Shifting views on immigration

In 1939, the infamous ship St. Louis limped around the Atlantic and Caribbean with over 900 German Jews on board. Arm-twisted by the Nazis, but also shamefully, the United States and Cuba both refused sanctuary to the refugees. Eventually the ship returned to Germany and most of the passengers on board were eventually killed during the Holocaust.

Bard College professor an director of the Hannah Arendt Center, Roger Berkowitz talks about a luckier refugee, Hanna Arendt: In 1943, Arendt wrote a poignant essay 'We Refugees': "The stateless person, without the right to residence and without the right to work, had of course constantly to transgress the law."

Berkowitz expands on Arendt's experience: 
"The word, refugee, flattens a person and a people marked by loss and vulnerability. Having lost their home, their language, their friends, and their families, refugees live in camps, in public; they experience the rupture of their private lives and their public visibility as only a mass.
   "The refugee is transformed from a person with a history and world into a pitiable figure. We can have compassion for an individual, look into their eyes, touch their shoulder, and feel the humanness in their pain. But faced with masses of refugees hands open, seeking refuge, compassion is too often replaced by pity (if not by fear).”

I’ve long accused all sides of hypocrisy regarding immigration!

History shows that Democrats protect the borders and reduce illegal immigration --demonstrably better and more vigorously than Republicans (till Trump) -- for the same reasons that they boosted legal immigration — because legal immigrants can join unions and eventually vote. Yes, this sounds counter to popular impressions because liberals try to be kind to illegals, once they are here. But democratic presidents always boosted the Border Patrol (Obama deported all the illegals who misbehaved, who he could get his hands on).

Think about why, until 9/11, GOP presidents always slashed the BP. It's true!  Why? Because their owner caste loves cheap labor that must live in fear and that undercuts unions.

If cranky, white, male boomers want to blame anyone for the changing look of America, blame the Democrats all right! But for legal immigration.  The landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 eased the path across the nation's borders for people from Asia and Africa by removing old regional quotas. That was moral and right.

And now the GOP Congress is moving against legal immigration.  

That 1965 Democratic Congress also did something that seems also to be right-sounding… easing the way for families to re-unite, if one member is already legally a U.S. resident. And there, well, I disagree. 

Sure, unite parents and children and spouses. But the sibling and cousin advantage is just immoral and wrong. 

Think.  Anyone in another country who has a U.S. relative is already much luckier than his neighbors in say, Bangladesh. Think, I mean it, actually think about this. Those relatives back home already get remittances and packages and favors, and help with legal paperwork trying to emigrate. They are already lucky! Why should they automatically be luckier than their neighbors, in Dacca?  Don’t those neighbors deserve a chance, too? See my earlier posting: Hidden factors in the rush to immigration reform. Must luck be kept limited to arbitrary family chains?

Does this mean I approve of a Republican bill?  Really? These monsters who have betrayed Adam Smith and Lincoln and who have sent Barry Goldwater spinning in his grave? 

Well, in fact, while it seems old-fashioned, I am capable of fine parsing. And there are portions of this bill that are as loathsome as anything else spewing from Paul Ryan’s Confederate Treason Cabal. But to be honest, there are parts that I can shrug over.

Look, we need to prioritize. Obama himself had no problems with simultaneously creating a citizenship path for "dreamers" - kids who came here as babies, while vigorously deporting slimes who betrayed their adopted land by wreaking crime and harm.  He called for kindness and help for hard-workers who were already here... while spending quite a few millions beefing up the Border Patrol and laying hundreds of miles of new fences, so immigration can channel through the legal processes.

Just in order to shock you all, let me say: "Build your stupid wall." It's about time Republicans were willing to employ lots of semi-skilled workers in infrastructure, creating high velocity money in the economy instead of sucking us dry with tax gifts to the rich.

If this were a negotiation, I'd let em have the wall, in exchange for... for... for not being jerks at war with facts and brains and heart in every way they can possibly find.

== Immigration and Violence ==

From the Los Angeles Times: Californians are 30% less likely to die a violent death today than other Americans. Since 1980, California’s rate of reported crime overall has fallen by 62%. The state’s criminal arrest rates, too, have fallen considerably, by 55% overall, and by 80% among people younger than 18 — a population, it is worth noting, that is now 72% nonwhite. 

Violent crime in California has fallen by an impressive 50% in the same period. This includes drops in robberies (65%), homicide (68%), and rapes and assaults (more than 40%). That last figure is even more remarkable when you consider that the legal definitions of both assault and rape were expanded during these years.

