aether

Seth Roberts - Becoming His Own Mouse

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 10:14:46 -0800

[Republished from QS]

I'm becoming a devoted fan of Seth Roberts, one of the great champion of self-experimentation. Roberts, an emeritus professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, has spent many year studying himself, and, even better, offering many practical clues about how to construct your own "experiments of one." I first found out about his work in the most obvious way: searching on "self-experimentation" in Google.

This lead me to Roberts paper: "Self-experimentation as a source of new ideas: Ten examples about sleep, mood, health, and weight." The problems he describes are so common, and his solutions so counter-intuitive, that you can't help being intrigued. One of the great things about reading Roberts is getting a feeling for how different self-experimentation is from other forms of self-knowledge. While Roberts often begins his experiments with a hypothesis, using his stock of common knowledge, suggestions from friends, and categories of analysis typical of a well-trained college professor, this first idea is usually proven, through experiment, to be wrong. Not superficial, or too narrow, or distorted by delusion or prejudice; simply incorrect, provably irrelevant. So then Roberts has to come up with new ideas. The data, expressed as charts, no longer merely test his hypotheses; the data becomes the source of his theories. And the theories bear the mark have having emerged from data. Often, they seem very, very odd. They seem to have no link to received wisdom, to folk knowledge, to intuitive "rightness." To me, they seem like the kinds of theories a computer might have about a person.

Does standing up a lot during the day reduce susceptibility to colds? Go ahead and doubt it; I did. But Roberts has data to back it up, and while it would be foolish to believe that standing up a lot during the day would eliminate colds across an entire population - foolish, that is, without experiments to prove it - Roberts' own practice of standing up a lot has a lot more empirical back-up than many of the more "sensible" things we naively believe.

Here's anther one: for a long time Roberts had a problem with his sleep. He woke too early, could not go back to sleep, and then was tired in the morning. He tried different ways to cure this problem until, through a combination of coincidence, experiment and analysis of the data, he discovered an expected correlation: his problem disappeared when he skipped breakfast. He cured his early awakening by not eating until 11 a.m.

The idea that skipping breakfast may reduce early awakening was, wrote Roberts, "a new idea in sleep research." Strangely, Roberts was not hungry in the wee hours when he was troubled by early awakening, which lead him to suspect that it was not discomfort that roused him, but rather some glitch in his sleep cycle caused by anticipation of food.

In his paper, Roberts cites a number of studies showing that:

Food-anticipatory activity is a well-established effect in animals (Bolles & Stokes 1965; Boulos & Terman 1980). Mammals, birds, and fish become more active a few hours before feeding time (Boulos & Terman); as far as I know, no effect present in mammals, birds, and fish has ever been absent in humans. Because activity requires wakefulness, food should produce anticipatory wakefulness as well.

Roberts' theory came to mind recently because just last week, in the May 23, 2008 issue of Science, Patrick M. Fuller, Jun Lu, and Clifford B. Saper report on some experiments that precisely locate an important mechanism that links food with circadian rhythms in mice. The idea that circadian rhythms in mice are influenced by food availability is not new, but, through an elegant experiment, the authors show that there is a food-entrainable clock in the dorsomedial nucleus of the hypothalamus (DMH), and that this clock can override the light-sensitive circadian clock in the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN).

Our data indicate that there is an inducible clock in the DMH that can override the SCN and drive circadian rhythms when the animal is faced with limited food availability. Thus, under restricted feeding conditions, the DMH clock can assume an executive role in the temporal regulation of behavioral state. For a small mammal, finding food on a daily basis is a critical mission. Even a few days of starvation, a common threat in natural environments, may result in death. Hence, it is adaptive for animals to have a secondary "master clock" that can allow the animal to switch its behavioral pattern rapidly after a period of starvation to maximize the opportunity of finding food sources at the same time on following days.

How strongly this mechanism operates in humans - if at all - is unknown. But, thanks to Seth Roberts' experiments, we have data on a human whose sleep problem was cured by an alteration in the schedule of food. One of the regular contributors to the forum Roberts runs on his Web site uses the tag line: "Proud member of Lab Rats United." This is a joke, but more than a joke. When we experiment on ourselves, we can fruitfully adapt the methods used by psychologists on mice; but that's not so surprising, because we share a lot of their biology, too.

Negotiating with Nazis - A Good Idea

Fri, 16 May 2008 08:51:49 -0800

Yesterday George Bush said: Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history. This comment is so irritatingly ignorant that I break into the usual random research notes posted on this non-blog to point out that the United States did, in fact, actively negotiate with Nazis long after the invasion of Poland, and not out of any delusions about the nature of the regime. The U.S. continued to operated a diplomatic mission in Germany after the invasion of Poland, staffed by - among others of course - an able administrative officer named George F. Kennan. A taste of the duties undertaken by U.S. diplomats among the Nazis can be had from Kennan's Memoirs: 1925-1950: Among other things, we were taking over the interests of France and Great Britain: the protection of their nationals, their diplomatic property, their prisoners of war, and the tasks connected with the exchange of their official personnel... This administrative burden of the Berlin embassy, incidentally, grew steadily as the war progressed... The increasingly desperate situation of the German Jews,, and Jews from the German occupied areas, and the heavy attendant pressures brought to bear upon us to effect their release and removal to the Untied States, added to the burden... As the Nazi conquest proceeded, new countries were added to the list of those whose interests we were protecting. By the time of Pearl Harbor there were, I believe, about eleven of them. And we had the responsibility for representing the interests of these countries not just in Germany alone, but also throughout the wider and steadily expanding sphere of German-occupied Europe, so that in the end we stood as the sole representatives for most of Europe, of the interests of the United States and a good part of the remainder of the Western world. Now somebody with knowledge of the historical details will find some painful ambiguities in this excerpt, for the "pressure" to rescue German Jews was resisted by many in the U.S. government. But that is another topic altogether, and I quote the passage just to show that if George Bush wants to make a list of delusional appeasers, and his criteria for this list is that they negotiate under such circumstances, then he should definitely include Roosevelt and the best of his diplomatic service. And in case you think that negotiating over the status of foreign nationals is a small thing compared to the negotiations Barack Obama must have in mind for Iran, here's a bit more from Kennan about what Roosevelt wanted: In late February 1940 I was sent off to Italy to meet the Under Secretary of State, Mr. Sumner Welles, and his party on their arrival at Naples and to accompany them on their journey to Berlin. Mr. Welles had been dispatched by President Roosevelt to the four European capitals of Rome, Berlin, Paris, and London to ascertain the views of the leading European statesmen on the possibilities for the negotiation of an end to the hostilities and the establishment of a just and permanent European peace. Up to that time, it will be recalled, the western front had been inactive. It was clear that unless the war could be in some way terminated before the advent of spring, hostilities would begin in the west on a serious scale, and the struggle would assuredly develop into another great and tragic one, from which it would be unlikely that the United States could remain aloof. If there were the slightest possibility of averting this catastrophe, the President wanted to know about it before it was too late. Kennan did not think such negotiations likely to succeed. He preferred that the White House rely on the diplomatic work of the staff, who were likely to be better informed. "But," he writes, "this was FDR's way of doing business, and he was entitled to the indulgence, in this respect, of his own preferences." Kennan's clear criticism of Roosevelt here has nothing to do with the mere fact of engagement with the Nazi regime and everything to do with the level of preparation, analysis, and diplomatic tact that could be expected under the circumstances. The irony here is that, while President Bush criticizes others for being naive in even considering to meet with the leader of Iran, he himself is most notorious for letting a sense of inner conviction substitute for information and thought.

Links for Talk at Maker Day

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:20:55 -0800

BodyBugg
Wrist Device Tracks Behavior by Category
Emotion Map
Reality Mining with Mobile Devices
Talk to Baby

Eric Kandel's In Search of Memory

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 01:08:53 -0800

At the beginning the memoir he published last year, the great neuroscientist Erik Kandel gives an account of his first sexual experience. His partner was "an attractive, sensual young woman," named Mitzi, who worked as a servant in his parents house. Mitzi was twenty-five. Kandel was eight. His memory of the encounter is intense and bittersweet. On the one hand, he felt great pleasure and interest. On the other hand, Mitzi told him they would have to stop, because if they didn't he could become pregnant. Kandel remembers being dubious. He knew full well that only women could have babies. But at the same time he felt a certain anxiety. What would his mother think if he became pregnant?

5 Posts on Getting Things Done

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:11:41 -0800

Below are links to some recent posts with background material (and a small amount of new reporting) connected my story in Wired on David Allen and Getting Things Done. Wired profile of David Allen
GTD and "The Civilizing Process"
Courtesy, Conditioning, and GTD
What is a Good Cult?
The Unity Church Influence
The Eusocial "Meaning" of Getting Things Done

Why work so hard: The eusocial meaning of Getting Things Done

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 20:01:25 -0800

Why work so hard? If there's a sore point in the literature of business self-help, this question touches it. A person who carries a to-do list everywhere; who divides the workday into segments; who strives for optimal efficiency: the last thing such a person needs is a wiseacre teasing him from the sidelines and raising questions about the ultimate purpose of life. The problem is, this critical voice does not come from the sidelines. It comes from the founders of the business-self-help movement, from its most revered leaders.

Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things.
Peter Drucker

Until now, it has seemed obvious that we can't perfect our means without a clear notion of our ends. Before you can answer the question of how, you must answer the question of why.

