Department of War

Most of us have grown up hearing about DOD (Department of Defense), and this is still how it is universally known. However, the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has decided to rename it the Department of War, and that is how you will find it on the official federal website (www.war.gov). The index of departments and agencies still lists it as Defense, but its leaders consider it the Department of War.

 

 

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this change, to America, and in the eyes of the world.

Consider how one would evaluate the effectiveness of a federal agency. If it is the Department of Defense, the question we need to answer is, Is America being adequately defended? I am not including those tasks that have been assigned to the Department of Homeland Security. Since most Americans do not live in fear of foreign aggression, we could conclude that DOD is doing its job and the Secretary of Defense is doing his.

But if we call it Department of War, then this department has to be fighting a war somewhere, or else it is not doing its job. If America is not fighting a war, then the War Department is effectively inoperative. This is why Pete Hegseth believes that, at any given time, America must be fighting at least one war. Otherwise, Hegseth is not doing his job.

People often ask if there is an Iran exit strategy. If not, what is it that we are trying to accomplish? But that is not the right question. We need to have at least one war, and from this war we must not have an exit strategy. We must be permanently at war.

This is what our supposed allies think when they see us. We are a nation that must be permanently at war. And we must find someone to conduct war against. Right now it is Iran. Who will it be next? Will it still be Iran five years from now? Or will we find another target? But we must have one or more targets or else we, as a nation, are failures.

That, at least, must be the view of Trump and Hegseth.

The Evolution of Weirdness

Weirdness cannot be defined, but whatever it is, it evolved, which means it provided an evolutionary advantage at many times during human evolution.

One reason it cannot be defined is that what one culture, in space or time, considers weird, another culture may not. One example is psychopaths. In most cultures, most people dislike psychopaths. They are very, very smart, and almost always use their intelligence and their charisma to advance their own interests. We tend to think of the psychopathic mass murderers and other criminals, but many psychopaths (who constitute about one percent of the population) pass as ordinary people and may be surprised by their own (often genetically-based) diagnosis. A lot of politicians and preachers are psychopaths, who cultivate the goodwill of others for their own financial or sexual benefits. And they also like to shame you for suspecting that they are committing acts of evil. It takes highly-developed social intelligence to recognize a psychopath. See the book by Kevin Dutton: The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us about Success. New York: FSG, 2012.

The success of psychopaths depends on the social situation. Adolf Hitler was a psychopath, and he got millions of people to follow him. After Germany lost World War Two, many Germans felt mentally liberated, and wondered, What were we thinking, to follow this jerk? Germany was not a nation of psychopaths, but maybe the Nazis were a party of psychopaths.

But there are many other ways of being weird. Most of us are a little weird in a few ways. But I mean clinical weirdness. One example is Williams Syndrome [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_syndrome]. People with Williams Syndrome have distinctive facial characteristics, and medical problems such as heart conditions. They have diminished intelligence, overall. They are extremely talkative, and effusively express their emotions. They are almost always cheerful. I have never knowingly met one but I get the impression that it would be really hard to not like them.

One word you would not associate with Williams Syndrome is suspicious. In order to become socially powerful, within your society, you have to be suspicious of the motives of other people in your society, and certainly of people in other societies. People with Williams Syndrome will walk right up to you and trust you. This is socially awkward. But openness and the willingness to trust is an essential component of altruism, of social bonding. It’s just that these people have too much of a good thing.

Another reason weirdness cannot be defined is that each kind of weirdness has its own social and genetic basis. Williams Syndrome is associated with a specific genetic deletion that affects a specific part of the brain. There is no set of terms in any language that exactly matches the symptoms of this deletion. And, in fact, characteristics resulting from mutations can be highly modified by upbringing and social circumstances. I am thinking of a person who acts as if she has Williams Syndrome, but who looks normal, and is brilliant.

Throughout human evolution, behavior patterns have sometimes been useful and sometimes not. Since each behavior has a different set of causes, human behavior has proven to be immensely variable. This has happened not because natural selection has done a bad job on human behavior, but because both the source and the target of human behavior is constantly shifting.

 

We can be glad we have empathy and altruism in the human species. And maybe Williams Syndrome is the price we pay for it.

 

Next, I will write about the evolution of nerds. Or not. Maybe I am a bit too close to the subject to be objective.

