The Future of Spray-On Skin

In my last post, I wrote about how an increasing number of complexities in modern society may constrain our collective ability to innovate. Whether it is the existing infrastructure that supports older technologies over newer ones, or a litigious society that exposes those doing something new and unproven to enormous financial risk, we are putting our inventors and entrepreneurs in an ever-tighter straight jacket.

Well, I found an interesting test case for the theory: spray-on skin. What's that? It sounds like some ridiculous thing I just made up? Well, then watch this video and doubt no more, my skeptical friend. For those of you who would rather not see images of severe burns, let me explain: scientists have figured out how to harvest skin cells from the remaining healthy skin on a burn victim, put them in a solution, and apply that mixture through a spray gun to encourage rapid skin growth. They have successfully demonstrated that this works in a number of cases, and it takes a fraction of the time that traditional skin grafts do.

On the surface, this seems like an easy innovation to adopt. It is easier, faster, clinically superior and (once it gets up to scale) probably cheaper than the existing options. Yet I see a number of obstacles to spray-on skin coming to a hospital near you:

1) The procedure uses stem cells, which have the taint of controversy, even though in this case the cells are harvested from the patient's skin, not embryos.
2) The gun will be a capital expense for hospitals, whereas skin grafts don't require any new capital equipment.
3) Surgeons are compensated based on set reimbursement rates for different types of procedures. Spraying on skin would need a code, which can take years. And when it gets one, it may pay physicians much less than the compensation for a skin graft procedure.
4) Skin grafts are big business (check out KCI if you don't believe me) and they are likely to vigorously oppose any disruptive new technologies in their space.

Now, all of these obstacles are surmountable, but it won't be easy. Which is why I view the spray-on skin as a test case of sorts: if it can run the gauntlet and get widespread adoption in the next few years, I will have to revise my earlier opinion and admit that our society, as imperfect as it is, still has room to identify and advance radical, life-improving innovations.

Climbing the Wrong Technological Hills

When I was a kid, I remember being told how amazing it was that the Aztecs built their great cities without the wheel, and thinking: "How the heck did they miss that one?" I couldn't fathom that millions of people had gone centuries without ever noticing that round things roll, and that could be useful for moving things around.

This article, on the development of rocketry as our means of reaching space, made me resolve to go a little easier on the Aztecs. The main point the author, Neal Stephenson, makes several times is that only a highly unlikely series of events led to the development of space-going rockets, and now we are wedded to that technology to the point that newer, better methods of getting off this planet are extremely difficult to develop.

I've always assumed, naively, that once we make discoveries in the basic sciences, that eventually we will appreciate the technological possibilities and make new and better stuff. The theoretical understanding of how to split the atom leads to fission bombs and nuclear power plants in a relatively straight line, because the rewards of technological innovation are so high. But, as the case of rocketry indicates, often technological innovation is haphazard, messy, and driven by the incidentals of history and personality.

So, my first question: how many great technologies could potentially be developed based on the theoretical knowledge we have, but aren't being created because of basic human oversight?

Then, the flip side: once a technological system is sufficiently developed, and bound up with all the other human institutions (government, the law, social expectations, finance and the like), what technologies suddenly become unappealing to develop because their adoption would depend on unlikely changes to these complex systems? I've joked before about wanting my flying car: would we have them if a flying car wouldn't lead to massive challenges to the air traffic control system, to our system of personal and corporate liability, to civic noise ordinances?

Which leads to my second question: how many great technologies will be smothered in the cradle because a society as complex as ours creates insurmountable barriers to certain types of innovation?

We've heard a lot recently about entrepreneurship being the key to revitalizing our economy. But the entrepreneur may be unable to break down the barriers to innovation erected by our laws, our systems, the past decisions of other innovators, and just plain old inertia.

Should We Fear the End of the World?

As I'm sure all my readers know, we're about a year away from the end of the world. The Mayans figured this out a long time ago, don't ya know. But I shouldn't pick on the Mayan calendar and all the hysteria around it. My own religion has a whole book about the Apocalypse, and too many people have spent big chunks of their lives worrying about when exactly the four horsemen were going to start riding. Add to that the secular speculations about global warming catastrophe, and it's clear that a huge subset of mankind can't help but speculate that our cushy existence is going to come crashing down around our heads.

It occurred to me to write about the topic of Armageddon (man, we have a lot of words for this) when I stumbled across this piece on the super-storms and mass destruction that will be unleashed by the Earth's rapidly moving magnetic field. On the face of it, the piece is absurd, and like all such pieces it takes controversial and in some cases half-baked theories and presents them as settled fact. I won't pick on the article too much: if you're interested, do a little Googling and check out what is being written elsewhere about magnetic field shifts.

What is interesting, though, is that even though most scientists don't seem to think the end is near, they do acknowledge that sometimes the Earth's magnetic field does shift or even reverse, and this will likely have serious consequences. It's just darn hard to know when this is going to happen: the geological record of past events shows the timing is highly variable. What this means is that at some point, if we don't nuke ourselves to death first, mankind probably will face one of these calamities.

Despite the thrill we get at speculating about the destruction of Earth, or at least the conditions in which civilization can endure, we generally tend to assume that life will go on as normal indefinitely, with nothing worse than the occasional earthquake or hurricane on the scale we're used to. But think of it this way: mankind's historical memory only goes back, at best, five or six thousand years. That's a blink in geological and astronomical time. If we had, say, a 1,000,000 year historical record, or perspective on disasters would probably be much different. Our distant ancestors would probably have filled volumes with their accounts of this worldwide calamity.

And, just maybe, they actually did so. Think of the Noah story. Almost every culture in that part of the world, and some in other parts as well, have an ancient flood story. Perhaps this wasn't mythological whimsy, but an attempt to record and understand something terrible that had happened during the time of ancient man. We may, as a species, find ourselves worrying about the end of the world in part because some distant ancestor survived just such an event.

When We Look, and When We Turn Away

Abortion is one of those topics I don't much like writing about. While I have a lot of sympathy for women who find themselves pregnant and frightened, and I think it is a societal failure (and especially a failure of religious folks like myself) that they aren't given more support, I am absolutely opposed to it. And many people who share my position have written much more passionately and wisely about why it is wrong than I ever could, so I don't think my best argument would add to the debate.

However, the gruesome case of Kermit Gosnell and his revolting clinic has given me reason to think about abortion more than normal. Then I read this piece by Elizabeth Scalia, who goes by the pen name The Anchoress, highlighting the lack of media coverage given to the case. She sees in that lack of coverage a bias in the media, as she states here:

So, allow me to ask the impolitic question I have hinted at elsewhere: in choosing to look away, in choosing to under-report, in choosing to spin, minimize, excuse, and move-along when it comes to Kermit Gosnell—and to this whole subject of under-regulated abortion clinics, the debasement of women and the slaughter of living children—how are the press and those they protect by their silence any better than the Catholic bishops who, in decades past, looked away, under-reported, spun, minimized, excused, moved-along, and protected the repulsive predator-priests who have stolen innocence and roiled the community of faith?

Scalia wonders why the press has not tenaciously dug into this story, why there have not been investigations into other clinics. And while I agree with her, I think there is a pretty obvious reason, and even an understandable one. Simply put, the primary emotion evoked by the Gosnell case is not outrage, but horror.

