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Now, on to some items of interest from around the interwebs.
UFO Beliefs
I’ve been interested in UFOs for a while — first as a kid taking the abduction narratives as scary but true stories, later as a sociologist taking them as a fascinating bit of modern folklore.
From that sociology of ideas and culture angle, consider this piece in Current by professor of history and religion Matthew Bowman on the Betty and Barney Hill case. If you haven’t heard of it, this supposed incident from the 1960s helped spawn the whole genre of reports about abduction by grey, bug-eyed aliens. There was even a TV movie about it starring James Earl Jones as Barney and the grandmother from Rosanne as Betty.
Bowman notes that various Christian leaders were initially receptive to claims about flying saucers and alien visitation, though their exact responses varied. Some rejected alien life as contradictory to Genesis, but nonetheless thought that UFOs were a real phenomenon and a sign from God. But in final analysis, the Unitarian Hills found their home not in Christianity but in New Age circles:
After their rejection at the hands of the American scientific and military establishment, the Hills found a home among such people, who easily incorporated their story of abduction and esoteric knowledge into a New Age worldview. By the end of their lives the Hills had blended the story of their encounter with psychic practice, the cosmic progress of all intelligent beings, and channeling of superhuman intelligences.
In a way, the Hills’ own story is a microcosm of the last fifty years of American religious history: a drift away from institution and toward eclectic practice, away from traditional models of Christianity and toward esoteric and Eastern belief, and away from the confidence of mid-century Christian leaders and toward skepticism and self-fashioning. The study of UFOs, it turns out, lies near the heart of much else.
Pointer from John Fea on Twitter X.
A lot of people have noticed the similarity between modern UFO abductions and old folk tales about being kidnapped by fairies and little people. Modern UFO stories also have tales of aliens using humans to make hybrid babies, which sound a bit like the changelings of European folklore. For some, like folklorist Thomas Bullard (paywalled journal article here), this is a sign that society reinvented old folk beliefs with a coat of sci-fi paint. For others it’s a sign that aliens have been up to these shenanigans all along, only people in ye olden days interpreted it in a supernatural rather than scientific way.
One might apply either perspective to this essay by Leon at Hidden Japan. He writes of how a Japanese folk tale contains elements of the modern UFO story — it involves a human-looking woman eventually goes back to her home in another world via a craft that sure looks like a flying saucer.
One might suspect cultural diffusion as an explanation, but the story dates from a century before flying saucer stories took off in the US — which means it dates from when the Tokugawa Shogunate still ran the show, and Japan was fairly isolated. Leon notes inspiration for these stories may well have been coastal fishermen in Tokugawa Japan spotting weird Western ships for the first time.
Mountain Mama
My youthful interest in UFO stories went along with an interest in crypids like Bigfoot. And you get a bit of both in the story of the Flatwoods Monster, aka the Braxton County Monster, one of several unique cryptids to come out of West Virginia (others being the Mothman and the Grafton monster). Thus it warmed the cockles of my heart when this year’s Mrs. West Virginian wore a Flatwoods Monster costume at the pageant.
Other news from these parts is less heartwarming. At West Virginia University, the faculty recently had a landslide vote of no confidence in President Gordon Gee, blaming the current mass layoffs on the administration overspending on buildings, bureaucrats, and goofy frills.
Mere minutes after the vote, the Board of Governors — a collection of lawyers and businessmen who nominally have authority over the president — released a statement of full-throated support for Gee. Faculty opinion doesn’t carry much weight.
Granted, faculty can be pretty goofy too and many or most would oppose even sensible changes. But I don’t see much evidence that the current transformation is about lowering student costs, improving their job prospects, or reigning in woke nonsense. And it’s sure not streamlining the administration. I’m still leaning toward the cuts being less a cunning plan than a major bungle followed by the higher ups making sure their own chairs remain when the music stops.
On that note, the administration cut the Library budget by $800K, which is approximately the same amount as the President’s base salary.
Crime
Speaking of higher ed budgets, lately I’ve been talking with criminologist Scott Jacques about this work to lower learning costs for criminology students and provide open access to criminology papers and datasets. See the link for more information on his ventures.
