Glimpsing Summer

It is Memorial Day weekend again. It was originally called Decoration Day though both names have been in use since the 19^th century. By the mid-20^th century Memorial Day became the more common usage. President Garfield spoke in Arlington National Cemetery at the first one in 1881. It was intended as a day to honor the fallen in the Civil War by decorating their graves. May 30 was chosen as the date because it was not the anniversary of a major Civil War battle and therefore applied more broadly. In World War I the day was expanded to include the fallen in all wars. Some of the decorative traditions still in use date to then, such as red poppies inspired by the 1915 poem In Flanders Fields by Canadian soldier-poet John McCrae. In 1968 the Monday holiday bill let the date float to fall on the last Monday in May in order to make a three-day weekend.
 
The holiday makes a convenient “unofficial start of summer” in much the same way that Labor Day marks the “unofficial start of autumn.” Neither makes much astronomical sense, but both do match a shift in the weather pretty well, at least in the northern states and similar latitudes elsewhere. May rarely makes up its mind to what season it wants to belong but it is generally immediately followed by warm weather. Daytime temperatures in NJ this May, for example, have waffled between 40 and 90 F (4 and 32 C) with no obvious trend. Memorial Day itself (tomorrow) is anticipated to be 45 degrees (7 C) but the first week of June should be balmier.
 
Summer is my favorite season. As I’ve gotten older I’ve favored warmth, so I’m happy to pretend that summer starts on Memorial Day. I save my seasonal celebration until the weekend of the actual solstice (June 20 this year) however. I don’t burn a wicker man with sacrifices inside it as Caesar describes the Gauls doing in his Commentaries. I just grill burgers (arguably much the same thing) and I try not to burn them.
 
Fortunately, the shape of earth’s orbit makes summer particularly long in the northern hemisphere. The seasons are not of equal length because the planet’s orbit is an ellipse. Earth’s distance to the sun ranges from 147 500 000 km (perihelion) to 152 500 000 km (aphelion). Aphelion occurs this year on July 5. Since orbiting bodies sweep out equal areas in equal times, this makes the time between the spring and autumnal equinox about 5 days longer than the time between the autumnal equinox and the subsequent spring equinox. Summer days in the northern hemisphere are marginally cooler than if the distances were reversed, but the extra days of summer insolation more than make up for the difference so the net effect is extra warming.

nasa.gov

It will not always be so. Earth’s orbit precesses about a day every 58 years so the distances will eventually reverse. Precession combined with regular changes in the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit and polar tilt (between 21.5 and 24.5 degrees – it is presently 23.5) create the Milankovitch cycles that are believed to drive the onset and retreat of ice ages. (The northern hemisphere is key because it contains most of the world’s land mass, which responds more radically to changes in insolation than the mostly oceanic southern hemisphere.) Whatever the short term (meaning the next couple hundred years) prospects for warming might be, the longer term points to massive cooling. 12,000 years ago there was a mile of ice on top of where I’m now sitting. Short of geoengineering on a gargantuan scale it will be there again. The eccentric but award-winning astronomer/mathematician Fred Hoyle in his book Ice: The Ultimate Human Catastrophe proposed deliberately heating the oceans to prevent a new ice age. This is probably not a good idea at the current time.
 
At my age I don’t need to worry much about the date of the next glacial maximum – nor do you. Tomorrow matters though, and tomorrow is the unofficial start of summer. Even though 45 is a bit chilly, I just might put a lawn chain in the sunlight and catch some rays.

 

Blue Cheer - Summertime Blues

That’s Not Funny

Friedrich Nietzsche defined humor as sublime cruelty. Cruelty is not always disrespectful. Sometimes it is the opposite. Why do guys commonly banter insults with friends? It’s an acknowledgement that the other fellow is strong enough to take it. The insults have to have some bite, too, which means they must have at least a kernel of truth. (There is of course a line the location of which is best not to misjudge too often.) Humor also can be genuinely critical – even contemptuous – which also is not necessarily a bad thing. We need to be able to laugh not just at what we hate but what we love – very much including ourselves. It’s the best way to get the proper intellectual distance to (re)evaluate our values, beliefs, and desires. This is why Fred valued laughter so highly: “And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.” It’s no surprise however that others are not always amused.
 
At the moment there is considerable social power in being offended, most notoriously on college campuses. Numerous comedians such as Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld refuse to work colleges for that reason. John Cleese agrees and adds, “And the whole point about humor, the whole point about comedy, and believe you me I thought about this, is that all comedy is critical.” The trend is likely to continue until enough people start to find the trend funny.
 
