Constant availability + new communication technologies = Stress

After the American Century                                                                                                                                                         

More than half of all Americans report that they are stressed. The American Psychological Association has conducted a survey showing that half of Americans feel that their level of stress has increased in the last five years. There are many reasons for this, but here I want to examine one of them: the constant interruption of work and thought by new communication technologies.

Once upon a time, the mark of success was having a secretary who screened an executive's phone calls and routinely said that he or she was in a meeting or otherwise unavailable. The most successful people were hard to reach. They had buffers of all kinds around them. Today many of the secretaries and almost all the buffers are gone. The ideal is constant availability: to have a phone handy and to check email at all hours, so that documents can be downloaded and read anywhere. This situation is not unique to white-collar workers. The plumber gets phone calls all day, and the contractor sends pdf files to his clients. Constant availability + new communication technologies = Stress

I have had unknown journalists call me before 7 AM, asking questions about events that occurred when I was asleep. I have students who send me things on Friday night and expect them to be read on Monday morning. I have been on conference programs as a commentator and received the articles I am to discuss in the airport on my way to the meeting. Everyone has similar experiences.

Why did most people in 1960 assume that to be productive a person needed shields from constant intrusions, while today the reverse assumption reigns: that productivity is supposedly based on constant networking while surfing ever higher waves of information (and trivia)? One is expected to follow a host of people on Twitter, Facebook, email, and text-messaging, and yet somehow have time for reading, reflection, writing and serious conversation. Interruptions have become constant, like static on an old radio that is continually on.

Such interruptions are far more frequent for young people. The Pew Trust found in a survey that almost all people under 24 use text messaging, and that they average more than 100 messages sent or received every day. They deal with more than 3200 a month. In addition, they make or receive 15-20 phone calls every day. Add to these roughly 120 messages all the email sent and received and top it off with Twitter and Facebook, as well as browsing the Web for information. If these many messages are distributed evenly over a 16 hour waking day that makes an interruption every five minutes. In addition,  there are TV programs and radio, as well as listening to music, usually through earphones.

People under 24 do not think of this endless stream of messages as interruptions, but rather as normal life. Yet I have a 17-year-old nephew who says he suffers from stress, and it seems to be a worsening problem among younger people. Time itself has become the scarcest resource, and enormous numbers of people feel stressed all the time. High levels of stress cause headaches, insomnia, high blood pressure, and fatigue, to make a short list. Stress also exacerbates many illnesses and in older people increases the risk of heart attacks.

Multitasking is often praised as proof of adaptability and productivity, but studies show the reverse. People who constantly shift between working on several different things take more time to complete their work. My observation is that the greater the number of tasks, the greater the chance that some of them will be forgotten entirely or will be poorly done. As an author in Forbes put it, whether old or young, "Your brain just can’t take in and process two simultaneous, separate streams of information and encode them fully into short-term memory. When information doesn’t make it into short-term memory, it can’t be transferred into long-term memory for recall later."

Would Hemingway have been a better writer if he had received a constant stream of messages from Twitter? Would Charles Dickens have written as many good books if equipped with email? Would Einstein have thought up the theory of relativity if he had an I-phone to distract him  with half a million apps? It seems likely that our mental and psychological makeup is not geared to a constant bombardment of messages, questions, advertisements, and comments. If consciousness is a stream, then all these interruptions are muddying the waters.

The solution? Turn off the phone and the email for some periods each day, so you can concentrate on doing one task well. Do tasks one by one, rather than simultaneously. Limit use of Facebook to a single period of no more than one hour (not during work) each day. These things have worked for me, though it would be even better if I had a full-time secretary/buffer between me and the tides of trivia and nonsense in the world. But that is a luxury of the past unless someone can develop an app to simulate that role.

Ten Ways to Respond to Syrian Use of Poison Gas, Other than Bombing

After the American Century

This column was written before the possibility of removing the poison gas emerged, with the subsequent negotiations between Russia and the United States. Much happened in just a week.

The use of poison gas is completely unacceptable and risks transforming warfare into indiscriminate mass-extermination. Some people therefore think that President Obama is showing weakness because he is not just bombing Syria without consulting Congress first. They would like to see more cowboy diplomacy of the sort practiced by Ronald Reagan in Libya and by George Bush I in Somalia. By some strange logic, many of the Republicans who cheered on George Bush II in attacking Afghanistan and Iraq now want restraint in Syria. But war should be declared and funded by Congress.

The more serious problem is that officials inside the Beltway, both Republican and Democratic, have reduced the available options to (1) launch missiles or (2) do nothing. There is serious mental poverty in Washington when people cannot think of more options than that.

