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Are Humans Warming the Earth? The Answer May Surprise You!

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I don’t write a lot about climate change, but every once in a while something catches my eye. Over on Watts Up With That, a post apparently written by Julius Sanks asks the question “Can we puny humans produce enough energy to melt the huge icecap?” Before explaining why he’s wrong — or rather, why that’s the wrong question — I want to take a detour to a another Watts Up With That post that Sanks praises at the beginning of his post. Along the way, I’m going to try to reproduce some of the math in the posts.

The post Sanks likes is written by Andrew Watt himself and is titled “Getting ‘Cooked’ by Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Global Warming.” In it, Watts complains about the claim by John Cook that

our planet has been building up heat at the rate of about four Hiroshima bombs every second

I kind of agree with some of Watts’s criticism. Describing global warming in terms of nuclear bombs can be unnecessary sensationalist. Nuclear weapons concentrate all their energy in a spectacular blast, whereas weather and climate events spread out their effects over millions of square miles. On that scale, nuclear bombs are not very significant.

The standard unit of energy is the Joule (J), but the yield of nuclear bombs is usually expressed in terms of the number of tons of trinitrotoluene (TNT) explosive that would be needed to give off the same amount of energy. That’s not a very precise measurement, but the conventional assumption is that 1 ton of TNT releases 4.184 billion Joules (4.184×109 J) of energy. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a 15 kiloton weapon, equivalent to 15000 tons of TNT, so it released 62,760 billion Joules (62.76×1012 J). Four of them would release about 251,000 billion Joules (251×1012 J).

Those numbers are big, but so is our planet, and lots of big things happen on it. For example, a fully-formed hurricane releases about 600,000 billion Joules (600×1012 J) per second, which is pretty close to ten Hiroshima bombs every second. In a single day, a hurricane will release 52 billion billion Joules (52×1018 J), the equivalent of 800,000 bombs. (Fortunately, only about 1/4 of 1 percent of that energy is used to drive winds. The rest is used to evaporate water from the oceans and turn it into clouds and rain.)

Watts’s post uses a different point of comparison by calculating how much energy is in sunlight. The Earth’s radius is 6378 km, which means that the Earth’s cross-sectional area (given by πr2) is 128 million square kilometers. Solar flux, the density of energy reaching the Earth, is 1361 Joules per second per square meter, so multiplying it out, the Earth intercepts 174,000,000 billion Joules per second (174×1015 J/s) from the sun. That works out to about 41 megatons, or about 2770 Hiroshima bombs, every second.

From this, Watt concludes that global warming energy is negligible:

Gosh, a thousand Hiroshima bombs exploding on this planet every second? How frightening! With that sort of threat, one wonders why Obama isn’t going to announce taxing the sun into submission next Tuesday.

These calculation just go to illustrate that in the grand scheme of things, not only is the global energy associated with global warming small, it isn’t even within the bounds of measurement certainty.

(Watt gets a figure of only 1000 bombs because he uses ballpark estimates for solar flux, the bomb’s energy, and frickin’ pi, and all the errors are in the same direction.)

This is kind of a silly argument. A lot of natural processes take a very long time. Water washing over rocks erodes only a tiny amount of material every day, but let it go on long enough, and the Colorado river can carve out the Grand Canyon.

Sanks’s post ostensibly addresses the issue of whether humans could possibly produce enough energy to melt the Antarctic ice cap, as is predicted to occur if the Earth’s climate gets warm enough. I’ll go through the math before explaining why this is a silly thing to talk about.

It takes about 334 Joules to melt a single gram of ice, and according to the National Snow & Ice Data Center, the Antarctic ice cap contains about 30 million cubic kilometers of ice. Given that 1 cubic centimeter of ice ideally weights 0.9169 grams, that’s 27.5 billion billion kilograms of ice. Multiplying by 334 J/g lets us figure out that melting the Antarctic ice cap would take 9,200,000 billion billion Joules (9.2×1024 J).

Sanks then tries to estimate how long it would take to melt the Antarctic ice cap if we used all of the energy produced by human civilization to do it. Using an energy production figure of 89 billion billion Joules per year(8.906×1019 J/yr) from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, he estimate that it would take about 103,000 years.

