First Climate Change Denial, Now Income Inequality Denial

The steps people will take to protect their wealth and justify the good fortune of being wealthy seem boundless.  Climate change was denied for many years in order to preserve the status quo and avoid making necessary changes to the operation of the economy.  Reality has finally muffled that nonsense.  Now appears an attempt to minimize the degree of economic inequality that is inevitable in the form of capitalism now operating.  The Economist, usually a conservative proponent of conservative economic dogma has noticed a debate between opposing teams of economists over the rate at which income inequality is increasing in the USA (Why economists are at war over inequality).  They were thrilled to side with the team that claimed the income share of the top 1% has not been growing as quickly as most had assumed.  This led them to produce articles such as Welcome to a golden age for workers and A new age of the worker will overturn conventional thinking.  They even produced this image to promote the so-called “golden age for workers.”

 

 What is really going on?  The Economist recognizes that tallying income, and its inequality, is challenging.

“You might think that analysing trends in income inequality would be straightforward. Don’t people’s tax returns tell researchers all they need to know? But although tax returns are useful, they can mislead. Americans who are partners in a company, or hold investments, often have enough trouble estimating their own income. Now imagine trying to estimate the incomes of millions of people over several decades, accounting for overhauls to the tax code. Researchers then need to account for the 30-40% of national income that is not even reported on tax returns—including some employer-provided benefits and government welfare. Researchers’ methodological choices have huge effects on the results.”

It should also have been mentioned that income, or gain in wealth, that is fraudulently hidden from tax collection must also be estimated in order to be complete.  One should also recognize the general conclusion that economists, like other researchers, tend to find the results they initially expect to find. (“There are lies, there are damned lies, and there are statistics.”)

“Research by a trio of French economists—Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman—has popularised the notion that American income inequality is soaring.”

“Others have cast doubt on the trio’s findings, however—notably Gerald Auten of the Treasury Department and David Splinter of the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan group in Congress.”

Capitalism’s cheerleaders are thrilled to see the latter couple come up with a lower estimate of the income earned by the top 1% of income earners.

“All in all, they find that after tax, the top 1% command about 9% of national income, compared with the 15% or so reported by Messrs Piketty, Saez and Zucman.”

So, should anyone be surprised that there is uncertainty in determining the accumulation of wealth by the extremely wealthy, particularly when the goal of the wealthy is to avoid any taxable income.  And does the difference between 9% and 15% really matter?  Does it change anyone’s perspective on income disparities in our economy?  The disputed finding that really titillates capitalism’s boosters is the claim that the 9% level has been holding constant for a very long time.

“Whereas the trio conclude that the share of the top 1% has sharply increased since the 1960s, Messrs Auten and Splinter find practically no change.”

This assumption, plus the recent boost in income for the lowest wage earners as the demand for their services surged as we emerged from the pandemic, prompted capitalism boosters like The Economist to gloat about how the rising tide has been lifting all the boats.  The stagnant workers’ wages of the past 60 years are just a figment of the imagination.  Don’t mess with markets, they always know best.  The worst thing you can do for workers is to try and help them.

“If the blue-collar age endures, the effect will be profound. The idea that capitalism fails workers is so pervasive that it may explain why people consistently tell pollsters they are unhappy about the state of the economy—even as they themselves continue to spend freely and to benefit from low unemployment. The idea has shaped views on everything from the dangers of immigration and low-cost manufacturers, to the desirability of more handouts and higher tariffs.”

“The bonanza for workers, though, shows governments need not shackle markets for workers to do well—and that the best route to prosperity for all is to increase the size of the economic pie. If you fight too much over distribution, you risk bringing the golden age to a premature end.”

Is this something to be proud of, something to produce the glee The Economist exhibits?  What the claim of a stable share of the income by the wealthy means to the workers of the nation is that for many years the wealthy enjoyed much higher untaxable income than we had thought. 

Isn’t that delightful!  Don’t mess with anything when you are living in this “golden age.”

Capitalism and Patriarchy: Is Population Collapse Their Endpoint?

 It is indisputably true that human societies produce fewer offspring as they grow wealthier.  This is not surprising for there are many reasons why this is likely.  What is disturbing is that this trend has continued to the point where most societies are no longer producing enough children to maintain their populations.  This trend is near universal in highly developed countries, with individual nations exhibiting various levels of decline.  Where once experts worried about the world producing too many people, now they are concerned with there being too few to continue the societies and economies that have been created.  Projections of population decline indicate the world’s population could fall as fast as it rose in the twentieth century and reach nearly zero in the twenty-second.  The term “population collapse” has entered the realm of public discourse.

What is troubling today is not that such a collapse is likely, but rather, the reasons people stopped having a sustainable level of births.  It takes a birth rate of about 2.05 per female to sustain a population.  In some countries, particularly those in Asia, the rate has fallen to around half that value.  South Korea and China are projected to have populations near half their current values by the end of the current century, a startling result.  What is it about the societies we are living in that causes women to have fewer or no babies?

First of all, women, across the globe, have more control over initiating or terminating pregnancies.  They are also more involved than ever in the economies of the world as individuals with unique self-fulfilling goals: education, career advancement, social standing, and income level.  Jessica Winter addressed the reasons why a woman might choose to not have any more children in The Morality of Having Kids in a Burning, Drowning World.  It has become common to hear opinions on whether one should bring additional children into a world seemingly heading for climate catastrophe.  Winter concluded that while that is a worthy concern, it was not necessarily the dominant cause of declining births.  She favored the conclusion that such decisions ended up based on a set of concerns.

“…as the result of a complex and extremely familiar interplay of factors. These include not only climate anxiety but also financial constraints, the demands of work and career, health risks (and the gross racial disparities that go with them), sexism (and the racism that compounds it), and a persistent imbalance in the division of domestic and emotional labor in heterosexual partnerships.” 

One can parse this list of concerns into a claim that women are concerned about their status as workers in the kinds of capitalist societies we have fallen into, as well as their status as females in our persisting patriarchal culture.  The fact that we can assign falling birthrates to the decisions of women indicates they already secured a degree of freedom from the constraints that held them in bondage for several millennia.  Further progress can be expected as they proceed to demonstrate their equality, if not superiority, to males in an economy that has little use for traditional male attributes.  There seems something terribly wrong with societies that create conditions that preclude maintaining their population.  Of interest here are the economic and social factors that have rendered children a burden rather than a fascinating and fulfilling aspect of life.

Humans are animals.  It is doubtful that any other species produced a society that results in members consciously deciding that their society is not one in which it is appropriate to produce offspring..  Animal societies do have means of controlling population growth when resources are scarce, but the human response is occurring when resources are, if anything, overabundant.  This is a bizarre situation which, in retrospect, we were warned about. 

When European invaders arrived to colonize the American continents, they brought with them cultures developed over centuries of domination by religious and monarchical rulers.  They were highly hierarchical with everyone knowing their place: who they had to obey and who they didn’t obey.  They required religions, police forces, and prisons to limit personal liberties so that society could function.  In the process, they encountered peoples who had developed an entirely different view of life, one which they considered far superior to that of the Europeans.  A good documentation of this social collision in the French and English regions was provided by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. 

