Maudlin Thoughts on My Aging

 Sometimes I visualize humanity like a huge composite rock. There are quartzes, and clays,  obsidians, and soapstone all smashed together. Sharp cutting edges and accepting softness. brittle in one place, flowing in another. reflective here and dull there. Each of us born a fragment. a small random assortment of actualities and tendencies. Each of us sees our own particular peculiarities and combinations. If we chance to get some reflective or soft pieces we see or feel our similarities with others and also see or feel the differences.

From as far back as I am aware, I have lived mostly inside myself. The light inside has always seemed bright and like a house at night, the windows reflect back and it is hard to see the outside. As I think more, I apprehend less of the outside world. I have a large memory for structures and a small memory for specific occurrences. As a result, I cannot tell you much about my life. I can tell you what I have deduced, but not much of what I have specifically experienced. I see what I have done, I can tell you how it is put together. If I find the right thread I can tell you what I was thinking when I did it. I remember many fragments of experience. Walking down a particular road on a particular day, riding a bike up a particular hill, sitting with a friend, and also the searing pain of when I have hurt others. But this is not an integrated whole. Things that occurred decades ago are mixed up with yesterday. I live mostly in a permanent now. Always constructing a model of the world and how I should behave in it. My children would sometimes say "You told me ..." and often I would say "That doesn't sound like me." because I could not remember, but it was not consistent with the way I behave in the world. You can see it in this essay. It is abstract, with few examples.

I have the full range of emotion. I love and hate, get happy angry and fearful. From childhood I have had a strong fear of rejection. This has caused a shyness and withdrawal that I have consciously worked to overcome. I also have an outsized aversion to inconveniencing those around me. If I can do something without asking for help, I will. I will do this even when there are those around who would be happy to assist. As a general tendency and later as a philosophy I have looked at people as mostly good and worthy. I like to help them as I wander along. I am fond of most people even when they exasperate me. I can be cruel and petty, but I try hard to repress this. I believe in compassion toward everything.

I am good at figuring out how things work. This combined with an innate curiosity means I know a lot about a lot of things. I also know enough to know that my knowledge is shallow and much of it may eventually be proven wrong. I think most people consider me to be knowledgable and reasonably competent as long as you ignore my tendency to forget things and walk into walls. As I wander along I try to take the role of educator when I think I know something and student when I don't.

I do not understand my emotions. Every once in a while a person comes along and I form an immediate and strong attraction. I am sure there is a sexual component, but only a component. I am a cis male and most, but not nearly all, of these pairings are with women. Usually I assume the feeling is one sided. Whan that appears to be the case, I try to not inconvenience them with the strength of my feelings. Even when there is reciprocation, I allow the exigencies of lives and families to get in the way of expression. I almost insist they make choices that are the best and most consistent for their lives without consideration of feelings, particularly my feelings.

Day by day, I got older. It happened gradually, but then faster and finally almost suddenly. Now when people look at me they see old. Looking back I see that I have set goals, made choices and stuck with them even when, in hindsight, they weren't always the wisest choices. I have attempted, and often accomplished, things that I found to be very difficult. I have also failed. I have let people down, I have hurt them and I have hurt the world around me. I have not done as much or been as good as I might have. Nothing I have done has been any kind of perfect. I hope much of it has been good enough to serve the purpose. I console myself with the Jesse Winchester lyric "Well goodness knows he could have been better, but heaven knows he could have been worse. If you've lit up the occasional candle, you're allowed the occasional curse"

Now my path is getting close to its end and a predominant feeling I have is that of loss. It is natural to have different groups of friends and family in different stages of life and in different places. Circumstances change, opportunities change. I move, they move. Contact becomes sparse then is lost. This gives me a large number of people I have grown close to or even loved deeply who are simply gone to me. Some of them have died and are literally gone. In addition to the ordinary changes of being that come with life and experience, now I deal with the changes caused by age and decay. I have lost strength, endurance, eyesight...

So here I am, always separated from the world by my interior life. Separated from others by my shyness and reserve. Now separated by time and space as everything drifts away. I have friends and family, but I have lived for a while and these current relationships are only a small part of the totality of relationships formed over my life, hence the feeling of loss.

Intelligence, Environments, Evolution, Change, and Choice

Many mornings after I get back from the gym I sip on a "mocha" (french press coffee instead of espresso), read my email, google news, social media, and watch random YouTube videos for a few minutes. YouTube gives me a selection of videos based on what it perceives as my interests. Sometimes it is correct, sometimes it isn't. Through an obscure chain I have been getting Jordan Peterson videos (I don't recommend). Mostly I ignore these, but I did watch one the other day where he was talking about intelligence. Peterson seemed to think the notion of intelligence was well understood and could be measured with IQ tests. I had a professor who, when asked what an IQ score meant, said that an IQ score measured what you scored on an IQ test.

