"Domesticated"

 I admit to strong opinions about politics, our national debt, the purpose of our schools and universities, gender identity, woke culture and myriad other subjects. However, when overwrought, and my pen fails me, I take a few deep breaths and pick up something comic, like a Wodehouse novel or collection of his short stories. There are over a hundred to choose from, beginning with The Pothunters in 1902 (written at age 21) and ending with Sunset at Blandings, written in 1975 (at age 93), and published posthumously in 1977. But I also try my hand at more personal essays, such as this one which I hope will provide some cheer regardless of the weather or one’s political affiliation.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Domesticated”

March 29, 2025

 

“I’m not very good at being domesticated. I’ve tried. The domestic

life I find claustrophobic – the rituals and habits and patterns.”

                                                                                                Ralph Fiennes (1962-)

                                                                                                British actor – Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series

 

The other day, while folding my second load of laundry, with breakfast dishes still in the sink and the bed still unmade, I thought of how domesticated I have become since retiring and moving to Essex Meadows – domesticated in the sense of sharing daily chores. I don’t mean domesticated like a dog. I was house-trained before Caroline and I were married sixty-one years ago. For the first fifty years of our married life Caroline did the laundry, made the bed and cleaned up the kitchen. I assumed some of those responsibilities when we moved to our apartment in January of 2016

 

Domestication was not a primary consideration for my parents; both artists, they scorned traditional roles. My father did not grab his dinner pail or take his briefcase and go off for the day. And my mother did not put on an apron, clean the house and set out my father’s slippers and prepare his dinner. Nevertheless, they had rituals. After breakfast, with us on the school bus, they would head to the barn where my father milked the half-dozen goats and my mother looked after the horses. They had a small business, Red Shed Rubber Animals. My mother modeled animals out of clay and my father prepared the molds to produce a rubber animal. The house was left to care for itself, at least until my older sister turned fifteen and mastered the vacuum cleaner.

 

I did not inherit my parents’ artistic genes. Examples of my early talents can be seen in a falling-apart 1947 photo album in which I placed ads for Westinghouse, Mickey Mouse and Schlitz, and in a rubber dog with two legs that I had modeled in clay. It was of no surprise to my family that I became a stockbroker. 

 

As I have grown older, my hair has become unruly, but, having been domesticated, my life has become more – if there is such a word – ruly. Now, upon waking and with no office to go to, I check the mouse traps – placed after discovering a forlorn little mouse in our washing machine (I have found none since putting them out) – take my pills, prepare and eat breakfast, glance through the newspapers, consider ideas for essays, make the bed, do the laundry on every third day, and run the dishwasher when it fills up. 

 

Unlike Mr. Fiennes, I enjoy the regimen domestication brings, which still allows me time to use what creative skills I have in writing. While I did not exactly come from a “wild or natural state,” making beds and doing laundry were not my natural focus. First married, and in our one-bedroom second-floor apartment – where to reach the bathroom one had to crawl across the bed – Caroline took command. And I became blissfully oblivious of how the household worked – clothes placed in the hamper appeared, miraculously, a few days later in my bureau, dirty dishes were washed and back in the cupboard, floors and rugs cleaned. That has now changed.

 

Now, you must excuse me; I have to go. I am being told the heating vents need vacuuming.

"Communism, China & Senator Cotton's New Book"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Thought of the Day

“Communism, China & Senator Cotton’s New Book”

March 28, 2025

 

“Last month, Senator Tom Cotton published what might

be the most important book of the 2020s on China.”

                                                                                                                Jimmy Quinn

                                                                                                                National Review, March 20, 2025

 

“I have seen the future, and it works” – words written by Lincoln Steffens following a visit to the newly formed Soviet Union in 1918. Last year, while in Shanghai for a store opening, Apple CEO Tim Cook was obsequious in his praise of China: “I think China is really opening up…it’s so vibrant and so dynamic.”

 

For more than a hundred years many, supposedly perceptive Western geopolitical analysts, journalists and business leaders, have chosen to ignore the evil that is Communism. In his 1919 book, Ten Days that Shook the World, American journalist John Reed, scion of a wealthy Oregon family, wrote sympathetically of the Russian Revolution that he had witnessed in Petrograd. Warren Beatty turned the book into a 1981 film, Reds, nominated for an Academy Award. In 1937, after spending months with Mao Tse Tung’s Red Army, American journalist Edgar Snow wrote Red Star Over China, a glowing portrait of life in Communist areas. He contrasted his experience with Mao and his Communist followers with his depiction of the gloom and corruption of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang’s government, which relocated to Taiwan in 1949.

