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Patty Lyons, Patty Lyons’ Knitting Bag of Tricks: Well-illustrated techniques for fixing pesky small things in knitting, like making a spiral into an actual circle so there’s less of a jog when you change colors. (She says jogless but I’m not good enough for that or I just knit differently enough—she’s very big on things being different for each individual knitter, just as each telegraph operator had their own “fist.”) Lots of things that I will try for, among other things, better buttonholes and ribbing, as well as a few things that seemed unlikely to be worth the bother. Good advice for changing patterns to match your own gauge as well as explanations of when that makes sense. I took a class with her before picking this book up, but if you can follow tutorials you shouldn’t need a class.
Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future: Lepore’s clever turns of phrase often rub me the wrong way, but this is a really interesting story about a forgotten data analysis company from the early days of computerization. It failed, but it was employed by major political campaigns and by the military in Vietnam before it did, and in a larger sense its mission succeeded. Connecting personal to professional lives, Lepore argues that its insistence on the knowledge of white men and the promise of data-enabled power to control others who were agitating for a share in governance was both what made it persuasive and what made it unable to see its own weaknesses. I also didn’t realize just how much of a huckster Ithiel de Sola Pool was. (A big one, though Lepore credits him with being right about what the internet could disrupt.)
Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage around the World, Joanna Davidson & Dinah Hannaford, eds.: A really interesting book of short chapters about divorced, separated, and never-married women in societies that regularly demand that women marry and enforce that demand with harsh social, economic, and even legal penalties. Around the world, age of first marriage is increasing, divorce and separation is rising, and more and more women never marry. Especially under circumstances that impair men’s ability to earn money (without removing the social rules that let them beat and cheat on their wives), heterosexual women may respond by reframing their lives around children and/or natal kin, sometimes giving lip service to the ideal of marriage.
In Namibia, for example, marriage is still seen as highly desirable but also mostly out of reach for economic reasons. Expensive weddings are the norm and very few people’s families are willing to humiliate themselves with cheaper options—“some young people, particularly men, have described getting married as a war between the sexes and the generations,” while high-status couples who can afford the social costs are the ones able to opt out and marry by magistrate. Large group marriages in eastern Botswana aren’t socially real but do provide some legal protection to spouses and children, avoiding the otherwise very real outcome in which a cohabiting “wife” is “widowed” and the “husband’s” patrilateral family arrive and seize all of the couple’s estate.
In South Korea, war-driven shortages of men left substantial percentages of women unmarried, but this was rarely publicly discussed and thus memory-holed. “Teknonymy was (and still is) widespread: women were called by their roles inside the family, most commonly referred to as Someone’s Mother, that someone being their eldest son. These norms made marriage not just expected but definitional of being a Korean woman. A woman without a husband and a child was in a real sense almost unnamable.” Today, the women who don’t marry often do so because they feel responsibility for taking care of their natal kin.
In India, less than one percent of older women have never married; marriage is not much of a choice. Widowed women may turn to sex work because it seems like the only financial option, but also because a husband’s death “creates something of a power vacuum”—the India chapter recounts stories of widows whose deceased husband’s friends pressured them for sex. A woman who married for love is particularly vulnerable—she “is considered morally audacious enough that a further step into the business of sex may seem probable to her community, or ultimately to her.” At the same time, sex work could provide self-determination and choices otherwise unavailable to women.
In Brazil, divorced Black women reconfigure notions of propriety by reframing divorce as a matter of self-respect: An abusive or unfaithful man was disrespectful, even as women who divorced without a “good reason” could be socially sanctioned. A new term—namorido, mashing up the words for husband and boyfriend—emerged to describe a man who didn’t have the same power or responsibility as a husband, but could provide intimacy without displacing women as heads of household. The namorido relationship was “intentionally slightly vague. The fewer and more ambiguous the expectations women had of a partner, the less likely they were to suffer from the disappointment of unmet expectations.” Namoridos were often 10-15 years younger than the women they dated, possibly as another way of balancing power. But women who became pregnant were still likely to remarry.
White women in Barbados took on more of the matrifocality and extended kin network of their Black counterparts, where 60 and 85% of all children were born outside of legal marriage, only 23.8% of the adult population is married, and 47.5% of all households are female-headed, the fourth highest in the world.
“In the Jola villages of Guinea-Bissau, the residents of more than a third of the houses are what you and I would call widows”—there’s a word for the houses but not for “widow.” Building a house is core to male adulthood, but when a man dies, his house is torn down and the widow’s (smaller, shabbier) house is built in her husband’s neighborhood—by herself, if she has no kin to help. Widows have no entitlement to land and have to struggle, and yet widows are socially invisible and generally considered to be totally fine (think of the discussions in Sense and Sensibility about how miraculously easy it is for a woman and her children to live on nothing).
The author notes that widowhood might be dangerously attractive—these privations may deter women from aspiring to it. But some village informants traced these circumstances to general economic insecurity, which led men to refuse to marry dead brothers’ wives (as had historically occurred) and led women to reject being second-class citizens, with their children, in another’s home. As one informant said, “[Your husband’s brother] has children of his own, a wife of his own. He will always favor them. … So you prefer to stay in your own hungomahu and with your own children and your own suffering. But your refusal to marry your husband’s brother makes him mad. … That’s why he doesn’t help you or your children. That’s why he takes all his brother’s land back. Because you refused.” Economic and environmental change matters: because the wet-rice paddies associated with men decreased in productivity, men’s relative power over women also decreased.
Wealthy Japanese women in sexless marriages reframe their pursuit of male hosts as something they do to preserve their femininity, which then bolsters their marital status by allowing them to continue to present themselves as worthy, attractive wives. The author suggests that “buying” a man “is actually about buying ‘the self who is romantically excited.’”
