsbury Group, with whom Morrell interacted, but she seems to qualify as an interesting person, in part because of her relationships with Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. She was a fringe bohemian – not common for a British aristocrat. We'll see how that goes.

I am sorely in need of reading material with winter closing in. Because of the weather, I usually don't hike as much at that time of year. At this point I don't have any special projects, because the house is in full working order, there are no rodents inhabiting it, and I'm not interested in improvements. Many suburban housewives would prefer a larger stove, a dishwasher and an island – but I'm not a suburban housewife. Some of the walls are white, but I have no reason to paint them. I could probably use a few area rugs, but I don't really need them. The house isn't exactly swarming with visitors. As far as the outside is concerned, even though the yard is surrounded by trees, I haven't had to remove any fallen trees or limbs, because it hasn't been as windy here as in Middlebury.

Another reason why I need distractions is that I don't really want to follow the news now. Consciously or unconsciously, it can be disturbing to see images of a free active criminal on a daily basis. In the news coverage, you can watch as he assembles his new criminal gang, and it is disconcerting to think about the chaos that may ensue. The news media are continuing their unprofessional neutrality on the behavior of the people in power. It seems possible that corporations, if not the billionaires themselves, will actually take over the federal government. That would include Congress, the Supreme Court and the President. The silver lining, though, is that Trump is such a poor executive that he is almost guaranteed to fail. He will still make horrendous mistakes even when his advisors recommend otherwise. So, as I said, it's only a matter of time before he disappears.

I've been thinking a little about the Republican and Democratic ideologies of recent years. Actually, neither were ever very good. The Republicans have long been about business and personal wealth, but they used to have a sense of noblesse oblige that has gradually disappeared. Republicans usually had fairly selfish outlooks, but those were held in check by their religious beliefs or a vague moral sense in their peer group. Now they seem almost exclusively selfish, to the extent that they don't even trust each other and are literally becoming a band of thieves. The Democratic tradition from FDR up to Jimmy Carter focused on helping the needy in the aftermath of the Great Depression. That all changed under Bill Clinton, when the presidency suddenly became business-friendly. Today, under neoliberalism, both parties favor business over people, and this partially explains why voters didn't get excited by Kamala Harris: she didn't represent a discernible populist change as far as low- and middle-income people were concerned. Other reasons for her failure were her sex, race and the relatively limited exposure to the public that she had compared to Donald Trump. Unfortunately, voters are really stupid and vote mainly on the basis of familiarity. Trump is proof that you can now become President if you have enough photo ops. He has inadvertently created a dangerous copycat phenomenon in which people say to themselves "God, if that idiot can become President, I could do it!" Unfortunately, this has caused a large cadre of slimy Machiavellians to cluster around him. However, I don't think that this situation will necessarily turn out as badly as you may think – eventually Trump will fail and lose his attractiveness to followers. How many people are emulating Joseph McCarthy today?

Diary

I've sort of been waiting for the election season to end. But now it looks as if we're going to be hearing about politics nonstop for several years. For me this is about as much fun as being forced to watch Roseanne reruns every night. That is a sitcom that I permanently gave up on after less than one episode. Since I'd prefer not to think about Donald Trump, I'll just make a few comments now so that I can move on to more interesting topics. 

At this point, since everything that Trump says is a form of hype, and his worldview is comparable to that of a character in a low-grade sitcom, it isn't clear where things will go from here. He doesn't have the slightest idea how to fix anything, but he always tries, unconvincingly, to appear knowledgeable and in control. The worst-case scenario might be his immediate transformation of the country into a fascist state, but I don't think that he is competent enough to pull that off. This is an ironic situation, because he won by convincing lower- and middle-income people that he will improve their economic prospects, and most of his career has been devoted to abusing ordinary workers either financially or sexually and then protecting himself by making litigation prohibitively expensive for them. If his father hadn't handed him $500 million, he would have been in jail decades ago. The evolution of his career consisted of starting as the front man for his father's unscrupulous real estate business and then becoming the front man for miscellaneous unscrupulous billionaires. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos do not want a federal government that increases their personal or business taxes, and they want as little regulation as possible for their corporations. If Trump accommodates them, the federal deficit will skyrocket, since he has promised his supporters lower taxes. He has also boxed himself into a corner on higher tariffs on foreign goods, since that would cause inflation. What Trump, like most crooked politicians, will probably do is raise the deficit as much as he can in the short term to create an illusion of prosperity and time his inflationary policies so that inflation remains relatively low until the end of his term. He is too stupid to do this on his own, but he has hordes of political lackeys dying to help him.

Besides Trump's avoidance of appropriate tax-based wealth redistribution that would benefit his voters, some of his appointees could be dangerous. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. could potentially open the floodgates to pandemics that kill millions of people. Ironically, if Trump's administration adopts a global-warming-denial policy, many of his supporters, who are located in the South, will face the direst consequences. Then you have to consider Trump's membership to the international kleptocracy, which may prompt him to withdraw aid to Ukraine, which is what his master, Vladimir Putin, would prefer. This could add a few thousand more deaths to Trump's account. As far as the Israel-Hamas war is concerned, that is completely over his head, and Trump has little incentive to get involved.

On a more positive note, it is worth mentioning that civil war is probably off the table. That is because the federal government is now under de facto corporate control, and civil wars are bad for business. That could hurt Tesla and Amazon sales!

As for me, I am staying in place. In my neighborhood I could pass for a Republican, and if things got really bad, I could put a bomb shelter in the back yard. 

In other news, though it is currently unseasonably warm, I'm all prepared for snow. I just made a rare family road trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This was my first road trip to a city in ten years. I thought that it was a good museum, but not as good as the ones, collectively, in Manhattan, London or Paris.