Christian Nationalism

Posted on September 16, 2022 by Luke Ford

Christianity wasn’t always wimpy. Nationalism and Christianity used to go together like ham and eggs.

I’ve been reading Peter Ackroyd’s 2012 book, Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors:

* For their part the kings were aware of all the advantages of the Roman faith. Christ was a more powerful support in war than Woden, and the Christian God offered more effective lordship than Thor. One hitherto pagan priest went to the trouble of destroying his own temple to prove the point. The Roman Church preferred the rule of strong kings and unified governments; it made the work of religious control much easier. The priests were the literate members of the kingdom and, at a time when legal documents and title deeds and proclamations of every kind were being published, they became the indispensable administrators of the state. Almost as soon as the first missionaries set foot on Thanet, the kings of the vicinity began to issue laws. ‘If anyone kills a man, he is to pay as ordinary wergild 100 shillings. If hair-pulling occurs, 50 sceattas [silver pennies] are to be paid as compensation.’
The kings were also happy to adopt a quasi-liturgical role as the embodiment of the people in public ritual. This was a way of enhancing authority. It was a way of enforcing respect and ensuring obedience. Kings and saints appear, in England, within the same period. And they are often the same thing. King Edwin and King Aethelbert are known to posterity as St Edwin and St Aethelbert. There were occasional reactions. King Sigeberht of Kent was killed by two of his kinsmen for the tiresome practice of forgiving his enemies.
Yet on the whole Christianity helped to bring unity to a kingdom. To adapt the old Catholic motto, a people who pray together stay together. The encouragement of moral discipline, by the priests, had a material effect upon the social discipline of the country. In the graveyard remains of great ladies in the seventh century, from Kent and Wessex, from Mercia and East Anglia, there is a much greater uniformity of ornament. The various regions of the country were slowly coming together. A single English Church seemed to require a single English nation as its stage. It was the time of the Christian conversion that turned all the people of the country, in the words of Pope Gregory the Great, into ‘Angelcynn, of English race’. Soon after a list was compiled of ‘the Saints of God who rest in Engla lond’. Bede wrote of ‘the Holy Church of the English nation’, implicitly excluding the Welsh and the Picts. England, as we understand it today, was created by the Christian Church.
So the Church was an essential aspect of government. That is why the boundaries of the dioceses followed the frontiers of the old tribal kingdoms. Worcester followed the same area as the district of the Hwicce, for example, and Hereford of the Magonsaetan. The lines of authority had been passed on. The diocesan synods were like parliaments, where laws were debated and where kinfolk could meet. Bishops were in any case aristocrats, members of the various royal families of the land. When the king called a Church synod in London, secular as well as spiritual lords would attend.
The king’s edicts invariably took an ecclesiastical tone. The archbishops, of York or of Canterbury, drew up the national law codes in consultation with the king. Only after the arrival of the Normans in England was there any formal separation between Church and State. In a similar spirit abbots and bishops were often part of the war-bands of the great magnates; one bishop of Sherborne, Heahmund, was killed in a bloody battle against northern invaders. He may have fulfilled the former role of the pagan high priest guiding companies of warriors.
There existed large organizations known as minsters, communities of priests and monks that, as the word suggests, ministered to their surrounding areas. Between the seventh and ninth centuries many hundreds of such foundations were planted so that every district had its minster. They represent the original expression of Christian England, with all the energy and power of first things. They acted as centres of patronage and learning; they maintained trade and agriculture. They organized the surrounding countryside with their constant demand for food rents. They were essentially royal courts, their abbots and abbesses an integral part of the aristocracy, where Christ was overlord.

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Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries in La Cienega Heights

Posted on September 16, 2022 by Luke Ford

Criminology professor Ana Munoz produced this 2015 ethno-graphic history of La Cienega Heights.

From Amazon: “Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries…explores the history of the area to explain how Cadillac-Corning became viewed by outsiders as a “violent neighborhood” and how the city’s first gang injunction—a restraining order aimed at alleged gang members—solidified this negative image. As a result, Muñiz shows, Cadillac-Corning and other sections became a test site for repressive practices that eventually spread to the rest of the city.”

Here are some highlights:

* Thank you, Adam and Christina at the Soros Justice Fellowships for your continued belief, concern, and support.

* During the first part of my research, from the summer of 2007 to the summer of 2010, I lived in the 18- square-block Cadillac-Corning neighborhood.

* I was struck by how residents, prosecutors, business owners, and police spent entire meetings vehemently complaining about Cadillac- Corning as well as by how they collaborated on repressive strategies. It was also apparent, however, that civilians and law enforcement often conflicted with one another on their assessment of
proper tactics in the neighborhood. In fact, the residents were often more militaristic than the police. Community group members were not representative of neighborhood residents. Their high levels of formal community
involvement made them unique. It is precisely this uniqueness and unrepresentativeness, however, that interested me. Community groups planned to shape the neighborhood in specific ways. They reached out to leaders in local government, the LAPD, the City Attorney’s Office and to business interests to control access to the neighborhood, resource distribution, the appearance of the area, and the behavior of residents.

* Cadillac-Corning is a predominantly working- class black and Latino immigrant neighborhood. It sits on the edge of the West Los Angeles police jurisdiction, which includes some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country.

* The neighborhood consists primarily of two- and three- story apartments built in the 1960s, punctuated
occasionally by a single- family home built in the 1920s. Most apartments are surrounded by wrought- iron fences, some with spikes pointing inward, that were installed in the 1970s and 1980s. The housing is dense, with narrow alleyways in between and behind apartment buildings. Parking along both sides of every street essentially creates one-lane roads throughout the neighborhood. According to the 2010 Census, 86% of all occupied housing in Cadillac-Corning was renter- occupied units. Sixteen percent of residents in Cadillac-Corning were white, 18% were black or African American, and 59% were Hispanic or Latino. The median household income for the 2000 Census, however, was $28,180. Thirty-two percent of families lived below the poverty level.

* Crossing the street to a surrounding neighborhood is an abrupt change from dense city life to an almost suburban space of trim lawns, ample parking, quiet sidewalks, and large houses. For example, in 2010, 66% of residents in the census tract to the north were white, 9.5% were black or African American, 8.5% were Asian, and 11% were Hispanic or Latino (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2010c). In the 2000 Census, the median household income was $45,641 with only 9% of families below poverty level (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2000d). The area to the north included more owner- occupied units and more whites than Cadillac-Corning. Furthermore, according to the 2000 Census, the inhabitants in the renter- occupied units to the north had higher incomes than those in the Cadillac-Corning census tract.