Now, Scalia is outraged because she shares my conviction about abortion. But a lot of people have made an uneasy truce with the notion that abortion is a necessary fact of modern life, and so the reality of the thing, the notion that living things, identifiable as babies, are being dismembered is not something they ever want to face. Whereas you would search long and hard to find someone who would suggest a Catholic priest had any right or sanction to molest boys and girls. Thus, the predominant societal reaction is not to turn away in disgust, but to seek justice.

To put it another way, the Gosnell case creates what psychologists (and especially amateur psychologists like myself) call cognitive dissonance. Our instincts tell us that something horrible is happening, but our rational brains say that what is happening is not that bad, or a freak happening, or the price we pay for some greater good. I would compare it to the gruesome videos I've seen of horrible (there's that word again) slaughterhouse conditions. I react viscerally, and maybe even doubt my decision to buy beef from the store without knowing where it came from and how the animals were treated. But then I let it go, telling myself that these videos are the exception and that the meat I buy isn't adding to the problem.

T.S. Eliot said, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." I think this is the type of thing he had in mind. The simple fact is that something disgusting, immoral, and disturbing was happening at Dr. Gosnell's clinic, and his acts were just on the far side of legality. For those of us who support the legal right to abortion, and for those of us who don't but who shirk the hard work of changing laws and minds, we simply prefer not to bear that reality.

SOTU Part 2: Politics and Brands

First, thanks for the feedback on my last post about Obama's reelection prospects. For those of you who thought I might be over-thinking it a bit, I refer you to Daniel Henninger's latest, who basically says, "Obama is putting a moderate frosting on the same big government cake." That could well be true! But I think he wants to appease the center and get re-elected, and my point was that the Tea Party will ensure that symbolic gestures and half measures don't get much traction, so to get anything done he will have to make substantial concessions to the Republicans.

Underlying that post was some thinking about brands which I wanted to make explicit. Right now Obama is virtually synonymous with the liberal brand. (Nancy Pelosi could have staked a claim while she was speaker, but she's faded from the picture rapidly in the last few months.) Another way to put it is that Obama has a monopoly on the liberal market: if you're a liberal who wants to 'buy' a different option, where do you turn right now? Even Keith Olbermann is off the air. And like all monopolies, the Obama brand has gotten a little flabby. Is he the bipartisan uniter? The new Kennedy? The racial healer? The smartest guy in the room? The professorial President? The empirical pragmatist? All of these ideas have been floated in the past year or so as the Obama brand, but none of them really define him. Which is good for him to the extent it means he can redefine himself (again, as I argued he's doing in my last post. But it is bad for him to the extent that he can't rally the public behind his brand.

In contrast, I think the competition between the "Standard Right" Republicans and the Tea Party helps them to define their brands. Both groups want to control the more conservative side of the political spectrum. But, as you could see from Paul Ryan's speech last night, the Standard Right are trying to be the responsible adults who have learned from the past and are ready to fix America's problems, especially it's deficit crisis. And while the Tea Party also wants to take on the debt, their brand is much more about restoring America's founding vision and throwing out the 'impure' elements that have corrupted the country.

To the extent that this isn't just rambling, here's the point: the Republican 'brands' have similar goals, but they are quite distinct in tone and values, and they are competing for the same audience. Obama, meanwhile, as no competition for his audience. The competition, I think, will force Republicans to evolve and improve their thinking and their brands more rapidly, and I think ultimately help them succeed in the marketplace of ideas.

So the lesson for marketers: embrace competition, and use it to help you define who your audience is and why they should care about your brand more than the competitors.

Why Michele Bachmann Will Get Obama Re-Elected

First, let me say my hope is that someone at Daily Kos or the Huffington Post will come across that headline, link to it, and drive my traffic through the roof. But my point is decidedly not that Michele Bachmann is some evil, despicable quasi-fascist who will drive Americans screaming back into the President's arms. In fact, I thought her speech tonight was a strong distillation of the problems we face, even though it was a bit selective in its argument that the economy and the deficit got much worse when Obama was elected.

But I did have a moment of clarity while watching Bachmann's speech, and realized that she (and the Tea Party more generally) will very likely create the conditions for Obama's reelection. And the way that will happen, ironically, is by pushing him closer to Republican positions. Let's say, for the sake of simplicity, that Obama represents the Standard Left position in American politics, and the Republicans, as ably represented this evening by Paul Ryan, represent the Standard Right position. Normally those two positions are the only two with any serious traction in our politics, and so voters and interests align with one of the two teams. Then the two teams fight and from time to time one team wins enough power to do some of the things it wants, though that inevitably generates a backlash. Or else a few moderates cut a deal, and pass some watered-down halfway measure.

Well, then, Bachmann and the Tea Party represent a distinct third position, related to the Republican side but not the same. Let's call it, not far-right (which people say when they're trying to call someone a Nazi) but Strict Right. The principles aren't THAT different from the Standard Right, but they're taken a little further and there is little room for compromise.

Now, President Obama just laid out a lot of things he would like to get done in his State of the Union, and acknowledged that he can't do those things with Democratic support alone. So he needs Republican partners, and the Paul Ryan/Standard Right team is going to be the only place he can go to do that. So there will undoubtedly be talks between the President and those folks. But the Strict Right group will be very skeptical of any proposed deal, and put a lot of pressure on the Standard Right to resist any compromises. So the Standard Right will have to consider these factors:

1) If they go too far to the center, they are vulnerable to primary challenges from the Tea Party, and these challenges were remarkably effective in the last cycle. That puts an upper bound on what compromises will be feasible (and Obama will know this, too.)

2) If they are completely unwilling to work with the President, the public is likely to blame Republicans for the resulting lack of progress, as they did in the Newt Gingrich era during the government shutdown fight. This will tell the Standard Right that they can't just sit on their hands for two years and try to pin the blame on Obama.

3) There is a real financial and budgetary problem that people like Paul Ryan are truly committed to solving, and a bipartisan deal helps them do that while spreading the blame for painful decisions across both parties.

4) Obama knows that it will be hard for Democrats to keep the Senate in 2012, so even if he is reelected, he's unlikely to be able to pass liberal legislation, so he might as well make the best deals he can now, because his second term will likely be about defending past liberal achievements, not getting new ones.

So the solution is for Obama and the Standard Right to make deals that give the Republicans 75% or more of what they want (to blunt the effectiveness of Tea Party primary challenges) while giving Obama some small victories he can present to the Standard Left. The Strict Right may complain that the Standard Right have betrayed their principles, but as long as the legislation is popular, generally conservative, and effective at cutting the deficit, these arguments will seem inflexible and overly partisan. And the far (Strict?) Left will complain, to the same effect.

So Obama will be able to run as a centrist, instead of just saying he is, and the Standard Right will be able to claim a victory for American principles, and that they made democracy work again. Independents will reward them both, giving us a Republican House and Senate and an Obama re-election.

And while I'm not exactly an Obama cheerleader, that'd be just fine with me.

Healer, Heal Thy Guidelines!

I found my way over to an interesting blog written by one Joseph Paduda on Managed Care. A number of his posts were interesting, but I was most captivated by this one on the limits of guidelines. This is a topic, as a healthcare marketer, that always catches my attention, because health guidelines cause an essential challenge: namely, that the guidelines can only be improved upon if physicians ignore them.

What I had always assumed, and what Paduda calls into question, is that guidelines are based on the best science of the day. He puts it as follows:

A recent study may well give you pause - the key finding is rather alarming - many guidelines are NOT based on solid research, but on work that is kindly described as rather more superficial.

