“No race problem”

Another interesting episode from Götz Aly’s book on 2/3 of a century of European antisemitism (1880-1945): At the conference convened in Évian, France in 1938, where representatives of the world’s democracies met to try to create a common policy on Jewish refugees, the Australian trade minister Thomas W. White explained Australia’s refusal to accept any Jewish refugees thus:

As Australia at present has no race problem at present, I think everyone will understand that we are in no hurry to import one.

From the perspective of modern race consciousness it is fascinating to see the Australia of 1938, with its marginalised and near-genocidally oppressed aboriginal population, seen as self evidently lacking a “race problem”, whereas the immigration of some thousands of Jewish refugees would self-evidently create one.

The Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King similarly believed that no good could come of tainting the pure Canadian race:

My own feeling is that nothing is to be gained by creating an internal problem in an effort to meet an international one… We must… seek to keep this part of the Continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood, as much the same thing as lies at the basis of the Oriental problem. I fear we would have riots if we agreed to a policy that admitted numbers of Jews.

(The exact quote comes from this paper.)

Nothing new in anti-Semitism: Jews as colonizers

Western leftists are committed to the ideological identification of Israeli Jews with European colonizers, which transforms the bitter conflict between Arabs and Jews into a noble chapter in the ongoing anti-imperialist struggle.* Thus I was interested when I discovered (in German author Götz Aly’s book on the history of anti-Jewish violence in Europe between 1880 and 1945) that this trope also has its conceptual antecedents.

It concerns the reaction of Romanian anti-Semites to the murder of Jewish student David Fallik in 1926. No less a figure than the Interior minister (and briefly later prime minister) Octavian Goga called the murder “a defense of the trampled honour of the Romanian people”, and went on to say that the Jews treated the Romanians no differently than “the English treat their colonised peoples.”

* I am referring here less to the discussion of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which does have colonialist traits, though I’d say more analogous to the English in Scotland and Ireland — including, dare I say it, Northern Ireland — than the military occupation of distant lands. I am thinking more of the general framing that the entire Israeli nation is a colonial project that should be overthrown, and that the Jews should go back where they came from.

Givers and takers

There‘s a video clip going around showing ageing Australian edgelord Tim Gurner — who built a property empire on nothing but grit, moxie, and capital borrowed from his grandfather — speaking the capitalist quiet part out loud, arguing that we need higher unemployment to keep employees from getting uppity.

This reminded me of a thought I‘d had about the peculiar moral judgements built into our language of employment. Whereas a worker is an active agent, an employee is passive, shifting the active role to the heroic employer, that benevolent figure who grants them the opportunity to work.

This role-reversal is even more stark in German: The one who sweats and strains building or cleaning or making — that one is the Arbeitnehmer, the work-taker. The one who owns the business, maybe because they started it, maybe because they inherited it, or purchased it with inherited capital, is the Arbeitgeber, the work-giver.

Climate-change denial and the paradox of scrupulous science

I had a conversation recently with a relative who is generally quite intelligent, but also deep down the rabbit hole of climate-change denialism. And in talking to him, I realised something about a dilemma in science communication that is particularly acute for any topic where there is a vested interest willing to devote some significant effort to mystification. (So, climate science and vaccine immunology, but not, for instance, condensed-matter physics.)

Here’s the problem: The basic principle of the greenhouse effect — that the Earth’s temperature is regulated by the atmosphere, and that is scientifically almost trivial. It was first formulated by Fourier more than 200 years ago, in the course of making the first quantitative theory of heat transfer. Basically, it was unavoidable. Fourier didn’t know how the thermal insulation properties were specifically related to the composition of the atmosphere, but this was pretty comprehensively explained in 1898 by Svante Arrhenius, who recognised that carbon dioxide and water vapour were the main insulating gases, and then went on to calculate that doubling the CO2 content of the atmosphere would raise global temperatures by 5 to 6ºC.

That science is as certain as anything can be, and it’s not complicated. It’s accessible to anyone with high-school level chemistry and physics (and not any controversial theoretical components of the curriculum, nothing that anyone would challenge if they didn’t have uncomfortable implications for the profits of wealthy corporations). And we did the experiment: CO2 has been increased by about 50% since Arrhenius’s paper was published, and global temperatures have increased by almost 1.5ºC.