All this comes to mind from two books that formed my nighttime reading last week – reading in bed being my most common soporific. First up was Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud. Sig’s reputation has taken a serious dive in recent decades, but mostly because of backsplash from the narrow-mindedness of the workaday hacks who followed him and called themselves “Freudians.” His own books are much more exploratory and thought-provoking. If I were to recommend just one of his books to someone who knows him only from secondary sources it would be Civilization and Its Discontents. In it he reveals himself to be far more open-minded than many of those secondary sources suggest, as in his remarks about alternative sexuality:
 

"The requirement, demonstrated in these prohibitions, that there shall be a single kind of sexual life for everyone, disregards the dissimilarities, whether innate or acquired, in the sexual constitution of human beings; it cuts off a fair number of them from sexual enjoyment, and so becomes the source of serious injustice." (Civilization and its Discontents, 1930)
 
Freud was not really known as a natural raconteur, but he did enjoy a good joke. Being himself, he could not resist analyzing them, however, which led to this book. Nothing kills a joke more effectively than explaining it. So, this is a very unfunny book but an interesting one. None of the jokes he uses as examples are knee-slappers. Those that involve wordplay seldom survive the translation from German. Don’t expect to laugh at any of them. After all, he is isn’t trying to be funny but trying to make points about the motives and reactions (both conscious and unconscious) of the jokers and the audience. This one about unreasonable expectations is about as amusing as they get, I’m afraid:
 
A man goes to a match-maker to find a wife.
Marriage broker: “What are you looking for in a bride?”
Customer: “She must be beautiful, rich, and educated.”
Marriage broker: “Very good, but I count that as three matches.”

After Freud’s book on jokes, I figured I’d check on another unlikely source on the subject: Marcus Tullius Cicero in How to Tell a Joke. This is actually a portion of De Oratore, translated by Michael Fontaine with the original Latin on the opposing page. (My Latin is very very rusty, but enough of it survives to check on how free the translation might be.) Cicero thought some people had a natural knack for being funny while others did not. However, he also thought anyone can improve on their base skills through training and practice even though the person who is not a natural will never be as good as someone who is. Cicero, who was apparently known for being a smartass in his day, is interested only in the use (and misuse) of jokes in oratory and legal arguments. He mentions but dismisses other forms of humor as outside his purview. Jokes are effective in oratorical contexts, he says, only if they reveal or exploit a truth. He also notes the risk of jokes backfiring if they create sympathy for your opponent or if they can be turned against oneself. He specifically warns against the temptation to express a clever line when it will hurt your cause: never choose a good joke over your goal. As it happens, he failed to take his own advice: he annoyed Mark Antony enough that Antony ordered his head and hands (the parts that spoke and wrote speeches) to be cut off and displayed on a rostrum. That is probably not the preferred response for any speaker. Like Freud, he doesn’t offer any knee-slappers as examples, but unlike Freud he is occasionally wryly funny.
 
Examples: When asked about the death of an enemy, “When did Clodius die?” he answered, “Too late.” When told he didn’t live up to the reputation of his ancestors he pityingly responded, “You live up to yours.” A story not in this book but mentioned by Plutarch involved Julius Caesar’s new calendar, which vastly simplified astronomical predictions. When Cicero, an opponent of Caesar’s dictatorship, was told what date the constellation Lyra would rise, he grumbled, “No doubt it has been ordered to do so.”
 
Fontaine’s translation also includes On the Art of Humor by Quintilian (35-96 CE), even though for some reason it receives no mention on the cover. Quintilian was an academic, not a politician, so he was at little risk of political murder for his commentary. In his tract he largely echoes Cicero’s tenets and even uses some of his remarks as examples, such as when Dolabella’s wife claimed to be 30. “It must be true,” Cicero said. “I’ve been hearing her say it for 20 years.” (I don’t know if Dolabella became an Antony partisan, but his wife might have.) He also tells a story that shows Augustus good-naturedly could take some sass. During a show (“in spectaculis”) he spotted one of the equites (upper middle class) drinking and snacking. “When I want to eat lunch I go home,” chided Augustus. “You don’t need to worry about losing your seat,” the man answered.
 
I suspect neither book has improved my jokes or their delivery, but both offer food for thought. There are of course plenty of “jokes” in the world that are indefensibly mean, bigoted, or rude, but every person draws the line in a different place. Everyone will cross someone else’s line at some point. I’m therefore more inclined to simply call the offending joker a jackass or to just let his jackassery bray for itself rather than go all Mark Antony on the fellow – which nowadays involves head-chopping of a less literal kind. There is more merit in being Augustus.
 
