New republics

There was a time when libertarians fantasized about starting their own countries on floating platforms. Now anyone can do it from home, on a digital platform. Some of these new countries are quite big. Facebook now has 1.7 billion users, more citizens (if you want to look at it that way) than China, and more adherents than Catholicism. 

If you're thinking that websites like this are just games ('Twitter isn't real life' etc.), you'd be right. But games are a serious business. Game designer Reed Berkowitz recently explored how QAnon (whose shaman is pictured) might have grown out of the same sorts of incentives that are generated by live-action role-playing and alternate reality games. People are given a quest (Who is Q?) and the motivation to want to complete it (this will show you the way thing really are). They build a world around them without a graphics card in sight.

This may sound like a new idea, or at least an eccentric one, but it's actually a highly familiar one in political science and economics, at least in the branch of economics known as the New Institutional Economics (NIE). The Nobellist Douglass North defined institutions as 'the rules of the game' in a given society. He may have meant it as a metaphor, but there's no reason why the rules of the game can't be the rules of a literal game.

Or, say, the ways a website is set up - its terms of service, its modalities, its incentive structures. The differences between social media sites might seem like just a matter of choosing different products - Twitter allows you less space per message; this bus company lets you drink coffee onboard. But there's more going on. The different sites have a vibe, a style, even (by now) a history - and we act differently when we're on (or in) them.

That's partly because of the multiplication of incentives within these worlds. I saw a link to Berkowitz's piece on Justin Murphy's Twitter feed. Murphy left academia, as he says, 'to spend more time on research and teaching,' and he seems increasingly interested in online learning not just a site for educational content, but for educational incentives. That last thing was what MOOCs were lacking. Murphy will send you an email a day (if you want him to) to help you learn R (What is R?). Khan Academy and other sites give you points, badges, etc. so that you keep levelling up in the game of Knowledge.

Meanwhile, in the world of real games (whatever that means), video games are apparently getting longer and increasingly nesting 'micro-transactions' within them to get you to pay up for a snazzier helmet, a deadlier weapon, or a more interesting adventure. (From what I can tell, this is one of the complainers' main complaints about the beautiful Assassin's Creed Odyssey.) We're long past the point at which companies have started selling real-world products in digital universes like Second Life (in fact, that's apparently something Reed Berkowitz used to do for a living). We're surely not far from Borgesian 'games' that electro-shock your brain into suffering or ecstasy as you proceed bravely through their new world.

But we're off on a side-quest now, so let's go back to something I wrote before. The different social media sites that already exist, I said, 'have a vibe, a style, even (by now) a history - and we act differently when we're on (or in) them.' If this reminds you of countries, well, that was sort of the point. Diving into an online community is kind of like visiting a foreign country and immersing itself into its exotic ways, its alien norms.

The reason countries used to be so different was because they had different pasts that led to different institutions, norms, customs - a different cultural infrastructure that in turn helped shape the way people were. I'm old enough to remember a time when people would talk openly about the way different countries (and its inhabitants) were, and even if some of this was ignorant or over-confident, some of it seemed about right. It had to be, in a sense - if changing laws or customs has any power to change behaviours, countries with different laws and customs should have a different vibe.

Of course, they still do, to a great extent, and this should remind us of something. The kinds of incentive structures nations have built up over the centuries are pretty formidable, and some of the axes they wield (like laws) ultimately trump the structures set up by social media companies. Twitter can oust Trump from its platform, true, but Twitter still ultimately exists at the pleasure of the US and other governments. Nation-states aren't going away any time soon, and their age-old institutions and norms continue to shape us in profound ways.

Still, sites like the United States of America are starting to seem a bit last century. If it's incentives and information that shape people, especially as they move like questers through whatever spaces open before them, trying to make meaning out of their lives - if that's what is forming individuals and communities, Arizona and Invercargill are really no match for the world wide web. What we'll have - what we to some extent already have - will be new republics shaped online, with new compatriots that are as different, and sometimes as hostile, to each other as Spaniards and Swedes were in 1634. 

The only difference is that this time, the citizens of these new republics - dressed differently, speaking different and mutually unintelligible languages, worshiping different gods - won't be separated by channels or ranges, but will be living side-by-side. And when fighting breaks out, as it has already started to, old-timers speaking of 'internal' or 'civil' war won't seem alarmist, but just quaint. 

