Etceterology, Phenomenology, Calamitology, Generalogy, and Triviology
Maybe a solution to anger and distrust is a bit of weird and whimsy
The Society for Informing Animals of Their Taxonomic Position had a problem.
It was their purpose to let the Animal Kingdom know where humans had decided to place them. And this should have been rather easy. Biologists generally operate under a very specific rule: When they discover a new species, they preserve an early specimen. That specimen becomes the basis for their new category of animal. This is the holotype.
If biologists caught a never-before-seen fish, for example, they would put aside the first catch — or one of them — as the holotype, the standard by which the species would be judged. If they ate said fish, they would preserve its skeleton — and remark, perhaps, that the species was particularly delicious.
So the Society for Informing Animals of Their Taxonomic Position would simply need to visit each holotype, such as this delicious fish, and inform them of their rank. Easy. But herein lies the problem: There is one species without a known holotype. It’s us. Humans.
These serious scientists developed a plan. They would rob the grave of Carolus Linnaeus, father of modern taxonomy, to stick him in a museum as humankind’s holotype. There, he would be informed of our name: Homo sapiens.
Problem solved.
The Society for Informing Animals of Their Taxonomic Position was one subcommittee of The American Miscellaneous Society. (The Society welcomed them with trepidation. Biologists, the Society worried, were too miscellaneous.)
The group also included the Society for Greeting Our Friends from Outer Space, which proposed giving extraterrestrial visitors fruit. And there was an unnamed project, which presented a plan to the United Nations to tow icebergs from Antarctica to provide fresh drinking water to populations in arid climates.1
The Society had been formed in the cramped, unglamorous D.C. digs of the Geophysics Branch of the Office of Naval Research, itself housed within the U.S. Navy. This was the top floor of a small office of a tiny unit within a small organization inside a massive government body. Sweating in the swampy heat of one summer in 1952, the scientists decided they needed their own scientific society, set on finding “the lighter side of heavier problems."
Their motto: Illegitimi non Carborundum, or, don't let the bastards grind you down.
This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, we’re (mostly) ignoring the current state of the world. Instead, I want to extol the virtues of looking for inspiration elsewhere. I want to talk a bit about the five disciplines of the American Miscellaneous Society: Etceterology, Phenomenology, Calamitology, Generalogy, and Triviology.
At a time when we seem to be, collectively, losing our minds, maybe it’s worth thinking about some other stuff. Maybe, just maybe, if we all spend some time thinking about this other stuff — this weird, eclectic, irreverent stuff — we may yet find a way to become less fucking insane.
Project Mohole
For their roughly half-century existence, the American Miscellaneous Society was “a mildly loony, invisible college of otherwise mature academicians…exceedingly democratic, but harmlessly anarchic.”2
As the foremost experts in scientific esoterica, the Society took it upon itself to recognize excellence in the field of oceanography. For that, they started the Albatross Prize. It was, yes, an actual albatross.
The first award went, naturally, to the creators of the Albatross Prize, “since it was their idea in the first place, they gave the first one to themselves, knowing they might not otherwise be nominated.” One notorious party animal was recognized with the stuffed bird for his “study of the oceans and other liquids after 5 p.m.” A Russian-born geophysicist, who helped us understand the shifting nature of earth’s magnetic poles, was given the award “for displacing Pacific Ocean 700 miles.”3 For decades, this stuffed bird travelled the world to be presented to exceedingly specialized scientists, bemusing customs officers in the process.
One of the American Miscellaneous Society’s favorite jokes was cooked up over breakfast in 1957. As man raced to the moon, these scientists were unimpressed. "The ocean's bottom is at least as important to us as the moon's behind,” remarked Gordon Lill, a founding member of the Society.
Why all this talk of outer space? What about our inner space?
Exploring the mysteries of what goes on beneath the water, silt, soil, and rock would be tricky. No rocket ship or telescope could see into the center of the earth. But, they ideated, a drill might work. They did the math, and decided that they would only need to drill 10 miles under the ocean to truly understand what goes on in the center of the earth. The only trouble — beyond the vast engineering complexity, the thicket of regulatory paperwork, the impossible work of getting political buy-in, and the obvious scorn they would receive when suggesting such a thing — was that such a drill would cost millions, and they barely had thousands. If that.
And then something weird happened. At a meeting in Toronto, in 1957, the researchers mentioned their harebrained scheme. To their surprise, a Russian scientist loudly proclaimed that they, the Soviets, were already working on drilling such a hole. They were already scouting locations.