In South Africa, many young couples hoped to marry eventually, but poverty and infidelity often doomed those plans. (A substantial bridewealth transfer to the bride’s family is considered a requirement for marriage.) The South Africa chapter explores one response: marriage between foreign African men, who are often generally despised as immigrant interlopers, and South African women. Though such marriages are rare and often criticized—including with estrangement from the woman’s natal family—they also offer some surprising advantages. Immigrant African men have higher employment rates than native-born South African men. They are more likely to be able to afford bridewealth, which satisfies the woman’s obligations to her own family. They also don’t have their own mothers nearby, meaning that a young wife’s life is likely to be much more pleasant and in her own control. The wife’s citizenship also provides her with more power in the relationship—an immigrant husband needs her help for permanent residency (and her kin would often support her if she decided on divorce, because they wouldn’t have to return the bridewealth as they would in a local union), and so he is more likely to be economically and romantically faithful.
Although women lost social status by marrying immigrant men, especially when they converted to Islam, they also shifted cultural expectations by speaking of their husbands’ “respect,” which historically was owed only to husbands, not from them. Distance from the husband’s natal kin not only limited their demands on the South African wives, but also freed the wives to give more support to their own kin. This was “was often celebrated and praised as exceptionally caring.” But not all is positive: All the author’s informants’ husbands hit them.
Senegalese women, meanwhile, increasingly marry men who have migrated—a husband abroad provides vital status and occasional support without the troubles of an actual, present husband. In a highly sex-segregated society, emotional support comes from other women anyway. Marriage is both almost mandatory and also “not expected to be a pleasurable experience for women, but rather a long test of a woman’s ability to stoically endure whatever obstacles she encounters.” At least for women who haven’t been forced to live with their in-laws, the husband in another country can be the best of both worlds, especially given their usually higher earning power. Nonetheless, many of the husbands don’t actually provide much support and regularly have other wives, including wives in Europe with no idea about the other/s. One of the most interesting points was that the fertility rate at the time of the author’s interviews was over 5, while her informants had 1.9 children; childbearing, like marriage, was a significant mark of status for women, and childless women felt shame or sorrow, but migrants’ wives who had 1-3 children with fertility limited by husbands’ absences had an easier time economically.
In Indonesia, romantic love became part of the ideology of the nation: “Indonesian revolutionary fiction from the 1920s to the 1950s relied on the analogy of the urban and urbane couple choosing each other as marriage partners, rather than submitting to a marriage arranged by their parents, as a metaphor for the allure of national independence from Dutch rule.” Men are supposed to be providers, but economic precarity makes that harder, so that many children are raised by single mothers. Nonetheless, public discourse focuses on urban middle-class women and their “normal” marriages, under threat from divorce and specifically divorcées. Greater economic independence allows at least some women to reject the norms that keep them in bad marriages.
Overall, fascinating.
Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds: A philosopher of/on evolution, surveying his takes on consciousness (what is it good for? What does it mean to say you can picture something in your mind?) and what it means to say evolution “designs” something. Much of his argument hangs on the idea that memes—in the pre-internet sense—drove human brain evolution and now compete with each other to colonize new minds, making classic evolutionary selection less important.
Eugenia Bone, Mycophilia: Chatty tour through mushrooms with a focus on edible mushrooms and the people who collect them. I would’ve appreciated a bit more science and a bit less about her mushroom collecting fandom/travels, though it was funny to distinguish the scientists from the “belly” fans, that is, those whose main interest was eating mushrooms.
Richard Cohen, Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past: Lives of Western historians (here and there, mention of others, mostly in China), with occasional context. Perhaps oddly or perhaps not, Cohen spends far more time on America’s post-Civil War context before writing about American historians of race & the Civil War than he does explaining the world of Thucydides.
Anand Giridharadas, The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy: Based on interviews with activists, mostly women, including AOC, about what allows them to keep engaging with (at least some) people who don’t agree with them or who they don’t think of as their core constiuencies. It’s really good and there’s a ton in it. Activists like Loretta Ross, who began by trying to protect women from rape, recognize that it’s not their obligation to help men not rape, but they do it anyway. Ross talked about how to tolerate people who agree with you on most things, on 75% of things, or even 25% of things. “The movement is not therapy,” she told me. “It is not going to be your healing space.” Anti-violence movements can’t create safe spaces, only “spaces to be brave together.” Emotional labor and unearned grace was required, but not everyone is required to do it. “If you’re still raw with your own emotional healing, then you’re not going to be in any space to help somebody else do theirs. That’s why the whole concept of emotional labor has to be voluntary, because you’ll actually make things worse if you do it involuntarily.”
Another expert distinguished between united fronts and popular fronts, “alliances that come together across a range of political beliefs, for the purpose of achieving a short- to intermediate-term goal.” She argued that we should change our language for comprehension, not for comfort. So you don’t have to say “white supremacy” to someone who’s just learning about social justice, but you shouldn’t avoid the term to make white people feel better.
Some progressive tactics can be counterproductive—one chapter uses the example of a proposed Biden ad highlighting the violence and chaos Trump generated; it actually increased persuadable voters’ affinity for Trump because it was communicating that the world was a violent and dangerous place. The Frank Luntz of the left, Anat Shenker-Osorio, emphasizes having the conversation “you want to be having, not the conversation your opponent prefers.” While the left often runs from its base, you need a base “to champion your visions, loudly and often, to woo the undecided.” Mobilization and persuasion are linked, not opposed. If you’re not preaching to the choir, the choir won’t go out preaching the sermon to others: what she calls “engaging the base to persuade the middle.”
