I decided to brush dust off this old chestnut that I've seen trotted around recently:

When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing— they believe in anything. ~ G. K. Chesterton

People seem to be using this rationale as a warning. "Now listen, if you stop believing in god, bad things could happen." And apparently the same people insist that it's true. Supposedly new age medicine is on the rise, people join various cults, the world seems to be acting more gullible on the whole. Perhaps.

But let's go back to Chesterton. Let's see what he's saying there. And this is not just my reading of it, this is how I perceive people are interpreting his statement to make a point:

When people stop believing in god they start searching for something else to believe. And they end up believing the most ridiculous things, they turn to superstition.

On the face of it, that seems like an insightful observation. But when you think about it for a minute.. what could be more ridiculous than god? I mean if you believe that story, how much more gullible could you get? Superstition? You mean like supernatural beings?

You know how people say "don't do drugs, they'll mess you up"? I wouldn't know, because I've never taken any. But it seems to me people are messed up already without the drugs.

The only difference between religion and your run-of-the-mill superstition is that religion is institutionalized. It is the accepted (or if you will, tolerated) superstition. It's the emperor's new clothes. It's Santa Claus. It's "sssh don't say it out loud, those people over there still believe it".

Chesterton was half right. People will believe anything. They do this not after rejecting god, but from the very beginning. And god is very much a part of of this "anything".

We see this again and again, how easy it is to trick people into doing things that are not in their best interest. How advertising makes us desire things we don't really want. How phishing attacks get people to give up their password by telling them lies. It's absolutely true. This is our weakness, and everyone is vulnerable.

I do it myself. I somehow got this idea that I have an impact on the results of my team. The situation is like this. I'm not watching the game, and I don't even know there is a game underway. So I just randomly check the scores to see if anything is happening and I notice my team is playing. If I then start following the scores until the end it often seems like a positive starting point turns into a bad result. What started out as a lead results in a draw or loss. I seem to have a bad impact. So what do I do about it? I don't follow it. I try to put it out of my mind and just check the score when it's all over. (Inevitably, of course, I forget. And I check before the game is over, by which time it might be a draw, so that just fuels the superstition.)

So what is that? It's superstition, plain and simple. Of course, I know that I don't have any effect on the result. And I would never try to suggest to someone that it's better not to check the scores underway lest you impact the result. It's totally irrational. But I still kind of believe this, my behavior proves that I do.

Superstition is a common thing, a lot of people have one thing or another that they kind of secretely believe despite knowing better. It's who we are. But to say that one man's superstition is gullibility, while another's is virtue? Let's cut the crap.

We are accustomed to ethical systems where rules apply universally to everyone. Such systems are everywhere: the legal system of every country, road regulations, the rules of just about every social organization. Universal rules are the only practical solution to the problem of anarchy in most cases. They are also based on the assumption that the greatest order and justice will be achieved through universality.

Ethics

To see why this is a flawed assumption you need look no further than the classic teen movie about the kid who gets bullied. The standard response from the authorities is always the same one: "report it to us, we will fix the problem". So they sit down the bully for a talking to, and of course it changes nothing because the intervention is too light, it has no effect on him. Why doesn't it? Because the bully [in the movie] is a lot more self confident than the average kid, so an intervention that would have taken effect on most kids doesn't make a dent in him. The guiding principle is that the an action has a universal appropriate response associated with it.

Parents discover the same thing. The ideal model is that all their kids get the same treatment and play by the same rules. No preference for one over the other. But the reality is that kids are different, and they need different stimuli. A kid who's thick skinned won't respond to a light reprimand, whereas a sensitive kid will be overwhelmed by the same harsh beat down that would have been appropriate for his robust sibling. One size does not fit all.

Most clearcut of all are monetary incentives. If one guy gets pulled over for speeding in a beat up old car worth 1000 bucks and another guy gets caught in a 100,000 sports car, should they pay the same fine? In the interest of fairness, yes. But if you're trying to prevent speeding, then each should get a fine that will be high enough to set a sufficient incentive. If you make them both pay 100 then the guy in the sports car doesn't even notice it and let's get real, people don't buy sports cars out of a strong dedication to the speed limit.

Universal rules are in a sense the least bad solution. And people intuitively accept them, because even as they feel judged harshly they can take solace in the fact that everyone gets the same treatment for the same infraction. But that doesn't mean universality promotes that most harmony. Sometimes people even act out in protest against being treated as replaceable cogs in a machine, and all it takes to pacify them is a little individual attention.