Jordan equated intelligence with what IQ tests measure. But there are other definitions. In popular culture we have "book smart" and "street smart"".  Most odd to me  is Donald Trump's apparent definition. He summarized it speaking about Xi Jinping, China's current dictator. “He runs 1.5 billion people with an iron fist. Yeah, I think he’s pretty smart. And they have a chain over there. If you’re a dummy, you get left here,” he said, gesturing low. “It’s like a pyramid. The smartest one gets to the top. That didn’t work so well recently in our country.” Both Peterson and Trump think they know what intelligence is and they know who has it. Of course that divides the world into two camps, smart people and not smart people. That, in turn, allows all the cruelty we inflict on the "others".

In a way, Peterson and Trump agree. They each take as markers of intelligence a measure that applies within their cultural environment. IQ tests have been criticized for being strongly associated with a particular culture. This disadvantages those outside that culture. The first IQ tests were developed to predict how successful a child will be in school. In a school system developed within and for a culture, those who are part of the culture will have an advantage. Using an "IQ" test designed in a different culture/environment, each child's score would be different. In a hunter gatherer culture what would an IQ test look like? Plant identification? Tracking? Endurance? Trump's measure of intelligence is power and money (the two are fungible). Money truly is a marker of fitness within a commercial society. Both Trump and Jordan seem to be so embedded in their own particular environments that they cannot envision different ones requiring different skills.

Book smart indicates scholarly success. Street smart indicates the ability to thrive in urban environments. In creative environments, "talent" is an analogous notion. In high school I had a friend who was brilliant at making things. He had an engineers notion of intelligence. Once he told me, while holding a borrowed object, that the person who understood the most about how something was made and operated should own it. Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dali Lama, embodies intelligence in a compassionate, more spiritual environment.

Evolutionary biologists are usually pretty careful not to associate evolution with any notion of progress, intent, or direction other than generally increasing complexity. Cyanobacteria have existed on earth for over three billion years. They are responsible for the oxygen rich atmosphere on that makes our life possible. Cyanobacteria live basically everywhere. They are genetically diverse with at least 150 genera and over 2500 described species. Each species survives in its own particular environment. On land they live from Antarctica to hot deserts. In water they are ubiquitous, living in oceans, lakes, and rivers. They live solitary and in colonies. It doesn't make any sense to speak of one bacteria species as better than another, or more advanced. Each is simply, uniquely, and beautifully adapted to its particular environment.

We are a single species and the notion of race is a social construct. Real, strong, and dangerous, but a socially constructed notion. The real differences are more broadly spread. Take a random group of ten people from anywhere, it could be from across the world or at a family reunion. In that group you will find large differences in emotional, physical, and intellectual tendencies. I don't think anyone has an answer to the blend of nature/nurture that causes these differences, but they certainly exist. I suspect this broad range is adaptive. Humans live in social groups. Depending on the surroundings, one set of tendencies maybe better adapted than another and different personalities will end up thriving. In a situation filled with immediate threats, the more adventurous and danger seeking among us will thrive. In a situation of stability and wealth, scholars, artists, and engineers will thrive. In both of these cases, the human race is more likely to survive because of this diversity of tendencies.

We live in our environment, but we also construct it, just as the cyanobacteria constructed our oxygen rich atmosphere. Unlike the bacteria, we can think about the world we want and deliberately move to create it. This is an individual ability, but more importantly it is a collective ability. As social animals we can decide as groups how we want to live and what we want the world to look like. We exhibit personality and thought tendencies, perhaps from birth, but these are just tendencies. Depending on our situation we repress some tendencies and work to enhance others to fit better with our surroundings. The human environment is largely social, our culture. Cultures are an aggregation of individuals complete with agreements both legal and informal. There are rewards for acquiescence and punishments for transgressions. Individual changes affect how others relate to us as an individual. Larger cultural changes require communication and agreement of more people and oftentimes changes to formal consensus such as laws. Culture changes all the time, sometimes accidentally through the zeitgeist, sometimes deliberately through popular movements or propaganda.

If we can deliberately change our social environment, our culture, then we leave the world of evolutionary biology behind and can introduce notions of human progress, human direction. Humans now control the planet and are causing a sixth great extinction of other species. We can continue to act largely through individual greed, ignorance, and accident or we can learn explicit cultural intent. I hope we can do this with a long view of the future to ensure our great, great, great, great grandchildren live fulfilling lives in a world they love.

How should we change our world? Each of us has to decide this for ourself, then try to find and persuade others to think and feel likewise. Not just find others, but a set of others whose span of collective intelligence is large enough to affect almost everyone. Not just find and persuade, but engage in collective action to create change.

Cultural Appropriation and Music

 This post is about cultural appropriation, particularly in regard to music. It will take a while to get there so I ask for your patience.

Music is a human and personal expression. Every single musician has a personal approach to music and every performance is idiosyncratic. Every group of musicians has its own communal personality based on the skill, backgrounds, interactions and the style of the music. We know from from found flutes that music is at least 35,000 years old, but I suspect it is as old as the species. Just as there are no "primitive" languages, there are no "primitive" musical styles. 

