Posts Tagged ‘futurism’
women and the future
8,000 years ago….
My previous post reminded me of some pieces I wrote (about a year ago), which I’ll reference below. I’m quite proud of these pieces – it seems indignation can bring out the best…
By the way, what happened to evolutionary psychology? To judge from Ryan Ellsworth’s efforts, it was a questionable enterprise, especially in trying to cement patriarchy into our biology. I would guess that it was never a ‘field’ that attracted female intellectuals. Here’s a passage from Ellsworth in his critique of a book by Susan Block called The Bonobo Way, which I criticised (his critique, not the book) in my earlier piece. Obviously I’m still fuming!
Block refers to babies to care for, and reputations to protect, but does not seem to understand the significance of these two things for understanding human sex differences in sexual desire. Perhaps she privately does, but to acknowledge the significance of these forces on the evolution of human sexuality would severely compromise her arguments, as it demands recognition of the fact that women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men. To argue that females are as interested as males in sexual variety is to buy into a sexist worldview wherein the male is the typical specimen of the species by which to compare females (Saxon, 2012). Although ostensibly parading under the guise of liberation, such a position is no less sexist or anti-feminist than is the oppression of women’s sexuality.
One has to read this passage a couple of times to let it sink in. Or at least I did – smarter people might’ve recognised the bullshit straight away. It’s there in the first two sentences (okay, the second sentence takes up most of the passage). The first sentence states as fact that there are ‘human sex differences in sexual desire’. So that must be why it’s okay to call men ‘studs’ and women ‘sluts’, or as Ellsworth puts it, we must recognise the fact that ‘women are not expected to have desires for sexual variety and quantity identical to men’. And it would seem to follow that if they have such desires they should be ostracised and shamed. Ellsworth even tries to argue that to suggest that women might have such pluralist desires is sexist because it (sort of) turns them into men, stripping them of their identity as caring mothers or potentially caring mothers, which is their evolutionary role.
Evolutionary psychology doesn’t seem to have lasted long, which I think is a good thing. It seemed to be wanting to find an evolutionary explanation for what many might find to be shifting social-psychological phenomena, and I don’t think that works. For example, in the WEIRD world we’ve shifted from larger families to smaller, often single-parent families, and family roles have changed. Marriage isn’t so essential to the reproductive process as it was, and of course it only came into being relatively recently, and as for monogamy, we have no idea whether that was practiced by humans, say 200,000 years ago. None of this has to do with evolution in a Darwinian sense – we often describe society as having ‘evolved’ in the last couple of centuries, but this nothing to do with the Darwinian concept.
So, back to monogamy. It’s seen as the norm for we humans, especially when it comes to bringing up children. And yet, neither chimps nor bonobos are monogamous, and clearly they manage to reproduce, and their offspring are just as well-adjusted as their parents. So when and why did we or our ancestors become so, and will we ever cease to be so? Ellsworth claimed in his essay that there have never been any successful or lasting matriarchal societies, but absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, and of course it would not be of interest to him to mention the controversial but undeniably thought-provoking finds at Çatalhöyük suggesting plenty of goddess-worship. As I’ve often pointed out, the double male god-worship that constitutes Christianity was both born of and a template for thousands of years of patriarchy, still championed by the Catholic Church, so it’s intriguing to wonder about the society around Çatalhöyük, a mere 9,000 years ago. Believing in females with godly powers just doesn’t fit with a male-dominated society, and even those who argue against evidence that the undoubtedly remarkable society that created Çatalhöyük was matriarchal tend to argue for gender egalitarianism, which is remarkable in itself (though I’ve read anthropological studies on some Australian Aboriginal societies that have come to similar conclusions).
All of this makes me wonder again about early humans and their ancestors, Australopithecus and the like, especially considering that bonobos are clearly matriarchal and chimps are clearly patriarchal. Of course, size matters, pace bonobos, and it has recently been found in a study published last year that both A. afarensis and A. africanus, and especially the former, were more sexually dimorphic than present-day humans. But size matters less in the modern WEIRD world, where brute strength is of decreasing importance. I suppose these days we should be looking more at brain size, or rather brain complexity, and I very much doubt if we found any real difference there, which is doubtless why nobody much studies gender-based brain complexity, whether in dogs, cats or humans (I did once have a university friend who seriously asserted that men were naturally more intelligent – and she spoke of neurological complexity – than women; but she was young, and I let it pass, probably due to shock).
Generally, though, I feel optimistic about the greater empowerment of women in the future (the future is long, and I’m getting old, so I’m not worried about being proved wrong). This in spite of Trump and Putin and the Ayatollahs and the Sudanese and so many other African and Middle Eastern nations/regions. We describe them as living in the past for a reason. And Australia, far from the madding crowd of backward-facing nations, with more and more women in government, both nationally and in my home state, can and hopefully will set a small example that exhausted and disillusioned humanists elsewhere might take notice of…
References
Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: how men came to rule, 2023
Rutger Bregman’s Reith lectures, an amateur commentary: lectures 3 & 4
In his third lecture, Bregman brings up the Fabian movement in Britain, whose most well-known members today were G B Shaw and H G Wells. It was named after a famous Roman statesman and military commander, Fabius (full name Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus), whose delaying tactics against Hannibal of Carthage strengthened Rome at a time of crisis. So the Fabians favoured gradual, piecemeal tactics to improve society – reform as opposed to revolution. Here’s Bregman’s opening remarks:
It begins with a tax system that is fair, simple, and based on the principle that work and wealth should play by the same rules.
Bregman’s issue here is definitely my own. Money made from money (Trump is a classic example, but there are many many others) is more ‘protected’ from the tax system than money made by work. So, Bregman asks, what do we do to encourage, if not enforce, a fairer tax system and a sense of social justice? I for one, would want to bring to the attention of the super-wealthy that their wealth isn’t as ‘deserved’ as they like to think it is – but what a task that would be!
The Fabians emerged from and split off from a broader, Quaker-inspired movement of moral reform in the late 19th century, feeling that political reform was the vital issue, and that this reform needed to be gradual and rational, bringing the majority of the people with it, if possible. Unsurprisingly, the movement held great appeal for many of the intellectuals of the day. They produced essays in pamphlet form, focussing on brevity and conciseness, with elegant packaging, and which invited those interested to attend conferences and debates on relevant issues. The movement became fashionable, in effect. It turned economics into a near-popular topic and was a major force in the formation of the British Labour Party. The movement spawned a very radical tax system, which reached such proportions that, in the 1960s, bands such as the Beatles and the Stones complained about being impoverished. Poor things! Unfortunately, since those days, the rich have had it much easier to retain and increase their wealth, as a range of schemes and tactics have emerged to protect private capital, including whole companies created to do just that.
Anyway, this Fabian movement managed to become ‘cool’, and increasingly successful into the 20th century. Education and healthcare were a major focus, as well as limits to working hours and extra pay for overtime. Women’s rights became an issue, as did the progressive taxation system that George Harrison maundered on about – until he found a tax haven, no doubt. In fact, it was into the 1970s that things began to change, and Bregman blames it on the neo-liberal movement, which began around the 50s and included some well-known names, particularly Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. This was of course about a minimal state and maximal markets – the rule of self-interest.
So, when the 70s brought increased unemployment, a drop in economic growth and an inflationary surge, the neo-liberal strategies of small governments and big, untethered markets began to sound enticing. It became the centrist approach for a time, gaining acceptance not only from conservatives such as Thatcher and Reagan, but also from supposedly centre-left figures such as Clinton and Blair. But over time – and Bregman is surely right on this – the price was a widening rich-poor gap, a reduced sense of community, an untameable capitalist class, ecological problems and the like. He claims that neoliberalism is dead, and we are searching for, in need of, new ideas and approaches, a ‘conspiracy of decency’.