This instilled new purpose in the Americans. What began as a joke had become a novel scientific problem, and then a moral imperative in the Cold War clash between civilizations. The geologists and oceanographers went to people who knew about drills: Oil men. And the oil men revealed a secret they had been hiding for a little while, that they had figured out how to mount a giant drill to a ship. Up to that point, all offshore drilling had been done from fixed platforms. Suddenly, this idea wasn’t so crazy after all.
If you need a small refresher on the state of inner space, author William Cromie has a perplexing metaphor to help you out.
Cromie: You can think of the Earth as a gigantic hard-boiled egg. The shell is like the outer covering of hard rocks that we walk on and know best. It is called the crust. Relative to the mass it encloses, the crust is even thinner than the shell of the egg. Beneath is the white of the earth-egg, called the mantle. The mantle makes up most of the bulk of our planet, extending down some 1800 miles, about halfway to the Earth's center. Inside the mantle, or earth-egg white, is a yolk about the size and shape of the Moon. This yolk is known as the core. Scientists believe the outer part of the core is liquid and the inner part is solid.4
To get through to the mantle, the scientists would first need to drill through a layer of earth between the crust and mantle named the Mohorovičić Discontinuity. From that, the project got its name: Project Mohole.
And then, despite all odds and reason, it began. They secured the money, bought the equipment, won over regulators. The Project would involve many steps, but step one was: Start drilling, small at first and bigger later. They drilled a hole in the bottom of the sea on time, on budget.
To properly explain the gravity of what was achieved in Phase 1 of Project Mohole in 1961, I would ask you to either consult this profile in LIFE magazine written by John Steinbeck or watch this incredible education video filmed around the project’s launch.5
After its initial phase, the MoHole project fell apart. All the things that made it successful — its unlikely origins, its whimsy and obscurity, its singular mission, its outlandish ambition — eventually gave way to petty competitiveness, contrasting visions, negative attention, and political realities. Phase II never went forward.
But the proof of concept, illustrated by these jokesters, would go on to inspire geologists and oceanographers for decades. Project Mohole helped unlock innovations in nautical navigation, knocked over the first domino that would help give us the Law of the Sea, and paved the way for the Deep Sea Drilling Project.
Hilariously, Project Mohole’s greatest impact may have been to spook the Soviets — who were, seemingly, bluffing about their own hole — into actually drilling. That gave us the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the world’s deepest hole and the source of enormously valuable scientific discoveries about the nature of the earth.
In studying the inner earth, we revealed a fascinating history of the earth’s freeze and thaw cycles, how our oceans have grown more, then less, salty, and how the earth has adapted to past rises in CO2 in the atmosphere.
And, I should say, that’s not the only thing the American Miscellaneous Society was right about. That cockamamie scheme to tow icebergs from Antarctica? It’s seriously being studied as a way to help address droughts in South Africa.
When the American Miscellaneous Society began, they weren’t curious about climate change or ocean acidification. They just wanted to see if they could turn their joke into reality. In the process, they ended up giving us some invaluable tools in the fight against climate change.
This Lady Is Not for the Fourth Turning
I recently found myself leafing through Reconciliation After Vietnam, written by William Strauss and Lawrence Baskir. Published in 1977, it’s a book that recognizes its own irrelevance.
The pair had been tapped by President Gerald Ford to head up a commission to study how, or if, the Vietnam draft dodgers should be treated after the war. Their recommendations went nowhere. There was, the pair wrote, a "popular desire to forget Vietnam as quickly as possible.”
By the time this book was published, the draft had been dead for five years and the American involvement in the war had been over for nearly three. Jimmy Carter had floated the idea of pardons in his presidential campaign, but the idea was thoroughly trashed by the establishment press. Strauss and Baskir may as well have been presenting a plan to inform animals of their taxonomic position.
But the pair, both lawyers, wanted the public to appreciate that their crystallized views on those who skirted the draft might have been totally wrong.
To summarize their work as briefly as possible: They found that draft dodgers were hardly the pot-smoking Canadian refugees they were portrayed to be. (Though some were.) They put aside the morality of the war itself, and spent more time considering the complex reasons why people refused to fight in it. And they revealed a conscription system which was cruel, unfair, and fundamentally broken. Continuing to punish these dodgers would be of no benefit to anyone, not veterans nor society writ large. Ending the persecution of the draft dodgers would be good for the country, they concluded.
Their recommendations reportedly had an impact on Jimmy Carter, who issued the exact pardon they recommended. And American society was considerably better off because of it.
