Cyberwarfare, Ukraine, and Mutual Assured Destruction

 This is being written the day after Vladimir Putin began his broad invasion into Ukraine.  As he announced his intention to do just that, he included a curious warning to any country that might choose to interfere with his plans.  He claimed that such a country would experience “such consequences as you have never experienced in your history.”  The news commentators seemed to assume Putin was threatening the use of nuclear weapons.  However, countries that could choose to try to block his plans have experienced nuclear weapons and all sorts of destruction and mass casualties, both military and civilian, from past wars.  It seemed as though Putin was referring to something new, perhaps a new type of warfare and a new type of damage.

Nicole Perlroth has provided a survey of what Putin could have been threatening in her book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race.  She chose the title based on the assessment that all complex software has vulnerabilities that can allow it to be penetrated and modified to perform in a way not intended.  And as we continue to move to the “internet of things” more and more of what defines our personal lives, and the lives of our nations, can be subject to hostile attack and caused to malfunction.  This cyberactivity could include intelligence gathering of information which is a nuisance and could prove dangerous.  It could also involve taking control of critical infrastructure and making it ineffective or even destroying it.  Rendering a nation without electrical power for many months, or the destruction of all financial records, would fall into the category of “such consequences as you have never experienced in your history.”  As Perlroth points out, such capabilities exist, and such capabilities have already been demonstrated.  Putin has been using Ukraine for both a testing area for his capabilities and a warning of what he could do to other countries should he so choose.

In 2015 Russia demonstrated to Ukraine and the world that they could take control of the electric grid in several locations and shut off the power.  That this was only a demonstration, or perhaps an experiment, became clear when it turned the power back on after a few hours.  In 2017, another, far more serious attack on Ukraine would be launched.

“On June 27, 2017, Russia fired…cyberweapons into Ukraine in what became the most destructive and costly cyberattack in world history.  That afternoon Ukrainians woke up to black screens everywhere.  They could not take money from ATMs, pay for gas at stations, send or receive mail, pay for a train ticket, buy groceries, get paid, or—perhaps most terrifying of all—monitor radiation levels at Chernobyl.  And that was just in Ukraine.”

“The attack hit any company that did any business in Ukraine.  All it took was a single Ukrainian employee working remotely for the attack to shut down entire networks.  Computers at Pfizer and Merck, the pharmaceutical companies; at Maersk, the shipping conglomerate; at Fed Ex, and at a Cadbury chocolate factory in Tasmania were all hijacked.  The attack even boomeranged back on Russia, destroying data at Roosneft, Russia’s state-owned oil giant, and Evraz, the steelmaker owned by two Russian oligarchs…The hack that circled the globe would cost Merck and Fed Ex, alone, $1 billion.”

“By the time I visited Kyiv in 2019, the tally of damage from that single Russian attack exceeded $10 billion, and estimates were still climbing.  Shipping and railway systems had still not regained full capacity.  All over Ukraine, people were still trying to find packages that had been lost when the shipment tracking systems went down.  They were still owed pension checks that had been held up in the attack.  The records of who had owed what had been obliterated.”

It could have been worse; Russia could have shut down the power grid at the same time.  They had the capability.

Russia is one of the most capable countries when it comes to this type of warfare.  But it would be the United States, complicit with Israel, who would first demonstrate the potential of cyberwarfare and, in so doing, encourage others to develop their own capabilities, setting off an arms race that is ongoing today.  It was so inexpensive a technology that almost any country could participate.

By 2009, the US and Israel had managed to infect the systems that controlled the Iranian centrifuge facility through the Windows operating system, then jump to Siemens code that controlled the centrifuges themselves.  The intention was to remotely drive select centrifuges in such a manner that they would become unstable and damage themselves.  To avoid detection the injected software would have to hide from observers any knowledge of this erratic behavior and be used in such a way that it appeared that what was happening was a hardware issue with the centrifuges.  The system worked for about a year with Iranians puzzled by why they were having so many centrifuge failures.  But, as with the Russians in Ukraine, introducing a worm into computer systems causes distribution around the world.  The offensive software was so highly specific to the Iranian systems that it caused little or no damage to others, but it did get noticed.  And eventually its purpose and its developers were identified and outed.  The worm would be known as Stuxnet.  It was a tremendous technical accomplishment, but in terms of civilization, a complete disaster.  Like nuclear weapons, once they were demonstrated, there was no going back.