So, towards the end of this third lecture Bregman claims that this conspiracy is at hand. I’m not sure that I agree, but he might be talking about something like a universal basic income, which I’ve written about before:
Imagine a state that embraces this role fully, where the brightest minds don’t waste their time polishing power points at McKinsey, but build high-speed rail, or cure entire classes of disease. Imagine the massive profits from AI, technology rooted in decades of government-funded research, flowing into a national wealth fund that paid every citizen a monthly dividend.
Yes, all this is nice to imagine, and we may well be working towards a world of greater leisure, but the forces of greed and empowerment over others don’t seem to be reducing….
So to Bregman’s final lecture, which he calls ‘fighting for humanity in the age of the machine’. He began, rather startlingly for me, with the free will issue, which I’ve come to terms with, mostly in the last decade or so, through reading, first Sam Harris, but particularly Robert Sapolsky’s massive work Behave, and its follow-up, Determined. Yet unlike Bregman, accepting our deterministic world hasn’t particularly traumatised me – probably because those works simply confirmed me in my ‘suspicions’, which were much more than suspicions.
I was a little startled, too, to learn that after a traumatic ‘loss of Christian faith’ period, Bregman found a hero worth worshipping in Bertrand Russell, that first Reith Lecturer, and a towering figure in philosophy and ethics, whose writings I’ve always enjoyed but have read too little of – time to correct that…. ah, time, time. Interestingly, he too experienced youthful crises – life-threatening ones, it seems – regarding free will and religious faith. These were issues that troubled my own youth, though they were certainly not existential crises.
Bregman quotes the simplest observation/advice from Russell, ‘love is wise, hatred is foolish’. This, of course, goes with the ‘no free will’ view. Understanding that people are what they are due to all sorts of determining factors may not enable you to love them, but it certainly makes it feel foolish to hate them, and I’ve often, in recent times, checked myself with this commonplace insight.
When Russell presented his Reith lectures in 1948, the world had been convulsed by two massive wars and was facing the spectre of possible nuclear annihilation. We’ve gotten used to living with this possibility after many decades, in which nuclear arsenals have expanded, but have never since been called upon. According to Bregman, though, we’re now facing another threat, a rather more amorphous one, in the rapid development of AI. Who knows where that will lead us, how much a benefit, how much a threat?
When, next, Bregman speaks of the five questions posed by religion, my mind drifts to the five essential questions formulated by Kant which I learned years ago. Or maybe they were four.
- Who/What am I?
- What do/can I know?
- What should I do?
- What can I hope for?
These questions, with some slight variants, seem existentially fundamental. And Bregman’s answers, or my takeaway from them, are fairly vital to me.
Who are we? The planet’s greatest co-operators. That, after all, is how we created AI, and nuclear weapons, and vaccines, and nations and governments and education systems and science and civilisations. Of course, with the growth of complexity came the development of hierarchies. And yet… I’ve read in the past that with the development of agriculture came fixed hierarchies, ownership of property and so on, but I doubt it was that straightforward. Hierarchies exist in chimp and bonobo societies, which we can observe directly, but the hierarchies of the earliest humans and their direct ancestors don’t leave traces. It’s likely that farming, and what we call ‘civilisation’, consolidated those hierarchies, sometimes to a socially destructive extent, as Joseph Henrich argues in The WEIRDest people in the world. Above all, this civilisation has had a massive impact on the planet itself, altering its atmosphere, wiping out many other species, and reducing its ‘size’, from our perspective, from that of our whole world, to a tiny speck in a galaxy that is itself a tiny speck in the universe as we know it.
And now, AI. This might be part of the fifth question to add to the four I gave above, but it’s definitely a ‘we’ question. Where are we going? Is AI the end of the road, the last of our inventions? Here’s Bregman’s summary of the bad news:
Literacy and numeracy rates are plummeting, teenage depression, anxiety and suicide attempts and anxiety are rising, face-to-face socialising is collapsing, as we retreat indoors, eyes glued to the screens, and solitude is becoming the hallmark of our age
This isn’t just opinion. The statistics provide confirmation. And this has happened before the rise of AI, which can hardly be expected to improve the situation. The online platforms tend to reward extreme views rather than ‘bland’ centrists ones, and Bregman quotes from a study in Nature:
Those with both high psychopathy and low cognitive ability are most actively involved in online political engagement.
This of course gives a skewed view of what the majority, who quickly grow tired of engaging with extremists and their violent reactions, are thinking. And when the most rational people start to give up, real danger ensues.
On this problem, Bregman tries something surprising, to me at least. The temperance movement was a reaction to the widespread abuse of alcohol – and its encouragement by profiteers – in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And the loudest voices against this abuse belonged to women, many of the same women who demanded the vote. It shouldn’t be difficult to understand why. Alcoholism was largely, though certainly not entirely, a male problem, leading to violence, abuse and family neglect.
Today the addiction is to computer games and other internet distractions, and with AI become normalised on top of this trend, the outcome is hard to predict, and even harder to be optimistic about. AI, as Bregman says, is a ‘supercharging’ technology, but we barely know what that means, and how it will affect current lifestyles. Current polls reveal a growing pessimism about the technological future.
But of course Bregman ends on a positive note, or tries to. What matters, he says, is not what people believe, but what they do. As the spectre of AI descends upon us, people need to act to protect the common interest, the human interest, which as we know is also the interests of the vast web of life from which we have sprung. AI is not, of course, like climate change, or alcoholism, it raises different questions which we need to be alert to, such as ownership, power, inclusivity versus exclusivity, and a close monitoring of effects. The common good is, of course, paramount. This is a difficult task – as Kierkegaard cleverly said, and which Bregman reminds us of – ‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards’. And this applies not only to our own lives, but our collective cultural lives. We must be alert to the mistakes we will inevitably make, and correct them as quickly as possible, to minimise damage. The future is ours to create, so we must be careful, and wise, and in the most important sense, loving.
Reference
women and leadership in Australia, etc
Australia currently has a Labor government with a larger number of women in the cabinet than at any time in its history…. but before I go into that – why Labor and not Labour, the general English (ie British) spelling? It’s a minor issue, but I’m torn between a dislike of the USA and its fulsome jingoism, and a preference for simplified spelling (labor, color, etc). Apparently, back in the 1880s, the trade union movements that went on to form the Labour/Labor party were enamoured of a number of US texts such as Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking backward. The USA had over time adopted the simpler spelling, perhaps largely due to the impact of the 1828 Webster dictionary of American English, while Australian spelling, at least of that particular word, had/has been equivocal. Theories vary, but some have pointed out the usefulness of distinguishing between Labor, the party, and the labour movement in general, with its appropriately labourious (actually laborious) spelling.
But back to women. There are 23 members of the Federal Cabinet, including the PM and Deputy PM. Twelve of them are women, and I vaguely wonder whether the leaders, such as Albanese, Marles, Wong and, say, Plibersek, tried to arrange it so that they would just manage to have more women than men, to create some kind of record for the books. Margaret Thatcher apparently had no women at all in her cabinet in eleven years as British PM, and the new, first-ever female PM in Japan, Sanae Takaichi, is apparently a big Thatcher fan. She has, at least, appointed two women to her cabinet, which has rather disappointed the media there. The USA’s Congress is currently 28.65% female (155 women in House and Senate), and a significant majority of them are Democrats. Their numbers are way up compared to 30 and 40 years ago.
