The Control of Nature by John McPhee

     John McPhee's The Control of Nature is a really good book and I'm glad I read it right after Annals of the Former Earth. Through three broad stories, McPhee addresses the theme of man versus nature, and how humans are able to live with nature successfully, or unsuccessfully try to harness it for our own ends. A major issue in all three books is sprawling development, bringing people closer to dangerous areas where humans are not meant to live. In so many of these stories, people are just building their houses in unsafe areas where they are guaranteed to run into problems with rivers, earthquakes, or rockslides, but they do it anyway because prices are too high in the city.

Atchafalaya

    Atchafalaya is about more than just the Atchafalaya River, a distributary of the Mississippi River, siphoning off water from the path to New Orleans and instead diverting it on a shorter path through Morgan Town. On the theme of controlling nature, McPhee meets with the Army Corps of Engineers and fishermen from the bayou to learn about the swampy region of the Mississippi Delta. 

    The difficulty with nature is that when mankind builds in a place, we often expect it to stay the same and rely on that illusionary permanence. In the Mississippi Delta, we've built cities, oil refineries, and miles upon miles of farms that all depend on the Mississippi River following one specific route that it doesn't want to follow. It has a shorter route along a steeper distributary called Atchafalaya, and since the 1860s (specifically the flood of 1863), more water has flowed through Atchafalaya every year. It was at that time that settlers in the area cleared the "Great Raft" of logs that clogged the Atchafalaya for centuries before Europeans arrived, clearing the way for the father of waters to take a more direct route to the Gulf. But this wasn't some massive intervention. The river would have moved one way or another, because the Mississippi River has been shifting here and there in an arc over a hundred miles wide, and some hydrologists believe its even gone through Texas at different times. By the late 1940s, one-third of the volume of the Mississippi River departed the continent through the Atchafalaya River. Of course, this would mean the end of New Orleans and Baton Rouge if it were to take over completely, so the Army Corps of Engineers stepped in.

    McPhee compares the Mississippi unfavorably to the Nile. Unlike the Nile, whose regular floods sustained life, agriculture, and civilization for thousands of years along its banks, the Mississippi, while pushing fertile soil downstream, is not so beneficial. There is no high ground in the Delta, so floods destroy homes. The waters of the Mississippi are cold, unlike the warm Nile, so they kill crops. And since floods can stand for months at a time, they can kill an entire year's agriculture. To successfully farm around the Mississippi, it cannot exist in its natural state.

    The path the Mississippi takes to the Atchafalaya is along the Old River, which the Army Corps of Engineers dammed in 1963. But that was only the beginning. The Mississippi remained (and remains untamed). For the last three centuries (and probably further back on a smaller scale) residents of the Mississippi Delta floodplain have been building levees to contain the river. But the levees helped to aggravate the problem of flooding, as all they could do is build a higher aqueduct, amplifying the force of the river downstream since it had nowhere to flood and relieve pressure upstream. New Orleans faces a similar problem of the cure being worse than the disease. Because the city is shaped like a bowl, with its highest points along the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, the rain that falls collects in the middle, and whatever doesn't evaporate must be pumped out. But removing the water lowers the water table and further aggravates the cities subsidence, making it lower and lower. The containment of the River has reversed the trend of building new land out in the Gulf as silt flows through it, but it has not abated the pressure of floods completely. Now erosion threatens the Louisiana coast from the sea while it faces floods from the River. Like a rock and a hard place, Louisiana and its citizens are trapped between floods and high water. 

Cooling the Lava

    The second section covers a volcanic eruption in 1973 on Heimaey, an island off the coast of southern Iceland, which resulted in the creation of a new volcano whose name is Eldfell, meaning "Hill of fire." Specifically, McPhee writes about the attempts by the Icelandic authorities and the US Navy to use waterspouts to control the flow of the lava and direct it away from the harbor, which was critical to the island's fishing community, itself critical to the Icelandic economy. 

    McPhee tells us about how rubbing away just a third of an inch of ash reveals temperatures so hot you have to pull your hand away, but that it is insulated by a thin layer of ash. When pumping crews arrived just after the explosion, they realized that just a couple of inches of hard rock on top of the lava was enough to support a person. But lava on the ground wasn't the only threat the pumping crews faced. During the weeks of the eruption, "bombs" fell from the sky. These were balls of lava with hardened exteriors and liquid interiors that shot from the mountain. Sixty-pounders fell as far as two-thirds of a mile from the eruption, and some that travelled a third of a mile weighed a third of a ton. To avoid them, the crewmen had to travel in pairs: one to direct them along the ground, and one to look up at the sky. If a bomb was headed their way, they were advised to watch it, wait until they were clear that it was going to hit them, and then step out of the way. 

