The WEIRD story so far...

Before I move on with the WEIRD theme, I want to do a bit of summing up and pulling-together of threads.

I started out with a discussion of cultural relativism, imperialism and human rights. There, I highlighted the unsatisfactory clash between relativism and human rights - that is, that if we want to say there are universal human rights, then we must be prepared to condemn the cultures whose values disagree - but also the danger of imperialism, the danger of forcing values on a culture (or individual) which are grounded in our own assumptions rather than any kind of universal principle.

We can think of this second danger as a risk of oppression. The risk is that, for some definition of 'legitimate', we may prevent other people making legitimate choices simply because those choices make us uncomfortable and we find ourselves in positions of power. For example, a favourite question of moral philosophers is whether it's ever OK to stop someone doing, for pleasure, something that harms theirself and no-one else (my A-level teacher's example of this was a group of men who used to get together to nail their scrotums to things for masochistic pleasure, and I still cringe every time I type that sentence...). Do people have a right to seek pleasure at their own expense? What limits should we put on this, if any? This is too big and complicated a question for this post, though.

What I've been asking, throughout the series, is whether there are some values which can be upheld as human rights, or as universal in some other way - that is, are there any values which we can always say it's better to have, or at least worse to lack? One test (perhaps even the only test) that any such value must pass, then, is the test of oppression; we can think of this as the question 'Will this value, if universalised, restrict the choices of those on whom it is imposed in any unacceptable way?'

And I've gone on to argue that the quartet of WEIRD values (Education, Industrialisation, Richness/wealth and Democracy) pass this test, despite what we might otherwise think. Specifically, I showed that, properly construed, they could only increase freedom. It's not necessarily trivially true that an increase in actual freedom involves no oppression, but that's a question that I'll return to in another post. Here, in summary, are the arguments I've presented:

Education. I defined the essence of education as the ability to perceive the existence of multiple conflicting value systems (eg. political ideologies, religions etc.), combined with the ability to analyse these systems relative to one's own character. My claim, ultimately, is that without these two abilities, one cannot truly hold any value at all, since one's choice can only have come from chance, or indoctrination. A value-choice must be autonomous to count, and without taking a critical, multidimensional approach to such a choice, autonomy is blindfolded.

Industrialisation. I definied industrialisation as a kind of efficiency - the ability to do more with less effort. As such it cannot be other than a lifting of limits on choice. Efficiency is not always a major factor in value choices, but it always helps, and sometimes it is essential to a desirable outcome (as, for example, if you must choose which of two different charities, one for cancer research and the other for child poverty, to give a portion of your limited disposable income to - if you could earn and/or live more efficiently, you'd have a greater disposable income and be able to support both causes).

Richness. I defined wealth as means. That is, the means to implement some or all of one's value decisions. A value decision without action is empty and meaningless - it is action which forms the content of the decision. If you lack the means to act on a given value (for example, I am not in a position to afford any of the procedures which would give meaning to my assertion of extropian values), then you can hold that value in only the most attenuated way. To put it another way, poverty - the lack of means - is an oppressor (a theme to which I'll return). Greater personal means can never be a bad thing, though of course one can do more bad things with greater means, which brings us to...

Democracy. In many ways, the tricky one. Democracy does limit choices, by definition; it is about people reaching compromises between each other's desires, each giving up part of what they want. On the other hand, what they get in exchange, in theory, is freedom from having the choices of others imposed on them. Think of it like this: in true democracy, one freely agrees to limit one's own choices in exchange for everyone else doing the same, so that no-one actually forces a choice on anyone else (obviously, this is a highly idealised picture of human affairs, but this is a debate about principle, not practice).

Perhaps I've used these terms in slightly revisionary ways, though I hope I've justified my revisions in the individual posts; at least, I don't think my definitions are any worse than the conventional understandings. Going forward, I'll be looking at why this unifying theme of freedom and wider choice is important. I'll start by looking at what 'freedom' might actually mean.

WEIRD Democracy

(WEIRD series introduction; Education; Industrialisation; Riches; Conclusion)

This is going to get a bit confusing. I'm quite a critic of Western democracy, but I think most people are still relatively in favour of it (or at least take Churchill's line that "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."). I'm now going to argue that all these opinions are based on a bad concept of democracy, and that when you dig deeper, you do get to a value that can be prescribed universally along with the rest of the WEIRD set.