Music changes over time. Knowledge passes from musician to musician through collaboration and explicit teaching. I was trained to play the flute in the classical tradition. I was a student of Frank Bowen, who was a student of Marcel Moyse, who was a student of Phillip Gaubert, who was a student of Paul Taffanel who studied under Vincent Dorus who studied under Joseph Guillou who studied with François Devienne. That partial chain goes back over 250 years. It is part of a tradition of western music that is as old as western culture. Western classical music has gone through various stylistic changes, but the chain is unbroken. In India, the tradition of raga has an even more consistent thematic history that goes back over a millennium. I am sure the same unbroken chains of musical tradition exist in almost every culture throughout the world.

Music is passed on by ear, personal instruction, and practice. In different times and places people have created notational systems for music. As with all notational systems, including written language, the notation is incomplete. Think about a play, say Shakespeare's Hamlet. The written play is fixed. There are occasional directions in the text "Enter LAERTES and OPHELIA".  In addition to the written play there is an unbroken chain of performance tradition passed from actor to actor and director to director. Despite this continuity, every performance of the play is different, often dramatically (pun intended). Every spoken word is interpreted by an actor who decides pace, emphasis, tone... Think how many ways there are to say "To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;". Within each tradition every generation, in fact every person, reinvents the tradition as part and parcel of performance and education.

Every work of performance art has an initial creator. Wanting credit for work and wanting to benefit from the fruit of our labor is an important human trait. Over time, virtually all performed art changes. This is true even when the only one who performs it is the creator. Over time phrases are polished, awkward parts added or changed, harmonies enriched... In folk music the  original creator is often unknown. Sometimes the author is unknown because the work is very old but I suspect the folk tradition also puts less emphasis on preserving the source.

In music, it is common that the original composition is only a structure. The composer intends for the performers to provide a complete piece on the basis of the structure. This is often visible in the music notation. In jazz, pieces are written as a melody with an associated set of chords (the changes). In performance this provides the basis for a set of variations. In Classical Baroque music, a piece may be given as a melody line and a figured bass, which is a bass line plus a set of chord symbols, much the same as jazz. In both Jazz and Baroque music the performers are expected to flesh out this skeleton and each of the players uses the written chords and melodies as a hints to guide their improvisation.

Because we are human, even brand new inventions are almost always based on existing objects and techniques. Jazz is only a hundred or so years old. It has grown and changed and now has multiple styles (New Orleans, BeBop, cool, fusion, free...). It originated from a number of traditions, most African based, including the blues. The Wikipedia list of  jazz contrafacts has over 50 separate jazz tunes based on George Gershwin's "I've Got Rhythm". Wikipedia also has a partial list of uses of the Gregorian Chant "Deus Irae". There are over 40 citations including Haydn, Liszt, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, George Crumb, John Williams and Jethro Tull. In current pop music, songs are often electronically constructed from individual sounds and phrases; "samples" taken directly from perviously recorded songs.

So... in music there are multiple traditions around the globe. Each tradition is constantly changing and each "piece" is subject to interpretation. Moreover, musical appropriation is rampant.

With the advent of radios, automobiles, and recorded music it became much easier to hear performances by people who live far away and have other musical traditions. When musicians hear new music, they imitate what they like and incorporate it into their own playing. This is how the largely African American traditions of blues, jazz, R&B... entered vernacular of white musicians and the commercial world of largely white owned corporations. 

The blues musician Robert Johnson has a known output of 29 songs. Eric Clapton has recorded at least 24 of them, including a tribute album. He has been respectful of the music and has given Robert Johnson credit. In fact Robert Johnson's fame has multiplied partly because of Clapton's work. That said, Clapton was a young white kid who heard, was affected by, copied, and helped commercialize the style.

In the U.S. there is a tradition of oppression and exploitation of black musicians. In general black musicians have been the inventors of styles and white musicians imitated. Note I say "in general". No one can deny the ingenuity and genius of, say Bill Evans, but the trend holds. A few years ago the New York Times published a photo with the headline "Is This the Greatest Photo in Jazz History?" The photo shows four musicians playing:  Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Roy Haynes, and Charlie Parker. These are four of the greatest jazz musicians who ever lived. The photo was taken on a Sunday night in a half filled dive. Neither Monk nor Parker had their cabaret licenses, which meant they were playing illegally. Cabaret licenses in New York were a means for the police to oppress musicians. Billie Holiday was hounded to death by government authorities, largely to suppress the song "Strange Fruit". Part of that hounding was taking away her cabaret license to reduce her ability to make a living.

The term "cultural appropriation" was coined in the 1970s. The Oxford language definition is "the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society."  As an old white man, I can be viewed as a member of a culture that is most likely to oppress and appropriate. As a human being and a musician, I can be knowledgable and sensitive to cultural appropriation, but I cannot avoid taking from other cultures. 