    But the major difficulty of managing lava flow (once you've gotten the pumps in place to actually do it) is how to choose where to send it. In 1973, the Icelandic authorities directed it away from the harbor. But any place you cool lava will form a wall. This protects the area behind the wall, but diverts more lava to everywhere else. The result was that some houses and parts of the city were destroyed that would have otherwise survived. But it was probably worth the cost to save the harbor, and the heat from the lava has provided the island with millions of dollars-worth of energy. What may not have been worth it is the loss of population, not from deaths, but from the many people who evacuated the island and chose not to move back.

    McPhee moves from Iceland to discuss the volcanoes of Hawaii, which are very similar. It reminds me of similar trips in Annals of the Former World, where geologists travel far and wide to see the future of one rock formation, already manifested on some other continent. McPhee writes that there are 5,000 miles of Hawaiian islands, created by the Pacific Plate moving over a hot spot under the Earth, which causes a new volcano to form, erupt, die, and erode back into the sea. The oldest islands in the state of Hawaii have been above water for five million years, but there are older islands that are part of the same chain but are in Japan, to the northwest. These islands get lower and lower as you travel north until they disappear under the waves due to erosion. One big difference between Hawaii and Iceland is that while Hawaii is a plate moving over a hot spot, Iceland is at the cracking center of new-forming land. Iceland sits astride the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and so Easter Iceland is moving east with Europe while Western Iceland is moving west with North America as the Atlantic widens. The rock at the edges of Iceland is young, just 14 million years old. And the rock at the center of Iceland is still liquid, and therefore has no age.

Los Angeles Against the Mountains

    The third and final book of The Control of Nature is set in the San Gabriel Mountains, north and northeast of Los Angeles. I found this book to be the least fact-laden of the three, with less information and more horror stories of people's houses being swallowed by landslides. The problem with the mountains in Los Angeles is that they feature canyons, which load with debris loosened by wildfires and washed into a slot during rainstorms. These things are loaded like guns, and when the right storm comes, it all gets loosed at once, destroying whatever is in its path with mud, boulders, and whatever it picks up along the way.

    Usually its not the first, early-winter rains that set it off. But those first rains usually just add to the waiting pile. Some years it never has a landslide. That's because it depends on if the chaparral region above the mountains needs to have burnt to trigger the cataclysm. The soil in the area will absorb water if unburnt, but after being exposed to high temperatures. the soil loses its absorbency, and water will just slide off it. It's even worse when the chaparral burns after a long period without burning. If it burns regularly, there isn't so much "stuff" that has been waiting to slide down the mountain. But if it has been decades, you can bet there will be a very bad landslide. 

    Yet people keep moving directly into the path of the landslides that the San Gabriels unleash. And they keep refusing to take measures to stop them. McPhee interviews an official from the Department of Public Works, who says that they needed to stop calling it "debris" and start calling the places where they collect the stuff that comes down the mountain "sediment-placement sites." He says they run into problems with the Sierra Club, the Forest Service, Fish and Game, and the California Environmental Quality Act, all things designed to improve the environment. Yet the result is, if they can't build large pits to collect the debris that comes off the mountain, people will die.

Conclusion

    I just want to throw a paragraph in here about how good a writer John McPhee is. He's amazing not just for his ability to describe a thing or a place, but for all the details he includes that you wouldn't think to put in a book about another subject. Like when he mentions that a chef on the island of Heimaey is a "master of hot smoked puffin" which is a dish that tastes like something between corned beef and herring. McPhee writes that "Burgundy flesh is in the puffed-up chest of the puffin. It is served with new potatoes and sweet thin slices of pickle." He is a pleasure to read.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In 1852, the Yellow River shifted course away from the Yellow Sea, establishing a new mouth four hundred miles from the old one. Other rivers have done similar things.
• In Sicily in 1669, Mt. Etna erupted and the citizens of Catania went up the slopes and used pickaxes to break the crust on one side and direct the lava flow away from Catania towards the neighboring town of Paterno. A law was then passed to stop that sort of thing. It was the first recorded attempt to divert a lava flow.
• Mauna Loa has erupted on average every 3.5 years since records began two centuries ago.
• Kilauea was in a state of continuous eruption for the entire nineteenth century.

After the End of History: Conversations with Francis Fukuyama (edited) by Mathilde Fasting

     After reading The End of History and the Last Man I felt like I really needed to know what Fukuyama's thoughts were on the book thirty years later, so I was very glad to find this book, answering exactly the questions I had, which Mathilde Fasting must have had about 2-3 years ago.

    Fukuyama clarifies his thoughts on liberal democracy, stating that really it is three separate institutions: a modern state capable of delivering services and protecting the country, a rule of law that limits the power of the state to rules agreed upon by the community, and institutions of democratic accountability that ensure the state reflects the interests of the people. This can contrast with illiberal democracies, like Hungary, where legitimacy comes from the people, but the people don't want a liberal order that restrains their power and forces respect for minority rights, enforcing the law in an impartial fashion. Illiberal democracies are more like government by the mob.