As for political humor, Cicero’s advice to keep a core of truth in the barbs is still valid. (This is sorely lacking in most modern political memes, which most commonly shamelessly misrepresent the other side: satisfying to partisans but unconvincing to anyone else.) Will Rogers: “I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.” Will was funny.
 

Jefferson Airplane - Share a Little Joke

But I Was So Much Older Then

When I was in high school as long ago as the late 1960s, biology textbooks were just catching up to the breakthroughs that had begun with the paper on DNA structure by Watson and Crick in 1953. The new textbooks (and many contemporary popular publications) gushed over the potential of genetic research for medical applications and bioengineering even though the techniques at the time were undeveloped. It was an exciting and aspirational time for the sciences generally. The world, after all, had been utterly transformed within the lifetimes of people not yet 70. My grandfather, for example, left Austria-Hungary before World War One in the back of a horse-drawn hay wagon, but a half century later he flew back to Budapest in a 707 while astronauts orbited overhead. There was every expectation among people of all levels of education that the next half century would see just as radical a transformation. Biotechnology (a term not yet shortened to biotech), we were told, would be the most transformative science of all. It would change humanity forever by eliminating disease, extending youth, and prolonging life. More than one of my high school teachers confidently predicted, “Some of you in this classroom will live to be 200.”
 
That prediction proved to be as much a fantasy as the lunar colonies we were told would exist by 2001. (We did get better phones, which is something, but commercial moon flights would be cooler.) Life expectancy has nudged upward decade by decade, mostly because of reduced smoking and better medical care, but all that means is that we aren’t dying early quite as often from some avoidable disease or preventable accident. Life expectancy at birth in 1900 in the US was 46, but that does not mean adults commonly went belly-up at 46. High child mortality (mostly from infectious diseases) accounted for that low average. If you made it to 21 back then, you’d probably reach old age; if you didn’t, a bacterial or viral infection was the most likely reason rather than an age-related illness. An 80-year-old in 1900 was much like an 80-year-old in 2021. Aging itself continues for the present generation at the same rate it always has.
 
Officially, no one dies of old age in the US anymore (that was disallowed as a cause of death on death certificates 70 years ago) but unofficially we do; the cause will be listed as heart disease or kidney failure or stroke or something, but in truth after a certain age if one thing doesn’t get us another will. At some point we just stop being able to repair ourselves after which inevitably one organ or another irretrievably fails. The uppermost possible limit for humans seems to be about 125, though (despite a handful of inadequately substantiated claims) no one is known ever to have reached 125. The longest lifetime that has been reliably documented (Jeanne Calment, d.1997) was 122 years. It is nonetheless possible that someone sometime has eked out (or will eke out) a few more years past that, but the person would be the rarest of outliers. Hardly anyone gets close to that age: the odds of reaching 100 are 1 in 10,000. The chances of reaching 110 are 1 in 7,000,000.
 
The high hopes of the 1960s have faded, and biotech no longer looks likely to change our longevity potential in a time frame that matters to anyone alive today. No one wants an extra 100 years in a nursing home anyway, of course, so it is not just longevity per se that we are after but extended youth. This, too, has proved elusive. It is true that people today in wealthy countries by and large look younger than their grandparents did at similar ages, but that is only because they strive to do so; beneath the surface, they have the same age-related systemic conditions and illnesses as their grandparents – in some ways (e.g. diabetes) they are worse off, mostly because they weigh more. It’s pretty safe to say that none of my high school graduating class (1970) of 27 students will reach age 200 – several are already gone. None of the class of 2021 will reach 200 either. Many Generation Z teens seem to believe the world will end before then anyway, which I don’t believe either; I’d place a bet but I’m at a loss on how to collect on it.
 
Will lifespans of 200 or longer ever be possible? Maybe. Not for us, but someday maybe. There is plenty of research being done on everything from stem cells to immunology to telomeres – and, of course, genetic engineering, the promise of which glimmered back in the 1960s. Elon Musk’s transcendence initiative takes a different approach; he anticipates a future blending of biology with computing and mechanical hardware (i.e. cyborgs) to such a degree that you could shed your biological parts as they age out and be left with an entity (a robot, basically) that is still essentially you. This wouldn’t be human by usual definition, but some folks consider this an advantage: hence “transcendence.” But what if purely biological fixes can concocted? How would that affect our outlook on life?
 