What the Europeans discovered were societies that had no prisons and no laws except those that the individual people decided to obey.  Leaders were those who were most capable of convincing others that they had the best proposals.  Their terms in office terminated when that status ceased to exist.  Punishment for an action that harmed another was imposed not on the offender, but on his extended family.  That family and that of the persons abused would negotiate compensation sufficient to eliminate any desire for revenge.  The French Jesuits had to admit that this peculiar system worked rather well in keeping the peace.  Males and females had specific responsibilities within a society, and each had control over their tasks.  Women also had control over their bodies.  Unmarried women had sexual liberty; married women could easily gain a divorce.  The natives did not use money.   They were not strictly an egalitarian society; wealth could accumulate to the most industrious, but it could not be used to purchase power over another; rather, it was used to acquire praise for the generosity shown in sharing it with others.  People in need were to be assisted. 

The American natives had no interest nor any tolerance for the type of lives lived by the French, and they had the eloquence to make the case that their way of life was superior.  The authors illustrate the indigenous critique with this insight.

“…the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly.  That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest.”

“The French had more material possessions…[the Natives] conceded; but they had other, greater assets: ease, comfort, and time.”

What the authors referred to as the “Indigenous Critique” would include the claim that the American Natives had a society better able to protect individual liberties and was better at providing gender and economic equality.  These notions would be intriguing for the intellectuals of Europe, as well as for the colonists themselves.  James W. Loewen reports on how early colonials viewed the Natives’ lifestyles in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. 

Loewen provides this quote from the illustrious Benjamin Franklin.

“No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”

Couple that with these observations.

“Historian Gary Nash tells us that interculturation took place from the start in Virginia, ‘facilitated by the fact that some Indians lived among the English as day laborers, while a number of settlers fled to the Indian Villages rather than endure the rigors of life among the autocratic English.  Indeed, many white and black chose to live an American Indian lifestyle.  In his Letters from an American Farmer, Michel Guillaume de Crevècoeur wrote, ‘There must be in the Indians’ social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no example of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European.”

“Europeans were always trying to stop the outflow.  Hernando de Soto had to post guards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native societies.  The Pilgrims so feared Indianization that they made it a crime for men to wear long hair.  ‘People who did run away to the Indians might expect very extreme punishments, even up to the death penalty,’ Karen Kupperman tells us, if caught by whites.  Nonetheless, right up to the end of independent Native nationhood in 1890, whites continued to defect, and whites who lived an Indian lifestyle, such as Daniel Boone, became cultural heroes in white society.”

Intriguing as the Native lifestyle might be, societies, willingly or not, directed themselves at obtaining “more material possessions” rather than “ease, comfort, and time.”  Could there come a time when the quest for more things would go too far?  Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky asked just that question a few years ago in the book How Much Is Enough?; Money and the good life (2012).

The authors make the argument that society should have used the wealth created by economic growth to satisfy its material needs and then transition to a mode in which the goal of greater wealth would be replaced by the goal of greater “leisure.”  The term leisure does not connote inactivity.  Rather, the authors define leisure as the time necessary to pursue “the good life.”  This is the equivalent to the American Natives’ goal of having “ease, comfort, and time.”  

The authors take their starting point from an essay by Keynes in 1930 predicting that enough wealth could be created by about 2030 to enable this transition to a life of little work and much satisfying leisure.  They also suggest our embrace of capitalism was a Faustian bargain made in hopes of attaining this good life.

“Keynes understood that capitalist civilization had, at some level of consciousness, undertaken to license motives previously condemned as ‘foul’ for the sake of future reward.  It had struck a bargain with the forces of darkness, in return for which it would secure what earlier ages could only dream of—a world beyond the toil and trouble, violence and injustice of life as it actually is.” 

Enough wealth has been created to provide the kind of society envisaged by Keynes, but there has been no mechanism for such a change, and little interest.

We are using the term capitalism here to represent a system whereby new products must be developed for consumption by the population whether they are needed or not.  If a potential product exists, a need for it will be created.  A continuous flow of such products is needed to continue increasing wealth and drive the motivation to develop more wealth.  This system is supported by technical developments that rapidly contribute to product development.  Change comes ever faster.  Economic security is fleeting for most.  This economic model can go unstable—and probably already has.  Growth has environmental and social implications but there is no way to regulate it to provide benign results.  Technology can develop faster than society can grasp its implications and respond.

This system develops two types of workers.  One is involved in the development of products and technologies where change is rapid and financial rewards can be great.  The second provides the basic services that society requires if it is to function; here the rewards are limited, and long hours must be worked to provide sufficient income.  Both types of workers can look at their situation and claim there is no time or no money to raise a child.

One can look forward to raising a child if one has ease, comfort, and time for the experience.  To change our economic model to provide those factors will require some sort of shock that demands a new model that recognizes what “enough” is and plans to maintain that “enough” while stabilizing society and providing a new wealth distribution rather than growing its economy.  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, there are plenty of potential shocks out there: population collapse itself, climate catastrophes, pandemics, chemical poisoning of we humans and the environment, another world war, artificial intelligence…the list grows.

 

Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals: Intersex is Rising, Sperm Counts Are Falling

 Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are those that are sufficiently similar to human hormones that they can fool the body’s hormone receptors into responding at an inappropriate time or trigger a response altogether inappropriate.  Encountering such chemicals is particularly risky if the occurrence is in the fetal stage where growth and development depend on hormonal surges at the correct time and with the correct intensity.  Body function depends critically on proper hormonal function, making encounters with these disrupting chemicals dangerous.   Consider this list provided by Wikipedia of health issues they can cause. 

“…[EDCs]are chemicals that can interfere with endocrine (or hormonal) systems. These disruptions can cause numerous adverse human health outcomes including, alterations in sperm quality and fertility, abnormalities in sex organs, endometriosis, early puberty, altered nervous system function, immune function, certain cancers, respiratory problems, metabolic issues, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular problems, growth, neurological and learning disabilities, and more.”

One might hope that such chemicals, essentially being poisons, would be highly regulated and be restricted from use in common products.  Rather, the opposite is true.  Consider this range of products using EDCs provided by this source: ENDOCRINE DISRUPTERS: A REVIEW OF SOMESOURCES, EFFECTS, AND MECHANISMS OF ACTIONS ON BEHAVIOR AND NEUROENDOCRINESYSTEMS.

“Exposure in people is typically due to contamination of the food chain, inhalation of contaminated house dust, or occupational exposure. EDCs include pesticides and herbicides (such as diphenyl-dichloro-trichloroethane, DDT, or its metabolites), methoxychlor, biocides, heat stabilizers and chemical catalysts (such as tributyltin, TBT), plastic contaminants (e.g. bisphenol A, BPA), pharmaceuticals (i.e. diethylstilbestrol, DES; 17alpha-ethynilestradiol, EE2), or dietary components (such as phytoestrogens).”

The sources of EDCs of most interest here are pharmaceuticals and plastics.  Most of the pharmaceutical drugs we ingest end up exiting our bodies through our urine, thus entering our wastewater and passing into our water systems where they accumulate over time.  The concentrations in our lakes and rivers are great enough that they are being encountered in the bodies of ocean-dwelling fish. 

The plastics industry uses thousands of chemicals in producing its products, some of which are known to be endocrine disrupters.  Plastics break down readily by fragmentation.  Every time a fragment is formed chemicals are released with the fragments.  Drinking water from a plastic bottle introduces us to a hundred or more chemicals as well as plastic particulates.  Particularly insidious is the use of plastic bottles to feed our infants formula and giving them plastic nipples with which to ingest it.  Plastic is everywhere.  Plastic particulates are in the air we breathe, on the highest mountain tops, and in the deepest ocean depths.  There are so many particulates in our waters that a breeze over the surface brings plastic particulates for us to inhale.  If the particulates are small enough, they can pass through our lungs and into our blood stream.  Similarly, small particulates can enter our blood streams through our digestive systems.  Once in our blood, particles and the chemicals they leach can go anywhere in our bodies, including through the placenta of a pregnant woman into a fetus. 