Begin with the end in mind...
Stephen R. Covey

To which a person devoted to David Allen's methods in Getting Things Done might reply: okay, but what if we don't? One of the secrets of why this book has proved so appealing is that Allen has magically removed from the genre something formerly thought to be crucial. He solves the problem of meaning in the simplest possible way: by ignoring it. Strangely, this seems to work. In my Wired profile of Allen I review some of the mechanics. But here, I want to look more closely at where the old existential questions have gone. Isn't it strange that something like the meaning of life, or your most important priorities, once thought so crucial to any self-improvement scheme, could simply vanish, and, more oddly still, not even be missed? In an earlier post, I described Allen's religious antecedents. He's at the end of a long series of innovations in American religion, innovations focused on using religious or quasi-religious practices (ranging from faithful prayer to positive thinking) to improve our life. This trend toward the worldly is one of the most powerful currents in religious life, and in this sense Allen's pragmatism is unexceptional. But if questions of ultimate purpose have become increasingly irrelevant, then why do the greatest purveyors of business self-help, such as Covey and Drucker, always make a sort of metaphysical bow before handing over their tools? One reason is that logic seems to demand it. Drucker's advice to examine one's priorities begins as common sense, not as a metaphysical demand: Don't get caught up in details; look where you're going. But the dialectical spirit, once unleashed, threatens to go too far. You start by subjecting your quarterly goals to a broader strategic analysis, and end up with doubts about the very purpose of your firm. Or even your life. Drucker was influenced by the great humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow, who taught that attention to one's highest goals was crucial for realizing the potential of any individual. But busyness in pursuit of money and worldly advantage cuts against these ideals. Drucker's command not just to do things right, but also to do the right things, is a kind of ritual formula designed to lesson this tension. It raises the level of thought, but re-assures everybody that things won't get out of hand. It's a combination of an axiom and a prayer. In a book called Flow, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes an interesting moment of metaphysical first aid. Csikszentmihalyi occasionally teaches a seminar for business executives on how to be happy. Many of them have mastered the techniques of efficacy, but have trouble and confusion in their private lives. After teaching the seminar a certain number of times, Csikszentmihalyi found a trick that seemed to work well. He now starts with a quick introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy. He treats the poem as a parable about the necessity of discovering a "life theme" that will underlie and direct their aims. The executives enjoy this exercise. Csikszentmihalyi reports that it helps them focus and be more open. For people who've already had great success, Dante may serve the same role as does the invocation of "meaning" in Drucker and Covey. It is a preparatory gesture, both an invitation to widen the critical frame, and an inoculum against the worry that they'll go too far. What's strange about David Allen's work, then, is not really that the question of meaning has disappeared. What's interesting is that a certain gesture, the preparatory invocation of meaning, has been discarded as unnecessary. Has something in the environment has changed? Does the communication network that makes such constant demands and offers such frequent re-enforcement somehow relieve the anxiety that older rituals of contemplation once addressed? The flow that Csikszentmihalyi describes is available at any minute by scrolling through messages on a Blackberry. Busy in that electronic colony that never flickers off, a person's "ultimate goal" is no more perceptible via study or self-reflection that it would be to other eusocial organisms; e.g., to ants. As far civilization is concerned, this might be considered an advance. A long-term downswing in metaphysical demand would obviously be a force of religious change. Maybe the strange arbitrariness of religion today is a sign that it is in a transition state, flipping back and force between random, extravagant assertions, and a kind Zen-like posture devoid of concrete claims. A couple of days ago I posted a video (repeated below) of John-Roger expositing his idiosyncratic theology. While the doctrine is unfamiliar, it is nonetheless quite traditional, in the sense that it attempts to explain and describe the unseen world. Only a genuine spiritual anxiety (or a base voyeuristic thrill) would get you through listening to the whole thing. But this second video is more important. Here, an acolyte of dubious sincerity seeks counsel from John-Roger, and he refuses to help out. The audiences joins him as he giggles. This is theology as a put-on, an attempt to demonstrate the pleasure of meaninglessness, and an interesting sample of the possibilities of eusocial religion. A benign and inarticulate spirit is moving through the crowd. Books Peter Drucker
Managing the Nonprofit Organization (link) Stephen Covey
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (link) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (link)

The Unity Influence on Getting Things Done

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:35:08 -0800

In a conversation with David Allen for a profile that ran in this month's Wired, I asked him how seriously he took the doctrines he encountered during the spiritual quest that led to him becoming a minister in the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness, founded by a Los Angeles-based mystic named John-Roger.

Allen replied that, for him, doctrine was beside the point. He took his experiences seriously. "People reify these experiences and take them for the truth," he said, "but they are only important as a working hypothesis. Let's pretend this is true, and measure the results." His answer reminded me of something Sir John Templeton, the billionaire mutual fund pioneer, said to me during an interview a few years ago on the topic of science and religion. Templeton was funding the famous prayer study supervised by Herbert Benson at Harvard. Templeton's hope was that science would demonstrate the pragmatic benefits of faith. The results of the study were not yet in when we talked, but I pressed Templeton on the potentially subversive effects of his experiment. Did he think believers would accept science this as a yardstick? Say a person found out his prayers were less effective than he had believed? "We never say yours is less effective," Templeton quickly replied. "We say, would you be interested in something more effective? Then they're on your side." Religion, in this view, is not divine authority but verifiable technique.

Templeton is a Presbyterian. Allen, a minister in MSIA. But their approach to religion shares a common root. Both are spiritual heirs of Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, great innovators in the "new thought" movement in Christianity, and founders of the Unity Church. The Fillmores emphasized the power of prayer to improve physical, emotional, and financial health. Prayer activated a divine spirit within the believer, while meditation, positive thinking, and visualization techniques were used to gain prosperity and happiness. The Unity influence on Templeton is direct and he has acknowledged it frequently. The Unity influence on David Allen comes by way of Alexander Everett, a pioneer of the human potential movement. Everett, born in 1921 studied to be a Unity minister and was deeply engaged with Unity ideas. He moved to San Francisco in 1970 and founded Mind Dynamics, a quasi-spiritual enterprise that used positive affirmations and meditation to help attendees attain their personal goals. Mind Dynamics was a tremendous success. Among Everett's students were John Hanley and Robert White, who founded Lifespring, and Werner Erhart, who created EST. Lifespring and EST, in turn, were key sources for the Insight training seminars, launched by John-Roger a few years after he founded the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness. Through all of these channels, Allen has had the benefit of more than a century of experiments in "practical" belief. The pragmatic strain in religion that characterizes Unity and its descendants is not confined to California, nor to the new religions and quasi-religious sects I've mentioned so far. The Mormons have it, as do many of the most successful evangelical leaders, from Aimee Semple McPherson in the twenties to Rick Warren today. But through Unity, the pragmatism that had found philosophical voice in William James and John Dewey, was formed into an explicit religious doctrine suited to popular use.

The question of ultimate reality, in these systems, barely counts; what's important are certain behavioral habits, along with an open, relaxed, optimistic frame of mind. "Belief" or "faith" is a description of a mental posture, not an assertion of metaphysical truth. But in this case, why doesn't doctrine disappear altogether? Why not go all the way to atheism, and enjoy pragmatism in its purest form? That's a question that still interests me, and I'll post a few notes in the next entry.

Profile of Templeton from Wired:
Sir John's Divine Gamble Books:
Harold Bloom
The American Religion (link)
Neal Vahle
The Unity Movement (link)
James R. Lewis and Gordon Melton, eds.,
Perspectives on the New Age (link)
Sir John Templeton
Possibilities for Over One Hundredfold More Spiritual Information (link)
Lately Thomas
Storming Heaven: The Lives and Turmoils of Minnie Kennedy and Aimee Semple McPherson (link)

What is a Good Cult? David Allen, GTD, and New Religious Movements

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 12:27:14 -0800

Among the most interesting things that came out of my research on GTD was the program's roots in the human potential movement of the 1970s, and the role David Allen played in one of its most vivid chapters. He was involved in the creation of a new religion. The religion is called the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness, but it is better known by its initials, MSIA. (In earlier days, this acronym was pronounced "messiah," but this may have seemed a bit like over-reaching, because it soon fell by the wayside.) In the story, I describe Allen's life with MSIA and the concern this causes some GTD users when they learn about it. (Here is a link to a rather intense discussion of David Allen and MSIA at 43 Folders.) One of the interesting moments in editing the piece came in a discussion with Angela Watercutter, a research editor at the magazine whom I like and respect. Angela objected to my using the word "cult" in connection to MSIA, pointing out that it was disparaging, and passing on a cautionary notice from the magazine's legal staff that use of the word cult in connection with Scientology had embroiled Time in a painful lawsuit. One possible response to this sort of thing is to point out that Time won the lawsuit. But what interests me more is disparaging. Many of the poisonous associations we have with the word cult connect with the very period in which MSIA was flourishing. These associations, while understandable, also hide something. The ruthless techniques of manipulation seen in the seventies' cults were intermixed with accurate intuitions, some of which even rose to the level of ideas, about how humans could change. The cults were popular test beds for the application of these techniques, and the intoxicating effect of discovering how well they worked may have been partially responsible for the ruthlessness on display. The anti-cult and deprogramming movements were one reaction, a kind of convulsive and paranoid counter-attack, against the success cults were having. (There's a great, short essay on this in Andreas Killen's book 1973 Nervous Breakdown.) But there was another reaction, whose effects have lasted longer and are still being felt. That is, to try and identify the valuable components of the cults, to extract them and, if not exactly purify them, at least to amalgamate them into less toxic compounds. This reprocessing of cult knowledge is part of the formation of civilization; in the past it was how we got our religions. In a few days, when I have a chance, I'll post some of the sources on the cult influence in the productivity movement.

Courtesy, Conditioning and GTD

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:46:02 -0800

I argued this month in Wired that the methods David Allen prescribes in Getting Things Done are more than practical hints; they are tools of civilization that make new demands on our conscience. Getting Things Done is to us what manuals of social comportment and table manners were to the middle ages. Here is a summary by Norbert Elias of what he found in those medieval primers:

Again and again we find the injunctions to take one's allotted place and not to touch one's nose and ears at table... There are very frequent reminders not to scratch oneself or fall greedily on the food. Nor should one put a piece that one has had in one's mouth back into the communal dish; this, too, is often repeated. Not less frequent is the instruction to wash one's hands before eating, or not to dip food into the salt-cellar. Then it is repeated over and over again: do not clean your teeth with your knife. Do not spit on or over the table... Do not clean your teeth with the tablecloth. Do not offer others the remainder of your soup or the bread you have already bitten into. Do not blow your nose too noisily. Do not fall asleep... [Elias, The Civilizing Process, "Changes in the Behavior of the Secular Upper Classes in the West"]

Once the secular upper classes, as Elias calls them, learned these manners, they were very proud to display them. The new rules of social hygiene David Allen describes also make those who obey them feel proud. Yes, the necessity of communicating with unceasing eagerness and courtesy, of answering emails promptly, of being available day and night, puts tremendous pressure on elites today; but this pressure is also felt as a type of social distinction.