At the time of Stuxnet, the US was the acknowledged leader in this type of technology.  Others now saw the utility in catching up.  The US made the situation even more threatening when its National Security Agency (NSA) somehow allowed access to its cyberweapons.  An outfit calling itself the Shadow Brokers in 2016 claimed possession, and eventually released many of them on the internet.  Finely honed cyberweapons became available to all.  The US has seen its own tools being used against it.  Russia had some US weapons assisting them in the 2017 attack on Ukraine.

The net result is that many players are using cyberweapons.  Most seem content with surveillance and intelligence gathering.  There seem to be four aggressive users of the technology, none being friends of the US.  Iran was furious and has frequently retaliated against the US; North Korea has seemed most interested in using the tools to acquire money; China has focused on surveillance, intelligence gathering, and the stealing of technology.  Russia’s focus has been on preparing for war with us and probably other countries. 

Besides the expected hacks of government departments, ransom attacks, and such, Russia has made a concerted effort to probe our infrastructure in ways that can only be interpreted as planning for an attack.  They have been all over nuclear and other power plants, our electric grid, and other critical facilities.  Perlroth seems to believe they are prepared to strike; they are just waiting for the right level of motivation.  The same approach has driven US work in this area.  Be able to strike harder than anyone else.  However, it is no longer clear that the US has an advantage should cyberwar break out with a country like Russia.  It can do to the US what it did to Ukraine in 2017, and a lot worse.  Consider what a meltdown in a few nuclear reactors would do.  We must expect, and hope, that we could do the same to Russia.

The cyber-standoff is reminiscent of the role of nuclear weapons during the Cold War.  They were so horrible, and it was impossible to use them in an attack without suffering intolerable damage in retaliation, so using them at all made no sense.  The armed standoff between the US and the USSR surprised everyone by yielding stability.  The tools available in cyberwarfare meet the “horrible” standard; let’s hope no one tries to get away with a first strike attack.

 

Charismatic Leaders and Delusions: The Crazies Can Get Crazier

 Our political discourse is characterized by a polarization in which two parties view each other as delusional and irrational.  Those are distinct terms with specific meanings.  Delusion refers to the refusal to believe or understand an objective, verifiable fact.  Irrationality is more complicated.  If a person is surrounded by people who suffer from a delusion and the person embraces that delusion as well, is he/she being irrational?  Rationality is a group-dependent concept.  Interestingly—and perhaps unfortunately—group dynamics play a role in how we interact within society.  William J. Bernstein considers these issues in historical contexts in his book The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups.  He considers episodes from the past when human group responses have led to extremely unfortunate behavior.  Bernstein claims he is purposely limiting himself to religious and financial manic behavior and avoiding political episodes, but some of our current political manias seem to be hovering close to the religious in nature.  He resurrects the old joke about the size of a deluded population.

“…a delusion shared by hundreds of people is called a ‘cult,’ whereas one shared by millions is called a ‘religion’.”

What does one call a delusion shared by nearly half the voting citizenry…a political party?

Political scientists have long told us that if a politician wishes to get the attention of a voter, he must have a good story to tell—a narrative in political jargon.  That is also the crux of Bernstein’s explanation for why crowds of people are willing to risk their money and even their lives activated by some delusion: they heard a narrative that moved them emotionally by promising them something they fervently desired.  It could be wealth, or salvation, or merely a return to better times, but it must activate an emotional response.  Nature provided sentient animals with emotions as improvements over instinctive responses.  Emotions don’t tell us exactly what we must do given an activation, they warn us that a response must be considered and let our consciousness determine what should be done.  Fear as an instinct might tell us always to flee.  That would work many times, but it also might reveal us to a predator who would slay us.  Fear as an emotion gives us the opportunity to consider more nuanced responses.  The problem with this system is that we humans do not always take full advantage of our cognitive abilities when they are called upon.

We like to take shortcuts whenever we think we can get away with it.  Rather than rethink each event from scratch we often depend on past conclusions reached in supposedly similar situations.  This is referred to as “heuristic thinking.”

“Strictly speaking, a heuristic is a story we tell ourselves as a mental shortcut that bypasses more rigorous analysis…” 

“Psychologists have demonstrated that people are ‘cognitive misers’ who avoid rigorous analysis in favor of heuristics—simple mental shortcuts—and that a compelling narrative is the most powerful heuristic of all.”

