BLM & CBT

Posted on June 26, 2020 by Luke Ford

Harry Baldwin writes on Steve Sailer:

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a useful approach to changing one’s way of dealing with the world. Wikipedia describes it: “CBT focuses on challenging and changing unhelpful cognitive distortions and behaviors, improving emotional regulation, and the development of personal coping strategies that target solving current problems.”

On-line, you can find lists of common cognitive distortions that make it very difficult for those who hold them to achieve happiness or success. What is remarkable, is that Western society, through its education system and media, imbues black people with these cognitive distortions and thinks it is doing them a favor.

* Resenting other people (Whites)
* Bitterness about the past (Slavery, Jim Crow, Red-lining, Emmett Till)
* Self-centeredness (Black Lives Matter)
* Blaming other people for one’s problems (Racism)
* Feeling superior to everyone else (We was kangz!)
* Ill-will towards strangers (Polar bear attacks)
* Focus on the faults of other people (Whites, Asians)
* Being overly pessimistic (Black man ain’t got no chance in the white man’s world)
* Blowing things out of proportion (Noose! Banana peel! Cotton balls!)
* Always attributing negative motives behind the actions of others (Why did he call me “articulate”?)

There are sites on-line where they go into depth on cognitive distortions, such as at https://positivepsychology.com/cognitive-distortions/

Read them and you can’t help but be struck by how this kind of self-defeating thinking is encouraged in blacks throughout their lives.

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The Treason of the Intellectuals (1927)

Posted on June 25, 2020 by Luke Ford

Norman Finkelstein tells David Samuels: “One of my favorite little books is Julian Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals, which is based in this binary notion that there are two competing sets of values in the world: fame and fortune on the one side, truth and justice on the other side. Benda’s main thesis is, the more vigorously you are committed to truth and justice, the less you’re going to see of fame and fortune. So, I don’t want to become too popular, because then I’m betraying truth and justice.”

Julien Benda wrote in 1927:

* We are to consider those passions termed political, owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions and national passions. Those persons who are most determined to believe in the inevitable progress of the human species, especially in its indispensable movement towards more peace and love, cannot deny that during the past century these passions have attained—and day by day increasingly so—in several most important directions, a degree of perfection hitherto unknown in history… Today there is scarcely a mind in Europe which is not affected—or thinks itself affected—by a racial or class or national passion, and most often by all three…. Today political passions have attained a universality never before known. They have also attained coherence. Thanks to the progress of communication and, still more, to the group spirit, it is clear that the holders of the same political hatred now form a compact impassioned mass, every individual of which feels himself in touch with the infinite numbers of others, whereas a century ago such people were comparatively out of touch with each other and hated in a “scattered” way. This is singularly striking with respect to the working classes who, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, felt only a scattered hostility for the opposing class, attempted only dispersed efforts at war (such as striking in one town, or one union), whereas to-day they form a closely-woven fabric of hatred from one end of Europe to the other…

Is it necessary to say that the passion of the individual is strengthened by feeling itself in proximity to these thousands of similar passions? Let me add that the individual bestows a mystic personality on the association of which he feels himself a member, and gives it a religious adoration, which is simply the deification of his own passion, and no small stimulus to its intensity… For the very reason that the holders of the same political passion form a more compact, impassioned group, they also form a more homogeneous, impassioned group, in which individual ways of feeling disappear and the zeal of each member more and more takes on the color of the others… How much more uniformity is shown now than a hundred years ago by the emotions known as anti-semitism, anti-Clericalism and Socialism, in spite of the immense number of varieties in the last-named! And do not those who are subject to these emotions now all tend to say the same thing? Political passions, as passions, seem to have attained the habit of discipline; they seem to obey a word of command even in the manner they are felt. It is easy to see what increase of strength they acquire thereby.

With some of these passions the increase in homogeneousness is accompanied by an increased precision. For instance, we all know that a hundred years ago Socialism was a strong but vague passion with the great mass of its supporters. But today Socialism has more closely defined the object it wishes to attain, has determined the exact point where it means to strike its adversary and the movement it intends to create in order to succeed… And we all know that hatred becomes stronger by becoming more precise.

There is another sort of perfecting of political passions. Throughout history until our own days I see these passions acting intermittently, blazing up and then subsiding. I see that the undoubtedly terrible and numerous explosions of class and race hatred were followed by long periods of calm, or at least of somnolence. Wars between nations lasted for years, but not hatred—even if we may say that it existed. To-day we have only to look every morning at any daily paper and we shall see that political hatreds do not cease for a single day. At best some of them are silent a moment for the benefit of one among them which suddenly claims all the subject’s strength. This is the period of “national unions,” which do not in the very least herald in the reign of love, but merely of a general hatred which for the moment dominates partial hatreds. To-day political passions have acquired continuity, which is so rare a quality in all feelings.

* An apostle of the modern mind clamors for “politics first.” He might have observed that nowadays it is politics everywhere, politics always and nothing but politics.

* the two essential characteristics of passion: The fixed idea, and the need to put it into action. I think it may be said that political passions in all classes to-day have attained a degree of preponderance over all other passions in those affected such as hitherto had been unknown.

* Jewish nationalism. In the past, when the Jews were accused in various countries of forming an inferior race, or at any rate a peculiar people not to be assimilated, they replied by denying their peculiarity, by trying to get rid of all appearance of peculiarity, and by refusing to admit the reality of race. But in the last few years we see some of them laboring to assert this peculiarity, to define its characteristics—or what they think such—taking a pride in it, and condemning every effort at assimilation with their opponents..

* When the national feeling was practically confined to Kings or their Ministers, it consisted chiefly in attachment to some interest (desire for territorial expansion, search for commercial advantages and profitable alliances), whereas to-day when this national feeling is continually experienced by common minds, it consists chiefly in the exercise of pride. Every one will agree that nationalist passion in the modern citizen is far less founded on a comprehensive knowledge of the national interests (he has an imperfect perception of these interests, he lacks the information necessary and does not try to acquire it, for he is indifferent to questions of foreign policy) than on the pride he feels in his nation, on his will to feel himself one with the nation, to react to the honors and insults he thinks are bestowed on it. No doubt he wants his nation to acquire territories, to be prosperous and to have powerful allies; but he wants all this far less on account of the material results which will accrue to the nation (how much is he conscious of these results?) than on account of the glory, the prestige which the nation will acquire… The susceptibility developed by national sentiment as it has become popular makes the possibility of wars far greater to-day than in the past.

* how many times during the last hundred years has the world almost flamed up in war solely because some nation thought its honor had been wounded?

