Tag: Great Britain

Chance and Necessity

If we free-associate the word “chance” you may arrive at “I’ll take my chances” before potentially arriving at Thomas Bayes’ “Doctrine of Chances”. Jacques Monod was an early explorer of the collision of probability and chance in biology.

THE PRINCE OF CHANCE

Jacques Monod grew up just down the coast from Monte Carlo in Cannes, France, another town famous for its casinos and, later, its film festival. Graced with movie star looks—one prominent French journalist described him as a “prince” who resembled Hollywood icon Henry Fonda, as well as considerable musical talent, and an exceptional intellect, Monod struggled to decide on a career path through his twenties. After distinguishing himself in the French Resistance, Monod rose to fame not as an actor or musician, but as a brilliant biologist. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for seminal discoveries about how genes work.

A pioneer in the field of molecular biology, Monod was privy to the blizzard of discoveries in the 1950s and early 1960s about the molecules that determined the characteristics of living things—what Monod and others dubbed “the secrets of life.” He kept close company with a relatively small international community of leading researchers. For example, when James Watson and Francis Crick cracked the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) in 1953, Monod was one of the first with whom Watson shared the breakthrough.

But as a Frenchman steeped in his culture’s deep philosophical traditions, Monod was interested in science for more than just science’s sake. After the war, Monod befriended France’s leading philosopher-writer Albert Camus, and the two men pondered questions of human existence in Left Bank cafés. Monod felt that the public misunderstood the principal purpose of science as being the creation of technology. Rather, Monod believed technology was merely a by-product. He said, “the most important results of science have been to change the relationship of man to the universe, or the way he sees himself in the universe”—a relationship of equally intense interest to his friend Camus.

Monod thought that there were profound philosophical implications of the new molecular biology, particularly in the realm of heredity, which had gone largely unnoted in the broader culture. Several years after his Nobel Prize and Camus’ untimely death, he decided to write a book to try to bring the meaning of modern biology to laypersons.

“[T]he ‘secret of life’…has been laid bare,” he wrote.

“This, a considerable event, ought certainly to make itself strongly felt in contemporary thinking.”

Monod used several chapters to describe the insights that had very recently emerged from the study of DNA and the deciphering of the genetic code. He understood this knowledge would be unfamiliar to most readers, so he included an appendix with chemical structures of proteins and nucleic acids, and a primer on how the genetic code worked.

In a matter-of-fact style, he explained genetic mutations as accidental alterations—substitutions, additions, deletions, or rearrangements—in the text of DNA, in the sequence of the long strings of chemical bases (ACTTGATAA, etc.) that make up genes.

Then, almost without warning, he turned to the broader implications of how mutations arise in DNA. It is worth quoting him at length for after 111 pages of background, he delivered one of the most powerful ideas in five centuries of science (all italics are original):

“We call these events accidental; we say they are random occurrences. And since they constitute the only possible source of modifications in the genetic text, itself the sole repository of the organism’s hereditary structure, it necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere.

“Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition—or the hope—that on this score our position is likely ever to be revised.

“There is no scientific concept, in any of the sciences, more destructive of anthropocentrism than this one.”

In essence, heretofore obscure discoveries in biochemistry and genetics (largely studied at that time in simple bacteria) had upended two millennia of philosophy and religion that put humans at the center or apex of creation. “Man was the product of an incalculable number of fortuitous events,” Monod wrote. “The result of a huge Monte Carlo game, where our number eventually did come out, when it might not well have appeared.”

Le Hasard et la nécessité (Chance and Necessity) appeared in France in October 1970. It was a fairly technical book with several chapters on philosophy and genetics, and those appendices full of chemical diagrams. A first-time author, Monod did not know what reactions to expect.

The merde hit the fan.

The book received dozens of reviews across France and quickly became a bestseller—second only to the French translation of Erich Segal’s Love Story (this was France after all. After it was translated into English, reviews and interviews with Monod were featured in several of the most prominent British and American newspapers and magazines.

Many commentators immediately recognized the threat chance posed to traditional ideas of humanity’s origins and purpose. To Arthur Peacocke, a British biochemist turned prominent theologian, Monod had put forth “one of the strongest and most influential attacks of the century on theism.” A flurry of articles and books appeared with titles such as Anti-Chance: A Reply to Monod’s Chance and Necessity, Beyond Chance and Necessity, and God, Chance, and Necessity. Monod was invited to debate philosophers and theologians both in France and abroad, on television, radio, and in print.