How the attention economy is sucking our will to platform

 

People (like the economist Ashley Hodgson) have long been talking about 'the attention economy.' When I first heard about it, it sounded liberatory and utopian: with the advent of the internet, the theory went, people would be paid as a kind of tribute for work they'd chosen to do, kind of like how you leave coins for a busker. 

Nowadays, the attention economy has more dystopian overtones. A friend of mine from college worked for years for a company that built super-computers to calculate the value of bits of space on the internet and bid against other super-computers in instantaneous, online options. Apparently that kind of thing is going on all the time, humming along in vast rows of air-conditioned calculation.

And more than that: basically everyone in the developed world now, from big tech companies to online sex workers, is trying to get your attention. (Me too, sort of.) OK, they may not be aiming at your attention in particular, but, in general, the more attention the better.

Of course, that was always sort of the case. Vendors in markets from time immemorial have shouted at passers-by to try to get them to buy their goods. Then there was advertising, which obviously didn't start with the internet. Getting someone's attention has always been the first step to getting some of their money.

As with other aspects of life, in some ways what the internet has done is simply speed everything up and expand it to a global scale. But social media especially has also introduced a new form of currency in the form of likes, followers, and so on. In the world of the bird app, or of the codex of visages, it's the man with many followers who's king.

And online publications like Quillette and Vox have, obviously, gained influence (and income) by gaining re-tweets rather than by selling collections of the articles in the form of glossy magazines. This has led to one of those little features of online life that runs up against the norms of anybody with a liberal education from more than 10 years go: people refusing to share links to a piece they then condemn.

The reason that seems so weird is that there used to be a strong norm in intellectual life that you didn't hide books or articles or try to stop their circulation. Imagine if I'd said to my fellow students 15 or 20 years ago 'I've read this book I strongly disagreed with but which has been influential; I therefore won't name it, and in fact I've withdrawn it from the library and hid it under a bush so that it won't circulate further.' They would have thought I was bonkers, not to mention that I was curtailing open debate and infringing on their own freedom to read what they saw fit.

I do think all these points still hold today for those who refuse to link to pieces they hate; but I can also see where they're coming from. They're right that clicks help websites, in a way that lending someone a book didn't help Penguin or Anthony Kenny. They're anxiously aware of the importance of attention in the new ecosystem we now live in - and they're keen to deny its oxygen to their enemies. 

All of this might, to some extent, help explain the recent vogue for de-platformings - that is, preventing people from hearing someone speak on campus because you don't like them or what they have to say. This kind of thing is yet another phenomenon that even people as young as this blogger tend to find pretty peculiar - it's another thing that, I think, most of my fellow undergraduates in the first few years of the millennium would have seen as obviously not the way to behave.

One way of looking at what's going on with de-platformings is to think about what the de-platformers think they're doing. One of the things they think they're doing, I would submit, is akin to not linking to a Quillette article. They see their campuses like their chirrup or mug-scroll feeds, and they don't want them to contribute to funnelling more attention towards Christina Sommers (or whoever). 

I remember hearing one of the bullies who tried to shut down Sommers' talk at Lewis & Clark Law School  saying something like 'You already know what she's going to say from YouTube.' Again, she's still wrong to act in the repressive way she did - Sommers still had a right to speak, and the students to hear her - but I think I now understand a bit more about why that student was acting as she was. 

Back in the day, Bjorn Lomborg (or whoever) coming to speak was interesting partly because you got something you didn't get from reading his articles or books. Nowadays, you can easily access recordings of public intellectuals online. But the mention of YouTube, I think, also suggests that the student was thinking of Sommers' appearance very much in internet terms. She didn't see the talk as a source of ideas or as an experience - she saw it as a kind of bid in a game whose point is to amass the most attention-chips. She saw it as she might have viewed a fellow student sharing a Sommers YouTube talk on social media. 

Christina Sommers giving a talk, Bruce Gilley publishing an article - back in the last millennium the obviously correct reaction to such things would have seemed, to most sane individuals, even those who disagreed with them, not much. Maybe they would have gone along and asked a critical question; maybe they would have written a letter to the student paper. Other people paying attention to such things didn't seem much of a threat.

On the online world, though, especially on social media, life is a high-stakes (OK, low-stakes, but it feels high-stakes) battle for attention. Attention accruing to your ideological rival empowers them and thus seems to threaten your own views and values. This economy of attention has become a kind of vortex, not only sucking previously rather somnolent groups like classicists into it, but also exerting its sucking effect on what's left of the offline world. The online economy of attention is sucking at our universities like a horrific hair-cutting 'solution'; and it's sucking at our will to let people explore ideas. 