So Australia is at the forefront of creeping changes in the political empowerment of women. I should also mention that the current leader of the Liberal opposition is a woman, Sussan Ley, and that our PM, Anthony Albanese, was brought up in a single-parent family, which very much helps to explain his faith in female leadership.
Female political empowerment, in Australia as elsewhere in the WEIRD world, has been slow, too slow from the perspective of one lifetime, but steady. We had our first and only PM, Julia Gillard, from 2010 to 2013, and before that we had female state leaders, starting with Rosemary Follett in the ACT in 1989, then Carmen Lawrence (WA) and Joan Kirner (Victoria) in 1990. In 2001 Clare Martin became Chief Minister in the Northern Territory, and in 2007 Anna Bligh became Premier of Queensland. In 2011 Kristina Keneally became the first female Premier of NSW and Lara Giddings became the first female Premier of Tasmania. Finally, in 2015 Annastacia Palaszczuk became Queensland’s second female Premier.
From all this, one might think female leadership has become run-of-the-mill here, and that ‘patriarchy’ is over, but that’s definitely not true. Of the six current state Premiers, only one, Victoria’s Jacinta Allan, is female, and that’s a fairly standard situation, though interestingly the Northern Territory’s most recent three Chief Ministers have been women. My home state of South Australia is the only state that has never had a female Premier.
There’s also the question of economic power. The mining sector, which is of course male-dominated, is the most fundamental sector in our export economy. Domestically, there’s a persistent gender pay gap, and a lower participation in the workforce vis-à-vis women, with men holding more senior positions. Business leadership and related wealth generation continues to be overwhelmingly male. AI (never lies) tells me that ‘men have approximately 40% more net wealth than women’, but, though I know I should worship the never-lying god, this time I’m skeptical. Wealth is surely about far more than salary. The world’s, and Australia’s, wealthiest are not ‘paid’, their financial worth is not so easily measured. And they are overwhelmingly male, without a doubt – but I value my life too much to try and uncover the murky details.
Of course, if we think in terms of centuries – not a long time in the scheme of things – women have come a long way, all over the WEIRD world. From being largely barred from universities in the early 20th century, they now head departments, even in the so-called ‘hard sciences’. They’re prominent in the judiciary, and in law generally, and in medicine, journalism, the media, the arts and so on. In fact the changes have been so great in the last couple of lifetimes, I’d love to see how things are in 2225, if humanity is still kicking….
Perhaps by then we’ll have realised how vitally important female leadership is for the survival of just about everything that lives on this planet.
References
SSBs, not as bad as they sound
Hmm – well, it’s a start
So I watched a video touching on solid state batteries (SSBs), and the difficulties involved in developing them and the promise they hold for the future of battery technology and electrification in general, in the battle for clean, renewable power generation. It was a bit nerdy, in other words way too technical for an arts-based ignoramus like me, but I do have a certain interest in learning and the future, so I want to get my head around the possibilities and the problems. So away we go.
Batteries are all about two electrodes, an anode and a cathode, with electrolytic material between them which enables charged ions to pass from one to the other. This material has generally been a liquid or a gel, but these materials have many efficiency (and flammability) problems, apparently.
So, to basics. How does a battery work? Why is it called a battery? AINL [Artificial Intelligence Never Lies] puts it this way:
A battery is a device that stores electrical energy in chemical form and converts it to electricity on demand through electrochemical cells. It consists of two terminals (anode and cathode) separated by an electrolyte, and when connected to a circuit, a chemical reaction causes electrons to flow from the negative terminal through the circuit to the positive terminal, creating an electric current.
Which raises more questions from the novice: what exactly is electrical energy, and how can it be stored in chemical form?
We have to get more basic. Energy is essentially stuff in motion, like a rock rolling down a hill, but also lightning, which is electrical. It ‘releases built-up electrical charges between a storm cloud and the ground, or between such clouds’ (AINL again). I’ve written about lightning before, quite a bit in fact, because it’s complicated. As to the term ‘battery’, it comes from Benjamin Franklin, whose early electrical experiments involved Leyden Jars, devices to store static electricity, linked together like a battery of cannons.
Anyway, no matter what I’ve written in the past, I have no idea what ‘electrical energy in chemical form’ means. Will I ever know? It has something to do with redox (oxidation-reduction) reactions, in which one chemical substance loses electrons (it’s oxidised) to another (which, counter-intuitively, is reduced, though I suppose that’s because electrons are negatively charged).
But I’m getting bogged down in the basics here – let’s accept as a given that batteries which use liquids or gels as the electrolytic material are never going to be as effective (energy-dense) or long-lasting, or safe, as those using solids (SSBs). The big issue is, why are SSBs so hard to create in a stable and effective form? Again according to AINL, it’s all about ‘high manufacturing costs, scalability, and performance issues, particularly in cold temperatures’.
Solid-state batteries being tried use lithium as the anode, from which lithium ions pass through a ceramic or solid polymer to a cathode of oxides or sulphides. Wikipedia briefly summarises the benefits and problems:
Solid-state batteries are potentially safer, with higher energy densities. Challenges to widespread adoption include energy and power density, durability, material costs, sensitivity, and stability.
These problems, or challenges, have been around for a long time, but apparently 2025 has been a year of real progress in the field, with lots of cashed-up, well-reputed manufacturers vying for SSB priority in making the crossing of ‘the valley of death’, as one expert puts it. One of these is the Chinese state-owned car manufacturer, Chery, and another is VW, in partnership with others, including Gotion, a Chinese company that has produced a battery called Jinshi. AINL again:
This advanced battery technology offers a high energy density of 350 Wh/kg [watt-hour per kilogram], which can extend the driving range of EVs to approx. 1,000 km. The Jinshi battery is also noted for its enhanced safety features, durability and ability to charge quickly.
This energy density is apparently well over that produced by Tesla so far. Gotion is claiming a 1,000 km range for its battery, with ‘stable performance between -20 degrees celsius and 85 degrees (!), and a projected lifespan of a million kilometres. They’re expecting effective mass production by end of decade. As a 69-year-old, I can hardly wait – just to see it never mind drive it.
Another organisation VW is working with is QuantumScape (how impressive is that name) in the US. They’re apparently a well known company ‘in this space’, They’re working on a lithium-metal/anode-free solid-state cell. Their lithium-metal anode is ‘formed in-situ’ during charging, it isn’t a permanent ‘built’ thing, apparently. According to ‘Just have a think”, there is no pre-existing anode:
The solid electrolyte is in fact a ceramic separator which plays a dual role: it provides a highly conductive pathway for lithium ions and it physically impedes the growth of the dreaded lithium dendrites (that we’ve looked at in previous videos).
I’ve seen images of the dreaded dendrites, which form like little tree roots on the anode of lithium batteries when charging.
Anyway, just to change the subject for a mo, what about sodium batteries? Not for vehicles though – for home. Subject for another post.
So QuantumScape are promising higher energy density – 300 watt-hours per kilogram at cell level – and improved safety and faster charging, and a longer cycle life. It might all be hype, but they have at least demonstrated one of their SSBs in a VW Ducati electric motorbike, so that’s something.
‘Just have a think’ tells me that the two largest battery companies in the world are CATL and BYD, so let’s just have a look. CATL is a Chinese company, Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited, which is ‘the world’s EV and energy storage battery manufacturer’. They’re into lithium-ion and other advanced battery technologies, for EVs and other commercial applications, including aviation. BYD (‘build your dreams’) is also Chinese but it has been focussing a lot on the Australian market, so I need to learn more about their operations here, where it’s been selling cars since 2022.