American Calvinist theologian and pastor R.C. Sproul summed up the high stakes posed by chance in the first page of his book Not A Chance:

“It is not necessary for chance to rule in order to supplant God. Indeed, chance requires little authority at all if it is to depose God; all it needs to do the job is to exist. The mere existence of chance is enough to rip God from his cosmic throne. Chance does not need to rule; it does not need to be sovereign. If it exists as a mere impotent, humble servant, it leaves God not only out of date, but out of a job.” More than two hundred pages later, Sproul concluded:

“Chance as a real force is a myth. It has no basis in reality and no place in scientific inquiry. For science and philosophy to continue to advance in knowledge, chance must be demythologized once and for all.”

Sproul and other critics argued that what scientists perceived as chance merely reflected a lack of knowledge of true causes. Perhaps that was the expression of hope to which Monod alluded—the hope that as scientists learned more, our position on the role of chance would somehow be revised.

A SECOND CHANCE

The ensuing fifty years have not played out as either Monod or his detractors hoped. The Frenchman thought that the new insights from molecular biology should be a turning point for modern society-away from traditional beliefs about causes in the natural world toward one that embraced randomness and our chance existence.

Ha! Fat chance. The excitement and fuss stirred by Chance and Necessity simmered down, and Monod passed away a few years later. Surveys reveal that the majority of Americans, for example, continue to believe that everything on earth happens for His reasons.

But Monod’s critics should take no comfort. The province of chance in the biosphere and human life has been revised, although not at all in the scope or direction that they hoped.

The domain of chance has expanded into realms neither Monod nor anyone else imagined.

As we have learned much more about the history and workings of the planet, we have been startled to discover how the course of life has been buffeted by a variety of cosmological and geological accidents—without which we would not be here. As we have explored human history, we have seen how pandemics, droughts, and other civilization-changing episodes have been triggered by random, singular events in nature that easily might not have happened. And as we have probed human biology and the factors that impact our individual lives, we have caught chance red-handed, reigning over the often-thin line between life and death.

This book tells the stories that Monod could not—of astonishing discoveries from the planetary to the molecular scale, from great upheavals across the globe to the machinery of chance that operates within every cell of every creature, including ourselves. And while these discoveries vaporize the comforts of anthropocentrism, the story of chance, I hope you will come to agree, is much more than highfalutin philosophy or the refutation of theologians’ wishful thinking.

I hope that you are awed—awed by the power and the drama of asteroids slamming into the planet, of continents colliding, and of the rapid rising and falling of ice and oceans; awed by the realization that we live on (and are at the mercy of a planet that is far more unstable than our short lives perceive; awed by the knowledge of how random chance is at the source of all of the beautiful and wondrous creatures with whom we share the planet; awed by the unique invisible accidents that made each one of us; and awed by the fact that we humans, recent descendants of bands of hunter-gatherers who persevered through a period of exceptional chaos, have in just the last fifty years or so, figured all of this out!

My goal here is to be comprehensible without being comprehensive. It is almost trivial to claim that the world is the way it is or that we are here because of a long chain of chance, albeit fortunate, events. The explanatory power I seek comes from specificity. It is essential to unpack some of those events to appreciate how they shape the direction of life. The layout of the book follows a simple three-part logic. I’ll begin with inanimate, external chance events that have shaped the conditions for life (Part One, “Stuff Happens”), and then turn to the internal random mechanism within every creature that generates the adaptations to those conditions (Part Two, “A World of Mistakes”). Then, I bring the story to the personal level (Part Three, “23 and You”) and how chance impacts our natural lives, as well as our deaths. Our chance-driven existence shatters long-held beliefs about humanity’s place and raises challenging questions about the meaning and purpose of our lives. In the Afterword, I’ll offer some possible replies with the help of some special guests.

This is a relatively small book for a really big idea. Science has given us a handful of really big ideas over the centuries, but they have been received in funny ways. Darwin had a huge idea that was very simple to understand, and even though the evidence is massive and everywhere, many refuse to believe it. Einstein had a brand new idea, and even though few understand it or the evidence for it, most everyone seems to believe it. Monod had a great idea, but these days most people (other than scholars) have not heard of it, or of him.