Trump often points at violence in Chicago. An outlier that is less blue and less immigrant rich, and far smaller than California. 

Oh, and California generates inventions and jobs faster than anyone. Texas keeps sending governors here to try to raid and poach our companies. Um, why? Can't generate your own?

Efficient government, top schools and universities... and sure, filled with problems... that are being handled better than any red state. Why? How? We haven't abandoned the formula of the Greatest Generation. We have unions, universities, infrastructure, tolerance and the rich pay taxes. And business flourishes. 

Oh, one more thing. We like being a little bit funky-crazy. It's cool. It is one of many reasons why we're the sane ones.

Violence and Progress, Part II: Is Conflict Necessary for Human Advancement?

In Part One we examined the notion that Steven Pinker promotes (in The Better Angels of Our Nature), that palpable progress has been made in reducing violence and poverty, worldwide -- and the harsh reaction these facts ignite, among dogmatics of both right and left. We did this by critiquing a purported pundit's deeply dismal and dishonest "rebuttal" of Pinker.

I won't even go to the real incitement caused by my friend, XPrize-founder Peter Diamandis, in his books Abundance: The Future is Better than you think and Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World, which suggest that progress will soon accelerate so fast that even cynical grouches will be dazzled. That I gotta see. Suffice it to say that Peter leaps far beyond Pinker's cautious and guarded optimism. 

It is a deeply important matter, especially as getting to this promised land will entail not only rejecting fanaticisms of the far-left and entire-right. Or some of the "abundance" geeks - not Peter - who think it will come blithely, naturally and easy. No, the opportunities are there, but we'll have to work for them.

But I am not done being provocative.  For you see, another factor is whether some harshness in the human experience in one more essential ingredient. Whether even war might be part of what has moved us forward.

== The power of opposition ==

A pair of best-selling books by Stanford Professor Ian Morris make the bold assertion that dynamic competition is just as important for human development as cooperation and shared purpose. His titles are deliberately provocative: “Why The West Rules — For Now” and “WAR! What is it Good For? Conflict and Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots.”

Well, well. From that alone, you can catch a strong whiff of Morris’s argument, that competition — even the violent kind — can be a core driver that leads to stronger and better human civilizations.

Of course this might, at first sight, appear to be an endorsement of enduring right-wing nostrums — that society should emulate nature, red in tooth and claw, because competitive evolution has been the great driver of adaptation and change, from bacteria to fish to mammals. Species improve their fitness by allowing the devil to take the hindmost. It is a bloody business. Also a slow and highly inefficient one, when competition manifests under Mother Nature.

Nor was it much better across the six to ten millennia since human tribes gathered together in regimes larger than tribes. Urban civilization required a top tier of rulers and priests, whose main obsession soon became staying on top, and ensuring their sons could take other mens’ women and wheat. Below that paramount level, a veneer of specialist scribes and artisans also benefited from taxing the mass of farmers and serfs, though arguably giving value, in return. 

Across these eras, in a vast majority of cultures, priests and kings generally suppressed any spirit of lively or fair competition, far more than they encouraged it. Status was inherited, as heaven obviously intended.

Still, despite this pattern of oligarchic conservatism, Morris makes the case that progress often happened anyway, especially when those pyramids of feudal privilege clashed with each other. Indeed, history is a tragic mess of delusion and horrific statecraft. But our ancestors do seem to have stumbled ahead a bit quicker when the lords were worried about other barons across the hills. Spured by outside threats, the elite castes devoted more effort to encouraging  innovation from bright subjects, instead of repressing it.

Examples from the past would include the Five Kingdoms of ancient China, which developed far faster than during the subsequent Qin Unification era.  And of course post-Renaissance Europe, when innovation skyrocketed under competitive pressure among nations of a fractured continent.  Indeed, this lateral competition is likely what led to the Industrial Revolution and its subsequent rapid leveraging of fossil fuels and sail and metals.

== Lateral drive ==

Looking at eras in parallel, comparing apples to apples, past eras tended to be more productive when they featured lateral competition than when they were rigidly top-down hierarchical. The same is true of industrial societies, when viewed in parallel.

Lateral competition can also be unpleasant and destructive! The examples I gave were also times of great violence. In China and Europe, some moderating forces helped keep violence from ruining the renaissances. Still, generally, average folk lived calmer, safer lives under an imperial “pax” like Pax Romana, Pax Sinica and Pax Brittanica, than in eras filled with lateral strife.

But we are discussing progress here, and without question progress does benefit from competition. Ideally competition in which many moderating forces, like law and democracy and mass education regulate the rivalry, maximizing market virtues and minimizing cheating or blood on the floor.