Last year, Melissa Mazmanian and two of her professors at the MIT Sloan School of Management gave a conference paper on the use of Blackberrys in a small financial firm. At the conclusion of the paper, the authors wrote:

...a self-reinforcing cycle of BlackBerry use and compulsion emerged, frustrating firm and professional values, and creating tension, consternation, resentment, and stress. These negative ramifications, however, did not appear to have diminished use or reduced reliance on the BlackBerrys.

What were the members of the firm using their devices for? They were using them to stay on top of email responses that other members of the firm were sending with their own BlackBerrys.

While all Plymouth members report valuing the use of the BlackBerry to keep them connected and allowing them to stay "on top of" the large amounts of communication they receive, they seem less aware of the extent to which their constant checking and frequent responding generates additional email traffic for others to check and respond to, which in turn, generates more email, and so on, in a self-reinforcing loop.

In short: meet George Jetson. On the other hand, perhaps the stated goal of staying on top of things should be understood more literally. The status competition in a private equity firm can be as intense and as unyielding as that in any little princely despotism; employees are together day and night, aggression is encouraged, and while there is great wealth and pleasure associated with success, progress also depends to a large extent on opinion and reputation. The company Mazmanian studied "believes" in work-life balance, but in the 18th century, the French court "believed" in the virtue of natural comportment. In both cases the realization of these fantasies was a reward for power already attained, and thus is a taunting reminder to work harder (in one case), and to be more self-controlled (in the other). "Crackberry," is already a cliche, but it may be an accurate joke in the simplest sense that answering email messages all day long is conditioned response. It probably it isn't any harder to train a banker to hug his BlackBerry tighter than his children than it is to train a courtier to grow his fingernail long and scratch at the door instead of knocking. Such things, even when done ruefully, are done with pride. They mean a person is in the mix, a respectable character, on top of things, rising through the crowd. As part of her research Mazmanian interviewed the spouses of employees. Of the women she talked to spoke explicitly about social pride:

I think that they're addicted to the idea that someone needs them all the time. That they can be important to someone and that things can't go smoothly unless they're involved.

This context helps explain why so many people have so gratefully responded to David Allen's work. Allen accepts the notion of a perfect responder, he feeds that contemporary pride. But by channeling the seemingly infinite demand of the new communication regimes into a set of elaborate (but routine) processes, he reduces the emotional charge in the conditioning. One is no longer responding, every time, out of that sense of urgency or compulsion that characterizes the addict. Responsiveness is less like scratching a itch, or getting a fix, or any other painful pleasure; and more like saying thank you, or using a fork, or not even thinking to spit on the floor: just another norm. Sometimes, in talking to people about GTD, I hear the word "robot," as if the ideal of the perfect responder is some kind of mechanical and soulless being. I don't think that's the right metaphor. The model of GTD is not the rotation of a gear, but the cycling of a processor; not the movement of celestial spheres or a divine clock, but rather the magical decision making of Maxwell's demon, who can choose when to open a gate without expending energy of any kind. But this crosses back into the religious influence on GTD, and best left for another day.

David Allen, GTD and The Civilizing Process

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:24:49 -0800

In the profile of David Allen in the October issue of Wired I discuss some of his intellectual antecedents, the influences that shaped Getting Things Done, and indirectly, all of its users, including myself. The story is an intellectual profile, with different aims than this piece, recently published in Business2.0, which focused on Allen as a model businessman. Wired, with an indulgence born of familiarity (or perhaps resignation) allowed me to ignore the immediate interest Allen holds for people trying to become more wealthy and successful. I looked instead at his role in a longer, slower, and more general process of mental change, a change in our civilization. While it may seem silly to look for evidence of this sort of change in a $14, er, $8.99 paperback, I was encouraged by a great old study by the pioneering sociologist Norbert Elias, whose book The Civilizing Process is full of references to popular how-to guides from the middle ages and Renaissance. NORBERT ELIAS As we attempt to improve ourselves, working hard to optimize our behavior and to exchange bad habits for good ones, we are continuing a process that was already occurring in the distant past. The dimensions of this labor are not purely practical. They involve deep feelings of pride and shame. What is at stake is our sense of goodness, of personal virtue, our "self-worth." Giving readers of a glossy magazine, even one like Wired, more than one or two quotes from a 70 year old academic tome is considered bad form, but no such rules apply on the Web, so in the next day or two I'm going to post more about Elias and the connection between the research he did in the1930s and the cult of productivity today. Books mentioned in this post: The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias Getting Things Done, David Allen

A.J.P. Taylor on Spying

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 11:38:33 -0800

In the course of some casual research, I came across a venemous review of a number of books about spying by the late A.J.P. Taylor. I've been thinking lately about what - if any - difference it makes that spying is no longer a matter of one human being listening in on another. Now, it is the machines that "listen." Taylor's review has an interestingly antique feel. Here is an excerpt: To anyone tempted to engage in espionage I commend Taylor's Law (now universally accepted by experts): the Foreign Office knows no secrets. Its rider, too, is noteworthy: the Kremlin is also not richly endowed with them. As for the State Department, it is not even worth postulating a principle. The State Department learns its own secrets only when it reads them in a newspaper. Still spying goes on, always has, always will. The spies feed on each other. Each side has to make out that its own secrets are of importance so as to justify its chase after secrets on the other side. After all, if spying did not matter, there would be no need for counterespionage, and then what would the FBI do for a living? Espionage is an enormously attractive subject, a field where human ingenuity operates almost fre from contact with reality. It resembles mathematics, an intellectual game where th most remarkable results can be achieved by pure ratiocination On a more prosaic level, spying is a form of looking through the keyhole. Among the most agreeable of minor pleasures is to observe the other man without his knowing it. Each of us grabs the chance of reading other people's letters or looking into other people's windows. Spying bestows on these exercises an aura of justification. But we learn little of serious import. The keyhole does not reveal much of the next room, and in the spy game, the occupants of the room clown for the benefit of the supposedly unobserved observer. In fact the only people really deluded about spying are those who read books on the subject and take them seriously. Full article here (subscription required): http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10313

A.J.P. Taylor on Spying

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 11:38:33 -0800

In the course of some casual research, I came across a wonderfully venemous review of a number of books about spying by the British rticle by A.J.P. Taylor. Along with a number of rich insults against the general category of journalists, Taylor's review has this to say about spying: To anyone tempted to engage in espionage I commend Taylor's Law (now universally accepted by experts): the Foreign Office knows no secrets. Its rider, too, is noteworthy: the Kremlin is also not richly endowed with them. As for the State Department, it is not even worth postulating a principle. The State Department learns its own secrets only when it reads them in a newspaper. Still spying goes on, always has, always will. The spies feed on each other. Eac side has to make out that its own secrets are of importance so as to justify its chas after secrets on the other side. After all, if spying did not matter, there would be n need for counterespionage, and then what would the FBI do for a living? Espionage i an enormously attractive subject, a field where human ingenuity operates almost fre from contact with reality. It resembles mathematics, an intellectual game where th most remarkable results can be achieved by pure ratiocination On a more prosaic level, spying is a form of looking through the keyhole. Among the most agreeable of minor pleasures is to observe the other man without his knowing it. Each of us grabs the chance of reading other people's letters or looking into other people's windows. Spying bestows on these exercises an aura of justification. But we learn little of serious import. The keyhole does not reveal much of the next room, and in the spy game, the occupants of the room clown for the benefit of the supposedly unobserved observer. In fact the only people really deluded about spying are those who read books on the subject and take them seriously. Full article here (subscription required): http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10313

The Church of the Non-Believers - Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 21:58:12 -0800