My greatest hope, then, is that this short book might be chance’s second chance.

Sean B. Carroll, A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You, Princeton University Press, 2020, pp. 6-12.

Modern biology as described by Monod pushes the linkage of probability, randomness and chance to the center. At the time, this was a very radical and profound way of looking at biology. If we combine Monod’s biology with theoretical physics like Lawrence Krauss’ A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing, we realize that accidentality is the bedrock on which our knowledge of the universe is built.

Line from Tennyson Poem: Thinking about Education

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson FRS (6 August, 1809 – 6 October, 1892) was the Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria’s reign and remains one of the most popular British poets.

One of his most famous poems is Locksley Hall (1835-1842).

In the poem, Tennyson predicts the rise of both civil aviation and military aviation with the following words:

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;

A key line in this poem is: “Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.”

This Tennyson line is not identical with what we are attempting here but it is helpful in terms of its basic intuition as to what “evaporates” from the mind and what might remain.

Our quest is more: develop through all these examples a sense of “omnidirectional zooming out” from any one field, lecture, book, movie, topic, question, quiz, discussion in schools and universities and create your own inner “map room.”

One “strange” characteristic of this particular map room is that it does not “banish the intensely personal” but considers that the basis and not some kind of illegitimate distraction. But that’s not all: it proposes that you hold in your mind the truth the education is itself found between the intensely personal and the global surround of techno-commerce, and that means that “the omnidirectional quest to understand” must always be aware of these levels and dimensions at the same time and in the same mind and person. Everything else is specialized training or platitudinous “motivational speaking.”

What we are introducing here is “equidistant” from all that and insists on an “all at once” evolving overview as odd as that may appear when you start.

You can neither “major in everything and all fields” and you also cannot neglect the deepest dimensions, taken together. This is the “razor’s edge” one must walk on.

Some Historical Notes on the Three Quests of China: Dignity, Stability, Understanding

Dignity Quest

In “The Philosopher,” a chapter in the 1922 travel book On a Chinese Screen, W. Somerset Maugham comments, “He was the greatest authority in China on Confucian learning.”

The philosopher mentioned above tells Maugham: 

“I took the Ph.D. in Berlin, you know,” he said.  “And afterwards I studied in Oxford.   …  But his study of Western philosophy had only served in the end to satisfy him that wisdom after all was to be found within the limits of the Confucian canon.  He accepted its philosophy with conviction.  If Confucianism gained so firm a hold on the Chinese it is because it explained and expressed them as no other system of thought could do.  He loathed the modern cry for individualism.  For him society was the unit, and the family the foundation of society.  He upheld the old China and the old school, monarchy, and the rigid canon of Confucius.  He grew violent and bitter as he spoke of the students fresh from foreign universities, who with sacrilegious hands tore down the oldest civilization in the world. ”

“But you, do you know what you are doing?” he exclaimed. “What is the reason for which you deem yourselves our betters? Have you excelled us in arts or letters? Have our thinkers been less profound than yours? Has our civilization been less elaborate, less complicated, less refined than yours? Why, when you lived in caves and clothed yourselves with skins we were a cultured people. Do you know that we tried an experiment which is unique in the history of the world? We sought to rule this great country not by force, but by wisdom. And for centuries we succeeded. Then why does the white man despise the yellow? Shall I tell you? Because he has invented the machine gun. That is your superiority. We are a defenseless horde and you can blow us into eternity. You have shattered the dream of our philosophers that the world could be governed by the power of law and order. And now you are teaching our young men your secret. You have thrust your hideous inventions upon us. Do you not know that we have a genius for mechanics? Do you not know that there are in this country four hundred millions of the most practical and industrious people in the world? Do you think it will take us long to learn? And what will become of your superiority when the yellow man can make as good guns as the white and fire them as straight? You have appealed to the machine gun and by the machine gun shall you be judged.”

Stability Quest

  1. The decade of the 1850s gives a most revealing picture of the Chinese sense of things falling apart.  The Taiping Rebellion, convulsed China in the 1850s. It was a utopian movement which wants to go backwards and forwards at the same time and arrive at a historical paradise.