Unfortunately, Watt is using the wrong numbers. As you might guess from the name, the U.S. Energy Information Administration only reports U.S. figures. A better figure for the world (for 2015) is 146,000 terrawatt-hours, which is 526 billion billion Joules per year (5.256×10^20 J/yr). At that rate, it would take 17,500 years to melt the Antarctic ice cap.

It’s actually a little wore than that. Ice only melts when it reaches its melting temperature, and the arctic ice sheet is actually -49 degrees C below its melting point (according to Sanks), so some energy will be absorbed just raising it to the melting point. The amount of energy to raise one gram of water 1 degree C is 1.865 Joules. Re-running the math, it would take 22,300 years to melt the ice cap.

The author thinks the conclusion is pretty clear:

My goal here is to show the enormous energy levels involved and how ridiculous it is to blame humans for any significant ice melt.

That’s just plain dishonest. Climatologists aren’t claiming that human energy production is directly raising the temperature of the planet. The principle global warming claim is that a variety of human activities are changing the composition of the Earth’s atmospheric gases in ways that change the way the Earth retains heat, leading to a slow temperature increase. As it happens, the combustion products of fossil fuels are the main source of the “greenhouse” gasses that are causing the change, but it’s not the fossil fuel energy itself that is raising the Earth’s temperature.

The weird thing is that Watt’s post (referred to by Sanks) actually sets the scene for how this works. As he explains, the amount of energy reaching the Earth from the Sun is a whopping 174,000,000 billion Joules — 2770 Hiroshima bombs — per second. That’s about 10,000 times as much energy as our entire civilization produces. If all of that energy were focused on the Antarctic ice cap, it would melt away in a little over two years.

That’s not going to happen of course, and no climate scientist is predicting that it will. But here’s the thing: As Watt emphasizes, this is a tremendous amount of energy — so much that even a really small change in how it is absorbed could cause big changes to the Earth’s climate.

Early climate models were built around the assumption that everything was in equilibrium: The weather may be chaotic from moment to moment and vary from place to place, but over reasonable amounts of time, the planet-wide climate as a whole did not change. This constraint was a good enough approximation for scientists to build useful models of weather and climate.

For that constraint to hold, there would have to be no net energy change over the entire planet: If 174 petajoules of sunlight strike the planet every second, then the planet has to radiate away 174 petajoules of energy to space every second. This doesn’t have to be true from second to second, but it has to hold over periods of years or decades.

If the energy flows in and out are not exactly balanced, the Earth will experience temperature changes. So if changes to the Earth’s atmosphere reduce the amount of energy radiated to space, the Earth will accumulate energy, and that energy will cause the Earth’s temperature to increase. The temperature will continue increasing until the energy equilibrium is restored. Fortunately, all other things being equal, the warmer an object gets, the more energy it radiates, so as the Earth warms, it will begin to radiate more energy. Eventually, it will reach a temperature where it radiates as much Energy as it did before, at which point the balance of energy flows will be returned, and the Earth’s temperature will stabilize at the new value.

There are, of course, a lot of complexities. Some solar energy is reflected away without ever being absorbed, there are complex energy exchanges between the land, the seas, and the atmosphere, and there are other sources of energy besides the Sun, such as nuclear decay of radioactive elements deep inside the planet. But the basic idea still holds: If the energy flows are not balanced, the Earth will experience temperature changes.

And given the enormous quantity of energy involved, over time spans of decades or centuries, it should not surprise us that even slight perturbations to the Earth’s energy handling mechanisms could cause devastating climate changes.

Headway Themes, WTF?

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It all began to go wrong when I started writing a post for Maggie’s Friday the 13th call for support, about how the sex work community on Twitter was responding to the one-two punch of FOSTA/SESTA and the Backpage raid. The post needed a lot embedded tweets from sex workers, and while I was reviewing the post I noticed something odd: My blog was not displaying the tweets correctly.

Normally, an embedded tweet pretty closely resembles the appearance of a tweet in Twitter. For example, tweeting the title of this post should look something like this:

But when I previewed the post, the embedded tweets looked more like this:

That layout, with the author’s name coming after the content, looks like the way the HTML is sent to the browser before it is styled. The tweet styling must be applied afterward, probably by some JavaScript, and for some reason, the script isn’t styling the tweet correctly. Weirdly, however, if you look at the same post on the main blog page, the tweets look like they’re supposed to. They also look like they’re supposed to if I switch the blog to one of the standard themes that comes with WordPress. All of this points to a problem with the theme I’m using.