MY FRIENDS, I MUST ASK YOU AN IMPORTANT QUESTION TODAY: Where do you stand on God? It's a question you may prefer not to be asked. But I'm afraid I have no choice. We find ourselves, this very autumn, three and a half centuries after the intellectual martyrdom of Galileo, caught up in a struggle of ultimate importance, when each one of us must make a commitment. It is time to declare our position. This is the challenge posed by the New Atheists. We are called upon, we lax agnostics, we noncommittal nonbelievers, we vague deists who would be embarrassed to defend antique absurdities like the Virgin Birth or the notion that Mary rose into heaven without dying, or any other blatant myth; we are called out, we fence-sitters, and told to help exorcise this debilitating curse: the curse of faith. The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it's evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there's no excuse for shirking. Three writers have sounded this call to arms. They are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. A few months ago, I set out to talk with them. I wanted to find out what it would mean to enlist in the war against faith. OXFORD IS THE CAPITAL of reason, its Jerusalem. The walls glint gold in the late afternoon, as waves or particles of light scatter off the ancient bricks. Logic Lane, a tiny road under a low, right-angled bridge, cuts sharply across to the place where Robert Boyle formulated his law on gases and Robert Hooke first used a microscope to see a living cell. A few steps away is the memorial to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Here he lies, sculpted naked in stone, behind the walls of the university that expelled him almost 200 years ago – for atheism. Richard Dawkins, the leading light of the New Atheism movement, lives and works in a large brick house just 20 minutes away from the Shelley memorial. Dawkins, formerly a fellow at New College, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. He is 65 years old, and the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene, dates from well back in the last century. The opposition it earned from rival theorizers and popularizers of Charles Darwin, such as Stephen Jay Gould, is fading into history. Gould died in 2002, and Dawkins, while acknowledging their battles, praised his influence on scientific culture. They were allies in the battle against creationism. Dawkins, however, has been far more belligerent in counterattack. His most recent book is called The God Delusion. Dawkins' style of debate is as maddening as it is reasonable. A few months earlier, in front of an audience of graduate students from around the world, Dawkins took on a famous geneticist and a renowned neurosurgeon on the question of whether God was real. The geneticist and the neurosurgeon advanced their best theistic arguments: Human consciousness is too remarkable to have evolved; our moral sense defies the selfish imperatives of nature; the laws of science themselves display an order divine; the existence of God can never be disproved by purely empirical means. Dawkins rejected all these claims, but the last one – that science could never disprove God – provoked him to sarcasm. "There's an infinite number of things that we can't disprove," he said. "You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it's wrong to say therefore we don't need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don't need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There's an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there's not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it." Science, after all, is an empirical endeavor that traffics in probabilities. The probability of God, Dawkins says, while not zero, is vanishingly small. He is confident that no Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. Why should the notion of some deity that we inherited from the Bronze Age get more respectful treatment? Dawkins has been talking this way for years, and his best comebacks are decades old. For instance, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a variant of the tiny orbiting teapot used by Bertrand Russell for similar rhetorical duty back in 1952. Dawkins is perfectly aware that atheism is an ancient doctrine and that little of what he has to say is likely to change the terms of this stereotyped debate. But he continues to go at it. His true interlocutors are not the Christians he confronts directly but the wavering nonbelievers or quasi believers among his listeners – people like me, potential New Atheists who might be inspired by his example. "I'm quite keen on the politics of persuading people of the virtues of atheism," Dawkins says, after we get settled in one of the high-ceilinged, ground-floor rooms. He asks me to keep an eye on his bike, which sits just behind him, on the other side of a window overlooking the street. "The number of nonreligious people in the US is something nearer to 30 million than 20 million," he says. "That's more than all the Jews in the world put together. I think we're in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago. There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people had the courage to come out. I think that's the case with atheists. They are more numerous than anybody realizes." Dawkins looks forward to the day when the first US politician is honest about being an atheist. "Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists," he says. "Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. It just doesn't add up. Either they're stupid, or they're lying. And have they got a motive for lying? Of course they've got a motive! Everybody knows that an atheist can't get elected." When atheists finally begin to gain some power, what then? Here is where Dawkins' analogy breaks down. Gay politics is strictly civil rights: Live and let live. But the atheist movement, by his lights, has no choice but to aggressively spread the good news. Evangelism is a moral imperative. Dawkins does not merely disagree with religious myths. He disagrees with tolerating them, with cooperating in their colonization of the brains of innocent tykes. "How much do we regard children as being the property of their parents?" Dawkins asks. "It's one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?" Dawkins is the inventor of the concept of the meme, that is, a cultural replicator that spreads from brain to brain, like a virus. Dawkins is also a believer in democracy. He understands perfectly well that there are practical constraints on controlling the spread of bad memes. If the solution to the spread of wrong ideas and contagious superstitions is a totalitarian commissariat that would silence believers, then the cure is worse than the disease. But such constraints are no excuse for the weak-minded pretense that religious viruses are trivial, much less benign. Bad ideas foisted on children are moral wrongs. We should think harder about how to stop them. It is exactly this trip down Logic Lane, this conscientious deduction of conclusions from premises, that makes Dawkins' proclamations a torment to his moderate allies. While frontline warriors against creationism are busy reassuring parents and legislators that teaching Darwin's theory does not undermine the possibility of religious devotion, Dawkins is openly agreeing with the most stubborn fundamentalists that evolution must lead to atheism. I tell Dawkins what he already knows: He is making life harder for his friends. He barely shrugs. "Well, it's a cogent point, and I have to face that. My answer is that the big war is not between evolution and creationism, but between naturalism and supernaturalism. The sensible" – and here he pauses to indicate that sensible should be in quotes – "the 'sensible' religious people are really on the side of the fundamentalists, because they believe in supernaturalism. That puts me on the other side." THREE YEARS AGO, Dawkins adopted a new word to demarcate the types of things he couldn't believe in. The word is bright, a noun. Coined by Sacramento, California, educators Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell to designate a person with a naturalistic worldview, bright was designed to be broader than the atheist movement; it is not merely God that is untenable, but superstition, credulity, and magical thinking in general. Dawkins happened to be present in the spring of 2003 when Geisert and Futrell unveiled their proposal at an atheist conference in Florida, and he subsequently issued a public call in The Guardian and in Wired urging its use. The monthly Brights meetup in London is among the largest. The main organizer, Glen Slade, is a 41-year-old entrepreneur who studied computer science at the University of Cambridge and management at Insead, Europe's leading business school. Slade points out that political developments in Europe and the US have created new opportunities for consciousness-raising. "The war on terror wakes people up to the fact that there is more than one religion in the world," Slade says. "I think we're at a crucial point, when we admit that certain types of religion are incompatible with certain rights. At what point does society say, 'Hey, that's insane'?" Like Dawkins, Slade rejects those who might once have been his allies: agnostics and liberal believers, the type of people who may go to church but who are skeptical of doctrine. "Moderates give a power base to extremists," Slade says. "A lot of Catholics use condoms, a lot of Catholics are divorced, and a lot don't have a particular opinion about whether you are homosexual. But when the Pope stands up and says, 'This is what Catholics believe,' he still gets credit for speaking for more than a billion people." Now that people are more worried about the fatwas of Muslim clerics, Slade says, this concern could spread, become more general, and wake people up to damage caused by the Pope. For the New Atheists, the problem is not any specific doctrine, but religion in general. Or, as Dawkins writes in The God Delusion, "As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers." The New Atheist insight is that one might start anywhere – with an intellectual argument, with a visceral rejection of Islamic or Christian fundamentalism, with political disgust – and then, by relentless and logical steps, renounce every supernatural crutch. I RETURN FROM OXFORD enthusiastic for argument. I immediately begin trying out Dawkins' appeal in polite company. At dinner parties or over drinks, I ask people to declare themselves. "Who here is an atheist?" I ask. Usually, the first response is silence, accompanied by glances all around in the hope that somebody else will speak first. Then, after a moment, somebody does, almost always a man, almost always with a defiant smile and a tone of enthusiasm. He says happily, "I am!" But it is the next comment that is telling. Somebody turns to him and says: "You would be." "Why?" "Because you enjoy pissing people off." "Well, that's true." This type of conversation takes place not in central Ohio, where I was born, or in Utah, where I was a teenager, but on the West Coast, among technical and scientific people, possibly the social group that is least likely among all Americans to be religious. Most of these people call themselves agnostic, but they don't harbor much suspicion that God is real. They tell me they reject atheism not out of piety but out of politeness. As one said, "Atheism is like telling somebody, 'The very thing you hinge your life on, I totally dismiss.'" This is the type of statement she would never want to make. This is the statement the New Atheists believe must be made – loudly, clearly, and before it's too late. I continue to invite my friends for a nice, invigorating stroll down Logic Lane. For the most part, they just laugh and wave me on. AS I TEST OUT the New Atheist arguments, I realize that the problem with logic is that it doesn't quicken the blood sufficiently – even my own. But if logic by itself won't do the trick, how about the threat of apocalypse? The apocalyptic argument for atheism is the province of Sam Harris, who released a book two years ago called The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. Harris argues that, unless we renounce faith, religious violence will soon bring civilization to an end. Between 2004 and 2006, his book sold more than a quarter million copies. This autumn, Harris has a new book out, Letter to a Christian Nation. In it, he demonstrates the behavior he believes atheists should adopt when talking with Christians. "Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you," he writes, addressing his imaginary opponent, "dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well – by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God." In midsummer, Harris and I overlap for a few days in Southern California, so we arrange to meet for lunch. I am not looking for more atheist arguments. I am already steeped in them. I have by now read my David Hume, my Bertrand Russell, even my Shelley. I want to talk to Harris about emotion, about politics, about his conviction that the days of civilization are numbered unless we renounce irrational belief. Given the way things are going, I want to know if he is depressed. Is he preparing for the