The list provided above of adverse health outcomes from encounters with EDCs is headed by “alterations in sperm quality and fertility, abnormalities in sex organs.”  These are what we are concerned with here.  Intersex is not a well-recognized issue—yet.  Wikipedia provides this definition of the term.

“Intersex people are individuals born with any of several sex characteristics including chromosome patterns, gonads, or genitals that, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, ‘do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies’.” 

It has long been known that polluted waters were causing high incidences of intersex in fish populations.  Consider this article: Intersex Fish on the Rise in Northeastern U.S. Rivers.

“The USGS defines intersex conditions in fish as occurring ‘when exposure to chemicals disrupts the hormonal systems of an animal, leading to the presence of both male and female characteristics in an animal that should exhibit the characteristics of just one sex in its lifetime’.”

The effects can be extreme as the chemical pollution increases.

“…one of the latest trends spotted in the continental Midwest and some parts of New England, male smallmouth and largemouth bass developing eggs in their testes.”

"At one study site near Hershey, Pa., USGS researchers found 100 percent of male smallmouth collected had eggs.”

In at least one site, an entire population of fish had its sexual development corrupted.  How great a level of chemical pollution would cause similar results in humans? The NIH was sufficiently concerned that intersex in humans was increasing to issue this report: The Increasing Prevalence in Intersex Variation from Toxicological Dysregulation in Fetal Reproductive Tissue Differentiation and Development by Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals.

“With the increasing incidence of intersex birth variations, urgency exists to better understand how chemicals in the environment are affecting fetal development. Identifying specific chemicals that pose the greatest risk during this critical window in genital development and quantifying the level at which they are capable of asserting their influence is an ongoing challenge for scientists.”

Male sperm counts have been falling for years.  This is not new information; what is new is the fact that sperm concentrations are becoming dangerously low.  Consider this article: How pollution is causing a male fertility crisis.  The author refers to Hagai Levine as an expert in this field.

“Seemingly small changes can have a powerful effect on these highly specialised cells, and especially, their ability to fertilise an egg. The crucial aspects for fertility are their ability to move efficiently (motility), their shape and size (morphology), and how many there are in a given quantity of semen (known as sperm count). They are the aspects that are examined when a man goes for a fertility check.”

“Sperm count, explains Levine, is closely linked to fertility chances. While a higher sperm count does not necessarily mean a higher probability of conception, below the 40 million/ml threshold the probability of conception drops off rapidly.”

We are approaching that threshold—rapidly!

“In 2022, Levine and his collaborators published a review of global trends in sperm count. It showed that sperm counts fell on average by 1.2% per year between 1973 to 2018, from 104 to 49 million/ml. From the year 2000, this rate of decline accelerated to more than 2.6% per year.”

The author also presents the work of Rebecca Blanchard, a veterinary teaching associate and researcher at the University of Nottingham, UK.  She noted that dogs share the environments of humans, encountering similar chemical environments from air, food, medications, and household plastics.

“Her research concentrated on chemicals found in plastics, fire retardants and common household items…  Her studies have revealed that these chemicals can disrupt our hormonal systems, and harm the fertility of both dogs and men.”

"’We found a reduction in sperm motility in both the human and the dog,’ says Blanchard. ‘There was also an increase in the amount of DNA fragmentation’."

“Sperm DNA fragmentation refers to damage or breaks in the genetic material of the sperm. This can have an impact beyond conception: as levels of DNA fragmentation increase, explains Blanchard, so do instances of early-term miscarriages.”

“The findings chime with other research showing the damage to fertility caused by chemicals found in plastics, household medications, in the food chain and in the air. It affects men as well as women and even babies. Black carbon, forever chemicals and phthalates have all been found to reach babies in utero.”

We are being affected by chemicals that can enter our bodies before we are born and while we live our lives.  As the concentrations of these chemicals in our environment rise ever higher, the deleterious effects become ever more prevalent.  If we wanted to ban the critical chemicals, could we do it? And could we do it before it became too late?  Current responses to such threats suggest we cannot.

 

What Is Happening to the Earth’s Temperature?

 There was a time when we could assume that we had like a century before we had to worry about global warming.  Then it became apparent that changes were happening that were measurable on a decade scale.  Now we are wondering how much worse next year will be than this year.  Recently, the famed climate scientist, James Hansen had the audacity to point out what was obvious; the experts have consistently underestimated the rate at which climate change was occurring.  Hansen is now predicting that the world will hit the optimistic target for limiting temperature rise to plus 1.5 degrees C in the 2020s and reach 2.0 degrees C by 2050.  When the Paris Accords in 2015 established the goal of limiting temperature increase to 1.5 degrees, scientists were asked to assess the possibility.  They replied in 2018.

“If the current warming rate continues, the world would reach human-induced global warming of 1.5°C around 2040.”

Hansen seems to be correct.  Berkely Earth tracks the global temperature changes and provided these comments after tallying the September 2023 data.

“Globally, September 2023 was the warmest September — and the largest monthly anomaly of any month — since records began in 1850.”

“In addition, this September exceeded the previous record by 0.50 °C (0.90 °F), an enormous margin described by one climate scientist as ‘absolutely gobsmackingly bananas’.”

“2023 is very likely (90% chance) to average more than 1.5 °C above our 1850-1900 baseline.”

Those chances may have gone up.  This UK source points out that October temperature data were even crazier.

“Globally, the average surface air temperature in October was 1.7 degrees Celsius warmer than the same month in 1850-1900, which Copernicus defines as the pre-industrial period.”

Perhaps even Hansen was too optimistic.  The Earth is a complex system and next year might find the temperature dipping a bit lower.  But we have sampled plus 1.5 degrees C and it was not pleasant.  And we will also reach 2.0 degrees C and higher, we just don’t know how soon.  Buckle up, it could be quite a ride.

 

The Effect of Native Americans on European Thought: The Indigenous Critique

There was a period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe when scientific knowledge began to emerge, along with questions about the nature of humans and their societies that initiated a challenge to the orthodoxy demanding submission to church and monarchial state powers.  This intellectual and philosophical era is referred to as The Age of Enlightenment.  It was also the age in which colonialists learned about the American continents and the natives who had been living there.  The American natives would provide the European intellectuals with plenty to think about as they provided an alternative path to forming effective and efficient societies that focused on protecting individual liberties, a concept at odds with many centuries of European history.  The Americans would provide not only examples, but also criticism of how the Europeans mismanaged their societies.  David Graeber and David Wengrow refer this body of dispute as the “indigenous critique” in their massive book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. 

One of the questions the authors continually ask as they review human history is “how did human societies end up with hierarchical structures requiring religions, police forces, and prisons to limit personal liberties so that society could function.”  They summon new archeological and anthropological data that are emerging to show that there is plenty of evidence that early societies were more complex than once thought and they often seemed to have had structures that did not require a domineering hierarchy.  The native Americans encountered by the French and English colonists would introduce Europeans to such societies. 

What the Europeans discovered were societies that had no prisons and no laws except those that the individual people decided to obey.  Leaders were those who were most capable of convincing others that they had the best proposals.  Their terms in office terminated when that status ceased to exist.  Punishment for an action that harmed another was imposed not on the offender, but on his extended family.  That family and that of the persons abused would negotiate compensation sufficient to eliminate any desire for revenge.  The Jesuits had to admit that this peculiar system worked rather well in keeping the peace.  Males and females had specific responsibilities within a society, and each had control over their tasks.  Women also had control over their bodies.  Unmarried women had sexual liberty; married women could easily gain a divorce.  The natives did not use money.   They were not strictly an egalitarian society; wealth could accumulate to the most industrious, but it could not be used to purchase power over another; rather, it was used to acquire praise for the generosity shown in sharing it with others.  People in need were to be assisted.