It’s not that simple though, because I’m using the Headway theme framework. That’s a very cool tool which allows me to visually design custom themes. However, when I fired up the Headway Visual Editor, I saw that I was using a shared set of styling rules for the main page and the individual post pages, so they should be rendered the same. But clearly they’re not. This was beginning to smell like some kind of bug in how Headway renders single post pages.

Before going further down that road, I wanted to make sure I was running the most up-to-date version of the framework. It’s supposed to be updated automatically, but of the update failed, an old version of the theme framework might not work quite right on newer versions of WordPress. As it turns out, when I logged in to the Headway site to see if I was using the latest version, I got an unpleasant surprise: Headway’s most recent release of the theme framework was version 3.8.9…released in October, 2016.

Crap. It looks like Headway essentially went out of business a year and a half ago and tried to keep their customers from noticing. Rumor has it that Headway ran through all their money too fast and had to lay off almost everybody, leaving just enough of the company operational to allow them to keep collecting licensing fees through the website. This is sneaky, desperate, and underhanded.

(It’s a darned shame too, because Headway did so much right. Most WordPress page building tools are aimed at designers building small storefront sites, so they are focused on allowing designers to make each page unique, like an online brochure layout. Headway is different, because it works through the WordPress theme system. You don’t build pages, you build themes which can be applied to all your pages and blog posts at once. Yet you can also do page building by creating a unique theme variant for each page. And despite all that, it rendered pages very fast.)

So now I’ve been looking through the morass of WordPress theme frameworks — Genesis, Divi, Themify, Builder, PageLines, Ultimatum — the list goes on and on. It’s hard to tell, but some of them appear to have gone the way of Headway. Meanwhile, I’m trying stuff and experimenting.

So if you see wild theme changes here on Windypundit, now you know why.

 

The DOJ Performs As Expected on Backpage

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On Friday there was a big news splash about the Department of Justice coming down hard on Backpage.com executives for their involvement with child sex trafficking. The Backpage.com site was taken down, and there were reports and rumors of seizures, searches, arrests, and a 93-count indictment. We didn’t get to find out much more, because despite all the publicity, the Department of Justice got the court to keep the indictment sealed.

Until today. Ryan Reilly of Huffington Post was nice enough to post a copy of the 61-page indictment here, if you want to take a look.

Back on Saturday, however, before the DOJ released the document, I posted a set of very cynical predictions of what would happen, and we can now check a few of them. To start with, my third prediction was

The majority of the counts in the indictment are not actually going to be about child sex trafficking. I think a lot of them will be crimes with what I like to think of as fictitious elements, such as “conspiracy” and “intent.” The prosecution is also going to be about adult consensual sex work and the usual smattering of federal add-on crimes, like money laundering or false statements, maybe with some wildcards like fraud. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the action is around these ancillary crimes rather than the flashy child sex trafficking that prosecutors are claiming they’re fighting.

To analyze this, I prepared a spreadsheet listing all of the defendants and all of the sections of the U.S. code that they are accused of violating, and tallied which defendants were charge with which crimes.

If you’re interested in learning more about the trafficking laws, the Department of Justice website helpfully provides an overview of all sections of the U.S. Code covering Involuntary Servitude, Forced Labor, and Sex Trafficking Statutes Enforced. From that, I prepared this brief summary:

  • 18 U.S.C. § 1581 (Peonage)– Makes it unlawful to hold a person in “debt servitude,” or peonage, which is closely related to involuntary servitude.
  • 18 U.S.C. § 1584 (Involuntary Servitude) — Makes it unlawful to hold a person in a condition of slavery, that is, a condition of compulsory service or labor against his/her will. Also prohibits compelling a person to work against his/her will by creating a “climate of fear” through the use of force, the threat of force, or the threat of legal coercion.
  • 18 U.S.C. § 1589 (Forced Labor) — Makes it unlawful to provide or obtain the labor or services of a person through threat of harm or restraint or abuse of the legal process
  • 18 U.S.C. § 1590 (Trafficking) — Makes it unlawful to recruit, harbor, transport, or broker persons for labor or services under conditions which violate any of the offenses contained in a variety of other code sections.
  • 18 U.S.C. § 1591 (Sex Trafficking of Children) — Makes it unlawful to cause a person to engage in a commercial sex act through the use of force, fraud, or coercion, or if the person is under the age of 18.
  • 18 U.S.C. § 1592 (Documents) — Makes it unlawful to seize documents (e.g. immigration papers, even if counterfeit) in order to force others to work.