Published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the research found "More than half of the current recommendations of the IDSA (Infectious Diseases Society of America) are based on level III evidence [expert opinion] only." [emphasis added]

Paduda goes on to note that many guidelines are based on good science, but encourages people to be vigilant in asking about the basis of guidelines they come across.

And while that may be good advice for the healthcare professional, or even a well-informed lay person, most patients aren't going to be able to debate the merits of particular guidelines with their doctor, or, more importantly, their insurer.

This bothers me immensely, because care decisions are going to be further centralized in the coming years (probably whether or not Obamacare is repealed, by the way), and the centralizers are going to lean on guidelines to cut costs and standardize care. This seems highly likely to slow the adoption of medical innovation. So never mind that slavish conformity to guidelines limits the opportunities for smart individual physicians to come up with better approaches to care, many of those guidelines may not be worth the glossy medical journal paper they're printed on. Not comforting.

A Healthy Dose of Fear

My good friend Ben blogs over at A Healthy Dose, with some interesting, and often very personal, observations on the interaction between healthcare and culture. He flashes up some interesting stats here, with a link to more here, that imply one of two possible futures:

1) Baby Boomers retire in droves, swamp the government and corporate systems designed to ensure their retirements, and suck up an increasing share of the nation's resources.

2) Baby Boomers 'work until they drop', stay in the labor market a decade or more longer than expected, and lock up positions that otherwise would have been freed up for younger workers. (James K. Gilbraith at Foreign Policy argues that we should lower the retirement age for this reason.)

Our best hope is for a Goldilocks outcome, where enough Boomers keep working to avoid overwhelming the safety net, but enough retire to open positions for the younger unemployed. But it is just as likely that, given the number of Boomers, there will be too many retirees and too many senior workers at the same time.

Unfortunately, while our society has finally woken up to the problem, we don't seem to have the first clue what the solution to our senior citizen boom might be.

How Many People Do We Need?

Just to be clear, this is not a post on population control, exactly. Rather, I am forced to wonder what is going to happen to the vast majority of mankind when civilization only depends upon the productive work of a few of us.

Why am I worrying about this? In this post, Walter Russell Mead boldly challenges the complacent thinking that the 'developed world' has reached some sort of pinnacle, and reminds us that from the perspective of the future, many of our fundamental institutions are likely to look downright awful. He cites a few examples in the quote that follows:

Much of today’s production that doesn’t take the form of mind-numbing, repetitive work in factories comes in the shape of mind-numbing, repetitive work in offices. Government, corporate, legal and non-profit bureaucracies suck up inordinate amounts of human time and talent. It is not at all clear that the output is worth it — or to put it another way, we should be able to get equal or better results with less work. Information technology offers increasing opportunities to transfer more and more of the routine scutwork of administration over to machines, setting the office drones free to do more rewarding, more socially useful things.

Moreover, our bureaucracies are not just cumbersome time and creativity sucks; they are expensive as well. Federal, state and local government can become significantly cheaper as we strip out the layers of bureaucracy, dispense with work rules developed in some cases back when carbon paper ruled the world, and restructure patterns of organization and management that date back even farther. People who like low taxes and people who like on big government can agree at least that by systematically making government cheaper we can have all the government we need at rates we can afford.

All very true, but do you notice one common thread? All of these reforms imagine fewer people doing the work done by many today. I'm sure Mead would contend that freeing up these people from drudgery will allow them to create, innovate, and add new value to the economy, and that's true. But increasingly, those innovations will require far fewer people to grow them than the great businesses of the past. In manufacturing, men are replaced by robots. In services, the personal touch is replaced by the convenience of online ordering. In entertainment, fewer and fewer people chase the same experiences provided by the same few musicians, writers, and artists. I can even point to the relative traffic of Mead's blog versus my own as another example: the better thinkers get the traffic and the links.

We have 10% unemployment now, and maybe close to 20% underemployment. However, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the wealthy have recovered quite nicely from the recession, and seem increasingly to be detached from the concerns of their middle-class countrymen.

Historically, innovation has always had positive effects throughout society, from top to bottom. There have always been disruptions (Mead even cites the destruction of the family farm a century ago), but overall change has been for the good. And in all likelihood, it will be in the future, as well. However, we might be moving towards a future where a few people live lives of meaning, creativity and success, while the majority draft along in their wake, doing the jobs that can't be automated or living off of the charity their success allows. I'm not sure if this is likely, but I'd ask this: where are the middle-class jobs of tomorrow going to come from?

How Do We Stand Up?

I was at a bar on Thursday night with my younger brother, an art student at Pratt here in Brooklyn. We were discussing our respective modes of artistic expression (his visual, mine written) and I was trying to explain a notion that the visual arts are more about human feeling than about concrete ideas. I used the painting here (The 3rd of May, 1808, by Goya) as an example, and said that it captures, to me, "the flickering flame of human defiance in the face of despair." My brother liked the phrase enough that he wrote it down and later sent it to me. As prose, it might be a bit much, but there's something to the notion that's been on my mind since.

In that painting, the man in the white shirt seems torn between fear of death and a proud resignation: I did what I thought I should do for my country, and now the bill is due. I am struck by how hard it is to follow your conscience in the face of forces beyond your control. Here, in the midst of deadly retribution being dealt out by the French troops, we see the toll taken on one man, and realize that the dreams, memories, skills and relationships that make up his existence are about to be snuffed out.

How many of us, in that moment, would be willing to renounce our ideals, our causes, for a chance to walk away alive? And that, I think, is why despair is always present for us: no matter how much we believe in a cause and are theoretically willing to sacrifice for it, for most of us, we despair of the thought of death (and especially a futile death) and know we may not follow through on the sacrifice when it matters. And yet, there is that flickering flame, the possibility that we may be able to believe in something bigger long enough to do what is right. For the man in the painting, he may in that moment wish to take back his rebellion against the French and live a peaceful life, but he made his decision to fight the day before (a scene Goya also painted) and now it is too late to turn back. His heroism, if it happened, happened out of the context of the painting. A believer in God may hold to faith not knowing it will lead to his martyrdom, but that makes him no less of a martyr when he dies for it.

I write this blog to think about tomorrow, and indeed I question how human defiance will manifest itself in the future. It isn't that people are unwilling to stand up for what they think is right, but rather that our systems (social, political, economic) are so complex that it is hard to tell exactly what the problems are and what should be done about them. On the whole, this is a good thing: in complex societies, there is room to carve out your little sphere of righteousness, and walk away from what it is that you think is wrong. But it also leaves the individual unsure of how to act morally, and leads to the possibility that despair will creep in, a despair that we are powerless to make our society better, or to address the wrongs that we see.

Why Civil Marriage Ought to End

The debate about who should be allowed to marry is, first and foremost, a debate around what the word 'marriage' actually means. Is it a descriptor of the loving union of two people? Or is it an institution upon which families (and specifically the optimal raising of children) is based? A series of court decisions have cast doubt on whether marriage is really about procreation: one of the foremost arguments against the procreative view of marriage is that if the point of marriage was to beget children, then we wouldn't let old people or the infertile marry at all. Therefore, the logic goes, the institution must be about two people loving each other and having an exclusive sexual relationship, and therefore it is discriminatory not to let gay couples participate in marriage.

Princeton professor Robert George attempts to bolster the procreative argument in a recent paper. His argument is that, even though some heterosexual couples can't have children, they are oriented towards that goal through the nature of the act. He makes the analogy to a baseball team: all baseball teams are structured to win baseball games, but some win and others lose. Yet the losers are still baseball teams, and in a similar way non-procreative heterosexual couples are still oriented towards procreation.