* It is impossible to over-stress the novelty of this form of patriotism in history. It is obviously bound up with the adoption of this passion by the masses of the populace, and seems to have been inaugurated in 1813 by Germany, who is apparently the real teacher of humanity in the matter of democratic patriotism, if by this word is meant the determination of a nation to oppose others in the name of its most fundamental characteristics. (The France of the Revolution and the Empire never dreamed of setting itself up against other nations in the name of its language or of its literature.) This form of patriotism was so little known to preceding ages that there are countless examples of nations adopting the cultures of other nations, even of those with whom they were at war, and in addition reverencing the culture adopted.

* The notion that political warfare involves a war of cultures is entirely an invention of modern times, and confers upon them a conspicuous place in the moral history of humanity.

* Another strengthening of national passions comes from the determination of the peoples to be conscious of their past, more precisely to be conscious of their ambitions as going back to their ancestors, and to vibrate with “centuries-old” aspirations, with attachments to “historical” rights.

* national passions, owing to the fact that they are now exerted by plebeian minds, assume the character of mysticism, of a religious adoration almost unknown in these passions in the practical minds of the great nobles.

* I shall point out another great increase of power in national sentiment which has occurred in the last half-century. I mean that several very powerful political passions, which were originally independent of nationalist feeling, have now become incorporated with it. These passions are: (a) The movement against the Jews; (b) the movement of the possessing classes against the proletariat; (c) the movement of the champions of authority against the democrats. To-day each one of these passions is identified with national feeling and declares that its adversary implies the negation of nationalism. I may add that when a person is affected by one of these passions he is generally affected by all three; consequently nationalist passion is usually swelled by the addition of all three. Moreover this increase is reciprocal, and it may be said that to-day capitalism, anti-semitism and the
party of authority have all received new strength from their union with nationalism.

* To-day I notice that every political passion is furnished with a whole network of strongly woven doctrines, the sole object of which is to show the supreme value of its action from every point of view, while the result is a redoubling of its strength as a passion… Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.

* Anti-semitism, Pangermanism, French Monarchism, Socialism are not only political manifestations; they defend a particular form of morality, of intelligence, of sensibility, of literature, of philosophy and of artistic conceptions. Our age has introduced two novelties into the theorizing of political passions, by which they have been remarkably intensified. The first is that every one to-day claims that his movement is in line with “the development of evolution” and “the profound unrolling of history.” All these passions of to-day, whether they derive from Marx, from M. Maurras or from Houston Chamberlain, have discovered a “historical law,” according to which their movement is merely carrying out the spirit of history and must therefore necessarily triumph, while the opposing party is running counter to this spirit and can enjoy only a transitory triumph. That is merely the old desire to have Fate on one’s side, but it is put forth in a scientific shape. And this brings us to the second novelty: To-day all political ideologies claim to be founded on science, to be the result of a “precise observation of facts.” We all know what self-assurance, what rigidity, what inhumanity (comparatively new traits in the history of political passions, of which modern French monarchism is a good example) are given to these passions to-day by this claim. To summarize: To-day political passions show a degree of universality, of coherence, of homogeneousness, of precision, of continuity, of preponderance, in relation to other passions, unknown until our times.

* the “clerks” have adopted political passions. No one will deny that throughout Europe to-day the immense majority of men of letters and artists, a considerable number of scholars, philosophers, and “ministers” of the divine, share in the chorus of hatreds among races and political factions. Still less will it be denied that they adopt national passions.

* the “clerks” now exercise political passions with all the characteristics of passion—the tendency to action, the thirst for immediate results, the exclusive preoccupation with the desired end, the scorn for argument, the excess, the hatred, the fixed ideas. The modern “clerk” has entirely ceased to let the layman alone descend to the market place. The modern “clerk” is determined to have the soul of a citizen and to make vigorous use of it; he is proud of that soul; his literature is filled with his contempt for the man who shuts himself up with art or science and takes no interest in the passions of the State. 1 He is violently on the side of Michelangelo crying shame upon Leonardo da Vinci for his indifference to the misfortunes of Florence, and against the master of the Last Supper when he replied that indeed the study of beauty occupied his whole heart. The time has long past by since Plato demanded that the philosopher should be bound in chains in order to compel him to take an interest in the State. To have as his function the pursuit of eternal things and yet to believe that he becomes greater by concerning himself with the State—that is the view of the modern “clerk.” It is as natural as it is evident that this adhesion of the “clerks” to the passions of the laymen fortifies these passions in the hearts of the latter. In the first place, it abolishes the suggestive spectacle (which I mentioned above) of a race of men whose interests are set outside the practical world. And then especially, the “clerk” by adopting political passions, brings them the tremendous influence of his sensibility if he is an artist, of his persuasive power if he is a thinker, and in either case his moral prestige.

* I am quite ready to agree that this sort of blind patriotism makes powerful nations, and that the patriotism of Fénelon or of Renan is not the sort which secures empires. It remains to determine whether the function of “clerks” is to secure empires.

* This adhesion of the “clerks” to national passion is particularly remarkable among…the Churchmen. In all European countries during the past fifty years, the immense majority of these men have not only given their adhesion to the national feeling 9 and therefore have ceased to provide the world with the spectacle of hearts solely occupied with God—but they seem to have adopted this feeling with the same passion as that I have pointed out as existing among men of letters, and they too appear to be ready to support their own countries in the most flagrant injustices.

* I shall point out another characteristic of patriotism in the modern “clerk”: xenophobia. The hatred of man for “the man from outside” (the horsain), his rejection of and scorn for everything which is not “from his own home,”…

* The nationalist “clerk” is essentially a German invention. This, moreover, is a theme which will frequently recur in this book, i.e. that most of the moral and political attitudes adopted by the “clerks” of Europe in the past fifty years are of German origin, and that in the world of spiritual things the victory of Germany is now complete.

* All cities,” says Guicciardini, “all States, all Kingdoms, are mortal; everything comes to an end, either by accident or by the course of nature. That is why a citizen who witnesses the end of his country cannot feel so distressed at her misfortune with so much reason as he would lament his own ruin. His country has met the fate which in every way she was bound to meet; the misfortune is wholly for him whose unhappy lot has caused him to be born in a time when such a disaster had to occur.” One wonders whether there is a single modern thinker, attached to his country as the author of that passage was to his, who would dare to form, still less to express, a judgment of her so extraordinarily free in its melancholy. And here we come upon one of the great impieties of the moderns: The refusal to believe that above their nations there exists a development of a superior kind, by which they will be swept away like all other things.

* The second characteristic of the patriotism of the modern “clerks” is a desire to relate the form of their own minds to a form of the national mind, which they naturally brandish against other national forms of mind. We all know how, during the last fifty years, so many men of learning on both banks of the Rhine have asserted their views in the name of French science, of German science. We know how acridly so many of our writers in the same period have vibrated with French sensibility, French intelligence, French philosophy. Some declare that they are the incarnation of Aryan thought, Aryan painting, Aryan music, to which others reply by discovering that a certain master had a Jewish grandmother, and so venerate Semitic genius in him.

