- EO Wilson on the real problem of humanity;
- Conservatives think you can command thing into existence, despite the evidence of the real world; re: Trump’s tariffs on aluminum;
- With my comments about modern technology and globalism;
- How the Minnesota killer was deep into a Christian movement about spiritual warfare and demon-possessed politicians;
- With my comments about religion as community vs religion as faith in supernatural claims;
- And how America, if it was once “exceptional,” isn’t anymore, because Trump.
Things come around again. It’s all one world. Here’s a quote from E.O. Wilson that I read years ago in one of his books, and now appreciate anew given my recent readings in human nature and politics. He understood.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
I find it stated in his book THE ORIGINS OF CREATIVITY from 2017, reviewed here. Though he might well have stated it earlier.
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Once again (a running theme): conservatives think you can command things into existence. They don’t do evidence.
Washington Post, Ed Conway, 17 Jun 2025: Trump’s tariffs are running up against the limits of nature, subtitled “U.S. geography makes it difficult to produce more aluminum — even with a 50 percent tariff for motivation.”
There is, on the face of it, a clear logic behind President Donald Trump’s decision this month to raise the tariff on imported aluminum from 25 percent to 50 percent. He thinks the United States is too dependent on imports and that China is too dominant in the production of this essential metal. In theory, a tariff might spark renewed production in the U.S.
Unfortunately for Trump’s ambitions, the deeper you delve into the weird and wonderful world of aluminum, the more you realize there are physical limits that make a resurgence of U.S. production unlikely.
The article goes on to explain why.
This is another example of how the United States cannot zip itself off from the rest of the world, and insist that it manufacture everything here. Any more than a single state can decide to charge tariffs on products ‘imported’ from other states, and manufacture everything in-state.
Hundreds of years ago, people *did* make due with whatever was at hand. Trains and ocean shipping gradually made trade easier among nations, and across continents. The complexity of the modern world with its magical technology is the result of an interconnected globe. That’s how we have everything from cheap bananas year-round to iPhones made from rare earth minerals mined in China.
Reject globalism, and you’re back to localized existence and a smaller, isolated world. That has an appeal for many people; recalls the TV series Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons. And the key issue is modern politics, is that that’s want many people *want*. Or say they want, using their iPhones. Or their PCs, using a global internet enabled by satellites orbiting a world some of them think is flat.
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Let’s get back to that Minnesota killer.
The Atlantic, Stephanie McCrummen, 17 Jun 2025: The Minnesota Suspect’s Radical Spiritual World, subtitled “Before Vance Boelter was accused of killing a Democratic state lawmaker, he had an active, even grandiose, religious life.”
The emerging biography of Vance Boelter suggests a partial answer, one that involves his contact with a charismatic Christian movement whose leaders speak of spiritual warfare, an army of God, and demon-possessed politicians, and which has already proved, during the January 6 insurrection, its ability to mobilize followers to act.
And
To some degree, the roots of Boelter’s beliefs can be traced to a Bible college he attended in Dallas called Christ for the Nations Institute. A school official confirmed to me that Boelter graduated in 1990 with a diploma in practical theology.
Little known to outsiders, the college is a prominent training institution for charismatic Christians. It was co-founded in 1970 by a Pentecostal evangelist named James Gordon Lindsay, a disciple of the New Order of the Latter Rain, one of many revivalist movements that took hold around the country after World War II. Followers believed that an outpouring of the Holy Spirit was under way, raising up new apostles and prophets and a global End Times army to battle Satanic forces and establish God’s kingdom on Earth. Although Pentecostal churches at the time rejected Latter Rain ideas as unscriptural, the concepts lived on at Christ for the Nations, which has become a hub for the modern incarnation of the movement, known as the New Apostolic Reformation. NAR ideas have spread far and wide through megachurches, global networks of apostles and prophets, and a media ecosystem of online ministries, books, and podcasts, becoming a grassroots engine of the Christian Right.
Sigh. How to account for religion, any religion? Another theme of this blog. It’s a cultural artifact, it’s a tribal mechanism for enforcing solidarity, and it accounts for the psychological tendency, especially in childhood, for perceiving causes in nature.
I think most modern people who profess to follow religions do so in a social sense. They like the feeling of solidarity within a like-minded community. They like the feeling of shared values, however vaguely defined. And most of them — as Steven Pinker has observed — do not actually believe in the literal truth of the supernatural claims in the Bible, or other religious books. The evidence of the actual world around us is enough to dissuade them of that.
The problem comes with those who do.
“Everyone brings faith to their life and the things they do—the question is, in what ways does your faith inform your actions and your decision making?” he told me. “Without knowing exactly what motivated the shooter, we can say that being oriented into this kind of NAR thinking, to my mind, it’s just a matter of time before an individual or group of individuals take some kind of action against the enemies of God and the demons in their midst.”
No, everyone does *not* bring “faith” — belief in imaginary things — to their lives. It’s those who have not who have built our modern world, which has not depended on “faith.”
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If American was once “exceptional,” it isn’t any more. Because Trump.
Washington Post, Gene Sperling, 16 Jun 2025: The worst thing Trump is doing to the economy isn’t tariffs, subtitled “Fidelity to blind justice and institutional integrity made the U.S. economy exceptional. No more.”
A major component of this American economic exceptionalism has been our demonstrated fidelity to serious economic norms, nonpolitical economic institutions and the rule of law.
I should leave it there. Read it again. This is what MAGA and Trump are doing away with.
But there’s a great ending here, about what investors in the US would be thinking now.
Consider what a multinational CEO contemplating new production in the United States must consider: Will they be subject to lawless executive orders that cancel federal contracts based on political resentment? Will defying the whims of administration policy trigger the kind of relentless government attack now facing Harvard? Will refusing to let the White House dictate pricing and production choices lead to the president threatening a company-specific tariff rate — as we are now seeing with Apple? With Trump accepting a luxury plane from Qatar and openly hosting a “pay to play” dinner for a family-owned company, will what Griffin called a “terrifying” swift rise of “crony capitalism” mean subtle or even coercive pressure to enrich the president’s family? With the president suggesting he’s willing to flout the law and have the IRS revoke the tax-exempt status of certain U.S. institutions — and with a House reconciliation bill that would allow the president the power to raise taxes by 5 to 20 percentage points on foreign investors if he finds their home country has engaged in “discriminatory” taxes — will any company with foreign headquarters still believe they will receive impartial tax treatment from our government? Will such companies send their best talent to help run U.S. facilities if their executives and family members could get locked up for weeks on end, as has already happened to several individuals with valid work and travel visas?
If American exceptionalism meant one thing, it was not having to ask these questions. Restoring the nation’s economic brand will require congressional and business leaders, along with dedicated citizens, to demand that a national commitment to serious economic policy norms and the rule of law is not a thing of the past.