Let's start with the problem: do you actually feel represented by the people you voted for to represent you? The answer, in all likelihood, is 'no', and with some justification.

Our periodic-vote, representative system of democracy (of which the governments of all the major Western nations, as far as I'm aware, are versions) has two problems: political campaigns are expensive, and we rely on the mass media industry to tell us about them. In essence, money and screen time are the biggest influencers of the results. The rich and well-connected are much more likely to end up in office, and if the last five years have shown us anything at all, it's that most of them simply don't understand what life is like for those less fortunate.

It's not universally true. But the very fact that we need news stories like that one underlines the point very nicely.

There's a clue to the underlying issue if we go back to that Churchill quote, specifically this bit: '[D]emocracy is the worst form of government'. It's when we think of democracy purely as a method of choosing our leaders that we get problems. In philosophical circles, it's oft-discussed, somewhat tritely, that the ancient Greeks who 'invented' democracy did not employ our concept of representation, instead allowing all citizens (though not all people) a vote on policy matters - this works when you've only got 30-60,0000 citizens, but not for a country of 60million like Britain. But there is something useful to take from the Greeks; they coined the term 'democracy', which comes from demos (people) and kratia (power/rule). 'People Power'.

Doesn't actually sound a lot like democracy as we know it, right? How many times have you felt powerless in the face of your government recently? For me, pretty much everything I've been aware of my government doing from the decision to go to war in Iraq onwards has been something I'd rather they not do.

What I'm getting at is this: true democracy, true people power, looks more like

than

This is a point well-made in this article that I linked right at the start of this series;

"If WEIRD college students aren’t voting in large numbers, for example, and feel profoundly alienated from politics, isn’t it problematic to think of ‘democracy’ as shaping their attitudes? I’d be more inclined to say we should examine the landless farmers in Brazil I worked with while studying the Landless Movement to understand ‘democratic’ populations. They had long community meetings modeled on the labour movement or anarchist movement to come to decisions. I doubt my university students in the US had experienced anything nearly as ‘democratic.’"

Are we really that democratic in the West? By some measures, voter apathy is at an all-time high. We feel disenfranchised, even if technically we're blessed with the most open franchises in history. Heck, for the first time in a very long time, the UK government is a coalition, and it's one that no-one who voted for any of the parties involved ever imagined they were voting for.

The point is, we're not engaged. Democracy is engagement with the dictates and processes of society. It's about knowing what's happening in your society and the world as a whole, understanding how it will affect you, and taking steps to change things whose effects you're unhappy with.

If education is about the ability to make judgements about a value and to hold some values as one's own, and industry and wealth are about the ability to act on value judgements, we can see democracy as the crucial final step of harmonising our judgements and actions with those of others. It's about setting limits on our freedoms so that we don't transgress the freedoms of others. It's also about coordination - if you aren't able to do something by yourself, you can engage with others to find like-minded people to work with.

A favourite refrain of post-modern cultural relativists is that some cultures (apparently the Chinese in particular, or at least so I'm always being told) favour authoritarian governance to democracy, and that may be the case in terms of a system of governance, but I don't believe it's the case more widely. You can have democracy in our sense under an absolute ruler provided that ruler can be induced to listen to his/her people (and, lest we get all high and mighty about our democracies, how often do our leaders listen to us?).

All through this series, I've been out to demonstrate that there's no risk of oppression by cultural imperialism in prescribing these values for all cultures. In fact, I've been trying to show that the WEIRD values are the best way to prevent oppression. And democracy, fundamentally, is (should be) about finding compromises that everyone can accept - policies that everyone can endorse and thus no-one feels oppressed by (note: there's a difference between 'not getting everything you want' and 'oppression', something far too many radicals on all sides would do well to remember).

WEIRD Riches

(WEIRD series introduction; Education; Industrialisation; Democracy; Conclusion)

If I tell you it's always better to be rich, you're going to protest, right? You'll think of Scrooge and Scrooge McDuck, or worse yet Ayn Rand and John Galt.

Well, bear with me. I'm no objectivist, that's for sure. I fully accept that financial wealth is a dangerous chimera, and that most of the modern super-rich are not to be trusted (though, it must be said, not all). As ever, I'm more interested in the abstract idea of wealth than the ordinary-language use of the term.