Much of the documentation of these encounters comes from reports of Jesuit missionaries sent over to Christianize the natives.  Consider this description from a missionary in 1642.

“They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to anyone whomsoever, except when they like.  They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs.  All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.”

Converting such people to Catholicism would not go well.

“…scandalized missionaries frequently reported that American women were considered to have full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried women had sexual liberty and married women could divorce at will.  This, for the Jesuits, was an outrage.  Such sinful conduct, they believed, was just the extension of a more general principle of freedom, rooted in natural dispositions, which they saw as inherently pernicious.  ‘The wicked liberty of the savages’, one insisted, was the single greatest impediment to their ‘submitting to the yoke of the law of God’.  Even finding terms to translate concepts like ‘lord’, ‘commandment’ or ‘obedience’ into indigenous languages was extremely difficult; explaining the underlying theological concepts, well-nigh impossible.”

The authors report on the findings of Brother Gabriel Sagard.

“Sagard was surprised and impressed by his hosts’ eloquence and powers of reasoned argument, skills honed by near-daily public discussions of communal affairs; his hosts, in contrast, when they did get to see a group of Frenchmen gathered together, often remarked on the way they seemed to be constantly scrambling over each other and cutting each other off in conversation, employing weak arguments, and overall (or so the subtext seemed to be) not showing themselves to be particularly bright.”

Consider the comments of Father Lallemant on his dealings with the Wendat (Hurons) from 1644.

“I do not believe there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjugation of their wills to any power whatever—so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except insofar as each is pleased to submit to them.  There is no punishment that is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger…”

“After expanding on how scandalous it was that even murderers should get off scot-free, the good Father did admit that, when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective.  Actually, it worked surprisingly well.  Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation.  This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control.  ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’  If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance they might take’.”

The American natives had no interest nor any tolerance for the type of lives lived by the French, and they had the eloquence to make the case that their way of life was superior.  The authors illustrate the indigenous critique with this insight.

“…the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly.  That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest.”

This kind of input would be of great interest anywhere people would gather to discuss human existence.

“In the years between 1703 and 1751…the indigenous American critique of European society had an enormous impact on European thought.  What began as widespread expressions of outrage and distaste by Americans (when first exposed to European mores) eventually evolved, through a thousand conversations, conducted in dozens of languages from Portuguese to Russian, into an argument about the nature of authority, decency, social responsibility and, above all, freedom.  As it became clear to French observers that most indigenous Americans saw individual autonomy and freedom of action as consummate values—organizing their own lives in such a way as to minimize any possibility of one human being becoming subordinated to the will of another, and hence viewing French society as essentially one of fractious slaves—they reacted in a variety of ways.”

“Some like the Jesuits, condemned the principle of freedom outright…In fact, the indigenous critique of European institutions was seen as so powerful that anyone objecting to existing intellectual and social arrangements would tend to deploy it as a weapon of choice: a game, as we’ve seen, played by pretty much every one of the great Enlightenment philosophers.”

Philosophers get to talk as much as they want but rarely get to take any action.  The church and the state did not like their power being questioned.  An effective counter argument would be provided by an economist named A. R. J. Turgot.

“Yes, Turgot acknowledged, ‘we all love the idea of freedom and equality’—in principle.  But we must consider a larger context.  In reality, he ventured, the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority; it’s a sign of inferiority, since it is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient and therefore, where everyone is equally poor.  As societies evolve, Turgot reasoned, technology advances.  Natural differences in talents and capacities between individuals (which have always existed) become more significant, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labour.  We progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex ‘commercial civilization’, in which the poverty and dispossession of some—however lamentable it may be—is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of the society as a whole.”

Turgot would go on to propose a theory of human social evolution in which humans progress from a stage of hunter-gatherer to a pastoral community followed by an agricultural phase before finally emerging into this “commercial’ stage.  This logic pleased the powerful because they could view their power and wealth as being a result of a meritocratic process that rewarded their obvious superior talents.  It also cast shade on those who were on a different path, relegating them to dwellers in an earlier stage of social evolution.

“Everyone was to be sorted along the same grand evolutionary ladder, depending on their primary mode of acquiring food.  ‘Egalitarian’ societies were banished to the bottom of this ladder, where at best they could provide some insight on how our distant ancestors might have lived; but certainly could no longer be imagined as equal partners to a dialogue about how the inhabitants of wealthy and powerful societies should conduct themselves in the present.”

This attitude would serve the European nations well as they rushed to colonize , dominate, and extract wealth from as much of the world as possible

Perhaps Turgot should have included an even larger context and considered where his beloved technical advances might take us.  The Wendat told the French that they possessed more things than them, but they exceeded the French in “ease, comfort and time.”  Can we really claim that our society has provided us with increasing ease, comfort, and time—or are those things intended to disappear?  The authors relish reminding us that for most, we submit ourselves to indentured servitude, if not outright slavery, at least eight hours per day and for at least five days a week—yet we claim to be living in the land of the free.  We claim to live in a democracy, but our only influence on society comes when about half of us have the energy or knowledge to cast a vote.  And on those occasions, only about half of that half have taken the time to try and understand what they are voting for.  For many, the motivation is merely “What’s in it for me.”  Would the indigenous critique change any if the Wendat encountered our twenty-first century society?

  

The Native Americans Encountered by the Pilgrims: History Revealed

 James W. Loewen is a sociology professor who has spent a lot of time reviewing and comparing the various history textbooks that our high school students are required to read.  He first reported his findings in 1995 in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.  His work created a stir and he felt compelled to return in 2007 with a look at a new set of textbooks.  He returned again in 2018 with a version that acknowledges the Trump era in a new Preface, but otherwise the book was unchanged.  This book is a revelation.  One is left with the realization that, by design, we are taught little about our history.  Instead, a collaboration between textbook publishers, politicians, and everyday citizens provides our children with history books not intended to provide knowledge but to induce patriotism.  This topic was discussed in Politics and Teaching History: Brainwashing Students.

Part of Loewen’s intent was to illustrate how inaccurate our knowledge of our own history had become.  Perhaps the most disturbing chapter was the one in which he compared the actual history of our interaction with Native Americans with what we have been taught.  We tend to assume that our pilgrims came to settle an uncivilized land inhabited by “savages.”  What actually happened was that “settlers” were invaders into a land that had been occupied for tens of thousands of years, that possessed civilizations that would excite enlightenment philosophers with thoughts of ways they could improve their own European nations.  What would allow the invaders to overwhelm the natives was not their advanced civilization, but the diseases they carried into the Americas.  The crowded European cities were perfect places to develop and propagate infectious diseases; the wide-open spaces in the Americas were not.

“Some areas in the Americas did have high social density.  Incan roads connected towns from northern Ecuador to Chile.  Fifteen hundred to two thousand years ago the population of Cahokia, Illinois, numbered about forty thousand.  Trade linked the Great Lakes to Florida, the Rockies to what is now New England.  We are therefore not dealing with isolated bands of ‘primitive’ peoples.  Nonetheless, most of the Western Hemisphere lacked the social density found in much of Europe, Africa, and Asia.  And nowhere in the Western Hemisphere were there sinkholes of sickness like London or Cairo, with raw sewage running in the streets.”