I’ve gone into and discussed the innovative ways that first Periclean Athens and Republican Florence tentatively tried to use rule-systems to keep competition flat-open-fair… then a much stronger experiment ensued, in which (mostly) western markets, democracy, science and courts regulated competition with one foremost aim — to maximize creative output in positive-sum ways by minimizing cheating.

Please dig this as I repeat it: cheating and blood were the chief hallmarks of feudalism, whose variants dominated 99% of societies with agriculture. Fierce repression to maintain inherited privilege was always the biggest kind of cheating, stifling ambitious innovation among those consigned to lower orders.  There is no greater defining trait of feudalism… in all its many variants… than conniving cartels of cheaters.

== More comparing oranges to oranges ==

During the 19th and 20th centuries, innovation thrived most in nations that encouraged middle class ambition, through education, social mobility and some degree of democratic rights. Bismarck’s Germany retained many feudal trappings and privileges, but it accelerated to catch up with the liberal societies of France, England and the U.S. precisely when education, land and rights reforms removed cheater dominance from the necks of  farmers, tradesmen, skilled workers and the bourgeoisie.  

The very same thing happened in Japan. Indeed, the beginnings of this phenomenon were seen in late Czarist Russia. The process is one that Karl Marx understood far, far better than today’s ill-read leftists do.

What neither Marx nor the classic right expected was the Twentieth Century Crisis that began with European monarchies and oligarchies self-destructing in a stunning maelstrom of stupidity, obstinacy, class-rigidity, stupidity, delusion and stupidity. Whereupon fanatical quasi-religions in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia repressed free thought and crushed the diversity of viewpoints that engenders flat-open-fair-confident competition.  

If the Nazis drove away all their scientists, the Soviets tried to tightly channel creativity. Both empires set up top-cabals of cheating nobility almost exactly like the classic human pattern… based on party membership that soon was heavily family-inherited.  Both empires became uncreative and stagnant, as did Maoist China.

If I sound like I am crowing the right’s triumphalist line, then forget it! Cheaters abound and cleverly seek new ways to cheat. Today — as happened in America’s “Gilded Age” — cabals of would be feudal lords are attempting a putsch to crush our diamond-shaped, flat-open-fair competitive systems back into feudal-style pyramids of inherited privilege.  

Between the left’s silly rejection of competition as a creative force, and the right’s delusion that flat-open-fair competition can happen without intense regulation to stave off cheaters, it seems we are starved of the intellectual understanding that we need, in order to keep this renaissance going.

== Summing up ==

Yes, pre-industrial societies did innovate! But note how many things were lost — Bagdhad batteries, Hero’s steam engines, Antikiythera-geared computers — all for lack of a patent regime that would protect and reward innovators for sharing, instead of forcing them to rely on secrecy… which was itself a kind of elite cheating.  And secrecy of method led, inevitably, to countless innovations simply being lost, the next time a city burned or a master died childless. The result was relentless, cyclical amnesia.  

Add to this deliberate repression by policy, as when a Chinese emperor rejected his father's anomalous enthusiasm for curiosity; he burned all of Admiral Cheng-He’s ships and trashed the records of those great voyages, thus setting in stagnation. Indeed, later Ming Dynasty emperors were amazed by the clocks provided by visiting Europeans, till scholars chimed in: “Oh yes, we used to have such things.”

Hyper-conservative societies were unable to totally stifle innovation precisely because they were unstable.  But in the future that may not be so. Both Orwell and Huxley showed us methods that - if adopted by a fierce autarchy - might empower it to be both all-seeing and permanent. And paranoid toward any new thing that might disrupt the stable order.

Lest any of you misconstrue that I am saying that primitive societies are inferior,  I am not. They did their thing and the few that did move forward, against terrible handicaps, helped to create the dais upon which we stand and accomplish wonders.

No, I am critical of a honey-pot attractor style of governance that seems to have pervaded 90%+ of all societies, in all eras.  Till now, that style merely impeded and slowed us down.

In the future… and perhaps across the cosmos… high tech methods of control might not just slow progress, but stifle it completely. Especially technologies like space travel, that would threaten any rigid caste system. 

And that is why we must fight today’s oligarchic putsch by an aristocracy-loving entire-right-wing seeking to end the Enlightenment, while we also keep a wary eye on the manias of a far-left that sneers at liberalism for its belief that competition can be a great, creative force.

The First Liberal — Adam Smith — was right (as Ian Morris contends) that competitiveness is the great steed that will overcome all obstacles and take us far — perhaps even across the galaxy.  