As for these companies’ development of commercially viable All-SSBs, they’re generally seeking to dampen expectations, as clearly they’re meeting with obstacles. Five years from now, more or less, seems to be their prediction. I can’t wait.
Obviously I’ve just started to scratch the surface of this technology, but it’s clearly stuff that’s got a lot of smart people and companies activated. I hope to educate myself further for future posts.
References
dithyrambs and dead ends….
So how does the great, yet still prospective, Trumpian dynasty finally establish itself as the ne plus ultra of all dynasties Americanian? How does it rid itself of the pestilence of the other? There is surely much work to be done. The current, almost too-belated and yet still maligned Apollinian leadership must, in its height and depth, ensure that the Dionysian dithyrambs of the soi-disant ‘Democratic’ canaille be rendered down to their most lassitudinous level, a level to which they are all-too naturally inclined. These untermensch have stained the great Americanian nation and threatened its proper and all-too-deserving ubermensch place in the political and all-essential financial world for too long, and their grave must not be risen from.
Voting, I can assure you, does not occur in heaven. What purpose would it serve but to lower standards? And when heaven is created on Earth, there is nothing for it but to celebrate, and fill ourselves with the love of the eternal. But we must have keepers at the gate, and be ever-vigilant regarding the enemies within, for in this soiled world impurities lurk everywhere, even our heavenly corner is not entirely safe, and nothing is forever, though we must strive to maintain our dynasty as thoroughly enriched as it could possibly be, as a haven against the levelling forces of inferiority.
So let’s have no more polling, and no more useless, disruptive, and profoundly unvisionary dissent. We are better than this. The future is already here. We will never dismantle it.
Okay, enough of the bullshit. I’m thinking, if that’s what it’s called, of doing a course in economics, to try and understand how the super-rich get away with paying far far less than their fair share of taxes, and what can be done to change this, and how it is that the US can have a national debt of over $37 trillion and yet be described as the world’s richest nation or biggest economy or whatever. According to AI, which never lies, the US has a projected deficit for the 2025 fiscal year of about $1.9 trillion. A fiscal year is apparently a 12-month annual accounting period, with the dates varying from country to country. In Australia it’s from July 1 to June 30, and I always thought that dating was a global thing, so parochial and untravelled am I.
I recently watched, with some skepticism I must say, a video recounting the fall of empires – that of Rome, Spain, Britain, Russia and – just stay tuned – the USA. It argued, in a rather pat and I should say smug way, that they all followed precisely the same pattern and the USA would inevitably follow suit. Obviously, being a 20-minute video it was a wee bit short on detail, but of course it was broadly correct in that no empires, or dominant nations, last forever. One thing it didn’t mention of course was the USA’s nuclear arsenal – or that of Russia. Both of these countries will remain a massive global threat for as long as those arsenals are maintained, and there’s absolutely no sign of them being dismantled in the foreseeable.
I was told today by a woman in the conversation class I help to facilitate – all the attendees were Japanese, as it happened – that Japan now has its first female Prime Minister. How did I miss that? Does she wear high heels? Anyway, it’s a good sign, But Sanae Takaichi, the new PM, has only 2 women in her 19-member cabinet. Then again, Margaret Thatcher never had a single female in her cabinet in her eleven and a half years as PM. Australia’s current 23-member cabinet under Anthony Albanese features 12 women – the first-ever female dominant cabinet in our history, and likely a world record for Prime Ministerial governments. Can’t wait for it to be the first female-only one. Sigh. But it’s interesting that Japan has a Prime Ministerial system, which I tend to associate with English-speaking, Westminster-based political entities. Clearly the fact that it still has a monarch, or emperor, and feels a strong need to maintain that imperial link as fundamental to its history, would make a constitutional system like that of Australia, and of course Britain, very appealing.
So the emperor plays much the same ceremonial role as the monarch in Britain and the Governor-General in Australia, but I note that Japan hasn’t gotten on board with female succession, unsurprisingly, being one of the most patriarchal nations in the developed world. This could cause problems in the slightly distant future, as current Emperor Naruhito, in his mid-sixties, has no sons. He does have a daughter, Princess Aiko, but it’s claimed that his nephew, the young Prince Hisahito, is being groomed to take the throne when the time comes. Now, I’ve mentioned that Japan is quite patriarchal, but feminism is certainly raising its voice there, and I’m hearing it. A lot of women are not happy that the succession is not going to Princess Aiko, which would create the first Japanese Empress. Modernising to maintain an ancient tradition – sounds perfectly cromulent to me.
Continuing on the feminism theme, I wrote recently on wealth-is-power, wondering just how much wealth/power is in the hands of women. My vague guess was 1% female compared to 99% male. AI (never lies) tells me that 86.5% of billionaires are male, 16.5% are female. There are no trillionaires as yet (which is why autocorrect thinks I’ve made a mistake in writing the word), but they’re getting there. Anyway I’m guessing that the 1% figure is still correct, as it’s likely most of the females on the list are thoroughly impoverished compared to the top males. Female empowerment is all very well but let’s not get ridiculous.
Economics is a subject of some interest to me, and I’m wondering if I might do a thorough study of it my old age. Courses are available at the usual institutions, but unfortunately not for the impoverished. Funny that. Meanwhile there’s economics talks on youtube which might be worth commenting on, so that’s a start – but the news is, we don’t have to worry about trying to work out how to make money or regulate our economies, whether we be families, nations or planets, because never-lying AI will be doing it all for us, so effectively that we won’t be needing economists or indeed humans. The BBC World Service, no less, has kindly informed us that artificial intelligence will ‘go rogue’ by 2027, leading to human extinction about ten years later. I’ll be only about 81 or so by then – way too young to die… but then, I’ll be in great company. Maybe that’s what happened to all those dead exoplanets out there….
References
Friedrich Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c751z23n3n7o
https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-general/japanese-monarchy-0016250
AI2027: Is this how AI might destroy humanity? – BBC World Service
matriarchy needs work – please consider
dreams dreams dreams
We’ve surely all heard that patriarchy began with agriculture, but I don’t think there’s any solid evidence for this. The Australian Aboriginal societies weren’t agricultural, but according to many early anthropologists and white commentators they were profoundly, even brutally patriarchal. Take this description:
“The treatment which women experience must be taken into account in considering the causes which lead to the extinction of the native tribes. Amongst them the woman is an absolute slave. She is treated with the greatest cruelty and indignity, has to do all laborious work, and to carry all the burthens. For the slightest offence or dereliction of duty, she is beaten with a waddyu or yam stick and not infrequently speared. The records of the Supreme Court in Adelaide furnish numberless instances of blacks being tried for murdering lubras. The woman’s life is of no account if her husband chooses to destroy it, and no one ever attempts to protect or take her part under any circumstances. In times of scarcity of food, she is the last to be fed, and the last considered in any way. That many die in consequence cannot be a matter of wonder …”
George Taplin, The Native Tribes of South Australia, 1878
Just about all of these early descriptions are from men, so I’m a wee bit skeptical here too (and for a very different description, see below)
My interest in this topic – I mean the origins of patriarchy – goes back to the chimp-bonobo contrast. What brought about this patriarchal-matriarchal divide on opposite banks of the Congo River between one and two million years ago? If it was essentially an environmental divide, with the bonobos benefitting from an abundant, largely frugivorous food supply, could it be that Aboriginal societies, divided by more than 200 different languages, might also be divided by more or less fruitful environments, where gathering was more or less key and hunting more or less incidental, leading to different cultural norms? Aboriginal people have been generally defined as nomadic, but they also had their own tribal lands and sacred places, the nomadism simply referring to a lack of fixed dwellings.