In 1901 a Japanese composer, Rentarō Taki, wrote a tune he called "Kōjō no Tsuki" as a music lesson. The song was popularized by a Japanese singer, Yoshie Fujiwara, in the 1920s. I have it in a book of flute tone exercises assembled by Marcel Moyse. That is part of how the tune become incorporated into the western classical tradition. In 1967 Thelonious Monk recorded a jazz tune "Japanese Folk Song" based on the melody. Monk's version is pure jazz with precious little Japanese influence other than the melody itself. The classical version collected by Moyse is simply the melody. In Japan there is a flute called the shakuhachi with a long and distinguished tradition as rich and complex as any other musical tradition (KODEN SUGOMORI (TSURU NO SUGOMORI): Mamino Yorita, shakuhachi player). I love listening to shakuhachi music, but I have never studied it. When I perform Kōjō no Tsuki" I play it as a theme with improvised variations. I will typically have variations that apply some of the gestures found in shakuhachi playing (pitch bends, short grace notes...) to the melody. Many other traditions including Irish penny whistle and blues guitar have "similar" gestures. Because I am not part of the shakuhachi tradition, it is unlikely that I perform these gestures in the same way that a shakuhachi player would. But I am me and I am playing my music the way I play it. I have stolen the melody just as Monk and Moyse did. I have stolen some gestures from the Japanese and,in other variations,  jazz traditions. My use of jazz gestures is probably equally inauthentic. I acknowledge the sources. If there were any money involved (there isn't) I would feel guilty that some of it did not trickle back to those who created the traditions.

Every single person speaks a unique language. Each person uses particular words and phrases. Each person has a particular way of telling stories. The way themes are introduced, the directness or indirectness of getting to the point, the arrangement of sentences; these are all particular and unique to each person. It is their idiolect. We understand each other because the overarching language allows these variations. We also criticize each other for not following our particular language norms (tenses, number agreement, we vs us, split infinitives ...).

It is the same with culture. Each of us is unique and particular. Because we live in social groups, we experience many of the same things as our neighbors and tend to conform to their patterns of behaviour. We also criticize others for violating norms.

People who study cultural appropriation say a line is crossed when members of the culture from which you have taken material find your use dishonorable. But culture is not monolithic. It is an aggregation of particular and idiosyncratic individuals. Who judges? Is it the most sensitive member of a group? Is it when a critical mass of people agree? When there is a critical mass, we can definitely agree on offense and appropriation. The "n word" and blackface are examples. I can definitely say that any white person who uses the n word or blackface is abusing culture in an offensive way and should be called on it. For general politeness, it is good to avoid offending even a single individual. My experience is that the most sensitive among us find a great deal objectionable. To submit to the most sensitive on every topic would be to freeze action. There are people who become incensed and offended when a stick of butter is sliced in an irregular fashion. When such a person is present, I curb my butter cutting. When they are not around, screw them. It's my butter and I'll slice it how I like.

Each of us takes elements from our complete surroundings. What we see and hear affects what we say and do. Each of us will sometimes offend others. Each of us will sometimes do things that violate even our own notions of what we "should" do. I try to be sensitive to others but, being a generally oblivious person, I probably fail often. I hope and expect that others will call me out when my behaviour is bad. I also reserve the right to disagree.

In my music I am going to continue to borrow what I find useful for what I am trying to express. I will try to be aware and sensitive to cultural background, but I cannot spend years studying each tradition I borrow from as I use it in my individual expression. From the background of other cultures I will undoubtedly misuse elements I have borrowed. I hope people point this out so I can learn and perhaps change what I do. In the end though, I am me. I will do what I do, and take my lumps when I offend others and they call me on it.

Vaccines and Nazis

 In the wake of a Tennessee school board banning the graphic novel "Maus" a friend posted a meme 

"FUN FACT: Kids who read Maus don't grow into adults who constantly compare minor inconveniences to the Holocaust". 

One of their friends responded with:

"Those who have read Maus I & Maus II realize the steps to genocide and become aware much earlier than those who haven’t, that what appears to be minor inconveniences to someone who they are manipulated into “othering” is much more significant than that and is one of the first steps to much worse. I TA’d a class on the Shoah/Holocaust at UCLA in which we carefully analyzed the beginnings of the Holocaust, which most did not recognize. They looked at propaganda about Jewish people, political dissidents, gypsies and LGBTQ people as a minor inconvenience. They saw it, as is happening to some disabled and religious minorities today with the current drug mandates, to be a minor inconvenience that they couldn’t go to the movie theater or a play or dtudy or work anymore. They saw it as a minor inconvenience that they were forced to publically identify themselves as other. Often it was mistakenly justified as they can choose-a different political

ideology, sexual orientation, religion- and nowadays to take the offered drugs. It requires empathy to step into another’s shoes and realize that not being able to work, travel, or study is not a minor inconvenience. Not being able to go to cultural events, museums, the theater, restaurants or other public places like trains is not a minor inconvenience. At least not for those being othered. Did the author of this meme really study the Holocaust, including the couple of years before the camps? Did they sit and watch the propaganda videos and read Wiesel and Primo Levi? The Nazi propaganda is eerily similar to much of the big pharma propaganda played on corporate news nowadays. Very little facts, much obsession with a monolithic view of what science and facts are, which does not allow for critical thought or inquiry. Intensive censorship."

There is a lot to unpack here. Before I start, so it doesn't get lost in the rest of this little essay, I want to be clear. I view the facebook response to be a clear instance of "comparing minor inconveniences to the holocaust". But... the response is complex and makes some interesting points, so I think it's worth a discussion. References to support my statements are available upon request.