    The most important question that's arisen since Fukuyama published The End of History is whether China is offering a better model than liberal democracy. They are not. Fukuyama writes that it would be unwise for other countries to imitate the Chinese model because it requires China's long history of meritocratic centralized bureaucracy and a strong cultural emphasis on education. It makes me want to read Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations since that's basically Huntington's thesis, but about China instead of liberal democracy (AKA that liberal democracy is a unique product of the Western experience). I feel like I have to read that anyway now that I've read The End of History. What China does is it challenges Fukuyama's thinking that liberal democracy is the direction all countries are heading in. China is well past the point in GDP per capita where most countries' middle classes demand a democratic voice to protect property rights and so forth. But I think Fukuyama sells himself short when he compares China to Taiwan and South Korea, which became democracies at a lower level of wealth than China has today. I think that China hasn't become a democracy yet because (1) they are run not by a petty dictator but by the Communist Party of China, which is a nearly mythical organization that has been unstoppable for almost a century. I think that Chinese middle classes know are willing to give the Communist Party more latitude to work with because of those intangible factors. And (2), the CCP has been able to uphold its fundamental promise that gives it legitimacy: if the CCP is in power, the economy will grow fast. We are now seeing signs of slowdown. If China keeps slowing down economically, the party will lose that legitimacy and need to use its security apparatus to keep control. But if China keeps growing at 5-6%, then I don't see the CCP going down any time soon. Essentially, I don't think Fukuyama is proven wrong yet, and more time is necessary to see if China's model is truly sustainable. I would want to see what happens when Xi Jinping dies or loses power or when the Chinese economy slows down. Then we could say whether Fukuyama is right or wrong. Fukuyama says that he doesn't think "China will ever occupy the kind of hegemonic position that the United States has had."

    One major problem with democratization is that, as Fukuyama says in this book, "all modern democracies are the lucky inheritors of nations that were formed by nondemocratic means, and their stability is due to the fact that they simply inherited these nations, but they didn't have to create them." That would seem to imply that one step on the road to democracy is a stable, authoritarian government that can build state power before the state is converted to a liberal democracy.

    Fukuyama has really interesting thoughts on Europe that were talked about in this book. He says that

Europe is really stuck right now because it's gotten to the point where it needs to complete a unification process if it's going to solve problems like a fiscal union, but politically that's not really possible. The euro, in my view, was a big mistake. While the 2010 euro crisis didn't lead to a collapse of the currency, it cold recur at any point-- and may, this time over Italy rather than Greece. The Schengen system also does not work, because Europe doesn't have secure outer borders. That's going to come back to haunt Europe. There's a lull in migration right now, but a lot of people from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East are going to want to move to Europe unless they secure that border, and that is just not politically tenable.

Additionally, Fukuyama says that the EU is strong in all the wrong places, like annoying economic regulations, and very weak in important areas like foreign policy, where there is essentially a vetocracy. 

    One part of the book was just crazy to read from today's perspective. This book was published fourteen months ago in May 2021 and so much has changed. Under the subheading "Ukraine--A Beacon of Hope," Mathilde Fasting asks Fukuyama the following:

Q: You have visited Ukraine many times, and you are hosting a program for promoting democracy there. How is it going? And why do you think it's important to be doing the work that you're doing in Ukraine?

 A:

    Ukraine is a big, important country that has been trying to free itself of the Russian mixture of kleptocracy and authoritarian government. It's made a great deal of progress since 2014, which many people don't recognize. Ukraine is the single most important frontline state in the war against authoritarian expansion. If Ukraine doesn't succeed in preserving its independence and democracy and in dealing with its own corruption problem, then no other countries in the post-Soviet space will succeed either. That's why I've spent a lot of time in Ukraine in the last few years.

    At the present moment, things are not looking so good there. In 2019 Ukraine elected a new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and a new Parliament in which 70 percent of the members have never served in politics before, many of them young people. It looked like they were sweeping out the entire old political elite. But in 2020 it has become evidence that Ukraine's oligarchs retain much of their power and continue to shape policy behind the scenes.

    My theory of change is to sponsor leadership programs where we teach a lot of young Ukrainians about how democratic government is supposed to work and how they can help bring about policy reform. Whatever the larger political picture there, I can tell you that I come back optimistic every time I go to Ukraine. I work in these leadership programs where we teach a lot of young Ukrainians. There are a lot of younger people, in their thirties and forties. They didn't grow up under the Soviet Union, and they really want Ukraine to be a European country.  

Miscellaneous Things:

• Fukuyama makes an interesting point that while the personal computer revolution was decentralizing in nature, the artificial intelligence revolution is centralizing. PCs gave everyone the ability to say what they wanted and see what they wanted on the internet freely. But artificial intelligence gives companies and governments the ability to show you what they want you to see. This is very good for authoritarians and bad for free people.
• I think I talked about this in my blog post on The End of History, but I'll just say again here that the point of The End of History wasn't that stuff would stop happening. It was a response to the communists who believed that history would progress from feudalism to capitalism to communism. Fukuyama instead agrees with Hegel that the final phase is liberal democracy.
• On our election system, Fukuyama has some proposals (which I largely agree with). He says that we should abandon first-past-the-post voting and primaries that encourage parties to select extreme choices. A ranked-choice system like Australia uses is probably better. Fukuyama likes the German system, which tries to reduce the number of parties by having a 5% threshold while retaining overall proportionality. And then there are also single-member districts that represent particular constituencies, creating a mixed system. 