But it is a steed that requires close attention, regulation and care. Because 6000 years have shown us what happens otherwise.

==

Return to Part I: Violence, War and an Improving World: The Pinker Effect

Violence, War and an Improving World - Part I: The Pinker Effect

A while ago I offered up an in-depth exploration of the mythic system of modern science fiction, as illustrated in James Cameron's epic film Avatar, exposing how a very healthy reflex (cultural self-criticism) all-too often sours into something much less wholesome -- a mythology that western civilization is not improvable.  That our society's inherent vileness merits only self-loathing and despair.

Ironically, some of the most sincere voices in film and fiction, who push messages of progress, are instead undermining it by encouraging cynical gloom. Take my esteemed colleague in the craft of creating worlds, Charles Stross, whose popular blog is often on target when it comes to listing phenomena that push against any hope for continuing our Western Democratic Scientific Enlightenment. The failure modes that he lists are daunting and mostly very real... and tell only half the story...  

The other half -- how we got the freedom and other goodies that are in peril, in the first place -- almost never comes up, nor the many, many countervailing forces that we might use - as our ancestors used them - to keep the Enlightenment Experiment going.

Why this obsession with downer news? Well, for one thing, dire warnings are more useful than polyanna-pangloss-happy ravings! If I must choose - zero-sum - between extremes, then please do have the cynics come sit next to me! 

But zero-sum is deeply stupid and self-defeating. As is stylish cynicism, over the long run. Diagnosing a disease is most effective when it is accompanied by a confident determination to take action. And that, in turn, requires some sense of the body's strengths, as well as its weaknesses.

In this new series, I plan to show how this same syndrome  pervades academia and popular punditry. The overall result has been a shattering of confidence in our ability to improve, giving comfort to those who see no reason to improve, at all.

== The worst sin: admitting good news == 

Among the most important books of our era is Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011) which presents voluminous statistical and other evidence to show that the cynical catechisms of both left and right are specious. 

The crux: there is enough good news in human affairs to merit some cautious optimism. As overall per-capita rates of violence plummet, worldwide (though not in hellish trouble spots)… as poverty declines and ever-larger fractions of the world’s children bring school books back to homes with electricity, clean water and plentiful food… and as ever increasing numbers of girls feel empowered over their own lives… the real question boils down to: 

“Why is such good news anathema — even rage-inducing — among zealots at all ends of the political spectrum?”

To be clear, Pinker and his supporters have never said “there has been some progress — therefore let’s all relax.” 

But that is what so many hear. And that perception is, in its own right, deeply sick.

The fear on the left is that any admission of real progress will sap the intensity of our passion to save the world. The dread on the right is even more intense -- that Pinker’s statistics will show past liberal and progressive efforts were, in large measure, responsible for this tentatively good news. 

Now please, look over those two sentences again. Don't skim. They are blatantly true, and reveal stunning psychoses spanning our so-called political “spectrum.” In fact, both sides are functionally insane. Especially liberals, for not seeing the simple sales-pitch they could start using:

“You see? Progressivism works! We’re halfway there! Of course, if we don’t double down and fix the rest, all of our hard-won gains will be lost and we’ll all die! But Pinker’s statistics show it’s possible! So yay Pinker. And let’s embrace optimism. Step up, with confidence, spurn the gloomists and naysayers, and double down on progress!”

That is what a few pragmatist liberals (the only sane political bloc left in the U.S.) do say! But at the far-left (very different from “liberals”) -- even the possibility of an agenda based on confidence and optimism is utterly anathema. And thus, they play into the hands of the even-more-sick right.

== Attacking Pinker ==

Pinker’s statistics are hard to refute, so how do the paladins of pessimism respond? In this article by John Gray from The Guardian - Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war -  Mr. Gray argues with deceitful tricks and outright lies. 

He starts by pointing out that Enlightenment philosophers like Locke and Voltaire — while demanding freedom for the common man, and definitions of citizenship an order of magnitude more inclusive than before — also muttered some statements that seem racist or bigoted or sexist, to modern ears. How monstrously vile…

... by which I mean vile of Gray. In judging sages of the past, the rule must be “did they try hard to push our horizons of inclusion wider than the assumptions under which they had been raised?” If they fought to enlarge tolerance and opportunity beyond what men and women of their times took for granted, then yes, they were heroes of “enlightenment” and not hypocrites, as manipulative cynics like Mr. Gray would have you believe.  