“The scarcity of disease in the Americas was also partly attributable to the basic hygiene practiced by the region’s inhabitants.  Residents of northern Europe and England rarely bathed, believing it unhealthy, and rarely removed all of their clothing at one time, believing it immodest.  Squanto, ‘tried without success, to teach them to bathe,’ according to Feenie Ziner, his biographer.”

The invaders found it easy to dominate a region when over 90 percent of the native population is killed by the diseases one has imported.

“Europeans were never able to ‘settle’ China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or much of Africa, because too many people already lived there.  The crucial role played by the plagues in the Americas can be inferred from two simple population estimates: William McNeill reckons the population of the Americas at one hundred million in 1492, while William Langer suggests that Europe only had about seventy million people when Columbus set forth.  The Europeans’ advantages in military and social technology might have enabled them to dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated China, India, Indonesia, and Africa, but not to ‘settle’ the hemisphere.  For that, the plague was required.  Thus, apart from the European (and African) invasion itself, the pestilence is surely the most important event in the history of America.”

The plagues would begin with the Spaniards in the 1500s and continue over the centuries.  Europeans understood what was going on before the Pilgrims took off for America.  They assumed that it was God’s will that the natives die so that white Europeans could take over their land.

“How did the Spanish manage to conquer what is now Mexico City?  ‘When the Christians were exhausted from war, God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox, and there was a great pestilence in the city.’  When the Spanish marched into Tenochtitlan, there were so many bodies that they had to walk on them.  Most of the Spaniards were immune to the disease, and that fact itself helped to crush Aztec morale.”

“In 1617, just before the pilgrims landed, a pandemic swept southern New England.  For decades, English and French fishermen had fished off the Massachusetts coast.  After filling their hulls with cod, they would go ashore to lay in firewood and fresh water and perhaps capture a few American Indians to sell into slavery in Europe.  It is likely these fishermen transmitted some illness to the people they met.  The plague that ensued made the Black Death pale by comparison.”

“Within three years the plague wiped out between 90 to 96 percent of the inhabitants of coastal New England.  Native societies lay devastated.  Only ‘the twentieth person is scarce left alive,’ wrote Robert Cushman, an English eyewitness, recording a death rate unknown in all previous human experience.”

It is more inspirational to think of the Pilgrims having to deal with hostile savages and a challenging environment, than to document what actually occurred.

“…the Pilgrims hardly ‘started from scratch’ in a ‘wilderness.’  Throughout southern New England, Native Americans had repeatedly burned the underbrush, creating a parklilke environment.  After landing at Provincetown, the Pilgrims assembled a boat for exploring and began looking for their new home.  They chose Plymouth because of its beautiful cleared fields, recently planted in corn and its useful harbor and ‘brook of fresh water.’  It was a lovely site for a town.  Indeed, until the plague, it had been a town, for ‘New Plimoth’ was none other than Squanto’s village of Patuxet.  The invaders followed a pattern: throughout the hemisphere Europeans pitched camp right in the middle of Native populations—Cuzco, Mexico City, Natchez, Chicago.  Throughout New England, colonists appropriated American Indian cornfields for their initial settlements, avoiding the backbreaking labor of clearing the land of forest and rock.  (This explains why, to this day, the names of so many towns throughout the region—Marshfield, Springfield, Deerfield—end in field.)  ‘Errand into the wilderness’ may have made a lively sermon title in 1650, a popular book title in 1950, and an archetypal textbook phrase in 2000, but it was never accurate.  The new settlers encountered no wilderness: ‘In this bay wherein we live,’ one colonist noted in 1622, ‘in former time hath lived about two thousand Indians’.”

Loewen was outraged that no treatment of the repeated epidemics existed in the textbooks covered in his first edition.  By the second edition, some textbooks merely noted that smallpox existed among the Natives.

The American Natives did not all die.  They would gradually increase their numbers and reconstitute their societies, but by then it was too late to stem the invaders’ tide.  But it was not too late to set an example of a life without the constant stresses of hierarchical societies and illustrate a form of liberty of which the European philosophers had barely managed to dream.

The American Natives had a history and cultures that deserve to be recognized and studied.  But if you are a white invader intending to eliminate them, it is best to have them recognized as savages who will not be missed.

 

Evolution by Cultural Selection, and Human Tribalism

 Carl Safina has written fascinating accounts of animals and how they live, communicate, and educate their offspring.  His latest book, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, is full of interesting revelations.  One of the topics he discussed involved the creation of new species.  Scientists have long recognized that evolution can allow animals living in isolated regions where no mating is possible with other groups to follow different paths and develop different body features and differing cultures.  Safina was intrigued by examples of animals who shared a location yet still seemed to be evolving in different directions.

“The existence of hundreds of species of cichlid fishes in the same African lake has always seemed to me proof that some other process is functioning in the world.”

What Safina needed to find was some mechanism by which, in a given species, groups will choose to not interbreed even though they might intermingle.  His best example is the orcas who live in the Pacific Northwest.

“Think…for instance of the killer whale types who inhabit the same region but specialize in hunting prey in different ways—catching fish in one case, mammals in another—and have consequently developed social and physical differences.  Regardless of the fact that scientists haven’t named these whale groups separately (yet), they avoid each other and really have become separate species.”

Safina finds other examples of species in which cultural differences develop and lead to the tendency to avoid mating with those having different cultural attributes.  He arrives at this conclusion.

“I strongly suspect that the mechanisms driving the origin of new species are mainly three: Charles Darwin’s ‘natural selection’ and his ‘sexual selection,’ and the one our present exploration has brought us to here, which I’ll call cultural selection.  By cultural selection I mean the power of socially learned preferences to create group cohesion and cause avoidance between groups.  The avoidance means reproductive isolation.  The reproductive isolation sets groups up for different journeys.  Cultural learning can cause groups to mate like with like, thus deepening specializations, amplifying differences, and, I believe, diverging until they are sufficiently distinct to be different species.”

Safina’s ruminations about the evolution of animal species bring to mind a related dynamic that is operative in human societies, particularly with regard to political divides.  Political analysts continually refer to our development of quite different political cultures as tribalism.  We already separate ourselves into red and blue regions, minimizing contact with our political enemies.  We have even begun to avoid genetic mixing.  In previous generations, there did not seem to be much concern about the politics of whoever one’s child was marrying, but that has changed.  The Institute for Family Studies put out this note in 2020: Marriages Between Democrats and Republicans Are Extremely Rare.

“Marriage has always been a marker of both social solidarity and division in America. Marriages between people of different races were once prohibited, but they are now on the rise – one indication of growing solidarity across racial lines in America. Tolerance toward interfaith marriages has also grown over the years, and Americans are more likely to marry a spouse of a different religion now. But the same cannot be said for politics.”

The term “mixed marriage” in this context refers to marriage between an avowed independent with a party member.  Pundits have doubts about how many “independents” are truly independent rather than possessing a rigid voting pattern. 

“…it is possible to make a direct comparison between 2020 and 2017, the earliest year when the spouse’s party affiliation was available in the American Family Survey. My analysis suggests that in just three years, the share of politically-mixed marriages in the U.S. has declined from 23% to 21%, and the share of marriages between a Democrat and a Republican dropped from 4.5% to 3.6%.”

Using marriage as a simulant for mating and acculturation is not as reliable as it once was, but it is as good as any available.  These data suggest there is a component of genetic enhancement of particular attributes in isolated political cultures.  We usually think of evolution as a slow process taking place over long periods, but it can occur faster than one thinks.

In 1959, a group of Russian geneticists began what is known as The silver fox domestication experiment.