Annals of the Former World by John McPhee

    This was a totally different kind of book for me that taught me as much about geology as I had learned in my entire life before reading it. John McPhee has to be one of the best writers I've ever read, and I really enjoyed learning the history of the world. I had gotten into biological anthropology a few years ago and read some book on that and I remember thinking how dizzying it was to think of history on the scale of tens of thousands of years. Well, this was like ten steps beyond that. In the five books that independently make up the larger book, McPhee bounces around the United States, guided by masterful geologists who teach him about the rocks they're seeing. I don't think you can read this book as a lay person expecting to figure out what everything on every page means. I would have never finished if I was looking up every rock. But it's useful to look up what he's talking about and sometimes just pass it by because a lot of these rocks seem the same to me. Great book. Geology is so cool. I wrote some fast facts from each book (except for Crossing the Craton because it was so short).

Book One: Basin and Range

• Zeolite is a type of porous stone. The name means "stone that boils," because the stone contains many crevasses that are often filled with water. Apparently one zeolite crystal the size of a pinhead will have the internal surface area of a bedspread. Zeolites are used to separate one type of a molecule from another in detergents and other industrial uses.
• The mantle is not liquid, it is a solid with some pockets near the top turning into magma and spurting upward.
• Very little can live in the Salt Lake not because it is too salty, but because it swings from being extremely salty to being not nearly as salty at all when floods come in annually. 
• Salt can make rocks explode by getting into cracks and slowly expanding.
• Part of the reason people know that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old is because we can find sea creatures' fossils at the tops of mountains, and clams don't move that fast.
• The order is: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Mississippian, Pennsylvanian, Permian.
• Tectonic plates may be as deep as sixty miles, but that makes them really just like eggshells since they are thousands of miles long and wide
• The peak of Mount Everest is capped by marine limestone, AKA dead fish fossils.

Book Two: In Suspect Terrain

• The Wisconsinite ice sheet, the effects of which are most noticeable in Wisconsin, is also known for depositing Long Island where it is today, as well as Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.
• Golf courses mimic the landscape of Scotland, which is a glacial landscape that is scraped out by ice sheets.
• Taiwan will eventually join with China ... geologically. Eventually it will crash into the Chinese coast, raising mountains between Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Book Three: Rising from the Plains

• Limestone is soluble in water, so mountains weathered more in the Eastern United States, where it rains more, while it remains rugged in the West, where surrounding rock falls away.
• In the Old West, they used to have a "hanging pole" in the bunkhouse, where cowboys would hand by their hands for 5-10 minutes to relieve pressure on their ruptured spinal disks that came from too much horse-taming. Some cowboys wore eight-inch-wide leather belts to keep their kidneys in place during hard rides. 
• Lakes don't last in the geological record. The Great Lakes are less than twenty thousand years old. Some of the oldest known lakes only made it to eight million years, nothing on a geological scale. 

Book Four: Assembling California

• The highest and lowest points in the contiguous United States are both in California, only eighty miles apart.
• The Sierra Nevada mountain range is forty million years old, also somewhat recent. 
• The oldest rock humans have found so far was found east of Great Bear Lake in Canada and is 3.96 BILLION years old, just six hundred million years younger than the Earth itself.
• The oldest rock found on any seafloor in the world is only 185 MILLION years old, just one-twenty-fifth the age of the Earth. The ocean crust completely recycles itself every two hundred million years. 
• In the 1980s, there was a campaign in California where cops disguised themselves as geologists to find marijuana farms, which led to narcos actually killing some real geologists.
• Cyprus (like the country) means copper. 
• The Pacific Plate first touched North America twenty-nine million years ago, making contact at Los Angeles and Santa Barbara
• The Massif Central in France is actually a continuation of the Appalachian Mountains. So are the Atlas Mountains and the Iberian Plateau and the Pyrenees, which were enhanced as they swung around and hit France.
• Japan is moving towards North America at a rate of one centimeter per year, and may join Alaska in 800 million years. 
• South Florida used to be a part of Africa that got left behind when the atlantic opened up about 200 hundred million years ago.

Book Five: Crossing the Craton

The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

     I had to read this classic book at some point, and I had already been somewhat familiar with Fukuyama's work through readings in college. I found the book to be highly relevant still, however I didn't realize how conservative Fukuyama was. One thing that has always annoyed me is the stupid criticism based on reading the title and nothing more that Fukuyama is somehow saying events will stop happening. That's not what the title means. However, I think he chose a really confusing title that is not that helpful, since it relies on different meanings of both "end" and "history" that most people aren't familiar with unless they read Hegel and Marx (nerds). The "End of History" is not a chronological end of events, but a sort of result of the "historical" movement of human progress. Marx believed that history moved towards an end of communism, but Fukuyama believes that end to be liberal democracy. And Fukuyama specifically states that states can regress from liberal democracy, so it is not like once you get there you are done. Rather, it is that once you get there, you have achieved the apex of political development, and that any change from the pure form of liberal democracy is a regression from it, moving backwards.

