“The Incoherent Jumble of Trump’s Own Mind”

Two pieces from the National Review website presented some ideas in ways that I agreed with.  That is, they distilled what I had been thinking a bit chaotically into statements I wish I had made.

One was “The Impeachment Train” by Yuval Levin that can be found here:

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-impeachment-train/

This seems to explain something I’ve been wondering about:

But in the laying out of both the case against Trump and the case in his defense you find the pattern that has repeated in these last few years by which serious people end up backing themselves into conspiracy theories because they want the world to make sense. The incoherent jumble of Trump’s own mind, backed now with the enormous power of the American presidency, has the capacity to create a real world that doesn’t hang together. When we each try to explain it to ourselves and others, we naturally incline to fill in blanks and sketch connections that might make it all cohere, and so we end up painting perverse conspiracies, most of which are surely false. We can already see that happening in this case, as we all try to reason our way through an avalanche of unfamiliar figures and preposterous events and end up acting like we’ve always had strong views about how many people listen to presidential phone calls and the relative merits of different Ukrainian state prosecutors.  [Emphasis added]

Trump is his own reality distortion field and this warps all of us into trying to adjust.  I’ve felt that for a long time but hadn’t the words to describe it.

Levin also points out this:

My rule of thumb for how to think about the endless chain of outrages and counter-outrages that compose the Trump era is that every scandal will proceed in whatever way is maximally damaging to public confidence in our core institutions.

The farther down this road we go the likelier it is that something will fracture the Republic irreparably.  I hope I’m wrong and I don’t know what our Reichstag Fire might turn out to be, but I have trouble seeing us on a path to sunlit uplands.  Nor do I know what individual course to take except to support what laws and institutions I can by not cutting corners, by being nice to my neighbors and co-workers, praying, fasting and keeping a civil tongue.  And don’t be stampeded and don’t panic.

In “Prince Don” by Kevin D. Williamson at https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/donald-trump-personal-flaws-led-him-here/ I found another summation of what I’ve been thinking:

And so that leaves at least one conservative simultaneously believing four things that are difficult to keep under the same hat:

1) I am glad that Hillary Rodham Clinton is not the president;

2) Based on what we know right now, I do not want to see Donald Trump impeached and removed from office;

3) I do not want to see Elizabeth Warren being sworn in as president in January 2021;

4) Donald Trump cannot be gone soon enough.

In data processing terms, this leaves me thrashing: whipping between logical paths that are mutually exclusive.

I am beginning to wonder, though, if the best long term course might be for the impeachment process to remove Trump from office in early 2020, leaving Mike Pence to stabilize things and present a more temperate, constitutional alternative to whatever shrieking progressive the Democrats nominate.

To The Mountain Top

No one visits Monticello on a whim, drawn in for a quick tour by a highway sign.  You have to work to get there through ever smaller northern Virginia highways.  Lovely country but rather out of the way.

In spite of that, the place was packed!  We found one open spot after driving through four or five lots.

Approaching the visitor’s center from the parking lot one encounters an roped off area about 60 square feet.  This is demarcated as an African American burial ground.  Archeologists have located a good number of graves and several unmarked head and foot stones which were not visible to the casual observer.  This spot is far from the top of the mountain.

Standing at the shuttle stop at the top of the mountain is a giant White Ash.  I told Ben, “That tree must be as old as Thomas Jefferson.”  A docent rushed over.  “There are no trees at Monticello as old as Thomas Jefferson!” 

Well, ok.  I was basing my guess on my memory of a cross-section of a tree I had seen – at the Lake of the Ozarks, I think – where some rings had been linked to historical events, the Revolution being one – but ok.

The house tours begin every five minutes in ticketed groups of 25.  Since we had a long time to wait, we joined the garden tour.  The flowered paths are beautiful and the gardeners have worked hard to recreate the gardens from Jefferson’s day based on letters and journal entries.  Jefferson collected seeds during his travels and sent them home so he had tremendous variety.