Shenker-Osorio has a particular view of moderates: they aren’t in the middle; they’re “confused, torn, not sure which pole is their pole. Which is different from saying they prefer the mean between the two poles…. I offer you a choice between a pizza and a burger, and you can’t pick … it doesn’t follow that you want a pizzaburger.” Instead, we should see “moderate” as temporary: “a situation, not an identity.” Moderates don’t hold fixed positions on policy issues. “What we actually see from persuadables is that they toggle between competing views of the way the world works, and whatever they hear repeated most frequently becomes ‘common sense’ and ‘what everybody thinks.’ ” Thus, the right strategy is “getting the base to keep repeating the set of messages that will activate those progressive narratives that already exist in people.”
Shenker-Osorio’s advice: “What is actually effective in persuasion is to say fewer things and say them more often.” You do want to alienate some people—“blue meat” is good because it clarifies things. Don’t be distracted by right-wing provocations that take us off our game.
Don’t lean in to fear: “making people more fearful over time makes them more conservative.” Voters don’t vote to reduce harm; they vote to create good. Thus, good political messaging shows people “what the world would look like if you won.” Thus, “ ‘Create a fair immigration process that respects all families’ is more persuasive, it is more mobilizing,” than “fight racist immigration policies.”
There’s really just one winning message: “We can have nice things.” Thus, we should speak about paying people enough to provide for their families; don’t say “paid family leave” but instead “pay people enough to make ends meet” and “you should be at your new baby’s side.” Don’t say “raising wages is best for the economy,” because that agrees to enter a debate about who’s better for the economy. “The economy is not real; as soon as you validate that frame, you become a runner-up on the issue whose salience you just raised.” People don’t care about more money for “the economy.” “They care about getting more money so they can feed their fucking family.”
That doesn’t mean giving up on all concepts: freedom is for us, as is any other contested term, like religion, spirituality, or being a good steward of the earth. But “protect the immigrants because they will mow our lawns and clean our houses—there is no progressive version of that.”
One of her most interesting points was that, while anger works as a kickstarter in union organizing, it doesn’t work well outside the workplace context. “Perhaps it was because people go to their jobs every day and have pain points that are clear and present to them, and they have also seen their workplace tangibly change over time, for better or worse.” For larger politics, starting with anger “doesn’t seem to make people believe things can change. It turns many people off of the political process.”
Instead, the formula she touts is: shared value, problem, solution. So: “No matter our differences, most of us want pretty similar things.” And one thing that many people share “is the desire to feel like good people.” But it is also important to identify villains, and not just what they’re doing but why: they’re trying to make you fear people who aren’t white because they hope to distract us from their failure to prevent and treat COVID. She advocates talking explicitly about race “as a thing opportunistic politicians exploit in order to avoid giving you those nice things they could be giving you.” The solution then requires naming how it would feel to have these things, and don’t be bipartisan: that’s just campaigning for the opposition.
What about disinformation? Here Giridharadas turns to experts on cults. This is a vicious problem, but warning people about attempts to manipulate them has promise. The only competition against the human desire for simple explanations is the desire not to be conned. Discrediting the source may work against disinformers too. “If you convey a blanket contempt for a person as a person, you are not in a strong position to harness some good, useful part of them against another part.” Researchers also have to simplify their own research, or someone else will; they should also bring story and emotion into their own narratives.
Finally, Giridharadas looks at an activist who is interested in making long-term change by rejecting certain beliefs: “that persuasion in politics doesn’t work; that people can’t and won’t change; that calling out every chauvinism everywhere is a moral duty, and failing to is complicity; that the views of the other side are deep rather than superficial.” His emphasis is on “listening and story sharing, non-judgment and vulnerability, an alternative to what he saw as the predominant approach to persuasion in his progressive circles—a combination of giving people the best arguments and information and shaming them for failing.” This is a risky approach, but when it works it is powerful and can help move people into activism: Canvassers spend a lot of time with each person, asking them what they think about a topic and then encouraging them to “pit some things going on inside them against other things going on inside them, to get them to re-rank these things.” Canvassers were supposed to avoid reacting, just show genuine interest in the subject’s thoughts. Then the canvasser was supposed to exchange a personal narrative and make analogies: “Was there a time you needed support?” Then and only then, the canvasser was supposed to make an explicit case and point out contradictions in what the subject said, and then respond to the subject’s concerns with talking points and facts. The idea was to help people make meaning of current events. It worked sometimes?
Overall the book is well worth reading for insights into progressive persuasion. I’ve skipped the AOC material but it’s a great look at her as well.
Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization:Interesting if not entirely convincing book about why we’re doomed: “Since 1945 the world has been the best it has ever been. The best it will ever be.” But people in North America will be better insulated than most from the coming collapse of international trade networks because autarky is more possible for us. Basically, economies of scale are going away because the networks that produce them are too fragile to survive, many resources will be out of reach even if we rejigger production of electronics etc. to be domestic, and also most of the world will undergo “mass retirements followed by population crashes.” As to the networks, he's pretty persuasive on long-haul transportation as the foundation of current production and consumption. “[R]educing transport costs by 1 percent results in an increase of trade volumes by about 5 percent. One doesn’t need to run that in reverse for long” to get disaster. The stuff about demographic collapse leading to economic collapse is the least convincing because it relies on the idea that people who retire will need to stop investing in stocks, bonds, and foreign assets in order to ensure their own retirement security, something that assumes widespread stock ownership and individual allocation. (He argues that one reason that America will be relatively insulated is that rich people own so much of the wealth in the US and therefore tolerate higher risks.) But the risk of widespread labor shortages, especially of care for aging people, does seem real. And on the political side, “retirees don’t so much fear change as endlessly bitch about it, resulting in cultures both reactionary and brittle. One outcome is governments that increasingly cater to populist demands, walling themselves off from others economically and taking more aggressive stances on military matters.”