Be with us now

 

In the depths of the lockdown, in the middle of my fortnight's stay at a quarantine hotel, I saw my friend. He was standing there at the end of my bed. He was smiling, and exuding the same bonhomie as ever. But the feeling I had upon seeing him wasn't joy. Why not? Because he had died a few months earlier. 

If I was living in a less rationalistic culture - any other culture than the one I do live in - I have no doubt I would be talking about that episode as the visitation of a ghost, spirit, or angel. As it is, I'm more inclined to believe it was a dream. Though maybe a dream of a particular sort, born of particular circumstances. 

I'm talking about lockdown dreams, the particularly vivid dreams that people have been reporting after weeks of being cooped up at home or in a hotel, sometimes without seeing another living person for weeks on end. These dreams come in different shapes and sizes, and not all of them involve people, but the ones that do suggest an obvious explanation. Are these dreams the result of our brains' effort to make up for the lack of human contact by providing us with the images of our friends?

It's interesting to me that, in the same period that I had the dream I mentioned, I was also praying to Mary with the rosary, something I'd never done before in my life (I've never been a Catholic, and I'm not one now). There were other reasons for that (I'd just been in a city with some beautiful Catholic churches, where I'd been exposed to and drawn to the practice), but it has struck me that it is a style of meditation that involves, first and foremost, calling upon a figure, a personality, a person.

Prayer, of course, often works in this way. Christians call upon God, Jesus, Mary, and various other saints. Muslims call upon Allah. Buddhists call upon Buddha and numerous bodhisattvas and spirits (and sometimes even visualise them as a form of meditation). Ancient Greeks who were ailing would call upon the healing God Asclepius and then go to sleep in one of his sanctuaries, where he would then appear to them in dreams. 

There are many reasons why people pray, but one may just be loneliness. We want another presence in the room, in our lives, for the night. In a sense, religious activity is a way of inviting people over, for dinner, say, and is often figured as such - the Greeks imagined the gods enjoying the smoke from their sacrificial feasts, and the Christian Eucharist re-enacts the Last Supper, seeing Christ as really (or symbolically) present once again. 

The many different forms of religious ritual obviously imagine different sorts of togetherness with different supernatural guests. And, as with ordinary guests, we may want to invite them over for different reasons. We may want to invite over someone powerful and reassuring, someone who will allow us to sleep with some sense of safety. We may want a mother-figure to smile down on us and tell us everything will be alright. We may want a raucous fellow-reveller like Dionysos.

None of this is to suggest that sending out invitations of this sort is necessarily a silly thing to do, even if we don't happen to believe that any of the guests are really going to be there. Whether or not we find it silly may, in any case, in some sense be neither here nor there. It may simply be something we humans do during lockdowns, in the desert, in the hour of our death. We find other ways of having our friends over, other ways of seeing them. 

Harsh but unfair

 

I remember reading once, in a book on Athenian law (perhaps this one) that anthropologists had observed that in societies where criminals were less likely to be apprehended, penalties were harsher. It made sense; after all, modern developed countries, with their highly developed surveillance technology, have (by historical standards) strikingly lenient punishment regimes; pre-modern ones, by contrast, which had zero or only rudimentary policing, had more of a tendency to turn to the gallows, the guillotine - or the gulp of hemlock.

The observation came back to me recently in connection with the current vogue for 'cancelling.' The frequency of this phenomenon has been questioned, but what seems to concern many people isn't necessarily how widespread it is, but how harsh the punishments can be. A disabled grandfather is sacked for sharing a comedy sketch. A researcher loses his job for re-tweeting a study about the effectiveness of peaceful compared with violent protest. And all the while, not-especially-controversial views and tame jokes elicit the kind of fury that used to be reserved for blood feuds. 

Given the many instances of such 'cancellations' that have occurred, it might seems strange that a good few people continue to insist that the whole phenomenon is made up. But there might be a way of explaining both why they think that and why some of these same people engage in such disproportionately harsh punishings of individuals who violates their norms. 

The reason they think the free speech crisis isn't really a crisis is partly because they see people saying things they dislike all the time. That's been one of the effects of the explosion of social media: whereas twenty years ago you wouldn't often be exposed to views from outside your thought-world, and you'd have to put in some work to have your views broadcast, now it's easy to post things and even easier to see things others have posted. 

If you have narrow parameters for what ideas are acceptable, it follows that you're likely to see quite a lot of what are to you unacceptable ideas. Twitter must be terrifying - all those people saying things you think are terrible! What's more, most of them are getting away scot free.