Some, perhaps most, anthropologists have found that Aboriginal culture is generally divided upon gender lines:
Diana Bell in her book “Daughters of the Dreaming” reported, after spending many years living with Aborigines in Central Australia, that there was no patriarchy or matriarchy but “Under the Law, men and women have distinctive roles to play but each has access to certain checks and balances which ensure that neither sex can enjoy an unrivalled supremacy over the other. Underlying male and female practice is a common purpose and a shared belief in the Dreamtime experience; both have sacred boards, both know songs and paint designs that encode the knowledge of the dreaming.” This was not as predicted by Gimbutas but is [a] more gender balanced society.
Some rituals are performed by both men and women. She tells of how men, grateful for being shown a woman’s dance, promptly return the favour by painting up their own boards and bodies and showing the women one of their own dances. In these dances they were exchanging ritual knowledge of the country and its Dreaming painted on their bodies and their boards and spelt out by the patterns their pounding feet make upon the earth. At one point the women picked up the male boards displayed and danced with them while the men called out approvingly “they are your dreamings now”. But this does not mean that there is not secret knowledge, private to each gender. In such displays, something is always held back, kept for people of the same gender.
Jani Farrell Roberts, Aboriginal women and Gimbutas, c 2000
If this is a reasonably accurate account of pre-colonial Aboriginal practice, we may be looking at societies that can’t be easily pigeon-holed as patriarchal or otherwise, which is difficult for me, as I’ve tended to argue that gender equality is kind of unnatural, like measuring the two genders on a balance of scales or a see-saw. The scales will either tip in favour of patriarchy or matriarchy, so we need to go for matriarchy as the more humane approach, based, just for starters, on all we know about history.
And bonobos.
As to history, most of it is about men, because it’s overwhelmingly been men who’ve started and fought in wars that have transformed human society. Let’s mention a few instigators, as well as slaughterers via policy – Genghis Khan, Kim Il Sung, Adolph Hitler, Ivan the Terrible, Pope Urban II, Napoleon Bonaparte, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Leo Victor (Leopold II of Belgium), Timur….
There’s plenty others, no doubt, but why make ourselves sick? How about the women warriors and presiders over slaughter?
Let’s see – Artemisia I of Caria, Boudicca, Fu Hao, Cleopatra, Isabella of Castille, Wu Zhao, uh, Margaret Thatcher…
It’s a struggle to find anyone who caused human suffering on anything like the level of the males. Maybe they just weren’t given enough power, but I doubt that. Whatever the case, I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that 99% of the human slaughter that has occurred throughout history has been at the hands of only one gender.
Having said that, humanity doesn’t seem to be getting the message, what with Xi, Putin, Trump, Kim Jung Un and co. Planetrulers.com claimed that there were 57 dictators worldwide in 2022, all of them male (though they really should have included Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s dictatorial Prime Minister .
So the history is bleak, as is much of the present, and the worst of it is that this can drive a sense of fatalism, or ‘what’s the use’-ism, so…
What can we do? Of course, the internet has the answer, sort of. We certainly have no option but to take the long view, and work work work, even if it’s just talking, arguing, making the obvious points. Sometimes even to women – I’ve written, ages ago that Margaret McMillan, the prolific and highly regarded Canadian historian, on giving a Q and A after a talk about the history of war, was asked whether more women in leadership might make a difference to that tendency towards warfare that has so characterised our history. Sadly, she rattled off the usual extremely dumb response – sorry Margaret but I get so tired of it – that this and that female leader was just as bad as the men. Of course! That’s because it’s not at all about individual men and women – it’s about matriarchy versus patriarchy. It’s bonoboism versus chimpism. It’s about changing the overall structure of society. And that is, of course, Very Big. A very big task. A very necessary task, though, in my humble opinion. Not because we won’t survive without matriarchy – I have no idea whether we will or not – but because we, and the environment we so dominate, will be so much better off without patriarchy. That’s something I’m entirely convinced about.
I’d ask everyone to just think about this, just for starters.
References
http://www.witch.plus.com/7day-extracts/aboriginal-women.html
Diane Bell, Daughters of the Dreaming, 1983
More musings on bonobos, families and the riddle of humanity
ring-tailed lemurs are female dominant and beautiful – just saying
So, returning to bonobos and how they’ve managed to become female dominant, and how they might teach humans by example. In an article from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, from just over a decade ago, it was explained in these terms, at least when it comes to conflict:
It is not female alliances that help females win conflicts. The context of the conflict does not seem to be relevant for its outcome either. Instead, the attractiveness of females plays an important role. If females display sexually attractive attributes, including sexual swellings, they win conflicts with males more easily, with the males behaving in a less aggressive way.
So that’s it, our next female aspirant to political leadership needs to be good-looking, with plenty of sexual swellings. Such swellings would need to be on display at political rallies (which, happily or sadly, don’t really exist in Australia).
But unfortunately, human society isn’t quite that simple – and nor is bonobo society, methinks, though the influence of sexual swellings among naked apes would surely be greater than among clothed ones. And we human males tend not to be attracted to females primarily because of signs of their fecundity, though it can be argued that physical attractiveness and being within a certain age bracket are common factors, with fecundity hiding slyly behind them.
It’s interesting to consider sexual differences between bonobos and humans. Bonobos are definitely not monogamous, and neither are their close cousins the chimps. We humans like to think we’re ‘naturally’ monogamous, but are we? Were Neanderthals? Australopithecines? And how does monogamy relate to male dominance, if at all? It’s worth noting that we’re by no means certain of how humans lived even in the recent past, in evolutionary terms – say, a mere 10,000 years ago. The term ‘hunter-gatherer’, which to many has suggested a clear delineation, with males as the hunters, has been very much in dispute in recent times (see references), and one might reasonably suspect that participation in either activity would depend on the food available in the region, just as is the case with bonobos, whose diet is mostly vegetarian with the addition of small game animals, easily hunted by either gender, and this has been cited as a contributing factor to bonobo female dominance.
In her book The Patriarchs, Angela Saini considers a number of historical examples, some clear-cut, others more murky, of female empowerment in the past. And much of this has to do with class and heritage:
The low status of some women has never stopped others in the same society from having enormous wealth or power in their own right. There have been queens, empresses, female pharaohs, and powerful women warriors for as long as humans have kept records. In the last two centuries, women have reigned as monarchs over Britain for longer than men have. Women have kept slaves and servants, and still do. There are cultures that prioritise mothers, in which children aren’t even seen to belong to the same households as their fathers.
However, there is no female equivalent to the sexual enslavement, or concubinage, practised in the past by alpha males in a number of human societies. This is highlighted in Joseph Henrich’s landmark work, The Weirdest People in the World, especially in chapter 8, ‘ WEIRD monogamy’, which begins with a quote from a 16th century Franciscan friar, Toribio de Benavente Motolinia, describing Aztec society:
For three or four years the Sacrament of Matrimony was not administered, except to those who were educated in the house of God. All other Indians lived with as many women as they cared to have. Some had 200 women and others less, each one as many as suited him. Since the lords and chiefs stole all the women for themselves, an ordinary Indian could scarcely find a woman when he wished to marry. The Franciscans sought to uproot this evil; but they had no way of doing so because the lords had most of the women and refused to give them up. Neither petitions nor threats nor arguments, nor any other means which the Friars resorted to were sufficient to induce the Indians to relinquish their women, and, after doing so, enter marriage with only one, as the law of the church demands… This state of affairs continued until, after 5 or 6 years, it pleased the Lord that some Indians of their own accord began to abandon polygamy and content themselves with only one woman, marrying her as the church required… The Friars did not find it easy to have the Indians renounce polygamy. This was very hard to achieve because it was hard for the Indians to quit the ancient carnal custom that so greatly flattered sensuality.