So what do we really mean by 'wealth'? I've talked both in this series and elsewhere about time as a kind of wealth, but while that's a step in the right direction, it doesn't go far enough. We need to ask why time is wealth, and the answer to this is that you need time, basically, in order to do stuff. Wealth is about means - the means to survive and to do more than survive. So really, for wealth to be a universal value in the sense we've been going on and on about in this series, all I need to show is that it's always better to be able to do more things.

In some ways, your reaction to this idea will depend on your opinion of general human nature. Your head may now be filled with nightmare visions of us rampaging unfettered across the galaxy, tainting everything we touch, or you may be mentally cataloguing all the amazing and wonderful achievements of our species instead.

Ultimately, though, it comes back again to a kind of freedom. Just as education frees you to choose your own values, and industrialisation frees you from wasting effort on things you don't value, wealth means freer choice of what you actually do because it means more options to choose from. Most crucially, wealth means you're more likely to be able to do things you value.

Our theme, the whole point of this series, has been values that actually justify a kind of imperialism; values we can advocate universally without risking harm to other cultures. The risk we want to avoid is overruling the decisions of other cultures about their own values, or to put it another way, the danger of imperialism is its potential to oppress. What we are looking for, then, are values that can only ever be forces for liberation (and, yes, there's a question to be asked over the value of freedom, but in the sense that I mean it, I believe I have an answer - though that's a question for another time).

It's true that when we think about the idea of wealth typical of Western society, we think about material wealth. And it's unquestionably true that exporting materialist culture in the way that we've been doing quite enthusiastically for at least the last 200 years (as a particularly good example, look at what happened to Japan after the Second World War) has changed, twisted and damaged many cultures around the world.

This isn't because wealth is a bad thing, though; it's because materialism twists the basic concept of wealth. Materialism holds things to be of intrinsic value, whether those things are flashy cars, nice houses, works of art or consumer electronics. It's a status symbol to drive a BMW or a Lamborghini; it's a status symbol to have a big house. Materialist culture revolves around the idea that the having of things means something over and above what those things allow you to do, be or experience.

The truth of the matter, though, is that value is a fundamentally human creation (I would even go so far as to say that value-creation is the fundamental component of the human condition, but again, this is a post for another time). There's no value in a work of art except that it finds an audience. There's no value in a fast car except that someone wants to drive fast.

And if value is a fundamentally human thing, then the only intrinsic values must be human values - things that are intrinsic to us, not the things we happen to possess. The value of an inert thing is only in the ways it allows us to enrich our own existence; its value is nothing more than the value of whatever it is a means to. Wealth as the accumulation of stuff, then, is only a coherent concept when the stuff is stuff which allows us to pursue our intrinsic values, whatever they are.

Perhaps it's wrong to say that wealth in this more abstract sense is a value at all (something similar might go for our efficiency-based concept of industrialisation). But whether we class it as a value or as some other, more specific category, it's always better to have it, provided it's properly understood. Wealth, ultimately, isn't something that forces you to be anything - it's what allows you to be yourself, to realise your own values.

And in that, it is as universally important as education and industry (and democracy, which we'll come onto next, and which I consider to be the hardest of these values to defend).

WEIRD Industry

(WEIRD series introduction; Education; Riches; Democracy; Conclusion)

Is industry a good thing?

Or a bad?

For that matter, do you think the former photo represents anything better than the latter?

Does industry mean dark satanic mills? Sweatshops? Mass-production and mass-consumption? It certainly produces them. As ever, though, with this series, I'm more interested in the broad principle than the actual contemporary implementation. The ills produced by rampant industry are well-documented and well-understood.

What I'm interested in, though, is what it means to be industrialised. How and why do societies come to be industrialised? Given how ugly and repugnant the edifices of industry tend to be, both environmentally and culturally, why do we have so many of them? Why do people build them, and why do the builders and owners go on to become rich?

Let's look at two key aspects of industrialisation, economy of scale and specialisation. These aren't the be-all and end-all of industry, but any attempt to define 'industry' that goes beyond a simple dictionary definition is going to mention both.

