We’re Doomed

I’m sometimes amused and sometimes dismayed by the mesmerizing effects of cute little arguments, but that doesn’t discourage me from making up my own:

People normally model their opinions on those of authority figures since they are usually not in a position to make an independent judgment even if they were motivated enough to try. Unfortunately, different authorities say different things. One solution is to parrot a party line, but that solution is, as it were, energetically unfavorable. An unambiguous and stridently stated point of view may have to be defended, a most unwelcome cost. Another common option is to hold several inconsistent beliefs at once—self contradictory propositions, unlike matter and anti-matter, can and do coexist indefinitely so long as the brain is kept at a fairly low temperature. The most common dodge, however, is to assume that the truth always lies between. This strategy has several advantages. It assumes that all differences of opinion occur on a continuum between polar opposites, thus sweeping 99.9% of the unwanted complexity of the universe under a handy rhetorical rug. Above all it is sweet and reasonable and blessedly vague. It is also highly exploitable.

The genre conventions of American journalism assure that every public issue will be presented as a conflict between two opposing positions. Under these circumstances, the more irrational of the two sides will always win no matter how idiotic its contention. Indeed, if you don’t give a damn about truth or fairness, you are well advised to strike the most extreme stance you can. The audience may not buy your thoroughly crazy ideas, but it they split the difference, you still win a partial victory and also make it possible to extend your success at the next occasion by further establishing the legitimacy of your zany ideology. Your opponent, handicapped by scruples, will not be able to counter your tactics by a countervailing exaggeration. His or her caution and good manners will simply be perceived as weakness.

The Rhetoric of the Anti-Masonic Party Revisited

The word fascism is useless rhetorically, but I sometimes wish it were still possible to use it analytically because the politics it names is not some historical curiosity but a recurring tendency with great appeal to many people. This fact was conveniently forgotten in the aftermath of the wars of the first half of the last century and not just in liberated France. It's as if we thought that thing itself could not come back if we didn't utter its name. As a result of this linguistic prohibition, still in force, we have no usable name for a political syndrome characterized by:

Coercive patriotism
Populist rhetoric
Non-stop, ubiquitous propaganda
Programmatic official deception
Contempt for individual rights
Demonization of foreign and domestic enemies
Machismo – the Cult of Attitude
Glorification of ignorance as a cultural value
Obsession with violence as a solution to problems
Fascination with weapons
Fear of sexuality
Disgust with parliamentary politics, non-stop calls for national unity
An interlocking directorate of big business and government officials
Cronyism on a vast scale
A politicized justice system
Hostility to labor unions
Regressive taxation
An aggressive, unilateral foreign policy

So what should we call this system now that Hitler has given fascism a bad name? I am keen to hear.

Si lingua non esset immortalis…

It’s an old percept of statecraft—or if it isn’t, it ought to be—that nations should not go to war unless losing the war is a better result than not fighting it at all. By that light, we owe the various Royal Academies and National Commissions a respite from the traditional sarcasm they endure for their doomed efforts to preserve the purity of their various native tongues. The point is apparently never made, but losing the war to create a stable language is a very useful futility. The professors and orthographers have, after all, succeeded in fashioning a whole series of literary languages from a local Babel of dialects and patois. It’s hard enough to understand human history or conduct its affairs when dealing with, reckoning from Sumerian to Tok Pisin, perhaps two hundred regularized languages. Absent the literary and sometimes political effort it required to cut the continuum of ever changing dialects into intelligible units and retard their mutation, human affairs would be illegible instead of merely chaotic. The language police always lose in the long run, but it makes all the difference in the world that it is a long run.

I am minded to make these remarks by the recent appearance of the I Tatti Renaissance Library, a whole series of modern Latin classics presented like Loeb editions of the Classics with an English translation on facing pages. Books written in neo-Latin have a difficult time finding readers, both because translations are often not available and because of the prejudice that even great writers like Petrarch and Boccaccio couldn’t write anything worthwhile in a dead language. This last notion is really quite peculiar since those of us who write in literary English are also writing in a dead language, even if we are working with a fresher corpse. Anyhow, there really are a great many fine books written in neo-Latin. The literary quality of writers like the original renaissance man, Leon Batista Alberti, and the Florentine historian Leonard Bruni is obvious in the high-quality I Tatti translations. The translations also help correct the record in other ways. I’ve just begun to read The Platonic Theology of Marsilio Ficino, but I’ve already discovered that he is a more a serious philosopher than I had ever realized.