The tract to the immediate west, which includes Beverlywood Estates, had a drastically different composition than Cadillac-Corning, with 93% of all occupied housing owner- occupied (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2010d). The area to the west was 86% white, 1.5% black or African American, 5.5% Asian, and 4% Hispanic or Latino (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2010d). In 2000, this area had a median household income of $114,097, with only 2% of families below poverty level… Many of the residents in the surrounding neighborhoods are upperclass,
white, and Jewish.

* In 1997, Cadillac-Corning was a site for the SARA (Scanning, Analysis, Response, and Assessment) model. The SARA model is a problem- solving policing method in which officers collaborate with neighborhood prosecutors, landlords, and community groups to fight crime, blight, and quality- of- life offenses. The SARA method is now
widely used by police departments nationally.

* In 2003, a blue sign went up at the intersection of Cadillac Avenue and La Cienega Boulevard. The sign boasted the city seal of Los Angeles and the name “La Cienega Heights.” A dozen or so people in a community group voted to rename the neighborhood. They were hoping the new name would “rehabilitate” the neighborhood’s status. But the new veneer has not buried a reputation decades in the making. There are still whispers about Cadillac- Corning at homeowners association meetings in the surrounding wealthier, whiter neighborhoods. A thirty- something white man with dark- rimmed glasses confided to a fellow Beverlywood Homeowners Association member, “I drive Cadillac every day. My wife is terrified.” A young pantsuit-clad woman gasped in response, “Oh my god, I would be scared too.”

* The ideal of the single- family home was central to Los Angeles’s sprawling development (Fishman 1987, 156– 157). Los Angeles was the land where everyone could have a car and where everyone’s backyard was assaulted by year- round sunshine. The first houses were built in the Cadillac- Corning area in the 1920s. Through the 1930s and 1940s, architect and Bel- Air developer Elwain Steinkamp built Spanish- style houses and duplexes characterized by tile roofs, courtyards, and large glass windows (Oliver 1989). The shopping center where a Ross Dress for Less discount store and CVS drug store now stand was a dairy farm at the time. Bill, a Jewish man who lives just south of Cadillac- Corning, grew up in the area and graduated from Hamilton High School in 1966. He
recalled, “Most of the time I was there it was about 90 percent white and about 80 percent Jewish.”

* Property management companies began accepting Section 8 renters (people entitled to governmental low- income housing assistance). Rental prices decreased, and tenants stayed for shorter periods of time than they had previously. Lower- income renters with a shorter tenure may have been to whom Brenda, the longtime resident quoted in the beginning of this chapter, was referring when she said, “When the big management companies started to purchase the buildings and take them over, there just seemed to be a shift in the type of person that you would see living in the neighborhood.” The changes in housing were followed by the demographic change from a Jewish to African American residential area, a shift that was important in the development of Cadillac-
Corning’s reputation.

* During World War II, employment in the defense industry brought large numbers of African Americans to Los Angeles. The rapid expansion of the aerospace industry and the establishment of military bases opened up
new job opportunities. Until 1948, racially restrictive covenants to maintain “neighborhood stability” were common throughout the United States. African Americans were confined to the southern part of the city.

* After the war, Jews also migrated to Los Angeles in large numbers. Jewish veterans from across the nation purchased homes in Los Angeles. Despite being shut out of the WASP (white Anglo- Saxon Protestant) downtown elite by a wave of anti- Semitism in the 1920s, Jews were able to enter retail, Hollywood, and Westside real estate. Consequently, Jewish elites formed a Westside power center around Century City, just west of Cadillac- Corning (Leonard 2003).

Hamilton High School (“Hami High”) opened in 1931. In the mid 1960s, Hamilton and the surrounding neighborhoods were still overwhelmingly white, Jewish, and upper middle class. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) adopted an open- school transfer policy for integration purposes in 1954 (Turpin 1967b). The open- school transfer policy in theory allowed students to enroll in schools outside of their neighborhoods if space was available. It was not until the mid 1960s, however, that the LA School Board actually issued open-transfer permits to minority students.

* Hamilton was central to integration struggles on the Westside of Los Angeles. Jewish and black groups formed (sometime uneasy) coalitions to end school, housing, and employment segregation, white supremacist violence, and police brutality (Eley and Casstevens 1968; Lockard 1968; Greenberg 2006). In the wake of World War II, the Holocaust, and the Red Scare, black and Jewish organizations allied to challenge institutional anti- Semitism and antiblack racism (Collins 2006, 27). For example, when Proposition 14 passed in 1964, repealing the 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act, only Jewish and black communities voted overwhelmingly against the proposition (Leonard 2003, 48). The Rumford Fair Housing Act prohibited discrimination by property owners and landlords on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sex, marital status, physical handicap, or familial status.

On Friday, September 20, 1963, members of the Congress of Racial Equality, local clergy, and black and white students from Hamilton and other high schools began a hunger strike at a Los Angeles Board of Education meeting to protest a special report on de facto segregation. Many of the white students cited their Jewish background as motivation to participate in the protest. A 17- year- old female Hamilton student remarked, “I went to
temple first. Then I thought I would do something more for my religion and my country.”

* Increasing numbers of white parents sought transfers out of Hamilton, especially to the nearly all white Culver City High School. In 1968, 8% of Hamilton students were black (Faris 1970). By 1970, the number of black students reached 20% in a student body of 3,000 students. The same year, Hamilton’s white enrollment dropped 22% from the previous year (Los Angeles Times 1973d). By the 1971–1972 school year, black enrollment had reached 34%, and minority enrollment was at 43%. In 1972 black- white enrollment reached a 50- 50 split (Smith 1972). For the first time in district history, the Los Angeles Board of Education banned transfers of minority students into and white students out of Hamilton in order to “racially stabilize” the school (Greenwood 1972). Only two
other schools were included in the ban, middle schools that were also on the Westside.

* School segregation and housing segregation relied upon one another because housing prices were (and are) tied to the quality of public schooling (Haurin and Brasington 1996; Figlio and Lucas 2004; Kane, Staiger, and Riegg 2005). The transformation from a white to a black Hamilton facilitated a parallel change in Cadillac- Corning, and vice versa. The white migration from Hamilton was later reflected in Cadillac-Corning. As one white parent moving from the area warned, “When the school goes all black, then the neighborhood goes all black”.

