...who are:

• Claude Stanly Choules, Australia
• John Campbell Ross, Australia
• Fernand Goux, France
• Pierre Picault, France
• Henry William Allingham, United Kingdom
• Netherwood Hughes, United Kingdom
• Henry John Patch, United Kingdom
• William Frederick Stone, United States
• John Henry Foster Babcock, United States
• Frank Woodruff Buckles, United States

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surviving_veterans_of_World_War_I

The last surviving veteran of a Central Powers Nation, Franz Künstler of Austria (Austro-Hungary), died in May.

Of the greatest war that had — in its day — ever been fought; the war that unmade four empires, rewrote the maps of Europe, near Asia, and Africa; the war that destroyed the last great age of globalism; the war so total that it was called, for fifteen years, the Great War: almost no one remains who remembers that war first hand. In four years, the last vestiges of the medieval Europe of kings, fiefdoms and peasantry were unwritten. In only a few years, no one alive will remember that ancient world.

Before I was born, November 11 was Armistice Day. These men were elder statesmen, gentle retirees, and they were everywhere. Today we look over the boundary of oral history and history. A thing we lived through will become a thing we read about.

We can turn the wheel forward: sometime around my own retirement, no one alive will have fought through World War II.

And we can turn this wheel backward: when my father was born, the codgers playing checkers in front of the feed store were Civil War veterans.

When we measure history in lifespans, it becomes shorter. By this measure, Napoleon conquered Europe only three lifetimes ago. For almost a century, when people spoke of “The Wars,” they meant the ones Napoleon started. (When I was a kid, people said “the war“ and meant WWII. No one says “the war” anymore, unless they mean “this war,” that is, the one we fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

With that new span of measurement — lifespans, not years, or decades, or generations — the progress of the last five hundred years takes on a frightening dimension. For 17 lifespans, the people of Europe toiled in varying states of serfdom within a religious and political framework that transcended all memory: living and written. Think about living within a social order that was almost exactly like your parents’ social order; who in turn lived almost exactly as their own parents had lived ... for seventeen lifetimes.

On an archaeological timescale, agriculture — the foundation of almost all existing social order — is ten times longer: 170 generations. Only one tenth of that time — those 17 endless lifetimes — have passed since the fall of the Roman Empire. But agriculture is itself but a blink: human beings, in their present shape, have been making tools, singing songs, telling stories, hunting, fishing, building: for 900 lifetimes.

Of those 900 lifetimes, we have lived with “modernism” (capitalism, democracy, equality, science, and progress) for only seven lifetimes. The United States is only barely three lifetimes old.

I think the men whose names appear above fought for the victory of Modernism over Feudalism, although they almost certainly didn’t see it that way. In 1900, serious thought about history and politics contended with the fate of empires: British, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Chinese...by 1919, only one of those empires mattered. As the Great War slips over the Event Horizon of a Single Lifetime, we might start to think that the modern world order — the one with capitalism and science and so forth — is here to stay. When we consider the weight of all the lifetimes before, however, our modern world order may feel a little fragile.

You can use a Swiss Army knife to cut your fingernails in two different ways. Everyone knows the first way and has probably done it at some point in their lives (usually while camping) you open the little tiny scissors and make scissory motions across the ends of your fingernails. In other words: you exploit the technology of a scissors, which is good for cutting through a thin surface, but not much else. By the same token, the only way you can “scissor” something is using a scissors.

The other way requires a little more finesse. You can open one of the blades — the big one works better — and caaaarefully pare the ends of your fingernails. In other words: you apply the technique of “paring,” using whatever sharp edge is available, in this case the blade of a knife. Importantly, if you know how to pare your fingernails with a knife, you can use anything with a sharp edge to do so, including one half of an open scissors.

In studying material culture, the difference between technique and technology struck me pretty forcefully. In a seminar in ethnoarchaeology I watched several short films on Aboriginal life produced by the Australian government in the 1920s and ’30s. They had catchy titles like “Butchering a Kangaroo,” “Collecting Dew,” and “Building a Fire,” but were deeply fascinating nonetheless. Aboriginal people traditionally carried very little on their persons. In “Butchering a Kangaroo” the protagonists accomplished this feat using a small stone flake perhaps two inches across (which one of the men carried with him), and two straight sticks conveniently lying nearby. The men exploited their own voluminous knowledge of the local environment and kangaroo anatomy. In other words, they exploited technique almost exclusively. If you know the party trick of opening a beer bottle with another beer bottle (or a belt buckle, or the edge of a table), you have a sense what this must feel like.