That is just my non-lawyer summary of the DOJ’s summary of the actual criminal code. If you want to learn more, you could go read the original DOJ summary or spend a few hour poring over the relevant sections in Chapter 77 of the U.S. Code. I’m sure it’s fascinating, if you’re into that sort of thing.

It would also be a complete waste of your time, because the Backpage.com executives weren’t charged with any of those crimes. There’s not a single child sex trafficking charge in the entire indictment. When I predicted that “The majority of the counts in the indictment are not actually going to be about child sex trafficking,” I was apparently nowhere near as cynical as I should have been. The indictment consists entirely of charges of facilitating prostitution, various flavors of money laundering, and conspiracy.

Here’s how it breaks down:

Law Description Counts Defendant
18 U.S.C  § 371 Conspiracy 1 Lacey, Larkin, Spear, Hyer, Padilla, Vaught
18 U.S.C  § 1952(a)(3)(A) Travel Act — Facilitate Prostitution 2 – 51 Lacey, Larkin, Spear, Hyer, Padilla, Vaught
18 U.S.C. § 1956(h) Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering 52 Lacey, Larkin, Spear, Brunst, Hyer
18 U.S.C. § 1956(a)(1)(B)(i) Concealment Money Laundering 52-62 Lacey, Larkin, Spear, Brunst, Hyer
18 U.S.C. § 1956(a)(2)(A) International Promotional Money Laundering 63-68 Lacey, Larkin, Spear, Brunst, Hyer
18 U.S.C. § 1957(a) Transactional Money Laundering 69-93 Lacey, Larkin, Spear, Brunst (different counts for each)

 

Most of the rest of my first five predictions assumed that there would be some child sex trafficking charges and made predictions about those charges. Since there were no such charges at all, I’m tempted to claim victory because nothing in the indictment contradicts my prediction.

The narrative material in the front of the indictment includes a lot of discussion that follows my predictions, but I haven’t read it all yet. I think some of the who-knew-what-when discussions I alluded to will still apply to the charges for adult consensual prostitution.

My remaining predictions will have to wait until the case is resolved.

All in all, however, it seems to be even a bigger steaming pile of bullshit than I predicted.

You Bastards! You Killed Backpage!

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Well, it looks like the bastards finally took down backpage.com.

Screen shot of Backpage.com after confiscation by law enforcement.

I hate these website confiscation notices. The agencies involved always plaster their logos all over the damned thing, like they’re so proud of how they wrecked someone’s business, like a bunch of dogs pissing all over to mark their territory. It makes me sick.

The reaction from sex workers on Twitter is heartbreaking:

(TER is TheEroticReview, a site that offers lists and reviews of escorts, which now has a message up that they are no longer serving content to U.S. visitors. EscortDesign is a service that I think created small websites for escorts…I can’t tell because they just have a blank page now.)

As I write this, the DOJ media site has no press release about any of this, but rumors and reports are flying. The FBI has reportedly raided the homes of Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, two of the founders of Backpage, and Lacey has been arrested. I’ve heard reports of the FBI going into colo facilities to confiscate Backpage’s servers. Anti-trafficking activist Cindy McCain (wife of Senator John McCain) is claiming that the FBI has raided other Backpage offices as well. Lacey’s lawyer says the DOJ has a 93-count indictment, but the court is keeping that sealed, so we don’t know exactly what’s in it.

There’s a lot we still don’t know, but I’m going to go out on a limb and call this a giant steaming pile of bullshit. The most obvious bullshit is that the feds have already seized Backpage property and shut the whole business down. You don’t see this kind of thing with normal crimes. If a someone gets road rage and runs over three people with their Buick Regal, the cops don’t seize General Motors and arrest the board of directors. This attack on Backpage is law enforcement showboating. Prosecutors have been looking to drag down a deep-pockets defendant like this for years.