  2. From 1859-1860, the Second Opium War racks China. The British extract more concessions from the Chinese by the Treaty of Tientsin, a tremendous new humiliation for the Chinese. As part of British “shock and awe” of that time the Summer Palace in Beijing is burned down.

  3. In Chinese society, to add to this misery, there is a tremendous conflict in China between the Hakka (客家, “Guest People”) with the Punti (本地, “Native/Original People”) called the Hakka–Punti conflict, and is referred to in the movie The Hawaiians, based on the James Michener novel.

  4. All of this Chinese turmoil and national weakness is itself taking place in a global context that is threatening. Commodore Perry and his “Black Ships” sail into Edo Bay (now Tokyo Bay) in 1853, to dictate terms to the Japanese which amount to “trade or die” (an American “shock and awe”).

  5. In 1857-1858, India convulses with the Indian Mutiny, which has been described as the opening chapter of the Indian Independence Movement. The Indian Mutiny, also known as the Sepoy Mutiny, was put down with shocking brutality. The Chinese watching the event, feel rage about the insouciant attitude of Westerners towards non-Western people.(A recent masterpiece Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker shows you the same insouciant attitude in the Bengal Famine of the 1940s and with Churchill’s dismissive comments about the human misery.) The Chinese who were studying news reports coming out of India suddenly learnt that control of India in 1858 was transferred permanently from the East India Company to the Crown, showing that the British could change the rules of the game at will.

  6. In the 19th century Chinese and Japanese thinkers came up with two definitive slogans, which they used to orient themselves.

    Slogan One

    “Western Technology, Eastern Ethics.” What is the balance point between West and the East? Xi Jinping (习近平) is also trying to find a balance. How American must a Chinese Silicon Valley have to be?

    Slogan Two

    “Rich Country, Strong Army.” How fast could China become a rich country with a strong army, without provoking a global backlash—think Chinese leaders since Mao.

  7. Certain opaque and chaotic phenomena in Chinese history haunt the Chinese mind. Mao was reading Chinese historians all his life to try to understand these phenomena. Chinese schoolboys are trying to understand the rebellion called the An Lu-Shan (安禄山) of 755-763, which takes place in the middle of the Tang Dynasty and plunges China into chaos. Leaders, scholars and schoolchildren of China want to decipher the events of this very classic rebellion in Chinese history and to understand what they are always trying to understand: how things go bad. An Lu-Shan was of Turkish and Sogdian origins, which created another kind of nervousness: turmoil in China coming from non-Chinese ethnic groups. Chinese brutality toward both the Tibetans and the Muslims within China echo these anxieties. This classical rebellion is interpreted by Chinese as the beginning of the end of the Tang Dynasty, the first Chinese Golden Age. China’s preoccupation with stability comes from its insecurity about national turmoil such as the An Lu-Shan Rebellion case, which could merge with foreign threats creating a nightmare for China.

  8. China was conquered by the Mongols who created the Yuan Dynasty circa 1300 A.D. China was conquered by the Manchus from 1644-1911. The Japanese assaulted China in the 1930s. Europeans colonized and broke China into pieces in the 19th century. The ultimate symbol of China’s defeat was the two Opium Wars—1839 and 1859—by the British. The tremendous humiliation suffered by the Chinese is masterfully conveyed by Arthur Waley’s classic book, The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes.

Quest to Understand

China and Charles Darwin, by James Pusey, captures the perplexity of the Western intellectual impact on China in the last few lines of the book. “But Charles Darwin honestly entered those mixtures in Chinese heads and made them different. So his influence was real. Chinese of course confused Darwin’s ideas and were confused by them, and of course they got confused in Chinese directions, but small wonder. Every people has gotten confused. For the fact of the matter is, when all is said and done, that no one knows what to make of evolution.”

Many Western ideas and philosophies are troubling and destabilizing for the Chinese such as, individualism before society and family; marriage based on romantic love alone; a society based on innovate-or-die.

The Chinese quest for such modes of stability has a perennial quality.

What We Mean by “Towards a Composite Understanding of Education”

(MI slogan, motto or catchphrase)

Let’s be concrete and start with the title of the classic 1978 book by the Princeton professor and 1979 Nobel Prize winner, Sir Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913 (introduced in the previous essay on “Looking Backwards and Forwards at the Same Time”).