But let’s elaborate on that point, since it seems difficult for many to grasp. Should Abraham Lincoln be “outed” for sharing some racial stereotypes of his own upbringing and era? Sure, look at them in cold light. But also take the word of Frederick Douglass who observed such inconsistencies up close, in the most dramatic case where an imperfect hero ultimately delivered the goods, however deep his imperfections:

“Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” 

                   -Frederick Douglass 

Am I too harsh on Mr. Gray, for his assertion that enlightenment thinkers should have made leaps to perfection, instead of pushing humanity and humanism forward by incremental stages? (Increments far greater than all the cynics, like Mr. Gray, have ever accomplished, combined?) 

No, if anything I am being gentle, especially after Gray's loathsome trickery was quintupled — when he tried to fob off onto the Enlightenment all blame for Hitler and Stalin!

“You would never know, from reading Pinker, that Nazi “scientific racism” was based in theories whose intellectual pedigree goes back to Enlightenment thinkers such as the prominent Victorian psychologist and eugenicist Francis Galton. Such links between Enlightenment thinking and 20th-century barbarism are, for Pinker, merely aberrations, distortions of a pristine teaching that is innocent of any crime: the atrocities that have been carried out in its name come from misinterpreting the true gospel, or its corruption by alien influences. The childish simplicity of this way of thinking is reminiscent of Christians who ask how a religion of love could possibly be involved in the Inquisition. In each case it is pointless to argue the point, since what is at stake is an article of faith.”

Grrrr.  The number of calumnies in just those sentences is beyond count. And that wasn’t even the whole paragraph! 

Anyone who correlates Nazism and Stalinism - two fiercely repressive state religions and pyramidal-authoritarian despotisms - with anything other than a pair of frontal assaults by romanticism against the tolerant diversity of enlightenment empiricism, is either a supreme delusion-artist or an outright propagandist. The fact that actual scientists fled both the Nazi and the Communist hells as fact as they could, lending all their fiber to strengthening the democratic west, just might suggest that Germany and the USSR were using the term “scientific” as an incantation, far removed from the real thing. The very thing that their befuddled modern analogues -- romantics like Mr. Gray -- also confuse. 

Indeed, it was western science that utterly demolished the rationalizations used by those despotisms for their insane thuggery, as well as engendering the fecund creativity that allowed free citizenries to surge forward, leaving both fanatical religions in a cloud of dust.

In Nazism, Stalinism and subsequent ‘isms' we see howls of rage aimed directly at enlightenment. Those who currently denounce democratic decadence — ranging from ISIS to the rising plutocratic oligarchy's court apologists like Gray and Leo Strauss and Francis Fukayama — all rationalize that the experiment in citizen sovereignty is doomed to collapse from inherent contradictions, despite it having achieved — in two centuries — far more than all other social systems across all continents and 6000 years.  Combined.

 Hitler and Stalin openly declared contempt for our experiment and eagerness to end it, using methods rooted in the feudal satrapies that dominated human affairs across those 60 centuries. Trying to pin them on our enlightenment is an act of legerdemain so staggeringly dishonest as to win Mr. Gray a place in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

== Other calumnies ==

Likewise, Gray's notion that Enlightenment’s defenders deny the efficacy of the atom bomb at deterring war. Um? Of course deterrence played a role! But if this window of relative peace is to become permanent, we had better use it to make peace a habit. And despite your snarking, Mr. Gray, just talk to the millions of young people graduating from the world’s universities, every year, to see that altruism and empathy are spreading!  And that nearly all of your assertions are diametrically opposite to true.

Oh, but he goes on, and makes one actual, true statement: “If great powers have avoided direct armed conflict, they have fought one another in many proxy wars.”  

Yep!  Enlightenment is not a light switch.This is no fairy tale.  Justice and happy endings aren't guaranteed.  Martin Luther King Jr. did not promise the path would be linear, but an "arc" that will sweep toward justice only if most (not all) of us pull on it, like gravity.  

 Let me avow something that might (at first glance, please the mad Straussian neocons out there and upset goody-goody lefties, by admitting that some older, rougher tools were needed, in order to get us to these (tentatively) better days. Particularly a “pax” imperium — Pax Americana. And, like all such empires, PA made some awful, thuggish mistakes. Fewer than any other “pax” across 6000 years! PA presents history with a vastly better ratio of good deeds to bad, and Mr. Gray does not dare meet my offer of a wager over that. He knows I would own his house. 

But yes, we have stuff to atone-for.

Nevertheless, the defense umbrella of Pax Americana allowed half of Europe (and later all of it), much of Asia, and nearly all of the Western Hemisphere to spend the last 70 years allocating far, far lower fractions of their national wealth to armies and defense than any other peoples, across all of time. 