Floaters: An American Health Care Horror Story

Actually, it is not a horror story, but a story of dysfunction. It is one more reason why American health care is so expensive.

Ocular floaters are caused by clumps of collagen that form in the vitreous humor of the eyes. They cast shadows on the retina. This usually happens in older people, but I had a lot of floaters when I was a kid. I looked up into the clear California skies and wondered what those gelatinous blobs were. I spent most of my life ignoring them.

But since they become more common with age, they began to bother me. When I retired and started Medicare, I decided to do something about them. A local ophthalmology office advertised that they could eliminate floaters from your eyes. So I decided to do it. Laser was used to disperse the clumps of collagen.

It took five sessions. I do not recall paying anything for them, but Medicare paid a lot, I am sure, though of course I never saw these bills.

To begin with, five sessions were not necessary.

• In the first session, my eyes were examined by the ophthalmologist who advertised that he could treat floaters. But after he examined my eyes, he said that it was actually another ophthalmologist at his clinic who did it. Nobody told me this when I made the appointment.
• In the second session, another ophthalmologist looked for floaters and found them.
• In the third session, all I did was sign up for the use of the laser machine.
• In the fourth session, the ophthalmologist shot lasers at the floaters as he yelped like a cowboy on a bronco. (This was in Oklahoma.) In the few weeks afterwards, I could still see the floaters.
• In the fifth session, the ophthalmologist examined my eyes and old me the floaters were gone. I said I could still see them, but he told me I was wrong.

This brings me to the second point. The treatment, as far as I can tell, does not work. When I moved to France, I decided to not think about it anymore. But I developed diabetes, which requires annual retinal exams. During one of these exams, I asked the ophthalmologist about laser treatment of floaters. He said that they don’t do this in France, because it doesn’t work. I have since found that laser treatment is used only in rare and severe cases.

The worthless floater treatments I had in America took a lot of my time, but not money. But it cost the American taxpayers plenty. This is money that Europeans can spend on better health care than in America. I wonder how much American health care is weighed down by unnecessary and ineffective treatments.

Biblical Deserts

There are many references in the Bible to deserts, none of them good. One of them is an Old Testament prophecy that Handel used in The Messiah: Make straight in the desert a highway for our God (Isaiah 40:3).

Clearly, Old Testament deserts are things that we should get rid of. And the Old Testament describes the reclamation of desert areas as the work of God. One of these passages follows immediately after the above quote.

When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them. I will open rivers on the bare heights and fountains in the midst of valleys; I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water. I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive; I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane, and the pine together, that men may see and know, may consider and understand together, that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it (Isaiah 41: 17-20).

The deserts, or wilderness areas, are not to be confused with thriving, highly-evolved desert ecosystems. In natural deserts, the plants have many exquisite adaptations to deal with heat and drought. Succulent plants store water, desert bushes have very deep roots, and desert plants even have special forms of photosynthesis that allow them to make food under all but the driest conditions. Some desert plants are small and tender, and have astonishing flowers, and they appear totally out of place in a dry desert. The way they survive is by living their whole lives, from seed to seed, in the brief rainy season. These are the deserts we need to protect, such as in Saguaro National Park (Arizona) or Anza-Borrego State Park in California. These are not the deserts to which the Bible refers.

 

 

The deserts of the Bible are the lands that have been corrupted by human civilization. Poor farming practices swept away the natural plant cover and caused soil erosion, leaving a barren landscape. That is why cities that were once thriving consisted only of collapsed walls surrounded by bare soil. This is what the earliest Sumerian cities looked like even at the time Isaiah wrote his prophecy. There was plenty of degraded land even around Jerusalem that everyone who heard Isaiah’s prophecy could readily see. To this day, most of the land around the Mediterranean remains partially degraded from millennia of human abuse. Today we think of Italy and Greece as dry shrublands; but they used to be, according to ancient writings, covered with thick forests.

If you are someone who is involved in any stage of land reclamation, to take a landscape that has been devastated by decades or centuries or millennia of human mismanagement, and turn it into a thriving ecosystem, you are doing some of God’s work. Although I do not believe that the modern nation of Israel is in fact God’s own special country, it is obvious that modern Israel has done a lot of reclamation, making what had been a devastated landscape bloom. They have been pioneers of soil conservation and dry land agriculture. Drip irrigation was invented in Israel. The joke goes: on the cover of the birthday card it says, In honor of your birthday, a tree has been planted in Israel. Inside the card it says, Wednesday is your day to water it.