The temptation, then, is to make an example of anyone you are in a positions to punish, pour décourager les autres. This is what ancient societies were up to as well. It makes sense, especially if you consider the point of view of the potential criminal. 

You can look at risk as the combination of how likely a bad thing is to happen, and how bad it will be if it does. You may not be that likely to fall of the cliff if you go right up to the edge, but if you slip you'll die, so why risk it? If you're in a society without a functioning police force, the chance you'll be apprehended for doing something bad is pretty low. One way for the state to increase the risk you face (and hence deter you from wrongdoing), is to increase the penalty you risk facing. You think you probably won't get caught, but if you do...

The temptation to make an example of someone might be especially great when there are artificial barriers in the way of punishing other people who are up to the activity you dislike. For example, if a lot of the people saying things you find unacceptable are represented by anonymous Twitter accounts. Or if there's been a state amnesty saying you can't punish any of the members of a tyrannical junta.

That last thing, of course, is what happened in Athens after the murderous regime of the so-called Thirty Tyrants. Once the democracy had been restored, there seems to have been an agreement not to prosecute anyone involved with the Thirty, except for the Thirty themselves (some of whom had already been killed in the process of restoring the democracy). (What exactly the amnesty required is, like most things in ancient history, a little bit controversial).

In 399, only four years after the Thirty had been toppled, the philosopher Socrates, who had links to some of the Thirty (including Critias, one of the more extreme members), was executed on a vote of a popular jury. Why? It's complicated; there were lots of factors that led to that outcome, including the way he went about defending himself (if that was even what he was up to) in court. 

But one possibility is that his prosecutors indicted him on a charge of inventing new gods and corrupting the youth precisely because they couldn't prosecute him for what they were really angry at him for - the actions of the Thirty. And they also couldn't prosecute many of the people who they knew had collaborated with the Thirty. Nor could they prosecute Critias and others who were already dead. But Socrates was there, still going about his business asking irritating questions in public...

Note that the theory, if it's right, explains not only the excessiveness of the punishings but also the way they have of mistaking their object. At least, it looks an awful lot like all of the guilt for something is being loaded onto the back of one, unfortunate person who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That, of course, is another phenomenon that's familiar to anthropologists: scapegoating. 

One way to stop this sort of thing, as you might guess, is to get better at apprehending wrong-doers. But it's very questionable in cases like the ones mentioned above (sharing comedy sketches and so on) whether anyone's done anything wrong at all. Another way is to reduce narrow-minded people's exposure to views they find distasteful. 

Doing that by force would be wrong (people should be free to go on social media, of course), but it might be advisable, considering the kinds of moral risks involved, for some people to think twice about the amount of time they spend online. In other words, if you can't deal with different ideas, it might be best just to stay off Twitter. Otherwise you might find yourself with a cup of hemlock in your hand - handing it to an innocent person. 

Dropping the past

 

Stephen Jones recently put out his list of the best rugby union teams of all time. Like a lot of these 'best of' lists, it doesn't seem to be based on much more than Jones' impressions and memories. His list doesn't go back further than the 1970s. Can we do better?

To start with we'll need to think about what we mean by 'the best.' Does that mean the 'with the best record'? In that case we'll need to bear in mind how much teams played - winning 15 matches in a year is harder than winning 5. Do we mean 'the best relative to contemporary rivals?' If so we'll want to have a sense of how strong the teams of various different eras were. Or do we just mean 'the best at rugby'? The problem with that approach is that it's no fun, since the pro teams of today would clearly have destroyed the amateur sides of yesteryear. 

And anyway, rugby teams play against other teams around at the same time, not against teams from 50 years ago. Supremacy in the present is the name of the game. So let's go with 'best relative to their contemporary rivals.' Note that if we're really focused on who's the best - as in, most likely to win - we'll have to be disciplined and not care so much about who has the most iconic players, who won the most memorable series, who had the most positive cultural impact, etc. Those things might be more important in saying which teams were the greatest, but not so much which were the best.

The next thing to think about is what we mean by a 'team.' Teams change over time. There's probably some form of fancy analysis that could be done tracking the similarity of teams over time, but I don't know how to do it. And some teams are clearly more stable than others. Touring teams and tournament sides probably produce the most similar lineups, since they're drawn from a squad that's brought together for a particular period of time. 

So, for what it's worth, here's my list. 