 

For Americans, Communism has never approached the revulsion felt for Nazism, yet the similarities are far greater than their differences. In the February 5, 2018 issue of The New York Review of Books, Ian Johnson responded to an earlier article by Timothy Snyder, “Who Killed More, Hitler or Stalin?” Johnson wrote that the question was slightly off: “…it should have included a third tyrant of the 20^th Century, Chairman Mao. And not just that, but that Mao should have been the hands-down winner, with his ledger easily trumping the European dictators’.” According to his research, Stalin killed somewhere between 6 and 9 million people, Hitler between 11 and 12 million, and Mao between 35 and 45 million, most during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Nazism and Communism both practice(d) genocide, are (were) authoritarian, and have (had) no regard for individual rights or human life.

 

Repression and intimidation in China did not end with Mao’s death in 1976. While accurate numbers are not available, estimates of those killed in 1989’s uprising in Tiananmen Square range from a few hundred to several thousand. Since Xi Jinping became President of the People’s Republic of China in 2013 more than a million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang Province have been placed in internment camps. No one claims to know how many have died. The province has a population of 24 million, half of whom are Uyghurs, so almost one in ten Uyghurs have been confined. The BBC has reported that Uyghur women have been sterilized, and former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has called what has happened in the province “genocide and crimes against humanity.” In a review of Emily Feng’s book Let Only Red Flowers Bloom, Maura Elizabeth Cunningham wrote in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal: “Under Mr. Xi, the definition of what makes a person ‘Chinese’ has become increasingly narrow: someone who exclusively speaks Mandarin, marries Chinese and has two or three children, respects the leadership of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), accepts censorship and surveillance and recalibrates in accordance with each new political campaign…” In the Introduction to his new book, Voice for the Voiceless, the Dalai Lama wrote about Communism and Tibet, which he was forced to leave in 1959: “The issue is not about the matter of economic development…The issue is about a people’s need and right to exist with their distinct language, culture, and religious heritage.” An impossible dream for Tibetan Buddhists in China today.

 

China has a population of about 1.4 billion, of whom about 100 million (or 7%) are members of the Communist Party, the second largest political party in the world (in a one-party state!), but one not open to all. Officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) are members, but most enlisted soldiers are not. While China, according to official statistics, has the world’s second largest economy, as measured by GDP ($18.8 trillion versus the U.S. at $28.2 trillion, its GDP per capita is $13,400 versus the U.S. at $83,000. Indicative of its concentration of wealth, China has, according to the Hunan Global Rich List, 814 billionaires, more than the U.S. That number, according to the Washington Times, includes Xi Jinping, who has never worked in the private sector. Mr. Xi has been hailed for eradicating poverty in China, but, as Bitter Winter (a European magazine that focuses on religious liberty and human rights) has stated: “Xi Jinping is a master in the Orwellian art to redefine the meaning of words to suit his propaganda.” In 2021, he put poverty at below $2.30 per day. The issue of how many Chinese fall below the poverty line was raised before Xi Jinping’s presidency, in Will the Boat Sink the Water? by Chen Guidi’s and Wu Chuntao, published in 2004. 

 

China represents a clear and present risk to Western liberalism – economically, militarily and culturally. 150 countries, representing three quarters of the world’s population and over half of the world’s GDP have signed Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China’s banks – backed by the CCP – have funded projects, including railroads, ports and gas pipelines in countries in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Latin America. Sean Thomas, in the April edition of The Spectator, wrote: “China is now the biggest trading partner for virtually every South American nation, supplanting the U.S. in the last decade.” While their military budget is less than ours (assuming we can believe their numbers), their standing army is twice ours – the largest army in the world. China has constructed artificial islands and military installations in the South China Sea, through which travel one third of all global maritime trade. In the 2022-2023 academic year, American universities enrolled almost 290,000 Chinese students, while 800 Americans studied at Chinese universities.

