Deep Thoughts

Vectors of Societal Destruction – and the Growing Pushback Against Them

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In Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, one of the characters explains a  ‘European-style gangster hit’,  which he says consists of three shots: head, heart, and stomach.  Yes, that should definitely ensure the target’s demise.

It struck me that this comprehensive approach to high-certainty murder provides a pretty good analogy for some of the malign happenings in America and in many other Western nations, and I wrote a post on that theme last year.  In my analogy, ‘stomach’ represents the basic, essential physical infrastructure of society–energy and food supply, in particular.  ‘Head’ represents the society’s aggregate thought processes: how decisions are made, how truth is distinguished from falsehood.  And ‘heart’ represents the society’s spirit: how people feel about their fellow citizens, their families, friends, and associates, and their overall society.

Over recent years, all of these things are under assault…and, given that 2024 is an election year, I think it’s fair to note that the ideology of the Democratic Party is a major factor in driving all of these malign trends.

Stomach: The suicidal energy policies of Germany could serve as a poster child here, but similar trends are in place in other countries, although mostly not so far along.  (The US state of California seems to want to be next on the list of bad examples.)  The destructive farming policies of Sri Lanka, implemented with the enthusiastic cheerleading of Western experts, now have echoes in Canada and in the Netherlands. And energy and agriculture are of course closely coupled…for the production of fertilizer, for the operation of farm equipment, and for the transportation of supplies to the farms and the transportation of agricultural products to process and distribution centers and ultimately to consumers.

Nearly all physical goods and products come ultimately from farms or from mines. At least in the US and in much of Europe, regulations and litigation have made it very difficult to open new mines and even to keep existing ones in operation. Yet there are very extensive materials requirements for the wind, solar, and battery systems required for the envisaged ‘energy transition’…and the answer, if one asks where these materials should come from, seems to be only ‘not from here.’

Pressuring people and entire economies for maximum use of wind and solar…while at the same time amping up the difficulties and disrespect facing the people and companies involved in the extraction and processing of the necessary materials…is a sure recipe for shortages and Greenflation.

Speaking of disrespect, the American businessman and politician Michael Bloomberg, has made some rather remarkable assertions about both farming and manufacturing.  With regard to farming, he said:

“I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer,” Bloomberg told the audience at the Distinguished Speakers Series at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School.  “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.”

…and regarding manufacturing:

“You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs.”

All of which elides the vast array of knowledge and skills required in order to do either farming or manufacturing successfully. I doubt that Bloomberg, for all his knowledge of information technology and finance, has much comprehension of any of these areas.  What he projects here is a feeling of contempt for people who are involved in the physical world rather than his own symbolic world of information technology and media.

Journalists and politicians, in particular, seem to have little grasp of those essential technologies, which I have metaphorically classified under ‘stomach’, even at the most fundamental levels.  And too many political leaders think…even while preaching about their respect for Science, that they can ignore people with actual, practical experience with energy and the other technologies which they wish to control.  For example:

Trudeau’s green hydrogen announcement, as big an international energy policy statement as there has been in memory, was held far from Canada’s energy heartland, and included no one from the energy sector that is currently shouldering the load.

Not only were they not invited, but Trudeau went out of his way to make an absurd statement about the lack of an economic case for LNG that was akin to a drama teacher going on stage at the Detroit Auto Show and telling the audience to get rid of all their wrenches because he didn’t think they were needed anymore.

Head:  The cognitive methods that have made Western societies thrive are under assault. Such benign things as asking students to get the right answer and to show their work are denounced as racism.   Debate and discussion have become difficult as disagreement is often perceived as a threat.  In law, the adversary system itself is under attack as lawyers are pressured not to represent unpopular clients…something that has long been the case in totalitarian nations and in areas dominated by mobs and by lynch law.

A vital part of the toolkit that has driven progress–social progress as well as technological progress–has been the open discussion enabled by the spirit of free speech.  This is under severe attack, not least on university campuses.   A recent Quillette article provides multiple data points on campus hostility to allowing speakers whose view might offend somebody. Link   A 2017 study, based on a sampling of all US registered voters, shows that 30% of Americans favor banning speakers “if the guest’s words are considered to be hateful or offensive by some.”   Among Democrats–and professors and administrators are much more likely to be Democrats than to be Republicans–the corresponding number is 40%. And for Democrat women–a demographic which is in the ascendency in key roles on campus–the opposition to free speech, as measured by the above question, is 47%.   Link  Not a hopeful sign for the future of campus free speech or for the direction that American society will evolve as students who have come of age in its universities move out into the wider world.