Over at Slate.com, Kenji Yoshino responds:

I suspect it will be cold comfort to many infertile opposite-sex couples to hear that while their marriage is still "real," it is a "losing" marriage as opposed to a "winning" one. Ideally, most of them view their marriages as something more than honorable defeats and would despise the contention that they had not fulfilled the central purpose of the institution. Moreover, the article says nothing of straight people who choose not to procreate. It is unclear why they would have "true marriages," as they are not even trying to win.

This argument tells you everything you need to know about the pro-gay marriage side of the debate. The first half of the paragraph hints at the skepticism, made more explicit elsewhere in the piece, that marriage has to do with anything other than the shared love and sexual intimacy of two people. (I'll just say, in passing, that the notion marriage is only about love strikes me as historically, anthropologically and psychologically clueless.) But the second half of the paragraph gets at why, despite my much greater sympathy for Robert George's point of view, I believe Yoshino ultimately has the better of the argument. You cannot argue that marriage is about an orientation towards procreation when a large number of married heterosexuals explicitly reject that belief, not by accident of biology, but by choice. And, what's more important, there are no legal or social repercussions when a married couple chooses not to have children.

However, while Yoshino is right that George's procreative argument does not create a sufficient case for preserving marriage as a heterosexual-only institution, he is wrong that his counter argument makes an effective case for gay marriage. Consider this sentence: "Closely examined, the common-procreation argument denigrates not only same-sex couples but several kinds of married opposite-sex couples." He is speaking about the State, our government, smiling upon certain types of loving relationships and 'denigrating' others. Does our government have any interest, at all, in licensing personal, loving relationships? Especially if no-fault divorce means they can be dissolved any time, or for any reason? Of course not. Gay marriage advocates are arguing for inclusion in an institution that, from a civil point of view, is completely hollowed out. If they were intellectually honest, they'd be arguing for an end to marriage as a legal concept, and its replacement with a system of contracts: we could have a basic civil union that covers things like joint tax filing and hospital visits, and a child-rearing contract that expresses the intention of two people to commit to raising a child (whether conceived by the couple or adopted) to adulthood.

To go back to the question of how you define marriage, it isn't an "either, or" issue, but rather a, "both, and" issue. Marriage is both about love, and procreation, and raising children correctly, and (at least for religious folks) making a commitment to God and Church about how you intend to conduct the rest of your life in partnership with your spouse. But that is very explicitly a religious vision of marriage. In our society, I would argue, the only consistent, valuable definitions of marriage are religious ones.

Our society is deeply influenced by its Christian heritage. However, once that faith ceases to be vital in the public square, that influence is not sustained, which means basic assumptions about our society enshrined in law, like marriage, come under scrutiny. I believe marriage as a civil institution was fundamentally hollowed by no-fault divorce, which strips a sense of duty and commitment out of marriage. That shift in the law was largely embraced by the public, including practicing Christians, who get divorced with basically the same frequency as the public at large. If we wish to have a religiously informed vision of marriage enshrined in civil law, Christians must prove through their actions the superiority of that vision. Until then, the best (and most fair) thing to do is to end civil marriage and return it to the religious sphere where it finds its truest expression.

The Wall Street Two-Step

I've long harbored the suspicion that our modern financial sector is something of a parasite, sucking wealth out of the American bloodstream. This suspicion intensified when I moved to New York, when I started meeting wealthy people who weren't obviously doing anything valuable to justify their wishes. (I know, a nervy statement coming from someone in advertising.)

But this article, from Tyler Cowen, brought these fuzzy thoughts into sharp relief. Cowen starts with the mission of explaining income inequality, but transitions to focusing on how Wall Street, in his words, "has learned how to game the American (and UK-based) system of state capitalism." How? By "going short on volatility," or by making financial bets that assume what is likely to happen will always happen. Cowen explains it well here:

To understand how this strategy works, consider an example from sports betting. The NBA’s Washington Wizards are a perennially hapless team that rarely gets beyond the first round of the playoffs, if they make the playoffs at all. This year the odds of the Wizards winning the NBA title will likely clock in at longer than a hundred to one. I could, as a gambling strategy, bet against the Wizards and other low-quality teams each year. Most years I would earn a decent profit, and it would feel like I was earning money for virtually nothing. The Los Angeles Lakers or Boston Celtics or some other quality team would win the title again and I would collect some surplus from my bets. For many years I would earn excess returns relative to the market as a whole.

Yet such bets are not wise over the long run. Every now and then a surprise team does win the title and in those years I would lose a huge amount of money. Even the Washington Wizards (under their previous name, the Capital Bullets) won the title in 1977–78 despite compiling a so-so 44–38 record during the regular season, by marching through the playoffs in spectacular fashion. So if you bet against unlikely events, most of the time you will look smart and have the money to validate the appearance. Periodically, however, you will look very bad.

This is essentially the same as Nassim Taleb's Black Swan argument, but Cowen explains why it in fact makes sense to ignore Black Swan possibilities. Taleb argues that there is opportunity betting against the herd (and also that the herd is too stupid to see these risks), but what if the Wall Street herd is actually smart enough to know that the government will have to step in when these unlikely events happen, to 'save the system'?

So far, Cowen is simplifying and clarifying arguments I have come across before, that essentially we are held hostage to Wall Street because it is the lynchpin of the economy. But one could still argue that it in best interests of individuals not to fail, because they will lose money, prestige, and opportunity. That is where Cowen makes his most devastating observation:

Another root cause of growing inequality is that the modern world, by so limiting our downside risk, makes extreme risk-taking all too comfortable and easy. More risk-taking will mean more inequality, sooner or later, because winners always emerge from risk-taking. Yet bankers who take bad risks (provided those risks are legal) simply do not end up with bad outcomes in any absolute sense. They still have millions in the bank, lots of human capital and plenty of social status. We’re not going to bring back torture, trial by ordeal or debtors’ prisons, nor should we. Yet the threat of impoverishment and disgrace no longer looms the way it once did, so we no longer can constrain excess financial risk-taking. It’s too soft and cushy a world.

If, to pick one example, Wall Street traders who lost billions of dollars lost every dollar they had, or spent years in prison, or were exiled to Zimbabwe, individuals would have incentive to resist following the investing herd. But they end up only slightly less rich and successful if they fail than if they succeed. This allure of big money without big risk, as Cowen and others observe, draws smart, driven people away from other fields (creative endeavors, entrepreneurialism, scientific exploration) where success is a prerequisite of financial reward.

The only problem is that this whole no-lose system depends on governments to be able to bail out the banks when the periodic crashes happen. But depending on this will encourage financial firms to take bigger and bigger risks until they overwhelm the government's ability to intervene. Whether what follows is another depression or societal collapse is unclear, but we can be sure it will be ugly.

The Limits of Facebook

Let me first start by saying I have a not-entirely-rational animus towards Facebook. It's mostly because I'm a contrarian: when all my basketball-loving friends were touting LeBron James as the greatest player of the 21st Century, I predicted he would fail because he was too immature to handle the fame and money. (In my defense, I underestimated his talent, but he clearly has some maturing to do, even now.) Basically, I get annoyed when someone or something is annointed 'transformative' before they've earned it. So when I read Mark Zuckerberg's recent comments that Facebook would 'reform' the world of entertainment within five years, I felt my teeth grinding.