This as a slippery slope argument. I think the basic point that moving into the Holocaust was a step by step process of dehumanization is true and valid. It is also true that part of the process is a gradual separation of us and them, with "them" being restricted in activities. At first the restrictions seemed relatively innocuous, like explicit identification, but then moved rapidly to eliminating necessities like education, work, and property.

It is also true that these tactics are not novel and this can happen in any society, including our own. The target can be foreigners; look at the English treatment of the Irish before, during, and after the great famine. Sometimes they are used to oppress subcultures like the  Uyghurs in China. Sometimes it is appearance, like black people in the United States. As with the Nazis the playbook is often used in conjunction with other techniques to establish an oppressive dictatorship. Dictatorships are usually created with the support of a substantial portion of the population. Garnering support is easier in the face of an identified threat from within: communists, Jews, homosexuals, elitists... 

We know from past experience that there is a slippery slope. But not every government action that separates "us" from "them" leads down that slope. A counter example is the Americans with Disabilities Act, the ADA. It identifies a class, disabled people, that has historically been a group that is shunned and discriminated against. The ADA does exactly the opposite. It forces the rest of us, under force of law, to make accommodations for the disabled. Each of us must park farther from the door of the store, must make curb cuts when we put in sidewalks. When I built my coffee shop I had to install a section of counter that was low enough so that a person in a wheelchair could easily sign a credit card slip. In other words, for the protection of a particular class of people, my freedoms are restricted and I am forced to act in ways that are sometimes expensive and inconvenient. 

In fact, a defining characteristic of humans is our ability to band together and subsume our personal interests to the groups to which we belong. This is one of the characteristics that makes our species so powerful. It is also the double edged sword I have described. On the one hand it allows us to create cruel and dictatorial societies. On the other hand it allows us to band together and make the lives of everyone better.

We band together with different groups of different sizes. The most universal is the family, but we also create a societies with friends, work groups, and legal entities (city, county, state, nation...).

Because the subject of the facebook response is really the societal attempt to get everyone vaccinated for Covid, it is worth looking at vaccination in general. I think the most popular vaccination in the U.S. was for polio. Smallpox vaccination had shown people that vaccinations could be safe and effective. Polio was severe and widespread. Even today, there are people who do not have full use of their limbs because of polio. The polio vaccine was partially funded by voluntary public contributions. When the vaccine became available it was eagerly accepted and there was little protest.

When the Europeans came to the "new world" they brought disease, most notably smallpox, with them. Within a generation or two as much as 90% of the native population was dead from disease. This makes the Black Death in Europe look like a Sunday picnic.

Benjamin Franklin wrote: “In 1736, I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if the child died under it: my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.”

Franklin's son died in 1736, but he had been a supporter of smallpox vaccination since at least 1721. Why wasn't his son vaccinated? Franklin blamed himself, but there is a school of thought that it was his wife Deborah who resisted and Franklin resented her for it. It is known that he found excuses to be away from his wife for years at a time. If the speculation is true, it is a case where Franklin sacrificed his own desire to vaccinate to that of his family group (his wife), and it cost him his son.

There are groups that should generally be ignored regardless of their sincerity, their arguments, or the depths of their belief. An example is the "flat earthers". People who believe that the earth is flat. They are interesting psychologically and sociologically, but their beliefs are simply wrong. The current scientific theories of gravity are some of the best tested theories in existence. Over all space and time scales the theories have been confirmed. The structure of the earth and the solar system are well known and described. Our models are predictive and confirmed by those predictions. We can, for example, predict eclipses, the length of the days, the precession of the North Pole, the tides caused by the moon... In contrast, the flat earth theories are a mess. They don't explain much of anything and can be disproven by anyone who has a simple knowledge of geometry. Despite this, the beliefs are remarkably resistant to change. All objections are met with an answer, incorrect, but usually in a form that has a surface coherence, and apparently raise more doubts about the scientific explanation.

The flat earthers are a case where we (individuals, educational systems, the media, government...) do not have to discuss "both sides". There are not two sides. We have well established information and we have a few people spouting nonsense.

Gravity is relatively (pun intended) simple. Many of the things in our lives are much more complicated. We have created large systems to measure, analyze, theorize... In science the system includes peer review of results to enforce honesty and reduce sloppiness. It is not perfect but, on the whole, the system works and knowledge increases. 

In economics we require large scale data collection to feed our analysis and understanding. Over the past century the government has refined the collection of economic and demographic data and put firewalls in place to reduce political manipulation of the data and its analysis. Again, it doesn't always work, but in general the data we have is roughly correct.

Medicine is another case where large scale data is needed. Data collection is difficult, but we have made progress. The insurance system requires standard diagnosis and treatment codes. All deaths are classified, which is why we know how many people died from being tangled in bed sheets. Of course no one knows that you had a cold three years ago because you did the sensible thing and waited for it to go away without seeing a doctor.

In the case of vaccines, we keep records. Each suspected side effect is tracked. This includes reports from physicians and large scale studies of correlations between vaccine recipients and reported illness. The data are not perfect, but they are not bad. For Covid, hundreds of millions of doses have been administered. There is simply no doubt that the Covid vaccines are safe and side effects are incredibly rare.