On the other hand, I completed my thesis work with Eskimo people, who are famous for having had a highly advanced Stone Age material culture. Whereas an Australian hunter might carry on his person only a small handful of very generalized tools with which he could hunt a wide variety of animals in many circumstances, an Eskimo hunter would have very complex and specialized weapons optimized for hunting a particular animal in a particular circumstance. The harpoon you’d use to hunt seals surfacing for air during the winter is rather different from those you’d use to hunt seals from the open water, or on shore during the mating season; all of these are probably different from the harpoons you use to hunt walrus. Eskimo material culture places great emphasis on technology.

Of course, Australian Aborigines and Alaskan Eskimos live in very different environments, which explains almost entirely why they place different emphases on technique and technology. If you tried to carry a diverse toolkit of specialized tools across the outback, you’d never make it from one water source to another fast enough to avoid dying of thirst. And if you tried to pare your toolkit down to something that would fit into one hand, you’d never kill and process enough animals in the Arctic summer to make it through the winter without starving. Surviving in the Outback places a premium on flexibility, which favors technical solutions. (If you have the right technique, you can cut your fingernails with any sharp edge). Survival in the Arctic places a premium on efficiency, which favors technological solutions (given the right tool — a fingernail clipper — you can cut your fingernails much more quickly than paring them with a knife.)

I think the history of technology is about the inexorable replacement of technique with technology, improving efficiency at the expense of flexibility.

For example, many years ago, finding your way around required pretty detailed knowledge about celestial motion and the local landscape. You had to use sticks and shadows, or stars, to figure out where North is, and you had to know a lot about the immediate geography (and geographic processes) just to answer “where am I?”.

Maps and compasses turned orientation into a technological task. Reading a map requires a great deal of technique, of course (as does using a compass), but much less than having to orient yourself without either of those things. You have to learn how to read a map, and you have to learn how to calibrate a compass and compensate for the declination of magnetic north. But maps and compasses allow much more efficient orientation than astronomy and local knowledge. If you have a compass and the right maps, you can find your way anywhere in any conditions ... no need to wait for the right celestial conditions (a clear sky), or spend time learning the local terrain.

GPS renders maps and compasses slow and fussy. If you have a good GPS receiver you don’t need to know how to use maps or compasses, and (more importantly) you don’t have to acquire a map before you start out on your journey. The GPS is much more efficient for the unskilled orienteer than maps and compasses, which are in turn more efficient than astronomy and local knowledge.

My discussion of GPS kind of paints technology as the clear winner over technique, but I can think of at least two downsides to a reliance on technology at the expense of technique. From a practical perspective, technological solutions presuppose a certain number of systemic, social, or other technological prerequisites. For example, if the Hubble telescope exploded and took out half the GPS satellites with it, your GPS wayfinder might become a useless paperweight. It would take a a pretty big systemic failure to render a compass and map useless.

But more than that, inattentiveness to technique means putting a lot of knowledge into a conceptual black box. You don’t even have to know what “north” is to use a GPS.

When the topic is GPS and maps, technique vs. technology seems kind of abstract and quaint. But using low-technology techniques allows a craftperson — especially a novice — to peek into that black box. I would rather, for example, hire a designer who started out coding their HTML by hand, even if they use a WYSIWYG tool to do so now. Someone whose only knowlege of orienteering is “I turn where the little box tells me to turn” is not likely to be a creative thinker about how to get un-lost. Just before Orion was born, I got into a little discussion with David Carson(!) about just this subject on the 37signals blog.

The older I get, the less faith I have in technology. (This is surprisingly common among people who work with computers). My French press broke last week, the fourth such press that’s broken for me. I’ve therefore taken to making cowboy coffee, definitely a triumph of technique over technology. With less prompting, I’ve been using a reel mower instead of a power mower, vim in deference to a word processor, and a bicycle instead of a car. (And I’ve started paring my fingernails, which even I admit is pretty pointless.)

I don’t so much fear a technology’s failures (although, with energy prices rising I think it should be a concern), as I appreciate the unusual attention to detail the low-tech method affords me. With the reel mower I can physically feel the way grass grows. Cowboy coffee has literal texture. My commute by bike connects me to all the places between my home and office. Vim makes me slow down and consider my words.

The fetus grows toward soulhood. It began in the land of the unliving, of elements, of formless matter and energy. It was not one thing, it was many things. It had no spirit and no soul.

The fetus spirit moves into the land of plants and dreams: unconscious, potential, dark and unthinking. It grows larger, it moves, “it” becomes “he,” he flutters, he wiggles, he hiccups. He inverts, his eyes open, he hears murmurs of voices and heartbeats. He wants to be born, he makes himself be born. He comes out of the between-world, the womb, the world of unthinking life of the sea, the world of life between dead things and sentient things. He is coming into our world now, the world of action and form and spirit.