We practice these shortcuts regularly when reading or viewing stories.  An author or screenwriter introduces some highly improbable event to move the plot along and we are willing to stifle any cognitive dissonance that might cause so that our satisfaction with the narrative will not be diminished.

Peer pressure can also encourage cognitive shortcuts.  A narrative becomes much more powerful as others in our sphere also become engaged.  And what narrative is more effective than one that promises us something that we desperately want or need?  Once one buys into a given narrative, one becomes less likely to rethink the accuracy of it.

“Thus, the deeper the reader or listener enters into the story, the more they suspend disbelief, and thus the less attention they pay to whether it is in reality true or false.”

“Put another way, A good story usually trumps the most ironclad fact.”

Bernstein provides an example of narrative leading to disastrous behavior that should have some relevance for us today.  It involves an offshoot of the Anabaptist movement during the Reformation era and illustrates the role a charismatic leader plays in keeping a delusion alive after reality attacks.

Anabaptists began with a reasonably solid quibble with Church dogma.  They believed that baptism should occur in adulthood rather than as an infant.  A reasonable suggestion at a time when Luther and the Lutherans were dividing the religious into armed camps became an intolerable and dangerous heresy.  They also drifted further from orthodoxy in preaching that wealth should by shared among the people when much of the wealth was controlled by the Church, and the taxes it imposed on the masses were what drove the desire for distribution.  As if that was insufficient, they also added the refusal to recognize the authority of existing governments.  These were serious sources of conflict with established authorities, but the path to madness came when some Anabaptists fell under the spell of Melchior Hoffman who preached of the coming apocalypse.

“As have apocalypticists before and since, he enthusiastically applied home-brewed eschatological math.  Hoffman calculated that Christ died in A.D. 33, and the apostolic period lasted one hundred years, until A.D. 133.  For the sins of the Judeans, he believed, mankind received a punishment of three and a half years, which was increased by a factor of twenty during the Babylonian period, and another twenty-fold for the falling away of the Church from Christ, i.e.,1,400 years.  Therefore, the apocalypse would occur in 1533 (133 + 1400), a prediction that precipitated riots and mayhem in multiple Baltic trading cities…a trail of chaos that earned him expulsion from each.”

Hoffman would spend the period of interest incarcerated while followers would propagate his beliefs with uneven success.  Their foremost task was to keep the believers happy when 1533 passed uneventfully into 1534.  This forced the apocalypse to be moved back while these leaders looked for more fertile ground on which they could work.  The target location become Münster where significant support existed.

Münster was by then a mixture of Catholics, Lutherans, and Anabaptists.  It was ruled by a Church-approved local nobleman termed a “prince-bishop.”  The evolution of the Anabaptist madness would be recorded for history by two independent observers.  Their accounts describe Bernard Rothmann as a prime mover in turning the populace towards overthrow of the existing order.  Apparently Rothmann fell in love with the rewards of demagoguery.  Bernstein quotes one of the historical accounts.

“Many people, especially those weighed down by debt, revered him like some godhead, hung from his every word, and were convinced that he was driven in his actions by the Spirit of God.  Despite official order to the contrary, they followed him in crowds from the city on account of their eagerness to hear him speak, their desire to do so being so great that they considered that there were no preachers but him and despised, condemned, and cursed the others along with the entire clergy.”

Rothmann would soon turn from Lutheranism to promote Anabaptist beliefs.

“By this point, things moved rapidly.  The Anabaptists sent envoys to neighboring cities with the message that by Easter of 1534, God would return to punish the wicked and that few would survive; safety and salvation could only be had at Münster, the New Jerusalem.  The end of the world was nigh.”

Rothmann had predicted the end would come on February 6, but the day came and went with the explanation that God had granted a temporary period of grace to mankind.  To recover from this setback the believers were encouraged to take to the streets telling all to repent while there was still time.  Things got a little crazy.

“Rothman’s Anabaptist colleagues, fearful that his forecasting incompetence had devalued their stock, comically attempted to reinflate their credibility by rushing through the streets and declaiming loudly ‘with horrifying shouts and insane bellows’ for nonbelievers to repent…Their remonstrations recruited others, who variously jumped up and down, rolled their heads, and flopped in the mud.  One Anabaptist galloped through the streets on horseback, announced the End, and told all who would listen of the tens of thousands of angels he had beheld.”