 

It is with that background, and at the suggestion of an old skiing buddy, that I picked up and read Senator Tom Cotton’s short but information-packed book, Seven Things You Can’t Say About China. Reading it convinced me of what I long suspected – China is an evil empire and the U.S. needs to be prepared. In seven concise chapters, covering 170 pages, Senator Cotton instructs the reader on how China is preparing for war, how they wage economic war, how they infiltrate society and are coming for our kids, and how they might actually win. In a telling example, and quoting PEW Research Center, he relates that in 2020 9% of young American adults got their news from Chinese-owned TikTok; today, 39% do. He starts off chapter VII, “China Could Win:” “Most of us take American global dominance for granted, without thinking much about it; since at least World War I, that’s just the way it’s been.” Complacency has become nemesis.   

 

If you believe, as I do, that most people, regardless of heritage or cultural background, prefer liberty to dependency, this is a book you should read. The West, led by the United States, is an advocate for the former, while China exemplifies the latter. In the U.S., we command our fortunes, and we control our futures. The vast majority of Chinese, living under the tyranny of a dictatorship, control neither their fortunes nor their futures. We cannot let them win.

 

In the March 16, 2025 issue of The Telegraph, senior foreign correspondent Roland Oliphant wrote: “China, not Russia, is the only country on the planet capable of challenging the United States’ military, economic and political hegemony.” Caveat emptor should apply when dealing with Communist China.

"The Anxious Generation," Jonathan Haidt - A Review

While Jonathan Heidt writes of Zoomers, the enticement of social media affects us all. Reading an article by Amelia Butler-Gallie in The Spectator on the 100^th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby, I was reminded of this. The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock symbolized Gatsby’s hopes and dreams – the unattainable. We see that same lure in today’s social media. Ms. Butler-Gallie wrote: “…the digital glow of our smartphones, beckoning us toward the ever-elusive ideal that, if we only keep scrolling, we will find what we were always searching for.”

 

Social media is not going away nor will its powers of seduction; so it becomes incumbent on each of us to make it our servant, not our master. For young and old, I believe you will find this book important.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt

March 22, 2025

 

“There is no one right way to be a parent; 

there is no blueprint for building a perfect child.”

                                                                                                                The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt

 

Professor Haidt’s book speaks to Generation Z (Zoomers), those born between 1997 and 2012, a grouping that includes our ten grandchildren. For a grandparent of Zoomers, Haidt’s findings are sobering; for a parent they must be alarming. Since 2010, depression among boys and girls is up 161% and 145% respectively. Mental illness among college students has surged, has have emergency room visits for self-inflicted harm and suicide rates for younger adolescents.

 

Since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, children have grown up in worlds foreign to their parents. They have access to goods and services unknown to their parents at the same age. My parents grew up with the telephone, automobiles and planes, all unknown to their parents at the same age. My generation grew up with the radio, television, talking movies and parkways. Our children grew up with space exploration, hand-held calculators, cassettes, and cordless electric games. However, the technologies available to generation Z are more dramatic. They have come of age with violent video games and “smart” phones. The iPhone was introduced in 2007, the App store in 2008 and, most concerning to Professor Haidt because of its consequences for young girls, the iPhone 4 with its front-facing camera. Facebook was launched in 2004, YouTube in 2005, WhatsApp in 2009, Instagram in 2010, and TikTok in 2014. 

 

As a father of two children of the “anxious generation,” Professor Haidt seeks answers, knowing that, as he writes in the epigraph, no one has all the answers. He writes easily and well, and supports his arguments with graphs, tables and figures, and concludes: “…we have vastly and needlessly overprotected our children in the real world. At the same time, we have underprotected our children in the virtual world…”

 

It is the virtual world that has overtaken the real world, in terms of time consumed: For preteens, it is close to 40 hours per week – an adult’s average work week.  “For teens aged 13 to 18, it’s closer to 50 hours per week.” He does not see the internet as harmful. “We need,” he writes, “to develop a more nuanced mental map of the digital landscape…I’m not saying that 11-year-olds should be kept off the internet. I’m saying that the Great Rewiring of Childhood, in which phone-based childhood replaced play-based childhood, is the major cause of the international epidemic of adolescent mental illness.”  

 

Professor Haidt concludes his book with suggestions for parents: less screen time – turn off phones during meal time and remove them from bedrooms an hour or so before bedtime – and provide more play time. He admits that he and his wife used the TV show Teletubbies to “mesmerize and calm our children from infancy through the toddler years.” He adds, however: “But if we had to do it over again, we’d do less of it.” He believes schools should increase recess times with lighter supervision, and parents should not micromanage their children; they should encourage sleepovers and after school free play.