1. New Zealand 2011-17. An 100% record in tests in 2013, 17 consecutive victories up to June 2014, 1st place in the Rugby Championship six times, plus a couple of World Cups. Thrashed the Springboks 57-0 in 2017.

2. South Africa 1949-52. Won test series against All Blacks 4-0, and then went on their own tour of the five nations, beating them all (including Scotland 44-0) and losing only 1 of their 31 matches overall. 

3. New Zealand 1905-6, the original All Blacks. Toured Britain, France, and North America winning 35 out of 36, scoring 976 points and conceding 59. 

4. England 2002-3. They didn't win the 2002 Six Nations, but won the Grand Slam in 2003. Beat the Springboks 53-3 at home and the Wallabies and All Blacks both home and away. Beat Australia again in the final to take the World Cup.

5. The 1924-25 All Blacks, dubbed The Invincibles' after winning all of their 32 matches (including one against each of the home nations). Points for: 838. Against: 116.

6. The 1937 Springboks, also dubbed 'The Invincibles,' slightly less deservingly, after suffering only two losses on a 29-match tour of Australia and New Zealand. 

7. New Zealand in the late 60s. A series victory against the Springboks in 1965 kickstarted a 17-match winning streak that was ended only in 1969 by Wales. 

8. South Africa 1995-1998. After the World Cup victory they lost a test series at home to the All Blacks for the first time in 1996, but they then swept the Tri-Nations in 1998, winning 17 consecutive matches. 
 
9. Australia 1999-2001. Two Tri-Nations victories following on from the 1999 World Cup. 

10. Wales in the 70s. Won 7 Five Nations championships including 3 Grand Slams. Lost both tests against NZ in 1969, and could only draw against South Africa the following year. Lost to NZ again in 1978. Formed the core of the British Lion team that won the test series in NZ in 1971.

In praise of prose

Near the end of his mammoth 6-volume Oxford History of Western Music (which, I must confess, I haven't read all the way through), Richard Taruskin suggests that musical notation may now have outlived its usefulness. Notation emerged in order to preserve and transmit music, to enable other people to play something far beyond the context it was originally composed in. But when I can upload my latest composition straight onto YouTube (be warned), why bother writing it down?

A few years ago, the top Facebook execs apparently decided that prose was going the way of musical notation, if not necessarily the dodo. Their thinking was similar to Taruskin's. Now that we can just speak into a camera and upload the video onto the world-wide web (as they're calling it), why would anyone go to the trouble of writing their thoughts down? 

The huge shift to video on social media that the tech execs anticipated hasn't quite materialized (at least not yet). There are a lot more videos online, and YouTube has become a venue for spoken commentary and argumentation (what the Greeks would have called rhetoric) from ordinary citizens in a way that was never quite possible in the world of TV, with its relatively few channels overseen by hierarchical corporations. And yet, people are also still writing a lot of prose.

I think that's a good thing. The written word, you see, still has its advantages.

The main one is that it allows both writer and reader to take things at their own pace. That means you can wait till you're really sure of what you're saying to write it down. You can look up everything you can find bearing for or against your argument and include it in a footnote. You can even change your mind and write a completely different sentence to the one you thought you'd be writing. And your reader can go back and puzzle out what you've written if they don't quite get it the first time round. They can pause for a while to ponder what you've said before moving on to the next paragraph.

Writing also has some plus points when compared to conversation. Now, I'm aware we're all intensely aware of the joys of in-the-flesh interaction at the moment, after weeks if not months of lockdown. In-person conversation has its plus points too (not least of which is that we seem to find it inherently enjoyable). But we're also all aware, I think, that there are things we choose not to say to people's faces. Often that's a very good thing. Often it's a result of an apparently natural tendency to want to be kind to each other. At other times it can be a result of hierarchy or outright intimidation. That means it can often be easier to state what we really think in the privacy of our own rooms (or, at least,  behind the partial screen of a laptop screen).

Of course, many people are retreating to their rooms to voice their thoughts - they're just doing so into a camera rather than on a page. They're obviously free to do so - I'll defend their right to that to the death, even if Voltaire might not really. But what shift to video there has been has brought with it its own issues. We're rarely intimidated in front of someone talking to us on YouTube in the way we might be in real life, and (as comment sections attest) we usually feel free to reply in ways we wouldn't in person (sometimes even to a pathological degree). But videos do transmit things about a person - like passion and attractiveness - in a way that often distracts us from the tough but necessary work of evaluating claims on their merits. Since the types of charisma that videos transmit aren't equably distributed, it can also exacerbate various forms of privilege.