Later that day the Anabaptists would try to take control of the city but were not quite strong enough and were turned back by a force of Lutherans.  Within a few weeks they had taken control of the city council and ordered any nonbelievers to leave the city.  Meanwhile, the prince-bishop began a siege of the city, limiting the restocking of food.

Rothmann would gradually lose his leadership role.  A man named Jan Bockelson would rise to that position and take the movement to its bitter end.  Even though “the end was nigh,” the believers should fight to defend the city and relish the little time left.

“…Bockelson would fashion his theatrical skills and calculating nature into a formidable political force.  Born into bitterness and disappointment as the bastard son of a town mayor and a serf woman, he was provided by his parents with rudimentary schooling and an apprenticeship in tailoring, at which he proved maladapt.  Nature, nonetheless, had endowed him with other attributes that he would shortly deploy in Münster: blond good looks, grace, cunning, oratorical prowess, and acting talent.  In the words of millennialist scholar Norman Cohn, he used these gifts ‘to shape real life into a play, with himself as his hero and all Europe for an audience’.”

Bockelson and his lieutenants were suspiciously interested in gathering up the gold and silver of the community.  Since the end was still coming by Easter, of what use was it to the churches and individuals.

“The first Catholics to depart were allowed to take their possessions, except for food, which was already in short supply; the last ones out left with just the clothes on their backs, usually minus their buttons and golden hooks, which were confiscated.  The Anabaptists, with the memory of the Lutheran counterattack against their coup still fresh in their minds, concentrated their ire on the menfolk.  For their part, the Lutherans and Catholic men fully expected the prince-bishop to recapture the city, and so left behind their women to guard their houses and possessions.  The resultant excess of women within the city’s walls would soon produce dire consequences.”

The Anabaptists would make up the nearly the entire population and would be further encouraged in their delusions by their success at defending the city from the prince-bishop and his mercenaries, the landsknechts.  Surely, God was pleased with their activities and would be returning soon.  Additional proclamations would not only collect precious metals and monies but eliminate even the concept of private property.  Since the future was nearly upon them, there was no need to maintain the past: books were burned, along with municipal documents, including any records of debts 

One of the townsmen, Heinrich Gresbeck provided a written description of the events taking place and would be a prime source for historians.

“In 1534, Easter fell on April 5, Jesus did not materialize, and the world did not end.  On that day Matthys and perhaps a dozen followers departed the city gates and rode toward the prince-bishops landshechts, who slaughtered them.  Gresbeck reported that the besiegers cut Matthys’s body into a hundred pieces and playfully struck each other with the gory fragments, affixed his head to a pike, and yelled back to the city that the inhabitants should retrieve their mayor.  The deluded Matthys may have been trying to entice Jesus to come, or, alternatively, to fulfill the passage in Revelation 11 suggesting that the deaths of Enoch (himself) and of Elijah (Hoffman, still rotting in a Strasbourg prison) would signal Jesus’s return.”

Bockelson would again have the problem of explaining why the world continued.  He would return again to the notion that the fault lay with the people not yet being worthy of Jesus’s return.  Bockelson could claim that not only did God wish him to accept Matthys’s responsibilities, but he would be required to marry his beautiful widow.  Bockelson also proclaimed that not only should God’s people be required to be rebaptized as adults, but remarriage was also required. 

“In July, Bockelson declared all previous marriages invalid and ordered all adults to remarry.  Women now outnumbered men by almost three to one, a situation exacerbated by the left-behind Lutheran and Catholic women, and so the Anabaptists encouraged polygamy.  At first, the more aggressive among the Anabaptist men engaged in a mad scramble through the city in search of young women and virgins on the theory that, in Gresbeck’s words, ‘The more wives they had, the better Christians they were.’  Quickly, the leadership realized the testosterone-fueled free-for-all had destabilized the city.”

Not every citizen was willing to go along with this and an insurrection occurred, but it was soon overcome.

“Most of the rebels pled successfully for mercy, but Bockelson had 47 of them shot, beheaded, or, in a few cases, hacked to death.  For good measure, he also had executed yet more women who had resisted forced marriage.”