* Ernst Renan: “Man belongs neither to his language nor to his race; he belongs only to himself, for he is a free being, that is, a moral being.”

* Plutarch taught: “Man is not a plant created to be immobile and to have his roots fixed in the soil where he was born.”

* I am only denouncing this desire of the “clerk” to feel himself determined by his race and to remain fixed to his native soil to the extent that it becomes in him a political attitude, a nationalist provocation.

* “A true German historian,” declares a German master, “should especially tell those facts which conduce to the grandeur of Germany.” The same scholar praises Mommsen (who himself boasted of it) for having written a Roman history “which becomes a history of Germany with Roman names.” Another (Treitschke) prided himself on his lack of “that anemic objectivity which is contrary to the historical sense.” Another (Guisebrecht) teaches that “Science must not soar beyond the frontiers, but be national, be German.”

* But where the “clerks” have most violently broken with their tradition and resolutely played the game of the laymen in their eagerness to place themselves in the real, is by their doctrines, by the scale of values they have set up for the world. Those whose preaching for twenty centuries had been to humiliate the realist passions in favor of something transcendental, have set themselves (with a science and a consciousness which will stupefy history) to the task of making these passions, and the impulses which ensure them, the highest of virtues, while they cannot show too much scorn for the existence which in any respect raises itself beyond the material. I shall now describe the principal aspects of this phenomenon.

A. The “Clerks” Praise Attachment to The Particular and Denounce The Feeling of The Universal

In the first place, the “clerks” have set out to exalt the will of men to feel conscious of themselves as distinct from others, and to proclaim as contemptible every tendency to establish oneself in a universal.

* This glorification of national particularisms, at least with the precision observable to-day, is undoubtedly something new in the history of the Church.

* When the Church in past times did approve of something in patriotism, it was fraternity among fellow-citizens, like love of man for other men, but not his opposition to other men. She approved of patriotism as an extension of human love, and not as a limitation of it.

* B. The “Clerks” Praise Attachment to The Practical, and Denounce Love of The Spiritual

* For twenty centuries the “clerks” preached to the world that the State should be just; now they proclaim that the State should be strong and should care nothing about being just. (Remember the attitude of the chief French teachers during the Dreyfus affair.) Convinced that the strength of the State depends upon authority, they defend autocratic systems, arbitrary government, the reason of State, the religions which teach blind submission to authority, and they cannot sufficiently denounce all institutions based on liberty and discussion.53 This denunciation of liberalism, notably by the vast majority of contemporary men of letters, will be one of the things in this age most astonishing to History, especially on the part of the French. With their eyes fixed on the powerful State, they have praised the State disciplined in the Prussian manner, where every one has his post, and under orders from above, labors for the greatness of the nation, without there being any place left for particular wills.

* This displacement of morality is undoubtedly the most important achievement of the modern “clerks,” and the most deserving of the historian’s attention. It is a great turning-point in the history of man when those who speak in the name of pondered thought come and tell him that his political egotisms are divine, and that everything which labors to relax them is degrading. The results of this teaching were shown by the example of Germany a decade ago.

* The extent to which the modern “clerks” have made innovations may be judged by the fact that up till our own times men had only received two sorts of teaching in what concerns the relations between politics and morality. One was Plato’s, and it said: “Morality decides politics”; the other was Machiavelli’s, and it said: “Politics have nothing to do with morality.” To-day they receive a third. M. Maurras teaches: “Politics decide morality.”

* At the beginning of the last century the Church still taught that war could only be just for one of the two belligerents.64 It is heavy with consequences that she has now abandoned this position and to-day asserts that war may be just on both sides at once, “from the moment when each of the two adversaries, without being certain of its right, considers it as simply probable after having taken the opinion of its counsellors.”65 Here is another serious thing: In the past, war would only be declared just when it was against an adversary who had committed an injury accompanied by a moral intention, whereas to-day it may be declared just if it is directed against a material injury caused without any malice,66 for instance, an accidental violation of frontier. It is certain that to-day Napoleon and Bismarck could find in the teaching of the Church more justification than ever for their incursions.

* (a) The affirmation of the rights of custom, history, the past (to the extent, be it understood, that they support the systems of force) in opposition to the rights of reason.

* I said that the modern “clerks” teach man that his desires are moral insofar as they tend to secure his existence at the expense of an environment which disputes it. In particular they teach him that his species is sacred insofar as it is able to assert its existence at the expense of the surrounding world.81 In other words, the old morality told Man that he is divine to the extent that he becomes one with the universe; the new morality tells him that he is divine to the extent that he is in opposition to it.

* Moreover, the modern “clerks” extol Christianity insofar as it is supposed to have been preeminently a school of practical, creative virtues, adjusted to the support of the great human institutions.

* Let me observe that I am not reproaching the Christian preacher for giving their due to glory and other earthly passions, I am only reproaching him for trying to pretend that he is in harmony with his institution when he does so. We do not ask that the Christian shall not violate the Christian law; we only ask him to know that he is breaking it when he does break it. This seems to me admirably brought out by the remark of Cardinal Lavigerie who was asked: “What would you do, Eminence, if some one slapped your right cheek?” and who replied, “I know what I ought to do, but I do not know what I should do.” I know what I ought to do, and therefore what I ought to teach. A man who speaks in that way may give way to every species of violence, and yet maintain Christian morality. Here actions are nothing; the judgment on the actions is everything.

* This extolling of harshness seems to me to have borne more fruit than any other preaching by the modern “clerks.” It is a commonplace that among the great majority of the (so-called) thinking young men, in France for instance, harshness is to-day an object of respect, while human love in all its forms is considered a rather laughable thing. These young men have a cult for doctrines which respect nothing but force, pay no attention to the lamentations of suffering and proclaim the inevitability of war and slavery, while they despise those who are revolted by such prospects and desire to alter them. I should like these cults to be compared with the literary esthetics of these young men, their veneration for certain contemporary novelists and poets in whom the absence of human sympathy reaches a rare pitch of perfection, and whom they plainly venerate, especially for that characteristic.

* One of the principal causes is that the modern world has made the “clerk” into a citizen, subject to all the responsibilities of a citizen, and consequently to despise lay passions is far more difficult for him than for his predecessors. If he is reproached for not looking upon national quarrels with the noble serenity of Descartes and Goethe, the “clerk” may well retort that his nation claps a soldier’s pack on his back if she is insulted, and crushes him with taxes even if she is victorious. If shame is cried upon him because he does not rise superior to social hatreds, he will point out that the day of enlightened patronage is over, that to-day he has to earn his living, and that it is not his fault if he is eager to support the class which takes a pleasure in his productions.

* The practice of the life of the spirit seems to me to lead inevitably to universalism, to the feeling of the eternal, to a lack of vigor in the belief in worldly conventions.