* In 1960, Cadillac- Corning was 99.6% white. In 1970, Cadillac- Corning was still about 98% white. The 1980 Census tells a completely different story. Over the course of the 1970s, Cadillac- Corning had become 25% white, 60% black, and 9% “Persons of Spanish Origin” (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1980a). The census tract to the north was 72% white (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1980b). The area to the west, which includes Beverlywood Estates, was over 90% white (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1980c). The average household income (in 1979 dollars) in Cadillac- Corning was $15,802 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1980d). To the west, it was over $50,000, and 97% of housing units were owner occupied (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1980e, 1980f).

* In 1973, the Los Angeles Times issued a five- part special on Hamilton. The series portrayed Hamilton so negatively that white transfers surged after it was printed, and the Los Angeles Times then issued a statement
highlighting Hamilton’s positive attributes and encouraging white parents to keep their kids at the school…

* The first article was entitled “Boredom and Tension Replace ‘Golden Age.’” The special grieved for the downfall of a segregated Hamilton:

Once it was the very image of an All- American high school on the suburban fringes of Los Angeles. Now it is an urban high school, with all the pressures and troubles which accompany that change in status. Apartment houses and homes surround the rear and two sides of the 21- acre campus, while the Santa Monica Freeway and a somewhat weary commercial district of small stores and businesses are its close neighbors to the front.

Some veteran members of the faculty look yearningly back on that period and call it Hamilton’s golden age. Their memory is of classrooms full of parent- prodded, anxious- to- succeed students who did not question a teacher’s authority and who often bit off more work than they were even assigned. It was, says one teacher, “like an
exclusive prep school.”

After the Golden Age, white teachers, students, and administration accused black students of bringing violence, drugs, conflict, and militancy to school…

The Los Angeles Times articles detailed white students’ fears: “Whites talk in apprehensive tones about being jostled in the halls or not using the bathrooms because they might be beaten up or exhorted for loose change by blacks. . . . White students tend to shun school dances and athletic events at night, largely because they or
their parents fear violence at the hands of blacks. . . . There are white students who stay away from school dances because blacks laugh at the way they dance. One coach, lamenting the problems he has getting some white boys to go out for sports, thinks the youngsters are not only unsure they can measure up to blacks athletically, but are also fearful of them.”

Teachers struggled with educating a racially and socioeconomically diverse classroom. One Hamilton teacher commented, “It’s not unusual to have a kid who is the son of a doctor and another who is from a family of seven and does not know who his father is in the same class” (Los Angeles Times 1973c). Teachers complained that students were less willing to take commands than in the old days, and they exhibited more “attitude.”

In 1970, Hamilton qualified for the first time as an “inner-city school.” The new designation earned Hamilton resources for 13 additional teaching positions. Some of the positions were converted to hire armed security agents instead of educators (Los Angeles Times 1973b). Hamilton administrators started to lock the school’s gates during school hours, and LAPD cars regularly patrolled the perimeter. As black students entered Hamilton in greater numbers, the school became more militarized. Suspensions and arrests of black students rose steeply. Black students complained that they felt as if they were in a prison. A Los Angeles Times staff writer recounted the school’s daily disciplinary routine: “The signal that a security agent is needed is one bell, sounded throughout the school by a control device in the school’s main office. One hears it periodically during the day, and it is a somewhat ominous sound. Everyone knows there is a problem, and maybe trouble.”

* In 1978, LAUSD announced that no student could transfer to a school in which the student’s racial group already made up more than 50% of enrollment.

* By 1984, minorities made up 78% of the student population… Parents threatened to sue the school district unless they investigated the number of students who had illegally migrated out of Hamilton to schools more west and more white. Parents replied that they would just enroll their children in private school rather than return
to Hamilton.

* Jews moved west into the area to gain access to employment and housing. Forty years later, black families migrated west into Cadillac-Corning for the same reason. Currently, Cadillac- Corning is home to recent Latino immigrants in search of the same things— reasonably priced housing, proximity to employment, and quality education for their children. For generations, the neighborhood offered opportunities to groups rejected elsewhere in the city, acting as a narrow passageway into the affluent Westside.

* In the 1980s, Los Angeles street gangs were exploding into popular consciousness. Rock cocaine was about to become big business. During a 1987 court case involving Cadillac- Corning residents, an LAPD officer pleaded with the judge, “Can you imagine meeting 15 year old kids who have $5,000 cash in their back pocket? Or meeting a high school junior who has the keys to a brand new Mercedes?” (City of Los Angeles v. Playboy Gangster Crips 1987b). A probation officer in the Cadillac-Corning area reflected the frustration of the police and the city prosecutors with the juvenile system: “Try to rehabilitate some of them if you can. I tried at first to help some of the kids, but I soon learned that it was a wasted effort” (City of Los Angeles v. Playboy Gangster Crips 1987c). Law enforcement officials had been locking up black youth in Cadillac- Corning, but they argued it had not worked. Probation had not worked either. They wanted a more powerful tool.

Law enforcement would have their prayers answered in the form of a gang injunction. Injunctions are civil lawsuits against neighborhoods based on the claim that gang behavior is a nuisance to nongang-involved
residents. Injunctions then restrict the movements of those labeled gang members.

* If alleged gang members are listed on an injunction, they are not allowed to engage in behavior that is
otherwise legal, including— but not limited to— congregating in groups of two or more, standing in public for more than five minutes, wearing certain clothes, and making certain gestures. They can be arrested if they engage in any of these activities. Alleged gang members can be subject to enhanced sentences of 10 years upon conviction. Gang injunctions are civil orders. Consequently, unless the enjoined are on probation or parole, they are not entitled to public defenders if they choose to appeal the order.

* By 2003, 47% of African American men in Los Angeles County between the ages of 21 and 24 were on the Los Angeles County CalGang Database.

* It is perhaps surprising that Los Angeles City’s first gang injunction was implemented in Cadillac- Corning. It was not the area with the most murders or assaults. Cadillac-Corning, however, was a threat to the boundaries of white, middle- and upper- class areas. Part of the reason Cadillac-Corning was targeted for the injunction is that it threatened geographic racial and class separation and control. Despite the sanitization of race in gang injunction policy, fear of black men and stereotypes about black families were central to the rationale for the injunction. Race is central in the evidence that was presented to attain the injunction. The injunction was meticulously designed to control the movement of black youth by criminalizing activities and behavior that is unremarkable and legal in other jurisdictions. Thus, the injunction shored up racial boundaries.