Bockelson, buoyed by continued success in defending the city from the forces of the prince-bishop, would surround himself with an entourage that included at least sixteen wives.  He concluded that he was the reincarnation of King David, making him the only legitimate ruler in the world.  His “kingship” would soon be expanded to provide him dominion over all the Earth.

Meanwhile, fate and time were not on his side.  While he ate and dressed like the King of Earth, the townsfolk were starving.  The strength of the prince-bishop increased as others from nearby regions came to his aid and strengthened the blockade around the city.  Bockelson’s attempts to get reinforcements from other towns in the region failed as emissaries sent out never returned.  It became clear the Anabaptists could not save themselves, but they had to assume that God would save them.  However, for many, the slow inevitability of death by starvation was a greater motivator than any faith in Bockelson’s divinations.  The “King” was forced to begin allowing people to leave the city.

“By this time the landsknechts were beheading 50 male escapees daily, allowing women and children to huddle together in the no-man’s land outside the walls, a hellish landscape a few hundred yards wide and four miles in circumference.  The women and children languished there without sustenance or shelter for more than a month.  The besiegers finally allowed the foreign women and children within to proceed home, and interned the locals until after the city fell.” 

The end would come soon.  As with most insurgencies, Bockelson and his ilk were tortured and killed. 

Bernstein’s goal in recounting this tale was to describe how deluded belief could become immune to reality and persist when all evidence indicated otherwise.  That is also why we, in an era when delusions seem to easily become revealed truth, should also take note and realize there may be no easy exit from our current situation.

We should also recognize that there is another lesson to be learned from Münster’s tale.  When madness reigns and the constraints of civilization have eroded, whether by strength, deceit, cunning, or sheer luck, a leader will emerge.  In these situations, it will not be a member of what we would, in another time, call “the best and the brightest.”  Rather, a “king rat” will emerge from the nether reaches of humanity.  Bockelson was the king rat of the Münster story.  Who is the king rat of our tale?

 

 

Polarization and Our Constitution-Induced Crises

 The citizens of the United States hold the nation’s Constitution and the “Founding Fathers” who created it in high regard.  This is in spite of the fact that we are in continuous discord over multiple issues because of deficiencies in the document.  Ezra Klein has provided an interesting account of some of the features that bedevil us today in his book Why We’re Polarized.  Polarization and how the Constitution nurtures it will be the topic here.

The inability to come up with a functional means for electing a president left us with the Electoral College and all the conflict that has ensued.  That tale is worthy of a book of its own.  The issues of interest here are the peculiarities of our divided system of governance.  The primary problem is the split or competition between Congress and the President.  Historically, most attempts at such a system collapse because of this tension.  The particularities of party politics in the United States have (thus far) protected us from constitutional crises, but our time appears to be coming.  Klein explains, using analysis by the political sociologist Juan Linz.

“In 1990, in a paper entitled ‘The Perils of Presidentialism,’ Linz explained why.  The ‘vast majorities of stable democracies’ in the world were parliamentary regimes, where whoever wins legislative power also wins executive power.  America, however, was a presidential democracy: the president is elected separately from the Congress and can often be at odds with it.  This system had been tried before.  America, worryingly, was the only place where it had survived.”

When Congress and the presidency are controlled by different political parties, each can claim they are the legitimate representatives of the people.  If the parties have irreconcilable differences, the bodies of governance will also have such differences.  It gets even more complicated because the Constitution provided the legislature and the presidency with different voter constituencies.  To arrive at a Constitution that would attain approval by all the states at that time, states with small populations had to be protected from dominance by states with large populations, and slave states had to be protected from non-slave states.  As a consequence, low-population states have excessive influence in the Senate, and a favorable bias, although smaller, in the elections in the House and the presidency.

“Linz noted that presidents tend to be elected by voters but legislatures tend to reflect geography, with small towns and rural areas given outsized power.  It’s hard enough resolving a democratic disagreement that plays out among a single electorate.  What do you do when you’re facing a disagreement that reflects different kinds of electorates?”

“It’s a question with no answer. 

“This is why there are no long-standing presidential democracies save for the United States.  And it’s why America doesn’t impose its specific form of government on others.” 

Klein asks the reader to consider Germany, Japan, Italy, and Austria by providing a quote from Matt Yglesias.