In science, ideas and conclusions which conflict with established views and prestigious people are increasingly likely to be condemned and suppressed as ‘misinformation.’  This paper Link argues persuasively that identity politics and censorship go hand in hand.  Major scientific publications are now evaluating submitted papers based on (what someone thinks are) the moral implications of the proposed conclusions, not just on the truth or falsity of those conclusions–see Alex Tabarrok’s recent post as well as this Quillette article.

There are of course precedents for this kind of thing.  As the blogger Neo notes, “The Soviets actively squelched science that contradicted certain political messages they wished to get across.”   The agricultural catastrophe that was brought about by the nonsensical but politically-correct and politically-enforced theories of Lysenko is well-documented history, but the damage is much broader than that.  This article mentions that the Soviets at one point banned resonance theory, in chemistry, as “bourgeois pseudoscience.”  The field of cybernetics–feedback systems and automatic control–was at one point denounced as “a misanthropic pseudo-theory”, among other things.  (It is interesting to note that “few of these critics had any access to primary sources on cybernetics”…the denunciations were largely based on other Soviet anti-cybernetics sources.)

In Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon, protagonist Rubashov is an Old Bolshevik who has been arrested by the Stalinist regime. The book represents his musings while awaiting trial and likely execution.

A short time ago, our leading agriculturalist, B., was shot with thirty of his collaborators because he maintained the opinion that nitrate artificial manure was superior to potash.  No. 1 is all for potash; therefore B. and the thirty had to be liquidated as saboteurs.  In a nationally centralized agriculture, the alternative of nitrate or potash is of enormous importance: it can decide the issue of the next war.  If No. 1 was in the right, history will absolve him.  If he was wrong…

Note that phrase in a nationally centralized agriculture.  When things are centralized, decisions become overwhelmingly important. There will be strong pressure against allowing dissidents to “interfere with” what has been determined to be the One Best Way.

The assault on what I have called “cognitive methods that have made Westerns societies thrive” has not originated only from the universities, but they have been the most influential source of this destructive challenge. Which is ironic, given that the great growth of educational institutions was driven by and premised on the Enlightenment ideals that all too many of these institutions seem focused on negating.

There was once a rather sinister toy: it consisted of a box with a switch on the side. When you turned the switch to on, the box would open, and a hand would come out, and the thing would turn itself off.  The behavior of much of western academia seems modeled after the behavior of that box.  Unfortunately, it’s not just themselves that these institutions may succeed in turning off.

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Science, Expertise, Trust…and Peanuts

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Yann LeCun, who is  Chief AI Scientist at Meta and an ACM Turing Award Laureate, is obviously a very smart and accomplished guy.  At X, he has been arguing for the trustworthiness of science and scientists and asserting that it makes sense for scientists to lean Left…because “they care about facts.”  (here, for example)  I don’t think many of us would disagree with the value of the scientific method and the importance of objective information; I do feel, however, that Yann’s remarks fail to address the importance of funder pressure, peer pressure, and Groupthink on scientific priorities, scientific conclusions, and especially on what gets asserted as The Science by media and politicians.

There has also been some discussion of this cartoon and various experiences that various people have had with doctors who wouldn’t listen.

Very relevantly, there is an article in today’s WSJ about peanut allergy.  The writer, Dr Marty Makary, says that concern about these allergies that began to rise in the 1990s…but that in fact, peanut allergies at that time were rare and mostly mild.  But starting in the year 2000, the prevalence began to surge:

What had changed wasn’t peanuts but the advice doctors gave to parents about them. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) wanted to respond to public concern by telling parents what they should do to protect their kids from peanut allergies. There was just one problem: Doctors didn’t actually know what precautions, if any, parents should take. Rather than admit that, in the year 2000 the AAP issued a recommendation for children 0 to 3 years old and pregnant and lactating mothers to avoid all peanuts.

