War. Envy. Friendship.
Is war a human choice? An essay reflecting on friendships.
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I lack a “hot take” on the Ukraine war itself. A tragedy for the people. I’m unsure even if long-time observers fully understand the character that makes Putin. There is complexity as Ukraine holds many minerals, pipelines and resources. Much more than people typically realise eg 20% of Europe’s potatoes and 25% of corn! And a top 5 titanium producer.
But, war itself I have made some observations on, as it comes up tangentially in Thinking Bigly. The last 80 years or so have shown a decline in mass conflicts, in contrast to the eg -500 BC to 1950 AD period which contained a great deal of war.
I draw attention to many slow-moving positive trends in Bigly, like life expectancy, over the last 100 years. Will our last 80 years be the blip? I truly hope not.
Yuval Noah Harari argues that war is a human choice.
“...Unlike gravity, war isn’t a fundamental force of nature. Its intensity and existence depend on underlying technological, economic and cultural factors. As these factors change, so does war.
Evidence of such change is all around us. Over the past few generations, nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into a mad act of collective suicide, forcing the most powerful nations on Earth to find less violent ways to resolve conflict. Whereas great-power wars, such as the second Punic war or the second world war, have been a salient feature for much of history, in the last seven decades there has been no direct war between superpowers”
And perhaps he over-stresses whether this is a pivot point in human history - but he might be right - and his prose on the call for better human choices I’ve found lingering in my mind. So I share it with you:
“...If you believe that historic change is impossible, and that humanity never left the jungle and never will, the only choice left is whether to play the part of predator or prey. Given such a choice, most leaders would prefer to go down in history as alpha predators, and add their names to the grim list of conquerors that unfortunate pupils are condemned to memorize for their history exams.
But maybe change is possible? Maybe the law of the jungle is a choice rather than an inevitability? If so, any leader who chooses to conquer a neighbour will get a special place in humanity’s memory, far worse than your run-of-the-mill Tamerlane. He will go down in history as the man who ruined our greatest achievement. Just when we thought we were out of the jungle, he pulled us back in.
I don’t know what will happen in Ukraine. But as a historian I do believe in the possibility of change. I don’t think this is naivety—it’s realism. The only constant of human history is change. And that’s something that perhaps we can learn from the Ukrainians. For many generations, Ukrainians knew little but tyranny and violence. They endured two centuries of tsarist autocracy (which finally collapsed amidst the cataclysm of the first world war). A brief attempt at independence was quickly crushed by the Red Army that re-established Russian rule. Ukrainians then lived through the terrible man-made famine of the Holodomor, Stalinist terror, Nazi occupation and decades of soul-crushing Communist dictatorship. When the Soviet Union collapsed, history seemed to guarantee that Ukrainians would again go down the path of brutal tyranny – what else did they know?
But they chose differently. Despite history, despite grinding poverty and despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Ukrainians established a democracy. In Ukraine, unlike in Russia and Belarus, opposition candidates repeatedly replaced incumbents. When faced with the threat of autocracy in 2004 and 2013, Ukrainians twice rose in revolt to defend their freedom. Their democracy is a new thing. So is the “new peace”. Both are fragile, and may not last long. But both are possible, and may strike deep roots. Every old thing was once new. It all comes down to human choices.”
My other tiny observation is that on the day of the invasion, gold rose, bitcoin fell, equities (US/global) fell; whereas the next day gold fell, bitcoin rose, equities rose. Equities rising on day 2 is potentially puzzling (John Authers covers potential reasons, Bloomberg) but gold and bitcoin moving inversely also suggest bitcoin does not act like “digital gold” (although others do argue for BTC as a potential currency reserve pillar).
For a slightly off-mainstream news commentator, I think Adam Tooze is likely to be interesting here. (He’s a mainstream progressive left thinker, but not journalist, more of a historian).
Finally, I can hardly believe the Ukraine president trained as a comedy actor. He won the presidency after appearing for 6 years as the fictional President in a TV show. (I guess cf Reagan).
His political party started off with the same name as the TV show one. “Servant of the People”.
In the UK, is that like Hugh Grant from ‘Love, Actually’ becoming Prime Minister?
Envy. Friendship. I read an essay on friendship, a conversation with Margaret Atwood and commentary from Charlie Munger that thread together some thoughts I’ve been having.
Why do so many humans not appreciate how much better life is now than 50 years ago or 100 years ago ?
Why is there so little work on the making, blaring and maintaining of friendships ?
This is what Charlie Munger had to say:
Question: What worries you most about our economy and the stock market? And on the other hand, what makes you optimistic?
Charlie Munger: You have to be optimistic about the competency of our technical civilization. But there again, it’s an interesting thing. If you take the last 100 years, 1922 to 2022, most of modernity came in in that 100 years. And then the previous 100 years, that got another big chunk of modernity. Before that, things were pretty much the same for the previous thousands of years. Life was pretty brutal, short, limited, and what have you. No printing press, no air conditioning, no modern medicine.