“Today the domesticated foxes at an experimental farm near the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Siberia are inherently as calm as any lapdog. What’s more, they look eerily dog-like. All of this is the result of what is known as the silver fox, or farm fox, domestication study.”

“Starting from what amounted to a population of wild foxes, within six generations (6 years in these foxes, as they reproduce annually), selection for tameness, and tameness alone, produced a subset of foxes that licked the hand of experimenters, could be picked up and petted, whined when humans departed, and wagged their tails when humans approached. An astonishingly fast transformation. Early on, the tamest of the foxes made up a small proportion of the foxes in the experiment: today they make up the vast majority.

After six generations they had developed specimens with the behaviors of a different species; physical change to another species would take longer.  How much change occurred in one generation?  In two?  In three?  What generation of cultural isolation are we in…second?  How much has our political system changed in the last generation?  How much will it change in the next? 

We could be heading for World War III, or Civil War II, or both.

 

Centenarian Clusters: Don’t Trust the Data

 Reaching the age of 100 is a significant achievement.  Making it to 105 labels one a semi-supercentenarian, hitting 110 a full supercentenarian.  Such accomplishments have been rare enough that if a town or region where an unusual number of people reached these ages was discovered, it was a newsworthy event.  It became a common practice to analyze the lifestyles and living conditions in the area in order to suggest reasons why people there were living longer than expected.  Articles would appear suggesting the particular diet of the local population was responsible.  Other suggestions included a physically active life, strong social support systems, and even genetic isolation.  A recent note provided by The Economist indicates research provides a simple explanation: such clusters might not even exist.

The article, Places claiming to be centenarian hotspots may just have bad data, focuses on the research of Dr. Saul Newman of Oxford University.  It was noted that in 2010 Japan had audited its records and discovered that 230,000 supposed centenarians in their data base were actually dead or missing.  If the data on aged citizens in Japan was that incorrect, could bad data explain the anomalies?  Many centenarians today could have been born at a time when birth certification did not exist.  Today, we are constantly required to produce our birthdate and forgetting our age is almost impossible.  But if there was no birth certificate to refer to and no constant reminder provided, would we remember our age accurately after 100 years?  The data from Japan suggests that in some cases dead people might be kept alive for fraudulent purposes such as a continued arrival of pension checks.

Newman studied data available from the United States, Britain, Italy, France, and Japan.  His first observation was that regions with exceptional numbers of centenarians tended to be in the poorer regions of a nation, where record keeping might make one suspicious.

“Okinawa, for example, has a poverty rate nearly twice the Japanese average and 1.6 times as many listed centenarians for each reported nonagenarian.”

There were examples of contradictory data sets.

“In Italy provinces where more people reach the age of 105 tend to have more people die before 55. On the island of Sardinia, renowned for its abundance of very old people, residents have among the lowest chances of reaching midlife of any Italians.”

Places that were late in issuing birth certificates have also tended to have an excess in centenarians.

“The most concrete evidence that mistakes could be causing variations in the numbers of very old people came from America. Between 1841 and 1919, states introduced birth certificates, making age estimates more accurate and fraud more difficult. By aligning data on the numbers of old people in each state with the date that birth registration was introduced, Dr Newman found that it resulted in a 69% drop in the prevalence of supercentenarians.”

As with all things dealing with humans and health, simple correlations can be terribly misleading—perhaps, this one as well.

World War III: A Second Front is Opened; What Comes Next?

The alliances are set: the major democracies of the US, Europe, Japan and South Korea versus the major autocracies China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.  The war began with Russia invading Ukraine.  A swift victory and the demonstration of NATO’s fecklessness would be outstanding and would give the green light to Russia’s allies to make aggressive moves in their own spheres of influence.  Easy victory did not happen, but neither did defeat.  Neither side has yet demonstrated the ability to defeat the other.  Russia is receiving warfighting assistance from China and Iran, and probably from North Korea as well.  Ukraine is receiving economic and military assistance from its allies, the alliance of major democracies.  Putin continues to gush confidence about the state of affairs in Ukraine even though his army seems unable to control any additional territory.  Could the autocrats have a plan B?

If NATO is an effective alliance, one not likely to collapse when threatened, it can still be enfeebled if the war in Ukraine saps its strength, both political and military.  The democratic alliance has admitted that political will in its nations is fragile, and military resources are being stretched thin by donations to Ukraine.  Putin could succeed by stretching out the war in hope that the alliance loses its will and allows him to win.  But what if your allies no longer trust you to do what you promised?  Could plan B include opening a second front to further test the endurance of the democratic alliance and to further deplete its military resources.  On October 7, the Hamas group executed a massive attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip.  Hamas is supported by Iran who probably provided the arms necessary as well as other forms of support.

Iran has much to gain in its sphere of influence by damaging Israel and creating chaos in the Middle East.  Could China be watching and waiting for an opportunity for aggressive action that would go unopposed?  Is North Korea waiting for an opportune time to have another go at South Korea?

Putin has lately begun talking in ways that suggest something big is planned.  Consider this statement from a CNN article.

“’The Ukrainian crisis is not a territorial conflict, I want to emphasize this,’ he said at the Valdai forum. ‘Russia is the largest country in the world, with the largest territory. We have no interests in terms of conquering any additional territories. We still have to explore and develop Siberia, Eastern Siberia and the Far East. This is not a territorial conflict or even the establishment of a regional geopolitical balance. The question is much broader and more fundamental: we are talking about the principles on which the new world order will be based’.”

Timothy Snyder has identified Vladimir Putin as a Christian fascist who believes that God is on fascism’s side.  He hates the western democracies because their lax morals and their insistence on personal freedoms weaken his Russian people—a rather Hitlerian concern.  The article’s author, Nathan Hodge, seems to agree.

“Putin casts that fight in existential terms, arguing this week that nothing less than a twilight struggle is underway to establish a new world order congenial to authoritarian states — and implying that Russia is in this for the long haul.”

Putin thinks he and his allies can win this war.

  

Waste, Recycling, and the Plastic Problem

Waste is a term that covers many materials.  There is what might be called household waste: the stuff we place in the garbage collection containers to be trucked away each week.  Then there are the body excretions to be disposed of and industrial wastes from unsold clothing to radioactive wastes from nuclear reactors.  Oliver Franklin-Wallis discusses them all in his book Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future.  Here, we will focus on the household stuff we throw away.

The method of disposing of unwanted objects has traditionally been to just dump them far enough away from where we resided so that we could forget about them.  As population density increased, a bit of planning became necessary.  Societies would establish formal dumpsites and control how much could be accumulated before a new site must be established.  The term landfill came to be used for planned dumpsites.  Large-scale accumulations of garbage initiate serious environmental problems.

“Today the solid waste industry contributes 5 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions—more than the entire shipping and aviation industries combined.  As it decomposes, rubbish produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps many times more heat than carbon dioxide.  Landfills ooze leachate, a waste industry term for the noxious black or yellow sludge that forms from the putrefying rubbish.  Leachate is a noxious smoothie of every chemical and by-product you can imagine—acids, heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, and other poisons and carcinogens, which can leak down into the water table or into rivers, and into our water supply.”

Franklin-Wallis takes the reader to waste dumping gone insane in India at New Delhi.

“This is Ghazipur landfill, a mountain not of stone, but of garbage—14 million metric tons of it.  Piled 71 yards high and covering an area of 69 acres, it is the largest of three mega-landfills that ring Delhi.”

This dump site is actually an example of recycling as thousands of people try to make a living out of salvaging things from the mountain of garbage.