The AAP committee was following in the footsteps of the U.K.’s health department, which two years earlier had recommended total peanut abstinence. That recommendation was technically only for children at high risk of developing an allergy, but the AAP authors acknowledged that “the ability to determine which infants are high-risk is imperfect.” Using the strictest interpretation, a child could qualify as high-risk if any family member had any allergy or asthma.

Dr Makary notes that the peanut allergy epidemic is largely a US and UK phenomenon…his African students report no such allergies in Africa, and Makary says that there is also no peanut problem in his own origin country of Egypt.  And, interestingly, Jewish children in Israel have one-tenth the rate of peanut allergies compared with Jewish children in the UK, suggesting that genetic predisposition is not responsible for the country-to-country difference.

Many Israeli children are fed a peanut-based food called Bamba, and Dr Gideon Lack, a pediatric allergist and immunologist in London, suggested that early consumption of peanuts leads to a low prevalence of the allergy at older ages. He coauthored a paper making this point in 2008, but (this) publication was not enough to uproot groupthink. Avoiding peanuts had been the correct answer on medical school tests and board exams, which were written and administered by the American Board of Pediatrics. For nearly a decade after AAP’s peanut avoidance recommendation, neither the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) nor other institutions would fund a robust study to evaluate whether the policy was helping or hurting children.

From 2005 to 2014, the number of children going to the emergency department because of peanut allergies tripled in the U.S. By 2019, a report estimated that 1 in every 18 American children had a peanut allergy. Schools continued to ban peanuts, and regulators met to purge peanuts from childhood snacks as EpiPen sales soared.

and

In a second clinical trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015, Lack compared one group of infants who were exposed to peanut butter at 4-11 months of age to another group that had no peanut exposure. He found that early exposure resulted in an 86% reduction in peanut allergies by the time the child reached age 5 compared with children who followed the AAP recommendation. 

From 2005 to 2014, the number of children going to the emergency department because of peanut allergies tripled in the U.S. By 2019, a report estimated that 1 in every 18 American children had a peanut allergy. Schools continued to ban peanuts, and regulators met to purge peanuts from childhood snacks as EpiPen sales soared.

Makary is basically asserting that peanut allergy is largely an iatrogenic disease.  One would think that if this was the case, the original recommendations on draconian peanut-avoidance might need to be modified.  But after talking with an allergist friend, Dr Makary said:

The AAP’s absolutism in 2000 had made the recommendation hard to walk back.

I am sure that there are many, many other examples like this, some of them with a lot worse consequences than the Peanut Panic.  It is actually dangerous to treat any individual or institution as beyond challenge.  In aviation, the reluctance to challenge authority (as in the case of a Captain and a First Officer) was identified as a significant safety problem quite a few years ago, and is explicitly addressed in the training of flight crews.  The same principle should apply more broadly.

The Platonic Form of what Science should be, is subject, when translated into operational form, to all the factors that affect other human activities and institutions: incentives, groupthink, political pressure, ambition, cliquishness, etc.

See also my related post Starvation and Centralization.

Worth Pondering

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In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet–the scientific poet–of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretensions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard an inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection…the dream of Order begets tyranny, the dream of Beauty, monsters and violence.

–Aldous Huxley

Previous Worth Pondering post.

Sleeping With The Enemy – Updated

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Hydie sipped at her glass. Here was another man living in his own portable glass cage. Most people she knew did. Each one inside a kind of invisible telephone box. They did not talk to you directly but through a wire. Their voices came through distorted and mostly they talked to the wrong number, even when they lay in bed with you. And yet her craving to smash the glass between the cages had come back again. If cafes were the home of those who had lost their country, bed was the sanctuary of those who had lost their faith.

The United States today is in a crisis of civilizational self-confidence, as are Western societies generally. That crisis is the real subject of Arthur Koestler’s 1950 novel Age of Longing,  Koestler being the author of the much-better-known Darkness at Noon.

Age of Longing  is set in a Europe which is facing the very real possibility–indeed the likelihood–of a Soviet invasion, but does not want to face that reality.  Hydie Anderson, living in Paris with her father (an American military attache) was a devout Catholic during her teens, but has lost her faith. She was briefly married, and has had several relationships with men, but in none of them has she found either physical or emotional satisfaction…she describes her life with a phrase from T S Eliot: “frigid purgatorial fires,” and she longs for a sense of connection.