For Covid as a medical condition, we have done a terrible job of keeping track. The best data we have are for hospitalizations and death. We also have the results from PCR tests. These come from a self selected sample, but act as a reasonable indicator of prevalence. 

Two things we know about Covid pretty certainly. First, in many people the disease is severe. Second, the vaccines used in the U.S. are safe and effective. The vaccines dramatically reduce the chance of severe illness and the rate of transmission. To dispute the severity of the illness or the effectiveness of the vaccines, you have to ignore the ICU at your local hospital and the testimony of the doctors and nurses who work there. This information is easy to get and widely disseminated. To deny it is ignorance at the level of the flat earthers. 

Smallpox and polio are diseases of humans, they have no animal reservoirs. That means if we eradicate the disease in humans, it goes extinct. Through world wide societal action, we have eradicated smallpox. It is simply gone. Some of this action was governmental and coercive. Children were not allowed in school unless they were vaccinated. Another way to say that is that unvaccinated children were identified as a group, singled out for special treatment, and refused access to education. This did not create a slippery slope leading to a dictatorship in the United States or anywhere else. In my view, it was a correct societal action that allowed a scourge of mankind to be eliminated.

Polio is nearly eradicated. It still exists in pockets around the globe. Those pockets exist because ignorant and militant ideologues in those places prevent vaccination. These repressive elements sometimes assassinate health care workers traveling from village to village trying to save children by vaccinating them.

An old saying is: Your right to extend your fist ends at my nose. In the case of disease it is sometimes hard to tell what your fist is and where my nose is. In 1907 a paper was published that traced a set of typhoid fever outbreaks occurring between 1900 and 1907 to a single person, later nicknamed Typhoid Mary. Mary was asymptomatic and never accepted that she was transmitting the illness. She was forcibly quarantined and her treatment by the state was appalling. Eventually she was released on condition that she take precautions to prevent spreading the disease and not work as a cook. She tried being a lower paid laundress but eventually returned to cooking. She again transmitted the disease and again was forcibly put into quarantine where she remained for over twenty years until her death. Conservatively, at least fifty three people were infected and at least three died because of Mary. There have been other asymptomatic carriers of typhoid fever, but none so famous or as appallingly treated as "Typhoid Mary". What should be done with someone who injures those around them and refuses to stop?

I have a grandson who is medically compromised. That is, he is more likely to get disease and, if he gets sick, is more likely to have severe symptoms. His life is easily put in danger. Because of Covid, this child has spent a third of his life basically confined to his home. His parents movements and actions are constrained because they do not wish to unwittingly infect him. Visitors to the home have to quarantine for a period of time and have a negative test before being allowed in. One of the reasons this has dragged on for so long is because there are a large number of people who have dug in their heels and refused vaccination. 

I am angry about this. I believe I am justified. Do I support restrictions on people who have not been vaccinated so the damage they inflict can be limited? You bet I do. If you want to go to a public place where you can infect other people, I want some assurance that you are not a danger to those people. Instead of my grandson, I want those who put him in danger to be restricted.

Pattern Language Used on Social Problems - Business Externalities

I  think it should be possible to address social problems using "Pattern Language" techniques. Here is a simple example that includes a serious proposal. I posted this to Facebook a couple years ago, but I might start using this framework here.

Problem:

Businesses externalize costs to save money and increase profits. That is, they force others to pay for their choices and actions. Examples of externalized costs include: government subsidized wages, pollution... These externalized costs must be born by someone, often society at large.

Solution:

Force businesses to pay externalized costs.

Initial Steps:

Choose a particular large externalized cost that is directly affecting a large number of people and force internalization.

The Carrot/Stick

The stick can be forced redistribution of profits. To protect new companies and marginal businesses, penalties should not accumulate indefinitely. Suppose the limit was one year without carryover. If the business owed $80,000 for externalities last year and this year it was $20,000, paying $20,000 this year would clear your externality debt. This requires safeguards to prevent gaming the system.

If a business is identified as having an unpaid externality debt the business would be restricted in how any profits are accumulated and distributed:

- No pay, entire package, for anyone in the company (e.g. the CEO) could more than 25 times the median (not mean) wage for the company. Any amount over 25x would be taxed at 100%. The number 25 is not arbitrary. Over time, investments can be counted on to return at least 4% per year after inflation. Suppose a CEO invested an amount 25 times the median wage for their business. They could withdraw the median wage from their investment every year, forever, without touching the principle.

- No investor returns until the externality is paid. This means no dividends, no stock buybacks, no acquisitions of other businesses, no investments unrelated to the current business. Profits would have to be distributed inside the company (buying new equipment, hiring new people, increasing worker pay...).

- No accumulation of cash more than some amount calculated from the debt. If you have tons of cash, you should pay your debt.

Business can continue forcing costs on others but they are limited in how they can distribute profits. This is not ideal but it is much better than the current situation.

Initial Externality Proposal:

Let workers keep what they have earned.

Wages are often subsidized by government. Government provides a safety net in the form of SNAP, medicaid, AFDC, WIC, TANF... Effectively, when businesses do not pay a living wage government steps in to make up the difference. That is, businesses externalize the cost of wages by having government tax everyone to make up the difference.