The leader of the garden tour pointed out two tulip tree stumps near the house.  These trees had been planted by Jefferson but they were only stumps.  She also pointed to a very tall cedar and said that tree might date from Jefferson’s time, but tests were ongoing.  So there was a little more nuance to the old tree story.

I joined part of the Slavery tour.  The slaves of the upper south at the time of Jefferson were permitted sufficient latitude to have their own garden plots with which they augmented the small food ration they were given and from which they could sell produce to the plantation kitchen or in a town market nearby.  They were also apparently permitted to gather for prayer services although such assemblies were outlawed later in the 19^th century.  However, violence and separation were constant fears.  Even favored and valuable slaves would be gifted or sold or bought back or sent on long assignments far from their families.  I wonder if all slave owners would feel compelled to order such separations occasionally so as not to tacitly accept the right or preference of an enslaved person to be near family.

Jefferson’s possible relationship with the slave Sally Hemmings was phrased by different tour guides with different levels of definiteness.  Joseph Ellis, author of the most perceptive book about Jefferson I’ve read, “American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson”, felt that Jefferson’s interpersonal diffidence makes him doubt Jefferson could have forced a relationship.  Ellis thinks it likelier that one or more of his nephews contributed the DNA now found in the Hemmings line.  Whether Thomas himself fathered children by his slaves, the institution in which he participated enabled the monstrous practice.

We decided to visit the family cemetery plot while waiting for our tour time.  We passed an enormous, gnarled Catawba tree.  “That is the biggest catawba tree I’ve ever seen.  That must date from Jefferson’s time.”  This from a middle-aged crew-cut wearing a D-Day t-shirt.  He peered at the trunk of the tree.  “It has some problems though.”  He looked at us, “I’m a licensed arborist.”

The family cemetery is ringed by a wrought-iron fence and is dotted with tombstones.  Jefferson himself lies beneath an obelisk that cites his authorship of the Declaration, the Virginia statute on religious freedom and his founding of the University of Virginia.  No mention of his ambassadorship, his governorship, his being the first US Secretary of State, its 2^nd Vice President or 3^rd President.  I have to wonder if this is a studied humility given his public posture to retire from public office while spurring a covert,  proxy campaign to defeat John Adams. 

The contrast between the family plot and the African American plot is complete.

Finally we get to tour the house.  Monticello’s is a neat, neo-classical design.  It is not palatial inside or out.  Ben was favorably disposed to this style over the Baroque.  Jefferson, of course, spent years having the house built and re-built.  He was a self-taught architect and learned much from travels in Europe.  Denise thought that the beds in alcoves showed him to be rather a bachelor architect.

No picture-taking was allowed inside the house, much to Denise’s disappointment, but we saw a good deal of a re-created collection of what Jefferson might have displayed or used: the polygraph was interesting and the artifacts from the Lewis and Clark expedition and the thoughtfulness that went into the design of each room.

As we waited for the shuttle to take us back down the mountain, Denise pointed to a magnificent Linden tree.  (I am not a licensed arborist although I play one at Monticello.  I only know the names of the trees mentioned because each was labeled.)  This linden tree spread great branches and shade in all directions.  Some of the branches sank to the ground, making it look like a banyan tree.

Being a provocateur, I said loudly, “I bet that tree is as old as Jefferson.”

“Go, get in the bus, hurry up,” Denise hustled me down the path.

***

What does Thomas Jefferson mean to us?  Being a “Jeffersonian” has so many interpretations that I can’t call myself one.  Yet a partial admirer I certainly am.

That the colonies declared and defended their independence was momentous, but fifty-six men signed the Declaration of Independence while one wrote it.  And beautifully.  It was the work that made Thomas Jefferson an icon.

`               Would Monticello have been restored, preserved and visited if Jefferson had not written the Declaration?  Granted that Virginia was a powerful state among the thirteen, but if Jefferson had not written the Declaration he would have been just another delegate.  Had he not written the Declaration, I doubt he would have achieved his higher offices and we would not care if he supported the French Revolution or Nullification or if he proposed a wall of separation between church and state.  Had he not written the Declaration, who would navigate to the depths of Albemarle County to see his personally designed house, his inventions, his gardens, his grave?  If he had not written the Declaration we would not go to Monticello and wonder about the slave owner writing for the ages that all men are created equal.