Adrian Hon, You’ve Been Played : How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All: What it says on the tin. Gamification was touted as making good stuff more fun to do. “More often, gamification is used to manipulate and control, whether that’s unscientific brain training games promising to make you smarter, or propaganda games spreading dangerous misinformation online, or video games tricking players into spending thousands of dollars on in-game items they can’t afford.” And even the “good” side “is deeply conservative. Even if you make driving for Uber more fun, you’re still driving for Uber.” Slack is optimized out of the system, so people get used up faster and can’t make human connections. And gamification is ripe for conspiracists: QAnon gamifies conspiracies by sending people on treasure hunts for rewarding information; making them feel like they’re contributing to a community; satisfying a sense of play (“Yes-and is great for creating things but not for truth”); and denying responsibility for consequences, since everything is just a puzzle to solve.
Media literacy is not the solution; they already “do the research.” “[T]he idea [that media literacy] can help solve the fake news epidemic is like training people to run faster to dodge traffic rather than enforcing road safety and building pedestrian crossings—it’s not that it’s worthless, but it places the burden on individual citizens rather than addressing the larger societal problem.” We need other institutions to channel “energy and zeal for community-based problem-solving” toward worthier causes. Importantly, alternatives must not encourage us to see other people as mere “players,” which strips out complexity and decreases our emotional range. “Few video games and no sex dolls simulate the painful but necessary experience of rejection and heartbreak. In their pursuit to engage and entertain, the lesson they teach is that love is always available if you’re persistent enough. Or if you pay enough.”
Possibly the most interesting bit is the comparison between gamification and Catholic indulgences. “A book of hours from South Holland awarded forty days of indulgence for each step when reciting a particular prayer. Virtual pilgrimages were extraordinarily popular perhaps for this reason.” And indulgences were often marketed and collected by “farmers”; there were bootleg and forged indulgences and other scams. We shouldn’t be snobs about indulgences: “Do we buy Girl Scout Cookies just to support a good cause? When we walk an extra ten minutes at the end of the day, is it only for the ‘10,000 steps’ achievement? Motivations are rarely as simple as we think, and not everyone who uses gamification is being misled.”
He recommends that gamification, including hit counts/like counts etc., should be off by default and users should have to opt in, “without nagging or incentives.” Rewards and punishments should be small. Friction should be easy to find and hard to get rid of.
Anat Rosenberg, The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment, and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity: Argues that in the long 19th century, advertising touted both specific products and the market economy, or life as a market, as ads for large businesses jostled alongside smaller and non-business advertisers. “Commodities and second-hand goods circulated alongside entertainments, services, financial and labour opportunities, and with less separation than we find in later periods. Personal ‘advertisements’, for example, those seeking lost persons or things, airing disputes, or communicating coded messages via a newspaper, were also part of the scene, as were political adverts.”
Rosenberg’s idea of “enchantment” covers both fantasies of reconfiguring the self and its relationships as well as “animating everyday life with mysteries, discovering deep meanings and forces inmundane environments…. Advertising encouraged the view that endless transformative experiences were lying within easy reach, and readers became busy with possibilities.” There was no contradiction with rationality; instead, imagination was clear vision.
Advertisers helped control a radical press and depoliticize the newspapers: advertising served as a new licensing system. As newspapers struggled with advertisers’ power, they strove to create a hierarchy between news and ads. Among other things, they were often pitched “stories” that were really promotions. They tried to require advertisers to pay for those and thus tried to reject putative stories that would serve the same function as ads, to preserve their own sources of income. “Thefts and fires were invented to advertise safes; a murder was made up to advertise milk; a report of a drowned body in the Thames turned out to be an invention of the advertisers of the watch allegedly found on the body; and an accident of the Lord Mayor’s carriage was fictionalized just outside an aspiring silver shop.”
Part of the response was for the news to professionalize, and shove off to ads that which was contaminated by the profit motive. Relatedly, as ads became associated with exaggeration, quacks found it easier to avoid fraud liability, and medicine carried out boundary maintenance of its own: “Medicine’s association with scientific truth became stronger through comparison to market exaggerations, and medicine’s epistemic authority was thus strengthened at a historical stage in which it was underdetermined by the practices of doctors themselves. … Restraint became a conceptual tool that explained how medicine and quackery differed, despite—or indeed because of—complexities in practice.”
I found the discussion of nonactionable “puffery” interesting although I’m not sure I’m convinced: As the price of avoiding liability for false cures, courts made advertisers pay the price of ridicule. Because ads were mostly puffery, they weren’t valuable, and so advertisers themselves were uncomfortable with the puffery defense. Advertising was a failure to offer real solutions to real problems, and only legitimate because it failed or worked only on unreasonable consumers. “Worlds of imagination, dream, adventure, wonder, and mystery that informed economic behaviour were reduced with this doctrine to exaggeration.”
Advertisers then worked to ensure that puffery would be a concept that only attached to specific elements of ads, so that advertising was a broader category. “[R]eferences in the press to ‘the puffing system’ dropped after the mid-nineteenth century, while ‘the advertising system’ picked up.”
There’s also an interesting discussion of ads for products that, not in so many words, offered abortifacients. Women who ordered them were sometimes defrauded and sometimes both defrauded and blackmailed. In one case, “advertisers actually obtained a certificate from a chemist confirming that their medicine would not induce abortion, because some newspapers demanded it before printing the adverts.” Advertisers could lie to women with impunity, which Rosenberg calls “an extreme case of the role of imagination and magical thinking in advertising. Women engaged in them for lack of choice and arguably rationally, as a matter of risk-management.” But they still made the leaps of faith central to advertising generally.
In order to sustain advertising as a respectable profession, though, practitioners “made serious efforts to retain rational consumer capacities as part of their accounts, even as they brought enchantment into the fold.” Ad men wanted to be both rational masters and wizards, deploying the scientistic language of psychology to claim cultural authority. Since no one knew how to link ads to sales, but clients still wanted measurable results, ad men turned to “mind-management,” where “[c]reating interest, impressing the brand name on memories, [and] encouraging a structure of feeling in favour of commodities” became measures of success. “The image of iteration as hammer was a popular visualization of an otherwise elusive form of control.”