“Those were countries that were defeated by American military forces during the Second World War and given constitutions written by local leaders in close collaboration with occupation authorities.  It’s striking that even though the US Constitution is treated as a sacred text in America’s political culture, we did not push any of these countries to adopt our basic framework of government.”

In that 1990 paper, Linz was forced to consider why the US was different.  Why had its system seemed to succeed where others had failed?  If Linz were to revisit the US issue today, he would have been presented with a completely different perspective. 

“…what read in 1990 like an explanation of what made America’s political system different now reads like an analysis of why America’s system is in crisis.”

Linz suggested what seemed to be an explanation for the success of the US.  That suggestion also explains what has changed since 1990 and why crises are now upon us.  Namely, he proposed that the overlap in goals and ideologies between the two political parties was great enough that irreconcilable differences were avoided and cross-party voting on legislation occurred   That is what has changed.  The two parties are now nearly at equal strength but totally opposed ideologically.  The near equality in the national vote between the parties creates its own negative dynamic in which bipartisanship becomes irrational.

“For most of American history, including the eras of cooperative, farsighted governance civics textbooks remember most fondly, American politics wasn’t competitive.  Writing in 1965, Samuel Lubell said, ‘Our political solar system…has been characterized not by two equally competing suns, but by a sun and a moon.  The Republican Party ran American politics for most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Democrats held the reins in the decades following the Great Depression and World War II.  And majorities, both in terms of presidential vote totals and congressional control, were often lopsided.”

“When one party is perpetually dominant, the subordinate party has reason to cooperate, as that’s its only realistic shot at wielding influence.  Either you work well with the majority party or you have no say over policy, nothing to bring home to your constituents.”

“…close competition, where ‘neither party perceives itself as a permanent majority or a permanent minority,’ breeds all-out partisan combat.  When winning the majority becomes possible, the logic of cooperation dissolves.”

“Instead of cultivating a good relationship with your colleagues across the aisle, you need to destroy them, because you need to convince the voters to destroy them, too.”

Firmly entrenching the institution of slavery in our homeland has been referred to as “our original sin.”  That act made us unique among democracies.  It also permanently created two cultures that have been at odds, if not in battle, since the beginning: slave states versus non-slave states, South versus North, whites versus nonwhites, religious versus secular, anti-abortion versus pro-abortion, anti-union versus pro-union pro-gun versus anti-gun…the list goes on.  Two events upended our political stability.  The exodus of blacks from the South in the twentieth century is relatively well documented.  The exodus of whites from the South was much larger and has been much less appreciated.  This first occurrence did not introduce racism to the North and the West, that was already there.  What it did do was provide political correctness to the white grievance politics that would emerge after the second event: Civil Rights legislation.  Soon afterward, George Wallace would take his presidential aspirations out of the South and discover that there were many whites across the country quite willing to vote for an avowed racist.  Richard Nixon would immediately take note and send out the message that southern Democrats would be more welcome in the Republican Party.  Thus began the great sorting whereby social liberals moved leftward and cultural conservatives moved to the right.  Once the lines were clearly delineated, an existential battle could begin in earnest.

Constitutional peculiarities provide a bias towards the rural, mostly white regions where Republicans are strong.

“By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in the fifteen largest states.  That means 70 percent of Americans will be represented by only thirty senators, while the other 30 percent of America will be represented by 70 senators.  It is not difficult to imagine an America where Republicans consistently win the presidency despite rarely winning the popular vote, where they typically control both the House and the Senate despite rarely winning more votes than the Democrats, where their dominance of the Supreme Court is unquestioned, and where all this power is used to buttress a system of partisan gerrymandering, pro-corporate campaign finance laws, strict voter ID requirements, and anti-union legislation that further weakens Democrats’ electoral performance.  That would not, in the long term, prove a stable system.”

There are things that could be done to correct issues that assist in our polarization, but any act that favors, even temporarily, one party over the other will be defeated by the party that deems itself the loser.  That is why the Electoral College, viewed as an abomination for two centuries, has never been eliminated.

In fact, things continue to get worse.  It might have made sense to give Supreme Court justices lifetime tenure when they were all expected to be old men who would not live very long.  But now people are living longer and the importance of a captured court to a political party is such that young people are being groomed, trained, and indoctrinated to perform appropriately at a young age if an opportunity arises to inject them into the court.