It’s interesting to note here the assumption that monogamy is a less ‘sensual’ or ‘carnal’ practice than polygamy. Bonobos are generally regarded as sensual, even sex-obsessed, but their relations can’t be easily described in a ‘mono’ or ‘poly’ sort of way, because there’s no clear sense of ‘ownership’ of others, though there is plenty of bonding, mediated by sexual-sensual activity, and there is also a degree of hierarchy. We too, will aways have that, as particular individuals emerge as ‘leadership material’, but this can be as much a problem as a benefit. The political meme, ‘strong and wrong beats weak and right’, is so often only fully understood in hindsight.
When I think of a bonobo-style human society, this notion of non-ownership, even as regards children, comes prominently to mind. The compartmentalisation of modern WEIRD society into nuclear family units seems particularly problematic for me, and personal, as I was a five-year-old child of immigrant parents, taken from Britain to Australia on the other side of the world, with no further contact with broader family relations, and neighbours who were barely seen or heard. It’s often claimed that this separation into individual family units, physically separated in a built environment, began with agriculture, with the separation between those units growing with further developments – industrialisation, migration, the Church edicts forbidding marriage between cousins to the nth degree (as Henrich describes in his book). The real story, though, is doubtless even more complex.
I suspect we’re just at the beginning of ‘the great unravelling’ of the nuclear family, with an increasing number of single mothers, and fathers, and a host of ‘different’ family or group organisations, some of which are barely discernible on the horizon. I firmly believe that humans will survive the crises we create for ourselves (and indeed the whole biosphere), though not without great damage to the most vulnerable. It will require greater internationalism, and greater understanding and sympathy for all the species we’re connected to – that’s to say all species. There are plenty of horrific ‘hotspots’ of violence, warfare and inhumanity, as well as callous indifference to the suffering that our everyday actions – our food consumption, our mining and undermining operations, our general rapacity – are causing to the most vulnerable of our own species and many others. Our dominance should teach us to care more. With great power comes great responsibility. So many great powers in the past have not cared enough about the damage they’ve done, for it isn’t immediate damage to them.
Enough, I’m waxing melancholic. Bonobos are, it seems, happy with what they are, which they might continue to be if humans don’t wipe them out. Humans want to know more, grow more, be more than what they are. The ‘beginning of infinity’ indeed. I too am caught up in that quest, as I’m only human. Is it an upward spiral or a downward one? That is the question.
References
Still more critique of the PLOS article on women hunting in hunter-gatherer societies
Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: the origins of inequality, 2023
Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest people in the world, 2021
salt cooled nuclear reactors – part of the mix?
On a recent Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast, Steven Novella presented a segment on salt-cooled nuclear reactors which really interested me. As a young person in the early 80s, I went to Roxby Downs, some six hours’ drive north of Adelaide, to protest against BHP’s Olympic Dam uranium mine, having learned something about uranium, radioactivity, fissile material and such, and having friends who had big concerns about all this stuff. There wasn’t much in the way of confrontation, but I certainly enjoyed tramping around in the semi-desert, espying desert peas, poached egg daisies and the like, and the night sky and its gadzillions of stars was definitely the highlight of the trip.
Of course I’ve learned a lot more about nuclear power since those days, and the era of the Maralinga nuclear tests, also in the South Australian outback, was then only a generation further back. The world has become a lot smarter about nuclear power, I think, since those days, and certainly I’ve noticed that nuclear power has been used in the USA (which currently has 92 operating reactors) and Europe (167, and falling) without any mishaps – uhh, excepting the Three Mile Island partial meltdown in 1979, no doubt an influence on the Roxby Downs protestors.
The only other reactor incidents of note, I think, have been Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011, about which there has been plenty of misinformation. I recall a fellow teacher, a few years ago, reminding us in the staff room of the Fukushima melt-down that ‘killed thousands’. She was confusing the Fukushima event with the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which indeed killed over 20,000 people, a catastrophe virtually unimaginable to Australians.
I’ve written about nuclear power before, including this quite impressive piece, if I may say so myself (as nobody else will), but this is an opportunity for me to learn more about salt-cooled reactors and the input to all this of one Bill Gates, a figure who seems to raise the ire of some of my acquaintances, presumably due to what they deem as his ill-gotten wealth. Economics has never been my strong suit, which partially explains my life of relative poverty (though laziness and a kind of habitual solitude is more to blame), so I couldn’t begin to judge how ill-gotten, or not, his gains have been, but I’ve read a couple of very good books on his recommendation – Origin Story, by David Christian (a ‘Big History of Everything’) and How the world really works, by Vaclav Smil (‘A scientist’s guide to our past, present and future’) – and I’m aware of the work he’s been doing in recent years on vaccination and education in various African and Asian countries, so I’ve come to trust him on various practical issues faced by our species.
According to Steve Novella, in episode 989 of the SGU podcast series, Gates sat down with climate scientists some years ago to get the lowdown on investing in green or clean technology for the future, and the option that apparently most appealed to him, was salt-cooled nuclear reactors, or molten salt reactors. Novella himself has advocated for nuclear along with solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and any other low carbon options, in other words a multi-pronged approach, with different options obviously more or less suited to particular regions, and he believes that there are more than a few misconceptions about the dangers and downsides of nuclear energy generation.
So the nuclear industry has not been faring well of late. Existing systems are passing their use-by dates, and investment is lagging behind demand, which itself is suffering due to aforementioned misconceptions. Gates, however, has been convinced that a relatively old nuclear technology needs to be revived. A reactor is currently being built in Wyoming by a Gates-backed company, TerraPower (referenced below), which is being mooted as faster (to build), cheaper and safer than existing reactors, and with a smaller output (around 300 megawatts rather than a gigawatt). It will be salt-cooled rather than water-cooled, and this, according to Novella, is the decisive feature:
‘Water has to be under high pressure, and this high pressure is what causes much of the expense, the safety features, you have to be constantly managing the amount of pressure, and this massively complicates the design, and therefore the cost, etc’.
Another important feature of the design is that:
‘It separates out the nuclear part of the plant from the energy production part. That may sound simple, but it means that the turbine, which turns the heat from the nuclear part, the reactor, into electricity, is housed in a separate building – which means, theoretically, that you don’t need a lot of the safety features in half of the plant (the production part) that you have in the other half’.
So the ultimate idea is for a cheaper, more efficient plant. The separated design for TerraPower’s system has yet to be approved by the regulators, but it sounds quite straightforward, and is even described by TerraPower as ‘boring’ in its simplicity.
So how does ‘salt cooling’ work? The salt (fluoride or chloride) stores the energy from the reactor by heating up until molten, after which it flows to the turbine to produce electricity, but the salt retains the heat from the reactor for much longer than water does, and as such it can essentially serve as a power storage device, like a battery, which can then serve as a kind of load-following power plant for more intermittent forms of renewable energy. The more conventional nuclear power plants don’t have this compatibility with renewables.
Apparently salt-based nuclear facilities were first produced in the 1950s and were phased out in the 70s, for some reason (more research required). The Wyoming nuclear site is being built within the region of a coal plant that is due to close completely in the 2030s, so that it can use the grid connections and some of the infrastructure of that plant, with the advantage that it can ramp up and down more effectively than coal-based power plants can (natural gas is also good as a ‘peaker’ electrical source, but without the clean benefits of nuclear).