Jill Lepore, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future: Lepore’s clever turns of phrase often rub me the wrong way, but this is a really interesting story about a forgotten data analysis company from the early days of computerization. It failed, but it was employed by major political campaigns and by the military in Vietnam before it did, and in a larger sense its mission succeeded. Connecting personal to professional lives, Lepore argues that its insistence on the knowledge of white men and the promise of data-enabled power to control others who were agitating for a share in governance was both what made it persuasive and what made it unable to see its own weaknesses. I also didn’t realize just how much of a huckster Ithiel de Sola Pool was. (A big one, though Lepore credits him with being right about what the internet could disrupt.)
Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage around the World, Joanna Davidson & Dinah Hannaford, eds.: A really interesting book of short chapters about divorced, separated, and never-married women in societies that regularly demand that women marry and enforce that demand with harsh social, economic, and even legal penalties. Around the world, age of first marriage is increasing, divorce and separation is rising, and more and more women never marry. Especially under circumstances that impair men’s ability to earn money (without removing the social rules that let them beat and cheat on their wives), heterosexual women may respond by reframing their lives around children and/or natal kin, sometimes giving lip service to the ideal of marriage.
In Namibia, for example, marriage is still seen as highly desirable but also mostly out of reach for economic reasons. Expensive weddings are the norm and very few people’s families are willing to humiliate themselves with cheaper options—“some young people, particularly men, have described getting married as a war between the sexes and the generations,” while high-status couples who can afford the social costs are the ones able to opt out and marry by magistrate. Large group marriages in eastern Botswana aren’t socially real but do provide some legal protection to spouses and children, avoiding the otherwise very real outcome in which a cohabiting “wife” is “widowed” and the “husband’s” patrilateral family arrive and seize all of the couple’s estate.
In South Korea, war-driven shortages of men left substantial percentages of women unmarried, but this was rarely publicly discussed and thus memory-holed. “Teknonymy was (and still is) widespread: women were called by their roles inside the family, most commonly referred to as Someone’s Mother, that someone being their eldest son. These norms made marriage not just expected but definitional of being a Korean woman. A woman without a husband and a child was in a real sense almost unnamable.” Today, the women who don’t marry often do so because they feel responsibility for taking care of their natal kin.
In India, less than one percent of older women have never married; marriage is not much of a choice. Widowed women may turn to sex work because it seems like the only financial option, but also because a husband’s death “creates something of a power vacuum”—the India chapter recounts stories of widows whose deceased husband’s friends pressured them for sex. A woman who married for love is particularly vulnerable—she “is considered morally audacious enough that a further step into the business of sex may seem probable to her community, or ultimately to her.” At the same time, sex work could provide self-determination and choices otherwise unavailable to women.
In Brazil, divorced Black women reconfigure notions of propriety by reframing divorce as a matter of self-respect: An abusive or unfaithful man was disrespectful, even as women who divorced without a “good reason” could be socially sanctioned. A new term—namorido, mashing up the words for husband and boyfriend—emerged to describe a man who didn’t have the same power or responsibility as a husband, but could provide intimacy without displacing women as heads of household. The namorido relationship was “intentionally slightly vague. The fewer and more ambiguous the expectations women had of a partner, the less likely they were to suffer from the disappointment of unmet expectations.” Namoridos were often 10-15 years younger than the women they dated, possibly as another way of balancing power. But women who became pregnant were still likely to remarry.
White women in Barbados took on more of the matrifocality and extended kin network of their Black counterparts, where 60 and 85% of all children were born outside of legal marriage, only 23.8% of the adult population is married, and 47.5% of all households are female-headed, the fourth highest in the world.
“In the Jola villages of Guinea-Bissau, the residents of more than a third of the houses are what you and I would call widows”—there’s a word for the houses but not for “widow.” Building a house is core to male adulthood, but when a man dies, his house is torn down and the widow’s (smaller, shabbier) house is built in her husband’s neighborhood—by herself, if she has no kin to help. Widows have no entitlement to land and have to struggle, and yet widows are socially invisible and generally considered to be totally fine (think of the discussions in Sense and Sensibility about how miraculously easy it is for a woman and her children to live on nothing).
The author notes that widowhood might be dangerously attractive—these privations may deter women from aspiring to it. But some village informants traced these circumstances to general economic insecurity, which led men to refuse to marry dead brothers’ wives (as had historically occurred) and led women to reject being second-class citizens, with their children, in another’s home. As one informant said, “[Your husband’s brother] has children of his own, a wife of his own. He will always favor them. … So you prefer to stay in your own hungomahu and with your own children and your own suffering. But your refusal to marry your husband’s brother makes him mad. … That’s why he doesn’t help you or your children. That’s why he takes all his brother’s land back. Because you refused.” Economic and environmental change matters: because the wet-rice paddies associated with men decreased in productivity, men’s relative power over women also decreased.
Wealthy Japanese women in sexless marriages reframe their pursuit of male hosts as something they do to preserve their femininity, which then bolsters their marital status by allowing them to continue to present themselves as worthy, attractive wives. The author suggests that “buying” a man “is actually about buying ‘the self who is romantically excited.’”