Economies of scale are familiar to us all, of course. In essence, the idea is that the bigger a process is, the less wasteful and thus more efficient it will be. This is why bulk-buying works; products bought in bulk cost less per unit to package and distribute. It's also why you make muffins in batches; you have to heat the oven up to do any muffins at all, so you might as well do as many muffins as you can fit in the oven (I'm sure there's an innuendo in that sentence somewhere...), to make most use of all that energy.

Specialisation, in this case, means everyone you employ having one particular, well-defined job to do, making them a single cog in a much bigger machine. It's the underlying principle of the production line; rather than having each employee making a whole car by himself and thus having to know how every part of a car goes together with every other part, you have one employee for each step of the process, and every one of them does that step on every car. The key here is that you then don't need to train all your employees in all the jobs - each gets one piece of training. It's easier to replace an employee who leaves, too.

It's dehumanising, true, but it's efficient - it allows the production process to function with least lost time (at least, it does when implemented correctly). And that's what all the elements of industry ultimately come down to: efficiency. Making the most productive use of all available resources - money, time, skill, raw materials etc.

So, is efficiency a universalisable value, in the way that we saw education to be last week? Should we always want things to be more efficient? One of the easiest ways to define efficiency is as the reduction of waste, so yes, there is no circumstance in which greater efficiency is a bad thing.

Some of you are about to protest that sometimes it's nice to stop and smell the roses, take the road less travelled, or do things the hard way just for the challenge, but you're missing the point. If it's 'nice' - more technically, if there's some value in doing it that way - then the time isn't wasted (unless exactly the same value can be generated a more efficient way - so you might say that actually going for a walk in the country is a better way to experience the nature-appreciating value of stopping to smell the roses while trudging through suburbia, for example).

Efficiency, basically, means getting more of the things you value for less effort - less time spent doing things you don't value. So I think it's pretty clear that efficiency in general is always better. What about the specific subsets of efficiency which are captured as 'industry', though?

Well, the key here is that industrial efficiency is about reducing the amount of time we collectively spend on survival. Centralisation and organisation have saved a vast number of work-hours for most people over the last five hundred years or so. You might still work a 40-odd hour week, but most of the earning you do in that time isn't for the means to basic sustenance (okay, this depends on what your job is and how well it pays); you're not just eking out the means to survive, you're also affording TV, internet, all mod cons and so on.

Put more generally, the point is this: industry means more time and energy to be spent on the business of choosing and living out your own values. It's not as essential as education is, but it is still always a good thing. Yes, it can be dehumanising, it can create a materialist cultural bias - but it doesn't have to. Ultimately, it's as much a form of freedom as education.

WEIRD Education

(WEIRD series introduction; Industrialisation; Riches; Democracy; Conclusion)

Okay, it's time (finally) to pick up this thread
. In that introduction to this series, I explained Jürgen Habermas' argument that human rights conflict with cultural relativism, and used it to justify, in principle, the idea of prescribing certain values as universal for all humans (indeed, all sentients, or at least all sophonts). I offered up the WEIRD quartet - Education, Industrialisation, Richness and Democracy - as possible examples, making the bold claim that I could defend their universal application.

Well, here goes. I'm starting with education because I think it's easiest to explain both the pitfalls and the ultimate defence of the topic, and it will set up quite nicely the pattern I'm going to follow throughout this series. I'm going to draw a distinction between how we actually practice education in Western culture today (and how we have practiced it for the last couple of hundred years), and what I see as the essence of the value; the latter being far more appealing than the former.

The problem with our 'old' concept of education (sadly, still prevalent today) is that it is focussed on the provision of information. For most of history, education has consisted of identifying some group of facts as important and then trying to get children to remember those facts. This becomes immensely problematic when trying to compare education between cultures - which culture should decide on what group of facts is important? Different cultures are going to advocate very different groups of facts, particularly cultural and historical facts.

Literacy and language present a great example. We can say that (with the exceptions of the authors of religious texts), Shakespeare is the most-studied and most culturally significant literary figure in history, and that therefore all people should learn about Shakespeare, but this ignores the fact that Shakespeare's prominence is really just the prominence of anglocentric culture. To force Brazillian or Kenyan children to study Shakespeare on these grounds is rampant cultural imperialism.

But you can't teach language without teaching some literature (much though my teenage self wished to deny this fact). An understanding of the relationship between literature and language is essential to seeing language as a feature of social context, rather than just words and grammar rules. So what literature should we prescribe the teaching of, if we are to universally teach literature?