Of course, that's hardly the most outrageous thing anyone has said about Facebook: one Russian tech investor with a stake in the company said it could help create artificial intelligence the next decade. All of these claims are based on one central contention: that the massive amount of data, and the underlying 'social graph', that Facebook controls will enable it to transform industry and technology in unprecedented ways. In the interests of brevity, here are three reasons why I don't think it will happen, at least not to the extent Zuckerberg and his investors would like:

1) Who owns the data?
Facebook has courted controversy multiple times when it has changed its privacy settings or let third parties access its data. So far, it hasn't seemed to lead to any mass exodus from Facebook. But the business needs of Facebook fundamentally clash with the desires of its users. Most poeople I know use Facebook to keep a virtual finger on the pulse of distant friends, and as a way of sharing lower-level personal news (photos of your vacation, where you went for dinner on Friday, the celebrity you saw at Saks Fifth Avenue) with a bunch of people easily and unobtrusively. Then there are the people who are on the site obsessively, curating their network and their social presence to some personally defined level of perfection. The former group likes the convenience of Facebook, but doesn't need it if push comes to shove. And the latter group is msotly showing off for each other and for the majority that fits into the first bucket. If Facebook starts monetizing its networks too aggressviely people will get turned off and leave. So the power of Facebook's data only exists so long as it can avoid too obviously using the data. When Zuckerberg talks about "changing standards of privacy," what he is saying is that his business ultimately depends on his users becoming comfortable with Facebook selling their data (aka the digital version of their personal lives) to marketers.

2) The Perils of Overexposure
Unsurprising news: many divorces, including celebrity divorces, are being abetted in part by discoveries on Facebook. This isn't a failing on the part of Facebook any more than it is Visa's fault if a wife finds charges for expensive 'massages' on her husband's bill. But it is the inherent nature of Facebook to expose the ragged edges of human life, and more and more people are going to get burned by it as time goes by. Soon everyone will have the story of a coworker who got fired because of an ill-conceived post, or family members who aren't talking because one sibling saw the other blew off her baby's christening to go to the movies. Once people start aggressively self-censoring, the site becomes less fun, and the data less valuable.

3) Our Network is not Our Brain
One of the fundamental assumptions of Facebook is that we'd rather learn things from our friends than from an algorythm. Zuckerberg and his boosters think we will soon be deciding what to buy, where to eat, and what to believe thanks to the power of our network. And to some degree, that will happen: there is a fairly compelling body of research that we are subtly influenced by the decisions and beliefs of the people around us. But where Facebook goes wrong is assuming the subtle interactions that drive so much human behavior are easily replicated online. If I see a friend wearing a really nice jacket, I might be envious and go get a similar one. But if I see a friend of five 'likes' Burberry on Facebook, that is not going to arouse my desire for Burberry coats: if anything, the display of sycophantic passion for a consumer brand is going to be a bit of a turnoff. I'll think less of my friend, and maybe a bit leas of the brand. The reason social effects drive so much real world behavior is because we aren't really aware they're happening. When we become conscious that someone is trying to influence us, we react very differently.

In the movie The Social Network, the Eduardo Savarin character wants to sell advertising on the site. Zuckerberg, under the influence of Sean Parker, is hostile to the notion, because "ads aren't cool." This is a basic insight into Facebook's enormous success: people like Facebook because it seems like a safe space to connect with people they know. But Facebook exists to make money, and the desires of its users and owners are in tension, if not conflict.

I am not predicting Facebook's demise: I learned better after talking down LeBron. But like LeBron, Facebook may not fulfill all of the lofty expectations people have for it, and when the hype has gotten this out of control, moderate success can feel an awful lot like failure.

Dreams for the 21st Century

In church on Sunday, our priest mentioned in passing Dr. Martin Luther King, and posed a question (I'm paraphrasing): "Who would have thought, when Doctor King gave his famous speech on the Washington Mall, that his dream would be realized in the lifetime of those hearing it?" The thought, which I have heard expressed before, set me to thinking about how a clear vision for how things could be in the future can actually change the trajectory of society.

And so, while humbly admitting that my dreams aren't as eloquent or as powerful as MLK's, I humbly submit three dreams that I would hope to see realized in my lifetime:

I have a dream that those involved in politics will assume their opponents are arguing their position in goodwill. Having become a political junky in my adulthood, I am disheartened by how hard most politicians and pundits find it to not cast doubt on their opponents' motives. While both sides have their share of opportunists and dealmakers, working with the assumption that a person genuinely believes his or her policy will solve the problem in question makes it a lot more likely to find a middle ground or a new solution that actually can work for everyone. This seems like asking for human nature to change, but then again, so did (does?) asking people to act without
thought of race.

I have a dream that we will cherish the value of human life. I am pro-life, but I think a major failing of those leading the pro-life movement is that they act as if the lives of the women and doctors involved are less important to them than the lives of the babies they may abort. But on the flip side, pro-choice rhetoric seeks to deny the obvious point that a human fetus is a human life. Abortions will happen in a sinful world, but appreciating the common humanity that unites everyone from the beginning until the end of life could change the tenor of the debate, and lead to a solution where abortion, at the very least, is seen as a genuine loss. I could make the same point about euthenasia, the death penalty, and medical cloning, among other topics.

I have a dream that religious people will really love the sinner. It is a difficult balancing act, in public debate, to condemn what you think is a sin without making the sinner feel rejected, shunned and unprotected by the law. We have to seperate sin (which is a matter of the soul) and crime (which is when one person does harm to another). A powerful article I read recently pointed out that if Christians had done a better job of reaching out to homosexuals by, for example, caring for those with AIDS, people might be a bit more willing to listen to arguments they might make about gay marriage, because it would be clear they weren't making the argument out of hatred for gays. But the reality is that many believers can't separate the sinner from the sin, leaving the faithful open to (sometimes well-deserved) charges of hypocricy.

At any rate, my list may seem utopian. But I hold out hope that as a society, we'll get there. (My dream for myself is that I get off the couch and find ways to make these dreams happen.) If we want to achieve the vision, we first need to clearly express the vision, which is what I've made a rough first effort to do here.

Which Way, America?

I think I have been hearing some version of the phrase "this is America's decisive moment" since I was old enough to care about politics, certainly since I was old enough to vote (1998, for the record). So all of the people going on about how we need to make some huge changes right now, OR ELSE are probably feeding the hype monster just a little bit.

But it is hard not to agree that the country is trending the wrong way, and has been for about a decade. It seems most people are content to look to assign blame (which in and of itself is a symptom of the disease). And in this column, Peggy Noonan does a bit of that, pointing at Obama's seeming disconnect from the country both in terms of policy and tone. But I don't think she really blames him, but rather sees his ascent to power as a symptom of the disease. And that disease is one that the Tea Party succumbed to this year, looking for the quick fix, for voting for passing celebrities rather than proven leaders. Noonan takes Sarah Palin to task for her fundamental unseriousness, then goes on to say:

Reagan's career is a guide, not only for the tea party but for all in politics. He brought his fully mature, fully seasoned self into politics with him. He wasn't in search of a life when he ran for office, and he wasn't in search of fame; he'd already lived a life, he was already well known, he'd accomplished things in the world.

Here is an old tradition badly in need of return: You have to earn your way into politics. You should go have a life, build a string of accomplishments, then enter public service. And you need actual talent: You have to be able to bring people in and along. You can't just bully them, you can't just assert and taunt, you have to be able to persuade.