* I see the interests of their careers. It is an obvious fact that during the past two centuries most of the men of letters who have attained wide fame in France assumed a political attitude—for instance, Voltaire, Diderot, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Anatole France, Barrès. With some of them, real fame dates from the moment when they assumed that attitude. This law has not escaped the attention of their descendants, and it may be said to-day that every French writer who desires wide fame (which means every writer endowed with the real temperament of a man of letters) also desires inevitably to play a political part.

* the practical writer’s desire to please the bourgeoisie, who are the creators of fame and the source of honors… he is not only in the service of a bourgeoisie which is in a state of anxiety, but that he himself has become more and more of a bourgeois, endowed with all the social position and respect which belong to that caste.

* Let me point out another and remarkable form of this extolling of particularism by the “clerks”: the extolling of particular systems of morality and the scorn for universal morality. During the past half century a whole school, not only of men of action but of serious philosophers, has taught that a people should form a conception of its rights and duties from a study of its particular genius, its history, its geographical position, the particular circumstances in which it happens to be, and not from the commands of a so-called conscience of man in all times and places. Moreover, this same school teaches that a class should construct a scale of good and evil, determined by an inquiry into its particular needs, its particular aims, the particular conditions surrounding it, and should cease to encumber itself with such sensibilities as “justice in itself,” “humanity in itself” and other “rags and tatters” of general morality. To-day with Barrès, Maurras, Sorel, even Durckheim45 we are witnessing the complete bankruptcy among the “clerks” of that form of soul which, from Plato to Kant, looked for the notion of good in the heart of eternal and disinterested man. The example of Germany in 1914 shows the results of this teaching which exhorts a group of men to set themselves up as the sole judges of the morality of their actions, shows what deification of their appetites it leads to, what codification of their violence, what tranquillity in carrying out their plans.

* If a man exhorts his compatriots to recognize only a personal morality and to reject all universal morality, he is showing himself a master of the art of encouraging them to want to be distinct from all other men, i.e. of the art of perfecting national passion in them…

* The cult for the particular and the scorn for the universal is a reversal of values quite generally characteristic of the teaching of the modern “clerks”…

* I should like to point out another form, not the least remarkable, which this preaching of particularism assumes among the “clerks.” I mean their exhortations to consider everything only as it exists in time, that is as it constitutes a succession of particular states, a “becoming,” a “history,” and never as it presents a state of permanence beyond time under this succession of distinct cases. I mean especially their assertion that this view of things in their historical aspect is the only serious and philosophical view, and that the need to look at them in their eternal aspect is a form of the child’s taste for ghosts, and should be merely smiled at. Need I point out that this conception inspires the whole of modern thought? It exists among a whole group of literary critics, who, on their own showing, inquire far less whether a work is beautiful than whether it expresses “the present” aspirations of “the contemporary soul.

* there are innumerable people who think they are demonstrating their aristocratic morality by declaring their systematic esteem for all who “succeed” and their scorn for all who fail.

* If I look at contemporary humanity from the point of view of its moral state as revealed by its political life, I see (a) A mass in whom realist passions in its two chief forms—class passion, national passion—has attained a degree of consciousness and organization hitherto unknown; (b) A body of men who used to be in opposition to the realism of the masses, but who now, not only do not oppose it, but adopt it, proclaim its grandeur and morality; in short, a humanity which has abandoned itself to realism with a unanimity, an absence of reserve, a sanctification of its passion unexampled in history.

This remark may be put in another form. Imagine an observer of the twelfth century taking a bird’s-eye view of the Europe of his time. He would see men groping in the obscurity of their minds and striving to form themselves into nations (to mention only the most striking aspect of the realist will); he would see them beginning to succeed; he would see groups of men attaining consistency, determined to seize a portion of the earth and tending to feel conscious of themselves as distinct from the groups surrounding them. But at the same time he would see a whole class of men, regarded with the greatest reverence, laboring to thwart this movement. He would see men of learning, artists and philosophers, displaying to the world a spirit which cared nothing for nations, using a universal language among themselves. He would see those who gave Europe its moral values preaching the cult of the human, or at least of the Christian, and not of the national, he would see them striving to found, in opposition to the nations, a great universal empire on spiritual foundations. And so he might say to himself: “Which of these two currents will triumph? Will humanity be national or spiritual? Will it depend on the will of the laymen or of the “clerks”? And for long ages the realist cause will not be completely victorious; the spiritual body will remain faithful to itself long enough to our observer to be uncertain of the result. To-day the game is over. Humanity is national. The layman has won. But his triumph has gone beyond anything he could have expected. The “clerk” is not only conquered, he is assimilated. The man of science, the artist, the philosopher are attached to their nations as much as the day-laborer and the merchant. Those who make the world’s values, make them for a nation; the Ministers of Jesus defend the national. All humanity including the “clerks,” have become laymen. All Europe, including Erasmus, has followed Luther.

* Indeed, if we ask ourselves what will happen to a humanity where every group is striving more eagerly than ever to feel conscious of its own particular interests, and makes its moralists tell it that it is sublime to the extent that it knows no law but this interest—a child can give the answer. This humanity is heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world, whether it is a war of nations, or a war of classes. A race of which one group exalts one of its masters (Barrès) to the skies because he teaches: “We must defend the essential part of ourselves as sectarians,” while a neighboring group acclaims a leader because, when he attacks a defenseless small nation, he says, “Necessity knows no law”—such a race is ripe for the zolögical wars Renan talks about, which, he said, would be like the life and death wars which occur among rodents and among the carnivora. As regards the nation, think of Italy; as regards class, think of Russia; and you will see the hitherto unknown point of perfection attained by the spirit of hatred against what is “different” among a group of men, consciously realist and at last liberated from all non-practical morality. And my predictions are not rendered less probable by the fact that these two nations are hailed as models throughout the world by those who desire either the grandeur of their nation or the triumph of their class.

* Peace, if it ever exists, will not be based on the fear of war but on the love of peace. It will not be the abstaining from an act, but the coming of a state of mind.1 In this sense the most insignificant writer can serve peace where the most powerful tribunals can do nothing. And moreover these tribunals leave untouched the economic war between the nations and the class wars.

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Just Be Yourself And Have Fun

Posted on June 25, 2020 by Luke Ford

Common advice that performers get is to “just be yourself and have fun.” That’s all right advice, but if you are performing on radio or TV or Youtube, you need to be a heightened and cleaned up version of yourself. I bring about six times my normal level of energy to my Youtube show, or about three times the energy I’d bring to a speech. Also, you need to prepare. Just taking care of the technical aspects of my Youtube show takes a minimum of 15 minutes (erecting the green screen, checking the video, making sure of the correct focus, putting in the title of the show and relevant links, having back up audio and video to play, sending out invites to guests to join, etc… During the pandemic, I’ve been reading a book a day.