Through her friend Julien DeLattre, Hydie is introduced to a number of Paris intellectuals and East European emigres. Members of the former group are mostly in denial about the danger of a Soviet attack…many of them have indeed convinced themselves that Communist rule wouldn’t be all that bad. For example, there’s Professor Pontieux (modeled on Sartre)…”He did not believe that the Commonwealth of Freedomloving People had solved all its problems and become an earthly paradise. But it was equally undeniable that it was an expression of History’s groping progress towards a new form of society, when it followed that those who opposed this progress were siding with the forces of reaction and preparing the way for conflict and war–the worst crime against Humanity.”  Vardi, another intellectual, says that if he had to choose between the (American) juke box on one hand, and Pravda on another, he isn’t sure which he would pick.

Madame Pontieux, modeled on Simone de Bouvoir (with whom Koestler had a brief affair) is less ambiguous about her choice among the alternatives. “You cannot enter a cafe or a restaurant without finding it full of Americans who behave as if the place belonged to them,” she complains to an American official. When the Russian emigre Leontiev suggests that France would not survive without American military support, pointing out that “nature abhors a vacuum,” she turns on him:

“I am surprised at your moderation, Citizen Leontiev,” Madame Pontieux said sarcastically. “I thought you would tell us that without this young man’s protection the Commonwealth army would at once march to the Atlantic shore.”

“It would,” said Leontiev. “I believed that everyone knew that.”

“I refuse to believe it,” responds Madame Pontieux. “But if choose one must I would a hundred times rather dance to the music of a Balalaika than a juke box.”

(The French intellectuals Koestler knew must have really hated juke boxes!)

Julien is romantically interested in Hydie, but she is not attracted to him, despite the fact that he seems to have much to recommend him–a hero of the French Resistance, wounded in action, and a successful poet. On one occasion, she tells him that she could never sleep with him because they are too similar–“it would be like incest”..on another occasion, though, she tells him that “what I most dislike about you is your attitude of arrogant broken-heartedness.” Parallel to Hydie’s loss of religious faith is Julien’s loss of his secular faith in the creation of a new society. He does not now believe in utopia, or any approximation to same, but he does believe in the need to face reality, however unpleasant it may be.  Hydie argues that the Leftists of their acquaintance may be silly, but at least they believe in something:

“Perhaps they believe in a mirage–but isn’t it better to believe in a mirage than to believe in nothing?”

Julien looked at her coldly, almost with contempt:

“Definitely not. Mirages lead people astray. That’s why there are so many skeletons in the desert. Read more history. Its caravan-routes are strewn with the skeletons of people who were thirsting for faith–and their faith made them drink salt water and eat the sand, believing it was the Lord’s Supper.”

At a diplomatic affair, Hydie meets Fedya, a committed Communist who works for the Soviet Embassy. She is powerfully attracted to him: things get physical very quickly and, from Hydie’s point of view, very satisfactorily. (Fedya is one of Koestler’s best-developed characters. His boyhood in Baku is vividly sketched, and Koestler–himself a former Communist–does a good job in showing how a political faith can become core to an individual’s whole personality.)

The affair blows up when Fedya humiliates Hydie sexually in a way that could only have occurred to a Dialectical Materialist–and, indeed, humiliation was not Fedya’s intent, he was “only” attempting the demonstrate to her the truth of Pavlovian conditioning as an explanation for human behavior. Hurt and furious, she pours out her heart to Julien…who now feels free to tell her the truth about Fedya, a truth he felt unable to divulge while Fedya was Hydie’s lover.

Fedya’s real job, underneath his diplomatic cover, is to collect lists of names–the names of the key people to be killed or imprisoned immediately after the Soviet invasion. Hydie is, of course, horrified, and is particularly appalled that so many people already knew about Fedya’s activities–and did nothing to stop them–while she was blissfully unaware.

Julien tells her, as does her father the Colonel, that nothing can be done about Fedya because of diplomatic immunity and because the French government does not want to create an international incident by deporting him. Refusing to believe this, Hydie arranges a meeting with a senior French security official. The improbably-named Jules Commanche (who, like Julien, is a hero of the French Resistance) also tells Hydie that nothing can be done, and that if she attempts to make an issue of it, the Soviets and their fellow-travelers will simply paint her as nothing more than a hysterical jilted lover.  Hydie remains unwilling to accept the conclusion that Fedya must be left alone to continue his activities:

“How can you, a Frenchman, say that it is not a crime when a man walks around marking down your compatriots with a pencil–like a man branding cattle for the slaughter-house? Don’t you see–don’t you see what is waiting for you?”

