Kerim's Triptych for Sunday November 17th, 2024

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1️⃣ Sortition

In "The Case for Abolishing Elections," by Nicholas Coccoma (published in the Boston Review), he challenges the notion that representative democracy is the best way to govern a modern nation-state. To make his case, he goes back to ancient Athens, arguing that:

The Athenians weren’t fools; they learned through bitter trials that elections are tools of elites. Having seen the Athenian experiment himself, Aristotle noted as much. “The appointment of magistrates by lot is democratical,” he observes in Politics, “and the election is oligarchical.”

Sortition, the random selection of public officials from the populace, is not a perfect solution — nothing is. But even the ancient Athenians knew of ways to mitigate some of its dangers.

To enhance accountability and preserve popular control, the Athenians employed measures like formal review of selected citizens before they officially took office (dokimasia), scrutiny of their performance (euthynai), impeachment (eisangelia), censure (atimia), and ostracism of corrupt officials.

He quotes C. L. R. James, who said: “We must get rid of the idea that there was anything primitive in the organization of the government of Athens.”

Nor is the article solely about ancient history — read the full story to learn how some modern democracies are trying to implement these ideas.

2️⃣ Ephaptic field effects

Writing in Scientific American, Tamlyn Hunt describes a major breakthrough in neuroscience: the measurement of ephaptic field effects. "These effects, resulting from the electric fields produced by neurons rather than their synaptic firings, may play a leading role in our mind’s workings."

While not entirely new — it was understood, for instance, that the retinal neurons which allow us to see work without any neural firing, instead relying on some kind of electrodiffusion — some recent studies have enabled scientists to measure ephaptic field effects for the first time. These findings suggest that "the speed of propagation of ephaptic fields in gray matter is about 5,000 times faster than neural firing," which has even led some scientists to make the extraordinary claim that "ephaptic field effects may in fact be the primary mechanism for consciousness and cognition, rather than neural firing."

It is too early to judge whether such claims will hold up, but it may point to an exciting new era for the study of human consciousness.

3️⃣ The "garbage time of history”

In the China Digital Times, Alexander Boyd writes about "the latest term to sweep the Chinese internet":

the “garbage time of history” (歷史的垃圾時間).

Coined by the essayist Hu Wenhui in a 2023 WeChat post, “the garbage time of history” refers to the period when a nation or system is no longer viable—when it has ceased to progress, but has not yet collapsed. Hu defined it as the point at which “the die is cast and defeat is inevitable. Any attempt to struggle against it is futile.” Hu’s sweeping essay led with Soviet stagnation under Brezhnev and then jumped nimbly between the historiography of the collapse of the Ming Dynasty and Lu Xun’s opinions on Tang Dynasty poetry.

The article goes on to describe how "Chinese Internet users have adopted of the term as a way to express bleak sentiments about the Chinese economy."

My favorite comment on this story was from the historian Bruce Buchan, on Bluesky, who wrote: "I can never remember which year is for garbage and which is for recycling."

Endnote

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