The Times They Are a-Changing (And The More They Change, the More They Stay the Same)

Following on yesterday's post, quoting the same American-Korean blogger's post:

When I landed at Incheon International I breathed a sigh of relief at the familiarity around me. I left a place that I’ve always thought of as home, a place where traditions crumble and reform in a continual act of self-creation. I’m not sure now whether it’s home or not, but I wonder whether in the end that’s what it means to be a San Franciscan. Allowing the walls of certainty to come crashing down so that you can then rebuild them, piece by piece.

Again, there's probably some rhetorical exaggeration going on here, and I probably notice more change in Korea because I don't live here but simply visit every year or so.  But Korea is changing rapidly: technology, certainly, but also the economy and the politics.  This would have been visible to the blogger even in 2009, but I think it's accelerated since then.  The downfall of President Park Geun-hye under massive popular pressure, but also US pressure even before the accession of Donald Trump, has forced changes in Korean life that are going to continue making traditions crumble.  As a result, many older Koreans are responding just as many older Americans are, and in similar ways.

I observed some of a pro-Trump demonstration in downtown Seoul on Saturday.  It was much smaller than the vast candlelight vigils that helped bring down President Park, and almost all (around 99 percent, I'd guess) of the participants were over 50.  They waved Korean flags with American ones, begged Trump to visit Park Geun-hye (unlikely, since she's imprisoned and awaiting trial), and to restore her to office.  Part of this was nostalgia for her dictator father Park Chung-hee, which accounts for her popularity among elderly Koreans.  (But elderly Koreans also helped bring her down.)

South Korea has been changing, technologically and culturally, ever since the Japanese occupation -- actually since the introduction of Christianity in the 1800s -- and the change has accelerated over the past couple of decades.  The civil war of 1950-1953 shouldn't be overlooked either: it uprooted people on both sides of the 38th parallel, and led to occupation by US troops, who required R&R support: bars, prostitution.  (This morning I saw a complaint in comments on another blog, about how unwelcome uniformed soldiers are in European public accomodations.  I don't want to stereotype, but there's a reason for this: soldiers are trained in violence, they're young and rambunctious, and they feel entitled to let off steam when they're off-base.  US soldiers in Korea, as elsewhere, have a long unsavory record of violence against local civilians, often exacerbated by white racism against black soldiers and the Korean women who served them.  Many in the military also despise the people they supposedly serve.)  Park Chung-hee's forced-march industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s drew many younger people from the countryside to the cities to work in the factories and offices (a normal process in capitalism) -- and now they're old people.  It's something else Seoul and San Francisco have in common: many Seoulites were not born here, but moved here for school, work, or escape from the countryside.  Traditions have been 'crumbling' in Korea under the hammer blows of 'modernity' in the same way they have elsewhere.

But I have to remember that the old people who were at the pro-Park/Trump demonstration are not really traditionalists: they're the generation that benefited, however ambiguously, from modernization.  They got electricity, trains, buses, television (even remote old rural houses have satellite dishes perched on them), refrigerators, washing machines, sanitation, a higher standard of living generally -- until the late 1980s, anyway, when growth began to slow and the Korean conglomerates, or chaebol, decided that the Korean dream was no longer viable, for most Koreans anyway.  They remind me of my parents and their post-Depression and post-WWII experience of change, except that they are my age, not my parents'.  Then the US and its instruments forced financialization on the Korean and other Asian economies, and the Korean Miracle staggered.  Even if it didn't quite fail, it still hasn't recovered.

Some changes have been positive: the shortening of the work week, more opportunities for women, and the like.  Young women, like their counterparts around the world, are less willing to marry than their mothers and grandmothers were, partly for economic reasons but also for "cultural" ones: they're not interested in being subordinate anymore, to husbands or to mothers-in-law.  In this respect they're like many Trump voters, right down to their soft spot for fascism and war.