Spirit is the gift of all living things, however low. Spirit is the will to animate, to thrive, to reproduce, to sicken, to die. Spirit is the blessing and curse of life. To be born is to die, and between those two is a constant state of Impermanence.

You cannot remember your birth, you cannot remember your first words, you cannot remember the world of unconnected sensations, of thoughts without forms and structures. My son lives in that world now. The world of insects, of small things that want light, warmth, food, sleep, comfort. Ahead of him is the growth of his soul.

Soul is the gift of sentient beings. We take our souls from God when we structure the world for ourselves, when we say: “here is the boundary between myself and all other things.” To have a soul means to know what it is to be unique, and to know that you will die. This the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; as long as we draw that boundary we eat that fruit.

Some souls are big and some are small. An adult human, armed with words and math and art and religion and science, has a huge soul that can change the rest of the universe. To shoot an arrow is to strike something with an arrow, that is the Law of Consequence, a law of nature like the second law of thermodynamics. To act without consideration of consequence is soulless.

If animals have souls, they are tiny souls with small aspirations and abilities. Right now my dog has a bigger soul than my son, but that situation won’t persist very long. Maybe other animals have souls like humans, animals like dolphins or chimpanzees or parrots. They have to think about souls in their own way, if they can. I think that all humans have a soul, but it wasn’t given to us in any one instant, we stole it in little pieces from God, we are always stealing more of our soul from God. To Live in Grace is to sometimes, voluntarily, give a little of it back.

“God” is the word we use when we try to understand the soul. We have written about God for three thousand years and we talked about God for tens of thousands of years before that. The Old Sage said “don’t confuse the finger pointing at the moon with the moon.” The Prophet said “the human mind cannot comprehend God.” I used to read a lot about God, but you can’t learn to plow by reading books. I think words are suspect. Human beings said every word ever. I think everyone ever, including myself, has misunderstood the nature of God. I think the most definitive thing you can say about God is: if someone tells you about the nature of God, whatever they say is wrong.

Science is a tool for understanding how wrong you are, that’s why science says so little about God.

I call myself a spiritual atheist, does anyone else do this?

Someone recently asked me for some businessy advice about working in China. Specifically, about team dynamics and the decision-making process. All four regular readers of 大黑狗 can probably guess my opinions on the matter, but this presents a golden opportunity to wrap them all up.

First, the usual disclaimer: this is a huge topic and my experiences are limited. I’ve only been here a year, I work in IT for an apparel company, and Xiamen is kind of in the sticks. All this might be different elsewhere in China and in other industries. Also, China is changing very rapidly. My advice will probably be obsolete in a couple of years.

As for team dynamics and decision-making, I can only offer my experiences:

• My work is much less collaborative than in the U.S.
• My Chinese coworkers are uncomfortable doing tasks they haven’t performed previously.
• A lot of work is “borrowed” from other sources (usually competitors). This is so common that objections to the practice are literally incomprehensible.
• Many people see their jobs as paying bills, not vocations. Westerners tend to read this as a lack of craftsmanship, personal initiative, or pride of work.
• The ladder of responsibility is much more hierarchical than at US web companies. I have a boss and I have subordinates. In the US these people would all be my peers.
• I am called upon to solve many problems that are outside my domains of expertise.
• I can’t delegate tasks as easily as in the U.S. — I need to break large tasks into many small tasks.
• The Chinese work ethic favors long hours over efficiency. Doing tasks quickly/with few resources is seen as subverting the need to fill 60-hour, 7-day work weeks.
• Most decisions require extensive consensus-building.
• Language barriers flatten conversations; there’s not a lot of horsing around or tangent-chasing. The barrier is easier to cross in writing than in conversation. We frequently write while we talk.
• Documentation is looked upon as kind of “cute.” I keep a large pad of newsprint on my desk. When we’re working through a problem we’ll map it out in writing. The sheet of paper becomes the only document necessary to start work. p.s. I love this.
• If I didn’t force them to do so, no one would test anything.

An example is in order:

We’re redesigning a shopping website. Let’s say I want to add a GUI widget that allows users to browse to other products without having to reload the page. I know this can be done but we’re not familiar with the technology.

With a Western team I can propose the solution in a brief or electronic document. A coworker will implement a competent (but probably not perfect) solution from scratch or using open-source libraries. They will see this as an opportunity to grow our collective capabilities. The important part is: I can ask someone else to take on a high-level problem, confident they will return a workable solution. Successive iterations, building on a well-understood codebase, are usually just tinkering and optimizing.