I append a list of the current and forthcoming volumes in this series:

In print:

GIANNOZZO MANETTI
Biographical Writings

LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI
Momus

MARSILIO FICINO
Platonic Theology, 3 Volumes

HUMANIST EDUCATIONAL TREATISES

POLYDORE VERGIL
On Discovery

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
FAMOUS WOMEN

LEONARDO BRUNI
HISTORY OF THE FLORENTINE PEOPLE
Volume 1, Books I-IV

Forthcoming:

FRANCESCO PETRARCH
Secret

CRISTOFORO LANDINO
Camaldulensian Disputations

RAPHAEL LIPPI BRANDOLINI
Republics and Kingdoms Compared

POGGIO BRACCIOLINI
Letters

GIROLAMO CARDANO
Autobiography

ANGELO POLIZIANO
Sylvae

GIOVANNI PONTANO
Dialogues

CYRIAC OF ANCONA
Later Writings

FLAVIO BIONDO
Rome Restored

PIUS II
Commentaries

FRANCESCO PETRARCH
Invectives

GIOVANNI PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
Philosophical Writings

LORENZO VALLA
Dialogues

FRANCESCO FILELFO
Odes

GIORDANO BRUNO
Lamps of the Thirty Statues

BARTOLOMEO PLATINA
History of the Popes

Worse than a Mistake

Military success is a handy cosmetic for a blemished foreign policy. Napoleon often sought battle as much for the domestic PR value of a victory as for its strategic consequences. The instance of Iraq shows how little changes. The triumphant march on Bagdad boosted Bush’s fortunes at home even though the scripted outcome, more lethal theater than dubious battle, was never in question and didn’t teach us anything about the wisdom or unwisdom of the war since it was always obvious that the high tech American military could easily dispose of the Iraqi government. But if the showy triumph of the spring ought to be discounted in evaluating our policy, the losses of the summer shouldn’t be decisive in judging it either. It could be, after all, that the costs we’re incurring are worth it. No 19th Century imperialist would trouble himself over a couple of casualties a day even if, as is quite possible in the present case, the sacrifice will have to be made every day of every year we occupy the mini-Raj. True, the notion that the terrorists are going to run out of personnel is worse than irrational wishful thinking—granted the birthrate in Muslim countries, it’s another right-wing abuse of arithmetic—but maybe a stable regime will nevertheless eventually emerge in Mesopotamia, probably led by a military strong man, another Bush family client like Noriega or Saddam Hussein. Obviously, one does not know.

Only a true prophet, which is to say somebody who’s lucky, can accurately predict the long-range outcome of a foreign policy action. My own great unhappiness with our attack on Iraq was not based on a judgment of its probable bad consequences, though I think a good case can be made from an unimpeachably cynical perspective that it was pretty unintelligent. I mean I thought it was a mistake, but maybe it wasn’t a mistake and, anyhow, governments make mistakes all the time in a desperately difficult game. What outraged me wasn’t that war was an error but that it was dishonorable. I simply didn’t want to be associated with a state that granted itself the right to make war on whoever it wished without immediate cause. I was also perfectly aware—who among the merely conscious wasn’t?—that Bush, Blair, and Powell were lying to everybody in a premeditated, indeed, systematic fashion and that important sectors of American civil society, especially the media, were complicit in these lies. That’s why I am less impressed than some others by the significance of the problems we’re facing in Iraq just now. If I thought we had any business being there, I wouldn’t find the cost excessive; and I won’t change my mind about the wrongness of what we did even if the triumph of Bagdad is followed by the triumph of Damascus as Jena followed Austerlitz.