Before continuing, yes, I know I could be wrong. I could be very wrong. Maybe the Backpage honchos are truly bad people, master criminals, and all of Backpage is nothing more than a criminal enterprise they founded solely for the purpose of child sex trafficking. I should also remind the reader that I am not a lawyer, and I don’t know much about federal anti-trafficking law. I am not an authority and this is not analysis. This is wild-assed guesswork.

But…I’ve seen this sort of thing before, and I think I recognize some familiar patterns. So my purpose here is to make predictions that will allow me to test my cynicism against reality, when the truth eventually comes out, days or months from now.

So here’s what I think will happen:

Prediction 1: The relevant anti-child-sex-trafficking laws will not be about straightforward crimes. Grabbing children and pimping them out to pederasts is already all kinds of illegal: It is at least the crimes of kidnapping and rape. You don’t need specialized anti-child-sex-trafficking laws to put guys who do that in prison for a very long time. What you need specialized anti-child-sex-trafficking laws for is to take that core act of violence and smear culpability around until the prosecutor can indict someone exciting, maybe even someone with valuable assets to seize.

Prediction 2: The definition of sex trafficking will not be what most people are thinking when they hear “sex trafficking.” I say this because I know the history of anti-pimping laws, which often define pimping broadly enough to include anyone who receives money earned through prostitution, including drivers, landlords, website designers, and even babysitters. The Backpage trafficking indictments will probably include the trafficking version of that kind of thing.

Prediction 3: The majority of the counts in the indictment are not actually going to be about child sex trafficking. I think a lot of them will be crimes with what I like to think of as fictitious elements, such as “conspiracy” and “intent.” The prosecution is also going to be about adult consensual sex work and the usual smattering of federal add-on crimes, like money laundering or false statements, maybe with some wildcards like fraud. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the action is around these ancillary crimes rather than the flashy child sex trafficking that prosecutors are claiming they’re fighting.

Prediction 4: Most of the legal conflict over the trafficking charges will be about criminal intent. That some child sex traffickers advertised on Backpage seems almost certain — the site has carried millions of ads, after all — but those ads were almost certainly handled by low-level employees, if they were seen by humans at all. This is not something the executives would normally have done, and yet they are the ones arrested. I expect to see a lot of effort picking over evidence such as email messages in an attempt to tie the executives to specific ads.

Prediction 5: Attempts by Backpage employees to block sex trafficking ads will be used against them by prosecutors as proof that they were aware of trafficking. We’ve seen this kind of thing in drug enforcement, where a nightclub or motel owner takes steps to keep drug dealers out, and that becomes evidence that he was aware of drug dealing on the premises. I wouldn’t be surprised to see analogous measures by Backpage used to argue that the knew, or should have known, that something illegal was happening, and that they either helped it happen, allowed it to happen, or didn’t take adequate measures to prevent it from happening.

Prediction 6: Less than 20% of the charges will survive to end. If it goes through trial, make that less than 5%.

I am sure that some of these predictions are wrong. But this whole process just has a familiar feel to it…I’ll bet I got some of this right. I guess we’ll find out.

Cultural Literacy With Darmok and Jalad

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My favorite source of ranty things to blog about, Jack Marshall, has a post up about that great bugaboo of conservative pundits, our lack of cultural literacy, and I want to rant about it, because just the phrase “cultural literacy” makes my skin itch.

I blame it on early childhood exposure to the writings of Allan Bloom, who for some reason felt it necessary to write ponderous complaints about our culture, like this bit about rock-and-roll:

Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse. That is why Ravel’s Bolero is the one piece of classical music that is commonly known and liked by them.

[…]

Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.

(Sigh. Somebody should have stopped him. Friends don’t let friends write that way.)

Anyway, Jack quotes with some admiration from a post by political scientist Patrick Deneen. Here’s a taste:

But ask them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian War? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?

Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural? What are the Federalist Papers?

It cracks me up that the first item on Deneen’s list of important cultural touchstones is a war that happened 2400 years ago, between political entities that have long since vanished.

And why exactly is it important to know how Socrates died? Is it so we can understand references to hemlock in popular culture? That seems trivial, and easy enough to look up if you need to know it. Or maybe the importance of how he died is the example of how the powers-that-be violently put down a troublemaker? But if that’s the case, I don’t think we are lacking in modern examples. Look, I admit I don’t know much about Socrates, but surely there are other reasons why he’s interesting besides how he died?