I completely agree that we have been following the political equivalent of false prophets for a while, but I think Noonan's invocation of those who "earn their way into politics" is another potentially dangerous shortcut to an answer. If, in 2012, we elect someone with a history of service, of accomplishment, does that guarantee anything? Couldn't that, for example, refer to Richard Nixon about as well as Ronald Reagan? Or Lyndon Johnson? The problem is not that the experienced leaders aren't popular, it is that they are correctly seen by many Americans as having put us in our current bind, and so rather than think coherently about the best way out of this mess, they look for fresh faces. And unfortunately, some of those faces are essentially reality TV stars who have learned to espouse some catch phrases that fire up a good chunk of one political faction or another.

Which is why, despite its lack of concrete policy proposals or political suggestions, I really liked this David Brooks column on America's potential to be "The Crossroads Nation". Brooks manages to avoid the tired terms of our current debate about whether we need more stimulus, or what the tax rates should be, or if ObamaCare should be repealed. He looks to principles, and tries to express a vision for what our nation should stand for. I personally find it a moving vision:

In fact, the U.S. is well situated to be the crossroads nation. It is well situated to be the center of global networks and to nurture the right kinds of networks. Building that America means doing everything possible to thicken connections: finance research to attract scientists; improve infrastructure to ease travel; fix immigration to funnel talent; reform taxes to attract superstars; make study abroad a rite of passage for college students; take advantage of the millions of veterans who have served overseas.

In other words, he wants the nation to serve as a welcoming hub for entrepreneurs, thinkers and inventors from around the world. That vision both identifies a key, hard to compete with strength that our country has, and suggests a series of policies that should be pursued to make it happen. Some would appeal more to the right, some to the left. That might make it harder (or impossible) to pass, but it also suggests that it offers a way to escape the dull political pendulum swings that are marking time in our nation's current decline.

On Condemnation

200 Years ago, the idea of slavery had many defenders: it was seen as biblically endorsed, blacks were assumed to be inferior, and it was the basis for an entrenched economic system. A combination of high and low rationales made it seem like a permanent feature of our society. Today, anyone who would endorse anything that bears the faintest resemblence to slavery would be hounded out of public life.

This evident truth occurred to me when reading a recent post by Ta-Nehisi Coates, titled, "On Improvement". He talks about some of the flaws inherent in humanity, and whether we can ever wash away the dark spots on our collective soul. He starts, innocently enough, by speculating on why we so enjoy football:

Have we created institutions which look unseemly, but actually are addressing some deeply-felt need? In relation to football, what if we--as humans--have a need to vent aggression, even if only vicariously? And what if we do this through other people who will be richly rewarded for their sacrifice, but will also suffer tremendously?

He goes on to speculate why some people persist in holding seemingly ludicrous beliefs and seeking out sources of information that reinforce them, for example those who cling to the 'Obama-is-a-Muslim' theory. He then concludes:

I confess that I have not fully worked this out, yet. I guess I'm just wondering the extent to which we've crafted our own chains. How much of this is just who we are? How much of it can be improved and reformed?

Coates doesn't touch on what I would consider the most obvious explanation: that our sinful human nature constantly tempts us down crooked paths that make us feel good, or make our lives easier, or help us avoid standing out from the crowd. To return to slavery, think about the ways that institution rewarded southern whites 200 years ago:

1) It enriched them. (we could probably stop right there, but wait, there's more!)
2) It gave them absolute power over someone else.
3) It helped them fit in, by not condemning something the richest, most important members of their community were all doing.
4) It gave them a clearly defined sense of the enemy (both the slaves and, perhaps more importantly, northern whites who were butting in.)
5) It provided a clear social hierarchy, and ensured they would never be at the bottom of it. (This is why, I'd guess, so many poor whites who owned no or few slaves were so adamantly against abolition, and explains some of the nostalgia for the Confederacy that still exists.)

I'm sure I could go on, but the point is that slavery was deeply embedded in the psyches and the relationships of the people in the southern states, and thus required major the application of powerful forces to tear it out.

Now, the interesting thing is that I could build similar lists for social causes championed today by both the left and the right. Does not abortion give the woman absolute power over the unborn child? Does not condemnation of gay marriage clearly define the enemy for conservatives? The question is whether as a society we will ever come to see abortion-on-demand or denying gay couples the right to marry in the same way we now regard slavery: that is, as a stain, something abhorrent.

One final thought. If it is true that societal ills have their root in human sinfulness, then we can expect changes in social structures, technology, and government to change what evils we tolerate, but not that some evil will be tolerated by large swaths of what we generally call decent people. An example: in the 1960's, television brought images of the civil rights struggle into every American home, making it impossible for people to ignore the plight of blacks the way they had for a century. At the same time, the contraceptive pill and improved surgical techniques made it possible, for the first time, for women to seperate sex from childbirth. Both technological changes created the impetus for major social changes: I would argue one for the better and one for the worse. One could imagine, say, a technology that allowed a fetus to develop in an artificial uterus after a few months of pregnancy, along with increased concerns about population declines in western nations, to change the societal calculus again.

A society's morals are not static, nor should we assume blindly that all changes are for the better. But we should hold out hope that we can learn an improve. Often, the sign of our progress is marked by those old practices which are now so widely condemned that (we hope) they will never curse us again.

Retreating to Psychology

My daily reading tends to cycle rapidly between political commentary and sports writing. Today, I read two pieces that demonstrated to me just how much of my life I am wasting on reading other people's dimestore psychologizing about public figures of all sorts. First, here is Maureen Dowd on President Obama:

His arrogance led him to assume: If I build it, they will understand. He can’t get the gratitude he feels he deserves for his achievements if no one knows what he achieved and why those achievements are so vital.

Once it seemed impressive that he was so comfortable in his own skin. Now that comfort comes across as an unwillingness to be wrong.

And here is Bill Simmons on Dwayne Wade:

The overthinking-it-but-maybe-I'm-right explanation: Maybe everyone slowly realized during the preseason, "Good God, LeBron is MUCH better than Dwyane. What do we do? How do we handle this? Do we wait for Dwyane to admit it? Do we ... wait, what do we do???"

Maybe Wade can feel it. Maybe his competitive juices are kicking in. No, no, we're equals. He's not better than me. We're equally good. Look, I'll show you. Maybe it's just been the elephant in the room for six weeks. Maybe deep down, everyone knows the Heat can't take off until Wade has his "You can be chairman and CEO, I'll be president and COO" moment. It goes beyond who gets to take the last shot. It's about the dynamics of basketball. It's about someone emerging as the emotional leader, the spine of the team, the guy who says over and over again, "I got this." And you can't keep saying that if you're looking over your shoulder worrying that someone else is saying the same thing. It's like a fly ball in the outfield. Eventually, someone has to call it.

In case you don't feel like clicking through to the whole pieces, I'll give you a summary. Dowd's point is: Obama was too cocky and believed his own hype and now he's paying for it. Simmons' point is: Both LeBron and Wade are used to being the star, and one of them is going to have to defer to the other if they are going to succeed. Both of these themes are so obvious and well-worn that if they had written their pieces without resorting to pop psychology, they wouldn't have been much longer than those sentences.

Why is psychological speculation so compelling to readers? Sadly, I can only answer the question by resorting to it myself: readers today are overwhelmed by how complex and challenging things have become, so they take comfort in speculation as to behavioral drivers that they can easily understand. We may not be able to figure out an agenda that will both help the country and appeal to Obama's political base, we may not be able to envision an offensive system that will maximize the combined talents of LeBron James and Dwayne Wade, but we can presume that we understand what's going on in the heads of famous people, and that makes us feel smugly superior to them. At least I'm not as cocky as the President (or Dwayne Wade).