OctoPower!

OctoPower!

We have several computers at the house.  The “big” computer is at least seven years old.  It’s “big” only in that it is an old tower case from back when they made computers the size of dresser drawers and it’s “big” because we hooked up a huge tv monitor to it quite awhile back.  This computer has been through several versions of Windows, each of which grew flakier until I finally tried Ubuntu on this machine.  That continues to work smoothly on the old beast – except for some incompatibility with some DVDs.  It suffered the loss of its ethernet port in a lightning strike a few years ago.  The ethernet port connects directly to the motherboard so I didn’t see any practical way to replace it.  So now it connects to the internet via a USB WIFI stick.  Aside from the fact that it is still serviceable, I keep it going to see how long I can keep it going.

The other day I pressed the power button to turn it on and nothing – absolutely nothing – happened.  No lights, no fan, nothing.  Probably the power supply I thought.  This was a good guess but I foolishly assumed that it would be a snap out and snap in replacement.  Hah!

This, this is what a power supply looks like.  Except, here, this has been laid out for viewing before being laid to rest:

Most, but not all of those cables were connected here and there in the computer.  When I saw the spaghetti inside the computer that I would have to disconnect and correctly reconnect I flashed back to an old Star Trek episode, one of the lesser episodes of the original series, called “Spock’s Brain.”  Spock’s brain is stolen – right out of his head – by beings who need it to be the “Controller” for their civilization.  Upon recovering it, Dr. McCoy’s surgical skills are temporarily, technologically augmented to enable him to reinsert Spock’s brain inside Spock.  But the augmented knowledge begins to wear off and he goes slower and slower…

I could just imagine myself grinding to a halt, connector in hand, whimpering, “Where the hell does this one go?”

Eventually I settled for a tedious process of disconnecting one cable belonging to the old power supply, locating a comparable connector from the new power supply and connecting that – gradually replacing the old and allowing me to remove the old one and replace it.  Here is what it look like midway through that.  The new power supply is sitting outside the computer at this point.

What really tickles me about all this is that I got it right all the way down the line: the right diagnosis, a compatible power supply purchased on the first try, the machine started up right away and everything worked.  So often technical adventures consist of, like, six trials and errors and three ah-hah! Revelations before completing a repair or install.

Here is the pc with the new power supply installed.  All those cables coming out really do look like the tentacles of an octopus don’t they?

Stigmergy, You Say?

“Every aspiring young materialist dreams of growing up to be a robot.”

Roland, as transcribed by David Bentley Hart

First Things, February, 2015

Or a termite?

One of the disappointments of David Bentley Hart writing much less for “First Things” is that I no longer get to enjoy the late-night wisdom of his dog, Roland.  That line above has stayed with me for several years and it comes to mind repeatedly when I think about stigmergy.

I don’t remember by what chain of Wikipedia searches I first came across the term “stigmergy.”  I was reading about termites but – why?

Here are some definitions of stigmergy, all from the Wikipedia article:

  

Stigmergy is a consensus social network mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a next action, by the same or a different agent. In that way, subsequent actions tend to reinforce and build on each other, leading to the spontaneous emergence of coherent, apparently systematic activity.

Stigmergy is a form of self-organizing social network. It produces complex, seemingly intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even direct communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even individual awareness of each other.

The term "stigmergy" was introduced by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé in 1959 to refer to termite behavior. He defined it as: "Stimulation of workers by the performance they have achieved." It is derived from the Greek words στίγμα stigma "mark, sign" and ἔργον ergon "work, action", and captures the notion that an agent’s actions leave signs in the environment, signs that it and other agents sense and that determine and incite their subsequent actions.