I know the Korea Dispatch blogger must have been aware of much of this, if I judge by his recommended readings.  And things have changed further since he wrote that last post in 2009.  "Allowing the walls of certainty to come crashing down" is not just what it means to be a San Franciscan, it's also what it means to be a Korean.

The Darwinian Apostles' Creed

I've mentioned before, and agreed with, the argument that you shouldn't judge a religion by its worst adherents, but by its best.  I still agree with it, up to a point, though as always the first question is how to decide who the best adherents are.

But, as I say, only up to a point.  Dismissing the "worst" adherents of a religion is often an evasion.  If a religion makes supernatural claims, as Christianity does, then it's fair to ask why the Holy Spirit fails to cleanse and purify and set straight the hearts of so many Christians.  But even without the supernatural baggage, it seems to me fair to notice that a religion doesn't manage to transmit its high ideals to most of its adherents.  Along the same lines, atheists who talk as though the absence of belief in God clears away irrationality, superstition, and magical thinking all by itself, are setting themselves up for a fall.  Atheists, of course, have no central authority, no organization to set doctrine and practice and inculcate them into the laity.

On the other hand, I think it's useful to look at the middling adherents of a religion, just I think it's useful to look not only at the best works of art but at the mediocre and even bad ones.  You can't see the virtues of an outstanding work if you can't see the background against which it stands out.

This is why I was interested as well as entertained by the discussion under this meme, posted by the liberal-Democrat site Daily Kos on their Facebook page on the 155th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species.

Something seemed off to me in that quotation, partly because it's not an accurate description of how natural selection works, so I looked around and sure enough, the quotation is not from Darwin.  It's a paraphrase of Darwin by a teacher in management studies, which explains to me why it sounds like it was said by a twenty-first century motivational speaker instead of a nineteenth-century naturalist.  Leon Megginson, the likely author, probably didn't claim to be quoting Darwin, but somewhere between 1964 and 1982 the paraphrase came to be treated as a direct quotation.  It was even inscribed in letters a foot high on the floor of the California Academy of Sciences.  This writer says that the Academy removed Darwin's name from it but evidently kept the text, which is too bad because the text will still convey an inaccurate picture of natural selection to students who see it.

So, what do the Facebook followers of Kos have to say about this meme?  They loved it.  Some samples:

Well, so much for the GOP!!!

They cannot die off soon enough. If ever a species should have gone extinct before its time...

The Pope got your message loud and clear , Mr. Darwin !

I guess if you look at politics from a Darwinian point of view, and seeing as the rich and powerful are the ones with the most to lose from change, you can understand why they fear change so much. Thus the term conservative and its ideology.

Well thank you, President Obama for hanging in there!

... In other words, thanks to President Obama for resisting change?

A few commenters pointed out that the quotation is bogus.  No one so far of the people who like the quotation have acknowledged that.  Predictably, since it's Daily Kos, many of them have interpreted it as a prophecy of the downfall of the American Republican Party.  (Just as conventional religious believers see current events reflected in Holy Scripture.)  Some commenters have pointed out that the GOP is currently managing change pretty well, having won control of Congress and many state-level governments besides.  This also rolls off the backs of the true believers.

While culture, such as our ability to create artificial environments so that we can live in regions that would otherwise kill us, certainly has played a role in human survival, that's not "managing change."  ("Manage change" is one of those empty phrases beloved of motivational speakers and gurus.  Does it mean to respond creatively or passively to change, or does it mean to make change happen?  What kind of "change" are we talking about here?)  Nor does functioning in an organization have much to do with natural selection.   Success in Darwinian terms means reproductive success, not climbing the corporate ladder.  A CEO with a multimillion-dollar paycheck who doesn't have offspring who in turn have offspring, is "unfit" for evolutionary purposes.

Even more, Darwin's theory is not about individuals or political parties, it's about species.  (Note the commenter above who referred to the Republicans as a species.)  It is species that adapt, or fail to adapt, and species that persist or die out.  All individuals die; it's the species -- a statistical abstraction that evolutionary theorists still have trouble defining -- that Darwin was concerned with.