And speaking of criminology, the 2022 National Crime Victimization Survey results are now available via the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
If you don’t know, these data are based on surveys of the general population about their experience with crime. It’s interesting to compare to data from the Uniform Crime Reports, which is based on crimes recorded by police departments. According to the victimization survey, property and violent crime were up in 2022 from 2021 but were getting reported less. It’s the sort of thing you might expect if the rise in crime were part of a general retreat of law from various social locations. Pointer from sociologist/criminologist Chris Uggen on Twitter.
In addition to any general rise or fall in crime, I’m interested in why particular patterns of crime go in and out of fashion. At the Intrinsic Perspective, Erik Hoel argues that the traditional serial killer is in decline, but a new species — the subway pusher — is growing.
While the rise of mass shootings is tracked and discussed and made into movies, the lowly subway pusher escapes cultural notice.
Yet the attacks can be just as horrific. As a former New Yorker I cannot help but run into stories (perhaps some algorithm at X has me marked) wherein some innocent is flung bodily by a crazy person onto the tracks, often right in front of the train. The latest victim I read about: Emine Ozsoy. She’s a Turkish immigrant and artist, who had moved to NYC to be with her husband, and who in mid-May had her head randomly shoved into a moving subway train.
… Although the total number remain low, subway shovings have become a clear genre of crime. In fact, Ozsoy was just one victim in a string of attacks within weeks. In a panic, there is now a 100 million dollar program to install barriers to prevent further attacks.
….if you go back to 2014, the New York Post was reporting that there had been just four subway pushings in the last two years. Only four from 2012 to 2014? And then 21 pushings in 2021? And more than even that by just October in 2022?
Dear Reader: Any theories?
Also on the topic of crime, sociologists Mark Cooney and Jeffrey Patterson recently did an analysis of homicide in England between 1250-1750, finding that the decline of third-party intervention and social concern with honor made conflicts more individualized and less collective. The result is that conflicts became less lethal, causing a decline in homicide.
Moralistic violence is, as Cooney has put it before, “the dark side of community.”
Long History
Several months ago, I noted the bet between Scott Alexander and Samo Burja on whether we’ll find evidence of complex civilizations from before the end of the last Ice Age (or, technically, Glacial Period). On Twitter, Burja is taking this news of a 12,000-year-old public building in Southern Turkey as a good sign for his case. Though this Boncuklu Tarla site is about a thousand years older than nearby Globeki Tepe, Alexander thinks the buildings are neither old enough nor complex enough to shift his priors on the issue.
Politics
Though Bradley Campbell and I’s Rise of Victimhood Culture touches on politics, I don’t normally follow it all that closely. I find object-level politics so stupid and unseemly that I’d rather just read about street crime. But as the saying goes: Even if you’re not interested in politics, politics is interested in you.
One way it might be interested in you is if the state needs to draft some soldiers. Personally, I’m well past the age when anyone would draft me for anything less than enemy tanks on the White House lawn. But it’s interesting to note that politicians’ support for bringing back the draft has a lot to do with whether or not their own sons have aged out of their fighting years.
A new article in the Journal of Political Economy with the clever title “No Kin in the Game” (paywalled, depending on your location) claims evidence for this:
“We compare the voting behavior of legislators with draft age sons versus draft age daughters during the conscription-era wars of the twentieth century. We estimate that having a draft age son reduces pro conscription voting by 7–11 percentage points. Support for conscription recovers when a legislator’s son ages out of eligibility.”
Pointer from Robin Hanson.
Speaking of politics, over at In My Tribe, Arnold Kling responds to the right-wing critics of the Republican establishment by tallying up the things he thinks that the Establishment gets right, as compared to either Democrats or the National Conservative (populist/nationalist) right. From his libertarian perspective the Establishment actually comes out ahead of both its right and left competitors. But he says that none of the major factions, even the Trumpist one, display much interest in actually dealing with the opioid crisis or lack of economic opportunities in Trump country.
At Not on Your Team But Always Fair, Helen Dale and Lorenzo Warby describe the resurgence of nationalism as a “revolt of the somewheres.”
The idea is that the educated professional class that runs most things nowadays has a social milieu where people move around for education and work, and thus have no particular deep roots or attachments to any locality. These anywheres have divergent interests from the somewheres who worry about maintaining local social capital and buffering their communities from external economic shocks. And the somewheres are beginning to react to their declining political influence over the past few decades.