    I really enjoyed discussion of governmental legitimacy in the book. Fukuyama, writing just after the fall of the USSR, explains that "it was much more difficult to tolerate economic failure in the Soviet system because the regime itself had explicitly based its claims to legitimacy on its ability to deliver its people a high material standard of living." Fukuyama goes on to explain that the USSR actually achieved this until the early 1970s, but when its economy declined (along with that of the West interestingly enough post-1973), it lost legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. Between 1928 and 1955, Soviet GNP increased yearly between 4.4 and 6.3 percent, but slowed to 2.0 to 2.3 percent between 1975 and 1985. Once the government proved it could not uphold its promise of economic growth, it was no longer legitimate. This differs somewhat from the emphasis Tony Judt puts on the Soviet repressive apparatus as a tool to uphold the government in his book Postwar. Judt emphasizes less the economic performance of the state and rather the USSR's reduction of willingness to repress free speech as the moment that allowed criticism to flourish and end the Communist experiment. But perhaps these two views can be reconciled as the economic decline depriving the state of legitimacy over many years and the easing of restrictions allowing people to express their displeasure at the Communist Party, provoking the sudden end of the USSR.

    Writing at the fall of the USSR, Fukuyama's argument is that the system of monarchy lost any legitimacy by the end of World War One, and that Fascism lost legitimacy after World War Two (or the 1970s in Spain and Portugal maybe), and that now that Communism had failed in 1991, there was no competitor to liberal democracy. Liberal democracy's main competitors have discredited themselves, and by the 1990s, even if not all or most regimes were truly liberal democracies (or anywhere close), almost all governments made some pretense of being liberal democracies, holding elections even if they were fake. Most importantly, Fukuyama believes that history moves in a single coherent direction following natural science due to the cumulative nature of both. Because we write down and preserve our scientific knowledge, science advances cumulative of the discoveries that came earlier, and history is the same. But here Fukuyama makes too big a jump, I think, and if I remember correctly from his book about order and decay, he's changed his mind on this. He writes that history is not reversible, and that there is no going back, erroneously arguing at one point that it would require that a civilization vanish entirely for history to reverse itself. But not only do civilizations vanish entirely sometimes (like those ones that pop up on LIDAR in the jungle every now and then), but liberal democracies often experience backsliding and a reduction in rights, like the United States right now. 

    The End of History is a highly psychological book, analyzing why certain types of governments work. He identifies the high correlation between higher education and democracy, a trend that has become dominant in America politics, as the highly educated tend to vote Democrat and favor preservation of democracy, whereas Republicans tend to support minority rule more and are made up of a less-educated coalition. Even more central to the book are the concepts of thymos and megalothymos, meaning the desire for recognition and the desire for recognition over others, respectively. Fukuyama believes that liberal democracy is especially good due to how it contains thymotic urges, as it grants equality to satisfy individuals' urge to be treated like others, and has constraints to prevent individuals from accumulating too much power. People don't just want to live under an economically strong dictatorship, they desire the dignity afforded to those who have a say in their government's choices. Simultaneously, through the freedom of expression in the arts and the free market, individuals can rise up high enough to satisfy their megalothymotic urges without disupting society like a medieval lord who had to go to war. The one urge that modern liberal democracy cannot satisfy is the urge to risk life and limb in war, as politically, liberal democracy doesn't offer so many benefits to those who rise up in politics as a monarchical system.

    The book also made me reflect on how it is more difficult for some countries to become liberal democracies because liberal democracy is a sort of privilege afforded to countries that don't need the faster development and political unification that can come with authoritarianism. A country like Russia, surrounded on almost all sides by potential rivals, doesn't have as clear a path to liberal democracy as Canada, which has only one neighbor that is also a liberal democracy. But the big question is whether or not the type of government matters in determining the government's actions. While we can observe that liberal democracies never seem to go to war with other liberal democracies, we may also observe that a country like Russia, regardless of whether it is communist, liberal democratic, or authoritarian, has the same borders no matter what, which will inspire the same actions, like desiring Black Sea ports. 

    The End of History has some serious weaknesses. At times, Fukuyama neglects to use hard data and engages in stereotyping, using the common refrain that Japanese culture is more group-oriented to justify its economic nationalism. Additionally, he uses that "group-oriented" culture to show that the Japanese consent to living under a government dominated by one political party, but you could say the same of Mexico in the middle of the twentieth century, which is a totally different culture. Moreover, Fukuyama's worst moment in the book comes when he decries those in America who "devote their lives to the total and complete elimination of any vestiges of inequality, making sure that no little girl should have to pay more to have her locks cut than a little boy, that no Boy Scout troop be closed to homosexual scoutmasters, that no building be built without a concrete wheelchair ramp going up to the front door. These passions exist in American society because of, and not despite, the smallness of its actual remaining inequalities." That has to be by far the most stupid statement of the whole book and I was downright embarrassed for the author when I read that.