It's not a big deal that so few people recognized that the Darwin quotation in this meme isn't genuine, though it's still significant since liberal secularist Democrats like to see their opposite numbers as gullible fools who'll believe anything they're told.  What matters is that so many pledge their allegiance to Darwin and Evolution, but have no idea what Darwin's theory actually says. Whether human beings and dinosaurs coexisted, for example, is not part of Darwin's theory; it has more to do with geology in any case, but it's an empirical question, not a theoretical one. (For that matter, I suspect that contrary to what orthodox Darwinians like to say, it's possible to do valid biological research on the details of evolution without understanding -- or even believing -- the theory as a whole.)

I don't have any real numbers, of course, but this meme and the reactions it inspired support my suspicions of poll numbers about belief in Evolution versus belief in Creationism.  (Just in passing, the percentage of Americans who subscribe to Creationism, according to Gallup, dropped from 46 to 42 percent since 2012.  That number has held fairly steady for "the past three decades.")  That a certain number of Americans say they believe that human beings evolved doesn't tell me anything about their grasp of evolutionary theory, and I have heard from enough people who clearly misunderstand the theory to wonder.  (Gallup asked its respondents to declare how "familiar" they are with the theory of evolution, but that's no help.  Thirty percent of those who said they were very familiar with the theory also believed that God guided the process, while thirty-four percent left God out of it.)  "I believe that Man Evolved, without help from God" is a declaration of faith, not evidence of scientific literacy.

Chaos Is What Killed the Dinosaurs, Darling

Today Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution linked to an article by the eminent journalist Orville Schell, on America as a "can't-do" nation. What stuck in my mind about this mostly forgettable article (anyone who uses the phrase "tipping point" without reference to cows should not be taken seriously) was this part:

Lately, I’ve been studying the climate-change induced melting of glaciers in the Greater Himalaya. Understanding the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet’s most magnificent landforms has, to put it politely, left me dispirited. Spending time considering the deleterious downstream effects on the two billion people (from the North China Plain to Afghanistan) who depend on the river systems -- the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, Amu Darya and Tarim -- that arise in these mountains isn’t much of an antidote to malaise either.

If you focus on those Himalayan highlands, a deep sense of loss creeps over you -- the kind that comes from contemplating the possible end of something once imagined as immovable, immutable, eternal, something that has unexpectedly become vulnerable and perishable as it has slipped into irreversible decline. Those magnificent glaciers, known as the Third Pole because they contain the most ice in the world short of the two polar regions, are now wasting away on an overheated planet and no one knows what to do about it.

To stand next to one of those leviathans of ice, those Moby Dicks of the mountains, is to feel in the most poignant form the magnificence of the creator’s work. It’s also to regain an ancient sense, largely lost to us, of our relative smallness on this planet and to be forcibly reminded that we have passed a tipping point. The days when the natural world was demonstrably ascendant over even the quite modest collective strength of humankind are over. The power -- largely to set an agenda of destruction -- has irrevocably shifted from nature to us.

Doesn't Schell know that the glaciers began receding thousands of years before the invention of the internal combustion engine, when human beings were fewer and weaker than they are now? Their "downsizing" (a word I think Schell also misuses) is a consequence or symptom of the end of the last Ice Age. To say that is not to deny that human actions have aggravated or accelerated the rising temperatures, only to point out that climate changes in any case, and not for the better.

Nor is it only human beings who change the biosphere. Scientists agree that the amount of oxygen, a poisonous gas, in the atmosphere increased greatly about 2.3 billion years ago, in what is called the Great Oxidation Event. Why this should have happened is debated, but a common theory is that one-celled organisms converted carbon dioxide to oxygen and exuded that waste product into the atmosphere. That probably had an effect on the anaerobic bacteria that are supposed to have been the dominant life form till then. Science cultists enamored of war metaphors can have a field day with such events, imagining an aerobic bacterium putting a tiny foot on the neck of the fallen anaerobic foe, beating its chest and uttering a victory call to attract females, thus ensuring its evolutionary success. But that's neither here nor there.