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How to blow whistles for fun and profit

Posted on June 24, 2020 by Luke Ford

Most stories about whistleblowers make them seem miserable. For example, the 1973 movie Serpico told the true story of Frank Serpico who went undercover to expose corrupt police. For his efforts, he got shot. This episode of Australian Story tells a similar tale: “When Australian Story first met young Detective Sergeant Simon Illingworth, he’d taken a brave stand against crooked colleagues and was paying a terrible price. He’d been bashed, isolated and threatened by police connected to Victoria’s notorious Gangland Wars. His personal life was non-existent and he was he says ‘Victoria’s most ineligible bachelor’. But for Simon Illingworth, speaking out was a ‘game-changer’. He unveils his unlikely new life, as a farmer in regional Victoria…”

I expect that the primary reason that whistleblowers rarely go on to happiness is that happiness is primarily measured by the quality of your connections, and when you blow the whistle on your peer group, you lose them for life. Life usually requires a group strategy, a sense of us vs them.

My father was a whistleblower of sorts, he blew the whistle on the Seventh-Day Adventist church’s essential doctrine, and as a result, his last 49 years were lonely and sad.

William G. Johnsson wrote the most perceptive analysis of my dad’s story under the headline ‘Des Ford: The Perils of Being Right’:

We became friends, more on the intellectual level than the emotional. Des did not open himself to others….The format for discussion was always the same: Des would say, “Let’s walk,” and we’d head for the hills, he striding out briskly, I panting to keep up. He did most of the talking…

On the Sabbath afternoon after the Glacier View conference ended, several of us went walking together. We fell in with Des and his wife Gillian. Gill was upset, urging Des to form his own ministry where he would, she said, get the respect he deserved. Des seemed unsure what to do. Along with others in the small group, I strongly urged him to stay with the church…

If Des had chosen to start a new church, he would, I think have attracted a large following of Adventists in the South Pacific, America, and Canada…

Des Ford is an Australian tragedy. You can’t begin to grasp the dynamics of his love-hate relationship with the Adventist church in the South Pacific without factoring in the culture. Australian culture lacks niceties, nuances, subtleties. Theology and politics reduce issues to distinctions of black and white. Australians tend to be suspicious of shades of grey. Election campaigns are a no-holds-barred, slam-bang brawl, lasting only a short time.

Des Ford was a child of the culture. By both temperament and environment his proclamation, whether oral or written, fell naturally into a debate, either/or mode. His clear proclamation of the gospel helped thousands to find peace and hope; inevitably it generated “concerned brethren” (their name) who bitterly opposed him.

Des Ford is an Adventist tragedy. This man of charisma, unmatched in debate — could not Adventism have found a place to accommodate his many gifts? As the years went by and Des passed into his 80s, I kept waiting and praying that at long last I would learn of a reconciliation. Des needed it; no less did the Adventist church, especially in Australia. He trained a generation of ministers and teachers; after he left the ministry hundreds of former students gave up on Adventism. The church in the South Pacific suffers from a deep, unhealed wound.

I need to make one thing clear: in my judgment, the blame doesn’t lie wholly with church leaders. Reconciliation requires action from both sides, from both parties. Des was so sure that he was right that he made reconciliation very difficult.

Margit Heppenstall, wife of Dr. Edward Heppenstall, Des’ mentor, shared a revealing vignette with Noelene and me when we visited them in their retirement home at Carmel, California. She related a conversation that went as follows when Des and Gill stayed at their home:

Margit: “The trouble with you, Des, is that you are always right.”

Des: “No, I am not always right — except in matters of theology!”

If my father could not set the terms of engagement, he was not usually interested in engaging with others. He was not a good listeners. He was more adept at preaching, even in private conversation.

To blow the whistle on a matter of theology is to enter a world of subjectivity (as theology depends upon faith).

I would assume that most whistleblowers are low in the personality trait of Agreeableness.

How can one blow whistles for fun and profit? You would need to have an accurate sense of yourself, which is difficult as most of us have an exaggerated sense of our own importance and goodness. Perhaps the key question to ask in such circumstances would be — how will this look like to most people? Will they support what am I doing? The way to get ahead in life is to enlist other people as allies. So can you blow whistles in a way that will enlist valuable allies? Many of the women who’ve blown whistles for the #MeToo movement have probably benefited. If they had tried to pull this in the 1950s, it would not have gone off as well.

Prior to the 1960s, having the status of a victim was shameful. After the 1960s, it became a badge of honor.

The desire to get the respect you feel you deserve usually leads people to part from their group and to start their own group on their own terms. It usually does not work out well. Most people feel that they deserve more respect than they’re getting because they have an exaggerated sense of their own importance and righteousness.

To blow the whistle in a way that enhances your life would require a clear perspective on wider trends around you and how you will be perceived by outsiders. For everything there is a season under heaven.

I’d expect that people with a strong internal compass, people who are self-validating, are better suited to whistleblowing than those who depend on others to tell them who they are. For example, when I enjoy reading a piece I’ve written, I know it is good. When I enjoy watching a video I’ve made, I know it is good. I don’t need anyone else to back up my opinion.

If you can get paid sizable amounts of money for blowing the whistle, that makes the option more appealing.

The Washington Post reported in 2017:

To begin with, whistleblowers must have a healthy understanding of what they’re getting into. The consequences of blowing the whistle shouldn’t be underestimated, said Carney Shegerian, a Santa Monica, Calif., lawyer who has represented whistleblower clients in court. He cited one client who spoke out about safety concerns with his company’s production process. As a result, Shegerian said, the man went through a long stretch of unemployment, lost his home, and had to move in with friends. “It’s just a living hell,” he said.

U.S. gymnasts always knew what would be in store if they aired dirty laundry, Moceanu said. “They could use it against you at a later time. If someone were to speak up, their Olympic dream could be hanging in the balance,” she said. And in fact, when Moceanu went public about the abuse she’d seen and experienced, she was ostracized from the gymnastics community and lost friendships and lucrative endorsement opportunities. “I’ve kind of been that outlier every time, going to gymnastics events and having people give me the awkward eye,” Moceanu said.

A whistle-blower’s belief in the rightness of his or her action must be strong enough to overcome the hazards of speaking out. In a recent Boston College study, researchers asked people questions to gauge their moral priorities. People who valued fairness above loyalty were more likely to say they would blow the whistle on someone who committed a crime. “A lot of it comes down to their ability to hold on to a set of principles in the face of countervailing social information,” said Zeno Franco, a psychologist at the Medical College of Wisconsin. “That’s a very tough call. Most of us don’t want to be in the out-group.”

Franco is an expert in the study of heroism. Like others in his field, he regards whistleblowers as members of a category called “social heroes,” who typically make some kind of personal sacrifice on behalf of the greater good. (Other categories include military heroes, who show bravery that surpasses the call of duty, and civilian heroes, everyday people who risk their lives for others — running into a burning house to save a child, for instance.)