There are writers who make more substantative arguments: Walter Russell Mead is a great example of someone using historic and strategic insights to help his readers understand what is happening in the world right now, and what might happen in the future if certain trends continue. His recent post about the sorry state of our politics, and the structural weaknesses of both parties that keep them from addressing our major problems, was compelling and avoided cheap point scoring. But as long as we continue to indulge our collective intellectual laziness by analyzing why our public figures don't behave exactly as we'd like, we will remain hopelessly far from finding new solutions to our tired problems.

What Soccer Can Teach Us About the Value of "The Best"

Word came recently that my beloved Red Sox are close to buying Liverpool, one of the soccer (I should say football, especially since I'm in Europe) clubs in the English Premier League (EPL). While I would prefer that the Sox owners put the money into acquiring a few stronger players, I understand the business motivation: after the last World Cup, there is (again) talk that soccer is finally catching on in America, and investing in a premium franchise, and in an English-speaking country, makes sense as a long-term play.

Well, so I thought, to the extent I thought about it at all. The essential logic is that the EPL represents the best in soccer, and that those franchises will only continue to increase in prominence and importance. Numerous books on business and branding have noted the phenomenon that the rich get richer, that there are many industries where winner increasingly takes all, and the most successful, the most powerful, the most well-known increasingly get more money and fame while second-best fades.

However, this column by Theodore Dalyrimple, ostensibly about the World Cup, caused me to reconsider. The key point:

There is also an interesting contrast between the way the professional sport is practiced in Germany and in England.

The English football league generates far more money than the German, and most observers deem it the best in the world, at least in terms of attracting hundreds of millions of television viewers. Players in the English league are much better paid than those in the German league (though the Germans are hardly impoverished). However, most of the players in the top echelon of the English league are foreign. Many of the best clubs have only two or three English players, and some have none. English clubs import players; German clubs foster and train German players. English clubs are largely owned by foreigners, such as Russian oligarchs of the most dubious reputation; German clubs are owned by Germans. English clubs lose money and are highly indebted; German clubs make a profit and have monetary reserves. And as I have already mentioned, the German national team plays incomparably better than the English national team.

As a marketer, I have to think that the German teams (and German soccer) as brands, are in the stronger long-term position. They are authentic, local, and sustainable, all modern branding buzzwords for a reason. One could imagine a future in which the EPL fans grow disenchanted with their crazy owners (who aren't English) and pampered players (who aren't English) and see their league as fatally compromised. One could also see a future in which the unsustainable financial practices of these teams cause a paring back, with the best talent going to other leagues, including the German ones, and cutting into the EPL's talent advantage.

If John Henry and the other Red Sox owners wanted my advice (which of course they don't) I would tell them not to invest in a bubble inflated by foreign money chasing "the best". They should try to be a part of building something (which is what they've done with the Sox) rather than buying at the peak of a sports bubble. They might even think about using some of that money to build soccer in the US. But I think they'll find the value of owning the Liverpool 'brand' will be much less than they think.

The Incentive to Mediocrity

In my last post, I argued that greatness is increasingly unlikely to occur when society rewards talent so lavishly in its embryonic state. I would like to examine the issue from another perspective: is there, in fact, an incentive in modern life to be mediocre?

Throughout most of history, luxury was exceedingly rare, and only those at the pinnacle of power (think kings, dukes and the like) could harness sufficient economic resources to have it. This changed with the industrial revolution to some degree, but the real shift came with the advent of electricity and broadcast technology, which allowed for the first time most people to consume entertainment regularly. The advent of commercial air travel then allowed the non-elite to consume experiences (going to a beach in the winter, seeing exotic places or great art) with some regularity. After this, you no longer had to be a king to receive the best society has to offer, just moderatly wealthy: the top 1% of US households bring in more than $350,000 a year, which will pay for a very nice home, luxurious travel, and a damned big television.

So the incentives, perhaps, start to change for people. Is it worth it to kill yourself for your art, your science, your political platform, if you can achieve recognition and wealth without going quite that far? For those without genius-level talent, a great effort is necessary just to get to that elite level, and they will work extremely hard if they want all the perks of modern life. But the most gifted can achieve great success without supreme exertion: these are the people who 'make it look easy.'

I admit there is no proof to back up my idle theorizing, but the nature of modern luxury seems to offer at least a partial explanation for why society has produced so few truly great individuals in the post-WWII era.

The End of Greatness

Would Ghengis Khan have conquered most of Asia and a big chunk of Europe if he had been able to vacation in the South of France? Would Tolstoy or Dostoevsky have toiled over thousand page novels if they could have gained fame and fortune from an Oprah's Book Club sticker? Would the leaders of the American Revolution have stuck with their hard path if the UN had existed to intervene and 'talk it out'?

These are, perhaps, stupid questions. At least, on their face, they are unanswerable. But they point to something I think is important: the great reduction of greatness in all walks of life in our modern times. Whatever the realm you choose to inspect, whether statecraft or art or science, we seem to be suffering, in the last 70 years or so, from a distinct absence of greatness. One could argue that we might recognize greatness in some of our contemporaries only once time has passed, but I think we'll find, even decades from now, that this time will be marked by a dearth of the extraordinary. Why? Because the luxuries and temptations of modern society sap the most talented of their will to punish themselves to scale the mountains which they might be capable of ascending.

Society has become so good at recognizing and celebrating talent that it rewards the gifted before their talents have matured. The intelligent, the creative, the visionary: for the most part they are absorbed into the upper levels of privilege before they have had the chance to achieve true greatness. If a talented 20- or 30-something is whisked off to Cannes or Miami or given the funds to afford a lavish lifestyle in the great cities of the world, chances are they are going to be diverted from whatever greatness they still had to achieve.

I can't imagine an easy solution to this problem. We just have to hope that later generations will be better able to resist the lures of a well-developed material culture, and will once again be willing to walk the hard road to high achievement.

Is Evil a Heritable Trait?

As an American businessman attending meetings in Germany, I have had to bite my tongue frequently. For example, over dinner in Berlin with some wonderful German beers, I had to suppress the strong urge to blurt out, "This is a beautiful city, especially considering the pounding we gave it seventy years ago." I wonder if my counterparts also ever stop and realize that two generations ago, our relatives would have been doing their best to kill each other. So far, at any rate, I've managed to keep Basil Fawlty's directive, "Whatever you do, don't mention the war!"

On the plane home the other day, these thoughts led me to what might be a commonplace observation: I could never imagine the Germans I've met throwing their support behind anything as vile as the Nazis. Now, there are some traits that are stereotypically German which I see in abundance: they are serious, hard-working, comfortable with hierarchy. You could see how they would make good soldiers: they seem like they would take to discipline very easily. But for the evil of Nazism to take hold, you would expect there to be some hint of that darkness in the character of the people, and I at least haven't seen it.

This is important because many materialists will tell you that free will doesn't exist in any meaningful sense. History and individual behavior are essentially pre-ordained. But if this is true, our personal and group behaviors must come from our DNA, and if so, it must be relatively immutable, certainly in the span of a few generations. People capable of aggression and cruelty on an industrial scale, especially people with a relatively homogeneous population, should show at least that potential relatively constantly.

I'm sure some clever materialist has come up with an explanation for this: the most plausible is that these cultures mask their traits as they recover from a defeat. But I think it much more likely that choice makes all the difference. The free will of parents to raise their children to hate violence changes the way they will feel as adults about war. Teaching ethnic and social tolerance will reduce fear of the other.