“In an analysis published after Justice Anthony Kennedy retired, law professors Lee Epstein and Eric Posner wrote in the New York Times that in the ‘50s and ‘60s, ‘the ideological biases of Republican and Democratic appointees were relatively modest.’  Even as late as the ‘90s, justices regularly voted in ‘ideologically unpredictable ways’,”

“But that’s changed.  Over the past decade, ‘justices have hardly ever voted against the ideology of the president who appointed them,’ Epstein and Posner find.” 

“Today, candidates considered for Supreme Court vacancies have a vanishingly small chance of surprising their sponsors in the future.  The path to being nominated to the Court runs through decades of ideological and professional party service.  Kennedy’s ultimate replacement, Brett Kavanaugh, was a top staffer in the George W. Bush administration in addition to being a member of the conservative legal group the Federalist Society.”

And, by the way, much of what has to be determined as being constitutional or not has no little or no constitutional input on which to base a decision.  One ambiguous sentence was provided for the Second Amendment.  Justices pondering over Second Amendment cases have little more than personal biases at their disposal.

The Constitution says that the President can nominate candidates for the Supreme Court, but to make it there they must be approved by the Senate.  Mitch McConnell made it clear that all-out war was the order of the day when he refused to consider a candidate presented by a Democratic President.  That was immoral and unethical, but it was not unconstitutional.  What might be the next weapon introduced into the battlefield.

Klein makes a compelling argument that once the two parties form opposing tribes, human nature will exacerbate tribal conflicts.  Then at the end he feels compelled to make suggestions as to how to improve the situation.  However, most of his changes would require agreement between the parties in which one gives up some existing leverage.  By his own earlier arguments, that can no longer happen.  He provides a more appropriate summary of his analysis in the following statement.

“The rules, as set down by the Constitution and our institutions, push toward partisan dysfunction, conflict, and even collapse.  The system works not through formal mechanisms that ensure the settlement of intractable disputes but through informal norms of compromise, forbearance, and moderation that collapse the moment the stakes rise high enough.”

 

Women and History: They Were Humanity’s First Scientists

The book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow is laden with cheeky and irreverent observations about our human history and our general lack of understanding thereof.  It is an absolute delight to read for those with an interest in the topic.  One of the constant themes that appears throughout the text is that recent human history, distorted by the rise of patriarchy and its religious propagation, basically eliminates contributions of women to our physical and cultural evolution.  The authors were moved to include a section devoted to countering that deletion titled “On Woman, the Scientist.”

Conventional wisdom concerning human evolution suggests there would come a time when people would discover the knack of large-scale agricultural production which would support greater populations, lead to necessarily more complex hierarchical social structures, produce greater disparities in wealth, and introduce the wars, plagues and pestilences that accompany wealth and concentrated populations.  It is common to view this transformation from comfortable hunter-gatherer societies to that produced by this “agricultural revolution” as being the fall from grace represented in Hebrew religious tradition.  What is clear from archeological and anthropological studies is that humans were smart people who learned the techniques of plant and animal management many thousands of years before this supposed agricultural revolution.  They wisely chose to augment their lives only with advances in knowledge that actually improved their well-being.  Why give up healthy and diverse diets for inferior ones based on a few crops?  Why give up a leisurely lifestyle for one that was extremely labor intensive?  Over this long transition period, the ability—the technology— to utilize natural materials from plants and animals would evolve.  If you think of technical developments as the work of scientists, the authors argue that the earliest scientists were society’s women. 

“Rejecting a Garden of Eden type narrative for the origins of farming also means rejecting, or at least questioning, the gendered assumptions lurking behind that narrative.  Apart from being a story about the loss of primordial innocence, the Book of Genesis is also one of history’s most enduring charters for the hatred of women, rivalled only (in the Western tradition) by the prejudices of Greek authors like Hesiod, or for that matter Plato.  It is Eve, after all, who proves too weak to resist the exhortations of the crafty serpent and is first to bite the forbidden fruit, because she is the one who desires knowledge and wisdom.  Her punishment (and that of all women following her) is to bear children in severe pain and live under the rule of her husband, whose ow destiny is to subsist by the sweat of his brow.”

“In this view, we’re not asking questions about who might have actually been doing all the intellectual and practical work of manipulating wild plants: exploring their properties in different soils and water regimes; experimenting with harvesting techniques, accumulating observations about the effects these all have on growth, reproduction and nutrition; debating the social implications.”