The profits of a company come from a number of sources (workers, capital investment...), but rank and file workers are a big source. If the wage at a company cannot support life, then the company is too poor to pay the CEO or investors large amounts.

Each company can receive an externality bill for their portion of safety net programs affecting their workers. For example, If a 10 hour a week worker receives $400/month in SNAP (food stamps), the company is responsible for roughly 1/4 of that amount because they work 1/4 time. That is an externality bill of around $100/month.

Attacking subsidized pay encourages higher wages and reduces the amount government has to spend on the social safety net.

On Being a Parent

 I was asked to write something about parenting. I don't know if I'm qualified, but I do have experience. I first became a parent a month after my twentieth birthday. I am now toward the end of my sixth decade. That means I have been a parent for more than twice as long as I have not been a parent. I have four children and a large number of grandchildren. This note reflects my aspirations. Sometimes I don't succeed.

I was young, but fortunate, as a first time parent. Both Sarah and I are readers. I also have a tendency to question whatever I am told and try to reason from first principles. Sarah had been working in a good day care center for some time and has a natural affinity for young children. So we read about child rearing. Not just current books, but older ones as well. It became apparent that child rearing is as faddish as all other aspects of culture. This was both troubling and freeing. Troubling because, in a deep sense, no one knows what they are doing. Freeing because reasonable human beings keep being reared despite the fashions. As a species we instinctually know what to do as long as we follow our better nature. We want to touch and hold our children. We want to see them laughing and happy. We want them to be strong, independent, and fearless. Most of us understand that if a child is unhappy, there is a reason for it. We may never find a cause, but there is one. That means an unhappy child needs and deserves love, support, and compassion even if their pain is caused by the trivial or even nothing we can discern.

Children grow to be adults, but they are not adults. They are unreasonable bundles of emotions, actions and reactions. They can sometimes be persuaded by argument, but they are not rational. They are exquisitely and effectively responsive to their environment. Children will mold themselves to get what they need from their environment. They also have all the normal human instincts and emotions: Empathy and cruelty, a sense of fairness and unfairness, love and hate, rewards and revenge. It is important to remember that they respond to the actual environment, not the stated environment. Parents may talk about love, fairness, and respect. If they display disappointment, favoritism, and criticism, the children will respond to the actual environment not the stated one.

Come to think of it, adults are much the same. The difference is that we have a greater mental capacity to examine the world and form rational plans. We also have a more developed capacity to act in accordance with what we think rather than what we feel. As an adult I may feel rage, but if that will not help the situation I will act calmly and unemotionally to make things better.

One very, very, important difference between adults and children is that children are easily distracted. When distracted, they often forget what happened before. My first child, September, was colicky as an infant. That just means she was fussy and often unhappy. That is when I learned that intense physical actions could erase her emotions. When she was fussy I would sometimes hold her high and let her fall, always in my hands, for a few feet. Her internal reaction was basically "what the hell just happened". Processing the experience often erased her previous unhappiness and she could be re-engaged with something happier. It also started me on a path of raw physicality. By the time she was nine months old I would take her and throw her high in the air and catch her on the way down. We both enjoyed it. On the now outlawed spinners in parks (maybe 15 feet across with metal tubes to hold on to) I would push sets of children just as fast as they could take. You had to watch how tight their grips were and whether anyone was turning green, but it was great fun.

For older children, the same lesson applies. When a child is behaving badly you can lecture them and punish them in various ways. However, they simply lack the mental capacity to reflect and change behaviour. A quick explanation is important so they understand how you view the world, but for most incidents after you have explained you can simply erase the situation. I find humor, games, and even the worst mock magic tricks effective. Recently I took an unhappy child who was effectively being punished for bad behavior with siblings and made things ok again by pretending to take a coin from behind their ear. I can't do such a trick, but I made it so apparent that I was disappointed with my repeated failures that it was funny to them. This erased the distress and they could go back to the family without causing additional trouble. The siblings share a short attention span, so the incident was forgotten and reintegration possible. If the punishment had been likely to be effective, I would have left the kid alone. But self reflection is not a strong point for children and I think a wiser course of action is to make the immediate situation better and get back to normal as quickly as possible. In this case, about two minutes.

Once on a family road trip we ran into a blizzard. This did not please my one year old(?) grandchild in his car seat who wanted us to stop and who wanted to be breast fed. Stopping seemed out of the question if we ever wanted to make it home. I drove for maybe six hours as the toddler screamed continuously. Everyone was as kind and patient as we could be with him. We talked and tried to explain, but he did not stop screaming. This made my driving, in a blizzard, on a highway with spun out cars littering the shoulder, "difficult". I must say though, I was impressed with both his stamina and force of will. For a while afterwords I called him The Dark Lord. He has turned into a fine young adult who has learned to control himself better. But I think he still has that underlying determination and force of will.

In that car, there were three generations of people of mixed ages. I like to believe we all modeled and reinforced important lessons: The focus and self control necessary to accomplish what needed to be done in spite of adversity. The ability to act calmly in an emotionally fraught situation. And most importantly, the compassion needed to deal with a child who was, quite reasonably, completely distraught about their situation.