Having been raised as a Lutheran, I am generally familiar with Martin Luther’s revolt against the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, but I’m not sure anyone needs to know the details, especially people who aren’t Christians. I don’t understand what’s so important about how Thomas Becket died, what Dante imagined Hell might be like, or what Lincoln said in his inaugural addresses? (And although I’m not an expert on his presidency, I think it unlikely he was inaugurated three times…I assume this is some kind of joke…)

I’m not arguing in favor of ignorance. If you are fascinated by Homer’s writing or the history of the Christian church or debates over the proper role of government in America, then by all means dig in. I admire people who go out of their way to acquire knowledge. But there’s a vast gulf between being happy that you know interesting things and arguing that everybody should know those things.

When it comes to “cultural literacy,” people have some funny ideas of what’s important to know. Jack Marshall, for example, is annoyed that people don’t understand the phrase “keep your powder dry”:

The phrase at issue is a useful and formerly famous one. It comes from a reported quote from Oliver Cromwell […] during the Battle of Edgehill in 1642. Cromwell supposedly told his Roundhead troops in that opening fight of the English Civil War, ”Put your trust in God, my boys, but mind to keep your powder dry.” The last part of the quote is usually evoked to mean “keep cool,” but the entire quote is more profound. As the late language maven William Safire wrote in the New York Times, it means ”stay calm” but carries an implicit, most ominous threat: ”and be prepared to blow the enemy’s head off at the propitious moment.”

The thing is, soldiers have long since stopped carrying sacks of black powder. Modern guns use bullets that come in pre-assembled cartridges filled with smokeless propellants that will actually burn just fine when wet. Soldiers fight in the rain all the time. In fact, modern bullets will even fire underwater. (It’s a bad idea for other reasons, however, so please don’t try it.) In the modern world, there’s no practical point to telling someone to keep their powder dry. So if you want to tell someone to be prepared for a conflict, you’ll have to settle for saying “be prepared for a conflict”…which sounds like it should work.

So much of “cultural literacy” strikes me as a pretense. It’s the high-brow intellectual equivalent of the tech nerd who sneers at you for not knowing the difference between Unix and Linux, or the music aficionado who is shocked that you never heard of his favorite influential artist, or the gearhead who looks down on you because you can’t drive a stick. It’s “You’ve never seen Star Wars?” but about ancient Greeks.

Cultural literacy fanboys insist that knowledge of these things is necessary for us to understand each other, get along, and work together. Without this shared cultural content — without knowing who Oliver Cromwell was, or how Thomas Becket died — we can’t maintain our civilization. Or, to employ a little bit of modern culture, they’re saying the world works like “Darmok.”

“Darmok” was the name of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Captain Picard found himself stranded on the planet El-Adrel IV with Dathon, a member of an alien species called the Tamarians, whose language frustrates Picard’s universal translation technology: The translator is able to translate the words, but the resulting speech doesn’t make sense. It eventually turns out that the Tamarians speak entirely in cultural allusions, saying things like “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” or “Temba, his arms wide.” Since the translator has no knowledge of Tamarian history, it cannot resolve the allusions to Darmok, Jalad, Tanagra, or Temba, so it can’t figure out what the alien is talking about. This turns out about as badly as you might expect, resulting in at least one death and the near-destruction of the Enterprise before the protagonists figure out what’s happening.

The argument of the “cultural literacy” advocates is that a shared culture avoids these kinds of problems. That may even be true. But if the primary purpose of cultural literacy is to enhance communications, then it doesn’t matter what shared culture we have, as long as we have the same one. There’s no need to go through the effort of teaching everyone the history of Greek philosophy, English governance, and the Christian church when people will happily build a shared culture around televised sports, Star Wars, and Twitter memes.

At the end of “Darmok,” after the Tamarians and the Federation have finally figured begun the diplomatic process, the Tamarians reveal that the phrase “Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel” will enter their language. The two civilizations have taken the first small step toward building a common culture.

Because that’s what people do. We build our common culture together. The “cultural literacy” mavens seem to be pining for a return to a mythical olden-time of a shared common culture…that only ever really existed at the heights of Western academia. And if Deneen and Marshall want to argue that elite universities should continue to teach the traditional canon, they should go right ahead. I’m sure it’s a wonderful thing to have learned. But in the age of mass media and the internet, we have plenty of common culture.

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