Whistleblowers are typically also comfortable with a certain degree of nonconformity. Sometimes that’s because they feel secure in their professional roles: Moceanu felt freer to speak out once she had retired from her sport and her income no longer depended on her gymnastics ability. Ohio State University studies have found that whistleblowers are more likely to be male, have high status, and have a long work history — which makes the sacrifices of less powerful whistleblowers even more notable by comparison. Situational factors matter, too. People tend to blow the whistle more when their organization is known for addressing problems effectively.

What most distinguishes whistleblowers from bystanders, though, may be their ability to stick to their principles when they’re under extreme pressure in the moment.

Many whistleblowers are shocked when people they had relied on for support back away. So to successfully navigate such a situation, you need to be able to read other people accurately and to understand what incentives will operate on them in the changed circumstance. For example, when I started blogging about Dennis Prager in late 1997, I lost all friends I had in common with Dennis. I was prepared to lose almost all of my friends in Los Angeles if necessary as I made this painful turning point in my life away from following and towards blazing my own trail. I was devastated when I went through this, I entered weekly therapy for most of the next 15 years, but I knew I had the stuff to make it and form new friends.

What are some primate parallels? Let’s look at whistleblowing as a move for increased status. If you are #17 in the status hierarchy in your group of warrior apes, you won’t have the stuff to knock off any of the top ten apes on your own, but you can join forces with others to replace the alpha ape, and as a result of such a successful coup, you’ll likely raise your own status as long as you are a loyal follower of the new rulers. On the other hand, if you just launch out against your whole group, you’ll be crushed. That seems like a good model for whistleblowing. Assemble allies and present your actions in the guise of the public interest. If you do something controversial and unprecedented, make sure you it will be widely seen as in the best interests of the group.

When I outed Marc Wallice as the likely Patient Zero of the porn-HIV outbreak of 1996-1998, I was not a part of the porn industry, so I could handle the negative blowback from the powers that be. At the same time, I needed to maintain access to some of the porners I was writing about, and I was sure that my actions would be widely seen as in the group interest (though not necessarily in the interests of certain power centers). From 1998 to 2007, I was best known in porn as the guy who blew the whistle on the guy who was transmitting HIV to a dozen or more porn girls and to unsafe industry practices that facilitated such spread. On the other hand, if I became known as the guy who broke the code and as a result the industry was banned in California, I would have had to leave town.

When I later broke stories about Orthodox rabbis committing sexual abuse, I knew I could count on wide support in Orthodox Jewish life in Los Angeles because such Jews would see this reporting as in their group interest. When I published in 2009 a list of five Orthodox rabbis who were converts to Judaism, I knew that some of these rabbis would take offense, but this knowledge was in the Orthodox community’s interest given that there are certain things that rabbis who are converts should not do.

One misunderstanding that many whistleblowers suffer from is that they put priorities on principles rather than interests. They want to cry, “But this is wrong!” They want to appeal to abstract principles. Most people however care more about their interests rather than abstract principles. So who will be hurt and who will be benefited by your whistleblowing? For pragmatic reasons, this is an essential question to ask. It’s not enough to be right. What will be the consequences of what I might do?

For example, organized crime is often essential. As the book McMafia pointed out:

* No societies are free from organized crime except for severely repressive ones (and although North Korea has undoubtedly very low levels of organized crime, its state budget is decisively dependent on the trading of narcotics to criminal syndicates in neighboring countries). But when you replace one set of rules (the Five-Year Plan) with another (free market) in a country as large as Russia, with as many mineral resources, and at a time of epochal shifts in the global economy, then such immense change is bound to offer exceptional opportunities to the quick-witted, the strong, or the fortunate (oligarchs, organized criminals, bureaucrats whose power is suddenly detached from state control) that were absent hitherto. It is certainly true that the Yeltsin government made some appalling errors. But they were under considerable economic pressure at the time, as the crumbling Soviet system was no longer able to guarantee food deliveries to the people and inflation (even before the freeing of prices) had hit at least 150 percent and was still rising. Something had to be done. By the mid-1990s the Russian government estimated that between 40 and 50 percent of its economy was in the gray or black sectors, and it is within this context that Russia and the outside world needs to understand the phenomenon of organized crime: it emerged out of a chaotic situation and was very brutal, but its origins lie in a rational response to a highly unusual economic and social environment.

* The oligarchs understood instinctively that Russia was a capricious and dangerous environment and that their billions of dollars were not safe there. They overestimated their ability to control President Putin, the man whom they chose to replace the weak and easily manipulated, alcoholic president Yeltsin. Yet their instincts served many of them well—as an insurance policy, they needed not just to get their money out of the country. They needed it to be clean once it arrived at its destination. So did the organized crime groups. Everybody needed to launder his cash. But before they could establish a worldwide launderette, they all—oligarchs and mobsters alike—needed to establish themselves abroad. The criminal groups now entered the most challenging stage of their development: phase three—overseas transplantation.

* Organized crime and corruption flourishes in regions and countries where public trust in institutions is weak. Refashioning the institutions of Kafkaesque autocracy into ones that support democracy by promoting accountability and transparency is a troublesome, long-term process. The task is made doubly difficult if economic uncertainty accompanies that transition. Suddenly people who have been guaranteed security from the cradle to the grave are forced to negotiate an unfamiliar jungle of inflation, unemployment, loss of pension rights, and the like. At such junctures, those crucial personal networks from the Communist period become very important. The Red Army evacuated its bases in Eastern Europe, but the equally effective yet more seductive force of favors owed and promises once made stood its ground to exert a strong influence over the transition.

* For their part, the oligarchs and organized crime bosses started colonizing Israel for a number of reasons. It was an ideal place to invest or launder money. Israel’s banking system was designed to encourage aliyah, the immigration of Jews from around the world, and that meant encouraging their money to boot. Furthermore, Israel had embraced the zeitgeist of international financial deregulation and considerably eased controls on the import and export of capital. And, like most other economies around the world in the 1990s, it had no anti-money-laundering legislation. Laundering money derived from criminal activities anywhere else in the world was an entirely legitimate business.

* The main reason for Israel’s popularity was the simplest—many of these iffy businessmen were Jews, and in Israel they were not treated like dirt but welcomed as valuable and respected additions to the family. A disproportionate number of the most influential Russian oligarchs and gangsters were Jewish. Before the huge wave of immigration to Israel, Jews made up only about 2.5 percent of the population of Russia and Ukraine. But they were hugely influential in the vanguard of gangster capitalism during the 1990s.

* It is no coincidence that among organized crime bosses, the other two chronically overrepresented nationalities in Russia were the Chechens and the Georgians, whose talent for overcoming the daily consumer misery of the Soviet Union was similarly the stuff of legend. The criminals and oligarchs emerged from communities who inhabited the twilight periphery of the Soviet Union—although usually denied access to the central institutions, they were not pariahs. Instead they were compelled to seek out the possibilities of social and economic activity that existed in the nooks and cracks of the state.