When I propose this to my Chinese team, they roundly denounce it as impossible. I find a competitor’s website that does exactly what I’m proposing. A subordinate copies the code and graphics from the competitor and tries to shoehorn it onto our site; it looks bad and works worse. When I point this out, no one sees the problem. I need to break down the code and research the technology. I divide the solution into many small problem domains (graphics production, different code components) that I then delegate. Throughout this process I must make frequent unscheduled “check-ins” to ensure everyone is actually working on the problem. Successive iterations usually involve trashing large bodies of previous work and starting over.

It’s hard to say one approach is better than the other but, I’m certainly used to working in a certain way. That way involves lots of trust and collaboration, with well-paid coworkers who all regard each other as equals, in a legal/ethical/social universe that punishes sloppiness and intellectual appropriation. In that cultural universe, labor is expensive, so we take great care in what we do and reward ourselves for doing it quickly. But it’s also a cautious universe. Every step is mapped out in some Process somewhere, and requires documentation and foresight. Nothing is impossible but everything is expensive.

In my other cultural universe, the profound cheapness of human labor swamps almost all other considerations. Work gets done off-the-cuff, using templates provided from elsewhere. The consequences for failure have historically been dire, so undertaking a task that may fail could literally mean life or death. Extensive consensus helps dissipate culpability. Everything is cheap and many things are impossible.

There’s an old IT saw that goes: “Fast. Cheap. Good. Choose two.” In the U.S. the two are usually chosen for you; in particular, I have a lot of trouble sacrificing “good” so the only free variable is “do you want it fast or do you want it cheap?” In China, “cheap” is chosen by default, so I have to ask “do you want this good, or do you want it fast?” And since “fast” is usually off the table, that leaves one choice. Which is really hard for my personality (i.e. craftsmanlike).

I’ve been struggling for a while to formulate a series of vague thoughts I’ve had about China. This is usually in response to a question I get from almost everyone who’s never been to China: “is China the next superpower?” Expats in China have similar conversations, but they tend to sound like this: “I can’t believe this system actually works.” My thoughts on the matter are complex and hard to disentangle, thus the struggle.

But more vexing to me than the actual question (“why is China currently ascendant, and what will happen to it next?”) is a kind of willful blindness on the part of Western (particularly American) observers. It’s not an ethical blindness, exactly, because everyone knows that doing business with a hard government like China’s will entail some ethical tradeoffs. Rather, the blindness has something to do with expecting that a) what Westerners do will have some impact on life inside China and b) China is playing by the same “rules” (of free trade and governance) as the rest of us. Because, if you live for even a few months in China, it becomes apparent that both of these expectations are pretty much not even on China’s radar. China doesn’t care how we intend to mold its development, because we can’t; we can’t because all the rules Westerners have established for trade and foreign relations have been rewritten in China.

Luckily, James Mann wrote an editorial entitled A Shining Model of Wealth Without Liberty in today’s Washington Post that kinda-sorta summarizes my thinking on the manner:

[Western] optimists assume that once a country becomes more affluent, its emerging middle class will press for democratic change. But in China, the middle class (itself still tiny as a proportion of the overall population) supports or at least goes along with the existing political order; after all, that order made it middle class in the first place. The ruling party allows urban elites the freedom to wear and buy what they want, to see the world, to have affairs, to invest and to profit mightily; in return, the elites don't challenge the Communist Party's hold on power. Moreover, China's new business community is hardly independent of the party; in effect, it is the party, linked to China's power structure through financial connections or family ties.

In economic terms, China doesn't fit into the standard model of a free-market system, either. American magazines and television programs have for years joyously proclaimed that China has "gone capitalist" -- a supposed sign (along with the proliferation of McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Starbucks) that the Chinese are becoming like us. In fact, the fast-growing economic system that China is developing is quite different from the American model -- a fact not lost on other countries. Yes, China has private firms and stock markets. But only a small portion of the stock of any given company is traded on the stock market; the majority is held by state-owned enterprises. Communist Party officials frequently retain a majority of the seats on boards of directors and keep veto power over personnel decisions.

Mann closes with:

So what can U.S. leaders do to turn things around? The most important change is a conceptual one. We need to get beyond the arid framework of seeing every policy dispute involving China as a choice between "engagement" and "isolation."
[...]

We also need to get beyond the notion that our trade, investment and interaction with China are going to transform its political system. Any serious policy must be based on China as it is, not on our mistaken assumption that prosperity and liberty inevitably go hand in hand. Trade and investment should be evaluated for their economic costs and benefits to the United States, not for their political impact on China. [..] [We] should approach China through the lens of our national interest. That includes not just security and prosperity but our interest in a world with open political systems and the freedom to dissent.

(Emphasis mine)

I’d love to read Mann’s book The China Fantasy but of course there’s no way in hell to buy a book like this in China. So it will have to wait a few months. [Actually, 6 weeks and 2 days —Ed.]

Anyway, Read the article.