“Worldwide, 37 percent of our waste is landfilled, according to the World Bank; fully another third ends up in open dumpsites.  Waste management is expensive…whereas dumping costs virtually nothing, so, as the global population has boomed, mega-dumps like Ghazipur have proliferated.”

If one wishes to have modern, ecologically sound landfills, one can contain the waste in barriers that prohibit leakage of waste, but barriers don’t last forever, and this process only delays the inevitable poisoning of the environment.

Countries that can afford waste management add incineration and recycling to the menu of options, with each choosing its own mixture of options.  Some have found incineration attractive because it can be done in such a way that useful energy can be captured in so called “energy-from-waste” (EfW) sites.

“In the UK and Europe, at least, landfills are a dying business.  (The same is not true in the US or Australia, which send 50 percent and 30 percent of waste to landfill, respectively.)  In 1996, the UK government introduced a landfill tax, to encourage recycling rates…Anything that cannot be sent for recycling or composted is increasingly burned inside energy-from-waste (EfW) plants.”

“The reason for landfill’s decline is not, as was once feared, that we are running out of room for them (quite the contrary—empty land is easy to find).  Rather they have become obsolete, unable to compete with recycling and energy generation on cost, as well as politically unpopular.”

“In the UK, the percentage of waste that ends up burned has grown from 9 percent in 2001 to 48 percent in 2021—a 435 percent increase.  In the European Union, which burns just over a quarter of its trash, incinerators power 18 million homes.  Sweden burns roughly 50 percent of its waste, Japan 78 percent.  Denmark, which burns four-fifths of its household waste, has built so many EfW plants that the country now has to import 1 million metric tons of waste per year to keep them running effectively.  China, which has built more than 300 EfW plants since the 1990s, burns 580,000 metric tons of rubbish every day.”

Incineration seems a curious form of waste management progress when global warming is becoming a more urgent issue.  And burning garbage can emit all sorts of dangerous chemicals if not highly regulated.  Modern systems try to burn at a high enough temperature that dangerous compounds can be decomposed.  Nevertheless, it cannot be considered a clean energy source, and people who live near incinerators tend to have worse health problems than people who do not.

“Even so, incinerators’ emissions are substantial: in the UK, energy-from-waste plants have been found to emit more CO2-equivalent per kilowatt hour generated than coal power stations while regulators in New York found that even incinerators that comply with air quality legislation can release up to twice as much lead, four times as much cadmium, and up to fourteen times as much mercury as coal.”

The roughly third of waste that does not get deposited on land is divided between incineration and recycling.  Both options depend on companies being able to make money in the process.  Therefore, market forces will arise and the two modes will be in competition.  Recycling will be economically efficient for some materials and less so for others.  Plastics will be the major problem.

“The environmental benefits of recycling are manifold.  Recycling an aluminum can requires roughly 92 percent less energy and emits 90 percent less carbon than making one from virgin material; for every ton of aluminum saved, you’re also saving eight metric tons of bauxite ore from being mined from the ground.  Recycling one ton of steel requires just a quarter of the energy of mining it new, cuts the associated air pollution by 86 percent, and saves around 3.6 barrels of oil.  Recycled glass requires 30 percent less energy to produce, paper 40 percent less, copper 85 percent.  By recycling most materials, we’re not only reducing the greenhouse gases required in production, but the environmental damage caused by extraction: the logging, mining, processing, and transportation required in replacing the item with new.  Recycling creates less water and air pollution.”

“It is also better for the economy.  Globally, the recycling industry employs millions of people; the market for scrap metal alone is worth more than $280 billion.  Studies have shown that recycling schemes create 70 jobs for every one that would be created by landfill or incinerators.  And the scale is enormous: 630 million metric tons of steel scrap is recycled globally every year.  It’s estimated that 99 percent of the metal in scrapped cars, for example, ends up reused.  Of all the copper ever mined, 80 percent is still in circulation.  In the UK, three quarters of glass waste is recycled into new bottles, fiberglass, or other materials.”

The situation with plastic is quite different both economically and environmentally.  Plastics are so useful that production is huge and growing.

“More than 480 billion plastic bottles are sold worldwide every year—approximately 20.000 every second…And that’s just one household item.  (It’s not even the most numerous.  That dubious honor goes to the four trillion plastic cigarette filters flicked to the ground and stamped out annually.”

Plastics are made from the residuals left from refining fossil fuels. Consequently, they are readily available and cheap to produce.  They were long marketed as having the advantage of being throwaway items.  However, they have severe health and environmental issues that are just now being recognized and studied. 

“When plastics are broken down, by ultraviolet radiation, by the elements, or by force, they do not disintegrate so much as divide, their chain-like structures splitting into smaller and smaller pieces of themselves.  Macroplastics become microplastics become nanoplastics.  By then they are small enough to enter our blood streams, our brains, the placentas of unborn children.  The impacts of these materials on our bodies are only just beginning to be understood; none are likely to be good.

Every time we drink from a plastic bottle, we are ingesting plastic particles.  Every time an infant is provided formula in a plastic bottle and sucks on a plastic nipple, it ingests plastic particles.  Every time we drive our cars, we cover the land and fill the air with plastic particles from the tires.  Every time we wash our plastic clothes, we emit enormous numbers of plastic fibers into our water systems.  There are so many plastic particles in our waterways that enjoying a sea breeze means you are inhaling plastic particles given off by the ocean water. 

Plastics have the curious tendency to attract other pollutants found in whatever medium they exist, including dangerous compounds and even pathogens.  Although drinking from a plastic container will send particles into your digestive system, they will get broken down into smaller particles in the process.  With each fracture, exposure to the chemicals in the plastic increases.  If the fractured particle is small enough it can enter into the blood stream. These things should be of concern, but they haven’t been until now.

“More than 10,000 additives can be used to make plastic, of which around 2,400 are potentially hazardous, according to EU safety standards, including plasticizers, flame retardants, dyes, lubricants, antistatic compounds, deodorizers and foaming agents.  The exact recipe depends on the base plastic being used and the purpose of the end product.  The plastics industry is notoriously secretive about these additives; a recent study found that more than 2,000 known plastic additives have been ‘hardly studied’ for their impacts on human health and are under-regulated in many parts of the world.”

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is a commonly used plastic in making plastic bottles, for example.

“In 2021, scientists at Brunel University found that recycled PET leached 150 different chemicals into drinks—including toxicants such as antimony, BPA, and numerous endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) such as phthalates—at a greater rate than virgin PET.  Like all PET bottles, they also shed microplastics.” 

Endocrine disrupting chemicals are particularly dangerous because they resemble the hormones used by humans and other animals.  Thus, they can trick the body into responding to them when it shouldn’t, or generate a totally foreign response.  We cannot perform experiments on humans, but we can study the effects of exposure to such chemicals on other animals.  The results are frightening.

“The health impacts of this are, as yet, unclear.  However, human and animal studies have shown compelling links between phthalates, a common class of plasticizers, and lower fertility, developmental issues, obesity, and cancer.”

Recycled plastic is not the same as virgin plastic.  It can be used, but it accumulates more impurities and damage every cycle.  Thus, it can be used only a few times and only along with a component of virgin material.  Unlike metals and paper products, there is no economic advantage to recycling plastics—they are always more expensive than virgin material.  The plastic industries were forced to take up the promotion of recycling by the force of public opinion.  Franklin-Wallis describes campaigns that were shams aimed mainly at avoiding any sort of regulation of their practices. 