 

His statistics are alarming, but there is wisdom in his recommendations. The primary purpose of parenting is to raise a child to become a productive and happy adult. This book helps illuminate that passage, a passage that should be joyous, but one that has become difficult to navigate.

"Eggs"

 The Ides of March seem a fitting time for this preamble.

 

I am mystified by many of Mr. Trump’s decisions, especially on the subject of tariffs and cryptocurrencies, and I find it disconcerting when I hear him speak disparagingly of some allies as he does. As for Ukraine, Russia and Europe, there may be more than meets the eye. The balance of power among nations constantly shifts. For the forty-five years following the end of the War, the United States and the Soviet Union represented two distinct powers and views of the future. Preservation of democracy and containment of Russia were our policies. Since the end of the Cold War (now 35 years in the past), the U.S. has been the world’s sole super power.

 

While rising national debt is our largest domestic problem, the rise of Communist Chinarepresents our biggest foreign policy threat, with their activities in the Pacific, along with their inroads in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. A world desirous for peace needs a more united, stronger, and productive Europe. The 27 EU member states plus the UK have a population of almost 520 million people and produce a GDP of $17.5 trillion. In contrast, the U.S., with 340 million people, generated $27.8 trillion. In 2023, the EU and UK spent $395 billion on defense, while the U.S. spent $916 billion. The Second World War has been over for 80 years. Europe must spend more on defense. And they must up their productivity.

 

It is not that the U.S. should abandon their European allies; it is that partnership terms shouldbe realistic about the world we live in. The number of nuclear powers has proliferated, and with Iran on the cusp of joining that group, democracies are going to have to band together. Europe needs to address problems inherent to their comfortable and popular welfare states. She needs to play a bigger role in defense of democracy and, perhaps, help sever the alliance between China and Russia. To the extent Mr. Trump’s actions are having that effect – intended or otherwise – that is a positive. In the future, the U.S. must focus more on the Pacific region, as China represents an insidious threat to all freedom loving people.

 

Mr. Trump and his administration need to address this growing concern. His predecessor did not. I only wish I knew what is behind his thinking when it comes to tariffs and cryptocurrencies and why he treats allies as he sometimes does.

 

But on this March 15, I will focus on a more personal, but equally controversial, matter, eggs.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Eggs”

March 15, 2025

 

“…if I’m about to buy an egg, I just buy on price.”

                                                                                                                Ken Anderson, Professor, Department of Poultry Science

                                                                                                                NC State University

                                                                                                                Inverse, online publication Bustle Digital Group

                                                                                                                August 28, 2021

 

Eggs are on our minds. A few days ago Caroline and I watched Claudette Colbert and Fred McMurray in The Egg and I. But it is the price of eggs, due to H5 bird flu, which prompted this essay. A dozen eggs that cost $4.95 a year ago now cost $8.42. According to the Global Center for Health Security, in the fourth quarter of 2024 more than 20 million hens were killed. Since the symptom was first noted in 2022, approximately 148 million chickens have been destroyed. To put that number in perspective, there are a little over 300 million egg-laying chickens in the U.S.  

 

This talk about eggs reminded me of a favorite essay, E.B. White’s “Riposte,” written in response to J.B. Priestly’s op-ed in the December 17, 1971 The New York Times, “The Meaning of Brown Eggs.” Priestly noted that the English prefer brown eggs because they are “closer to nature.” Americans, he argued, prefer white eggs “because their very whiteness suggests hygiene and purity.” But he went beyond eggs to criticize American civilization as being “curiously abstract…You dine off the advertiser’s ‘sizzling’ and not meat of the steak. Sex is discovered in manuals and not in bed.” Priestly’s satirical comments demanded a response, and that eloquent chicken farmer Mr. White did. He wrote that New Englanders prefer brown eggs, as they are plentiful in those parts. But the rest of the country ate white eggs, as they are more common. He added: “I ascribe the whole business to a busy little female – the White Leghorn hen. She is nervous, she is flighty, she is the greatest egg-machine on two legs, and it just happens that she lays a white egg.” Fifty-fours later, the White Leghorn is still the most productive hen in the United States.

 

My parents raised Rhode Island Reds, so we always had brown eggs. As a youngster, I recall taking an egg from a hen’s nest, poking a hole in one end and sucking out the raw yolk. Ugh! My wife’s mother, in New York City where they lived (and did not raise chickens), ate white eggs, but served her husband brown eggs. Why? My wife does not know, but she has fun speculating. Today we buy brown eggs. Why? No good reason, except it is what we have always done. 