Instead, the fever dreams of Patriarchs become stories that became the foundations of patriarchal religions in which women are deemed dangerous and incompetent and must exist only as a subspecies to be manipulated by males.

“Consciously or not, it is the contributions of women that get written out of such accounts.  Harvesting wild plants and turning them into food, medicine and complex structures like baskets or clothing is almost everywhere a female activity and may be gendered female even when practiced by men.” 

“…where evidence exists, it points to strong associations between women and plant-based knowledge as far back as one can trace such things.”

These activities fall into the categories of technology development.

“By plant-based knowledge we don’t just mean new ways of working with wild flora to produce food, spices, medicines, pigments or poisons.  We also mean the development of fibre-based crafts and industries, and the more abstract forms of knowledge these tend to generate about properties of time, space and structure.  Textiles, basketry, network, matting and cordage were most likely always developed in parallel with the cultivation of edible plants, which also implies the development of mathematical and geometric knowledge that is (quite literally) intertwined with the practice of these crafts.  Women’s association with such knowledge extends back to some of the earliest surviving depictions of the human form: the ubiquitous sculpted female figurines of the last Ice Age with their woven headgear, string skirts and belts made of cord.” 

The authors provide us with a summary of how technology developed over those early eras—a process much different than we might expect. 

“Instead of some male genius realizing his solitary vision, innovation in Neolithic societies was based on a collective body of knowledge accumulated over centuries, largely by women, in an endless series of apparently humble but in fact enormously significant discoveries.  Many of those Neolithic discoveries had the cumulative effect of reshaping everyday life every bit as profoundly as the automatic loom or lightbulb.”

“Every time we sit down to breakfast, we are likely to be benefiting from a dozen such prehistoric inventions.  Who was the first person to figure out that you could make bread rise by the addition of those microorganisms we call yeasts?  We can have no idea, but we can be almost certain that she was a woman…”

The reason the authors seem so determined to highlight the role of women in human history—and the same reason we should be interested—is probably a feeling of guilt over what has been stolen from women over the last several millennia.  Gerda Lerner addressed the effect of patriarchy on women in her breakthrough study The Creation of Patriarchy. 

Patriarchy as documented in the Hebrew religious texts, defined women as a subspecies relative to men, one who the Hebrew God had explicitly relegated to a subordinate role.  Women’s access to God would only be through men.  Lerner’s findings were discussed in Women: Patriarchy, Religion, and History.  She would reach these conclusions.

“The decisive change in the relationship of man to God occurs in the story of the covenant, and it is defined in such a way as to marginalize women.”

“We must take note of the fact that Yahweh makes the covenant with Abraham alone, not including [his wife] Sarah, and that in so doing He gives divine sanction to the leadership of the patriarch over his family and tribe…the covenant relationship is only with males—first with Abraham, then explicitly with Abraham and Sarah’s son, Isaac, who is referred to only as Abraham’s son.  Moreover, the community of the covenant is divinely defined as a male community, as can be seen by the selection of the symbol [circumcision] chosen as ‘token of the covenant’.”

“For females, the Book of Genesis represented their definition as creatures essentially different from males; a redefinition of their sexuality as beneficial and redemptive only within the boundaries of patriarchal dominance; and finally the recognition that they were excluded from directly being able to represent the divine principle.  The weight of the Biblical narrative seemed to decree that by the will of God women were included in His covenant only through the mediation of men.” 

The tyranny of the religions men created in order to propagate their dominance held women back for many centuries—and still does in some regions and cultures.

“…All males, whether enslaved or economically or racially oppressed, could still identify with those like them—other males—who represented mastery of the symbol system.  No matter how degraded, each male slave or peasant was like to the master in his relationship to God.  This was not the case for women.  Up to the time of the Protestant Reformation the vast majority of women could not confirm and strengthen their humanity by reference to other females in positions of intellectual authority and religious leadership.”

“Where there is no precedent, one cannot imagine alternatives to existing conditions.  It is this feature of male hegemony which has been the most damaging to women and has ensured their subordinate status for millennia.  The denial to women of their history has reinforced their acceptance of the ideology of patriarchy and has undermined the individual woman’s sense of self-worth.”

We must give thanks to the authors for bringing to current memory the history of eras when men and women were both freed from the burden of patriarchy and the talents of both genders contributed to society and its progressions.