Here are ten other ideas about what might be done. No doubt some of these ideas are better than others, but none of them involves bombing a foreign government or killing people.

(1) Punish economically the states that supply the Assad regime with arms and military supplies. It should cost something to support gas warfare. American tourists might also be advised to avoid travel to such countries.

(2) Press the World Court in The Hague to investigate and charge Syrian scientists and government officials with crimes against humanity.

(3) Launch a global public relations campaign against Russia and China for supporting Syrian atrocities at the UN and thereby paralyzing any world response.

(4) Seize Syrian government assets, if any remain in the United States, and use them to feed the enormous number of refugees fleeing the civil war.

(5) Create a no-fly zone over Syria, so its air force cannot bomb the Syrian people.

(6) Work insistently with the Arab League to develop a coherent regional response to the crisis.

(7) Break all diplomatic relations with the Syrian government. Expel their ambassador and staff.

(8) Press the rebel groups to find common ground to create a political alternative. Otherwise, their victory over the current government would likely only lead to more civil war.

(9) Press NATO (i.e. the European so-called allies) to take a role in the crisis. Europeans seem to have forgotten that it was in their own World War I that poison gas was used indiscriminately.

(10) Hold ceremonies at the graves of soldiers who perished due to gas warfare in every European country that refuses to hold Syria accountable.

One could also drop vast quantities of laughing gas on Syria, and see if that changes the mood. (OK, that is not a serious proposal, but it shows the ability to bomb, while not doing it.)

These are some of the many things the United States might do in this crisis and that President Obama could do (in most cases, including the laughing gas) without consulting Congress. It is time to use more imagination and less force in meeting international crises. The military approach has not been so wonderfully successful that all other alternatives can be ignored.

National Security Agency costs more than faculty of the Ivy League plus US Cultural Exchanges

After the American Century                                                                                                                     

Should the United States invest in education, cultural exchange, and international understanding, or should it take money away from such things and instead invest in spying, code-breaking, eavesdropping, and the creation of international distrust? Since 2001, the answer to that question has been to plow billions into The National Security Agency (NSA) while cutting funding for cultural programs. Since May the NSA has been much in the news, as the extent and reach of its programs has become known. Most Americans, if asked before then, probably could not have said what the initials N S A stood for, even though they were paying billions of tax dollars to support it.

The scale of the NSA's main facility at Ft. Meade, Maryland is best grasped by some comparisons. It is larger than the United Nations building and US Congress combined. It is the largest employer and the largest user of electricity in the State of Maryland. There are spaces for more than 18,000 cars in its parking lot, and the site has its own entrance from the nearby interstate highway. Do not try to use the entrance, however, as it is for NSA employees only, and you will be stopped if trying to enter the area.

There are many NSA facilities besides the buildings at Ft. Meade, both in the United States and abroad. Estimates of the number of employees vary, but apparently there are about 30,000. Being a secret organization, it is hard to get a reliable figure. The Washington Post recently wrote that there were 35,000 code breakers working for the NSA and affiliated groups at the CIA and other agencies. Whatever the number, it is clearly more than the combined faculties of the Ivy League plus MIT and CalTech. Harvard has 2100 faculty, for example. Dartmouth and Brown have fewer, Cornell has more. But the faculty for these ten elite universities are less numerous than the employees of the NSA.  Is the social, educational, and cultural value of the NSA greater than ten of the world's finest universities? The Harvard faculty has won 44 Nobel Prizes, trained generations of outstanding leaders, and graduated an international body of alumni from almost every country in the world. Such universities are a major force for progress, peace, and prosperity. They not only create knowledge; they create a global community. 

BEcause the NSA is secretive it cannot create a global community. It creates suspicion and distrust. It stimulates paranoia. It assembles enormous databases.  It listens in on the presidents of foreign countries, and has recently angered Brazil, Germany, and Mexico, to name just a few. Its staff creates encryption and de-encryption codes. They publish some articles, but their best work must be hidden from scholars, and they cannot be said to be part of or to participate in the global community of knowledge. They are paid as well as Ivy League faculty, but they do not have the same credentials. Would anyone seriously propose that the NSA's contribution to life is equal to that of one Harvard or one Yale, much less 10 such universities?

I am not arguing against the NSA, as such. But how large should it be? At what point would money be better spent elsewhere? Its value does not increase as a direct function of its size. When do diminishing returns set in? An NSA twice as large is not necessarily twice as valuable. There is an enormous new building about to open in Maryland. There is a new data center in Utah as well, and there are more facilities on the drawing board. 