So, the quantity of carbon we’re burning globally is (by simple arithmetic) clearly the right amount to shift the CO2 content of the atmosphere by a substantial amount, and elementary physics tells us that this amount of extra CO2 should warm the globe by several degrees, and that several degrees of warming will be insanely destructive. We could stop there, and focus on thinking about how to clean up this mess. But again, there are vested interests whose profits and/or lifestyles depend on not understanding this.

As far as I can see, they mostly don’t challenge the first step (measuring CO2 seems like it should be pretty straightforward, and there’s no time lag or other complication) or the third (not sure why, since 2 or 3ºC doesn’t sound like so much — maybe I just haven’t explored the right dark corners of the interwebs), but focus on the middle step: Does CO2 really cause warming?

Now, the climate is a funny place, and all kinds of feedback effects could affect the result of the doubling CO2 experiment. Rationally, the core intuition should be to expect what elementary physics tells us: 5-6ºC increase. If you want to claim that something very different will happen, you should need a theory to explain the divergence, backed by rock-solid evidence. Instead, the challenges were of the sort, well, it’s all so complicated, anything could happen. Backed by the core intuition that the Earth is so big, and we are so small, that probably whatever we do is pretty harmless on a global scale. Or that said the Earth has homeostatic forces that will prevent any large changes — basically, the Gaia hypothesis.

In the 1980s climate scientists took on this challenge. And this is where things went off the rails. They studied all the feedback loops anyone could think of. They built up multiple lines of evidence about the palaeoclimate. They vastly expanded their theoretical understanding of and empirical measurements of deep ocean currents. They combined all of these into simulation models that can estimate the range of possible outcomes based on all the unknown and unknowable factors. And the outcome of all this effort and increased understanding is that smart (but scientifically naïve) laypeople have gotten the impression that anthropogenic warming is not a simple physics calculation, but the counterintuitive prediction of some complicated, abstruse modelling that no one understands very well… sort of the equivalent of asking ChatGPT for a weather forecast. And those precise measures of uncertainty, well, get back to us when you’re certain.

Tremendous effort has gone into trying to figure out whether these first-order effects might be overwhelmed (in either direction) by second-order feedbacks. And it turns out they might, to some extent, that it could happen in either direction, and there’s a fair amount of randomness, or at least, irreducible uncertainty, but we’ve acquired a much better understanding of how the climate system works. The result of all this, though, is to reduce the confidence among a segment of the public that looks at it and says, they sure seem to be working awfully hard to convince us of this totally counterintuitive claim that harmless CO2 is going to wreck the planet.

The depressing thing is, I can’t see how this could have been handled differently, or how it could be improved for the future. The work really did need to be done. The quibbles were right, in a sense, in that it’s all much more complicated than anyone even imagined, and there are huge feedback effects, positive and negative, increasing and decreasing the extent of warming. The final result, though, is that the central prediction for doubling of CO2 isn’t too far off what Arrhenius calculated, but we have more uncertainty on either side. And more ominously, rather than the gradual change that Arrhenius might have expected — with CO2 increase being directly translated into temperature increase — we have a system that responds with both time lags and in irreversible jumps, both of which make control extremely difficult — particularly in a situation where there is strong pressure not to take any action.

Concrete proposals

The UK government is taking its talking points from third-rate comedians. You can barely get a chuckle anymore with the tired joke template “No one talks about all the things we didn’t screw up.”

Now, with hundreds or even thousands of UK schools facing emergency closure because the government — and specifically Rishi Sunak when he was chancellor of the exchequer — drastically cut the budget for repairing the crumbling concrete that was cheaply put up in the 1950s and 60s that was only supposed to last 30 years, the PM is offended that nobody is talking about all the schools whose roofs haven’t collapsed. He said

There are around 22,000 schools in England and the important thing to know is that we expect that 95% of those schools won’t be impacted by this.

I’m waiting to hear the government focus more attention on all the millions of migrants who haven’t tried to come to the UK — indeed, on the billions of people who haven’t even left their home countries — rather than harping on the tiny percentage who have tried to cross the English Channel in small boats.

