And now for something completely different

 Confession time:   since the tv show Survivor premiered around 2000, I doubt that I have missed half a dozen episodes.  I enjoy competition and strategy, and the show at different times has been a bond between me and both of my sons.  There are things about the show that have driven me crazy.  In particular, when one person is obviously the outstanding contestant physically and as a person, he almost never wins, because other contenders are so desperate not to have to compete against him at the end.   On the other hand, there are few more dramatic scenes on television than when a contestant who thinks he is on top of the Survivor world is blindsided and voted out.  Wokeness hurt the show for a while around 2020, but that era seems to be over.  And this season, which ended last Wednesday with the victory of young lawyer Kyle Fraser, featured some very interesting new departures that might, repeat might, say something good about where our society is heading.  There are obviously spoilers coming, but I would be amazed if I had any readers who 1) haven't watched the show AND 2) still have plans to do so.

The changes involved two relationships--not romantic ones this time--between two pairs of characters: firefighter Joe Hunter and Ph.D. candidate Eva Erikson--the other two members, with Kyle Fraser, of the final three--and Fraser and software engineer Kamilla Karthigesu, the last of the final five, who lost the fire challenge to Eva.  Eva described herself throughout the show as autistic.  I don't know a lot about autism and I'm not going do dispute her self-diagnosis, but she did not show what I think is a common symptom of autism, a lack of empathy--she had a keen sense of what made other people tick.  She has however a tendency towards emotional meltdown that was very much on display on the show especially in one of the first and the last episodes.  In the midst of one of the first episodes--maybe even the first, I'm too lazy to check--she collapsed and began sobbing uncontrollably.  

Joe, the fire captain, stood out from the beginning not only as a physically strong person, but as the kind of rock-solid guy you would want as your army sergeant.  And when Eva collapsed, Joe, who was not even on her tribe, walked over to her and began comforting her.  She eventually snapped out of it.  In the second, post-merge phase of the game, they became the core of the alliance that dominated the proceedings, and which also included Kyle.  They trusted each other completely and rewarded one another's trust.

Eventually--although no one ever said this in so many words--we learned what had moved Joe to help Eva in her distress.  Joe told the audience and some of his fellow players that several years ago, his sister had been killed by her domestic partner.  He had fought with his sister on the telephone on the night before she died, and he felt tremendous guilt over that and over his failure to protect her.  I think he must have seen his sister in Eva's distress, although he never said so.  And in the last episode, he came to her help again.  Kyle had won the last challenge among the last four contestants, which gave him the right to pick which of the other three would automatically go to the end with him.  The other two would face off in a fire making challenge, which has become one of the most dramatic events of every season.  He picked Joe, because, he said, he had told Joe that he would do so if he won that last challenge.  Keeping one's word, needless to say, is not often a priority among Survivor contestants.  That left Eva to face that challenge with Kamilla.  Using their permitted tools--a machete and a piece of flint, which seems actually to be magnesium--they both began practicing their fire building, and Eva melted down again.  This time her emotional collapse was complete--sobbing and writhing on the ground (which the producers unfortunately did not show.)   Drawn by her cries, both Joe and Kyle went to her and offered to surrender their automatic spots in the last three to her and enter the fire challenge themselves. She steadfastly refused, and eventually got a grip on herself and managed to make a practice fire.

The second relationship between Kyle and Kamilla was fascinating in a different way--it was a secret.  They formed an early alliance but spent as little time together as possible.  All these contestants, it seemed, had been watching the show since childhood and had learned a lot about it.  Tight couples usually become targets because the emotional support they give each other is so valuable.  Kyle and Kamilla provided each other with a lot of key intelligence and also orchestrated a clever coup against another contender in one of the last weeks.  And then, on the eve of the final immunity challenge that would put one person in charge of the game, they had an amazing conversation.  Kyle told Kamilla that if he won, he would NOT select her as the second automatic final three contestant, because in the final jury vote (the jury is composed of the last 8 people to be eliminated), the same people would want to vote for both of them, their votes would split, and the third contestant--either Joe or Eva--would win.  And Kamilla, to my amazement, didn't complain at all--she said she completely understood and implied, I think, that she would have done the same thing.  

The fire challenge did not disappoint.  Kamilla, who entered it as a favorite, could not get a fire going at all, while Eva progressed rapidly and soon had a real blaze going that seemed certain to reach the string suspended a few feet above the fire, burn through it, and win her the challenge.  But on the verge of victory, her fire was checked by gusts of wind, and fell way back.  Suddenly Eva began to melt down hysterically again--but everyone, even Kamilla, encouraged her to hang in there.  Kamilla did get a fire going but it never really took off, and Eva managed to build hers back up and burn through the string.  Kamilla became the eighth and last jury member.

At the final tribal council Eva announced that she was not simply a hockey referee, but a Ph.D. candidate at Brown, and Kyle admitted that he was a lawyer, not  a teacher.  This implied that Joe, a 45-year old fire captain from Sacramento with a wife and family, would in the long run need the $1 million first prize more than either of them.  (AI tells me that Sacramento fire captains can make as much as $140,000 a year, but average $81,000.)  Such people usually get voted off before the end because the other contestants fear their appeal, but Joe had not.  Yet in the final vote, Kyle got 5 votes, Eva 2, and Joe only 1.  I think that more than anything else, that vote was generational.  Most of the contestants were Millennials or Gen Z, and Joe was only one of two late-wave Gen Xers, the second of whom provided his only vote. 