end? He is not. "Look at slavery," he says. We are at a beautiful restaurant in Santa Monica, near the public lots from which Americans – nearly 80 percent of whom believe the Bible is the true word of God, if polls are correct – walk happily down to the beach in various states of undress. "People used to think," Harris says, "that slavery was morally acceptable. The most intelligent, sophisticated people used to accept that you could kidnap whole families, force them to work for you, and sell their children. That looks ridiculous to us today. We're going to look back and be amazed that we approached this asymptote of destructive capacity while allowing ourselves to be balkanized by fantasy. What seems quixotic is quixotic – on this side of a radical change. From the other side, you can't believe it didn't happen earlier. At some point, there is going to be enough pressure that it is just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God." Suddenly I notice in myself a protective feeling toward Harris. Here is a man who believes that a great global change, perhaps the most important cultural change in the history of humanity, will occur out of sheer intellectual embarrassment. We discuss what it might look like, this world without God. "There would be a religion of reason," Harris says. "We would have realized the rational means to maximize human happiness. We may all agree that we want to have a Sabbath that we take really seriously – a lot more seriously than most religious people take it. But it would be a rational decision, and it would not be just because it's in the Bible. We would be able to invoke the power of poetry and ritual and silent contemplation and all the variables of happiness so that we could exploit them. Call it prayer, but we would have prayer without bullshit." I do call it prayer. Here is the atheist prayer: that our reason will subjugate our superstition, that our intelligence will check our illusions, that we will be able to hold at bay the evil temptation of faith. THAT WEEK in Los Angeles it is very hot. Temperatures in the San Fernando Valley, where I'm staying, set a record at 119. Intermittent power outages kill the lights, and the region is bathed in an old-fashioned brown smog that blurs the outlines of the trees. In the evening, as it cools to 102, I decide to enter the emplacements of the adversary. I am headed for the Angelus Temple, in Echo Park. A landmark of modern Christianity, it is one of the original churches of the surging charismatic movement. It is not the richest church, nor the most powerful, nor the most famous. But Angelus, founded by Aimee Semple McPherson in the 1920s, pioneered that combination of high production values and uplifting theology that began to purge the stain of hickdom from evangelical faith. Aside from being a historical shrine, the Angelus Temple is a case study in religious evolution. While the New Atheists are arming themselves against faith, faith itself renews its arms. Superstition, it turns out, is a moving target. In 2001, a merger with a thriving church downtown, run by the young son of a powerful pastor in Phoenix, brought renewal – not merely in the form of massive social outreach and volunteer programs, youth events, and Bible study groups, but also, as the church explains on its Web site, in the form of "new cushioned theater seats, Ferrari-red carpet, modern stainless steel fixtures, and acoustical absorbers hung decoratively from the ceiling similar to the Royal Albert Hall in England." It is Saturday night, and I am greeted at the door by a blast of air-conditioning and a wave of sound. It looks like a rock concert. It is a rock concert. More than 500 teenagers are crowding the stage, hands uplifted, singing along. There is a 12-member band, four huge videoscreens, and a crane that allows the camera to swoop through the air, projecting images of the believers back to themselves. "How many people are excited to give to the Lord tonight?" asks a young man who saunters up to the front. He handles his microphone naturally; he is not self-conscious. "How many people are pumped up? You have a destiny. God has a plan. But you have got to sow some seeds tonight, or it is never going to happen." Text flashes across the overhead screens, telling the teenagers how to make out their checks. Behind the lighting rigs and the acoustic panels, stained glass peeks out, a relic of McPherson's era. McPherson was personally wild and doctrinally flexible. She had visions and spoke in tongues, but she tried to put aside sectarian disputes. Even today, the charismatic movement is somewhat careless of doctrine. There is room for theistic evolutionists, for nonliteralists who hold that each of God's days in Genesis was the equivalent of a geological epoch, even for the notion that a check made out properly to the Lord can influence divine whim in the matter of a raise at work or a scholarship to college. Of course, evolutionary accommodation is controversial in the seminaries, and the idea of bribing God is rank heresy – no trained theologian in any Christian tradition would endorse it. But such deviations are generously tolerated in practice. The forces at work in a living church have little to do with intellectual disputes over the meaning of the Lord's word. Having agreed that the Bible is inerrant, one is permitted to put it to use. This use is supremely practical. Pastor Matthew Barnett, onstage, wears the uniform of America – jeans with loafers, a short-sleeved knit shirt. It's one of the costumes Kanye West wore on his Touch the Sky Tour, the same costume kids put on to go fold clothes at the mall. Like Kanye, like the kids at the mall, like millions of sober alcoholics, like Jesus, Pastor Matt – as he's called – does not traffic in proofs. Instead he tells stories. For instance, Pastor Matt used to be fat. Every night at 10 pm, it was off to an orgy of junk food at Jack in the Box. Two monster tacos, curly fries, a chocolate shake. He was programmed. He was helpless. He could not resist. "The devil is a lion seeking whom he may devour," Pastor Matt says. On the other hand, strength to resist temptation is an explicit promise from the Lord. Let us read from 1 Corinthians: God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it. Anybody who has ever been a teenager will recognize the relevance of Pastor Matt's sermon. These are the years of confusion, temptation, struggles with self-control. Pastor Matt openly shares with the teenagers the great humiliation he faced when trying to lose weight. The pastor is trim and handsome now. He talks intimately with the teenagers about food, about sex, about drugs. He boosts them up. He helps them cope with their shame. He tells them that they are kings anointed by God, that they simply need to pray, and have faith, and be honest, and express their vulnerability, and work hard, and if they do these things they are guaranteed their reward. When he calls them to the stage, hundreds go. He puts his hands on their heads, and some cry. The altar call is a moving spectacle, and even we adults, we readers of Dawkins and Harris, we practiced reasoners and sincere pilgrims on the path of nonbelief, may find something in it that makes sense. Notwithstanding the banality of the doctrine, its canned anecdotes, and its questionable fundraising, Pastor Matthew offers a gift to his flock. They sow their seeds, and he blesses them. It is a direct exchange. THE NEXT MORNING, I seek to cleanse my intellectual conscience among the freethinkers. The Center for Inquiry is also a storied landmark. True, it is not as striking as the Angelus Temple, being only a bland, low structure at the far end of Hollywood Boulevard, miles away from the tourists. But this building is the West Coast branch of one of the greatest anti-supernatural organizations in the world. My favorite thing about the Center for Inquiry is that it is affiliated with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, founded 30 years ago by Isaac Asimov, Paul Kurtz, and Carl Sagan and dedicated to spreading misery among every species of quack. I have become a connoisseur of atheist groups – there are scores of them, mostly local, linked into a few larger networks. There are some tensions, as is normal in the claustrophobia of powerless subcultures, but relations among the different branches of the movement are mostly friendly. Typical atheists are hardly the rabble-rousing evangelists that Dawkins or Harris might like. They are an older, peaceable, quietly frustrated lot, who meet partly out of idealism and partly out of loneliness. Here in Los Angeles, every fourth Sunday at 11 am, there is a meeting of Atheists United. More than 50 people have shown up today, which is a very good turnout for atheism. Many are approaching retirement age. The speaker this morning, a younger activist named Clark Adams, encourages them with the idea that their numbers are growing. Look at South Park, Adams urges. Look at Howard Stern. Look at Penn & Teller. These are signs of an infidel upsurge. Still, Adams admits some marketing concerns. Atheists are predominant among the "upper 5 percent," he says. "Where we're lagging is among the lower 95 percent." This is a true problem, and it goes beyond the difficulty of selling your ideas among those to whom you so openly condescend. The sociologist Rodney Stark has argued that the rise and fall of religions can be understood in economic terms. Believers sacrifice time and money in exchange for both spiritual and material benefits. In other words, religion is rational, but it is governed by the rationality of trade rather than of argument. Stark's theory is academically controversial, but here, in the Sunday morning meeting of Atheists United, it seems obvious that the narrow reasonableness of Adams can hardly be effective with the deal on offer at the Angelus Temple. "We're lagging among the lower 95 percent," says Adams. "You are kings anointed by God," says Pastor Matt. As the tide of faith rises, atheists, who have no church to buoy them, cling to one another. That a single celebrity, say, Keanu Reeves, is known to care nothing about God is counted as a victory. This parochial and moralistic self-regard begins to inspire in me a feeling of oppression. When Adams starts to recite the names of atheists who may have contributed to the television program Mr. Show With Bob and David between 1995 and 1998, I leave. Standing in the half-empty parking lot is a relief, though I am drenched from the heat. MY PILGRIMAGE is about to become more difficult. On the one hand, it is obvious that the political prospects of the New Atheism are slight. People see a contradiction in its tone of certainty. Contemptuous of the faith of others, its proponents never doubt their own belief. They are fundamentalists. I hear this protest dozens of times. It comes up in every conversation. Even those who might side with the New Atheists are repelled by their strident tone. (The founders of the Brights, Geisert and Futrell, became grim at the mention of Sam Harris. "We don't endorse anything from him," Geisert said. We had talked for nearly three hours, and this was the only dark cloud.) The New Atheists never propose realistic solutions to the damage religion can cause. For instance, the Catholic Church opposes condom use, which makes it complicit in the spread of AIDS. But among the most powerful voices against this tragic mistake are liberals within the Church – exactly those allies the New Atheists reject. The New Atheists care mainly about correct belief. This makes them hopeless, politically. But on the other hand, the New Atheism does not aim at success by conventional political means. It does not balance interests, it does not make compromises, it does not seek common ground. The New Atheism, outwardly at least, is a straightforward appeal to our intellect. Atheists make their stand upon the truth. So is atheism true? There's good evidence from research by anthropologists such as Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran that a grab bag of cognitive predispositions makes us natural believers. We hear leaves rustle and we imagine that some airy being flutters up there; we see a corpse and continue to fear the judgment and influence of the person it once was. Remarkable progress has been made in understanding why faith is congenial to human nature – and of course that still says nothing about whether it is true. Harris is typically severe in his rejection of the idea that evolutionary history somehow justifies faith. There is, he writes, "nothing more natural than rape. But no one would argue that rape is good, or compatible with a civil society, because it may have had evolutionary advantages for our ancestors." Like rape, Harris says, religion may be a vestige of our primitive nature that we must simply overcome. A variety of rebuttals to atheism have been tried over the years. Religious fundamentalists stand on their canonized texts and refuse to budge. The wisdom of this approach – strategically, at least – is evident when you see the awkward positions nonfundamentalists find themselves in. The most active defender of faith among scientists right now is Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project. His most recent book is called