In South Africa, many young couples hoped to marry eventually, but poverty and infidelity often doomed those plans. (A substantial bridewealth transfer to the bride’s family is considered a requirement for marriage.) The South Africa chapter explores one response: marriage between foreign African men, who are often generally despised as immigrant interlopers, and South African women. Though such marriages are rare and often criticized—including with estrangement from the woman’s natal family—they also offer some surprising advantages. Immigrant African men have higher employment rates than native-born South African men. They are more likely to be able to afford bridewealth, which satisfies the woman’s obligations to her own family. They also don’t have their own mothers nearby, meaning that a young wife’s life is likely to be much more pleasant and in her own control. The wife’s citizenship also provides her with more power in the relationship—an immigrant husband needs her help for permanent residency (and her kin would often support her if she decided on divorce, because they wouldn’t have to return the bridewealth as they would in a local union), and so he is more likely to be economically and romantically faithful.
Although women lost social status by marrying immigrant men, especially when they converted to Islam, they also shifted cultural expectations by speaking of their husbands’ “respect,” which historically was owed only to husbands, not from them. Distance from the husband’s natal kin not only limited their demands on the South African wives, but also freed the wives to give more support to their own kin. This was “was often celebrated and praised as exceptionally caring.” But not all is positive: All the author’s informants’ husbands hit them.
Senegalese women, meanwhile, increasingly marry men who have migrated—a husband abroad provides vital status and occasional support without the troubles of an actual, present husband. In a highly sex-segregated society, emotional support comes from other women anyway. Marriage is both almost mandatory and also “not expected to be a pleasurable experience for women, but rather a long test of a woman’s ability to stoically endure whatever obstacles she encounters.” At least for women who haven’t been forced to live with their in-laws, the husband in another country can be the best of both worlds, especially given their usually higher earning power. Nonetheless, many of the husbands don’t actually provide much support and regularly have other wives, including wives in Europe with no idea about the other/s. One of the most interesting points was that the fertility rate at the time of the author’s interviews was over 5, while her informants had 1.9 children; childbearing, like marriage, was a significant mark of status for women, and childless women felt shame or sorrow, but migrants’ wives who had 1-3 children with fertility limited by husbands’ absences had an easier time economically.
In Indonesia, romantic love became part of the ideology of the nation: “Indonesian revolutionary fiction from the 1920s to the 1950s relied on the analogy of the urban and urbane couple choosing each other as marriage partners, rather than submitting to a marriage arranged by their parents, as a metaphor for the allure of national independence from Dutch rule.” Men are supposed to be providers, but economic precarity makes that harder, so that many children are raised by single mothers. Nonetheless, public discourse focuses on urban middle-class women and their “normal” marriages, under threat from divorce and specifically divorcées. Greater economic independence allows at least some women to reject the norms that keep them in bad marriages.
Overall, fascinating.
Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds: A philosopher of/on evolution, surveying his takes on consciousness (what is it good for? What does it mean to say you can picture something in your mind?) and what it means to say evolution “designs” something. Much of his argument hangs on the idea that memes—in the pre-internet sense—drove human brain evolution and now compete with each other to colonize new minds, making classic evolutionary selection less important.
Eugenia Bone, Mycophilia: Chatty tour through mushrooms with a focus on edible mushrooms and the people who collect them. I would’ve appreciated a bit more science and a bit less about her mushroom collecting fandom/travels, though it was funny to distinguish the scientists from the “belly” fans, that is, those whose main interest was eating mushrooms.
Richard Cohen, Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past: Lives of Western historians (here and there, mention of others, mostly in China), with occasional context. Perhaps oddly or perhaps not, Cohen spends far more time on America’s post-Civil War context before writing about American historians of race & the Civil War than he does explaining the world of Thucydides.
Anand Giridharadas, The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy: Based on interviews with activists, mostly women, including AOC, about what allows them to keep engaging with (at least some) people who don’t agree with them or who they don’t think of as their core constiuencies. It’s really good and there’s a ton in it. Activists like Loretta Ross, who began by trying to protect women from rape, recognize that it’s not their obligation to help men not rape, but they do it anyway. Ross talked about how to tolerate people who agree with you on most things, on 75% of things, or even 25% of things. “The movement is not therapy,” she told me. “It is not going to be your healing space.” Anti-violence movements can’t create safe spaces, only “spaces to be brave together.” Emotional labor and unearned grace was required, but not everyone is required to do it. “If you’re still raw with your own emotional healing, then you’re not going to be in any space to help somebody else do theirs. That’s why the whole concept of emotional labor has to be voluntary, because you’ll actually make things worse if you do it involuntarily.”
Another expert distinguished between united fronts and popular fronts, “alliances that come together across a range of political beliefs, for the purpose of achieving a short- to intermediate-term goal.” She argued that we should change our language for comprehension, not for comfort. So you don’t have to say “white supremacy” to someone who’s just learning about social justice, but you shouldn’t avoid the term to make white people feel better.
Some progressive tactics can be counterproductive—one chapter uses the example of a proposed Biden ad highlighting the violence and chaos Trump generated; it actually increased persuadable voters’ affinity for Trump because it was communicating that the world was a violent and dangerous place. The Frank Luntz of the left, Anat Shenker-Osorio, emphasizes having the conversation “you want to be having, not the conversation your opponent prefers.” While the left often runs from its base, you need a base “to champion your visions, loudly and often, to woo the undecided.” Mobilization and persuasion are linked, not opposed. If you’re not preaching to the choir, the choir won’t go out preaching the sermon to others: what she calls “engaging the base to persuade the middle.”
Shenker-Osorio has a particular view of moderates: they aren’t in the middle; they’re “confused, torn, not sure which pole is their pole. Which is different from saying they prefer the mean between the two poles…. I offer you a choice between a pizza and a burger, and you can’t pick … it doesn’t follow that you want a pizzaburger.” Instead, we should see “moderate” as temporary: “a situation, not an identity.” Moderates don’t hold fixed positions on policy issues. “What we actually see from persuadables is that they toggle between competing views of the way the world works, and whatever they hear repeated most frequently becomes ‘common sense’ and ‘what everybody thinks.’ ” Thus, the right strategy is “getting the base to keep repeating the set of messages that will activate those progressive narratives that already exist in people.”