 

A year ago, Fabian Carstairs wrote an article for London’s Spectator Live, “Which Came First? The Egg Obviously.” Referencing the Priestly essay, Carstairs noted that “…there’s really no relationship between shell colour and the egg.” He pointed out that eggs from the Chilean Araucana are “a beautiful blue” and that the Chinese Cochin “dapples her eggs with delicate yellow spots.” As for the question of which came first, Mr. Carstairs closes: “In evolutionary biology, chickens are the result of interbreeding between various jungle fowl. A mutation during one of those romances resulted in a fertilized egg whose DNA was distinct from its non-chicken parents. Upon hatching, the first chicken was born.”

 

Now, how to end this scrambled essay? The late radio host Bernard Meltzer once said: “A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg, even though he knows that you are slightly cracked.” Knowing those words apply, I will stop before there is more egg on my face.

"Hair or Fur?"

 In these turbulent times, I hope this short essay provokes a smile. 

 

Generally, I like to send these essays on weekends, but since my wife and I will be away this weekend visiting two granddogs and their charges, a son and daughter-in-law, I opted for this morning.

 

Cheers, Sydney

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Hair or Fur?”

March 7, 2025

 

“Is there a difference between hair and fur?”

Kate Wong of Scientific American

“There isn’t. Hair and fur are the same thing.”

Nancy Simmons, mammologist, American Museum of Natural History

February 20, 2001

 

The world is in turmoil. The war in Ukraine threatens the NATO alliance. China menaces the Pacific Region and is making inroads in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Financial markets, already dicey, now have to deal with tariffs and the possibility of a U.S.-financed “crypto reserve,” whatever that is. Public schools are failing our children, especially in inner cities. Climate is shifting, and we don’t know whether to halt the change or adapt.

 

And here am I writing about hair and fur, when Ms. Simmons, an expert on mammals, says there is no difference. Yet my barber would be surprised if I said I wanted to come in for a fur cut. She would probably say she was booked and notify public health authorities. In fact, she looked at me oddly when I asked her recently if the stuff on top of my head was hair or fur. If the two words are synonymous why do we say dogs and horses have hair, while cats and rabbits have fur? And why do we say “hair-of-the-dog” and speak of “cat furballs” and not the other way? But then, nothing in life is simple; poodles and dachshunds are said to have hair, while German shepherds and huskies have fur. Muddling the subject further, pigs and sheep – both mammals – have, respectively, bristles and wool. Then there is the Mangalica pig that looks like a sheep and has hair. And now I read of a Texas company Colossal Biosciences that has genetically engineered mice with “long, thick, wool hair,” like an extinct wooly mammoth. I must be getting old. 

 

And why is facial hair called whiskers? They are not used as antennae, as cats or mice do, to see if they can slip through an opening. And don’t get me going on moustaches or muttonchops. BBC Wildlife Magazine suggests the word “hair” is an “umbrella term,” for “similar structures…growing from the skin of mammals.” That sounds cumbersome. When particularly thick it is called fur. But not always. Crowning Samson’s head (before Delila got to him) was a thatch of thick and abundant hair, not fur. 

 

It's all so bewildering. A hairshirt is worn by an ascetic, while a cashmere sweater is worn by a dandy. As days grow warmer, my wife will store her winter coats. She doesn’t call a hairier; she calls a furrier.

 

It will be by a hair-breadth (or is that fur-breadth?) that I escape, without some reader coming after me with a pair of scissors, or should that be shears? I’m ready to pull out my fur – I mean my hair.

"Doubt and Skepticism"

 Friday’s disastrous meeting in the White House is a reminder of how doubt and skepticism can help us observers, and our political leaders. Certainly, there was enough blame for each of the three participants – President Trump, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Vice President J.D. Vance – to take a share. Besides watching a re-run of the events on YouTube, I read twenty interpretations of the afternoon’s events, from all perspectives. Yet, I am still unsure how best to allocate blame. It is common knowledge that Mr. Trump is thin-skinned and likes to be praised. Mr. Zelensky is stubborn and theatrical – look at how he dresses. Mr. Vance is smart but immature, at least in matters of diplomacy.