    I'll end by saying that I like that book and that it raises really good questions about government and political science. I find myself thinking frequently about what Fukuyama said about the USSR's legitimacy being based on its ability to sustain a strong economy. In the same way, the USA's legitimacy is based on its ability to maintain a democracy and strong rights for minorities. If America cannot maintain that political legitimacy, it loses its reason for existing. That makes gerrymandering and malapportionment a crisis of legitimacy for the country that we must solve. Fukuyama is prescient in identifying that the greatest threats to liberal democracy come from the inside, as illiberal actors seek to overthrow the entire democracy to achieve their personal or group goals.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Fukuyama does not count Periclean Athens as a liberal democracy because it did not systematically protect individual rights. 
• Not really a "fact," but Fukuyama writes that "while economic planning does play a relatively greater role in Asia than in the United States, the most successful sectors within Asian economies have tended to be those permitting the greatest degree of competition in domestic markets and integration into international ones." To support this, he cites Michael Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations, but directly contradicts the thesis of How Asia Works, which I read a few years ago. I'm not sure which is right, but I think that the high level of competition in domestic markets and integration into international ones may still include very significant government intervention, unlike Fukuyama implies. 
• The key difference between Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington is that Fukuyama believes that liberal democracy is a universal value while Huntington believes that not all cultures can adopt it, specifically Islamic cultures. 

Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and Hot It Can Help Us Find - and Keep - Love by Amir Levine, M.D. and Rachel Heller, M.A.

     Attached was a pretty cool book that I was interested in because I had heard of the various attachment styles and wanted to know more about them. I found the book to be interesting, but also over-quantified. I mean that the book cites all these studies that felt like fake science to me, lending a veneer of data to stuff that was really just categorizations. Like that people with an avoidant attachment style rated their partner less positively. But okay... that sounds to me like they are avoidant by definition. Like it is a circular logic. And since people can change attachment styles, it seems like the studies of attachment styles will either confirm scientists' prior beliefs, or they'll just say "Oh, I guess they were actually this other attachment style."

Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918 by Katja Hoyer

    Blood and Iron was a great book, and especially good considering its size at about 200 pages in my kindle version. In this really concise book, Katja Hoyer gives the reader a quick and dirty introduction to the Second German Empire that left me both feeling more knowledgeable and also wanting more. The Second Reich accomplished a lot, but we're essentially looking at a state that was made subject to the whims of a king and then destroyed by its third king, Wilhelm II. For all that Bismarck is heralded as a genius (and he is), his ultraconservative monarchism killed the state he created. And this is why monarchies are not legitimate. What works with one king fails with another and it creates an inherently unstable state that was bound to get torn apart eventually.

    The really interesting parts of the book for me were about Bismarck, and I plan on reading a biography about him soon. As a young, obscure nobleman, Otto von Bismarck ran a conservative newspaper in the 1840s and was elected to the Prussian parliament in 1849, just after the failed revolutions of 1848. In return for his unfailing support of King Wilhelm I, the king named Bismarck the Prussian envoy to the parliament of the German Confederation in 1851. In that position, Bismarck successfully defeated Austrian power grabs, which was critical because Austria and Prussia were the two rival German powers that sought to control central Europe. Bismarck became the Minister President of Prussia, and it was in that position that he gave his famous "Blood and Iron" speech in September 1862. In it, he announced that he would go ahead with planned military reforms without parliamentary approval, increasing the number of peacetime troops from 150,000 to 220,000. In a summation of his philosophy, he said:

Germany is not looking to Prussia's liberalism, but to its power; Bavaria, Wurttemburg, Baden may indulge liberalism, and yet no one will assign them Prussia's role... it is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of our time are decided - that was the big mistake of 1848 and 1849 - but by iron and blood." 

It's also a great summation of why the Second Reich failed in just half a century. The German Empire's legitimacy was based purely on its ability as an extension of Prussia to win wars and crush its enemies. When it lost World War One, there was no reason for it to exist anymore. On the other hand, America's legitimacy is based on its promise of rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for its citizens. If that is gone, then so is the United States.

    Bismarck was able to take advantage of events as they unfolded. In a blunder, Christian IX, King of Denmark, signed a document in 1863 that annexed Schleswig to Denmark. Bismarck was able to convince the German Confederation to send a force to Schleswig and Holstein to seize it before the Danes, making sure the northern German region would remain in Germany. When Austria argued that the German Confederation should reconsider the Schleswig-Holstein question, Bismarck called foul and sent Prussian troops into Austrian-controlled Holstein in 1866, triggering the Austro-Prussian war, which the Prussians won. Prussia annexed a huge amount of German territory, and now that Prussia held land from the River Memel to the Rhine, it declared the constitution of the German Confederation to be null and void. Since the Habsburgs of Austria had led the Confederation, this was a huge moment in European history, as Prussia triumphed over Austria to lead Germany.