Academic performance

Another area where universal standards rule is academic testing. The idea is that if you give every student the same test then you can determine how well each person has absorbed the same material. Of course, what you end up measuring in part is test taking aptitude. But there is a more serious problem with this. Ideally, what you would like to measure is not so much knowledge of this specific material, which may be obsolete a few years down the road. Instead, what a potential employer would be interested in is learning aptitude. And taking it one step further, perhaps even the aptitude to learn how to learn.

To clarify this point, suppose you are taking a class on discrete mathematics. It's entirely possible that you won't ever find a use for this knowledge in your professional life, so to determine your knowledge of discrete math isn't particularly interesting. What's more interesting is to have some metric of how successful your learning process was. So if you knew all the material beforehand, you would score a zero. And if you think about it, that is a far more just way to measure performance. A student with no relevant background would get credit for the work he had to put in to compensate for his deficit.

Ruby is a great language, but one thing it needs is process. And what seems to suffer most from this is documentation.

1. Ruby’s not ready
2. Ruby 1.9.1 released

Tell me how many times you've seen this. A guy is talking to a room full of people. He wants to do a quick poll, like "how many people are familiar with..". So he asks his question, but while he's doing that he raises his hand.

What the hell is this about? I mean what is the message here? "I don't know where *you* are from, but around here we raise our hand in a situation like this." Is that what it means? What else could it be? Is the guy really thinking 'Well, in case there are some people here who have never been among other people before...'? Is he worried everyone is gonna yell out all at once?

What does it say about us if we really need this cue? Is this mode of response really that hard to figure out? Are there people in the room thinking "I want to give a positive response, but damn if I can figure out how to do it"? If a guy is sitting in the room who doesn't know how to respond, and he sees people around him raising their hands, does he need this additional confirmation?

The strange thing is I don't remember seeing this in the past. Somehow we all seemed to know how this works in the past. I mean if anything you would expect everyone would know this "new thing" by now. Next thing you know, the guy is gonna start saying "See my hand in this position? This is what I want you to do if you want to give a positive response."

With Ludlum's passing in 2001, Eric Van Lustbader has taken up the mantle of writing more Bourne books for the fans. As it turns out, he does this surprisingly well in that his voice is very similar to Ludlum's. To date, he's put out three books, with a fourth on the way. Interestingly, Ludlum left Bourne when the character was 50 years old, so to the extent that Van Lustbader wants to keep this going, he'll have to equip Bourne with the characteristics of a James Bond, or... Donald Duck. Characters that never seem to age, merely appear again and again in successive episodes.

Legacy

Nevertheless, The Bourne Legacy certainly does add to Jason's life story, as the title no doubt implies. Sadly, Van Lustbader kills off the lovable characters Alex Conklin and Morris Panov right off the bat. I suppose after three stories we've had it with them? This sets the stage for Jason, who is implicated as the suspect through a set up. Strangely enough, the CIA takes the bait without ever considering the possibility that something is amiss. What's mind boggling about these people is that they never seem to know what the people working for them actually are capable of. First they train a Bourne, and then they're astonished that a simple hit squad can't take him down. The agency director, a long time friend of Conklin's, puts a price on Jason's head without thinking twice about it.

It's odd that a man with no connections into the agency is able to execute such a plot, sending the whole agency after one of its agents. But that's what Stepan Spalko, on the face of it a well respected leader of a humanitarian organization, has done. His hired gun is a man called Khan, a superb assassin whose main asset is to never betray his emotions, no matter the situation. Van Lustbader lets it slip quite early on that Khan is actually Jason's long lost son Joshua, presumed dead, from his first marriage. But it takes us until the end of the story for Jason to accept this truth.

In the meantime, there is a scheme to execute a bacteriological attack on the participants of the terrorists summit in Iceland, that is leaders from the US, Russia and Arab states. Naturally, the plot is Spalko's, with the help of the puppeteer's favorite puppets: Chechnyan rebels. In the end, Khan has an unlikely soul cleansing moment with one of Spalko's betrayed Chechnyans, Zena, through which (although Zena is dying) he's able to gain some fresh perspective on his father who supposedly abandoned him back then in Phnom Penh.

Betrayal

I'm starting to resent Van Lustbader. He is systematically destroying everything Ludlum built up. First he killed off Panov and Conklin, and now Marie. Marie was shockingly absent from Legacy, and now she's met her end in the most trivial and un-Bourne like way, to pneumonia. Imagine, the strong and resourceful Marie to wither like this? It's absurd. I can think of two reasons. Either Van Lustbader doesn't like Marie or he doesn't have it in him to write her part.