Please read again that last sentence and let it sink in. Across all of time, nations generally devoted half of their national wealth to war or defense, almost anywhere you look. Half. 

What was the average under Pax Americana? Two percent of GDP — that is how much the NATO countries are currently arguing over. A pittance that would be hilarious, if folks from any other era showed up to offer comment. 

The exception? The USA, which for a human lifespan has carried the more “normal” defense burden, protecting trade and general peace. And thereby empowered other nations to prosper. These aren’t just assertions. Refute them, if you can! (In the form, of a wager please: put real money on it.) You cannot.

Oh, but then, after dipping into a half-truth, Mr. Gray dives right back into full-lies. “While it is true that war has changed, it has not become less destructive.” 

Dang. Just dang. Um, has he watched even one historical documentary, ever, of any kind? Notice that Gray does not even try to back this up.  He armwaves assertions. He is the Fox News of cynicism.

Is his screed without value? In fact, Mr. Gray raised many cavils and modern problems.  We do live in a world still wracked with awful conflicts. The USA can hardly preach a pure morality tale while we have the world’s highest incarceration rates. And the oligarchic putsch that has deliberately re-ignited the American Civil War — destroying politics as a means of negotiated problem solving — is an act of treason that threatens to eviscerate the nation’s heart, its ability to deal with a future of onrushing change.  These and a myriad other vexing challenges merit our determined attention and passionately militant response!

Only please dig this, Mr. Gray.  It is not your relentlessly deliberate cheating and lying that I find despicable, but your intensely evident aim to denounce and undermine our belief that problems can be solved. By denying that any of our past efforts ever have solved any.

It is the jibbering insanity of today’s Far-Left, which makes that extremum (not moderate liberals) almost 10% as crazy as today’s Entire-Right.

Yes, that crazy.

==


Continue to Part II: Is Conflict Necessary for Human Advancement?

Getting the lead out: a quirky tale of saving the world

This somewhat autobiographical missive was sparked by recent research that confirms something long suspected -- our civilization dodged a bullet a while back. A bullet made of lead. We dodged it thanks to science, open argument, and the power of dramatically-conveyed evidence...

... plus a fascinating coincidence in which I played a minor-but-interesting role.

== A root cause of violence? ==

Lead has long been rumored as a major culprit of individual and societal downfall - even in the collapse of the Roman Empire. Starting in the 1960s we found that remediation of houses that had lead-based paint correlated with improved IQ tests for children in poor neighborhoods.

A connection with violent crime now seems to be statistically proved.  The elimination of lead-based octane enhancers from gasoline in the United States just may have been the most dramatically cost effective step taken to improve the lives of Americans, and then people around the world.

A couple of snippets from a fascinating article, America's Real Criminal Element, Lead: "...if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America."  and "If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly." And that's exactly what the data showed.

Read this fascinating look into how science can be used to rescue us from devastating errors, then contemplate whether those now waging relentless war on science are dangerously life-threatening to your kids.

== Strange angles to a weighty matter ==

Okay so here is my first of three interesting addenda you won't find in the article:  Leaded gas is still sold in some countries.  These include Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Algeria, Yemen and Myanmar,  Holy mackaral, just look at that list and tell me there aren't alarm bells.

Second addendum: this is almost certainly not the only case where some environmental factor may have debilitated or hampered millions of humans into being or behaving less than they could be.  Beyond malnutrition, poor sanitation and general poverty, I mean.  Or even the lobotomizing effects of TV, video games and Twitter. Take the parasitical paramecium Toxoplasma gondii which is endemic in many populations around the globe, entering human brains and - according to strong studies - systematically altering the behavior of tens or hundreds of millions on this planet.  Suppose we find even more such mind-altering infections?  Would that be good news, allowing us to use simple medical techniques and thus eliminate harmful behavior biases that cynics always assumed to be inherent in human nature?  Should this perhaps be made a really, really top priority for research?

I'll get to my third addendum - the personal one, describing my own role - in a moment.  First though...

== How we got the lead out ==

By 1970, some far-seeing types had begun pushing for regulation or legislation to curb this horrific poison  pouring from the tail pipes of millions of automobiles. But they got nowhere, foiled by The Ethyl Corporation (TEC), which successfully pioneered obfuscate-and-delay tactics identical to those later applied by the tobacco industry and then by the Climate Denialist Cult.  Using some of the same public relations firms and "think tanks."