But this isn’t why I want to talk about Strauss. After writing this report, he went on to become just another D.C. staffer, moving through the offices of various Republican senators. He found himself working with some other ambitious and under-stimulated political apparatchiks on the incredibly-titled Subcommittee on Energy, Nuclear Proliferation and Government Processes for the Committee of Government Affairs. (A generology committee if I ever saw one.) There, Strauss and his colleagues got a reputation for Capitol Hill showmanship, using oversized props to get TV buzz for their impossibly esoteric subcommittee.
“Gradually, we came upon a discovery,” Strauss wrote in a 2002 memoir “If B-grade actors (like Reagan) could become politicians, then B-grade politicians (like us) could become actors.” Strauss began writing songs. Then he began performing them. Then he became one-third of Capitol Steps, a political musical comedy troupe of Hill staffers.
In the introduction of a 1986 show, it was proclaimed that the two-party system was a myth. There were not just Republicans and Democrats, but also “a Capitol Hill office party that has been going on for four years: The Capitol Steps.”
If the phrase “political musical comedy troupe” doesn’t already conjure up a hive-inducing image of the worst kind of sketch comedy you can image, well, you can watch this:
Their material looks, now, unbelievably cringe-worthy. But this group had unbelievable staying power: Performing, in various iterations, until 2020.
The pandemic killed Capitol Steps, and that’s probably for the best. Their kind of toothless bi-partisan musical parody is decidedly out of vogue. But, as long-time fan and Washington Post contributor Graham Vyse wrote in 2022, the group served as a useful meeting point for both sides at a time of intense polarization. “For all their lampooning of the failures of our politics,” Vyse wrote, “they had an underlying faith in America that’s been shaken today.”
This is useful background about Strauss, a deeply miscellaneous guy, but it’s not why I’m writing about him. (Nor the fact that he also invented a comically specific award, The Cappies, which recognizes talent in high school theatre production.)
No, I’ve recently become fascinated by Strauss because of his pursuit of a particular scientific field: Generationology.
Over his career, Strauss penned a number of books about a thing that underpinned the comedy of Capitol Steps: The monumental generational shift happening in Western democracy, from Baby Boomer to GenX to Millennial. (Strauss died in 2007, so that’s where his study ends.)
In so doing, Strauss and his frequent co-author, Neil Howe, tried to develop a model for predicting the future based on the cycles of the past. But rather than looking at grand historical trends, as historians Hegel and Nietzsche had done, Strauss and Howe drilled down to the bottom of our modern society and studied the silt and rock at the bottom, to understand how humans of all classes responded to these trends in the past.
The pair came up with archetypes for the generations and the types of eras through which we move. And it is, to my mind, pseudoscientific hokum. These two are not scientists and do not conduct any real scientific study to come to these conclusions. And it is all painfully and fatally American-centric.
Then Strauss and Howe veered from triviology into calamitology. In their 1997 book The Fourth Turning, the pair warn that — based on their measurements of our cyclical ages — we’re heading for rough waters. The particulars of generations and the movements of eras combine to give us turnings. Shifting every two decades or so, we go from good times to spiritual renewal to a great unraveling into the fourth turning: Crisis.
The book proclaims: “Sometime around the year 2005, perhaps a few years before or after, America will enter the Fourth Turning…Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.”6
The authors consider possible catalysts for this era of crisis: A global financial crisis; a global terrorist group blows up an aircraft which leads to an first-strike war; a budget stalemate shuts down the government; a new pandemic breaks out and the government imposes mandatory quarantine; anarchy in the former Soviet republics throws Eastern Europe into chaos as Russia turns to new allies like Iran.
Not a bad track record of predictions!
In warning, as they do, of civil war and societal collapse, the two are not making any kind of moral judgement on our actions. Because Strauss and Howe are fatalists. It’s coming, they think, and all you can do is prepare for it. “Is new thinking required?” the pair write. “On the contrary: To prepare for the Fourth Turning, America needs old thinking.”
That is to say, Strauss and Howe believe we should look to the past — not a decade or two ago, but to the last time society was facing similar tumult. Because, hey, they made it through alright.
Therein, they have some good suggestions. “People on all sides of the Culture Wars should cultivate pragmatic alliances with niches possessing competing visions,” they write. Nihilism in culture, on the contrary, “is a seedbed for fascism.”
Institutions, too, should be improved and fortified to make them resilient — not by making them bigger, but by reducing their square footage to make them more sturdy. Politicians can help this along by ending the debasement of their profession. “Politicians should speak very candidly about the nation's future challenges and craft a new rhetoric of public purpose that emphasizes collective duties over personal rights.”
There’s lots of other stuff, some of it good and some of it bordering on survivalist, but there’s one I quite like: “Diversify everything you do,” they write, extolling the virtues of the noble generalist. “Be fluent in as many languages, cultures, and technologies as you can.”