So this facility, which has yet to clear some regulatory hurdles, should serve as a proof-of-concept for further facilities as other nuclear reactors pass their use-by date. The USA currently derives about 19% of its energy from nuclear, and falling, but energy demand for that nation is expected to increase by some 50% by mid-century. As we all should know, Germany decided to decommission its nuclear reactors some time ago, with the stated aim of ‘going green’, but has instead fallen back on coal and gas.
So it seems that the salt-based technology and the architectural design of this Wyoming plant will be proof against the kind of disaster experienced at Fukushima (where ‘corporate capture’ was also a factor to be mindful of), but there is also the issue of nuclear waste, or spent nuclear fuel. Of course this is of great concern to the public, as shown when South Australians rejected plans by its government to make a bit of dosh by offering some of our vast, uninhabited land as a dumping ground for such material. But as Novella points out, there’s a linear inverse relation between the radioactivity of this spent fuel and its half-life. That’s to say, the more highly radioactive the material, the shorter the half-life. So the material, if buried well underground in a geologically stable environment, would only be dangerously radioactive for a fraction of the thousands of years of its overall radioactivity.
It all sounds relatively positive. Something to keep an eye on over the next few years.
References
giving nuclear energy a chance, please
Episode #989
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant
the thorium fuel future, or not…
So what about thorium as part of our clean energy future? Are there any thorium reactors operating? How do they work? How do they compare to uranium-based reactors?
Well, there appear to be a lot of plans on drawing boards, for good reason, it seems. Thorium is about three times more abundant than uranium, and is potentially a safer source of nuclear energy, which, ironically, is largely why it was overlooked early on, due to uranium’s far greater weapons potential. To quote Wikipedia,
The Thorium Energy Alliance estimates “there is enough thorium in the United States alone to power the country at its current energy level for over 1,000 years.”
When used in a liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), a type of molten salt reactor (MSR), far less nuclear waste results. And there are many other positives. An estimate by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Carlo Rubbia, for example, that a ton of thorium can produce the energy of 200 tons of uranium and three and a half million tons of coal.
And there’s more stuff about thorium’s advantages that sound just too good to be true. Wikipedia lists nine positives in bullet points. However, there are substantial start-up costs, and there are problems with ‘breeder reactors’ and proliferation, which I’ll try to understand later.
Reading the story of uranium v thorium from the late forties into the seventies, you can clearly see that the military side of the military-industrial complex, especially in the USA, won out at the expense of safe commercial and domestic energy use. But what with the recent urgency about alternatives to fossil fuels, and the concern (methinks largely unwarranted) about uranium-based nuclear, thorium is inching its way back into favour. Sabine Hossenfelder reports on its soon-to-be-arrival in Europe while castigating the German state’s pulling the plug on nuclear in general (Steve Novella of the Skeptics’ Guide is also bemused). I reckon they’re gonna change their changed mind eventually.
Anyway, the news is that the Netherlands and France, two countries that embrace nuclear power, have teamed up to bring small thorium reactors to Europe. NAAREA, a French alternative energy company, and Thorizon of the Netherlands, have combined their smarts and funds, and I’ll quote Sabine:
NAAREA is already working on small nuclear reactors, and they want to combine their technology with the thorium cores from the Dutch.
This is the concept of small, transportable nuclear reactors that I first read about in Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now some years ago. The fact is, though, that progress seems to be slow in this field, in spite of all the global warming concerns. NIMBYism is still a problem, as well as whole of government negativity, as in Germany. Nations that are more keen are India, which has the world’s largest thorium reserves, China, Canada and the USA.
So what about here in Australia? We have actually banned nuclear energy, both federally and in every state and territory, and there appears to be no appetite for changing the situation. This also means there’s no avenue for those interested in nuclear energy and its engineering and technical requirements to gain expertise in the field here. I suspect the only factor that will change our governmental (and popular) mindset will be the proven success of new thorium-based reactors elsewhere. Of course, Australia has the perfect climate for solar and storage, so there’s little appetite for changing direction – though it should be noted that Australia ranks with the USA as having the third largest reserves of thorium, behind India and Brazil.
So how does thorium work as a nuclear fuel? I’ve no idea, so here goes with another particle of my lifelong learning. First, to the World Nuclear Association. Three points:
- [Thorium] is fertile rather than fissile, and can only be used as a fuel in conjunction with a fissile material such as recycled plutonium.
- Thorium fuels can breed fissile uranium-233 to be used in various kinds of nuclear reactors.
- Molten salt reactors are well suited to thorium fuel, as normal fuel fabrication is avoided.
The first point is sort of self-explanatory – thorium nuclei (232) can’t be split apart by ‘thermal neutrons’ (neutrons travelling above a certain velocity), but they can be converted into fissile material via ionising radiation. The nuclei may then capture neutrons and be converted to fissile material (uranium-233, in the case of thorium).
The third point obviously needs some explaining. The reactors used to generate thorium-based energy are called liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs), which are:
a molten salt type of reactor [MSR], meaning that the fuel inside the core is actually in a liquid form in a salt formation that circulates inside the core. It is hot and acts as a fuel and coolant at the same time, meaning that the heat from this liquid fuel that is circulating inside the core is being transferred to the heat exchanger and to the rest of the components and electricity is produced similarly to any other type of reactor.
Elina Charatsidou (see references)
That’s a start. The differences between this type of liquid fuel and the highly structured solid fuel rods create both advantages and disadvantages…
So, as mentioned, thorium-232 is quite abundant and, unlike uranium-235, it isn’t fissile (which makes it similar to uranium-238), but its ‘fertility’ allows it to capture neutrons, so transmuting into protactinium-233 which then decays into uranium-233, which is fissile. This, I think, is the important point. It’s the splitting of the uranium-233 that produces the efficient energy, not thorium itself. And Elina points out something I don’t quite understand as yet – ‘there are 2 ways that can be produced – uranium-233 can be produced inside the core, or outside and then placed inside the core as a fuel for the thorium reactors’.
Ultimately, though Elina Charatsidou and other informed commentators aren’t quite buying into the hype of some about a thorium future. It should be developed, and it’s needed as our population continues to grow and, more importantly, become more prosperous. We need to get behind it as part of a multi-faceted approach to our energy future.
For a more positive spin on thorium and new developments in nuclear energy, especially regarding storage, re-use, corrosion and cost factors, as well as issues around public-private ownership, the Copenhagen Atomics video, linked below, is well worth a look.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
Good News: Small Nuclear Thorium Reactors are Coming to Europe (Sabine Hossenfelder video)
Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 2018 (pp146-9)
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/thorium.aspx
origins of human patriarchy, and where we may go from here
The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world … The point, however, is to change it.
Karl Marx
In a sense we [Beauvoir & Sartre] both lacked a real family, and we had elevated this contingency into a principle.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life
I’m not a historian, or an anthropologist, or a palaeontologist, or a primatologist, though I’ve taken in many shreds of those subjects, all of which might help to illuminate the mystery of patriarchy, the default state of the vast majority of human cultures throughout the period of H sapiens existence – as far as we’re able to tell. Of course, we’ve been around for some 300,000 years, according to the most recent findings, but we don’t really know much about our socio-sexual relations beyond the last 10,000 years – or 20,000 at the outside. And there are so many mysteries – the beginning of human language, for example, which I imagine as originating in a complexifying amalgam of gesture and sound. And the beginnings of the notion of possession and property, which, in terms of male possession of females, can be seen in gorillas, lions (though the females do the hunting, and are no shrinking violets), chimps, baboons and, arguably, orangutans (which are largely solitary). Female dominant species include elephants and orcas (and of course bonobos), some of the smartest and most communally successful species on the planet.