* In the 1980s, John, a white male, was a city prosecutor assigned to the West Los Angeles area. As we sat in his office on a sunny spring morning over 20 years later, he remembered asking West LAPD officers at the time
what the worst area in the division was. They took him to the corner of Cadillac Avenue and Corning Street. The neighborhood gained its name from the intersection that was infamous among West LAPD officers. In an interview, an LAPD Officer who worked Cadillac-Corning explained, “It was just the two major streets where all the activity was. It was where all the problems were occurring. Officers knew that’s where you go when you want to pick up some crimes.”

* LAPD officer: “It’s funny. If you walked or drove through RD 869 [Cadillac-Corning], you’d think the neighborhood just has young black males by the looks of who dares to walk outside.” In court testimony, he characterized black gangs as far more threatening than Latino gangs:

“They don’t even do the things that you’ll sometimes see the Mexican gangs do, like play football or have a picnic. They have only one purpose in life . . . to profit from crime. . . . Unlike the Mexican gangs where there is a very strict hierarchy and strict decisions as to who will commit a crime, in the black gangs there is less respect for that hierarchy and all the players are scrambling to be the number one guy.” (City of Los Angeles v. Playboy Gangster Crips 1987d)

The greater comfort with Latinos extended beyond gangs into stereotypes about family values, competence, and morality. In an interview, John argued that the police initially ignored black gangs based on assumptions about family structure:

“Hispanic gangs came from families with very strong family values. You’re not supposed to say it but it was real clear that in the black culture they didn’t have that kind of value system that Hispanic families had. And it carried over into the gangs. . . . A lot of times in the early, in the mid- eighties, the feeling was as bad as it gets, and you could call this maybe prejudice in a way, but the black gangs will never get it together. It was like, yeah, Hispanic gangs sold more pot. Black gangs are more ruthless, at the time they were at least, and selling, you know, and selling crack cocaine but they’re not organized. You know, one person will kill another one in a second. And that was true, there was only so much respect for their hierarchy. Law enforcement kind of rested on their laurels thinking they will never get to be really organized because we see in the black community they can’t pull their families together.”

* Early on, authorities saw the PBGs and black gangs generally as a problem. They did not, however, expect black gangs to be able to run an organized drug operation. Regarding the difference between the Italian Mafia, the Brown Shirts of Nazi Germany and black gangs, an officer testified, “All that’s is [sic] missing is the intelligent gang member who has a head on his shoulders” According to law enforcement, black gangs were violent, “ruthless,” savagely aggressive, immoral, and out of control. But they supposedly did not have the smarts that Italian- American gangsters or German Nazis possessed.

Law enforcement quickly realized their mistaken assumption about social disorganization as they tried unsuccessfully to stop the PBG’s flourishing drug trade.

* A Los Angeles Times article, entitled, “Drug- Peddling Street Gang Holds Neighborhood in Fear” mentioned only two murders. One was the murder of a 14- year- old, who the report emphasized was a gang member. The other murder covered was that of the white youth on the motorcycle: “Drug buyers have also been robbed, raped or gunned down, authorities say. In late 1986, a 16-year-old involved in a business misunderstanding with a Playboy Gangster drug dealer was killed by a lookout who, upon receiving a signal, stepped out of an apartment building and fired a gun as the youth drove off on his motorcycle”.

* For years, wealthier whites from nearby neighborhoods had enjoyed Cadillac-Corning as a convenient drug market. However, Cadillac- Corning garnered attention after several white drug patrons were robbed and one
was murdered.

* John mentioned another success to me, regarding property values: “The Realtors were— and by the way, this was at a point when real estate in the city was the highest ever— and in Corning nobody could buy a house or sell a house. It was like the way the whole country is now. Then Realtors were saying, ‘Oh, we’re seeing a change. Property values are going up and the street is looking better.’”

* One community group member commented, “I have been in the neighborhood for three years. I own two buildings. I believe that it is up to landlords to get rid of the neighborhood’s crime problem. Landlords need to raise rents and renovate their buildings to get rid of the riffraff. If any other landlords are interested, talk to me after the meeting about getting together. Thank you.” The predominantly white, home-owning group of residents was also concerned about the neighborhood’s black youth. “They have no respect for cars or anything else. They will not
move for cars that come into the intersection. The other day, a car clipped one of the kids. The driver was black, the kid on the skateboard was also black, so they laughed it off. I fear that if the driver had been another color it would not have been settled so easily.”

* Hamilton High School students are also a reliable topic. Today, Hamilton is essentially a two- track school. The campus consists of the “original school” and two magnets. The two magnets have larger percentages of white students, higher test scores, and better college attendance rates than the predominantly black and Latino original school.

* The majority of the firepower for the 64-square- mile West Division of the LAPD is concentrated within the boundaries of Cadillac- Corning. The local council office assigns a field deputy to drive though the streets and
alleyways of the neighborhood daily to address graffiti. Local media reinforces the stigmatization of the neighborhood by referring to Cadillac-Corning as a “tough pocket” that the good forces of gentrification have
not been able to “revitalize”.

* Throughout the early and mid-20th century, police in American cities strove to keep their distance from the neighborhoods they policed (Garland 2001). Detachment was not only intended as an antidote to rampant corruption but also as a way to shield departments from public scrutiny. Professionalization gave the appearance that policing could be scientifically efficient and apolitical (Lyons 1999). However, social unrest, high-profile cases of police brutality, and consistently high crime rates were a few factors that sparked misgivings about professionalized policing in the 1970s.

Two prominent models that emerged, broken windows policing and community policing, entail distinct roles for community members and law enforcement. Community policing involves cooperation between police and residents in the development of crime prevention strategies. Broken windows policing places emphasis on order maintenance by officers with community members in a supporting role. Despite the traditional theoretical differences in the two paradigms, in practice many urban police forces implement both simultaneously.

* The practice of broken windows policing relies on a racial ideology that connects the dark/foreign other to
unpredictable chaos and criminality. The disorderly people targeted by police are overwhelmingly lower-class, black, and Latino, who are using public space.

* The shoring up of threatened lines developed Cadillac-Corning as a sort of borderland space. Borderlands are places of untamed and destabilizing ambiguity. They are geopolitical spaces in flux. There is a lot at stake, which is why community groups, police, and policy makers dedicate so much time and resources to those spaces. They tried to turn upheaval into stasis and reestablish smudged lines.

* The racist policies and practices that increased the militarization of Hamilton High School and Cadillac- Corning ended up stigmatizing the neighborhood.

* While police had a monopoly on authoritative force, wealthy residents had political connections and
resources that even the police did not.

* I want people to oppose LA’s treatment of youth because they feel it viscerally and ethically, because the knowledge enters them and becomes entwined in their insides— not because investigating murders of youth or locking them up is getting too costly.