Satire is dead.

Christian pastry

The Guardian reported recently on a dispute between Ryanair and the cultural authorities of the Balearic Islands over a traditional pastry called ensaïmada. This spiral-formed pastry is apparently rather bulky, and the Irish surcharge-generating firm has been charging passengers £45 to take their ensaïmadas onboard as carry-on luggage.

Ensaïmada

According to the article, the pastry is

made from flour, sugar, eggs, water and pork fat. It takes its name from saïm, the Mallorcan word for pig fat.

Pig fat? Seems like a weird thing to put into pastry. And indeed, the article goes on to say that an identical pastry called a bulema was made by Mallorcan Arabs and Jews before the Spanish conquered the islands in 1229. Needless to say — but the Guardian does need to say it — neither the Arabs nor the Jews put pig fat in their pastry. But the weird thing was that apparently the pig fat was added explicitly to “Christianise” the pastry.

The Catalan poet and painter Santiago Rusiñol wrote in 1922 that with the addition of pig fat, “the Moorish ensaïmada became Christian, then it became Mallorcan and then was transformed into a food for all of humanity”.

I’ve long found it bizarre the extent to which, just as much as many Jews and Muslims see not eating pork as a crucial determinant of their identity, so many gentiles see themselves as a mirror image, with positively eating pork as decisive for their Christian identity. For example, there was this article about how some French schools were refusing to serve any alternative to pork for school lunches.

Bacon and sausage school dinners are being used by rightwing politicians to hammer home what it means to be French. Court battles and vicious political spats have erupted as protesters warn that controversial menu changes are sending a message to Muslim or Jewish children that to be truly French, they must eat roast pork.

And then there were the repeated attacks by the British press on the Jewish Labour leader Ed Milliband for “failing to look normal eating a bacon sandwich”.

Mathematics and Meditation

Womb Realm Mandala

Sure, they’re both four-syllable words starting with M*, but do they have anything else in common?

Actually, quite a lot. They’re both ancient mental technologies for refining the mind’s ability to focus and grasp what is fundamentally ineffable: for mathematics this is space, motion, and quantity (or number); for meditation (I’m thinking here of Buddhist jhana meditation) it is the nature of mind and thought itself. Both require many years of intensive training and apprenticeship, often focusing on learning to solve a set of standard problems and carry out fixed exercises and incantations (QED, induction on n, proof by contradiction; buddham saranam gacchami). The practitioners of both are generally viewed as weird and otherworldly, and advanced practitioners demonstrate their mastery with bizarrely abstruse feats such as proving that all integers can be represented as a sum of a finite number of primes, or spending long periods of time in trance states, or levitating.

There is some direct overlap as well. Meditative practices often draw on geometric motifs — as in the mandala above — and arithmetic relations. Many chants are built on combinatorial principles. More specifically, the last of the five jhana factors is ekagatta, often translated as ‘one-pointedness’. This is typically interpretted as identification of mind and object, but the Pali word is purely geometric: eka (one) agga (point) ta (state). Viewed from a mathematical perspective you can see that the focusing of consciousness to a point can happen continuously, through contraction, or discretely, through reduction of dimension. It is possible to experience the mind as a geometric space, whose dimension can be reduced through concentration.

Presumably it’s just a coincidence, but I find it fascinating that the modern systematic approach to numbers is often attributed to the work of Euclid, in the early 3rd century BCE, shortly after Indian influences started to filter into Greek philosophy, particularly through the thought of skeptics such as Pyrrho of Ellis.

* Reminding me obliquely of the report I heard on the radio in Germany about 20 years ago about the efforts in Germany to establish mediation as an alternative path for dispute resolution. The expert bemoaned the lack of understanding that the general public had of mediation, claiming that many people thought it was some sort of esoteric process, because they confused the word with meditation. (The German words are the same as the corresponding English words.) That is, at least, a problem I’ve never had with the word mathematics.

God is high above, and the free speech tsar is far away

Apparently, the UK now has a “Free Speech Tsar”.

This is about as encouraging as the Conservatives’ decision a few years back to appoint an “Antisemitism Tsar”.

I guess it’s a way of signalling that the real point of these positions is to smash the socialists…