The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. In defiance of the title, Collins never attempts to show that science offers evidence for belief. Rather, he argues only that nothing in science prohibits belief. Unsolved problems in diverse fields, along with a skepticism about knowledge in general, are used to demonstrate that a deity might not be impossible. The problem with this, for defenders of faith, is that they've implicitly accepted science as the arbiter of what is real. This leaves the atheists with the upper hand. That's because when secular investigations take the lead, sacred doctrines collapse. There's barely a field of modern research – cosmology, biology, archaeology, anthropology, psychology – in which competing religious explanations have survived unscathed. Even the lowly humanities, which began the demolition job more than 200 years ago with textual criticism of the Bible, continue to make things difficult for believers through careful analysis of the historical origins of religious texts. While Collins and his fellow reconcilers can defend the notion of faith in the abstract, as soon as they get down to doctrine, the secular professors show up with their corrosive arguments. When it comes to concrete examples of exactly what we should believe, reason is a slippery slope, and at the bottom – well, at the bottom is atheism. I spend months resisting this slide. I turn to the great Oxford professor of science and religion John Hedley Brooke, who convinces me that, contrary to myth, Darwin did not become an atheist because of evolution. Instead, his growing resistance to Christianity came from his moral criticism of 19th-century doctrine, compounded by the tragedy of his daughter's death. Darwin did not believe that evolution proved there was no God. This is interesting, because the story of Darwin's relationship to Christianity has figured in polemics for and against evolution for more than a century. But in the context of a real struggle with the claims of atheism, an accurate history of Darwin's loss of faith counts for little more than celebrity gossip. From Brooke, I get pointers on the state of the art in academic theology, particularly those philosophers of religion who write in depth about science, such as Willem Drees and Philip Clayton. There is a certain illicit satisfaction in this scholarly work, which to an atheist is no better than astrology. ("The entire thrust of my position is that Christian theology is a nonsubject," Dawkins has written. "Vacuous. Devoid of coherence or content.") On the contrary, I find the best of these books to be brilliant, detailed, self-assured. I learn about kenosis, the deliberate decision of God not to disturb the natural order. I learn about panentheism, which says God is both the world and more than the world, and about emergentist theology, which holds that a God might have evolved. There are deep passages surveying theories of knowledge, glossing Kant, Schelling, and Spinoza. I discover a daunting diversity of belief, and of course I'm just beginning. I haven't even gotten started with Islam, or the Vedic texts, or Zoroastrianism. It is all admirable and stimulating and lacks only the real help anybody in my position would need: reasons to believe that specific religious ideas are true. Even the most careful theologians seem to pose the question backward, starting out with their beliefs and clinging to those fragments that science and logic cannot overturn. The most rigorous of them jettison huge portions of doctrine along the way. If trained theologians can go this far, who am I to defend supernaturalism on their behalf? Why not be an atheist? I've sought aid far and wide, from Echo Park to Harvard, and finally I am almost ready to give in. Only one thing is still bothering me. Were I to declare myself an atheist, what would this mean? Would my life have to change? Would it become my moral obligation to be uncompromising toward fence-sitting friends? That person at dinner, pissing people off with his arrogance, his disrespect, his intellectual scorn – would that be me? Besides, do we really understand all that religion means? Would it be easy to excise it, even assuming it is false? Didn't they try a cult of reason once, in France, at the close of the 18th century, and didn't it turn out to be too ugly even for Robespierre? THE DOCTOR for these difficulties looks like Santa Claus. His name is Daniel Dennett. He is a renowned philosopher, an atheist, and the possessor of a full white beard. I suspect he must have designed this Father Christmas look intentionally, but in fact it just evolved. "In the '60s, I looked like Rasputin," he says. Children have come up to him in airports, checking to see if he is on vacation from the North Pole. When it happens, he does not torment them with knowledge that the person they mistake him for is not real. Instead, the philosopher puts his fingers to his lips and says conspiratorially: "Shhhh." Dennett summers on a farm in Maine. Flying in, I have a fine view of the old New England tapestry, which grows more and more rural as we move north: symmetrical fields with pale borders like the membranes of cells, barns and outbuildings like organelles, and, at the center of every thickening cluster of life, always the same vestigial structure, whose black dot of a cupola is offset by a whitish gleam. I know something of the history of the New England church, which began in fanaticism and ended in reform – from witch burning to softest Presbyterianism in a few hundred years. Now, according to the atheists, these structures serve no useful purpose, and besides, they may be conduits for disease. Perhaps it is best that we do away with them all. But can it be done without harm? Among the New Atheists, Dennett holds an exalted but ambiguous place. Like Dawkins and Harris, he is an evangelizing nonbeliever. He has campaigned in writing on behalf of the Brights and has written a book called Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. In it, the blasting rhetoric of Dawkins and Harris is absent, replaced by provocative, often humorous examples and thought experiments. But like the other New Atheists, Dennett gives no quarter to believers who resist subjecting their faith to scientific evaluation. In fact, he argues that neutral, scientifically informed education about every religion in the world should be mandatory in school. After all, he argues, "if you have to hoodwink – or blindfold – your children to ensure that they confirm their faith when they are adults, your faith ought to go extinct." When I arrive at the farm, I find him in the midst of a difficult task. He has been asked by the President's Council on Bioethics to write an essay reflecting on human dignity. In grappling with these issues, Dennett knows that he can't rely on faith or scripture. He will not say that life begins when an embryo is ensouled by God. He will not say that hospitals must not invite the indigent to sell their bodies for medical experiments because humans are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. Ethical problems must be solved by reason, not arbitrary rules. And yet, on the other hand, Dennett knows that reason alone will fail. We sit in his study, in some creaky chairs, with the deep silence of an August morning around us, and Dennett tells me that he takes very seriously the risk of overreliance on thought. He doesn't want people to lose confidence in what he calls their "default settings," by which he means the conviction that their ethical intuitions are trustworthy. These default settings give us a feeling of security, a belief that our own sacrifices will be reciprocated. "If you shatter this confidence," he says, "then you get into a deep hole. Without trust, everything goes wrong." It interests me that, though Dennett is an atheist, he does not see faith merely as a useless vestige of our primitive nature, something we can, with effort, intellectualize away. No rational creature, he says, would be able to do without unexamined, sacred things. "Would intelligent robots be religious?" it occurs to me to ask. "Perhaps they would," he answers thoughtfully. "Although, if they were intelligent enough to evaluate their own programming, they would eventually question their belief in God." Dennett is an advocate of admitting that we simply don't have good reasons for some of the things we believe. Although we must guard our defaults, we still have to admit that they may be somewhat arbitrary. "How else do we protect ourselves?" he asks. "With absolutisms? This means telling lies, and when the lies are exposed, the crash is worse. It's not that science can discover when the body is ensouled. That's nonsense. We are not going to tolerate infanticide. But we're not going to put people in jail for onanism. Instead of protecting stability with a brittle set of myths, we can defend a deep resistance to mucking with the boundaries." This sounds to me a little like the religion of reason that Harris foresees. "Yes, there could be a rational religion," Dennett says. "We could have a rational policy not even to think about certain things." He understands that this would create constant tension between prohibition and curiosity. But the borders of our sacred beliefs could be well guarded simply by acknowledging that it is pragmatic to refuse to change them. I ask Dennett if there might not be a contradiction in his scheme. On the one hand, he aggressively confronts the faithful, attacking their sacred beliefs. On the other hand, he proposes that our inherited defaults be put outside the limits of dispute. But this would make our defaults into a religion, unimpeachable and implacable gods. And besides, are we not atheists? Sacred prohibitions are anathema to us. Dennett replies that exceptions can be made. "Philosophers are the ones who refuse to accept the sacred values," he says. For instance, Socrates. I find this answer supremely odd. The image of an atheist religion whose sacred objects, called defaults, are taboo for all except philosophers – this is the material of the cruelest parody. But that's not what Dennett means. In his scenario, the philosophers are not revered authorities but mental risk-takers and scouts. Their adventures invite ridicule, or worse. "Philosophers should expect to be hooted at and reviled," Dennett says. "Socrates drank the hemlock. He knew what he was doing." With this, I begin to understand what kind of atheist I want to be. Dennett's invocation of Socrates is a reminder that there are certain actors in history who change the world by staging their own defeat. Having been raised under Christianity, we are well schooled in this tactic of belated victory. The world has reversed its judgment on Socrates, as on Jesus and the fanatical John Brown. All critics of fundamental values, even those who have no magical beliefs, will find themselves tempted to retrace this path. Dawkins' tense rhetoric of moral choice, Harris' vision of apocalypse, their contempt for liberals, the invocation of slavery – this is not the language of intellectual debate but of prophecy. In Breaking the Spell, Dennett writes about the personal risk inherent in attacking faith. Harris veils his academic affiliation and hometown because he fears for his physical safety. But in truth, the cultural neighborhoods where they live and work bear little resemblance to Italy under Pope Urban VIII, or New England in the 17th century, or Saudi Arabia today. Dennett spends the academic year at Tufts University and summers with family and students in Maine. Dawkins occupies an endowed Oxford chair and walks his dog on the wide streets, alone. Harris sails forward this fall with his second well-publicized book. There have been no fatwas, no prison cells, no gallows or crosses. Prophecy, I've come to realize, is a complex meme. When prophets provoke real trouble, bring confusion to society by sowing reverberant doubts, spark an active, opposing consensus everywhere – that is the sign they've hit a nerve. But what happens when they don't hit a nerve? There are plenty of would-be prophets in the world, vainly peddling their provocative claims. Most of them just end up lecturing to undergraduates, or leading little Christian sects, or getting into Wikipedia edit wars, or boring their friends. An unsuccessful prophet is not a martyr, but a sort of clown. Where does this leave us, we who have been called upon to join this uncompromising war against faith? What shall we do, we potential enlistees? Myself, I've decided to refuse the call. The irony of the New Atheism – this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism – is too much for me. The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban. But, so far, their provocation has failed to take hold. Given all the religious trauma in the world, I take this as good news. Even those of us who sympathize intellectually have good reasons to wish that the New Atheists continue to seem absurd. If we reject their polemics, if we continue to have respectful conversations even about things we find ridiculous, this doesn't necessarily mean we've lost our convictions or our sanity. It simply reflects our deepest, democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there's always a chance we could turn out to be wrong. Wired, Issue 14.11, November 2006