That third paragraph, with its rhapsody about the "creator's work," and its concluding lament that the "power -- largely to set an agenda of destruction -- has irrevocably shifted from nature to us", makes particularly painful reading. The "creator's work" is destructive at least as often as it is constructive -- volcanoes, numerous extinction events, tsunamis, earthquakes, supernovae, plague, the ichneumon wasp, and death. The "creator" killed off the dinosaurs, for heaven's sake! The metaphor of human disobedience to a benevolent deity or Nature makes for good Mad Scientist movies, and it plays a major role in the current narrative about global warming: "Man" has meddled in matters that he ought not, sought knowledge that properly belongs to Gawd, but soon he will reap the harvest of his sinful pride when Nature strikes back, cities are drowned by the rising sea, and blah blah blah.

Schell then switches topics and moves on to failures in American civil society, comparing us unfavorably to China, South Korea, Europe, and other countries. Unfortunately his approach is the same as his approach to Nature: comparing "China’s gleamingly efficient airports to our chaotic and all-too-often broken-down versions of the same, or Europe’s high-speed trains to our clunky railroads", but what is the carbon footprint of those gleamingly efficient edifices? (What is the plural of edifice? Edifaeces?) That gleaming efficiency, which is often wasteful, has other downsides, which is why "developed nations" want to export their pollution to the less developed nations, where Orville Schell won't have to see it and get all depressed.

TomDispatch founder Tom Engelhardt contributes a much more relevant note as a preface to Schell:

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which runs the city’s bus and subway lines, finds itself (like many other transportation systems across urban America) facing a sudden financial “shortfall” -- in the MTA's case, almost $400 million, which means severe cuts in service just when we couldn’t be more in need of public transportation. Whole subway and bus lines lopped off or significantly scaled back in places like the borough of Queens, which guarantees that, for many, getting to and from work, especially in the off-hours, will be a nightmare, or in some cases for late night workers essentially impossible. “The cuts,” reported the New York Times, “would eliminate two subway lines, create more crowding on subways and buses, and reduce frequency at off-peak hours. Service on dozens of bus lines would be reduced or ended, and disabled riders would find it more difficult to get around. ...

This has one practical meaning. If you’re poor and young in New York and your family can’t afford approximately $4 a day in subway or bus fares, you’re stuck in your neighborhood, maybe at the crumbling, overcrowded school around the corner. No hope of better. The finest, most competitive schools in the city’s public school system will be left for those who can afford to get to them. It’s a small thing on the scale of this planet’s problems, but it tells you a good deal about the direction this country is heading in and even if the MTA reverses its decision under pressure, the thinking behind it goes with an America I’ve never known.

The America Engelhardt has never known, however, is an America that has always been there -- the America of slums, high infant mortality, sweatshops, industrial accidents, and the upper strata that don't mind all that as long as it doesn't affect them. It's always going to be a struggle to create and maintain structures that benefit the mass of people, like public health, public education, and public transportation. I'm not blaming Schell and Engelhardt for that struggle, only for supposing that it can ever be resolved finally, that the well-off will ever give up.

I think something else is going on here, though. It's the childish wish that everything should stay the way it was in our first memories, that stories should always be told exactly the same way every time. I remember how strange I felt the first time I passed the site of my first elementary school and saw that the building had been demolished; it was as if something had been destroyed in me. But someone who'd passed by that site when the school was newly built would probably have mourned the loss of whatever was there before, whether it was a familiar house or an open field. I suspect that our fear of mortality is related to this wish to stop the world. Not that I think death is a good thing, or that wanting not to die is unrealistic or childish; what I mean is that the way we think about mortality is affected by our wish that nothing should change. Change is always destructive as well as constructive; something that was there must be replaced with something that will take its place. The hard part is figuring out what to change and what to keep.