The more I think about it, there's something bigger going on here. You don't just kill off the second most important character without reason. But it isn't just her. Van Lustbader's characters are different. They are exaggerated, caricatures almost. Conklin first appeared every bit the single minded, firing from the hip kind of guy, but he turned out to be a wonderfully nuanced character. And Panov had great personal warmth. Then it was Marie, the most complicated of all of Ludlum's characters. She was never a flat character instructed to repeat the same concerns in the same words. On the contrary, there was much growth, and you could always sense that Ludlum had a lot more in store for her, he was never finished with her. A wonderful aspect of the Bourne stories was precisely the unpredictability of Marie.

Contrast Conklin, David Abbott and Peter Holland to the nameless director of the CIA. Ludlum's characters are flesh and blood, they feel guilt and remorse. Van Lustbader's director, in contrast, is Pointy Haired Boss. And he barely has a handle on the job, consumed in the struggle to maintain his political position and that of the company. He knows little about the ongoings and understands even less, least of all about Bourne. It struck me how odd this was. Surely the CIA chief would be a highly sophisticated character, surely he'd be clever enough both to protect the agency and run it, or how else would he have risen to the highest position? Strangely enough, Van Lustbader uses him a lot, but then he doesn't bother to build him a decent character.

But that's the thing about Van Lustbader, he can't do characters. Ludlum would never motivate killing or terror with anger or hatred. Hatred is a complicated emotion, with forays into many other states of mind. Furthermore, a character who's hateful is not hateful all the time, he undergoes moments of weakness, of shame and doubt. Meanwhile, the CIA chief orders Bourne's execution more or less because he's sick of him. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Van Lustbader's one honest attempt at creating a character was Kahn who, agonizingly, doesn't reappear.

Van Lustbader's villains are also altogether different. They go under the common banner of "terrorists". First Chechnyan rebels and now Saudi jihadists. Their objective is a rather vague scheme to disrupt US-Saudi relations. Compare that to the mesmerizing plot of the Taiwanese magnate who wanted to seize control of a fragile Chinese state, now that was a plot! Van Lustbader's villains can said to be more or less "crazy", but in a more shallow sense than, say, Carlos. There is endless rhetoric about Western decadence, but what exactly are they trying to achieve? At least Carlos had his reasons, and there were reasons why he had them. Spalko too was a stronger character. If nothing else at least it was clear that he was a puppeteer, and a puppeteer never reveals his cards to his puppets. But Fadi and Karim spend 20 years planning a "Face Off" reenactment only to detonate a nuke in Washington DC. Well, so what? What does that accomplish?

Ludlum believed that life can twist you every which way, but it does not ultimately possess you. He used a lot of older characters, he believed in redemption and forgiveness. With Van Lustbader, there are three options. You are corrupt from the start and eventually meet your end. You start out good, then become corrupted. Or, you remain good, but you'll be put through the very harshest episodes in life. That's the complete set of human experience with Van Lustbader.

A final, smaller, matter is Van Lustbader's courageous stab at computer security. I understand his motive, but he should keep it to a minimum. That scene where Karim runs a virus on the mainframe and brings down the entire network is quite sad. So the CIA, one of the most technologically advanced organizations (as every spy fiction writer insists) only has a single mainframe? He completely betrays his ignorance of the computer networks present even in small businesses, let alone huge organizations. The insistence on portraying "the firewall" as some kind of fantastic artificial intelligence is also rather tedious.

Sanction

As much as the previous Van Lustbader novels were sub par, this one just didn't grip me at all. His lack of imagination is tiring.

Tiring is also his reliance on recycling the same themes again and again. CIA gets a new female director. None of the men respect a woman in charge. Yadayadayada. And it drags on and on. Come to think of it, this feminist angle has been present in all of his books. Yes, we get it, don't you have anything else?

The plot this time is convoluted without being especially interesting. Which is an odd thing to say for a Bourne story. But lo and behold, another Van Lustbader favorite theme: muslim fundamentalism. A group calling themselves the Black Legion is planning a large scale attack on the continental US. Their motive is typically weak. "We can not accept the Western way of life so we must strike." Another pointless motive that can't possibly accomplish anything, this is starting to feel familiar. Let's see, all of Van Lustbader's villains are muslim terrorists.

The other half of the story is the CIA vs NSA power struggle. This is what Van Lustbader loves to write about, the hard man in charge. Again in stark contrast to Ludlum's characters. Yes, Luther Laval is clever, but he's not as sophisticated as Ludlum's characters. He's simple minded, one sided, flat. At least the two agencies fighting it out is somewhat interesting, but Van Lustbader completely fails to imprint Veronica Heart's character on the story.

So how does it go? Pick some tried and true themes. Add a few locations, some exotic names (preferably Russian or Turkish), shallow characters and wrap it up with Bourne. Oh, and add a lot of politics. Yeah, that seems to work well enough.