That year, opinion polls showed a majority of Americans opposed to changes that might (according to scare-mongering by TEC)  cause everyone's car engines to erode or explode, if we were all forced to use abominably inferior unleaded gas.  That, in turn, would destroy the economy, all because a bunch of pointy-headed scientists, doctors and public health officials were spreading chicken-little panic about a "purely hypothetical and overblown danger." That was the situation in August 1970.

And yet, by 1972, the situation was transformed! In less than two years' time, with rapidly changing public attitudes, the EPA launched an initiative to phase out leaded gasoline. What led to the plummet in support for lead?  Could a simple demonstration have been responsible?

Let's get to that final addendum.  This one is a personal anecdote. For you see, I was an eyewitness and participant in an event of some historic significance, though it has only been in the last few years that I came to realize just how important it was.

Many of us thought we were participating in something like a great big science fair.  Little more.  But we helped to change the world.

== The Clean Air Car Race of 1970 ==

Do smoking cars cause CACR?

In July and August, 1970, while an undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology, I served as a member of the coordinating committee for the Clean Air Car Race, which pitted 44 student-built vehicles against each other in many categories (electric, propane, natural gas, hybrid....) for a rally-race from MIT across the continent to Caltech. There were some truly amazing innovations.  No, not the electric cars, which were way, way not ready for prime time! But several of the very first hybrid gas-electric vehicles participated, including one from the University of Toronto that we all voted "grooviest car" because it had regenerative braking and several other features now standard on your Prius.  It required a full-time co-driver, in those days, way back when putting a computer in a car was the stuff of science fiction.  But it worked and got real attention.

There was also a truck propelled by a Lear Jet turbine engine that scored well on exhaust quality, but got a zero in the noise pollution part of the competition, leaving a trail of seared underpasses and shattered toll booths across the nation. (It also parked outside my room at Caltech for a week, after the rally, while the drivers gave ear-splitting demos to the press, ouch!)

And yes, here I am, among the cars and drivers and officials of the 1970 CACR, posing for a full-page center spread in LIFE Magazine below the dome at MIT.  I'm the fellow with all that black hair and no tie, standing in the front row at the far left, looking like I actually know what I'm doing there.

Surprised by the prominent national coverage?  That's nothing!  We were mentioned every day during the race by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. Much of America tracked our progress. It was one year after the Apollo 11 landing, so folks were expecting good things from science. And we delivered! Though perhaps not precisely in the way that we imagined.

== Okay, then what was world-changing? ==

So what does all of this have to do with getting the lead out of gas?  Simple. There were three cars participating in CACR whose sole "clean air" attribute was that they ran on unleaded gas.  Deliberately kept in stock condition, these performed perfectly and made it to Pasadena without a glitch... which is more than could be said for the entry subsidized by the The Ethyl Corporation.

Remember all that press coverage?  These results got lots of play. Moreover, while we students were enthralled by things like hybrid-electrics (and CACR 1970 definitely helped push those ideas into research labs at Toyota and Honda and Wayne State etc, leading eventually to your Prius), it turns out that the most historically significant thing we accomplished was effected by the least romantic or innovative vehicles in the race!  Those three boring old internal combustion cars that made it across the country on unleaded gas... without any explosions. Not even any excess engine wear.  They still went vroom in Pasadena, and then were driven all the way back east again...

... and the public noticed. Poll numbers shifted. Scare tactics about "panic-mongers destroying the economy" withered. Within 18 months the EPA had enough support to start acting to reduce lead poisoning, which soon resulted in far lower parts-per-million in the blood of children. And 20 years later, when a new generation of boys entered their "high crime age" something amazing happened.  They did a whole lot less crime.

Am I claiming credit for the sharp decline of violence in the United States of America, and later around the world?  Nonsense. I wasn't the chairman or prime mover of the Clean Air Car Race and anyway, there were thousands of scientists , engineers, doctors and activists at the forefront of the struggle against lead poisoning, folks who made the real difference.

Still, to have been  a participant and witness -- and to realize, decades later, that a very public blow was struck, a clear demonstration that might have accelerated progress by a year or two or more, affecting many lives? Well, that's priceless.

It also teaches a lesson.  Good things happen because of human effort.  But sometimes in twisty ways that aren't obvious at the time.  We were jazzed and excited (rightfully) by the hybrids. But all we accomplished was to interest some companies and labs who then needed thirty years to actually deliver them.

Meanwhile, we ignored or barely tolerated unromantic vehicles that cruised placidly amid the tech-dazzler jalopies. But that placid cruising was what most significantly and rapidly changed our world.