The lands that have been reclaimed from human-produced deserts do not look like natural deserts. Just read the list of plant species in the passage above. Cedar, acacia, myrtle, olive, cypress, plane, pine. There is no natural ecosystem where you will find all of these trees together. They have to be planted in a garden that has displaced the degraded land.

None of this is miraculous. It is just good, hard work based on scientific studies (many of them Israeli). Isaiah says that God has done this. But it was not miraculous. God works through us, in this case through scientists and farmers. In order to see it as God’s work, you have to do what Isaiah said: to see and know, to consider and understand together. A quick glance at the trees is not good enough to see the work of God through mankind.

Killing Time? The Evolution of Hobbies

As I have continued reading Lonnie Aarssen’s book, What We Are, I ran across another interesting idea. He claims, and is probably correct, that human evolutionary psychology has been strongly influenced by the awareness that we are going to die. Many aspects of our cultures result from our responses to the certainty of our deaths.

One category of response is to create something that outlives us. Most of the estimated 90 billion people who have ever lived have not left any trace, other than perhaps a name on a record somewhere, that they ever existed. It doesn’t take many generations for this to happen. My great-grandfather exists now, as far as I am aware, of two photos from about 1890, a grave, and some DNA in his descendants.

 

But people who have had more money and power than did my great grandfather can do a lot more to create an enduring legacy. Rockefeller and Carnegie had endowments that are still giving awards to people. Simon Bolívar has a country named after him. These legacies create the false impression, while we are alive, that we will not die, and after we die, that we are still alive. In the Becky Hobbs/Nick Sweet musical Nanyehi, devoted to our ancestor Nancy Ward, the great Cherokee leader, the Nancy Ward character says, when you see the white swan’s wing, know that I am still alive. Of course, she isn’t, and there is remarkably little of her personal effects that can still be found (she died about 1822). But Rockefeller, Carnegie, Bolívar, and Nanyehi are still having an impact on the world.

Sir Francis Bacon noted that childless men put more into their legacies (he was thinking of creativity and intellect) than do men with big families precisely because they have no physical posterity. Wikipedia lists no children for Bacon. I have one child and two grandchildren, but this is below the world average.

The main motivation I feel in creating a legacy of writing is that I do not feel that I should hoard for myself the insights I have encountered in life. I want to share them.

Another category of response is to lose ourselves in hobbies. This allows us to ignore the fact that we will die. My Dad, for example, recorded country music on hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes, and spent countless hours documenting and organizing them. They have almost all disintegrated. I have his tape of country songs sung by our next door neighbor’s brother, Truitt. Are these hobbies just a way of killing time?

That is clearly one purpose of a hobby. But some of us try to turn our hobbies into legacies. I have thousands of photographs. They would be depressing if they were just a pile of pictures. But since 2007 all are digital, and I scanned the others. I labeled each photo with a descriptive name, and the year, so that the next generation of my family will know what each one was. Just in case they ever look at them. Of course, my daughter and family are in my photos also. You can see about a thousand of these photos (mostly of natural areas, not of me and my family) at my newly refurbished author website.

One of the best ways to create a unique legacy is to write a book. Major commercial publishers have published six of my books; I plan one more; all about popular science and history. I have also written articles, which are on various databases. My website is me, in the future. The books that I know I cannot publish through increasingly unstable commercial publishers will be, or so I plan, on Amazon. My tech-savvy son-in-law can probably find a few minutes a year to maintain my digital presence long after my passing. The essays on this blog, starting about 2008, will be available perhaps as long as the internet exists.

And that is pretty much what I do these days. I have no hobbies that are just for killing time. Time is precious, and I want to use it—all of it—to make the world better. This includes activities that maintain health and vigor, since I do not want all of my work to collapse if I have a stroke or something. And to keep me happy, since I do my best work as a writer and a grandfather by being happy. I hope to put a reasonable finish to my work and then, one day, I just won’t wake up.

Of course, my main legacy (both biological and cultural, even spiritual) will be my family, which so far is resisting extinction, and consists entirely of good people. World, you will be glad we were here.