The budget increases for the NSA have come at the expense of other programs, notably cultural exchanges, such as the Fulbright program, which creates strong international connections and builds understanding and trust. As the NSA has grown, such programs have shrunk or disappeared. The Mike Mansfield Fellowship program improved cultural understanding between Japan and the United States, until it was cut from $1.8 million to 0! Likewise, the Institute for International Public Policy Fellowship Program (IIPP) once offered study abroad to minority undergraduates, but it has lost all of its funding. The State Department also plans to eliminate all funding for the George J. Mitchell Scholarship. It provides postgraduate study in Ireland and Northern Ireland for 12 individuals a year. That is a small investment, but over time such programs create valuable networks of human relationships.

The largest and oldest such program, The Fulbright, has had to struggle for funding since the end of the Cold War. Yet in many nations the American contribution is matched or topped by the partner countries. Germany and Denmark, for example, put more money into their Fulbright exchanges with the US than the State Department does. American cutbacks in this case make no economic sense, for these foreign countries are funding US faculty and students to go abroad. There are more than 300,000 Fulbright Alumni from more than 150 countries, and everywhere they are a force for mutual understanding that promotes economic growth and cultural exchange. About 8,000 Fulbright awards are granted every year, with roughly 30% of the money coming from other nations or private contributions.More than 40 Fulbright alumni have won Nobel Prizes. No one from the immensely better-funded NSA has done so or ever is likely to do so, because its organization and goals are antithetical to the values that these prizes recognize.

The US government contributes about $275 million per year to Fulbright. By comparison, the 2014 budget for NSA and the like is 175 times that size. It "Provides $48.2 billion in discretionary base funding for the National Intelligence Program." This is more than the operating budgets for the ten leading universities already mentioned and all the exchange programs combined.

Instruments of "soft power" such as the Fulbright Program are being neglected or even abandoned in favor of secrecy, spying, and code-breaking. Yet the West won the Cold War in good part because its cultural life, its educational institutions, and its consumer goods were more appealing than the Soviet alternatives.  Expanding the NSA at the expense of good universities and cultural exchange is not good policy. It is time to see the NSA as just one part of a coordinated approach to better security and improved international relations. Spying cannot bring peace or prosperity. Creating vast secret agencies with no public oversight does not enhance democracy. The danger in such enterprises is that the means become the ends, that surveillance itself (and its expansion) becomes the goal.

Where did Syria get its poison gas?

After the American Century                                                                                                                                                        

I have read the headline stories in the newspapers of three nations, and fail to find much discussion of a vital question: Who supplied the poison gas to Syria? Such weapons are outlawed by an international treaty that has been widely respected since the 1920s. Such gas is not made in a basement by a self-taught chemist, and the delivery systems are also complex and demand sophisticated manufacturing. 

Scientific American has posted an article about this issue, detailing the difficulties of determining who made the sarin gas. It points out that fragments of the bombs that contained the poison gas can offer some useful clues. "The materials composing the rockets could differ depending on who made them, thereby pointing a finger at who deployed them." This is no doubt true, but apparently no such analysis has yet been completed.

Meanwhile, Der Speigel reports that German Intelligence has concluded that the gas used was almost certainly sarin, and that it believes the Syrian government (and not the opposition) has the expertise to manufacture both the gas and the small missiles used to deliver it. The  delivery system itself requires considerable expertise. It sprays out the gas as a fine, deadly mist that lingers longer in the air during the early morning hours, when the missiles hit, than it does during the heat of the day.  In short, the gas, the missiles, and the sophisticated delivery system all point to the government. The same story reports that German Intelligence intercepted a phone call that also seemed to confirm Assad's direct involvement with the attack.

While different sorts of evidence seem to point to the same conclusion as to who used the gas, however, we still do not know who made it. A third party might have been involved. For example, Iran has the ability to make it, and it supports Assad. Russia has long been an ally, and of course they too could produce it. Whoever these persons are, they should be the focus of an international manhunt. The only use for sarin nerve gas is slaughtering indiscriminately all the people who happen to be nearby when it is released. Those who manufactured it and the military people who used it should be named, shamed, caught, tried, and punished. Their assets should be seized and used to help surviving victims. They must become infamous.

The Jewish Press says that the central figure in Syrian gas production is Dr. Amr Najib Armanazi. He is head of Syria's Scientific Studies Research Center. The United States Treasury reached the same conclusion, and as early as 2005 it imposed sanctions on him and his enterprise. Should there not be a warrant for  Dr. Amr Najib Armanazi's arrest and trial in The Hague?