    In 1869, Bismarck sought to unify Germany, but needed a unifying conflict that would spur the Germans to act together. He found it when the Spanish Queen, Isabella II, was toppled, and he floated Prince Leopold of the Hohenzollern dynasty (the Prussian ruling house) as a replacement since he was married to the Portuguese princess. Of course the French objected to being surrounded by Prussians. They objected in a letter to King Wilhelm I, but Bismarck cleverly wrote a flippant response to the French, which he then leaked, inflaming French passions and provoking Napoleon III into declaring war on Prussia. Prussia won a decisive victory in September 1870, capturing Napoleon III and seizing Paris in December 1870. Through this conflict, the German states worked together under Prussian leadership, and Bismarck convinced Wilhelm I to declare a unified German state in the beginning of 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, since it would have been difficult to declare in German territory, showing favoritism. And so the Second Reich was made by the bullet and declared its existence in the palace of its vanquished enemy. 

    The Second Reich was headed by the Kaiser, Wilhelm I, who had the powers under the constitution to lead foreign policy, represent the empire, give royal assent to bills, appoint and dismiss imperial officials, convene the Bundesrat, convene and dissolve the Reichstag, command the military, and declare war with approval of the Bundesrat. The Kaiser also appointed the Imperial Chancellor (Bismarck), who was the chairman of the Bundesrat, the upper house that introduced bills to the Reichstag, which could approve or reject them. The Bundesrat was like the Senate, with one representative from each of Germany's 25 states, while the Reichstag was more like the House, with direct election with a secret ballot. But the "democracy" was heavily tilted in favor of Prussia and in favor of agricultural, rural areas. The result was a disproportionately conservative state with large powers given to the Kaiser and his Chancellor. 

    As Chancellor, Bismarck now ruled over a united Germany, and I put a map of it above. One major policy he initiated was the cultural war, Kulturkampf, to eliminate the Catholic Church from the German state. While much of it had to be repealed in the Catholic backlash, he was successful in creating a secular state, and religion has been weaker than the national identity of Germans ever since. As part of that secularization, Bismarck allowed Jews to serve in the army and public positions as long as Jews were invisible as a minority and well-integrated. Despite this "toleration," or perhaps because of it, 15,000 Jews converted to Christianity to gain higher office at this time. 

    Economically, the Panic of 1873 had a weak effect on Germany, and while other states struggled, Germany switched from free trade to protectionism, developing into a modern industrial giant to rival its Western European neighbors. Bismarck cracked down on socialist organization, trade meetings, and publications, arresting many while others fled abroad. But in a "carrot and stick" approach to deal with the poverty that came with industrialization, Bismarck allows the creation of social insurance through the Sickness Insurance Act in 1883, giving up to thirteen weeks of sick pay, and the Accident Insurance Act of 1884, paid by employers, therefore giving them a good reason to improve health and safety in the workplace. The 1889 Old Age and Disability Act have pensions to people over 70 and those who could not work. But don't get it twisted- Bismarck did not support these programs, he tolerated them as a way to placate the working classes who demanded them so that he and Wilhelm I could remain in power.

    As Wilhelm I aged, difficulties came about in the transition of power. His son, Friedrich, who would eventually rule as Friedrich III, was a liberal, openly critical of his more conservative father and Bismarck. He had advocated drawing closer to Britain and France than Russia. But he himself was outmaneuvered by his own son, Wilhelm, who would become Wilhelm II. This understandably created confusion at court, and is an obvious weakness of the Second Reich system. Wilhelm II created his own cabal at court, which grew much stronger in 1887, when it was revealed that his father had incurable throat cancer. 1888 was the year of three Kaisers, as Wilhelm I died at 90 on March 9th, and was then followed to the grave by his son Friedrich III 99 days later. Wilhelm II would rule the Second Reich until its collapse in 1918.

    In March 1890, Wilhelm II decided to go his own way and forced Bismarck to resign. The new Kaiser was enthusiastic about modern innovations and spent most of his reign travelling the country and giving speeches, spending on average less than 100 days per year in Berlin. Hoyer writes that, "where Wilhelm I had been old, modest, and Prussian, Wilhelm II was young, audacious, and German," From already accelerated levels of economic growth, German industrial production increased by 33% in 1895-1900 alone, and the total value of the German economy had risen 75% by 1913. German exports increased from 2.9 billion marks in 1880 to 10.1 billion in 1913. At the dawn of the First World War, Hamburg was the third largest port in the world by the value of goods passing through it, behind only Antwerp and New York.