“Over the years a kind of playbook emerged: plastics companies would make big promises about moving to more recycled content and even open new recycling facilities, only to abandon them when attention moved on.”

“In the early 1990s, Coca-Cola announced a goal to make its bottles from 25 percent recycled plastic, only to abandon the target four years later once consumer and political pressure had lifted.  In 2007, the company made headlines again when it set out to ‘recycle or reuse 100% of its plastic bottles in the U.S.’ and to achieve this, opened the ‘world’s largest PET recycling plant’ in Spartanburg, South Carolina.  In reality, the company missed its recycling target and quietly shut down the plant two years later.  Coke’s target of using 10 percent recycled plastic in its bottles by 2010?  Missed.  It set a target of 25 percent recycled content in its bottles by 2015 and failed to meet even half that.  They’re not alone.  PepsiCo and Nestlé, among others, have all previously failed to reach plastics recycling targets.  This is partly a failure of journalism: pledges get news coverage.  Few ever check later to see if they come true.”

Almost without realizing it, the world and the animals living on it have been inundated with plastic particulates and the chemicals of which they are comprised.  This cannot be healthy.  It could be an existential threat.  Evidence of health threats is not yet convincing, but the annual production of plastics will continue and accelerate.  Yearly production is expected to quadruple by 2050.  Recycling is not the answer.  The only apparent solution is to stop making plastics, but we have become so dependent upon them that this can not happen anytime soon.  We seem destined to follow this path until it is too late to respond, much like our experience with climate change.  Sigh….

  

Politics and Teaching History: Brainwashing Students

 James W. Loewen is a sociology professor who has spent a lot of time reviewing and comparing the various history textbooks that our high school students are required to read.  He first reported his findings in 1995 in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.  His work created a stir and he felt compelled to return in 2007 with a look at a new set of textbooks.  He returned again in 2018 with a version that acknowledges the Trump era in a new Preface, but otherwise the book was unchanged.  The first thing one should take away from a reading today is that we know little about our nation’s history because we are not taught anything that might be controversial or might generate disappointment in our country.  The second illumination results from recognizing that the way history is taught to our children is similar to the approach autocrats have always used to create a compliant society.

Loewen was moved to make this startling claim.

“People who have taken more mathematics courses are more proficient at math than those who have not.  The same holds true for English, foreign languages, and almost every other subject.  Only in history is stupidity the result of more, not less schooling.”

In Loewen’s experience authors whose names appear on the cover of the books seem to make mistakes that they couldn’t possibly have made if they had actually written the book.  And, they seem to have little knowledge of what is actually in their book.

“Editors tell me that recent chapters of American history textbooks are ‘typically written by freelance writers.  Nor is it just the final chapters.  Judith Conaway, who has ghostwritten elementary-level textbooks in several fields, wrote, ‘It is absolutely the standard practice in the textbook publishing industry to assign ALL the writing to freelancers.  Then you rent a name to go on the cover.”

If historians are not writing our textbooks, who is?  The publishers of course.  Their goal is not to produce good history, but to sell a product to as many school systems as possible.  Texas, with its high population and conservative bent, can veto any section of a textbook its reviewers are unhappy with.  The wise publisher knows what will pass review and what will not.  Politicians and the general public were taught that they had historical heroes and they do not want their heroes to be sullied by historical fact.  They were taught that white men with European heritage created the modern world, and they are happy with that.  They were taught that their country is the greatest country in the world (in all ways) and has been the “good guy” in all disputes, and that belief must not be disturbed.  They were taught that everyone can be a success if they just work hard, and that progress is inevitable, providing a better life for all.  It would be wise not to cast doubt on that outrageous belief, although it implies that if you do not succeed it is your own fault.

“Textbook authors need not concern themselves unduly with what happened in history, since publishers use patriotism, rather than scholarship, to sell their books.  This emphasis should hardly be surprising: the requirement to take American history originated as part of a nationalist flag-waving campaign early in this century [twentieth].  Publishers start the pitch on their outside covers, where nationalist titles such as The Challenge of Freedom and Land of Promise are paired with traditional patriotic icons: eagles, Independence Hall, the Stars and Stripes, and the Statue of Liberty.  Four of the six new books in my sample display the American flag on their covers; the others use red, white, and blue for their titles and authors.  Publishers market the books as tools for helping students to ‘discover’ our ‘common beliefs’ and ‘appreciate our heritage.’  No publisher tries to sell a textbook with the claim that it is more accurate than its competitors.”

Loewen utilizes the majority of the chapters to illustrate how far from actuality is the history presented to our students.  He begins with the destruction of many of the myths developed to celebrate our early history, with the altered history of our dealings with Native Americans and African Americans being the most troubling.  He points out that the history of slavery and racism changes as what society wants to hear changes.  After the end of Reconstruction, the Southern narrative was sold nationwide and blacks were deemed incapable of participating in governing, or even in tending to their own affairs.  With the success of the Civil Rights Movement, history would have to be rewritten.  Blacks would be characterized more appropriately, but under no circumstances must whites be blamed for anything.

“Although textbook authors no longer sugarcoat how slavery affected African Americans, they minimize white complicity in it.  They present slavery virtually as uncaused, a tragedy; rather than a wrong perpetrated by some people on others.”

“The emotion generated by textbook descriptions of slavery is sadness, not anger.  For there’s no one to be angry at.  Somehow we ended up with four million slaves in America but no owners.  This is part of a pattern in our textbooks: anything bad in American history happened anonymously.  Anyone named in our history made a positive contribution…Or as Frances Fitzgerald put it when she analyzed textbooks in 1979, ‘In all history, there is no known case of anyone’s creating a problem for anyone else’.”

“When textbooks make racism invisible in American history, they obstruct our already poor ability to see it in the present.  The closest they come to analysis is to present a vague feeling of optimism: in race relations, as in everything, our society is constantly getting better.  We used to have slavery; now we don’t.  We used to have lynchings; now we don’t.  Baseball used to be all white; now it isn’t.  The notion of progress suffuses textbook treatments of black-white relations, implying that race relations have somehow steadily improved on their own.  This cheery optimism only compounds the problem, because whites can infer that racism is over.  ‘The U.S. has done more than any other nation in history to provide equal rights for all.,’ The American Tradition assures us.  Of course, its authors have not seriously considered the levels of human rights in the Netherlands, Lesotho, or Canada today, or in Choctaw society in 1800, because they don’t mean their declaration as a serious treatment of comparative history—it is just ethnocentric cheerleading.”

An important aspect of education in the K-12 years is referred to as socialization.  Students learn the rules of society and how to interact with others: what is acceptable and what is not.

“Teachers may try to convince themselves that education’s main function is to promote inquiry, not iconography, but in fact the socialization function of schooling remains dominant at least through high school and hardly disappears in college.  Education as socialization tells people what to think and how to act and requires them to conform.  Education as socialization influences students simply to accept the rightness of our society.  American history textbooks overtly tell us to be proud of America.”

Loewen uses Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-tung as examples of autocratic leaders who used education to create their versions of good citizens: people who would behave themselves and conform to the wishes of their leaders.  The more education, the more conformity.  If he had written today, his best example would have been the Chinese who have added high tech surveillance to education to make conformity even more rigid.

History textbooks are not for learning history, they are designed to indoctrinate children with belief systems that are consistent with those of society in general: our nation is the greatest, we always do the right thing, if we stay the course things will get better for everyone  Once such a system is initiated, it is easy to propagate it forward in time as each generation provides the role model for the one following.  The best one can say of such an approach is that it will protect the status quo.  The worst one can say is that it forms the basis for creating a fascist state under the wrong leadership.