Squaring the Circle

If all that it takes is to believe that your nation is God’s favorite, chosen peoples have always infested the Earth, though their hurrah-for-our-side ideologies have never had much more content or validity than a high-school football cheer. The historical novelty of the Jews is rather different. Like the Greeks, the Hebrews were late comers to a world that already had a long history behind it. They certainly tried to take their place among the ranks of the goyim, an impulse that has never gone away, but promoting legendary or mythical figures such as David or Solomon as local pharaohs didn’t quite come off despite the talk of chariots and mighty men. It was the Book and the tradition of reading it that set the Jews apart and allowed them to persist with a sense of their own identity in the aftermath of the destruction of their insignificant territorial states. Indeed, many of the exiles in Babylon and Egypt chose not to return to Palestine. There was something half-hearted about the rebuilding of the temple, a partially sensed irrelevance that perhaps accounts for the literary dullness of the Books of Nehemiah and Ezra. In any case the gradual establishment of a definitive canon and translation of the Torah into Greek by Jews in Alexandria were far more momentous than priestly squabbles in Jerusalem. To be sure, as I gather from people who actually know about these things, we have next to no reliable information about what actually took place in these crucial centuries. Even so, the salient event was presumably not the resettlement of the West Bank by Judeans of impeccable lineage but something spiritual or at least intellectual.

Being chosen means being set apart, but the terms of this separation are not, or were not, geographical and political so much as ritual and ethical. You some times read that during the Diaspora the Jews reverted to the situation before the monarchy during which the people had rallied around a portable symbol of identity except that in the later age the Torah took the place of the Tabernacle. In this respect, Zionism is a reversion of a reversion, a redefinition of Israel as a territorial unit. Granted the horrors of the last century, it’s easy to understand and sympathize with this desire for a secure homeland, an impulse similar to the frequently expressed wish of Russians and other East Europeans to live in a normal country in the aftermath of the Soviet era. In Israel’s case, unfortunately, the hoped for normalcy is impossible because the new state is not just a place where Jews live among others, but a Jewish state where only Jews have full citizenship. Only the presumption of some sort of special privilege can justify the mass expulsion of the Palestinians back in 1947, the gradual annexation of the West Bank, and the restrictions on intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews; but what’s special about the Jews is precisely that they aren’t just another nation. That’s why the Israeli flag shouldn’t feature the Star of David. The more appropriate emblem would be a square circle on a field of blue.

In the World of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is Under Arrest

We Americans have a right to mess up our own affairs, which is why I get more exercised by the foreign policy of the Bush administration than by its domestic program. The two are related, however; and the regime pursues its aims at home and abroad with the same characteristic combination of good conscience and studied dishonesty. While the State and Defense Departments, the CIA, and the FBI cheerfully jigger intelligence to support the Conquest of Iraq and other international adventures, the independence of the government’s various scientific advisory boards has been compromised by political intervention through the stocking of boards with ideologues and operatives and the censoring of supposedly objective reports as in the recent instance of the excision of inconvenient conclusions about global warming from an important EPA document. Apparently, the administration is also doctoring the economic information issued by various agencies. For example, for the last couple of years the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis has stopped reporting the distributional effects of tax changes. This outfit previously issued formal reports addressing the question of who benefits and who pays for various policy changes. Since the last two tax bills were obviously crafted to benefit the wealthy, objective analysis could not be permitted. Unfortunately, the muzzling of the Office of Tax Analysis is hardly an aberration. Under the prevailing circumstances, government data on the budget, unemployment, and the balance of trade are probably all suspect.

One has to be both naïve and ignorant of the moral history of the last thirty years to think that significant numbers of contemporary bureaucrats, scientists, and economists are going to be willing to risk their incomes to blow the whistle on the politicization of technical information. Ranked by its bad effects, the great vice of the age is not a fondness for child pornography, after all, but plain old careerism. These guys agree with Tim Russert that integrity is for paupers. Meanwhile, it’s easy to understand why the rightists think that they can get away with corrupting the sources of information even though they blind themselves in the process. The administration is a faith-based institution; prophecy doesn’t require eyes.

Make It So

I don’t doubt there are things that are what they are because of the way we think about them, which is to say, because of the will or whim of a sovereign community. Famously, it is consensus not connubium that makes a marriage; and imaginary medical facts can send you off to real jails and madhouses or, thanks to a show of hands at some hotel in Toronto, turn a disease into a life style choice or vice versa. There is nothing new about such astonishing feats of creation from nothing. We read in the Talmud that the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel disputed for two and a half years whether the creation of man had been a good thing. Eventually they took a vote. I guess that settled that. But even admitting that it is indeed possible to do things with words, one has to ask why anybody is especially impressed with these somewhat less than earth-shattering miracles, “Do you believe in infant baptism?” he asked earnestly. “Yes, I’ve seen it done.”