Ah well.  Story finished.  Except to suggest that we should all learn the basic lesson.  That progress will always be blocked by fools who emphasize short-sighted greed and play upon the prejudices of the gullible. By now their suite of tricks is well-known and perfected. But so should be our quiver of responses. Sometimes, the ongoing War on Science can best be stymied with symbols and imagery that are simple, clear... and utterly true.

Only now, on a related topic, a bit of lagniappe...

== A plague of psychopaths? ==

Just because overall statistical rates of violence have plummeted, that is poor comfort when tragedies such as Aurora or Newtown erupt, sending shock and despair through communities and terrifying the innocent, everywhere. As fresh calls arise for measures to reduce gun-related devastation, let me again suggest that sensible approaches to gun control will only happen if advocates study the needs and fears of moderate gun owners and then tailor proposals with those concerns in mind.

But let's agree that weapons aren't the core problem. (Nor will filling our schools with armed guards provide a solution.) Indeed, much has been said recently about the fact that mass-shooting calamities are rooted in desperate problems of mental disease and our inability to grapple with needed changes. We all need to start by doing what we can, locally, to see to it that those isolated "loners" out there get shown less harshness and more kindness -- more reason to feel connected -- during formative years. A final end to bullying won't make this go away. But if we haven't reached out, we can never say we weren't in part to blame.

Still... that only illustrates one end of a spectrum in which - it appears - civilization is being harmed by socipoaths at all levels, including the political and economic elite.

I've spoken elsewhere of the worst addictive problem in the world today - a plague of self-doped self-righteous indignation that is so rooted in brain chemistry that I gave a talk about it at the National Institute for Drugs and Addiction. Strong evidence suggests that much of our current "culture war" --  thwarting the American genius for can-do negotiation and pragmatic solutions -- is amplified by this modern curse that prompts us to rage instead of negotiate.

Yes, the Indignation Addiction Plague is bad.  But sociopathy is another aspect: one that probably does just as much harm. Have a look at an interesting (even though overly partisan) perspective on psychological factors plaguing the high end of the socio-economic spectrum: Psychopaths holding America hostage?

"Dr. Dale Archer, a psychiatrist and frequent guest on "FoxNews.com Live" of all places writes, "Physically, studies have shown that the brain chemistry is different in powerful politicians, leading to sensation seeking and risky behavior. They have lower levels of the brain chemical monoamine oxidase-A, which means they have higher highs when they engage in risky behavior and that they get bored much more easily than the norm." 

Another excerpt: "Psychopaths often appear normal, even charming. Underneath, they lack conscience and empathy, making them manipulative, volatile and often (but by no means always) criminal. The psychologist Kevin Dutton in his book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths, notes society, and especially Wall Street, admires and rewards many of the qualities of psychopaths - fearlessness, emotional sterility, supreme confidence, ruthlessness, lack of remorse, refusal to take responsibility, narcissism and delusions of grandeur. Who could argue that those characteristics virtually defined the Wall Street crowd responsible for blowing up the world's economy in 2008? In fact, a recent study showed psychopaths were four times more common among business leaders than among the general population." (Babiak P, Neumann CS, Hare RD. Corporate psychopathy: Talking the walk. Behav Sci Law. 2010 Mar-Apr;28(2):174-93.)

== A path to sanity ==

So, what can we conclude? Despite the fact that the lower and middle classes have languished economically, without growth in prosperity for 20 years, there appears to be less danger than ever of dissolving into chaotic, spasmodic violence from below, of the kind that lead poisoning once fostered.  That bullet is being dodged. If the lower castes get violent, it will be with cause, as in 1789 France, not out of inchoate, poison-induced rage.

We are in danger, however, from other forms of mental illness. That plague of indignation, tearing through our middle class politics, causing neighbors to despise each other over abstract issues and to disdain experts like scientists.  Plus a tsunami of psychopathy where it is most dangerous, in the top layers where any self-serving machination or risky behavior can be rationalized away, the manner that such things always were, back in feudal times.  By proclaiming (without cause or evidence or justification) that "My kind of folks are inherently superior."

The stakes are high.  But remember this.  Our scientific enlightenment is the great exception to the rank/repeated stupidity of feudal oligarchies that ran 99% of human cultures.  We are capable of detecting and noticing and even dodging some of the bullets that struck down other societies. We've proved this can happen. So let's ignore the cynics of both left and right, and let's believe we can do it again. And again. Dodging bullets and gradually making larger the fraction of children who grow up healthy, un-poisoned, with sane and knowledge-filled and vigorously curious-empathic brains...

...until our grandkids -- vastly saner and smarter than we neanderthals can now imagine -- are ready to take over.

David Brin

http://www.davidbrin.com

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