Posted in Crime, Los Angeles | Comments Off on Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries in La Cienega Heights

The Decline and Fall of the Russian and Chinese Empires (9-16-22)

Posted on September 16, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:10 I’d like to teach the world to sing but I wound up here
02:00 The elites browbeat you to follow rules they ignore
13:00 Martha’s Vineyard doesn’t mess around getting rid of brown people to a Republican city
28:00 Christian nationalism
42:20 Putin’s tactical nukes ‘won’t be much use’ in Ukraine
46:20 The Collapse of Empires
50:00 China’s Economy Is Not Overtaking
52:00 America Is Not Ready for a War With China
59:50 The sins of our mother – the danger of believing in demons
1:10:00 Why Aren’t You Voting in Your Financial Self-Interest?
1:17:30 Talking to Our Selves: Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency

Posted in America | Comments Off on The Decline and Fall of the Russian and Chinese Empires (9-16-22)

I’d like to build the world a home (9-15-22)

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:25 Christianity is not a death warrant
3:10 Republican governors send illegal aliens to Democratic cities
54:20 Christopher Anderson says liberals dislike latinos
56:45 Ken Brown analyzes the argument that China and Russia will win because they are homogenous
1:03:00 An end to conquest
1:06:30 Andy Nowicki’s heartfelt please for the ADL to take Colin Liddell off their hate list
1:09:00 Putin is using the ‘Syrian Playbook’ to break the will of Ukraine
1:19:45 Dooovid joins to discuss friendship

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Talking to Our Selves: Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency

Posted on September 14, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2015 book by my favorite moral philosopher — John M. Doris:

In 1957, a marketing consultant named James Vicary reported huge sales increases at a New Jersey theater concession. All one need do, Vicary said, was intermittently flash Eat Popcorn and Drink Coca Cola on screen for 1/3000th of a second, and unsuspecting moviegoers ate more popcorn and drank more Coke. Before long, subliminal advertising was a staple of Cold War paranoia. Exposés like Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders and Wilson Brian Keys Subliminal Seduction glutted bookstores, while The New Yorker pronounced Packard’s opus an “authoritative and frightening report on how manufacturers, fundraisers and politicians are attempting to turn the American mind into a kind of catatonic dough that will buy, give or vote at their command.” Pretty creepy stuff, this catatonic dough: movie night as Night of the Living Noshers, with film buffs cast as junk food zombies.
The hysteria hadn’t to do with over-indulgence in sugar, salt, and grease, about which Americans have little compunction. What was sinister, according to alarmists, was that victims of subliminal sales techniques were made to do things; people’s desires were manipulated without their knowledge or consent. Clearly, something sneaky was going on: in 1974, federal regulators stepped in, ruling subliminal advertising deceptive, and “inconsistent with the obligations” of licensed broadcasters.
Turns out the alarmists were unduly alarmed: after decades of research, scientific evidence for the effectiveness of subliminal advertising remains in short supply (Pratkanis and Greenwald 1988; Dijksterhuis et al 2005). By 1962, Vicary had recanted, admitting that the Coke and popcorn “study” was a publicity ploy for his marketing business. Near enough, he was never heard from again.
Not everyone thinks it’s safe to go back in the theater. Surveys indicate that a majority of Americans have heard of subliminal advertising, and a majority of these believe it works (Rogers and Smith 1993). Books like The Secret Sales Pitch (Bullock 2004) and Subliminal Persuasion (Lakhani 2009) are still getting written; a celebratory 50th anniversary edition of The Hidden Persuaders appeared in 2007.

* The philosophy at issue subscribes to reflectivism, a doctrine according to which the exercise of human agency consists in judgment and behavior ordered by self-conscious reflection about what to think and do. Typically, this doctrine is associated with a corollary: the exercise of human agency requires accurate reflection. In an exercise of agency, as construed by reflectivism, a person correctly divines the beliefs, desires, and other psychological states relevant to her decision, makes her decision in light of these states (sometimes called her reasons), and acts accordingly.

* However attractive, this assumption is compromised by decades of research in the social, cognitive, and behavioral sciences. Empirical research suggests that reflection appears in a limited portion of human conduct; very often, behavior is altogether thoughtless, and quite unconstrained by the deliverances of reflection. And on those instances when people do reflect, there is little warrant for confidence that these reflections are informed by accurate self-awareness.

* At least in the cultures that are home to the Western philosophical tradition, there is an entrenched practice of people treating one another as morally responsible agents, and although this practice is sometimes egregiously infelicitous in its particulars, I’m convinced it is tolerably functional—in any event, considerably more functional than going without it. On my view, the trouble is not so much with the practice, but with extant attempts to provide theoretical support for the practice: reflectivist understandings of agency have prevented philosophers from understanding the ways in which human beings do, in fact, function as agents.
I envisage an alternative theory. The theory is anti-reflectivist: it does not require reflection and accurate self-awareness for the exercise of agency. The theory is valuational it locates the exercise of agency in the expression of a person’s values. The theory is collaborativist: it understands individual exercises of agency as products of social interaction. The theory is pluralist: it allows that a diversity of processes may effect the exercise of agency.

* The history of ideas in the twentieth century was a history of disintegration: physics rendered nature into infinitesimal particles, anthropology sundered humanity into incommensurable cultures, politics divided nations into irreconcilable factions, and literary theorists deconstructed what little remained.

* the history of mind in modernity (and post-modernity) is the history of a fragmented psyche

* cognitive performance is remarkably—not to say ridiculously—context-specific (Olin and Doris 2014): to mention a couple of representative findings, people may be good at estimating distances on lawns but not in hallways (Lappin et al. 2006), and better able to detect erroneous statements written in difficult fonts than in fonts that are easily read

* Just as success at one cognitive endeavor does not guarantee success in another, the attainment of ordinary (or even extraordinary) decency in one regard does not guarantee decency in others. People exhibit astonishing susceptibility to social and material influence, even when that influence is employed in the service of flagrant inhumanity, and the perpetrators of atrocity, more often than not, are disquietingly like the rest of us (Doris 2002: 53-8; Doris and Murphy 2007). As Solzhenitsyn learned in the Gulag, the line dividing good and evil crosses every human heart.

* Human beings are profoundly social organisms who do everything together, from making love to making war. It may seem like philosophers fully appreciate this obvious observation: that humans are, in Aristotle’s words, zoa politika, is a staple of introductory philosophy classes. Yet much Western philosophy bears the imprint of individualism, the supposition that people reason best asocially, doors closed and curtains drawn, as in the gripping fiction of Descartes’ Meditations.