Dr. Amr Najib Armanazi

Read more at: http://www.jewishpress.com/news/meet-the-monster-behind-syrias-chemical-weapons/2013/08/29/

Dr. Amr Najib Armanazi

Read more at: http://www.jewishpress.com/news/meet-the-monster-behind-syrias-chemical-weapons/2013/08/29/

Three Encounters with the late Seamus Heaney

After the American Century                                                                                                                                                          

I heard Seamus Heaney three times over three decades. In each case, we briefly spoke afterwards. The first was in about 1972, when he came to the University of Minnesota to give a well-attended reading. He was in his early thirties and had recently become a poet full-time. He seemed modest and a little amazed at his reception on the American poetry reading circuit. I was a graduate student then, not so much younger than he, and we spoke only briefly in a relaxed moment at the reception afterwards. It was already clear then that he had a marvelous ear and a remarkable facility. 

Young Seamus Heaney

The second encounter was about six years later, at a college in upstate New York, where I was teaching. By this time he was far more famous as a poet and more polished, really elegant, as a public speaker. He had also begun to lecture on famous predecessors. The one I heard compared Yeats and Eliot, focusing on how they described the process of writing poetry. The gist of it was that while Eliot seemed more academic and even added footnotes in some poems, he nevertheless seemed to experience the act of creation as a flow that was always temporary. These outpourings might be reworked, of course, but the initial surge of creativity was crucial. In contrast, Heaney argued, Yeats described writing poetry as hard work, like getting down on your marrow bones to scrub floors or like breaking stones. For him, evidently, writing was a craft and a struggle.

I recall this lecture not least because it showed how deeply Heaney was interested in two of the greatest poets of the first half of the twentieth century. In the talk he made no immodest comparisons between himself and either of the poets he was discussing. Nor on that occasion did he wish to be drawn out on his own methods of composition. My sense then was that his own experience of writing was more like Eliot's. This was later confirmed by something he said later in life: "The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself." 

We spoke for a few minutes. I did not expect him to remember me, but he fondly recalled Chester Anderson, who had invited him to Minneapolis, and who was one of the leading scholars on James Joyce and modern Irish literature. (I could tell him that all was well with Professor Anderson, who had held the reception for Heaney where I first met him.)

The third and last time I heard him was in Copenhagen, when I was on the faculty at the university there. He was friends with one of my older colleagues, a man who had memorized thousands of lines of poetry. He has passed away since then, and he cannot present whatever might be his version of this story. Therefore I will not give his name.

I came early to the poetry reading, and ran into my older colleague and Heaney in a nook below stairs. They had an open wine bottle, and I was immediately pressed to take a plastic cup and help myself. I did so, and listened to their conversation, which was a mix of memories of various people and appropriate lines of poetry that they called to mind. It was not showing off in the least, but playful, occasionally a little competitive, and quite funny. But after twenty years I cannot recall the details.

As the time for the reading drew near, I went up the stairs to the hall, in order to get a decent seat. Heaney had not yet won the Nobel Prize, but it seemed obvious that he was a very plausible candidate. I was in time to secure a good spot and then waited. Eventually, Heaney arrived, alone. He  sat down and waited. The clock moved well beyond the appointed hour. As my colleague did not come, he finally went up to the podium, looked out at the crowd and said, "Well I suppose you all know who I am and that this is a poetry reading, so I may as well begin. No introduction is needed, surely."  He then began to read. After two or three poems, my colleague rushed in, a bit red in the face.

"Seamus. What are you doing? I have to give my introduction." The crowd tittered and had to restrain itself from laughing.

"Oh, sit down," Heaney said jovially, waving him toward a seat, "I am well started now."

"What about the introduction?"

"You can give it afterwards." Which is what he did. It was a bit incoherent (for the wine had taken full effect!) and totally unnecessary. But Seamus seemed to enjoy it all the more for that. When the "introduction" was over, they went off to dinner.

In all three of these encounters. I found Seamus Heaney to be an unpretentious, warm man. He was brilliant, of course, and far more able than most poets at presenting his work to readers. His passing is a loss to the literature of the world, and also (as sometimes is not the case) a great human loss. I wish I had heard him more often.

Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" Speech 50 Years later

After the American Century                                                                                                                                                           

To Black activists and college students in the middle 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. was not the iconic figure  who is being remembered this year, on the fiftieth anniversary of his famous "I have a Dream Speech." Delivered from the Lincoln Memorial in August, 1963, that speech was the rhetorical high point of the Civil Rights Movement. 