May I suggest that what has been novel and remarkable about the last couple of centuries is a partial escape from the tyranny of the illocutionary? In the near total absence of reliable knowledge, truth was bound to be an act of social will, a set of sacred, obligatory clichés. These days, having figured out how to let reality get a word in edgewise, we actually do understand a thing or two including our location relative to the Sun and the other stars, the nature of the chemical bond, and how living things work. Even granting that the objectivity of the various sciences is to some extent inversely proportional to their human relevance, you’d think we’d be impressed if not relieved to encounter at least a few examples of facts that remain the case whether or not you believe in them. But, of course, it is quite possible that the obsession of retail Postmodernism with the relativity of knowledge is actually an indirect recognition of the new state of affairs, just as the Fundamentalist’s newly found interest in radical skepticism is pretty obviously a response to the practical impossibility of doubting the reality of the evolution of life.

Going Ted Postol

The trouble is, the evil part is so much easier than the genius part. Every three-year old dreams of conquest and empire, but then they kick the wrong uncle in the shins. Unfortunately, the current crop of would-be masters of the universe disposes of a lot more firepower than a toddler and their comeuppance is likely to involve blood rather than tears. In either case, however, wishful thinking leads to a drastic overestimation of real capabilities.

In theory, disciplined but unscrupulous individuals can exploit the power of fantasy to move masses of people without falling for their own line. In practice, even technically sophisticated people don’t seem to be able to keep the two sets of books straight. Back in the 80s, for example, the rational reason to promote antiballistic missile defense was to outmaneuver the Soviets. In the context of that strategy, it made sense to tout the prospects of a successful system even in the face of a near-total scientific consensus that the whole idea was nonsense. The Reds are long gone and the prospects of a working system remain essentially zero, but the dream of perfect safety lives on, recruiting new threats—North Korea, terrorists, perhaps China—to justify what is really a childish and extremely aggressive dream of irresponsible power. By now, it is pretty clear that many in the current regime actually believe in ABMs despite the simultaneous recognition that tests results must be faked to keep the project going.

This sort of thing has happened a lot in the last hundred years. Alfred von Schlieffen could never make his famous plan work even in a map exercise, and the grand dreams of the even more feckless Austrian Franz Conrad von Huetzendorff were similarly dead before arrival. The logistical experts of Hitler’s Wehrmacht calculated that the panzers would run out of gas before they reached Moscow. That didn’t matter to the high command for whom, as usual, hope was indeed the plan. Similarly, the Japanese discounted the results of the war games they conducted in the run up to the Battle of Midway. The umpires ruled that the result of the simulation, the loss of four aircraft carriers, was simply impossible. Authoritarian regimes appear to be especially prone to this pathology. The absence of a free press and serious political opposition makes it easy to fool the populace and therefore yourself. As America becomes steadily more authoritarian, we can expect its leaders to believe their own propaganda more and more.

Unmodern Library

I know a biology professor who draws a chemical structure in front of his class and asks what it is. The students are always familiar with that one, and immediately tell him it’s DNA. “No!” he thunders—well, I imagine he thunders—“It’s chalk on blackboard!” thus producing a new cover of the Buddhist number about the finger and the moon, though as far as I know Ralph hasn’t cut off anybody’s finger yet. There is a philological version of this riff.

Encountering some nice modern translation of an old book or, more likely, a few well-chosen paragraphs from a translation, it is very easy to think you are encountering the word of Dante or Sophocles instead of a thoroughly synthetic surrogate for the postulated original. I recently encountered a photo of a crumbling Babylonian tablet of an episode from the Gilgamesh epic along with a transliteration of its contents (Introduction to Gilgamesh, A Reader, edited by John Meier). What we read as “Why, Enkidu, do you curse the love priestess, the woman?” was vocalized, leaving out the diacritical marks and brackets for conjectures, as “am-me-ni en-ki-du ha-rim-ti sam-hat ta-na-an-za-ar.” Except the tablet is in pretty bad shape, in several pieces in fact, and the scribe’s handwriting, though rather better than mine, is not perfect. And the text is in Akkadian, a Semitic language, but the epic was originally in Sumerian so a literate Mesopotamian would actually have read the characters for Enkidu as something like Heabani. (Apparently, it’s just a convention to call the hero by his Sumerian name Gilgamesh [Bilgamesh?] since the Akkadian is something like Izdubar and everyone knew him as Nancy.) There are other difficulties also. For example, George Smith, who originally translated the passage back in the 1870s, didn’t realize that Samhat means sacred prostitute. He thought it was a proper name for a lady called “Delightful.” It goes on.