* There’s also virtual sociality, where a solitary person can be said to function socially. The disapproving gaze of the “imagined other” characterizing shame is familiar in moral philosophy, but examples abound, such as the private, but socially engaged, activity of journal writing (time was, Dear Diary received a lot of letters).

* even solitary behavior is often governed by cultural norms.

* A gynecologist friend of mine reports that a surprising number of her patients avow the following constellation of inclination and disinclination: I want to have intercourse—I do not want to use contraception—I do not want to have a baby.

* America where the rugged individualist is celebrated, the conformist is castigated, and the child is admonished about succumbing to “peer pressure.”

* autistic children present atypically when asked to report their moral reasoning. In one study (cited in Doris and Nichols 2012: 432-3), neurotypical and autistic children (ages 5-9 years) were asked:
“Why was it wrong for Johnny to hit Billy?”
Neurotypical children gave the expected sorts of answers, exhibiting culturally appropriate instances of moral reasoning:
“Because it hurt Billy.”
Autistic children, however, often produced quite inappropriate responses:
“I was on an escalator once.”
This phenomenon is well known from clinical studies in the area: autistic children often produce conversational non-sequiturs, and present other evidence of social disconnection, such as presentation of strangely inappropriate gifts (cf. Dawson and Fernald 1987: 496-7). Evidently, impairments in sociality are associated with impairments in moral reasoning.

* Consider Narcissistic Personality Disorder, where afflicted individuals present with self-importance and feelings of entitlement (American Psychiatric Association 2000: 715).4 Unfortunately, the narcissist’s affliction is an affliction on those around him: individuals with Narcissistic Personality Disorder may believe they are exempt from social norms, such as waiting their turn in line. One patient, “Brian,” was compelled into therapy after a series of legal problems resulting “from his belief that rules and laws for other people didn’t apply to him” (Schwartzberg 2000: 106-88). Matters came to a head when Brian arrived at the airport for a trip minutes before his scheduled departure and discovered that his seat had been reassigned. Outraged, he claimed that his luggage was aboard the plane with a bomb in it, which did not endear him to authorities. Apparently, Brian was unable to grasp the fact that his flight was not literally his flight; the narcissist behaves, as Mom used to say, like the world revolves around him.

* If isolation is implicated in psychopathology, it may fairly be concluded that sociality is required to sustain normal adult reasoning, it is not merely a developmental prerequisite.

* Substantial cognitive achievement, such as scientific and technological discovery, is very often social achievement. In the first instance, knowledge is cumulative: the present generation learns from the previous generation, and the steam engine gives way to internal combustion, which in turn (one prays) gives way to some more sustainable technology. In the second instance, knowledge is specialized, especially in cases of large-scale industrial productions: it takes a lot of engineers, in a lot of fields, to make a skyscraper stand, or an airliner fly. Moreover, a diversity of researchers employing a range of methodologies facilitates scientific progress, because a larger percentage of the empirical and theoretical space is thereby investigated, increasing the likelihood of identifying undersubscribed, but high pay-off, research programs…

* people tend to believe propositions they entertain…

* people may reason better when a diverse set of views is represented across the population of intellectual contestants (Zamzow and Nichols 2009: 377-9). In addition to the aggregate benefits of such “checks and.balances,” the agonistic character of intellectual discourse in a diverse population of motivated reasoners may provoke individual contestants to reason more compellingly (if not more impartially) while they advocate for their views. As you strive for fame and fortune, you’re motivated to maintain your own theory and repudiate opposing theories, so you’re likely pretty good at producing support for your view and objections to your opponent’s.

* Specifically moral reasoning is also socially embedded. The idea is not that solitary individuals are somehow bereft of moral views; it’s that people are most likely to reason about those views when justifying themselves to others.

* In the early days of American desegregation, it was hoped that putting African American and white children in the same place would effect increased racial harmony. After all, one of the staple results in social psychology is that familiarity facilitates attraction (e.g. Grush 1976; Matlin 1970; Zajonc 1968). What happened instead was the formation of ethnic in-groups, which eventuated in in-group/out-group conflict…

* Group interactions are likely to be emotionally freighted, in ways both dramatic and mundane, and many familiar emotions like anger, guilt, and sympathy are characteristically triggered by social cues: it’s the tone of your colleague debasing a peer that makes you angry, it’s your friend’s stunned look that makes you feel guilty for slighting him, and it’s the tears running down a child’s face that triggers your sympathy. While such processes may follow conscious pathways, they needn’t. A celebrated example is “emotional contagion,” where people unconsciously mirror the affective states of those around them (Hatfield et al 1994): your good spirits may give me a lift without my realizing it, and my foul mood may have the opposite effect on you.

* moral emotions like sympathy and guilt tend to improve moral behavior, and the moral emotions are emotions that are especially likely to be triggered in a social context.

* people seek out psychotherapy in hopes of making their lives go better, so this active process has a more agential appearance than the capitulations just described. Of course, people often enter therapy in response to something like duress: a stalled career, a strife-torn marriage, or stacks of unpaid bills. But these incentives are not obviously inimical to agency. On the contrary, people trying to change their lives for the better is an excellent place to look for agency. Psychotherapy can help effect this change. Numerous outcome studies, using both clinician assessment and client self-report, indicate that talk therapy works; it can ameliorate various adverse psychological conditions, such as depression and anxiety…

* One clinical study evaluated a short course of cognitive therapy designed to help patients increase their awareness of emotions, modify dysfunctional beliefs, and enhance communication; twelve months after initiation of treatment, the severity of patients’ symptoms, compared to controls, was rated as significantly reduced by independent evaluators and by the patients themselves, and average health care expenditures were reduced by more than a third…

* It seems relatively uncontroversial to infer that the values at issue here—reducing pain, disability, and health care expenses— are values worth promoting, and are values held by the patients themselves; indeed, to assert the opposite would be controversial. Moreover, the patients work to realize their values. Is there good reason to deny them agency, even if they did not implement their values as completely independent individuals?
Uncertainties remain. Therapists’ theoretical predilections have relatively little to do with client outcomes, and the means by which therapy works are imperfectly understood. However, there seems to be strong evidence for the following: a “positive alliance” between therapist and client is associated with positive outcomes…

* To the collaborativist, this is an unsurprising finding: sociality— of the right sort—does people good. If it’s correct to say that the good in question is a good the people in question value, we’ve got a place to look for agency: sociality may facilitate agency in circumstances where people are unable to do so on their own.
Moreover, the theoretical indeterminacy of psychotherapy is congenial to the critic of reflectivism. If the explicit theoretical rubric under which therapy is conducted is not a critical determinant of therapeutic outcomes, it’s tempting to say that accurate reflection is not required for clinical success: whether you think your troubles are due your relationship with your mother or your father may not matter much, so long as you’ve a good relationship with your therapist. If we also conclude, as I’ve just concluded, that therapy can facilitate agency, we’ve here a case where agency is achieved without accurate self- awareness. In this instance, collaborativism and anti-reflectivism may travel together.