Shenker-Osorio’s advice: “What is actually effective in persuasion is to say fewer things and say them more often.” You do want to alienate some people—“blue meat” is good because it clarifies things. Don’t be distracted by right-wing provocations that take us off our game.
Don’t lean in to fear: “making people more fearful over time makes them more conservative.” Voters don’t vote to reduce harm; they vote to create good. Thus, good political messaging shows people “what the world would look like if you won.” Thus, “ ‘Create a fair immigration process that respects all families’ is more persuasive, it is more mobilizing,” than “fight racist immigration policies.”
There’s really just one winning message: “We can have nice things.” Thus, we should speak about paying people enough to provide for their families; don’t say “paid family leave” but instead “pay people enough to make ends meet” and “you should be at your new baby’s side.” Don’t say “raising wages is best for the economy,” because that agrees to enter a debate about who’s better for the economy. “The economy is not real; as soon as you validate that frame, you become a runner-up on the issue whose salience you just raised.” People don’t care about more money for “the economy.” “They care about getting more money so they can feed their fucking family.”
That doesn’t mean giving up on all concepts: freedom is for us, as is any other contested term, like religion, spirituality, or being a good steward of the earth. But “protect the immigrants because they will mow our lawns and clean our houses—there is no progressive version of that.”
One of her most interesting points was that, while anger works as a kickstarter in union organizing, it doesn’t work well outside the workplace context. “Perhaps it was because people go to their jobs every day and have pain points that are clear and present to them, and they have also seen their workplace tangibly change over time, for better or worse.” For larger politics, starting with anger “doesn’t seem to make people believe things can change. It turns many people off of the political process.”
Instead, the formula she touts is: shared value, problem, solution. So: “No matter our differences, most of us want pretty similar things.” And one thing that many people share “is the desire to feel like good people.” But it is also important to identify villains, and not just what they’re doing but why: they’re trying to make you fear people who aren’t white because they hope to distract us from their failure to prevent and treat COVID. She advocates talking explicitly about race “as a thing opportunistic politicians exploit in order to avoid giving you those nice things they could be giving you.” The solution then requires naming how it would feel to have these things, and don’t be bipartisan: that’s just campaigning for the opposition.
What about disinformation? Here Giridharadas turns to experts on cults. This is a vicious problem, but warning people about attempts to manipulate them has promise. The only competition against the human desire for simple explanations is the desire not to be conned. Discrediting the source may work against disinformers too. “If you convey a blanket contempt for a person as a person, you are not in a strong position to harness some good, useful part of them against another part.” Researchers also have to simplify their own research, or someone else will; they should also bring story and emotion into their own narratives.
Finally, Giridharadas looks at an activist who is interested in making long-term change by rejecting certain beliefs: “that persuasion in politics doesn’t work; that people can’t and won’t change; that calling out every chauvinism everywhere is a moral duty, and failing to is complicity; that the views of the other side are deep rather than superficial.” His emphasis is on “listening and story sharing, non-judgment and vulnerability, an alternative to what he saw as the predominant approach to persuasion in his progressive circles—a combination of giving people the best arguments and information and shaming them for failing.” This is a risky approach, but when it works it is powerful and can help move people into activism: Canvassers spend a lot of time with each person, asking them what they think about a topic and then encouraging them to “pit some things going on inside them against other things going on inside them, to get them to re-rank these things.” Canvassers were supposed to avoid reacting, just show genuine interest in the subject’s thoughts. Then the canvasser was supposed to exchange a personal narrative and make analogies: “Was there a time you needed support?” Then and only then, the canvasser was supposed to make an explicit case and point out contradictions in what the subject said, and then respond to the subject’s concerns with talking points and facts. The idea was to help people make meaning of current events. It worked sometimes?
Overall the book is well worth reading for insights into progressive persuasion. I’ve skipped the AOC material but it’s a great look at her as well.
Peter Zeihan, The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization:Interesting if not entirely convincing book about why we’re doomed: “Since 1945 the world has been the best it has ever been. The best it will ever be.” But people in North America will be better insulated than most from the coming collapse of international trade networks because autarky is more possible for us. Basically, economies of scale are going away because the networks that produce them are too fragile to survive, many resources will be out of reach even if we rejigger production of electronics etc. to be domestic, and also most of the world will undergo “mass retirements followed by population crashes.” As to the networks, he's pretty persuasive on long-haul transportation as the foundation of current production and consumption. “[R]educing transport costs by 1 percent results in an increase of trade volumes by about 5 percent. One doesn’t need to run that in reverse for long” to get disaster. The stuff about demographic collapse leading to economic collapse is the least convincing because it relies on the idea that people who retire will need to stop investing in stocks, bonds, and foreign assets in order to ensure their own retirement security, something that assumes widespread stock ownership and individual allocation. (He argues that one reason that America will be relatively insulated is that rich people own so much of the wealth in the US and therefore tolerate higher risks.) But the risk of widespread labor shortages, especially of care for aging people, does seem real. And on the political side, “retirees don’t so much fear change as endlessly bitch about it, resulting in cultures both reactionary and brittle. One outcome is governments that increasingly cater to populist demands, walling themselves off from others economically and taking more aggressive stances on military matters.”
Adrian Hon, You’ve Been Played : How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All: What it says on the tin. Gamification was touted as making good stuff more fun to do. “More often, gamification is used to manipulate and control, whether that’s unscientific brain training games promising to make you smarter, or propaganda games spreading dangerous misinformation online, or video games tricking players into spending thousands of dollars on in-game items they can’t afford.” And even the “good” side “is deeply conservative. Even if you make driving for Uber more fun, you’re still driving for Uber.” Slack is optimized out of the system, so people get used up faster and can’t make human connections. And gamification is ripe for conspiracists: QAnon gamifies conspiracies by sending people on treasure hunts for rewarding information; making them feel like they’re contributing to a community; satisfying a sense of play (“Yes-and is great for creating things but not for truth”); and denying responsibility for consequences, since everything is just a puzzle to solve.