Alberto R. Gonzales and The Hive Mind

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 22:27:22 -0800

ATTY. GEN. Alberto R. Gonzales dealt our assembled senators a mighty dose of frustration recently, parrying their wickedest thrusts by claiming, for example, that key decisions about which U.S. attorneys to fire emerged from "a process that was ongoing that I did not have transparency into." The senators did not respond well. Even Republicans seemed to suspect a certain lack of candor. If Gonzales really had been the one to decide which of his top employees to fire, then he was lying. On the other hand, if he truly hadn't even seen the list of names of those to be dismissed until it was complete, then he was working inside a cloud of obliviousness that would get a person fired from the local Mailbox Central. But there's a third way to look at it, revealed in the way the attorney general combined the usual passive-voice bureaucratese with terms -- "recommended list," "information-sharing project" and "consensus recommendation" -- that hint at the language of collaborative filtering. Gonzales may be on the cutting edge of a knowledge revolution that is reinventing the way we work, study and play. Old notions of transparency and responsibility are not exactly obsolete in this new world; rather, they are special cases, rare islands of individual understanding in a society increasingly governed by the wisdom of crowds. For example, Amazon frequently recommends books that "it" thinks you should buy. Who makes these recommendations? Nobody does -- or rather, everybody does. Amazon watches your purchases and the ratings you give to things you like, and it runs a complex program that identifies common patterns among millions of users. The result is a list of recommended books, without any recommender. Now, imagine the books are U.S. attorneys. You needn't object that there wasn't a computer observing Gonzales, or Karl Rove, or President Bush himself, as each praised or criticized an attorney. No computer is required. The number of transactions in the tiny and insular world of the Bush administration is minuscule in comparison to the number of purchases that Amazon tracks. Put into a database, with a field for every time somebody important makes a telling remark, the total amount of data to crunch would fit on a thumb drive. Hey, it could even fit in a person's brain. Gonzales said in his testimony that he had nothing to do with making the list, but when he saw it, he wasn't surprised. And it's not surprising he wasn't surprised. The list reflected the "hive mind"; it was opinion writ large, in the same way we all know that Sanjaya deserved to be kicked off "American Idol." The key to making a consensus operative -- getting it out of mere chatter and into the real world -- is preventing the outbreak of factionalism and debate, which can lead to time-wasting attempts to resolve conflicts by "thinking" about them. The Bush administration, so brutal when seen from the outside, has been a remarkable oasis of cooperation within. Now well into the last quarter of its eight-year tenure, the executive branch has weathered a series of national crises that border on catastrophe, and yet it has yielded no point of principle or policy. Though plans may have occasionally been foiled by force majeure (the unforeseeable sectarian violence in Iraq, for instance, or the surprising vulnerability of Gulf Coast cities to wind and water), still, in nearly every case, White House staffers have stuck to their stories and to each other. There have been few public fights and bitter resignations, fewer negotiations with adversaries, no apologies and certainly no explanations. Almost exactly three years ago, then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice appeared before Congress to talk about why she hadn't felt it necessary to take any special action after being warned that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States. "If there was any reason to believe that I needed to do something," Rice said at the time, "I would have been expected to be asked to do it." At the time, this sentence seemed a marvel of tortured syntax and evasive passivity. But with Gonzales' testimony in hand, we can now read it differently. What Rice was saying was not that she was too disengaged or too inexperienced to do her job. Instead, she may merely have been expressing her trust in the distributed system of knowledge that gives the Bush administration its remarkable confidence. The hive mind has a curious blindness, however. It has reasons for doing things, but those reasons are typically inaccessible to its members. Pressed hard, Gonzales simply looked at the committee and admitted that he was baffled as to why he did what he did. Repeatedly, he was asked what criteria were used to select individuals for firing. "I would like to know," he said. "I would like to ask that question." Los Angeles Times, April 21, 2007