Survivor is, above all, a high-stakes game, and no one makes it onto it without understanding that winning is the goal.  This year, however, winning was not the only thing that mattered.  Joe in particular made that point by helping Eva, and Kyle and Kamilla understood that there tight bond could only go so far.  In general the contestants showed more mutual respect than I ever remember seeing before.  The sample is much too small to conclude that values are changing in society at large--but I hope that that might turn out to be the case.  I am sorry that Joe didn't win, but the others were worthy.

A podcast interview

 Several weeks ago I was contacted by a young man named Eddie Carson, a dean at a private school in Vermont.  Somehow he had come across my autobiography, A Life in History, and had also become a fan of historyunfolding.  He invited me for an episode of his podcast and we taped it last week.  Here it is!

More thoughts on how we got here

 Testifying before the congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair in 1987, Secretary of State George Schultz repeatedly declared, "Nothing is ever settled in this town."  History suggests that humanity has a deep yearning for certainty, for a resolution of certain fundamental questions, and for a guarantee of a stable future.  Yet history also shows how illusory all that is.  Somehow my life has prepared me for what is happening to the United States now.  By 1983, when I wrote a 20th anniversary piece in The New Republic looking back at the Kennedy years, I felt that our political system had been on a wrong track for over a decade.  In the next thirty years I saw the decline of my own profession and intellectual life in general, and now a near-contemporary of mine, backed by battalions of eager ideological warriors, is undoing the government and many parts of the world that I grew up in.  That, I am convinced, reflects another cornerstone of human nature--a tendency of certain younger generations to rebel against conventional wisdom, regardless of how wise it was.  And last but not least, every human institution, no matter how praiseworthy and inspiring at the moment of its birth, seems to grow old, lose its vitality, and become easy prey to those who can imagine a world without it.

I have pointed out here several times in the last 20 years that the historian Henry Adams made a related point well over a century ago in his presidential address to the American Historical Review dealing with the future of history as a science.  Historical science, he argued, could reach one of three obvious conclusions about the future of humanity.  First, it might decide that mankind would adopt socialism.  Secondly, it might eventually conclude that earlier generations were right and adopt a religious view of the past, present, and future.  And lastly, it might conclude that mankind would not change, and that evils like war and economic exploitation would continue.  Yet any one of those conclusions, he thought, would arouse determined opposition among powerful elements of our society.  I think that is a good analysis of what has happened over the last sixty years or so, not only in the historical profession but in society as a whole.  And increasingly, new forces are not merely attacking the conclusions of the historical profession, but the whole idea of science as a guide to politics and life.

Under Trump this seems to be clearest with respect to public health.  My maternal grandmother died in 1923, when my mother was ten, of postpartum strep, then known as childbed fever.  Within ten years, sulfa drugs could cure that frequently fatal illness, and penicillin followed within another decade.  As a child I read several books about the great medical discoveries of the past century, and I was in the first cohort of kids to receive the Salk vaccine---although I acquired my immunity to mumps, measles and German measles naturally.  I lived to see the end of smallpox.  Now more than three generations of younger Americans have grown up under the intellectual authority of the medical profession, and enough of them have rebelled to lead to the appointment of our most prominent vaccine skeptic as Secretary of HHS.  Significant numbers of parents refuse to vaccinate their children, and we are experiencing a measles epidemic that has killed three children so far.  

I don't think there is any legitimate excuse for this particular rebellion, but I do see plenty of evidence that we can't trust our highly educated population to do the right thing.  American medical care is now organized for profit, not simply to cure disease and save lives.  That is why big pharma has failed to develop desperately needed new antibiotics, preferring to research drugs that people will have to take for much longer periods of time.  And good science constantly encounters powerful enemies.  We all know that the processed food industry is poisoning us, but even Michelle Obama essentially caved in to the industry when she tried to make school lunches healthier.  It also seems that the fossil fuel industry has succeeded--and not only under Trump--in committing us to a continued, major role for it in energy production.  I keep wondering if that industry has secretly concluded that global warming is something that we will all just have to live with.  

Industry however is not the only institution to abandon the use of knowledge for the common good.  The same thing has happened in universities.  Identity-based ideologues have joyfully transformed literature and history over the last few decades, crippling their university enrollments and leaving themselves vulnerable to the counterattack that the Trump administration has begun.  Administrators have replaced scholars as the most numerous and influential university officials.   And K-12 education has apparently slipped even further, valuing students' self-esteem more highly than the pursuit of truth.

The modern bureaucratic state bases its power on superior knowledge of what we need.  Human nature being what it is, millions inevitably resent those claims even when the knowledge they rely on is true, and even more when it does not intuitively make sense.  Donald Trump, who has never shown much respect for anyone else's opinion, has exploited that resentment brilliantly.  The Democratic Party seems trapped in a defense of a status quo which obviously has serious problems.  Eventually, I am sure, the pendulum will swing back in the other direction and we shall begin restoring respect for truth--but for the time being, to paraphrase Orwell, millions are so sick of  hearing that 2 + 2 = 4 that they are willing to believe they equal 5, if only for a change.  That is part of the rhythm of history.