Commanche, who had half risen, let himself slump back into the chair. He no longer tried to conceal his exasperation.

“Are you really so naive, Mademoiselle, as to imagine that we know less about these things than you do?  Do you think that we were unaware of Monsieur Nikitin’s activities, or of your affair with him, if it comes to that? And as for your somewhat patronizing remark about what is ‘waiting for us’–myself, my family, my friends, in short, the French people–allow me to refuse to discuss it, in order to avoid embarrassing you.”

“Me? I don’t understand?…”

“Well, we both know what is waiting for you.  A comfortable airliner, when things get hot–and some nostalgic regrets for the sunny cafes on the Champs-Elysees…”

For his own part, Commanche plans a heroic but militarily-futile death in resisting the coming Soviet invasion: he does not wish to survive what he sees as the inevitable destruction of European civilization. After sharing his own sense of hopelessness with Hydie, he asks her for a date, which she rejects.

In an anguish of anger and despair, Hydie buys a gun and goes to Fedya’s apartment. After asking him for a drink, she get out the weapon and tells him why he must die.

He summoned all his patience and self-discipline for a last attempt to bring her back to reason. He forced himself to make his voice patient and gentle; and, after the first few words, its sound made him indeed regain his calm–and even feel a kindly pity for the unhappy fat-legged girl.

“Listen, please,” he said. “We have talked about these matters often before. You don’t like that we make scientific studies of human nature like Professor Pavlov. You don’t like revolutionary vigilance and lists on the social reliability of people, and discipline and re-education camps. You think I am brutal and ridiculous and uncultured. Then why did you like making love with me? I will tell you why and you will understand…”

“I am not a tall and handsome man…There are no tall and handsome men who come from the Black Town in Baku, because there were few vitamins in the food around the oilfields. So it was not for this that you liked to make love with me…It was because I believe in the future and am not afraid of it, and because to know what he lives for makes a man strong…Of course many ugly things are happening in my country. Do you think I do not know about them?…And what difference will it make in a hundred years that there is a little ugliness now? It always existed. In a hundred years there will be no ugliness–only a classless world state of free people. There will be no more wars and no more children born in Black Towns with big bellies and flies crawling in their eyes. And also no more children of the bourgeoisie with crippled characters because they grew up in a decadent society…I am not handsome, but you have felt attracted to me because you know that we will win and that we are only at the beginning–and that you will lose because you are at the end…That is why I was not afraid of your little revolver, because you can’t have the courage to shoot me. To kill, one must believe in something.”

Nevertheless, Hydie pulls the trigger…

One one level, this book is sort of a romance novel, with the theme “chicks like self-confident guys.” This is no doubt true, but this point wasn’t Koestler’s main reason for writing Age of Longing. Koestler’s deeper theme is that the decline in religious belief in the West (and Koestler himself was certainly no traditional religious believer) has created a hunger for faith which will likely be filled by those who carry their convictions with great certainty. As Jules Commanche explains to Hydie:

“You cannot cure aberrations of the political libido by arguments…Now the source of all political libido is faith, and its object is the New Jerusalem, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Lost Paradise, Utopia, what have you. Therefore each time a god dies there is trouble in History. People feel that they have been cheated by his promises, left with a dud check in their pocket. The last time a god died was on July 14, 1789, the day when the Bastille was stormed. On that day the Holy Trinity was replaced by the three-word slogan which you find written over our town halls and post offices. Europe has not yet recovered from that operation, and all our troubles today are secondary complications. The People–and when I use that word, Mademoiselle, I always refer to people who have no bank accounts–the people have been deprived of their only asset: the knowledge, or the illusion, whichever you like, of having an immortal soul. Their faith is dead, their kingdom is dead, only the longing remains. And this longing, Mademoiselle, can express itself in beautiful or murderous forms, just like the frustrated sex instinct…Only the longing remains–a dumb, inarticulate longing of the instinct, without knowledge of its source and object. So the people, the masses, mill around with that irksome feeling of having an uncashed check in their pockets and whoever tells them ‘Oyez, oyez, the Kingdom is just round the corner, in the second street to the left,’ can do with them what he likes.”