 

All three made mistakes in that Oval Office meeting, but especially, in my opinion, Mr. Vance. He should have kept quiet. In debate or argument, Mr. Trump, right or wrong, does not need defending. He often digs himself into a hole, but just as often extracts himself. Mr. Zelensky would have been better served to have kept quiet, not argue with Mr. Vance, and let the offered deal play out. Mr. Trump, as everyone knows, shoots from the hip, but he is also quick to walk back what he has said. I feel confident he knows that Putin is a dictator and that Zelensky is not. Was he wrong to imply otherwise? Of course. But did Mr. Zelensky believe he could win over Mr. Trump by publicly disagreeing with him and his Vice President? It would seem so. Contrast Mr. Zelensky’s behavior with that of Emanuel Macron and Keir Starmer when they met with Mr. Trump.

 

Nevertheless, there is doubt in my mind as to who bears most responsibility.

 

I hope you find this essay of interest.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Doubt and Skepticism”
March 3, 2025

 

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect

confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”

                                                                                                                                Robert Hughes (1938-2012)

                                                                                                                                Australian author & art critic

                                                                                                                                “Modernism’s Patriarch”

                                                                                                                                Time Magazine, June 10, 1996

 

“Our doubts are traitors and cause us to miss

the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.” 

                                                                                                                                Lucio speaking to Isabella

                                                                                                                                Measure for Measure, 1604

                                                                                                                                William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

 

As the two epigraphs infer, doubt is personal. In her Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, the American poet wrote “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” On the other hand, in The Selected Letters of Tennessee Wiliams, the playwright is quoted: “I don’t believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work…”

 

………………………………………………………….

 

Doubt, including self-doubt, and skepticism are not synonymous but are related. Doubt can be defined as uncertainty regarding one’s abilities (as Lucio infers). It also serves as questioning one’s judgement (as Robert Hughes suggests). It is intuitive, reflecting a lack of knowledge, as Thomas wanted proof of Jesus’ resurrection. On the other hand, a skeptic is one with an open mind who questions the truth of something stated or alleged, or at least who defers judgement until more facts are available.

 

This is not to argue that belief in one’s self is uncommon. When a youth, I was not skeptical about much and had few self-doubts. Many of us were raised on the American folktale, The Little Engine that Could. Theodore Roosevelt, allegedly, expressed a similar sentiment: “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.” All good advice, so long as it does not morph into cockiness, arrogance, or conceit. As I grew older, I read and thought more, I became more skeptical. I recall, when a teenager, the president of a brokerage firm who told me that the longer he worked in the business the less he felt he knew about finance.

 

Self-doubt is often a positive. Fyodor Dostoevsky struggled with doubt. In an 1855 letter to his friend Natalya Fonvizina, he wrote: “…the mind which does not labor will wither.”[1]Recently, I had a conversation with an old school friend, now living in Denver, and told him of my struggle with this essay. He reminded me of “Pascal’s Wager”[2] – that even if one cannot definitively prove the existence of God, it is better to believe in Him, as the potential benefits outweigh the risks of being wrong. Believe you can do it, he said.

 

But it is for our political environment I am most concerned, where skepticism has been overwhelmed by a tidal wave of hubris. In a 1901 letter to the Swiss professor of Greek and history Jost Winteler, the 22-year-old Albert Einstein wrote: “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” In our hyper politically-polarized world, neither doubt nor skepticism is widely extant. Instead there is an attitude of “either you’re with me or you’re against me.” This fractionalization has set brother against brother and friend against friend. Conservative students are hesitant about speaking out. In schools and universities, speech that is deemed “harmful” is disallowed. The dogmatism of progressives on the left and ardent Trump supporters on the right are notably void of skepticism.

 

At the risk of widening even further the gulf between conservatives and progressives, I place most (but not all) of the blame on progressives. Certainly, there are some on the right who don MAGA hats, pump fists in the air and, incoherently, raise their voices for Mr. Trump. However, most on the left do not just disagree with Donald Trump, they hate him, and they let hatred drive their responses; reason falls victim to emotion. In part, their aversion to Mr. Trump lies in his muddled syntax. Like Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter, Mr. Trump speaks in unintelligible riddles. Whether he is negotiating a deal, reflecting whomever he most recently spoke to, or speaking from ignorance, I don’t pretend to know. But I suspect he is neither as stupid nor as uncompassionate as he sometimes sounds. His opponents would be wise to let skepticism replace their instinct for immediate condemnation. 