Even if they are fatalists about the coming of this Fourth Turning, they are far from certain about its outcome. It could destroy modernity, they write, sure. Or it could leave America broke, broken, and irrelevant. Or, it could, after some pain, propel the world into a much better place.
Strauss & Howe: Its ecology might be freshly repaired and newly sustainable, its economy rejuvenated, its politics functional and fair, its media elevated in tone, its culture creative and uplifting, its gender and race relations improved, its commonalities embraced and differences accepted, its institutions free of the corruptions that today seem entrenched beyond correction. People might enjoy new realms of personal, family, community, and national fulfillment.
Unlike the spiritualist historians of yore, Strauss and Howe are humanists. They believe it is up to us to break free of the choreography that civilization keeps trying to assign to us and dance to free jazz instead.
But you could use this study to come to just about any conclusions which fits your worldview. Their book could be a bible for political reconciliation just as much as it could be a manifesto for a domestic terrorist. It is basically a historical horoscope.
And, unfortunately, one student of Strauss and Howe is Steven K Bannon.
Not only has Bannon, the one-time aide to Donald Trump who is now one of the most influential men in Trump-world, recommended the book constantly and even produced a 2010 documentary inspired by it.
Bannon has spent more than a decade building up the idea that, as Howe and Strauss warn, “winter is coming.” And, at least in his telling, America must get in lean shape to handle it. ”Everything President Trump is doing — all of it — is to get ahead of or stop any potential crisis,” he said during Trump’s first term in office.
I don’t have a lot of good things to say about Steve Bannon. But one thing I think we fail to appreciate about him is his ability to transcend the current moment and speak to people about grand things.
Bannon conscripts his followers into pondering politics as a generational struggle, one of fastidious study and hard-nosed planning. Who else in our current political and media landscape is doing that? Few, if any.
I don’t think anyone needs to be like Steve Bannon. But sometimes we do need to think like him. And that means considering a bit more miscellany.
We’re in the waning days of 2024, a profoundly fucked up year which followed a series of profoundly fucked up years. Before them? Some even more profoundly fucked up years.
And, listen, I think there are good odds that things are about to get even more fucked up. (Maybe we’re in the Fourth Turning after all.) But that doesn’t mean we have to spend every hour of every day tensed up like a frightened cat. So, if I could end where I began: You have to go engage in etceterology, phenomenology, calamitology, generalogy, and triviology.
Here, we could take some cues, unfortunately, from Elon Musk.
I’ve been writing recently about the importance of ambition in modern politics. (Dispatches #115 #117) And I’ve been pondering the fact that Musk, craven and thick as he is, gets something very right about this current moment: People want to be inspired to explore again. (I, personally, am much more interested by the bottom of the sea than outer space. So you can see, now, how this thoroughly miscellaneous dispatch came to be.)
And Musk certainly inspired them: To be exocolonists, champions of the electric vehicle, weird little mole people. On the surface, there is very little that connects this vaguely scientific and ecologist endeavors with his increasingly-bug-eyed politics. There is no good reason why his fanboys should follow in shooting for the stars to celebrating Germany’s neo-Nazi party.
But it does happen. Musk’s own radicalization isn’t super interesting (too rich, too much time online.) But for the masses, he served as a linkage between optimism and dour hyper-partisanship.
Politics works like a recommendation algorithm: If you enjoyed SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES you may also enjoy MANUFACTURING CONSENT and if you enjoyed GUY THROWING SHOE AT GEORGE W. BUSH you may also enjoy 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB. We navigate a neural network to arrive at our political positions, and it’s not always obvious, based on where we started, where we’ll end up.
Rather than fixate on this current era of reactionary politics, why not focus on the various turns and twists that led people to it? In so doing, it might help us construct a meaningful alternative. Ones that encourages generalists intent on building pragmatic alliances.
Step one? Shut down the high-velocity bad news laser.
If you’ll follow me into a sub-basement of self-reflection: I hate being hyper-aware. I hate the assumption that I must know every single detail of every single thing going on at every minute of every day. I do not feel better informed because I watched the results on John King’s Magic Wall™ or because I got to see inside the courtroom as the jury deliberated. I do not feel more enlightened because I got to hear the punditry before, after, and during the debate. I do not think the newest opinion poll numbers are making me smarter. On the doortstep of the 21st century, CNN’s selling point was that you could keep up with the news 24 hours a day, 7 days a week — not that you had to.
This month, I watched the Syrian government fall in real-time, streamed by both the rebels capturing the country and the government forces who pretended like it wasn’t happening. It was both fascinating, enthralling, and…strangely hollow.