A few thoughts on Commanche’s speech and its applicability to our times…

First, I think I disagree with Commanche/Koestler that loss of belief in personal immortality is of the essence here. Indeed, Fedya is an atheist, but his faith is strong. What matters more (from a societal standpoint) is the belief in the society’s moral authority, in its future, in its system of symbols. And it is specifically these things that have been systematically undermined by so many forces in our society and especially in academia. (When people with PhDs are willing to accept the idea that gravity is a “social construct”–see The Sokal Hoax–is it any wonder that many ordinary people feel disoriented?)

Second, I think that while our present problem does involve people chasing new gods and promulgators of new faiths…see Tara Isabella Burton’s book Strange Rites for a description of some of them…our more serious problem involves those who are no longer seeking and have abandoned themselves to cynicism. I find Hydie, as drawn by Koestler, to be a fairly appealing person, despite her naivete and self-centeredness. I suspect that a present-day Hydie would be much less likeable.

I’m reminded of some lines from Kipling, in which he describes the fall of a soul into Hell:

The Spirit gripped him by the hair, and sun by sun they fell
Till they came to the belt of Naughty Stars that rim the mouth of Hell:
The first are red with pride and wrath, the next are white with pain
But the third are black with clinkered sin that cannot burn again

There are probably more people now at the clinkered sin that cannot burn again stage than there were when Koestler wrote.

Julien, in explaining to Hydie why he cannot write anymore, says:

Fallen angels don’t write poems. There is lyric poetry, and sacred poetry, and a poetry of love and a poetry of rebelling; the poets of apostasy do not exist.

The book ends on a note of almost unredeemed darkness:

Her thoughts travelled back to Sister Boutillot standing in the alley which led to the pond…Oh, if she could only go back to the infinite comfort of father confessors and mother superiors, of a well-ordered hierarchy which promised punishment and reward, and furnished the world with justice and meaning. If only one could go back! But she was under the curse of reason, which rejected whatever might quench her thirst without abolishing the gnawing of the urge; which rejected the answer without abolishing the question. For the place of God had become vacant and there was a draught blowing through the world as in an empty flat before the new tenants have arrived.

70 years later, I think we now begin to see who the New Tenants might be, and it is not comforting knowledge.

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Freedom, the Village, and Social Media (updated)

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To what extent are ‘cancellation’ campaigns against people expressing unpopular opinions (unpopular, at least, in the view of some substantial number of people)–now a regular and unpleasant feature of social media sites–really a new phenomenon, rather than being just a modern incarnation of a kind of behavior which has long existed?

Hans Fallada’s novel  Every Man Dies Alone, is centered on a couple who become anti-Nazi activists after their son Ottochen is killed in the war;  it was inspired by, and is loosely based on, the true story of a real-life couple  who distributed anti-Nazi postcards and were executed for it.  I thought the book was excellent.  The present  present post, though, is not a book review, but rather a development of some thoughts inspired by a particular passage in the story.

Trudel, who was Ottochen’s fiancee, is a sweet and intelligent girl who is strongly anti-Nazi..and unlike Ottochen’s parents, she became an activist prior to being struck by personal tragedy: she is a member of a resistance cell at the factory where she works.  But she finds that she cannot stand the unending psychological strain of underground work, made even worse by the rigid and doctrinaire man (apparently a Communist) who is leader of the cell and she drops out. Another member of the cell, who has long been in love with her, also finds that he is not built for such work, and drops out also.

After they marry and Trudel becomes pregnant, they decide to leave the politically hysterical environment of Berlin for a small town where, they believe, life will be freer and calmer.

Like many city dwellers, they’d had the mistaken belief that spying was only really bad in Berlin and that decency still prevailed in small towns. And like many city dwellers, they had made the painful discovery that recrimination, eavesdropping, and informing were ten times worse in small towns than in the big city. In a small town, everyone was fully exposed, you couldn’t ever disappear in the crowd. Personal circumstances were quickly ascertained, conversations with neighbors were practically unavoidable, and the way  such conversations could be twisted was something they had already experienced in their own lives, to their chagrin.