* From an economic point of view, a person’s decision to enter into the drug trade as a producer, distributor, or retailer is entirely rational because the profit margins are so high. This is all the more compelling in countries such as Afghanistan and Colombia where chronic poverty is endemic. Time and again, narcotics traffickers have demonstrated that their financial clout is sufficient to buy off officials even in states with very low levels of corruption, as in Scandinavia. In most countries, traffickers can call on combined resources of billions of dollars where national police forces have access to tens or hundreds of millions (and are further hamstrung by a complex set of regulations constraining their ability to act).

On the whole, governments do not argue that drug prohibition benefits the economy. They base their arguments instead on perceived social damage and on public morality.

Why would you expect people in narco states to inform against narcos? That’s suicidal and it won’t necessarily do their country any good. If incentives align in such a powerful way that a state turns into a narco state, why would you risk your life battling the inevitable tide?

Here’s a 2013 article:

Whistleblowing—Is It Really Worth the Consequences?

* Because whistleblowing can have deleterious effects on nurses’ professional and personal lives, they should consider exhausting all remedies before reporting infractions to authorities.

* Once nurses weigh the professional and personal ramifications for reporting a violation and determine that time is remaining to report the violation, they must know how to report the violation. Unfortunately, reporting requirements can be strict, and nurses must comply with all technicalities or the case will be dismissed.

* In Hollywood, a nurse who was retaliated against after blowing the whistle on her employer would be protected under whistleblower laws, returning to the job unscathed, and be heralded by coworkers for reporting an employer who endangered others. Unfortunately, real life does not have a Hollywood ending. Deciding to blow the whistle on an employer can be one of the most difficult decisions employees face during their careers because they may be viewed as a traitor, a tattler, or someone who cannot be trusted. Even coworkers who are loyal to their employer or employees involved in the violation may be angered by whistleblowing.

Whistleblowing is especially difficult for nurses because nurses have a duty to protect and advocate for clients; therefore, nurses who witness violations that harm clients are in the difficult position of maintaining client safety while risking retaliation or ignoring client safety and maintaining employment. Whistleblowing has both professional and personal consequences. Nurses who witness violations and report them risk losing their current position and any future employment. Additionally, nurses may endure physical and emotional strife from reporting the violation. Not reporting the violation can even cause distress in nurses’ personal lives because nurses are responsible for protecting clients.

Another common mistake that whistleblowers make is to assume that reality will comport with laws on the book. All laws are enforced by human beings and hence are somewhat arbitrary. There is law as it is stated in books and there are laws as they operate in real life (for example, plenty of freeways may have a 65 mph speed limit and most traffic is flowing north of 80 mph). Also, you can be legally right and judged by your group as morally wrong. You might think you are legally protected from adverse consequences, but nevertheless find yourself descending into a living hell. As my dad found out, there is no free speech protection within the SDA group. All groups have rules, formal and informal, and if you break important rules, you get pushed out.

When we act against other people, they always react and it’s often not what we like or expect. Our opponents are rarely inert.

Perhaps the best move about whistleblowing is 2009’s The Informant:

Mark Whitacre, a rising star at the Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) office in Decatur, Illinois, during the early 1990s, blows the whistle on the company’s price-fixing tactics at the urging of his wife Ginger.[3][4]

One night in November 1992, Whitacre confesses to FBI special agent Brian Shepard that ADM executives—including Whitacre himself—had routinely met with competitors to fix the price of lysine, an additive used in the commercial livestock industry. Whitacre secretly gathers hundreds of hours of video and audio over several years to present to the FBI.[3][5][6] He assists in gathering evidence by clandestinely taping the company’s activity in business meetings at various locations around the globe such as Tokyo, Paris, Mexico City, and Hong Kong, eventually collecting enough evidence of collaboration and conspiracy to warrant a raid of ADM.

Whitacre’s good deed dovetails with his own major infractions, while his internal, secret struggle with bipolar disorder seems to take over his exploits.[3][7] The bulk of the film focuses on Whitacre’s meltdown resulting from the pressures of wearing a wire and organizing surveillance for the FBI for three years, instigated by Whitacre’s reaction, in increasingly manic overlays, to various trivial magazine articles he reads. In a stunning turn of events immediately following the covert portion of the case, headlines around the world report Whitacre had embezzled $9 million from his own company during the same period of time he was secretly working with the FBI and taping his co-workers, while simultaneously aiming to be elected as ADM CEO following the arrest and conviction of the remaining upper management members.[3] In the ensuing chaos, Whitacre appears to shift his trust and randomly destabilize his relationships with Special Agents Shepard and Herndon and numerous attorneys in the process.

Authorities at ADM begin investigating the forged papertrail Whitacre had built to cover his own deeds. After being confronted with evidence of his fraud, Whitacre’s defensive claims begin to spiral out of control, including an accusation of assault and battery against Agent Shepard and the FBI, which had made a substantial move to distance their case from Whitacre entirely. Because of this major infraction and Whitacre’s bizarre behavior, he is sentenced to a prison term three times as long as that meted out to the white-collar criminals he helped to catch.[3] In the epilogue, Agent Herndon visits Whitacre in prison as he videotapes a futile appeal to seek a presidential pardon. Overweight, balding and psychologically beaten after his years long ordeal, Whitacre is eventually released from prison, with his wife Ginger waiting to greet him.

Steve Sailer writes:

Watching Steven Soderbergh’s comedy The Informant! (with Matt Damon as that guy back in the 1990s who squealed to the feds about how he fixed the price of lysine for Archer Daniels Midland) reminded me of Econ 101, where you learn about the glories of competitive markets. Traditionally, economists draw their examples of “perfect competition“ from agricultural commodities like corn, which ADM processes into other commodities, such as lysine, an amino acid used in animal feed.

What the professors sometimes forget to tell you is that you don’t want to work in an industry where the invisible hand sets the price.

Before the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was finally enforced in 1911, the first thing the more respectable sort of businessman would do when a new commodity like oil came along was to sit down with his rivals to agree on how to cut production and raise prices. American captains of industry prided themselves on their cooperativeness, not competitiveness. ADM’s internal byword “Our customers are our enemies; our competitors are our friends” would have struck J.D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan as sound thinking.

To this day, business strategy largely consists of trying to wield market power so you can charge more than the commodity price.

Trust me, it’s no fun competing in a commodity market. In the 1980s and 1990s, I worked for two archrival marketing research firms who each invested a fortune to turn a lazy and lucrative little industry of idiosyncratically guesstimating supermarket sales into a precise but unprofitable commodity industry where, it was often said, there was room only for 1.5 firms. The facts, it turned out, were a commodity — a lesson the newspaper business has painfully learned in this decade.