Platonic Friendships

I read a book, What We Are, by Lonnie Aarssen. Aarssen is a Canadian plant ecologist, roughly contemporaneous with me. He has made the transition from plant ecologist to evolutionary psychologist—that is, studying the effects of our human evolutionary history on the way our brains work. I have made the transition from plant ecologist to a general science writer, so I know about evolutionary psychology, but do not know as much as Aarssen.

I’m not sure platonic friendship can be defined, but most of us have a general understanding of it. Aarssen makes the assertion that it is very difficult for men and women to form platonic relationships. Why? Rather than attempting a detailed summary of his reasons, I will just say that it is because men are jerks. They want to conquer women, not befriend them. That sort of captures the meaning.

I immediately recognized that this is not true of me. As I think over my life, I have had lots of platonic relationships with women. I recently made a list of people—men and women; all ages; most of them still alive—who have been important in my life, just so I could remember them. The list had 111 names, and the list keeps growing. Of these, 55 are women of a reasonably similar age with myself and with whom I had a close friendship, and with none of which I had sex. What is wrong with me?

In many cases, it would have been professionally unethical—for example, students and colleagues. But in at least 30 cases, there was no such difficulty (they were single and not, at least at the time, my students). So, I ask again, what is wrong with me?

What is wrong with me is love. In earlier decades, it was religious conviction. Later, it was that I did not want to endanger or stress my marriage. Neither of these is known, on a societal level, as a reason why a man does not have sex. But I loved all of these women, and did not want to mess up the trust they were placing in my friendship. I know for a fact that at least a few of them would have welcomed sexual intimacy from me. But a life is something you build, and as I look back on mine, I am satisfied with the choices I have made.

I knew that I was unusual, but I did not realize how unusual.

European Forests Also Need Control Burns

…but are not getting them. European forests have grown up in thick stands of saplings, just like most American forests. In North America, the Natives kept the forest undergrowth cleared away, which benefited agriculture and hunting, by the controlled use of fire, as I explain in chapter 2 of my recent book Forgotten Landscapes. When European diseases and conquest killed off ninety percent of Native populations in America, the forests shifted from bountiful productivity to being “a forest of sticks” choked by undergrowth.  Native fires were an essential part of what a “natural” forest should be like in North America.

It appears to me that the same is true in Europe. It is likely that the tribal peoples of Europe, before (and after?) Roman conquest, burned their forests just as Native Americans did theirs. The forest preserves we see in America, and in Europe, today are not “natural” but have resulted from fire suppression in recent centuries. This would be true even of the last “virgin forest” in Europe,  Białowieża in Poland.

I explored one of the last fragments of pre-industrial Rhineland forest in France earlier this summer. It is (what passes in Europe for) an extensive forest southeast of Strasbourg. I hiked around on just a portion of its extensive system of trails. Beech trees (Fagus sylvatica) dominated the canopy and its seedlings were abundant on the forest floor. Maples (Acer pseudoplatanus) dominated the forest floor and had some canopy trees, along with two species of linden (Tilia cordata and T. platyphyllos). There were a lot of shrubs, especially the field maple (Acer campestre), dogwood (Cornus mas), hazelnut (Corylus avellana), and hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna).

This forest had been undisturbed for a long time—the beeches were large and tall. But it was not that long ago, perhaps a century and a half, when the forest had been cut down. In a desperate but successful attempt to control the resulting soil erosion, the French government planted conifers (in the lowlands, Norway spruce, and on the hillsides Douglas fir from America) which persist in a few places, remnants of once successful forestry but now ceding their dominance to hardwoods.

It was a peaceful and wonderful place to hike. But it was not natural. In my book I wrote about Native inhabitants being an essential part of the “natural” landscape in America. And it appears that the same is true in Europe. I suspect this is a general pattern. Sam Goldwyn is said to have quipped that wilderness is “where the hand of man has never set foot.” But I think this may not be true not only in America but anywhere else. Humans have always been, ever since we mastered fire, an important factor in the operation of entire landscapes all over the world.

The only alternative to small, frequent fires is large, perhaps equally frequent fires. This is what is happening in America, where the lack of control burns has allowed huge forest fires to get started especially in the west. But the same is true where I now live in France. With increasing frequency, the forests of southern France burn in the hot, dry summers. With global climate change, the forests where I now live in northern France will also burn more frequently. The problem will take care of itself, though not in a way we would like.