Stories are important. It is how we, as humans, approach life. We tell ourselves stories of who we are, and who we are not. I tell myself the story that I am an honest, intelligent, capable person. I tell myself this, and believe it, despite the fact that I can recite a litany of my deceits, embarrassingly stupid actions, and incompetence. Having this litany is important in being honest to myself. It does not change my view that, on the whole, I am honest, intelligent, and capable. It is something I aspire to even if I don't always accomplish it.

As a parent we have the opportunity, through our actions, to form the inner story a child tells themselves. If they are constantly accused of deception and bad intent, they will form the inner story that they are deceitful and wicked and will behave accordingly. If they are praised for effort and encouraged in kindness, they will form the inner story that they are hard working and kind.

My father's mother, an irish catholic, raised nine boys. Much of it effectively as a single, poverty stricken, mother because her husband developed parkinson's disease and was totally disabled. She was revered by her children and by many of her peers. She said the way to create honest children was to always believe them, even when lies were apparent. That way they understood that the very air around them was filled with an expectation of honesty. It worked. Her children were sometimes SOBs, but they were almost invariably honest. And, as it turned out, invariably intellectually rigorous. They passed these traits to my generation.

I often say that when a child is just born, they rely on us for everything. By the time they are forty five, we hope they rely on us for almost nothing. The art of parenting is managing the transition between the two stages. One important aspect of the transition is agency. Agency is the notion that you can choose a course of action and see it through. As parents I think we should give every child as much agency as possible while still protecting them from irreparable harm. To show them that even adults were children and did things that were not great, I tell young kids stories about times I did embarrassing things. A favorite seems to be the time, when I was about four, I got up from my nap without my mother knowing and walked to the beach (a few blocks away) NAKED. I was brought home in a police car.

In my mind, the statement that I have four children is not quite accurate. For me, any child in my presence is my child. In the presence of a child, I am not important. The child is the important one and what I am thinking and feeling takes a back seat to what they are thinking and feeling. I think this is reasonable because, given the normal course of events, they will be here after I am dead and gone. They will be able to affect the world long after I cannot, and they are the repository of any small legacy of humanity that I hope to leave behind.

Life is often difficult, unfair, and disappointing for each of us. I firmly believe that if anything is going to allow us to improve our lives, it is compassion. For me, that means putting myself aside and trying to understand others. Once we understand, forgiveness is often possible. This includes compassion for ourselves. That does not mean that we condone actions, just that understanding is necessary for correction, change, and redemption.

Compassion is especially important around children. It not only makes their lives better and happier, it also makes for an emotionally supportive environment. That environment allows them to grow into better people.

My basic advice to other parents is this. Compassion begins with putting aside your needs, your emotions, your desire for a different world. As the Buddhists say, "Comparisons are odious". Look at your current children, your current situation. Understand it, and make it better. Do this with as little regard for yourself as you can manage. You have a lot to juggle and a lot of responsibilities. Sometimes when the toddler is screaming, you just have to tend to business and drive the car. Remember, you are the least important person in the room.

Shower Thoughts

You may start to think I'm a little obsessed with showers, but in fact I'm a little obsessed with everything.

Showers are a small protected space in the day. The requirements are simple as is the activity. You walk into the shower and a few minutes later you walk out warm, wet, happy, and cleaner. The act of washing is simple and repetitive. It requires very little thought, which clears the way for everything else. Showers put the lie to any notion that I am a single unified self. There are multitudes inside me.

Take this morning. I have been playing a lot of music and it is common for me to sing in the bathroom and shower. This morning I was singing "Summertime", the same verse over and over, but a jazzy scat version with lots of embellishment and some pushing of the harmony. As with much bathroom singing I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it and part of my mind started wandering to think about what it would be like to give a regular short weekly concert, maybe a half hour or so, at a very nice concert venue at Colorado State University. I would love to do this, but the University is quite closed off. I've pursued ways to work with the music school, but there are roadblocks and nothing has panned out. It would be really nice to bring in other musicians I have been playing with for this little non-existent concert. Oooh, for a long time I have thought it would be nice to find a reasonably accomplished tabla player to improvise with -- and flute/tabla music starts running through my head in along with "Summertime".

All this is going through my head as I am singing, taking off my robe, adjusting water temperature, and climbing in to the shower. After a minute enjoying the warm water, I stop singing. For the rest of the shower, and even now, "Summertime" is still floating through my head. It is a little musical background to everything else I am thinking and doing, but my mind moves over to thinking about this multi-processing going on and how I find it an interesting story, maybe I should write it up. Meanwhile I'm rinsing my little mesh body scrubber, washing my hair and starting to lather up. The lack of musical venues for me is running through my head as I re-imagine various schemes that I may or may not work on to secure spots and I'm idly thinking of pieces for these little short concerts. This is at the same time, I'm observing this mix of events and "Summertime" is still there, with variations, running through my head.

Is it any wonder that sometimes after having been in the shower for five minutes, I honestly cannot remember whether I have washed my hair or not?