All that, obviously, is why I've written this entry. 

Bow, wow

My first Greek teacher at school was one of those wizened, old-school schoolmasters they don't seem to make anymore. He was a deeply civilized man - he played the cello and the piano to concert standard as well as being able to talk more entertainingly about Cicero (an advanced skill in itself). He was usually kindly and often humorous, but he also had a stern side. I remember him leaning over my friend (who had just farted in class), his face inches away, pronouncing, very distinctly, 'Let nothing get in the way of learning!' It was rumoured he'd been in the SAS. When we got too rowdy supporting the First XV he would simply walk along the touchline and we'd all go quiet.

It was the same walk as he had in chapel. Somehow he was always the last one in, though I don't think that was an official role. We'd all be fidgeting, gossiping, poking each other with compasses, that sort of thing. He would walk down the aisle, his clipping shoes sealing up the silence behind him like he was zipping up the door of a tent. And when he got to the end, he would bow his head to the altar.

It was interesting to me partly because he was usually so upright. Later I encountered the same oscillation between bowing and upright posture at the San Francisco Zen Centre. It took me years of experience with different Buddhist groups before I could put aside my distaste for bowing to Buddha statues. Whether it was a Western egalitarianism or a Protestant distaste for idols, I didn't like it. Part of me still doesn't. And - something it's taken me years to admit to myself - part of me does.

The rationale for the formal postures they have at Western Zen centres tends to focus on mindfulness. Bowing and then standing upright and so on at different times certainly does require a certain alertness, but there's also something else going on. Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of the SF centre, apparently tripled the number of bows there because he thought Westerners needed to 'get their heads down.' The Tibetans who do full protestations have a phrase about that practice as a way to 'turn the cup upside down.' Bowing is, in other words, a way of practising and cultivating humility.

But it can also go deeper. Pack animals that have clear hierarchies in the wild - dogs, for example - seem to feel more secure in the presence of a undisputed top dog (a role human owners have stepped into). We may have something of this in ourselves. Bowing to Christ or the Buddha may be as much about handing over responsibility to them as anything else. And surrendering responsibility over ourselves is something we seem to find strangely comforting. There's something of this in the erotic sphere too, with a whole subculture of people who enjoy putting themselves in subordinate positions. Kneeling as part of oral sex and as part of religious ritual may not be as far apart as we like to think (a similarity that's been noted by generations of poets).

An increase in humility in one person is often accompanied by a growth in pride somewhere else, though, and humility can sit dangerously close to humiliation. That's what used to give me the willies about bowing, and still does occasionally. The Kings of Persia used to demand a full prostration from their vassals, something the Greeks called proskynesis. (Earlier, Kings of Assyria had required the same form of obeisance; below is the black obelisk of Shalmeneser III, who is standing over the defeated Jehu of Israel). When Alexander the Great started demanding similar treatment, his Greek and Macedonian peers took it as a sign of a slide towards tyranny. Forcing people into head-down positions and onto the ground can be elements of torture, featured from medieval heresy trials to the prisons at Abu Ghraib.

The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick's ritual of 'taking a knee' in protest against perceived injustice has now been more widely adopted as part of the 'Black Lives Matter' movement. The posture is uncannily similar to the way Catholics genuflect to the altar. That, of course, isn't necessarily to the discredit either of the protests or of Catholicism. As we've seen, bowing clearly has deep roots in human psychology as an expression of devotion. It's a central part of the human palette of gestures, as much as hugging someone or jumping for joy.

As the same time, given its potential for abuse it's easy to see why some (like the UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab) have refused to take a knee, seeing it as a symbol of submission. That it clearly is, though perhaps what's really going on in such cases isn't a distaste for submission in any context, but simply for submission to that particular cause (and Raab did indicate that he would bend the knee for the Queen). My old Greek master bowed to his idea of God, but apparently not for much else. This might be part of the point of religious types of bowing, to find a way of satisfying the human urge for submission in a way that nonetheless preserves our independence. Whether that works out in practice will depend partly on your idea of God.

Others will particularize their acts of submission, holding their heads up high in everyday life while choosing not to in certain contexts. But it might make sense to always remain a little on guard wherever we choose to bow our heads. I know it's possible to get too hung up on this; after all, bowing is a very common way simply of greeting other people across the Far East. But when it comes to more ritualized bowing, the kind of bowing that turns your heart upside down, it might be worth choosing your masters wisely. Be careful, in other words, what you bow to.