In the history of civilization, there has always been a gradient of peoples’ engagement with their own self-government. Some don’t care, some are disgusted, some care a little bit, some care a lot, some care too much. Every one of those groups is now being assaulted with a volume and tempo of news that was unimaginable even five years ago.
That is, probably, unavoidable. But we should ask: What news are these people being assaulted with? Is it 50 different takes and minutiae updates on some new calamity, some wild speculation about an unlikely outcome? Are we bombarding them with endless nonsense on drone sightings and Musk tweets?
In increasing the speed and volume of news, we have wildly reduced its heft. Take it from somebody who has worked across every type of news media over the past decade: Publishers are obsessed with engineering content that keeps people maximally engaged, even if it means sacrificing nuance, whimsy, irreverence, and etceterology to do it.
We have come to assume that people want to extract as much information as possible from every interaction, and that those interactions must be made as efficient as possible. I, increasingly, don’t want that. Sometimes I want someone to tell a long, convoluted, pointless story before they get to the fucking point.
That is, to some degree, what newspapers were: A cheap, ubiquitous, catalog of news, opinion, games, sports, weather, business, science, esoterica, and miscellany. (Dispatch #83). It was designed to encourage you to read every page, but it wasn’t built to manipulate you into reading every letter of every classified ad.
It strikes me that in this new quest for A Left Wing Joe Rogan, as I noted after the election, nobody is bothering to understand what makes Joe Rogan successful. It’s not that he’s right-wing or some super-efficient source of information: It’s that he’s relentlessly curious and constantly chasing rabbits. (Dispatch #117)
Some colleagues have made fun of me recently for frequently beginning dispatches — even ones that, I guess, contain news-worthy stuff — with esoteric historical anecdotes or bewildering asides. It is, they’re right, indulgent. But it’s also on purpose. I think the emerging point of this newsletter, coming up on two years after I started it, is that it’s full of asides, irrelevances, and triviology. Maybe I’m offside from our current moment (and maybe you are too) and that’s fine by me.
I can’t help but feel like we tried this before. There was, I guess, the Slow News era of journalism — though hell if I know where I was during it. (Napping?) Its most obvious successor is probably Matthew Yglesias. His Slow Boring newsletter is, I suspect, exactly the comparison I should be striving for. (I don’t read Slow Boring, because it’s slow. And, frankly? Boring.)
Last year, my new year’s resolution was to spend less time on this newsletter writing lengthy historical deep-dives. Resolution failed. I feel like the only way to correct my smashing through that pledge is to run frantically the other direction. I will read and listen to more weird generalology (including Yglesias’ Substack.) I shall seek out scientific obscura and historical curios.
And, in 2025, Bug-eyed and Shameless shall spend more time writing irreverent, occasionally inane, stuff.
If this dispatch had a point, and it probably doesn’t, it’s this: We have to find ways of being weird, optimistic, ambitious, and curious again. Perhaps it won’t solve any particular issue facing out world right now, but you never know how it will serve us in the future.
That’s it for this week’s dispatch!
I suspect it will be the last one of 2024, barring some big development. But I will be back straight-away in the new year with some fascinating conversations I’ve had with some very smart people over the past few months.
For anyone interested in the calamitous state of Canadian politics, I’ve been publishing more-than-usual at the Toronto Star. I also penned a particularly acidic take on Ottawa’s fecklessness on the atrocities happening in Gaza.
Check WIRED on Monday, where I’m publishing a deep dive into Ukraine’s incredible advances around Electronic Warfare, complete with some cool historical analogies.
I wish everyone a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, totally respectful Kwanza, a tip-top Tet and a solemn, dignified Ramadan.
"Need some fresh water? Tow up an ice berg say U.N. scientists,” Herald Express. Tue, Apr 23, 1974
Albatross Award of the American Miscellaneous Society, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives
Recounting the History of the Albatross Award, John Knauss, Gordon Lill, and Arthur Maxwell. Eos, January 20, 1998
Why the Mohole; Adventures in Inner Space, William J Cromie. (1964)
Lest you think the video is less impressive than John freakin’ Steinbeck, its presenter, Donald Hornig, helped develop Trinity, the world’s first Atomic bomb. His character has a brief cameo in Oppenheimer.
The Fourth Turning, Willia Strauss and Neil Howe (1997)
“Some colleagues have made fun of me recently for frequently beginning dispatches — even ones that, I guess, contain news-worthy stuff — with esoteric historical anecdotes or bewildering asides”. That’s one of the elements of your writing I like the most.
I for one like your deep dives, Justin. It's why I read you, occasional whimsy included. Happy whatever to you too!