Notice the following other dimensions that have to be included to “compositize” our understanding:

  1. The period 1870-1913/4 is called Globalization I by economic historians. Globalization in this view is not about Marco Polo, but the rise of world prices, such as for wheat.

  2. Paul Kennedy (Yale), who is known for his Rise and Fall of the Great Powers classic, wrote a tighter book called The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914 (1980), described as follows:

    “This book gives an account of the rivalry between Great Britain and Germany in the period leading to the First World War. It gives readers a thorough comparison of the two societies, their political cultures, economies, party politics, courts, the role of the press and pressure groups, and so on. …”

  3. The first treaty between a European power and an Asian country was signed in 1902, “The Anglo-Japanese Alliance.”

    “In this book, Professor Nish deals with one of the most important aspects of far eastern politics in the critical period between 1894 and 1907. His object is to demonstrate how Britain and Japan, at first separately and later jointly, reacted to Russian encroachments in China and east Asia; he is concerned also with the policies of the other European powers and of the U.S., to whose hostility towards the Anglo-Japanese alliance after 1905 Britain showed…”

  4. The first defeat of a European by an Asian nation (i.e., the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5). The famous Indian writer Pankaj Mishra wrote a recent book on this, showing how this defeat of a European country sent shock waves through the world and especially through the anti-colonial movements of Asia and Africa…

  5. Partition of Africa:

    “Between 1870 and 1914 the whole of Africa, apart from one or two small areas, was partitioned by the European powers.”

    (David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914, 1978, Penguin Books, page 203)

  6. Rise of Suburbia:

    “The 1890s saw the coming of the first electric trams, the first “tubes,” and the first motor-cars. By 1914, almost any provincial city of any size had its electric trams, mostly under municipal control, and London had its buses and underground (i.e., subway). “These changes in urban transport created suburbia.”

    (David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914, 1978, Penguin Books, page 202)

In other words, the world itself is a crisscrossing composite of processes at different scales.

We have growth and fluctuations, the partition of Africa, suburbanization, Anglo-German tensions, techno-revolutions (including those in urban transport), interacting with Globalization I.

All of this culminated in the “guns of August” (i.e., World War I).

We are downstream from World War I, what the Germans call the “Urkatastrophe” (i.e., original calamity), and its reincarnation in World War II and its progeny, the Cold War.

The more you can “compositize” the elements of this “historical matrix,” the deeper your MetaIntelligence will be. Hence the catchphrase for the MI site:

“Towards a Composite Understanding of Education”

Education and London’s Centrality in Global Finance: Then and Now

To understand our world, we have to go back to classics of understanding such as Lombard Street [Project Gutenberg ebook] which gives one a vivid sense of London’s rise as world’s banker, already in 1873. 

Our current world was certainly shaped by these long-term historical trends.

…But very few persons are aware how much greater the ready balance—the floating loan-fund which can be lent to any one or for any purpose—is in England than it is anywhere else in the world. A very few figures will show how large the London loan-fund is, and how much greater it is than any other. The known deposits—the deposits of banks which publish their accounts—are, in

London (31st December, 1872). . . . . . . .£120,000,000
Paris (27th February, 1873) . . . . . . . . . .13,000,000
New York (February, 1873) . . . . . . . . . .40,000,000
German Empire (31st January, 1873) . . .8,000,000

And the unknown deposits—the deposits in banks which do not publish their accounts—are in London much greater than those in any other of these cities. The bankers’ deposits of London are many times greater than those of any other city—those of Great Britain many times greater than those of any other country.

Of course the deposits of bankers are not a strictly accurate measure of the resources of a Money Market. On the contrary, much more cash exists out of banks in France and Germany, and in all non-banking countries, than could be found in England or Scotland, where banking is developed. But that cash is not, so to speak, “Money-Market money”: it is not attainable. Nothing but their immense misfortunes, nothing but a vast loan in their own securities, could have extracted the hoards of France from the custody of the French people. The offer of no other securities would have tempted them, for they had confidence in no other securities. For all other purposes the money hoarded was useless and might as well not have been hoarded. But the English money is “borrowable” money. Our people are bolder in dealing with their money than any continental nation, and even if they were not bolder, the mere fact that their money is deposited in a bank makes it far more obtainable. A million in the hands of a single banker is a great power; he can at once lend it where he will, and borrowers can come to him, because they know or believe that he has it. But the same sum scattered in tens and fifties through a whole nation is no power at all: no one knows where to find it or whom to ask for it. Concentration of money in banks, though not the sole cause, is the principal cause which has made the Money Market of England so exceedingly rich, so much beyond that of other countries.