When thinking about termites – for whatever reason – or ants or other hive creatures, this idea of simple agents leaving unintentional signals for each other that trigger follow-up actions is a reasonable hypothesis.  That is, a hypothesis to account for seemingly intelligent structures without a termite architect and a termite foreman.

Darwin came at this question from a different angle in “Origin of the Species” while considering slave-master ants.  There are ants that carry off pupas after a successful raid on a target colony.  They hatch them back home and the foreign ants become workers in their captor’s colony.  How did this come about?  Darwin did not know for sure, but applying the idea of natural selection -- the idea that variation produces tiny advantages and disadvantages for species, which advantages accumulating over many generations lead to significantly improved adaptations (and the disadvantages lead to fewer offspring and perhaps extinction) – he wondered if long ago some of the pupas carried home as food hatched instead.  In some instances the foreign ants would have fought or been killed out of hand.  In the range of variation, in some colonies they would have survived.  These colonies, having the advantage of additional workers, might have gained a survival advantage and their behavioral adaptation could have become dominant in the species.  (This is all supposition and this series would have relied on further, related adaptations.)

As a matter of fact, the whole idea of natural selection seems “stigmergic” once you think about it.  But that’s not why I think about it.

I think about stigmergy because I come across attempts to explain intelligence, or find ways to mimic intelligence, through “self-organizing” non-deliberate mechanisms.  From the Wikipedia stigmergy article:

On the Internet there are many collective projects where users interact only by modifying local parts of their shared virtual environment. Wikipedia is an example of this. The massive structure of information available in a wiki, or an open source software project such as the FreeBSD kernel could be compared to a termite nest; one initial user leaves a seed of an idea (a mudball) which attracts other users who then build upon and modify this initial concept, eventually constructing an elaborate structure of connected thoughts.

Yes, you could compare Wikipedia to a termite’s nest – but you could also contrast it to a termite’s nest: the basic structure was designed and did happen randomly.  While contributors may suggest unexpected new topics there is an overall governance in place.  All the contributors know what they are doing and are aware of the larger effort of the wiki. It also has a purpose exterior to the efforts of the termites contributors which is the gathering and dissemination of knowledge.  Insofar as a termite’s nest has a purpose it is the survival and propagation of termites.

All of this is obvious to anyone with a mind.  One’s initial conclusion upon reading the above would be that someone heard about stigmergy and just got analogy-happy.

Except for this, also from the same Wikipedia article:

Heather Marsh, associated with the Occupy Movement, Wikileaks, and Anonymous, has proposed a new social system where competition as a driving force would be replaced with a more collaborative society. This proposed society would not use representative democracy but new forms of idea and action based governance and collaborative methods including stigmergy. "With stigmergy, an initial idea is freely given, and the project is driven by the idea, not by a personality or group of personalities. No individual needs permission (competitive) or consensus (cooperative) to propose an idea or initiate a project."

If that quote doesn’t send a shiver of apprehension up your representative democratic spine, I have a nice, busy hive-mind to send you to.  They twitter with excitement for your assimilation.

I have been pondering this idea of stigmergy for a long time and hoping to write an essay or, now, a blogpost, about it.  The problem is that the topic really keeps unfolding into other areas, there are so many pheromone paths to follow – so many, so many -- what am I to do?

I am to cut it off here and keep thinking about the rest of the material I’ve gathered and will gather.  In the meantime, because he really is quite a dog, here is a fuller quote from Roland:

“It’s all about freedom, you see,” he said; “that’s what makes this picture of an interior psychomachy so delectable to late modern persons. It’s a passion for determinism—physiological, subconscious, socioeconomic—what have you. It’s all to do with the final triumph of the mechanistic philosophy in every sphere, even that of consciousness. How silly. As if machines could delight in bacon, or in the chasse sauvage when some impudent rabbit scampers past one’s nose, or in that romp that amuses you so—what’s it called? ‘Fetch?’ Yet nothing so excites the modern materialist as the possibility of proving that consciousness is reducible to physiology, that freedom is an illusion, that mind is a ghostly epiphenomenon of unconscious metabolisms. Every aspiring young materialist dreams of growing up to be a robot.”