The answer is to take as a principle of universal education that children should be literate, but say that the teaching should be adapted to teach culturally-relevant literature. There's no use in teaching Shakespeare to Brazilian children whose first language is Portuguese, even translated into Portuguese (for more on the idea of teaching literacy in culturally-sensitive ways, there's no better source than the work and methodology of Paulo Freire).

And there's a hint in here of the broader point. It's an entirely legitimate question to ask why we should hold the teaching of literacy as universally important. The answer is that someone who is not literate cannot evaluate, critically analyse and engage with the products of literate culture - and I mean 'culture' here in the broadest sense, including laws, government reports and so on. A person who is not literate is incapable of defending himself effectively against things that are written down, because he cannot know what has been written down.

I'm being a little melodramatic, but the idea of defense is key. There's a huge wealth of behaviourist psychological research showing how human beings can be conditioned and indoctrinated by authority figures; the ability to question authority, therefore, is an essential part of the freedom to be self-determined, and this goes just as much for the values authority imposes as for the figures of authority doing the imposing.

At the core of my concept of education, then (and, indeed, at the core of the concept of education that is now widely taught in teaching courses - for which critical pedagogy provides an excellent framework) are two ideas, the key traits that I consider to be the essence of being educated:

- The awareness that there are many conflicting values in the world.
- The ability to critically analyse values and choose among them for oneself.

It should be obvious that a person who is actually equipped with these two traits will be (in principle) immune to indoctrination and thus to cultural imperialism. Obviously, nobody can be expected to have a perfect record in these fields - I certainly don't - because there are all sorts of people in the world working to indoctrinate us in ever more sophisticated ways, but the more critical we are, the safer we are from indoctrination.

The final point to be made is that this concept of education is entirely self-defending. If we promote being educated (in this way) as a value, then anyone who is so educated will be capable of deciding for themselves whether or not to adopt the value of education, and repudiate it if they want to. Obviously, this is a level of self-awareness that is very difficult to teach or train, but we can hold it up as the ultimate goal.

I would also argue that without the awareness that one's values are a choice from among many, one cannot really be said to hold those values correctly, but only by blind faith (any holding of values is an act of faith; but no faith should be blind). As such, education thus construed is the ultimate universal value, because it is a necessary condition of the having of any values at all.

* * *

Some tangential remarks about the old concept of education while I'm here; fundamentally, at the start of the 20th century, the concept of education used more or less globally was that born from the English public school. These were institutions whose express principles, principles understood and recognised by almost everyone involved, parents, teachers and pupils alike, are almost diametrically opposed to the principles I suggest in this blog.

The principles of the English public school were authority, hierarchy and conformity; they existed, in essence, to prepare the children of the British elite for their work as the officers and officials of the British Empire. This included a degree of indoctrination in views like the inferiority of non-white races, the importance of obedience to one's superiors, and so on.

Fortunately, slowly, this concept is being wiped out (though ask me sometime about my experiences in a turn-of-the-21st-century English public - which actually means 'private' - school). In the educational studies lectures I work in as an amanuensis, concepts of critical pedagogy and the teaching of independence are emphasised.

Be very wary of anyone trying to defend the 'old' concept or denounce the new (as for example, in the decision by the Texas Republican Party to include a plank in its 2012 platform that discouraged the teaching of critical thinking skills). The only reason to support the old concept is if you want to be able to indoctrinate pupils rather than teaching them.

Making the world WEIRDer

(Education; Industrialisation; Riches; Democracy; Conclusion)

This is a topic that's been doing the rounds for a couple of years now, starting with this paper by Joe Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan. The WEIRD paper (as I'll be calling it henceforth) is originally about the predominant use of American undergraduates as a sample in psychological studies. It turns out that a vast majority of psychological studies are carried out on the people that psychology academics have to hand - to whit, their students.

The WEIRD paper claims that the assumption made by all this research, that undergraduates form a representative sample - that is, that things which are generally true of undergraduates can be expected to be generally true of everyone else - is misguided, and that in fact undergraduates are a very poor sample, due to being from a quite peculiar background - a background of being Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (hence, WEIRD, which may be set to become this generation's YUPpy or WASP).