Martin Luther King delivering his "I Have a Dream" Speech

One only has to look at a photograph of King to begin to discern why he fell somewhat out of favor on university campuses between 1963 and 1968. King invariably wore a dark suit and had a short haircut. He dressed like a banker or a mainstream politician. By 1968 students had adopted a colorful wardrobe of loose-fitting clothing and long hair. Only a small, square minority had crew-cuts or short hair. That "look" declared one’s sympathy for the military. Dressing like Martin Luther King was just not cool.

King also made a point of presenting himself as a Christian. This was a good strategy in the American South in the late 1950s, as it challenged the minds and reached out to the hearts of his opponents. King challenged the core values and identity of Southern racists, who regarded themselves as quintessentially Christian. But on university campuses, emphasizing Christianity was more controversial and did not win support from Marxists, for example, or from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Indeed, in the late 1960s many Hippies were turning toward Eastern religions and non-Christian religions.

Martin Luther King was still respected for his early work in Civil Rights, but by the middle 1960s young Black students were distancing themselves from him. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had begun as an outgrowth of his civil disobedience campaign against segregation. But by 1967 SNCC had rejected non-violence, Black Power was the new slogan, and more confrontational tactics were being adopted.  Some even called King an Uncle Tom.

King’s goals were under attack. He called for assimilation. Black Power demanded separation; not integration into mainstream white society, but separate businesses, separate organizations of all kinds, and even separate Black states. The more radical white student leaders rejected the white middle class itself.  They did not think that African Americans would benefit from assimilation. The white middle class, they thought, was not the solution but the problem. Their values, radicals believed, were dangerous. They were imperialistic and violent. They subscribed to patriarchy, and keep down women, Blacks, Native Americans, and Third World peoples.  The new ideology of Black Power proclaimed that “Black is beautiful” and called for liberation from white society. The Black Muslims and Malcolm X had arrived at similar conclusions.

Stokley Carmichael and the more radical students wanted revolution not assimilation. From this perspective, King was part of the problem. They did not want "to overcome" with whites and join in a new color-blind society. They instead wanted Black communities that affirmed a distinctive Black culture and consciousness. They wanted to stop what they regarded as the white war on people of color, whether in the United States or in Vietnam.  Martin Luther King met with Lyndon Johnson at the White House. In contrast, Stokley Carmichael and SNCC refused to meet with him.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, student radicals were angry, but they also felt vindicated. They regarded the shooting as final proof of their own arguments. The assassination seemed to demonstrate that non-violence could never work. In 1968, a Revolution seemed necessary, and it seemed near.

Half a century later, it is painfully obvious that the radical students were wrong. The years after 1968 did not lead to revolution or even a liberal government. On the Left, Richard Nixon's election in 1968 was regarded as the last gasp of an old order that would soon be swept away. But between 1968 and 1992 Republicans would hold the presidency for all but 4 years. The United States proved far more conservative than student radicals thought. 

Looking back a half century to 1963, King has emerged as a towering figure, an effective organizer, a captivating public speaker, and a man able to mobilize and unite disparate groups to effect fundamental change. He has been canonized as the visionary who redefined what the American Dream might yet be. He appears great today, but he also illustrates all too well that a prophet often is not recognized in his own country. Only with the passage of time have Americans begun to understand his true stature.  

King still speaks to the world's problems today. The following words from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech apply with considerable force to all too many contemporary crises, particularly in the Middle East.

"Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers."

Tenth anniversary of the 2003 North American Blackout.

After the American Century                                                                                                                                                        

The tenth anniversary of the 2003 Blackout passed a few days ago. Fortunately, such a large blackout has not occurred again inside the US, but this is no reason to feel sanguine about electricity supply. The blackout in 2003 was a cascading failure that started in Ohio, tripped by an overhead line touching a tree limb. It was a hot day, which meant that demand for air conditioning was also high, and that caused the high tension lines to heat up. When this happens, they sag down. Power companies know this, and well-run companies make sure that the area below the lines is kept clear. But trees and bushes keep growing, and when not kept in check they soon rise closer to the lines. 

In short, the time of the accident was hardly a surprise. August is late in the growing season, when trees have had months to intrude upward. A hot day in August is hottest in the middle afternoon, and this is when the lines sagged down and touched the trees. The cascading effects knocked out power for 50 million people in Ontario, Canada and the eastern United States. The old adage, "For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse. . ." still applies.

Since 2003 the monitoring of the power system has improved, and power plant operators have a few seconds more to notice when a problem occurs. But remember that electricity moves at 186,000,000 miles per second. A breakdown in Ohio can cascade a long way in one second.

If you want to know more about this problem, including how blackouts relate to terrorism, the smart grid, and the future of energy use,  a New York Times article appeared in November the same year that this was posted, and I have also written a short book on the problem, When the Lights Went Out.