Winter of Darwin II

Winter of Darwin II

Voyaging with Beagle…

I realized with a start that germ theory had not yet been developed when Darwin wrote of his voyage on the Beagle.  While in Polynesia he notes a missionary who observed that “most of the diseases which have raged in the islands during my residence there, have been introduced by ships; and what renders this fact remarkable is, that there might be no appearance of disease among the crew of the ship which conveyed this destructive importation.”  (p. 375-376)  Darwin and his contemporaries knew that there was some method of transmission and that some exposed people were affected and some were not.  But they did not know the means of transmission.  Some ideas we learn to take so thoroughly for granted that we assume they must have been known forever. 

On the subject of missionaries, by the way, Darwin was generally approving of the English missionaries in the islands and found their work among the natives to be a positive influence.  Not so the Catholics in South America: "...but he could scarcely have been an Indian, for the race is in this part extinct, owing to the Catholic desire of making at one blow Christians and Slaves." (p. 252)

Through most of his voyage and his book, Darwin registers his disapproval of something with a quick observation and moves on – as with the comment on Catholics above.  But near the end of the book, in Brazil, he launches a spirited, eloquent condemnation of slavery with the sentence, "I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country." And he continues for an uncharacteristic two pages, giving examples from his travels of mistreatment observed.  “And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbors as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth!  It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty…” (pp. 426-427)

It is a truism now that his visit to the Galapagos Islands spurred Darwin’s thinking along the lines of natural selection.  He was already keenly observant of how geographic barriers affected species population (see p288, for a non-Galapagos example re the Andes Mountains).  Certainly the many species unique to the Galapagos – or even unique to specific islands – made him think.  The islands were over 500 miles west of South America.  In his words, (p329), “…hence, both in space and time, we seem to brought somewhat near to that great fact - that mystery of mysteries - the first appearance of new beings on this Earth.”

On the Origin of Species…

Where the “Voyage of the Beagle” benefits from the narrative framework of a voyage, “Origin” is a scientific thesis.  Still, there are numerous charming details sprinkled throughout whenever Darwin uses his own experience to buttress a point.  Thus we learn that he has long kept and bred pigeons, he has an extensive garden, he floats seeds in fresh and in salt water to see how long they float and if the germinate after, he tracks ants hundreds of yards to their nest, he collects bird droppings to see what seeds survive in them, and on and on.  If he hadn’t published a pivotal scientific work, he would have been thought an eccentric, slightly daft old codger.

Darwin made it a point to include likely objections to his theory of natural selection.  I like the intellectual honesty of this and I was struck by how many of these objections are repeated by modern opponents of evolution – as if newly discovered!  The eye, for example.  How could something so complex as the eye have evolved?  By the gradual accumulation of advantageous variations over countless generations, Darwin posited.

It seems to me that Darwin and his contemporaries did not have a reliable estimate as to the age of the earth.  Darwin refers to countless ages or generations, but he does not name a figure.  I don’t think it was until radioactive dating in the 20^th century that scientists were led back and back to the 4.5 billion year estimate we hear now.

This did leave Darwin and his theory necessarily vague on how long nature would have had opportunity to vary and select among the species.  I’ve always thought it a weakness of evolution to appeal to as many millions of generations as needed to explain a given result.  Lacking a good estimate of the earth’s age, Darwin avoided speculating on specific time boundaries.

And while on the subject of things Darwin didn’t know there is the source of the variation that he made the basis of his theory.  The fact of variation of offspring from parents was widely known and was used by breeders to cultivate favorable traits in domesticated animals, but the source of variation would not be unraveled for decades after Mendel’s 1866 paper.

Everyone feels free to have an opinion of the theory of evolution but what strikes me is how thoroughly steeped in nature studies Darwin was.  How informed, therefore, his conclusions by ceaseless observation.  Somewhere in “Beagle” Darwin writes to the effect that, “it is as difficult not to have an opinion as to have a correct opinion.”   How many of us consciously make that distinction – whether about evolution or anything else?