The good news is that our DNA does not determine our behavior, and whether we embrace good or evil in our lives. The bad news is that our DNA does not make us immune to the kind of evil that overtook Germany in the middle of the 20th century. If society makes bad choices, it could happen anywhere, including here.

Lazy or Sick?

As a thought experiment, imagine that we discovered a virus that inhibited certain higher brain functions. Most subjects infected with this virus would exhibit a greater tendency towards short-temperedness, and would be seen as 'difficult' or 'moody' by others. A few, though, become criminally anti-social. When a treatment for this virus is developed, many formerly hardened criminals become model citizens, exhibiting none of the destructive tendencies that had seemed so hard-wired.

How would this change the way we viewed criminals? (And, for that matter, the cranky uncle who drives everyone nuts at Thanksgiving?) My hypothetical above does not claim that the criminals and the cranky were powerless to resist these urges, just that it was harder for them than for the non-infected. I would contend that society would be split between those who felt those with the virus had been dealt a bad hand, but their behavior was still their fault, and those who would argue people cannot be held really responsible for behavior driven to a large extent by an outside influence.

I bring this up because of a brief article in New Scientist that outlines the link between a mouse virus and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). The science is clearly at an early stage, and previous attempts to link CFS to a virus have not borne out. But here is the key finding:

Shyh-Ching Lo of the Food and Drug Administration in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues found that blood samples from 32 of 37 people with chronic fatigue syndrome contained "polytropic" murine leukaemia virus-related fragments, compared with only three of 44 healthy blood donors.

Now, having done some work in this topic, I can say that many physicians, especially older male physicians, put CFS in a bucket of "women's conditions", along with related syndromes like Fybromyalgia and Restless Leg Syndrome. They tend to believe that the women in their care have underlying psychological problems that are manifesting themselves in these syndromes. That some anti-depressants have proven helpful in alleviating several of these syndromes reinforces their view. To say these physicians are dismissive of these problems and these patients is an understatement.

Patients would widely embrace the identification of a 'real' cause, and would undoubtedly demand a level of care and support for their condition far beyond what they receive today. But notice that not every CFS patient has the virus, and not everyone with the virus has CFS. That implies either that the virus may contribute to the syndrome without fully causing it, or that the reaction to infection might vary enough that a significant number of the infected aren't noticeably sick. (And would this be so surprising? After all, people react very differently to infection by the same cold viruses.) But if, for example, 25% of the people infected with this mouse virus are not noticeably fatigued, and another 50% are fatigued or lethargic to a degree, but are still able to function, many people are going to dismiss the 25% who are most affected as lazy, as milking their diagnosis. And it will be hard to prove the truth either way.

As the science of health continues its amazing advance, we're going to learn more and more about the environmental influences (viruses, bacteria, chemicals, etc.) that impact human performance. If pre-natal pollution exposure lowers IQ, should the less intelligent from dirtier environments be compensated, or get preferential treatment at schools? If certain gut flora lead to obesity, do we give them health coverage for bariatric surgery? With each new learning or theory, we move farther from the notion that people should be held accountable for their choices, and closer to a world where every personal failure is attributed to an outside force. It may be hard work to preserve the notion that we are masters of our own lives.

The Untalented and the Fearful

About a week ago, I saw some truly lousy modern dance. It went as these things often do, with odd costumes, occasionally amusing visual gags, brief moments of coordinated physical movement, and an audience that often tittered at what one could only guess were inside jokes. And so my mind wandered, a bit.

I found myself trying to determine if the dancers had talent in any discernible way. Did they, through combination of native ability and hard work, demonstrate high aptitude, if I took what they were doing at face value? I thought to other modern dance performances I have seen, and in subtle ways, I thought they were probably in fact a bit less skilled then many of their peers. To put it another way, I thought other dancers I have seen would have performed the same routine with more grace, more flair, and more humor. But those differences are minimized by the art form itself, which has sacrificed everything but novelty.

I don't mean to bitch about modern art, or not only to do so. Other writers, including one of my favorites, have done that much better than I can. But I mean to question if the sad state of modern art forms (I'd include painting, poetry, dance, classical music composition, and much of theater and architecture in this bucket) have evolved so as to coddle the talented and shelter the talentless.

If judgments about art's quality are subjective, then it is awfully mean to tell anyone their art stinks. So you don't, and the poor artists don't get weeded out. But the talented have no incentive to hone their skills, either, because that's not how they will be judged. They will be judged by novelty, their flair for self-promotion, and whether they master the language and the symbols of the in-crowd. Showing too much raw skill just might turn everyone else off.

And so the state of art is perfect for our self-esteem culture. The talentless are given a fair chance to beat the gifted. If someone rejects your work, it is not because you stink, it is because they don't get it. You don't need to master what your predecessors knew because it is old hat, and all anyone in your crowd cares about is what's next. Jackson Pollock is relevant as a cultural marker, but a young painter cannot learn what he needs by studying his predecessor's technique, because he can never fling paint at a canvas better than Pollock. The attempt would just be derivative. Maybe splatter a canvas with your own blood or desecrate a religious icon.

Great art, even mediocre art, requires deeply understanding and at least partially mastering what the public standard for quality is, and then either building on it or turning it on its ear. Modern art has build a Tower of Babel where the insiders only pretend to understand each others' gibberish, and then pat each other on the back in celebration of the wonderful new language each has created.

On Rejection

If I can disagree a bit with the image at left, increasingly, we don't learn early on how to deal with rejection. It seems the self-esteem factories of childhood are dead set against letting young people experience anything that could be seen as rejection or a repudiation of their innate wonderfulness.

I am writing this from the very un-objective point of view of someone who just got a rejection letter for a short story he thought was pretty good. But despite my anger (and there's no other word for it) that some hack assistant editor decided my story wasn't worth the time of day, rejection is clarifying. And I don't think we have enough of it in our modern world, especially for young people.

In the worlds of academia and youth activities, we have worked hard to ensure that relatively few people are told their work is inadequate. There's a paint-by-numbers way to get at least decent grades, and there's always an activity willing to celebrate your effort. (Sports remain something of an exception, but only because putting lousy players on the team only delays rejection until the actual game, when you get the ultimate rejection of losing.)

Grade inflation is perhaps one of the more insidious ways that a culture of non-rejection ruins people. A smart student that gets B's and C's because their work isn't quite up to the level of top achievers might be motivated. But when everyone who is adequate gets an "A", the underachiever has no motivation to improve and the overachiever feels cheated and stops working as hard.

Even in dating, perhaps the area most likely to create rejection, the challenges have been lessened. When most people dated with some degree of commitment, the decision to be with a person or not was serious, and a lot of feelings got hurt. Now, young people increasingly have to live with a hook-up culture that discourages serious commitment, but opens the door to casual flings where no one's feelings are hurt, but no one leaves quite satisfied, either.

In adulthood, this translates into no one being willing to tell you that you could be better. I had a long conversation recently with some managers at my company, who said that they were trained to treat anyone under 30 with kid gloves and to overwhelm them with positive reinforcement, lest they become discouraged and quit. Unsurprisingly, those 20-somethings don't seem to be learning how to get better.

That's the value of rejection: it either clarifies your failings or makes you that much more determined to prove the rejector wrong. If we are losing our ability as a society to reject that which we feel is inadequate, we will end up with steadily less excellence, as too many talented people will feel their first, mediocre efforts in their chosen field are good enough. Far better to maintain a culture of high standards, where a little rejection goes a long way to motivating people.