* If I form a vague intention to exercise more, I may never drag my lazy butt from the couch, but if I specify a concrete plan to run the Carolina North Trail, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5pm, then quitting time on Tuesdays and Thursdays may stimulate thoughts of my lumbering along the trail, which may in turn facilitate the planned-on lumbering. Evidence suggests that this approach may be effective for exercise (Milne et al 2002:173) and a variety of other health interventions: in one study, people missed fewer doses of a vitamin if they committed to when and where they would take it each day (Sheeran and Orbell 1999: 359, 364), in another, women who committed to location and time were more than four times as likely to perform a breast self- examination in the following month (Orbell et al 1997: 950). Here, reflection supports self-direction, not as deliberation proximate to action, but as prior strategizing about implementation: think about your plan, ahd you won’t have to think about your performance…

* Cognitive capacity is limited, so people can’t focus on everything equally: attention to one thing may require inattention to another.

Thinking may be the most impressive thing humans do, but it’s not the only thing humans do, and given finite biological resources, what’s spent on the brain can’t be spent on muscle, blood, and bone (Wrangham 2009: 105-27). Moreover, a cognitive system less prone to omissions might be, for many problems, an over-engineered system. Processing power is a mixed blessing, an observation underscored by Luria’s (1987: 159) celebrated mnemonist, whose prodigious memory so saturated his mind with detail that he experienced life “as though through a haze.” One might suspect something similar of self-awareness. Attending to what’s within your head may prevent you from attending to what’s without; lose yourself in your thoughts, get lost on the way to the store.

* Even if foods only seem to have tastes, there are systematic patterns of seemings that help animals get around in the world: bitter-seeming things are more likely to be poisonous, sweet-seeming things are more likely to be calorie rich, and so on (Glendinning 1994; Kreps 2009). The appearances are invaluable, though not infallible, signals.

* It’s probable that some illusions of self, namely, positive illusions of self, are implicated in well-being (Taylor and Brown 1988, 1994; cf. Lazarus 1983). For example, individuals with greater tendencies to self-enhancement may be more resilient in the face of traumatic events, as has been found with survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Bonanno et al. 2005). Nevertheless, the thesis that selfenhancement is generally advantageous has drawn heated criticism (Badhwar 2008; Block and Colvin 1994; Colvin and Block 1994; Kurt and Paulhus 2008). The connection between surplus positivity and happiness is hardly transparent: excessive optimism about one’s finances might cause one to under-save, and excessive optimism about one’s health might cause one to under-insure…

* Evidence indicates that supportive social relationships promote well-being, and in some cultures, marriage is a primary context for such relationships, so one may infer that marriage promotes well-being for members of these cultures. Numerous studies point to a “marriage protection” effect where marriage is causally implicated in lower mortality rates, perhaps especially for men (Johnson et al 2000; Kolip 2005; Lynch 1979; Wilson and Oswald 2005). In America, the happily married may enjoy lower rates of unemployment (Forthofer et al 1996) and better health (DeLongis et al 1988; Kiecolt-Glaser and Newton 2001), while dissolution of marriage is associated with depression and loneliness, even when the union in question was an unhappy one (Price and McKenry 1988; Weiss 1976). In Germany, widows were found to be more depressed than non-widowed comparison groups (Stroebe et al 1996), and German women’s life satisfaction was observed to decline immediately before and after the death of a spouse (Lucas et al 2003:534). Contra Plato’s Phaedrus, it’s not love that’s madness, but want of love: a review of mental hospital admissions found them highest in the separated and divorced, lowest in the married, with singletons in the middle (Bloom et al 1978: 869; cf. Horwitz et al 1996). Although the nature of the causal relationship is uncertain (and likely bidirectional), it seems safe to surmise that relationships like marriage support well-being.

In turn, marriages are associated with illusion. According to one group of marital researchers, the presence of positive illusions is “nearly universal” among “satisfied spouses” (Fowers et al 2001: 96). In an early study by Edmonds (1967: 684-6), it was found that married people tended to strongly agree with sentences such as “If my mate has any faults I am not aware of them.”

* Maybe people are aware of the daunting odds, but suppose they’ll occupy the lucky half. It’s also possible that people clearly appreciate that the difficulty applies to them, but decide to go forward anyway; as the saying goes, it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved (for some loves, anyway). If so, why doesn’t everyone get prenuptial agreements? It’s not easy to find records of how many do (perhaps because the practice is largely restricted to the wealthy), but given the state of the divorce courts, it’s safe to say that lots don’t. With the advantages prenups offer in the rather likely event that unhappy push comes to unhappy shove, forgoing one looks like irrational optimism, not so different from neglecting to save or insure. On the other hand, maybe people fear that prenups sour marriages with defeatism, and decide the advantages of planning for the worst are not worth the risk of relationship damage; as one divorce mediator put it, the “premises of prenuptial agreements are logically contradictory to the premises of modern marriage” (Margulies 2003: 426). But if this is what people believe, they take the point I want to make: relationships benefit from positivity exceeding a sober assessment of the probabilities.

* There’s evidence that people simultaneously maintain inflated and accurate views of their romantic partner’s attractiveness; they think their partners are more attractive than their partner’s friends and their partners themselves do, but are aware of this discrepancy, and are able to fairly accurately report their partner’s reputation for attractiveness (Solomon and Vazire 2014). Close relationships, like other human endeavors, are characterized by a mixture of awareness and ignorance.

* Authenticity has its place, but that’s not every place.

* Unrealistic positivity has been repeatedly implicated in good health outcomes (Taylor et al 2003), and it appears that this positivity extends to perceptions of control. In a study of cancer patients, perceptions of control were negatively associated with maladjustment; patients with higher perceptions of control were less likely to experience anxiety and depression…

* In relationships, as with illness, people are often motivationally challenged: Yve had enough. Ym out of gas. I can t go on. Here, I’m willing to speculate, sturdy perceptions of control have motivational utility: if you don’t think marital outcomes are responsive to effort, how do you get yourself to undertake the effort? By supporting value-relevant motives, illusions of control may facilitate behavior that helps to realize values. If so, we’ve identified a pathway whereby self-ignorance supports, rather than impairs, agency. This pathway is indirect: falsely believing I can directly influence something may effect efforts eventuating in behaviors or circumstances that influence the something in question. The fact is the child of the fiction.