 

We witness this arrogant audacity from media disciples of both parties, especially on televised cable evening news programs, podcasts and video-sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and Twitch. Social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) make it easier for viewers to limit their news to only that with which they agree. Do Rachel Maddow or Jesse Waters ever have moments of doubt, of questioning their loudly proclaimed ideologies? 

 

There are, of course, situations when conviction should be paramount – love for family, belief in freedom, and faith in God. “You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think,” said Christopher Robin to Pooh. But generally, skepticism is healthy and doubt drives creativity.

 

True conservatives tend to be skeptics. In 1967, the prescient Daniel Patrick Moynihan was invited to speak to the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa: “Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government agencies to do good.” Conservatives are concerned of the power that accrues to political leaders and for the tendency of the state to expand inexorably. This concern is not only because of the difficulty of paying for ever more programs, but because such growth threatens individualism, the bed-rock of conservative thought. Doubt and skepticism are generally associated with reflection, not spontaneity.

 

“Skepticism: the mark and even the pose of the educated mind” are words attributed to educator John Dewey. Like chastity, as the philosopher George Santayana is alleged to have once said, it [skepticism] should not be relinquished too readily. Truth (the holy grail of the skeptic) is illusive, perhaps never to be discovered; it is the search that is important.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] As quoted by Gary Saul Morson, professor of Slavic languages at Northwestern University, in the February 28 issue of The Wall Street Journal.

[2] Blaise Pascal, 17^th Century French philosopher.

"The Rabbit Factor," by Antti Tuomainen - A Review

 Today is the first of March. My wife has long believed that on the first of a month one should say (or write) Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. It is supposed to bring good luck. So I say to all of you: Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit – a perfect introduction to this delightful, fun-filled, thriller.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Rabbit Factor, Antti Tuomainen

March 1, 2025

 

“Actuarial mathematics is a discipline that combines mathematics and 

statistical analysis to assess the likelihood – or risk – of any eventuality…”

                                                                                                                                Antti Tuomainen (1971-)

                                                                                                                                The Rabbit Factor, 2021

 

Serendipity lives. A grandson gave me this book for my birthday, not because he had read it or knew anything about its Finnish author. He gave it to me because the title caught his attention. His father always called him Rabbit. Whatever his reason, I’m glad he did. I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

 

Despite the epigraph, the story, thank God, has nothing to with insurance. It is a thriller. The hero Henri Koskinen is a 42-year-old actuary, at least when we meet him. In his nerdiness, he will remind you of Hermione Granger. He lives alone with his cat “Schopenhauer,” a fitting name given Henri’s insurance job of calculating risk and odds. Henri has one wish: “I wanted everything to be sensible.” But the insurance company that employs him goes “woke,” or at least Henri’s boss does; so Henri is told he is too skeptical, too pessimistic, that he is missing, you know, “…the whole community vibe” thing. Thus Henri is fired.

 

Almost immediately, and conveniently for the story, his brother Juhani, who is the antithesis of Henri in terms of common sense, dies. Henri, then, inherits his brother’s adventure park, YouMeFun, located outside Helsinki. Juhani, who never had Henri’s gift for numbers, had become involved with loan sharks. Circling the adventure park, they are hungry when Henri arrives.

 

The park staff form the supporting cast: Laura, the manager and former (and future) artist, with a mysterious background; Kristian, the caretaker who is angling to become general manager; Joanna, who efficiently runs the Curly Cake Café; Minttu, who is in charge of marketing and who has a love affair with gin; Samppa, a former nursery school teacher, runs themed events for children; and Venla, who is supposed to work at the gate, but is usually too sick to show up.

 

What we have is a mystery but one enveloped in humor. Of one of his earlier novels, The Man Who Died, The New York Times said: “You don’t expect to laugh when you’re reading about terrible crimes, but that’s what you’ll do when you pick up one of Tuomainen’s decidedly quirky thrillers.” In this, despite a few despicable acts, Henri’s career as an actuary serves him well. He is expert at determining probabilities, whether someone is coming after him with a knife or a car. The horror we feel is countered by humor. We understand why Tuomainen has been called the Finnish “King of Noir Comedy.”

 

In the course of the story, Henri discovers there is more to life than mathematics, that passion, both for the adventure park and for Laura, is a delightful sensation. Indicative of my enthusiasm, I have bought the second book in this series, The Moose Paradox, published in 2022.