…

…I believe that our system, though curious and peculiar, may be worked safely; but if we wish so to work it, we must study it. We must not think we have an easy task when we have a difficult task, or that we are living in a natural state when we are really living in an artificial one. Money will not manage itself, and Lombard Street has a great deal of money to manage.

Education and the Movies: The Issue of Political Irrationality

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a movie masterpiece that is enormously educational not for the particular details of the story but for the phenomenon of politics as an outlet for personal problems: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a 1969 British drama film, based on the novel of the same name by Muriel Spark. Directed by Ronald Neame, it stars Maggie Smith in the title role as an unrestrained teacher at a girls’ school in 1930s Edinburgh.

Maggie Smith (whom you know from Downton Abbey as the aggressive matriarch) plays a romantically naive schoolteacher at a girl’s school in Scotland, 1930s. She has a “big time” crush on a handsome gym teacher whom she discovers in bed with one of the young girls—“Sandy” and has a kind of nervous breakdown or better, “image of the whole correctness of the world” breakdown.

The teacher sees newsreels of Mussolini in Italy and begins to think of him as a “romantic savior and ‘world-cleaner’ who will clean up the illegitimate situation at her girls’s school in Edinburgh and salvage her dignity and place and prestige and sense of how the world should be. On the one hand Miss Brodie talks about the girls of the school as ‘la crème de la crème’ but how does that comport with ‘Sandy’ and the male gym teacher sharing their beds with each other? The ‘cognitive dissonance’ (incompatibility) in Miss Brodie’s mind is causing her to break down and flee into fantasy land (i.e., Mussolini will restore the romantic world to the way it’s supposed to be). She goes deeper and deeper into this nutty vision of salvation and romantic re-balancing and at the end of the movie, ‘Sandy’ senses that she’s coming unglued and is borderline bonkers. Thus the title ‘the prime of’ can be thought of as ironical or sardonic since the teacher Miss Brodie is flipping out and ‘maps’ her romantic frustrations” onto Mussolini. This is what makes politics so dangerous (i.e., it serves as a “Rorschach test” for people’s inner irrationalities and yearnings and they “see” what they need to see).

Harold Lasswell (died in 1978) spent his life exploring politics and people’s private lives, order, sense of things, grievances, in such books as Psychopathology and Politics.  If you watch the movie The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie you will see how people use politics as a “screen” on which they project their emotions, grievances, hurts, humiliations, hysteria, anger.

Harold Dwight Lasswell (February 13, 1902 – December 18, 1978) was a leading American political scientist and communications theorist. He was a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, and he was a professor of law at Yale University. He served as president of the American Political Science Association (APSA), of the American Society of International Law and of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS).

He has been described as a “one-man university” whose “competence in, and contributions to, anthropology, communications, economics, law, philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and sociology are enough to make him a political scientist in the model of classical Greece.”

Table of Contents for Lasswell’s Psychopathology and Politics Book

Introduction
Preface
I. Life-Histories and Political Science
II. The Psychopathological Approach
III. A New Technique of Thinking
IV. The Criteria of Political Types
V. Theories of Personality Development
VI. Political Agitators
VII. Political Agitators—Continued
VIII. Political Administrators
IX. Political Convictions
X. The Politics of Prevention
XI. The Prolonged Interview and Its Objectification
XII. The Personality System and Its Substitutive Reactions
XIII. The State as a Manifold of Events
Afterthoughts—Thirty Years Later
Appendix A. Select Bibliography
Appendix B. Question List on Political Practices
Index

(2016 reprint of 1930 edition. Full facsimile of the original edition.)

First published in 1930, this classic study of personality types remains vital for the understanding of contemporary public figures. Lasswell’s pioneering application of the concepts of clinical psychology to the understanding of power brokers in politics, business, and even the church offers insights into the careers of leaders as diverse as Adolf Hitler and, arguably to more recent figures such as Richard Nixon, Donald Trump and the Clintons.