Reading the above passage, I was struck by the thought that if we are now living in an ‘electronic village,’ even a ‘global village’, as Marshall McLuhan put it several decades, ¦then perhaps that also means we are facing some of the unpleasant characteristics that, as Fallada notes, can be a part of village life. And these characteristics aren’t something that appears only in eras of insane totalitarianism such as existed in Germany during the Nazi era. Peter Drucker, in Managing in the Next Society, wrote about the tension between liberty and community:

Rural society has been romanticized for millennia, especially in the West, where rural communities have usually been portrayed as idylic. However, the community in rural society is actually both compulsory and coercive.  And that explains why, for millennia, the dream of rural people was to escape into the city.  ‘Stadluft macht frei ‘ (city air frees) says an old German proverb dating back to the eleventh or twelfth century.

Consider: Going way back to 2013,  an assistant manager at a Wal-Mart store lost his job because of a post he put up on his Facebook page, in which he made some negative and slightly obscene comments about Muslim women wearing niquabs. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) complained, and the man was fired. (Having demonstrated their power, CAIR then kindly asked that he be rehired  (I don’t know whether he ever was.)

If, in the pre-social-media era, a Wal-Mart manager living in a large city had made negative comments about some group to friends in person, the odds that it would have resulted in his firing would have been pretty low. On the other hand, if a store manager living in a village were to repeatedly express opinions hostile to the deeply-held beliefs of the majority of the villageers–say, if a rural store manager in 1955 became well-known as hostile to religion,  it might well have had an adverse effect on his employment. The electronic village has to some extent re-created the social pressures of the traditional village.

Of course, the village culture doesn’t always reinforce and serve the values of the politically dominant . During WWII, for example, the people of  Chambon-sur-Lignon, a town in the France’s  Massif Central Range, saved more than 5000 Jews from the Holocaust. The village community can act as a bulwark for civil society against the over-reaching power of distant tyrants, and in some cases, as with Chambon-sur-Lignon, “the community culture will be of a nature that can accept, respect, and help  people whose beliefs from their own.

Certainly, the ability of the Internet to facilitate the distribution of information and opinion, beyond the control of the media gatekeepers, has been and is of tremendous value in preserving liberty. Without it, we as a society would be in even more trouble than we currently are. But the erosion of privacy, and the resultant fear of expressing oneself or acting in ‘unapproved’   ways that might harm your Permanent Record (to use the phrases with which teachers and school administrators used to threaten students) are factors whose influence in undeniable.

The widespread distribution and sharing of information enabled by technology becomes particularly dangerous when the national government is in the hands of people who lack respect for individual liberties and when the administrative discretion granted to individual bureaucrats is high. Can anyone doubt the high likelihood that information from Electronic Medical Records which were pushed as part of Obamacare will at some point be used to destroy political opponents of whatever Administration is in power at the time? (If, indeed, these records have not already been so used.)  Can anyone doubt that, with the ideology of  ‘progressivism’  becoming increasingly intolerant, ever-larger numbers of people have been and will continue to be denied jobs, promotions, college admissions, and tenure based on opinions that they have expressed in a Facebook or Twitter post or a blog post at some point in their lives? (and, quite likely, the other way around as the political winds shift and the ‘progressives’ themselves are under attack)  and that expressions of opinion will unless the climate changes markedly,  tend to become much more guarded, just as a village merchant might be reluctant to say anything to offend the small group of people on whose goodwill he is permanently dependent for his livelihood?

Special musical bonus

I (still) haven’t read it, but Roger McNamee’s book Zucked is subtitled Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.  The author is a well-known VC and was himself an early investor in FB.  (Although some have asserted that on-line cancellation campaigns have been largely a Twitter phenomenon, the early phases of this phenomenon predated Twitter popularity and used Facebook and other early social media as vehicles.  This all accelerated considerably with Twitter under its previous ownership; I’m hopeful that it may be damped down somewhat under Musk leadership, especially with the introduction of the Community Notes feature.

As an overall conclusion, I think that electronic cancellation in the global village is indeed the modern manifestation of behavior patterns that have long existed–but enabled by technology to operate both more rapidly and with much wider geographical scope.

Your thoughts?