This question was considered and addressed by George Bernard Shaw in his 1921 play Back to Methuselah, which is worth a (re)visit. World War One and the revolutionary (and counterrevolutionary) chaos of the postwar years led Shaw to suspect that humans, regardless of the political system, were simply not up to the task of rational and humane social organization. The problem, he decided, was short-term thinking: short-term thinking that makes sense if you won’t live long enough to face the consequences of your own actions and policies. People, he decided, just need to live longer. This would alter their approach to public life – and also to private life. You are less likely to go in for daredevil stunts, for example, if you are risking centuries of life instead of decades. The only hope for humans, he decided, was to evolve longer lives. (Shaw proposed that biological evolution could be directed by force of mind, a pleasantly wrongheaded notion that doesn’t undermine his basic point that human life is too short.)
 

The play consists of five parts (with subsidiary acts) set in different times. Part One features a nontraditional story of Adam and Eve. The second Part is set in Shaw’s own time after World War One. The third is in 2170 when ultra-long-lived humans are discovered to exist secretly. Part Four is in 3000 and features a short-lived (normal-lived by today’s standards) visitor to Britain, which is now occupied by long-lived people; he struggles to make sense of the place. Part Five is in the year 31,920 when humanity has finally matured. All it took was virtual immortality and the change in outlook that entailed.
 
This may be short-term thinking, but I’m not inclined to worry much about the year 31,920 or even 2170. If my old high school teachers (assuming they are still with us) follow through on their promises and fork over that 200 year life span, however, I’ll endeavor to look at the matter more maturely.
 
 

Melanie – I Tried To Die Young

Charlie Brown's Football

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” is an aphorism commonly attributed to George Santayana who did say something like it – as did Burke and Churchill. Another aphorism is “History does not repeat, but it often rhymes." This is commonly attributed to Mark Twain though the first known appearance of it in print was in 1970. Misattribution (or uncertain attribution) of some pithy line or other is a mistake folks tend to repeat – or possibly rhyme.

 

Whoever first said them, the two sayings will continue to be quoted because they strike home on a personal as well as a public level: we as individuals all too regularly repeat our mistakes by failing to learn from our pasts. A big reason is that circumstances seldom repeat in exactly the same way. They merely rhyme, and so we are caught off our guard time and again. For example, if we spent more than we ought to have done on our credit cards last month, it is likely we will do it again even though we are duly punished when the bill arrives. The new charges won’t be exactly the same, after all, but will be for the purchase of a very different mix of temptations. In our romantic lives we often date someone with the same traits that worked out so badly for us the last time – but it’s not exactly the same person.

 

This is one of the conclusions of recent studies published in The Journal of Consumer Psychology and Neuron on why people repeat the same mistakes – or, more accurately, the same type of mistakes. To be sure, getting burned once slows us down the second or third time. We don’t rush as quickly into the same type of mistake, but we are still likely to make it. Says Roozbeh Kiani, co-author of the Neuron study, “the deliberative approach we take to avoid repeating a mistake neither enhances nor diminishes the likelihood we'll repeat it."

 

We make our characteristic mistakes based on our personality and on the neural pathways we create as we navigate through life. Personality is pretty hard to change even if we want to; part of it is innate and part was acquired during our formative years. More recent neural pathways are another matter. We create neural pathways whenever we do anything new, and (like following a beaten path rather than pushing through brush) it’s easier to reuse them than to make new ones even when they lead us nowhere good. It is how we form habits. The formation and maintenance of these pathways is mediated by a mix of neurochemicals.

 

Fortunately we are not irretrievably doomed to repeat our mistakes. We may be impelled, but we are not compelled. It is possible to rewire these pathways. Numerous books aimed at popular audiences explain how to do go about making the changes. One that is as good and accessible as any is Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin, & Endorphin Levels by Loretta Breuning, PhD, founder of the Inner Mammal Institute. Will such rewiring prevent us from making mistakes? No. But at least the mistakes are more likely to be new ones, which counts for something.

 

Truly traumatic mistakes also can alter pathways. For example, while there are people who engage in serial marriage, rhyming past errors over and over, there are others who experience a particularly bad one and swear off the institution forever. If asked if they would consider getting married again, the response will be something like, “Has hell frozen over?” That response might or might not be a mistake itself, but, even if it is, it is not a repeat of the old one. (There are even some who don't back off, but change their pattern and make a go of a second marriage.) But while trauma is a quicker path to rewiring those circuits than the slower deliberate method, generally speaking it’s not worth it. Choosing it is almost certainly a mistake.