Regarding populism in general, Richard Hanania argues against it not just as bad politics but on the grounds that it makes the people worse:
In most other areas of life, where they face the direct consequences of their actions and have relevant experience, individuals tend to be relatively humane, realistic, logical, and honest. So if the political views of most individuals are going to be evil, then a world where people think about politics 1% of the time is better than one where they think about it 10% or 20% of the time and it becomes central to their identity. Populism makes both individuals and society worse off. I know old people who have always had a sort of crazy worldview, but have become less bearable as cable news and Facebook have eaten the rest of their brains.
This reminds me of my disappointment with seeing figures like famed author Stephen King spout political takes on Twitter. Presumably the man has sophisticated and insightful things to say about writing, publishing, and literature, but what you get on social media is “Republicans are Nazis!”-level stuff that could have come from any half-wit college sophomore.
It’s worth pointing out, though, that Hanania had an earlier piece on how the left wins more often because lefties are more motivated, and in that he seems pretty critical of the righties who “simply care less about the future of their country.” I suspect he’d still have his trademark Nietzschean contempt for righty proles whether they cared more or cared less.
And yes, I’ll probably review his new book Origins of Woke in the near future. He has a piece plugging it now in Quillette. His main point of overlap with Campbell and I’s work is that we identify the proliferation of moralistic bureaucracy as one cause of changing moral culture, and Hanania purports to explain the rise of moralistic bureaucracy as the result of legal policy.
My Back Catalogue
I recently had occasion to make a list of all the articles I’ve published in online outlets over the past few years, either by myself or with Campbell. Here’s the links if you’re interested:
“Why Do People Die by Suicide? Mental Illness Isn’t the Only Cause.”
“The End of Academe: Free Speech and the Silencing of Dissent.”
I’m not saying they’re all gold, but I think they hold up pretty well.
“We’re After Men.”
On the Art of Manliness podcast, Jon Tyson talks about the healthy maturation of boys into men as “the 5 shifts of manhood.” The big theme is the obstacles modern life prevents to such maturation.
Discussing the lack of opportunities to develop skills in conflict management or to learn assertiveness, Tyson mentions that he has his own children go to the counter at fast food places and ask for a drink refill — just for a tiny bit of experience in being proactive.
Also per Tyson, “You gotta get your son out of his room.”
Speaking of, I’ve seen this little graphic making the rounds:
Article here, possibly paywalled depending on your location.
On manly achievement: As a role model for young males, Elon Musk is a mixed bag. Like most history-making individuals, both his virtues and vices standing out as more extreme than those of normal people, and to complicate matters they might be two sides of the same coin.
Scott Alexander reviews a book on Musk and his achievements, noting that he succeeds in spite of childlike volatility because he is extremely bright, insanely determined, and good at recruiting and inspiring other talented people to follow his mission.
I’m glad people like him are out there creating the future, but I wouldn’t trade his life for mine. Were I smart enough to do rocket science, the unstable family life and 72-hour work benders aren’t a price I would want to pay. Even if the work hours didn’t make me crack, reading to my kids at night is too valuable.
Speaking of high achieving men, Alexander the Great was certainly one by ancient standards. But I don’t think the bloodthirsty terminal alcoholic even qualifies as a mixed bag for a modern male role model. Still, I was interested in this Scott Alexander post on the weird genre of stories his life spawned: The Alexander Romance.
Music
A friend’s band, Raen, has released their first album: Burning Suns. You can see their first single on Youtube: “Red Blue Gold.” You can order the album on CD or vinyl at Casita Records or stream it from Bandcamp.
Speaking of friends’ bands, The Drugs’ 2006 First Hit’s Free is on Youtube as well.
None of my friends, so far as I know, have been successful enough to transform their musical output into financial instruments. But per this piece at Marginal Revolution, apparently that is something that has been done.
Links to Links
If you like this sort of post, check out Links for August; Links for July, and Links for June.
Thanks for reading! And once again if you like the content, consider leaving a tip or becoming a subscriber.
Substacks cited above:
(Intrinsic Perspective); (Leon); (Scott Alexander); ; (In My Tribe); (Lorenzo Warby/Helen Dale).
Cheers!
Thanks for the shout out!