I don’t think we’re going to get things that are in what I call the ‘real human needs’. Think of what it meant to get the steam engine, the steamship, the railroad, a little bit of improvement in farming, and a little bit of improvement in plumbing. That’s what you got in the 100 years that ended in 1922. The next 100 years gave us widely distributed electricity, modern medicine, the automobile, the airplane, the records, the movies, the air conditioning in the south. Think what a blessing it was.
If you wanted three children, you had to have six, because three died in infancy. That was our ancestors. Think of the agony of having to watch half your children die. It’s amazing how much achievement there has been in civilization in these last 200 years and most of it in the last 100 years.
Now, the trouble with that is that the basic needs are pretty well filled. In the United States, the principal problem of the poor people is that they’re too fat. That is a very different place from what happened in the past. In the past, they were on the edge of starving.
It’s really interesting. With all this enormous increase in living standards, freedom, diminishment of racial inequities, and all the huge progress that has come, people are less happy about the state of affairs than they were when things were way tougher.
That has a very simple explanation. The world is not driven by greed; it’s driven by envy. So the fact that everybody’s five times better off than they used to be, they take that for granted. All they think about is somebody else having more now and it’s not fair that he should have it and they don’t. That’s the reason that God came down and told Moses that he couldn’t envy his neighbor’s wife or even his donkey. I mean, even the old Jews were having trouble with envy.
So it’s built into the nature of things. It’s weird for somebody at my age because I was in the middle of the Great Depression and the hardship was unbelievable. I was safer walking around Omaha in the evening than I am in my own neighborhood in Los Angeles after all this great wealth and so forth. So and I have no way of doing anything about it. I can’t change the fact that a lot of people are very unhappy and feel very abused after everything’s improved by about 600% because there’s still somebody else who has more. I have conquered envy in my own life. I don’t envy anybody. I don’t give a damn what somebody else has. But other people are going crazy by it. And other people play to the envy in order to advance their own political careers.
We have whole networks now that want to pour gasoline on the flames of envy. I like the religion of the old Jews. I like the people who were against envy, not the people who were trying to profit from it.
Think of the pretentious expenditures of the rich. Who in the hell needs a Rolex watch so you can get mugged for it? Yet, everybody wants to have a pretentious expenditure. That helps drive demand in our modern capitalist society. My advice to the young people is: don’t go there. To hell with the pretentious expenditure. I don’t think there’s much happiness in it. But it does drive the civilization we actually have. And it drives the dissatisfaction.
Steven Pinker of Harvard is a smart academic. He constantly points out that everything’s gotten way, way better, but the general feeling about how fair it is has gotten way more hostile. As it gets better and better, people are less and less satisfied. That is weird but that’s what’s happened.
Margaret Atwood had this to say on envy and friendship after Jen Senior’s essay:
Many of Senior’s observations in her essay on friendships resonated with me.
This long passage on envy…
Whenever I mentioned to people that I was working on a story about friendship in midlife, questions about envy invariably followed. It’s an irresistible subject, this thing that Socrates called “the ulcer of the soul.” Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, told me that many years ago, he taught a seminar at Yale about the seven deadly sins. “Envy,” he said dryly, “was the one sin students never boasted about.”
He’s right. With the exception of envy, all of the deadly sins can be pleasurable in some way. Rage can be righteous; lust can be thrilling; greed gets you all the good toys. But nothing feels good about envy, nor is there any clear way to slake it. You can work out anger with boxing gloves, sate your gluttony by feasting on a cake, boast your way through cocktail hour, or sleep your way through lunch. But envy—what are you to do with that?
Die of it, as the expression goes. No one ever says they’re dying of pride or sloth.
Yet social science has surprisingly little to say about envy in friendship. For that, you need to consult artists, writers, musicians.
But the whole essay reflects on the making and breaking of friendships, how vital they are, how understudied; how they drive all types of creative partnerships, how they are in today’s age…
I highly recommend the essay.
One of her points is:
It is amazing how the death of someone you love exposes this lie you tell yourself, that there’ll always be time.
And
I think of Nora Ephron, whose death caught virtually all of her friends by surprise. Had they known, they all said afterward—had they only known that she was ill—they’d have savored the dinners they were having, and they certainly wouldn’t have taken for granted that more of them would stretch forever into the future. Her sudden disappearance from the world revealed the fragility of our bonds, and how presumptuous we all are, how careless, how naive.
But shouldn’t this fragility always be top of mind? Surely the pandemic has taught us that?
This is one point I take up in my Thinking Bigly show. If you are thinking of coming, please do - March 11 - and you can book tickets here:
Time does run out and if you have things left unsaid - you should really think about correcting that.
Matt Clancy suggesting (at least for incremental innovation) that policy such as raising emissions standards might work.
Price decline of solar. (If Germany and Italy / world / Europe) need to rely less on Russian gas…. then do they need to invest more in renewables?
Climate strategy. Buy coal mines. Close them early.
Viral causal link to MS - much suggested previously, this study provides evidence for this.
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