Now, there are some legitimate questions over the psychological science involved in this paper; not so much the claim that undergrads make up too much of our psychological sample, but whether or not the WEIRD diagnosis is correct and whether it is as much (or as little) of a problem as the WEIRD team think. Those complaints are for psychologists and anthropologists, though, and I'm neither (this article is a good starting point - I particularly enjoy its suggestion that we replace WEIRDs with MYOPICS: Materialist, Young, self-Obsessed, Pleasure-seeking, Isolated, Consumerist, and Sedentary).

I'm more interested in a broader issue which has appeared in some commentary on the WEIRD paper, an issue which falls more squarely within my remit as a philosopher. Roughly put, some people have made an argument a bit like this:

- The WEIRD paper can be taken as alleging that the most powerful nations in the world (at least, pre-2008) share an unusual mindset, the WEIRD mindset.
- These nations have imposed their values, the values which come from the WEIRD mindset, on other nations.
- The cultures and values of other nations have been suppressed or otherwise damaged as a result.

The first of these claims by itself could be quite controversial even in the wake of the original WEIRD paper, but I have seen references to other research which has pointed in this direction (though the only thing I can lay hands on at short notice is a reference to this book by Ethan Watters), and I'm happy to accept the claim.

What we're talking about, of course, is cultural imperialism, and there is much more to the debate about cultural imperialism than the WEIRD paper. Certainly, the Western tradition of cultural imperialism (and it does seem to be a primarily Western tradition) has a great many evils to its name, both directly and indirectly - it goes back at least as far as the slave trade, encompasses the partitioning and statification of the third world, and remains an issue today in our handling of post-war Afghanistan and Iraq, to say nothing of the growing question of how we should deal with China's essentially non-democratic power system (and, indeed, whether we should take the nation's hierarchy into account at all in our dealings with them).

There is definitely, therefore, a worry here, one that Watters and anyone else like him is entirely right to examine. But there's also a possibility of overstating the danger and going too far in the opposite direction. If we try too strenuously to avoid cultural imperialism, we will end up with unrestricted cultural relativism - the doctrine that outsiders to a culture can pass no judgement at all on the values of that culture.

Stated as such, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with cultural relativism. It's certainly more palatable than some of the more condescending and clumsy acts of imperialism in the 21st century. But the philosopher Jürgen Habermas pointed out that relativism is incompatible with the doctrine of human rights. Basically, a 'human right' is, by definition, a universal value (at least, to all humans and human-like sentients). So if you want to say there are human rights, you must accept the principle of censuring cultures whose values conflict with what you identify as 'human rights'.

This is where we find perhaps the most serious danger of cultural imperialism - who, after all, should decide what is and isn't a human right? The deeply anglocentric UN? If the WEIRD research is right, these decisions have been made, from the first, by people not necessarily qualified to speak on such matters.

I posed this question to a philosophy seminar group I was teaching last term, and most of them expressed a preference for relativism over human rights, at least in terms of us being the ones to pick rights to prescribe for all of mankind.

However, when I re-phrased the question as "Is there a universal human right to life?" that preference more or less disappeared. Put more strongly, we could ask "Is respect for a cultural value ever so important that one should allow that value to lead to the death of a human being?" If you answer no (and, though this is a debate for another time, I believe one should), then you accept Habermas' point.

You may have realised by now (no kidding) that I'm no relativist. In fact, I am quite stringently against relativism, for a whole wealth of reasons. However, relating this specifically to the WEIRD research, what I want to present, over the course of the next few weeks, is an argument that the values identified by the WEIRD team - education, industrialisation, richness and democracy ('western' isn't a value in and of itself) - are actually, properly construed, very good things to be promoting in all circumstances.

I'm not saying that these values as currently practiced in Western society should be exported - I think we actually do a pretty shoddy job of some of them, especially democracy - but the essence of each value remains important, and, I will argue, universal. I do not intend to be a cultural imperialist speaking purely to cultures other than my own - I would rather regard myself as a cultural absolutist speaking to all cultures (and indeed, my claim to be just this will figure in several of my arguments).

The question of whether I am fit to make pronouncements of this kind is a legitimate one, but one I will deal with separately. I also intend to offer some arguments as to why being WEIRD may have had a part to play in creating the dominance of western culture to date.

All of that will have to wait for other posts, though, because this one has gone on long enough.