    Wilhelm II, who had spent much of his childhood with his English cousins, was desperate to match the English fleet with a German one. The plan he shared with Admiral Tirpitz was to build a fleet two-thirds the size of Britain's, which would force Britain into an alliance with Germany. But this was not to come. While Britain was happy to support German naval ports in East Asia and Africa, it was not willing to risk its relationship with France by forming an open alliance with Germany. In 1902, cooperation broke down, and in 1904, Britain established the Entente Cordiale with France over North African Policy. To try to drive a wedge between the two, Wilhelm went to Morocco, where he rode a white horse and declared that the Sultan had his support to declare independence from France. But this isolated him further. He often hurt Germany by being undiplomatic.

    From 1906 to 1909, Wilhelm was forced to deal with the Eulenberg scandal, in which several of his minsters were accused of homosexuality. Wilhelm was shaken by the whole thing, and fell into a depression. To try to cheer him up, his friends hosted a hunting party, but it only led to him being pushed over the edge. In the most bizarre thing I read in the whole book, General of the Infantry Dietrich bon Hulsen-Haeseler tried to lighten Wilhelm's mood by dressing up as a ballerina and dancing. But in the middle of the laughter of the guests, the General collapsed and died in front of them all from a heart attack, traumatizing everyone. Even worse, since he was wearing a tutu, they had to remove it from him before anyone could know. But obviously someone found out because here I am reading about it. From 1910 onwards, Wilhelm II withdrew, gave fewer speeches, and left the country drifting. Without any great Chancellor at the helm (because Wilhelm II had dominated power and centralized everything in himself), it was the military establishment that took over. 

    German war strategy was based on the Schlieffen Plan, which prescribed a quick strike against France, knocking it out of the war before having to face Russia. It feels like a plan from another time when wars were shorter. The idea was that Germany would need to defeat France in three weeks before turning to Russia, which was estimated would take four weeks to mobilize. However, in 1914, Russian mobilization came early (in just two weeks with nearly 400,000 against Germany's 153,000 troops), and Germany never knocked France out of the war. Instead, Belgians and Brits came to France's aid and knocked Germany out after four years. Germany caught a break when it knocked Russia out of the war and (temporarily) seized a huge amount of territory, but it only prolonged the inevitable. Germany was not going to win the war from the beginning. There was little lasting support for it, and it was funded through loans and bonds, as the people could not support higher taxation like in Britain and France. The famous hyperinflation of the post-war years in reality began during the war, with German marks eight times cheaper in terms of US dollars at the war's end. 

In conclusion, the German state that achieved so much under Bismarck was really an abysmal state. It depended entirely on talented leadership, and so it wasn't really a state at all, just a vessel for ambition men. And so the Second Reich was destroyed where it was born 48 years earlier, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Not really a "fact" but it's strange that Prussia and Austria, the two great powers that fought to control Germany, are today not really in Germany. 
• The German Confederation was formed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as a replacement for the Holy Roman Empire, which was dissolved in 1806.
• This is sad. The day Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were assassinated was their 14th anniversary. They didn't usually get to appear together publicly because she was considered "beneath his station" but they married for love. He renounced his claims to the throne for his children with her, ending his own royal bloodline. When he was shot, he exclaimed to her, "Sophie! Don't die! Live for our children!" But she was shot too and they were both dead within the hour.
• Wilhelm II initially commanded German bombing zeppelins not to attack London to avoid harming his relatives there. This really stuck out to me as so messed up that tens of millions could die in the battlefields of his war but that he felt he should get a special exception for his relatives that ruled his enemy's country.
• The death blow to Germany in WWI came when Austria and Romania fell, cutting off Germany's oil supply. 
• Of German men between 19 and 22 when the Great War broke out, 35% were dead by the war's end.
• German soldiers had bad headgear in WWI. The pickelhaube had a big spike on it, sticking out to make soldiers into targets, and many of their helmets were made of leather, stretched felt, or even paper. Only in 1916 did Germany start to make helmets out of steel.

Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski

     This was a good book (with a terrible clickbait subtitle) all about sex and relationships that was recommended to me after I finished the Esther Perel book. The thesis of the book is more or less that good sex depends on context, whether love/emotional bonding cues, explicit/erotic cues, visual/proximity cues, or romantic/implicit cues. Nagoski uses some really useful language of brakes and accelerators with sex, because someone not desiring sex isn't just because there is nothing making them want it (accelerator) but also can be because there is something stopping the desire (brake). Some of the brakes are feelings about one's body, concerns about reputation, unwanted pregnancy, feeling used by a partner, not feeling accepted by a partner, poor style of approach, timing, and negative mood.

    There's also useful information in the book about how the point of sex should be pleasure, not orgasm. While orgasm and pleasure usually go hand in hand, they often don't. Vaginal lubrication isn't an indication of pleasure, as many women become lubricated and orgasm during rape, and there are also many occasions in which women enjoy sex but don't become lubricated or orgasm. The lesson is to listen to women's words more than their bodies, which requires trust in the relationship. 

Miscellaneous Fact:

• Fetuses have been known to masturbate in utero.