In contrast, it’s much nicer to be in an industry driven by the mystique of brand names, where you can slack off and let your past successes carry you for awhile…

The Informant! largely works as Soderbergh’s self-parody of the heroic-whistleblower-inside-evil-multinational-corporation genre, as epitomized by his Erin Brockovich and by his buddy Clooney’s Syriana and Michael Clayton…

Soderbergh, of course, has no interest in the economics of anti-trust. Instead, he’s fascinated by Whitacre, whom he portrays rather harshly until the very end, when he absolves him with the excuse that he was manic-depressive.

I’m not crazy, however, about letting bipolar disorder become established as an all-purpose excuse. The problem is that manics get credit for a surprising fraction of the big events in the history books. Think of Ross Perot, for example, surging into the lead in the 1992 Presidential race as a third-party candidate, then disappearing into seclusion all summer, then finishing strongly to win 19 percent of the vote. Therefore, since they get the credit, we can’t afford to let them wriggle out of the blame when their self-confidence runs amok.

I suspect that Soderbergh might be too focused on jocularly depicting Decatur’s small town schlubiness to emphasize fully the more alarming aspect of Whitacre’s story. Whitacre, who obtained an Ivy League PhD in biochemistry, then rose rapidly up the corporate ladder in Germany before becoming the youngest corporate officer of ADM, was a man of immense ambitions. Perhaps he was attracted to ADM because it was a massive player in DC. He reminds me a little of Lee Harvey Oswald who traipsed all over the world, defecting to the Soviet Union, for example, looking for a conspiracy to join so his name would go in the history books.

What Whitacre found unsatisfactory about ADM, I speculate, was that it was a family firm, with countless Andreases standing between him and the CEO position. His plan appears to have been to use the FBI to take down the Andreases. Then, when he had the most politically well-connected job in corporate America by the time he was 40, well, who know where his ambitions would have led him next?

Whitacre turned out to be a little too crazy. Yet, how many of our leaders got to where they are because they are just crazy enough?

John Dean seemed to have been a successful whistleblower. He made a whole career out of it. James Comey, Eric Ciaramella, and John Bolton also seem to have done well for themselves. If you can count on media support, blowing the whistle should be fun and profitable.

Becoming an enthusiastic member of the majority religion is usually a savvy move for a whistleblower. Christianity in particular loves penitent sinners.

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The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Posted on June 24, 2020 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this book by Richard Dawkins:

* Breeders are almost like modellers with endlessly malleable clay, or like sculptors wielding chisels, carving dogs or horses, or cows or cabbages, to their whim.

* Something funny happens to the gene pools of domestic dogs. Breeders of pedigree Pekineses or Dalmatians go to elaborate lengths to stop genes crossing from one gene pool to another. Stud books are kept, going back many generations, and miscegenation is the worst thing that can happen in the book of a pedigree breeder. It is as though each breed of dog were incarcerated on its own little Ascension Island, kept apart from every other breed. But the barrier to interbreeding is not blue water but human rules.
Geographically the breeds all overlap, but they might as well be on separate islands because of the way their owners police their mating opportunities. Of course, from time to time the rules are broken. Like a rat stowing away on a ship to Ascension Island, a whippet bitch, say, escapes the leash and mates with a spaniel. But the mongrel puppies that result, however loved they may be as individuals, are cast off the island labelled Pedigree Whippet. The island itself remains a pure whippet island. Other pure-bred
whippets ensure that the gene pool of the virtual island labelled Whippet continues uncontaminated. There are hundreds of man-made ‘islands’, one for each breed of pedigree dog. Each one is a virtual island, in the sense that it is not geographically localized. Pedigree whippets or Pomeranians are to be found in many different places around the world, and cars, ships and planes are used to ferry the genes from one geographical place to another. The virtual genetic island that is the Pekinese gene pool overlaps geographically, but not genetically (except when a bitch breaks cover), with the virtual genetic island that is the boxer gene pool and the virtual island that is the St Bernard gene pool.

* You want high milk yield in cows, orders of magnitude more gallons than could ever be needed by a mother to rear her babies? Selective breeding can give it to you. Cows can be modified to grow vast and ungainly udders, and these continue to yield copious quantities of milk indefinitely, long after the normal weaning period of a calf. As it happens, dairy horses have not been bred in this way, but will anyone contest my bet that we could do it if we tried? And of course, the same would be true of dairy humans, if anyone wanted to try. All too many women, bamboozled by the myth that breasts like melons are attractive, pay surgeons large sums of money to implant silicone, with (for my money) unappealing results. Does anyone doubt that, given enough generations, the same deformity could be achieved by selective breeding, after the manner of Friesian cows?

* If you see an animal feeding, you can measure its flight distance by seeing how close it will let you approach before fleeing. For any given species in any given situation, there will be an optimal flight distance, somewhere between too risky or foolhardy at the short end, and too flighty or risk-averse at the long end. Individuals that take off too late when danger threatens are more likely to be killed by that very danger. Less obviously, there is such a thing as taking off too soon. Individuals that
are too flighty never get a square meal, because they run away at the first hint of danger on the horizon. It is easy for us to overlook the dangers of being too risk-averse.

Natural selection will work on the flight distance, moving it one way or the other along the continuum if conditions change over evolutionary time. If a plenteous new food source in the form of village rubbish dumps enters the world of wolves, that is going to shift the optimum point towards the shorter end of the flight distance continuum, in the direction of reluctance to flee when enjoying this new bounty.

Something like this evolutionary shortening of the flight distance was, in Coppinger’s view, the first step in the domestication of the dog, and it was achieved by natural selection, not artificial selection. Decreasing flight distance is a behavioural measure of what might be called increasing tameness.

* Selection – in the form of artificial selection by human breeders – can turn a pye-dog into a Pekinese, or a wild cabbage into a cauliflower, in a few centuries. The difference between any two breeds of dog gives us a rough idea of the quantity of
evolutionary change that can be achieved in less than a millennium.

* evolutionary scientists are in the position of detectives who come late to the scene of a crime. To pinpoint when things happened, we depend upon traces left by time-dependent processes…

* A tree-ring clock can be used to date a piece of wood, say a beam in a Tudor house, with astonishing accuracy, literally to the nearest year. Here’s how it works. First, as most people know, you can age a newly felled tree by counting rings in its trunk…

* Varves are layers of sediment laid down in glacial lakes. Like tree rings, they vary seasonally and from year to year, so theoretically the same principle can be used, with the same degree of accuracy. Coral reefs, too, have annual growth rings, just like trees. Fascinatingly, these have been used to detect the dates of ancient earthquakes. Tree rings too, by the way, tell us the dates of earthquakes.

* What would be evidence against evolution, and very strong evidence at that, would be the discovery of even a single fossil in the wrong geological stratum. I have already made this point in Chapter 4. J. B. S. Haldane famously retorted, when asked to name an observation that would disprove the theory of evolution, ‘Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian!’ No such rabbits, no authentically anachronistic fossils of any kind, have ever been found… Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order.

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