How did H sapiens, and H neanderthalensis, organise themselves socio-sexually, say 50,000 years ago? I mention Neanderthals because I’m nearing the end of Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes’ extraordinarily rich and detailed book on the subject, which makes little or no mention, even speculatively, on gender roles. What I did find was a great deal of focus on lithics and tool-making, which we tend to associate with males, though I see no reason why females would not be engaged in this activity in earlier times.
A blog piece I’ve discovered (linked below) argues that the size difference between male and female humans has been diminishing over the millennia. This has certainly been the case in the WEIRD world over the past few decades, when every human and her dog has become overweight (he wrote while downing another chardonnay with his pizza). This piece also argues for different roles (but not necessarily in a hierarchical sense) for the sexes based on consistently different teeth wear at numerous Neanderthal sites over thousands of years across the length and breadth of Eurasia.
Travel forward to the historical period – the period starting with the development and dissemination of writing – and we encounter a god-besotted world. Some of the first inscriptions we find are the names of gods, and it’s also notable that these early gods – Anu (Sumerian), Ra (Egyptian), Marduk (Babylonian), Brahma (Hindustani) and Zeus (Greek), were male. There were of course female gods, and ‘households’ of gods, but the principal deity was male, an indication that patriarchy was well established throughout the literate world a few millennia ago. It was also a world full of warfare, violence and mind-boggling cruelty, both within and between ‘states’. If you require evidence, read the first hundred pages or so of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s massive work The World: a family history. It should silence the critics of Pinker’s ‘better angels of our nature’ thesis, but it probably won’t. And with the odd notable exception, the warfare and slaughter was carried out by males. It’s interesting to remind myself that while all the horrors of Shalmaneser, Nebuchadnezzar, Darius, Ying Zheng, Sulla, Caesar and countless other warlords were being perpetrated, bonobos were doing their merry thing south of the Congo River, far from that madding crowd. And just north of that river, chimps were doing their small share of squabbling and killing.
Getting back to religion, the European success of the Roman Empire, and its eventual ‘capture’ by Christian monotheism, marked the beginning of the WEIRD world, according to Joseph Henrich. As he points out, the Catholic Church, which over time created a five-tiered male hierarchy of popes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops and priests, was essentially the Christian Church, or simply the Church, from the fourth century CE to the reformation of the 16th century. During that time, Henrich persuasively argues, the Church transformed the world over which it held sway in subtle but significant ways, often to enrich and further empower itself. The key to that transformation was the Church’s marriage and family program (MFP). To be clear, this wasn’t a program drawn up by a Church Committee some time in the fourth century. There was nothing pre-meditated about it, and the result was in no way predicted, but it arguably set the foundations for the WEIRD values espoused today.
One key to all this was to break down the generally inward-facing kinship relationships of pre-Christian Eurasia. Before the Church’s interventions, linguistic and ethnic groups generally behaved in decidedly unWEIRD ways, but ways that are still found in regions dotted around the globe. Henrich provides an open-ended list:
- People lived enmeshed in kin-based organisations within tribal groups or networks. Extended family households were part of larger kin-groups (clans, houses, lineages, etc), some of which were called sippen (Germanic) or septs (Celtic).
- Inheritance and postmarital residence had patrilineal biases; people often lived in extended patrilineal households, and wives often moved to live with their husbands’ kinfolk.
- Many kinship units collectively owned or controlled territory. Even when individual ownership existed, kinfolk often retained inheritance rights such that lands couldn’t be sold or otherwise transferred without the consent of relatives.
- Large kin-based organisations provided individuals with both their legal and their social identities. Disputes within kin-groups were adjudicated internally, according to custom. Corporate responsibility meant that intentionality sometimes played little role in assigning punishments or levying fines for disputes between kin-groups.
- Kin-based organisations provided members with protection, insurance and security. These organisations cared for sick, injured, and poor members, as well as the elderly.
- Arranged marriages with relatives were customary, as were marriage payments like dowry or bride price (where the groom or his family pays for the bride).
- Polygynous marriages were common for high-status men. In many communities, men could pair with only one ‘primary’ wife, typically someone of roughly equal status, but could then add secondary wives, usually of lower social status
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world, pp 162-3
Henrich then presents a table of Church decrees, beginning in the fourth century and becoming more extreme as it increased its power, outlawing as incest marriage even up to sixth cousins, as well as with in-laws (sororate and levirate marriage). Marriage with non-Christians was also proscribed, and the Church enforced its own role as mandatory for officiating at marriages, ‘Christenings’ and the like. In fact the term ‘in-law’ derives from Canon Law as it was used to ‘officially’ order human relationships. These increasingly strict laws could sometimes be bent or broken through the payment of ‘Indulgences’, but it’s clear that many Church leaders came to believe their own propaganda, which they would back up with whatever scriptural passages they could find.
The power of Church laws, which determined the very legitimacy of human lives, was brought home to me as an adolescent reading Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbevilles, in which Tess Durbeyfield, a simple country girl of Wessex, is impregnated by Alex d’Urberville, an upper-class rake, and is refused permission to christen the dying child, born ‘out of wedlock’, so that she has to bury the boy herself, beyond church grounds – just the start of Tess’s ordeals. I remember feeling both shattered by Tess’s sufferings and contemptuous of the behaviour of Christians and the absurd concept of ‘illegitimacy’. By Hardy’s time, England had become decidedly anti-Catholic, but the Church had done its work in determining the very bona fides of human existence, work which has only been undone in recent times, thanks to pioneering humanists like Thomas Hardy.
It’s probably reasonable to assume that the Church’s aim in all this was to extend its power, and that the development of ‘love’ based marriage, or a union based on common interests, was an unintended consequence. Certainly the Church’s proscriptions released individuals from earlier kin-based responsibilities, and left them free to choose partners based on mutual attraction. It also widened individuals’ sense of allegiance from kinship groups to like-minded political, social, work-based and even sporting associations.
Another unintended consequence was the lessening of patriarchal control, via patrilineal kinship relations – somewhat ironic given the highly patriarchal nature of the Church. The choosing of partners on the basis of mutual interests smacked – shock, horror – of gender equality. This has led, ultimately, but really inevitably, to the choosing of partners of the same gender. And the reduced power of the Catholic Church – even amongst avowed Catholics, strangely enough, at least in moral issues – has led to a world of ‘cultural Catholics’ or ‘cafeteria Catholics’, who seem to be only in it for the pomp and circumstance, or a certain degree of camaraderie.
It seems weird that the WEIRD world, which is becoming weirder with its acceptance of or creation of a broadening range of sexual sub-types – agender, cisgender, genderfluid, genderqueer, intersex, gender nonconforming, and transgender – might owe its origins to the Church, but somehow it seems fitting to me. Meanwhile, priestly paedophilia seems to have been largely a consequence of that Church’s own bizarre and inhuman anti-sex restrictions on its trained messengers of the Holy Spirit. It has been weakened by the ensuing scandals – another small blow to patriarchy. Patriarchy didn’t of course originate with the Church, nor can its defeat, if that ever comes, be sheeted home to its capitalising edicts. The WEIRD world’s intelligentsia, and increasingly its leadership, has been freed from the narrow confines of religion and patriarchy into a more accurate understanding of humanity, its origins in the biosphere, and its capacities. But I admit to being impatient with the pace of change. If we don’t see a larger and more dominant role for the female of the species, and soon, the future looks grim.
References
Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes, 2020
The WEIRDest people in the world, Joseph Henrich, 2020