 

Tracy Nelson – I Don’t Do That Kind of Thing Anymore

Landli(n)es

One of the signs of being “of a certain age” is still having a landline telephone. I have kept mine mostly by inertia.  I just don’t think about it enough to take the trouble to cancel service even though 80% of my significant voice calls (and all of my texts) are on my cell. 80% of the calls that come into my landline on the other hand are from scammers. They call every day. Not all of them are scammers in the legal sense. Many of the callers urging me to extend the warranty on my car or to change my energy supplier or whatever, are acting within the law, however unwelcome (and often deceptive) the offers might be. Few of these callers successfully deliver a first word anymore. I hang up immediately upon hearing the telltale pause-and-click that so often precedes the pitch. Some callers, however, are in fact attempting scams by legal definitions as well as by subjective ones. My favorite was a fellow pretending to be from the Sheriff’s office who claimed that I missed jury duty but that he was willing to accept payment of the fine over the phone. When the day comes (as it will soon) that I at long last disconnect my landline it will be in order to eliminate these calls. Meantime, they provide fodder for thoughts about deception in general.
 

Not all criminals are liars – more than average that is. (According to a study published in the Journal of Basic and Applied Psychology in the early 2000s, 60 percent of people lie at least once within the first ten minutes of a casual conversation, typically a small fib told for reasons of tact or minor social posturing; "2.92 inaccurate things" in that time frame was the average.) The greatest crimes against humanity have been committed by honest true believers in some –ism or other; these folks often are quite open about their willingness to sacrifice you for their notion of the long-term greater good. For instance, Pol Pot and his followers, at whose hands some 2,000,000 Cambodians died, were honest about their ends and means. Nor is all deception harmful. Some is just foolish but harmless braggadocio. Much of it is well-meaning social tact. Blurting out whatever is honestly on one’s mind can be needlessly cruel – and, on the job, a quick route to HR. Anyone who denies this is engaging in (self-)deception on a grand scale. Some deceivers are even socially honored for what they do; the job of diplomats is commonly described as “lying for one’s country.”
 
The type of deception that concerns us is fraud. Fraud is a particular kind of lie: tricking someone into surrendering money or other valuables under false pretenses. In essence it is a fake contract. The distinction between fraud and other lies is not a difficult one to make – it requires a victim most obviously. Like many clear lines, nonetheless, it can be crossed in a single step. There is a not altogether small minority of folks who enjoy nothing more than crossing it.
 
Con and flim-flam artists are often presented in popular entertainment as charming rogues, as in The Lady Eve or Catch Me If You Can. (Years ago, I also wrote a short story with such a character: The Great Gaffe.) Anyone who has had the misfortune of dealing with the real thing has a different opinion.
 
Even animals lie. Blue jays may mimic the cries of hawks to literally clear the field. Chimps have been known to voice false alarms in order to get food the fleeing chimps leave behind. But full awareness makes human deceit special. Much of it is socially adaptive. By age 5 nearly all children have worked out that their parents are lying when they say “Don’t lie.” They really mean don’t lie about certain things in certain ways. Michael Lewis writes in “The Origins of Lying and Deception in Everyday Life” in American Scientist that by age 3 most children already have learned to lie “to protect the feelings of others,” as when thanking grandma for a sweater when really hoping for a toy. Children also grasp very early that lying can be a way to avoid punishment though they are often bad at it – e.g. “I didn’t eat the cookie.” Disturbingly – but, truth be told, unsurprisingly – he reports that kids between 5 and 10 who are good liars generally score higher on tests “that assessed moral judgment, theory of mind, and executive functioning, which included the challenge of inhibiting certain responses. In all these assessments, children who had lied scored better than those who had told the truth—a result that strongly suggests the ability to lie is positively related to cognitive competencies!”
 
Once again, there are different kinds of lies. The big four are lying to protect others, lying to protect (or aggrandize) oneself, self-deception, and lying to hurt others. The first three can be helpful, harmful, or harmless depending on the circumstances. The fourth is always a problem – at least for the targets of the deception. The fourth can be for fun or profit (or both), and this type of deception is usually the intent of those who cold-call my number and yours.
 
Lies that are discovered undermine trust whether on a personal or social level. It is advisable to be forgiving of minor or harmless lies however. Being human, you just might tell one yourself someday. It is also advisable, though, to be on guard for actual fraud. All too many people out there mean us no good.
 

The Cramps – People Ain't No Good