Media literacy is not the solution; they already “do the research.” “[T]he idea [that media literacy] can help solve the fake news epidemic is like training people to run faster to dodge traffic rather than enforcing road safety and building pedestrian crossings—it’s not that it’s worthless, but it places the burden on individual citizens rather than addressing the larger societal problem.” We need other institutions to channel “energy and zeal for community-based problem-solving” toward worthier causes. Importantly, alternatives must not encourage us to see other people as mere “players,” which strips out complexity and decreases our emotional range. “Few video games and no sex dolls simulate the painful but necessary experience of rejection and heartbreak. In their pursuit to engage and entertain, the lesson they teach is that love is always available if you’re persistent enough. Or if you pay enough.”
Possibly the most interesting bit is the comparison between gamification and Catholic indulgences. “A book of hours from South Holland awarded forty days of indulgence for each step when reciting a particular prayer. Virtual pilgrimages were extraordinarily popular perhaps for this reason.” And indulgences were often marketed and collected by “farmers”; there were bootleg and forged indulgences and other scams. We shouldn’t be snobs about indulgences: “Do we buy Girl Scout Cookies just to support a good cause? When we walk an extra ten minutes at the end of the day, is it only for the ‘10,000 steps’ achievement? Motivations are rarely as simple as we think, and not everyone who uses gamification is being misled.”
He recommends that gamification, including hit counts/like counts etc., should be off by default and users should have to opt in, “without nagging or incentives.” Rewards and punishments should be small. Friction should be easy to find and hard to get rid of.
Anat Rosenberg, The Rise of Mass Advertising: Law, Enchantment, and the Cultural Boundaries of British Modernity: Argues that in the long 19th century, advertising touted both specific products and the market economy, or life as a market, as ads for large businesses jostled alongside smaller and non-business advertisers. “Commodities and second-hand goods circulated alongside entertainments, services, financial and labour opportunities, and with less separation than we find in later periods. Personal ‘advertisements’, for example, those seeking lost persons or things, airing disputes, or communicating coded messages via a newspaper, were also part of the scene, as were political adverts.”
Rosenberg’s idea of “enchantment” covers both fantasies of reconfiguring the self and its relationships as well as “animating everyday life with mysteries, discovering deep meanings and forces inmundane environments…. Advertising encouraged the view that endless transformative experiences were lying within easy reach, and readers became busy with possibilities.” There was no contradiction with rationality; instead, imagination was clear vision.
Advertisers helped control a radical press and depoliticize the newspapers: advertising served as a new licensing system. As newspapers struggled with advertisers’ power, they strove to create a hierarchy between news and ads. Among other things, they were often pitched “stories” that were really promotions. They tried to require advertisers to pay for those and thus tried to reject putative stories that would serve the same function as ads, to preserve their own sources of income. “Thefts and fires were invented to advertise safes; a murder was made up to advertise milk; a report of a drowned body in the Thames turned out to be an invention of the advertisers of the watch allegedly found on the body; and an accident of the Lord Mayor’s carriage was fictionalized just outside an aspiring silver shop.”
Part of the response was for the news to professionalize, and shove off to ads that which was contaminated by the profit motive. Relatedly, as ads became associated with exaggeration, quacks found it easier to avoid fraud liability, and medicine carried out boundary maintenance of its own: “Medicine’s association with scientific truth became stronger through comparison to market exaggerations, and medicine’s epistemic authority was thus strengthened at a historical stage in which it was underdetermined by the practices of doctors themselves. … Restraint became a conceptual tool that explained how medicine and quackery differed, despite—or indeed because of—complexities in practice.”
I found the discussion of nonactionable “puffery” interesting although I’m not sure I’m convinced: As the price of avoiding liability for false cures, courts made advertisers pay the price of ridicule. Because ads were mostly puffery, they weren’t valuable, and so advertisers themselves were uncomfortable with the puffery defense. Advertising was a failure to offer real solutions to real problems, and only legitimate because it failed or worked only on unreasonable consumers. “Worlds of imagination, dream, adventure, wonder, and mystery that informed economic behaviour were reduced with this doctrine to exaggeration.”
Advertisers then worked to ensure that puffery would be a concept that only attached to specific elements of ads, so that advertising was a broader category. “[R]eferences in the press to ‘the puffing system’ dropped after the mid-nineteenth century, while ‘the advertising system’ picked up.”
There’s also an interesting discussion of ads for products that, not in so many words, offered abortifacients. Women who ordered them were sometimes defrauded and sometimes both defrauded and blackmailed. In one case, “advertisers actually obtained a certificate from a chemist confirming that their medicine would not induce abortion, because some newspapers demanded it before printing the adverts.” Advertisers could lie to women with impunity, which Rosenberg calls “an extreme case of the role of imagination and magical thinking in advertising. Women engaged in them for lack of choice and arguably rationally, as a matter of risk-management.” But they still made the leaps of faith central to advertising generally.
In order to sustain advertising as a respectable profession, though, practitioners “made serious efforts to retain rational consumer capacities as part of their accounts, even as they brought enchantment into the fold.” Ad men wanted to be both rational masters and wizards, deploying the scientistic language of psychology to claim cultural authority. Since no one knew how to link ads to sales, but clients still wanted measurable results, ad men turned to “mind-management,” where “[c]reating interest, impressing the brand name on memories, [and] encouraging a structure of feeling in favour of commodities” became measures of success. “The image of iteration as hammer was a popular visualization of an otherwise elusive form of control.”