Reinventing 911

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 16:05:09 -0800

It's another dangerous day in America. Bird flu is spreading, the North Koreans have a nuclear bomb, and Osama bin Laden is still at large. The federal security threat-warning system points to "elevated." Citizens nationwide have been told to be extra vigilant against new terror attacks. Meanwhile, in the midsize city of Portland, Oregon, the authorities have other things on their minds. A little before 6 pm on this ordinary Saturday evening, there is a hit-and-run in the city's western suburbs. A moment later, a silent alarm goes off in a building near downtown. At 6:03, there's trouble with a drunk on the north side, and at almost the same time there's a report of a disturbance at a Home Depot. Three quiet minutes go by, and then at 6:07 comes news of another hit-and-run. From a room on the 10th floor of the old Heathman Hotel downtown, I follow the action as it scrolls across the screen of my laptop, little exclamation points popping up on a detailed satellite photo of the town. Each alert is attached to a short bit of text. I can zoom out, watching multiple traumas light up across the whole metropolitan area of 1.7 million people, or zoom in, finding nearly silent places where nothing that requires attention from the police happens for a long time. The resolution is so good, I can pick out individual buildings. At 7:38 pm there's news of a robbery downtown. At 7:53 pm another robbery occurs, across the Willamette River. Between these incidents, there's a motorist in distress, an audible burglar alarm, and a problem with an "unwanted person" serious enough for the police to dispatch three units. I stay in front of my map for hours, watching a swift, unceasing flow of local problems. While there is an undeniable voyeuristic appeal to a real-time data feed of break-ins, auto thefts, fisticuffs, and public drunkenness, the true value of this experimental system lies elsewhere. For several months, I've been talking with security experts about one of the thorniest problems they face: How can we protect our complex society from massive but unpredictable catastrophes? The homeland security establishment has spent an immeasurable fortune vainly seeking an answer, distributing useless, highly specialized equipment, and toggling its multicolored Homeland Security Advisory System back and forth between yellow, for elevated, and orange, for high. Now I've come to take a look at a different set of tools, constructed outside the control of the federal government and based on the notion that the easier it is for me to find out about a loose dog tying up traffic, the safer I am from a terrorist attack. Art Botterell is a 51-year-old former bureaucrat whose outwardly earnest, well-formulated sentences have just the degree of excessive precision that functions among technical people as sarcasm. At one time, Botterell worked for the State of California, in the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. But he quit that job in 1995. Today, Botterell is supported by his wife, a teacher, leaving him time to save America. I first met Botterell earlier this year at a discussion of the book Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World. (Safe has four authors, including Katrina Heron, the former editor in chief of this magazine, and Evan Ratliff, whose story, "Fear, Inc.," appears in this issue.) He caught my attention because, in an evening of discouraging commentary on the security establishment, he alone expressed optimism. There are enormous public safety resources that remain untapped, Botterell argued. "The focus in homeland security is on the idea of America as an invincible fortress," he told me later. "Most of the effort goes into prevention, law enforcement, and the military. But those of us in emergency management tend to think, 'Well, stuff happens. So, what are you going to do about it?'" In the world of disaster management, here is some of the stuff that happens: Levees burst, power grids go dark, oil tankers run aground, railcars full of toxic chemicals tumble off their tracks, tornadoes sweep houses into the sky. In dealing with such catastrophes, emergency managers have experience in the cascade of consequences: Phone service vanishes, hospitals are jammed, highways slow to a crawl, shelters overflow. No matter how much advance planning may have been done, disaster response becomes an improvisation, and society eventually rights itself through the cumulative effect of many separate acts of intelligence. Obviously, if you want citizens to improvise intelligently, it is wise to let them know as soon as possible when something goes wrong. Back in 1989, when he was working for the state of California, Botterell started creating an innovative warning system called the Emergency Digital Information Service. Botterell's system - still in use - aggregates weather alerts, natural disaster information, and other official warnings into a common database, then makes them available through multiple media: pager, email, the Web, and digital radio broadcast. Because EDIS warnings are picked up by television newsrooms, local police, school principals, building management firms - anybody who wants them - the system injects massive redundancy into the public warning system and ensures that any serious news will immediately be bouncing around multiple communication channels. EDIS was designed to fix two flaws in traditional warnings like tsunami sirens, telephone trees, and old-fashioned broadcast alerts. The first problem is that specialized warning systems are infrequently used, and usually fail under stress. But the second problem is more serious: Humans are encoded with a tendency to pause. When we receive new information that requires urgent action, we hesitate, testing the reality of the news and thinking about what to do. Emergency managers are all too familiar with this feature of human nature. They call it milling. Milling is rational - and dangerous. Even when a warning is successfully delivered, there are deadly delays before people respond. What are they doing in these minutes, hours, and even days? They are talking to friends and family, watching the news, listening to the radio, calling the police, counting their money, and trying to balance the costs of leaving against the risks of staying. When alerts are given through rarely used pipelines, milling increases. And when the information distributed by hard-pressed government officials is confusing or contradictory, milling increases even more. During a large disaster, like Hurricane Katrina, warnings get hopelessly jumbled. The truth is that, for warnings to work, it's not enough for them to be delivered. They must also overcome that human tendency to pause; they must trigger a series of effective actions, mobilizing the informal networks that we depend on in a crisis. To understand the true nature of warnings, it helps to see them not as single events, like an air-raid siren, but rather as swarms of messages racing through overlapping social networks, like the buzz of gossip. Residents of New Orleans didn't just need to know a hurricane was coming. They also needed to be informed that floodwaters were threatening to breach the levees, that not all neighborhoods would be inundated, that certain roads would become impassible while alternative evacuation routes would remain open, that buses were available for transport, and that the Superdome was full. No central authority possessed this information. Knowledge was fragmentary, parceled out among tens of thousands of people on the ground. There was no way to gather all these observations and deliver them to where they were needed. During Hurricane Katrina, public officials from top to bottom found themselves locked within conventional channels, unable to receive, analyze, or redistribute news from outside. In the most egregious example, Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff said in a radio interview that he had not heard that people at the New Orleans convention center were without food or water. At that point they'd been stranded two days. By contrast, in the system Botterell created for California, warnings are sucked up from an array of sources and sent automatically to users throughout the state. Messages are squeezed into a standard format called the Common Alerting Protocol, designed by Botterell in discussion with scores of other disaster experts. CAP gives precise definitions to concepts like proximity, urgency, and certainty. Using CAP, anyone who might respond to an emergency can choose to get warnings for their own neighborhood, for instance, or only the most urgent messages. Alerts can be received by machines, filtered, and passed along. The model is simple and elegant, and because warnings can be tagged with geographical coordinates, users can customize their cell phones, pagers, BlackBerries, or other devices to get only those relevant to their precise locale. The EDIS system proved itself in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, carrying more than 2,000 news releases and media advisories, and it has only grown more robust in the decade since. Anyone who has paid close attention to the evolution of the Internet will recognize the underlying power of the Common Alerting Protocol. Good standards and widespread access, not hardware or software, bring social networks to life. CAP provided the first proven warning standard, but when it comes to participation, California's EDIS remained strikingly primitive. To this day only certain agencies - like the US Geological Survey, law enforcement and fire departments, and the National Weather Service - are permitted to send out information. This increases trust, but at the expense of scope. Until recently, CAP was like the markup languages that existed before the invention of the Web - a useful set of technical rules whose potential to change society looked like nothing more than the exaggerated enthusiasm of a few geeks. Open data standards aren't sexy. You can't sell them to the government for a pile of cash. And it's hard to pose in front of them for celebratory photographs. On May 11, 2005, a small plane took off from an airfield in Pennsylvania, wandered around for a bit, then aimed straight for the Capitol. This was the type of incident the homeland security establishment had been preparing for ever since 9/11. An evacuation began, and reporters caught sight of members of Congress rushing down the steps of the Capitol. Just over half an hour later, the plane was on the ground. As the pilot explained that he was merely lost, rounds of congratulations began to circulate; the government's quick reaction had proven that new investments in public safety were paying off. Then the DC mayor, Anthony Williams, told reporters that nobody had alerted his administration to the threat until after the all-clear was sounded. There are more than half a million civilians in the District of Columbia. Wasn't anybody thinking about them? Washington's emergency protocols, it turned out, were a jumble after all. And the same is true across the nation. Thousands of vulnerable targets have been identified, but there is no credible plan for protecting them. The reason is simple: Any plan would be inherently incomplete. The possibilities for disruption are too numerous. You could plan forever and still not account for all of them. The word that security experts use to describe simple threats to complicated systems is asymmetry. As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in his essay "The Great Asymmetry," catastrophe is favored by nature. Species diversity increases for millennia, and then an asteroid extinguishes many forms of life; a skyscraper that takes years to build can be destroyed in an hour. The wreck of a city by a hurricane is an example of asymmetry. So is terrorism - the relative ease of destruction is the edge terrorists use to compensate for their small numbers. On the other hand, software designers have gotten pretty good at increasing resistance to asymmetrical threats. The principles are well known: Use uncomplicated parts, encourage redundancy, and open the system to public examination so flaws can be discovered and fixed before they become catastrophic. The key is not to anticipate every problem, but to create flexible networks that can route around failure. Yet ever since 9/11, the security establishment has gone in the opposite direction, building highly specialized tools, centralizing control, and increasing secrecy. After the debacle of the errant Cessna, federal officials pointed out that a system to coordinate response to aerial attacks had already been installed. The system, called the Domestic Events Network, involves an always-open conference call. A dedicated speakerphone sits in the DC police headquarters. In this case, a human error had occurred - some idiot hung up the line. But of course the problem goes deeper than that. Such rarely used systems actually produce idiocy. Who could remain ready to act on a signal that seldom, if ever, comes through? Eventually, people zone out. They stop paying attention. They become idiots. Real reactions to real threats take an entirely different form. In the case of the Cessna flyover, plenty of citizens knew that there was an evacuation, even those with no special access to government communications. Why? Because as soon as the evacuation of the Capitol began, it was noted by reporters and bystanders. Within minutes, it was on the Internet. Wherever they occur, major threats nearly always trigger instant ripples through electronic networks. Bursts of communication are unleashed as witnesses spread the word. This is the raw material of warning. The good thing is that the signal is immediate. The bad thing is that it comes with a lot of noise. A formal structure for warnings, like Art Botterell's Common Alerting Protocol, eases transmission but doesn't make the information more reliable. We still need a way to analyze the warnings, to sort the raw cries of amazement and confusion, the requests for aid, and the coolly professional descriptions of experts, and assemble these records into a real-time portrait of a bad event. We need a system to boost intelligence everywhere, providing the kind of distributed, networked resistance crucial for surviving asymmetrical attacks. Such work could hardly be performed by machines. Operators would have to take calls from people on the ground, separate out the cranks, dampen the hysteria, and keep a precise record. In theory, all that information could then easily be pushed back out to the public. Such a system would be expensive, difficult to build, and extremely valuable. Fortunately, in most cities, it already exists. "A 911 call center is a resource of awesome power," says Carl Simpson, the director of emergency communications for the city of Portland, "because when something goes wrong, everybody dials 911." I was talking with Simpson at the entrance to the metropolitan area's hypermodern Bureau of Emergency Communications. He led me up to the call center, a large, theatrical, open space where dozens of operators were taking incoming emergency calls and dispatching police, fire, or medical response teams. Being a 911 operator means balancing seemingly contradictory skills. On one hand, operators have to be fanatically precise and well-organized. On the other, they must be able to establish rapport with panicky callers. Operators need excellent spatial memories so that they can keep a map of an ongoing crisis clear in their minds. But they cannot be wedded to an old picture of reality, because the city is constantly changing. It takes more hours to become a fully trusted operator in Simpson's center than it does to become a licensed helicopter pilot. The washout rate during training is 40 percent. I spent most of the day listening to calls, hearing how the narratives of people in distress are taken in, rearranged, stripped of irrelevancies, compared to known data ("There's a parking lot on the north side there, ma'am, is that where you are?"), and coded for urgency. Simpson pointed out that most people think of a 911 call center only in terms of the data coming in. Very few people have considered what would happen if, after collecting all those public cries of alarm, you extracted the essentials, tagged them for easy distribution, then reversed the flow and pumped that information back out. In 2002, Simpson went to lunch with a Portland businessman named Charles Jennings. A serial entrepreneur, Jennings made his first product 28 years ago; it was a little booklet called Drought Gardening that included a back-cover photo of the author in a full hippy beard. Later, he helped run his wife's company, which sold pastries at a street market under one of Portland's downtown bridges. After stints as a news-paper columnist, a comic strip writer, and a film and television producer, Jennings got into the software business, creating three companies in 10 years. After September 11, Jennings pulled together several large public meetings in Portland to discuss how the local tech community could help out. Counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke appeared at one of them and spoke about one of the biggest but least-glamorous public safety problems: Emergency personnel - police, firefighters, paramedics - can't share information easily in a crisis. A handful of projects emerged around that time, including a nonprofit founded by Jennings called the Regional Alliances for Infrastructure and Network Security, and a private software firm called Swan Island Networks (Jennings is CEO). Their goal was to create a system linking public safety agencies. Jennings' engineers discovered Art Botterell's CAP standard, in which they saw a lingua franca of emergency communication. They added mapping, messaging, and security features and set out to license the package to public safety agencies for a fee under the name Connect & Protect. But this plan, seemingly straightforward, included a twist that turned out to be a radical breakthrough. The twist was in the very definition of a public safety agency. What is a public safety agency? Obviously, the police count, but what about, say, hospitals? If hospitals are included, then why not clinics? If clinics, why not schools, senior housing, and neighborhood groups? Connect & Protect was designed to link people who need to share information in a crisis. But this turned out to be a lot of people. During that lunch in 2002, Jennings pitched Carl Simpson the idea of capturing all the cries of distress pouring into the 911 center and using them to warn the public. He wanted to use Connect & Protect to give his swarm of public agencies a real-time picture of the region's emergency activity. At first, Simpson was dubious, but a few weeks later, after a visit to a local school, he changed his mind. Simpson had been standing out on the grounds with the principal when a teacher walked up and asked where the kids would be having lunch that day. The principal squinted up at the clouds and said, "Outside." Simpson, whose job puts him in the middle of a complex, highly effective sensor network, found this style of information gathering unimpressive. "His sole basis for deciding whether to put his kids inside or outside is a glance at the sky?" he told me later. "What if there was a chemical fire nearby? What if the police were combing the neighborhood for a criminal?" Such emergencies are rare, but when they happen the principal ought to know. Simpson called Jennings back and offered access to the 911 data on two conditions. First, there had to be no additional effort on the part of the dispatchers. And second, it had to be offered to the public schools for free. Jennings' company automated the process of reformatting the 911 call records into the CAP standard, and he and Simpson started inviting people to sign on. The schools got access, of course. They invited the security officers at the Oregon Zoo to join the network - it gets 1.3 million visitors a year. The county parole officers got access so they could keep an eye on incidents that might lead them to violators. Then they went further. They provided the 911 data to a private property manager responsible for three high-rises on the east side of the Willamette River, and they also gave access to the management of Lloyd Center, Portland's biggest shopping complex. The public libraries and the county transportation officials and even the dogcatchers got the warnings. Meanwhile, the evangelists at the nonprofit that Jennings had founded were out peddling the idea that Connect & Protect wasn't just for receiving alerts, it was for sending them, too. The raw data of warning and public safety didn't have to come from 911 alone. Almost everyone receiving information could contribute information. Network effects began to take hold, and by late 2005 recipients of the 911 alerts were sending warnings directly to one another every day. Messages about auto break-ins at the mall went to high-rises across the street, where the security office had 32 guards on staff. Parole officers sent alerts to the schools. On the Oregon coast, hotel managers used Connect & Protect to pass along news of storm threats. During a recent tsunami warning for the West Coast, Connect & Protect beat the beach siren in one coastal town by 24 minutes. Connect & Protect is now a large conglomeration of overlapping alerts stretching across nine Oregon counties. Each stream of warnings is controlled by the agency that issues it. Fairly strict security features attempt to limit abuse of the warnings - certain categories of calls, such as reports of sexual crimes, are not transmitted publicly, the alerts can't easily be copied or pasted, anonymity is forbidden. Despite these controls, Connect & Protect blatantly undermines privacy. Pick up the phone and call 911, and your address flashes across screens around the city - maybe even your neighbor's. Then again, if you have a real need for help, your neighbor might be just the person you want to know about it. Like a charcoal rubbing that reveals the pattern of a relief, the spread of Connect & Protect exposes the region's real security network, a ubiquitous but previously hidden tangle of private and public groups. The lines of authority through which the alerts travel on Connect & Protect do not form a simple pyramid, but extend in a mycelial net that grows thicker in some places, thinner in others. The network copies - but also broadens and blurs - the existing web of governance. Eventually, most people may be touched by such a network, but the origin and route of any message is unpredictable and constantly changing. Many of the important nodes of this network are run by people like Derek Bliss. The tall, skinny 36-year-old is the regional manager of First Response, the largest private security firm in the Northwest. "Let's say there's a high school football game that doesn't go so well," Bliss says, noting that he has security contracts with 10 percent of the Portland schools. "Remarks are made, and our guys have to keep people apart. We send out an alert to all the other schools." Bliss plays no official role in his region's crisis management bureaucracy. Yet his office takes about 16,000 calls per year. The 15 cars he has on duty, his secure dispatch center equipped with a generator, his contacts with property owners around the city - none of these count as public resources, even though his team would almost certainly be active in any emergency. Nationally, the employees of private security firms like First Response outnumber public law enforcement officers four to one. The traditional way to tap into such private security firms - and the rest of the unseen resources that might help in a disaster - is by staging elaborate drills. But you can't drill for every type of threat, and you can't drill all the time. Everybody has better things to do. Laborious training sessions are forgotten during the long stretches when everything's fine. That is the true nature of citizens. Even with constant propaganda, it's impossible to keep us safe by keeping us scared. Weeks, months, and years pass, and we insist on living normally again. If national safety - the ability to respond to hurricanes, terrorist attacks, earthquakes - depends on the execution of explicit plans, on soldierly obedience, and on showy security drills, then a decentralized security scheme is useless. But if it depends on improvised reactions to unknown threats, that's a different story. A deeply textured, unmapped system is hard to bring down. A system that encourages improvisation is quick to recover. Ubiquitous networks of warning may constitute our own asymmetrical advantage, and, like the terrorist networks that occasionally carry out spectacular attacks, their power remains obscure until they're called into action. -- Wired, Issue 13.12, December 2005