Movies should be your off-campus alternate university. You should ask yourself does this movie and Lasswell’s notions of psychopathology in politics help me understand authoritarian leaders today and such bizarre phenomena as half-dead prisoners in Stalin’s gulags bursting into tears in March 1953 when they learned of his death. Why sob over the death of the man who’s murdering you and tormenting you and your family?

How to See the Rise of Speculative Finance via Novels: Trollope

Anthony Trollope (died in 1882), the great British novelist, gives us a glimpse of the world of speculative finance in the nineteenth century where to some extent the stock market becomes a kind of “betting parlor” where abstract bets can be made on previous bets in a kind of “infinite regress.”

The example here concerns coffee, guano, and something called “Kauri gum” which is the title of a chapter in The Prime Minister, Trollope’s novel, which introduces us to the “betting parlor” tendency, which is not unique to the prelude to our own Great Recession of 2008.

Sexty Parker sympathized with him to the full, — especially as that first 500 pounds, which he had received from Mr Wharton, had gone into Sexty’s coffers. At that time Lopez and Sexty were together committed to large speculations in the guano trade, and Sexty’s mind was by no means easy in the early periods of the day. As he went into town by his train he would think of his wife and family and of the terrible things that might happen to them. But yet, up to this period, money had always been forthcoming from Lopez when absolutely wanted, and Sexty was quite alive to the fact that he was living with a freedom of expenditure in his own household that he had never known before, and that without apparent damage. Whenever, therefore, at some critical moment, a much-needed sum of money was produced Sexty would become lighthearted, triumphant, and very sympathetic. ‘Well; — I never heard such a story,’ he had said when Lopez was insisting on his wrongs. ‘That’s what the Dukes and Duchesses call honour among thieves! Well, Ferdy, my boy, if you stand that you’ll stand anything.’ In these latter days Sexty had become very intimate with his partner.

It was evident on that day to Sexty Parker that his partner was a man of great resources. Though things sometimes looked very bad, yet money always ‘turned up’. Some of their buyings and sellings had answered pretty well. Some had been great failures. No great stroke had been made as yet, but then the great stroke was always being expected. Sexty’s fears were greatly exaggerated by the feeling that the coffee and guano were not always real coffee and guano. His partner, indeed, was of the opinion that in such a trade as this they were following there was no need at all of real coffee or real guano, and explained his theory with considerable eloquence. ‘If I buy a ton of coffee and keep it six weeks, why do I buy it and keep it, and why does the seller sell it instead of keeping it? The seller sells it because he thinks he can do best by parting with it now at a certain price. I buy it because I think I can make money by keeping it. It is just the same as though we were back to our opinions. He backs the fall. I back the rise. You needn’t have coffee and you needn’t have guano to do this. Indeed the possession of the coffee or guano is only a very clumsy addition to the trouble of your profession. I make it my study to watch the markets; — but I needn’t buy everything I see in order to make money by my labour and intelligence.’ Sexty Parker before his lunch always thought that his partner was wrong, but after that ceremony he almost daily became a convert to the great doctrine. Coffee and guano still had to be bought because the world was dull and would not learn the tricks of trade as taught by Ferdinand Lopez, — also possibly because somebody might want such articles, — but our enterprising hero looked for a time in which no such dull burden should be imposed on him.

On this day, when the Duke’s 500 pounds was turned into the business, Sexty yielded in a large matter which his partner had been pressing upon him for the last week. They bought a cargo of Kauri gum, coming from New Zealand. Lopez had reasons for thinking that Kauri gum must have a great rise. There was an immense demand for amber, and Kauri gum might be used as a substitute, and in six months’ time would be double its present value. This unfortunately was a real cargo. He could not find an individual so enterprising as to venture to deal in a cargo of Kauri gum after his fashion. But the next best thing was done. The real cargo was bought, and his name and Sexty’s name were on the bills given for the goods. On that day he returned home in high spirits for he did believe in his own intelligence and good fortune.

(Trollope, The Prime Minister, Chapter 43, “Kauri Gum”)

One could “marry” this mini-essay to the previous one about Dreiser’s novel to get a fuller picture of the story of our technology-and-finance strand of the present world.

There is a potentially unhealthy “dephysicalization” of finance whereby you don’t need to think about actual “coffee and guano and Kauri gum” at all but only on the “betting structure” (i.e., horse races without horses, so to speak).