* While it may be that people are genuinely clueless about the causes of their romantic commitments, I don’t think they often proclaim their ignorance. Coupled readers might try an informal experiment: go home and announce to your partner, “You know babe, I have no idea, I mean no idea, why I’m with you.”

* This sounds like saying you become your bullshit. Yes—but your bullshit had better become you. Fictive biography may facilitate agency, but living by fantasy isn’t the formula for agency; self-conceptions that are completely uncorrelated with ability may impede* the expression of values.

* Self-ignorance often functions to effect self-direction, and its absence can be an impediment to agency: a complete and accurate understanding of your relationship, or your health, might prevent you from making them all you want them to be.

* On one view, self- deception is adaptive because it allows people to deceive others with less “cognitive load” than conscious deception; to put it roughly, pretense burns more energy than sincerity, so the self-deceived deceiver is the more efficient deceiver…

* reasoning capacities evolved not so much to discover the facts—probably lots of considerably less fancy ways to do that—but to persuade conspecifics [members of the same species].

* Biographies are often structured by norms governing social roles, and this climate of expectation facilitates, through channels both conscious and unconscious, role-appropriate behavior.4 When someone presents herself as a gourmet she restricts her conduct; the professed gourmet risks censure by her acquaintances (or her self) if she exhibits behavior, like serving bargain wine at an important dinner, which confounds her self-appointed role. Some things fit the gourmet…

* many romantically involved couples indulge in telling and retelling the story of their beginnings. The point of these tellings and retellings, it seems to me, is not to discover an accurate history; it is to create a shared history. For American couples, there’s research indicating that something like the famous “we knew right away” chronicle associated with “love at first sight” may be the dominant form (McCollum 2002). My informal impression is that, in addition to “we knew right away,” there’s a second major form, “we hated each other.”

* In the two archetypal forms, love stories seem to share a theme: they celebrate strong feelings, and therefore help create and sustain emotional connections. With the mutual formation and endorsement of romantic biographies, lovers become couples. In contrast, a story like, “I wasn’t much drawn to your father, but I hadn’t been on a date in 17 months,” doesn’t seem to have the requisite bounce. (Note to reader: keep stories like that to yourself, even if—especially if—true.) Moreover, sharing idealizations can help make them reality: studies of dating couples suggest that positive illusions can be “self-fulfilling prophecies,” where idealized partners internalize their partners’ idealizations, and may thereby act in ways more closely approximating the ideal (Murray et al 1996: 1170; 2003; cf. Drigotas et al 1999). The endearment “you make me a better person,” sounds cheesy, but there you are.
Human beings order their lives together by jointly developing rationalizations, and the central requirement for these rationalizations is not accuracy, but accord: friends may jointly recall a big night on the town as bigger than their bar tabs report, neighbors may jointly recall a harsh winter as harsher than the meteorological record shows, and colleagues may jointly recall a dull performance by a professional rival as duller than unbiased assessment suggests. We’ve laughed and cried together, such stories say, and this commonality helps provide the foundation for together going forward.

* having a good conversation is typically more important—‘far more important—than conversing in facts.

* For agency, the key word is participant While it’s true that people are subject to social influences that constrain their self-understandings, they are not passive entities in these negotiations, the outcome of which is influenced by whatever values each party brings to the table. This is not to deny that inequalities of power may impede the exercise of agency; that’s one thing that makes inequalities of power bad. But in other instances, the opposite is true: relationships help people express their values in their lives, as they do in the right sort of friendships, romantic involvements, and institutions. Agency requires not freedom from influence, but mutual influence.

* In August 1911, an emaciated man was found at a stockyard near Oroville, California, apparently having walked out of the rugged canyon land fronting Mount Lassen and the Sierra Nevada. It was eventually determined that he was from a group anthropologists call Yahi, one of the native cultures decimated by European settlers in California. Ishi, as he came to be known, was the last of his people.

Ishi’s story became widely known through Theodora Kroeber’s bestselling memoir, Ishi in Two Worlds (2002/1961). Theodora was the widow of Alfred Kroeber, a distinguished Berkeley anthropologist who arranged for Ishi to reside at the University’s San Francisco anthropology museum, where he lived from shortly after his appearance in the stockyard until his death from tuberculosis some four and a half years later.

At first contact with Spanish explorers in 1542, there may have been around 300,000 Native Californians scattered in hundreds of groups across the region; while native peoples mounted some lethal resistance, the predations of Spanish colonization and the Gold Rush left perhaps 20,000 alive at the ninteenth century’s end (Starn 2004: 24-5, 65; cf. Thornton 1987: 25-32, 162). Lest enormity be lost in numbers, understand that Native Californians were literally hunted; some California towns offered 5 dollars per Native scalp..

Thus Ishi, who was probably born around 1860, was born to a culture in crisis (Kroeber 2002/1961: 68). The Yahi likely never numbered more than a few hundred, and by 1908 only four remained, concealed by remote backcountry. When their last encampment, Wowunupo Mu Tetna (Grizzly Bears Hiding Place), was plundered by surveyors and cowboys, death probably came quickly for everyone but Ishi (Starn 2004: 41). Of his desperately solitary existence between the destruction of Wowunupo Mu Tetna and his emergence at Oroville, little is known, but Ishi gracefully acclimated to life in the museum: he learned some English, worked as an assistant custodian, demonstrated traditional skills to museum patrons, and developed seemingly warm relationships with a number of people…

* When a person’s values change, they become less like the person they were before; at the extreme, if a person’s values are completely changed, they are no longer the same person.

* the desire for something like internal control has been identified in various locales; for example, across samples from 23 countries and Hong Kong, including both individualist and collectivist cultures, external locus of control was negatively associated with job satisfaction…

* Continuity, identity, and agency are all socially contingent: where human organisms achieve these, they do so as members of groups.

* the hubris of elevating humanity above the rest of nature.

* re-envisaging human beings, not as little gods with big brains, but as animals that, alongside other animals, have evolved with a curious assortment of endowments for muddling through the world. Human cognition—including the rarified sort called Reason—is but one of these endowments, not so different than feather, fur, and fang: by turns comical, wonderful, and tragical.

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