I don’t mean to belabor the point, both because it is preposterous for me to talk about the finer points of Assyriology at all granted my well-known imbecility with languages but also because you don’t have to go back to the Dawn of History to find examples of the illusion of transparency. Anyhow, my point is not so much a matter of instances as generalities. Everything we read from other languages, indeed most of what we read in our own language, is highly mediated. Like baby sea gulls we never feed on an actual herring, though in the human case, mommy chews our food for us our whole life long. Intellectually speaking, we subsist on pasteurized, homogenized, and bowdlerized texts, a processed cheese product but one without nutrition information on the label. That’s why I like very literal translations and even more bilingual editions of books. You don’t learn how to make conversation in Assyrian, but at least you preserve some sense of the distance between yourself and the past and the sheer difficulty of understanding.

Hiring the Handicapped

Integrity in a politician is like the tail of the peacock, an extravagance that advertises that its possessor is so vigorous he can afford a superfluous expense. That’s why I usually support the better man even when, as a practical matter, what is most needed is the better politician.

Sunday School

I’ve frequently cited the Book of Daniel for polemical purposes as an example of prophesy after the fact (ex eventu). Obviously put together around 165 BC during the despotic reign of Antilochus IV Epiphanes, the book represents the legendary Daniel as “foretelling” history that had long sense taken place—until very recently Daniel was seven times more fraudulent than any other document ever forged in the land of Mesopotamia. The fortunetelling doesn’t occupy the entire text, however; and I still fondly remember its tales of the handwriting on the wall and the fiery furnace from a picture book I had as a child. Both for old time sake and to see if I had been representing the historical status of the book accurately all these years, I reread Daniel this weekend with the help of the translation and commentary of Hartman and Di Lella. I still like the folkloric parts, and the apocalyptic predictions are still a transparent fiction; but I did learn a few things.

1. The pious commentators treat “the book’s supposed historical setting and dates as merely literary conventions and nothing more,” but they educe no evidence that Daniel’s authors are winking at the reader. It is true, however, that the rabbis, who in this as in other matters demonstrate considerable integrity, eventually put the Book of Daniel in the third part of Scripture, Kehuvim or writings, instead of in the second part, Nevi’im or prophets. The writings contain a number of works such as Job, the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes that are of considerable literary merit but theologically problematic. The Christians were less cautious. St. Jerome followed the Hellenistic Greek translation of the Jewish Bible in placing Daniel among the prophets.

2. The clumsiness of a fraud is no evidence of the innocence of the perpetrators, but it does testify to the remarkable credulity of the faithful. One speaks of a will to believe, but that’s surely a misnomer if the word “will” implies a process of deliberation leading to a decision instead of automatism, group think, and wishful thinking. One believes in the good news much as one believes that it’s you can eat awesome blossoms on a regular basis without bad consequences. One hardly needs to sift the archaeological evidence or to become an expert on Oriental languages to notice that the accounts in the Book of Daniel are incoherent and self-contradictory—on internal evidence alone, the pagan philosopher Porphyry correctly dated the composition of the book back in the 3rd Century.

3. The prophesies in Daniel are indeed ex eventu, but they are also erroneous despite the advantage of predicting the past. The authors of the work simply didn’t understand the history of the Near East—not surprising when you recall that they were talking about things that had happened four hundred years before their own time. How many people today would get the wars and rulers of 16th Century right? Thus the famous allegory of the statue with feet of clay confuses Medes and Persians and generally makes a hash of chronology and king’s names.

Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex by Judith Levine

Harmful to Minors is an expose of the craziness of American attitudes towards sex and children, including our hysteria about pedophilia and child pornography, our dotty notion that there’s something pathological or criminal about nine year olds playing doctor, and the official promotion of abstinence as a panacea. From a statistical point of view, children aren’t at much risk of sexual attack from strangers—family members are another matter—and notion that sex offenders are a homogenous population of incorrigible monsters is not so much a psychological generalization as a rule of genre fiction like the convention that you can’t see vampires in a mirror. Levine usefully reminds us that these received truths hurt a lot of actual people. Minor offenders are branded for life and subjected to vigilante justice, and children get stigmatized by pointless psychiatric interventions backed by the force of law. Meanwhile, the obsession with real or imagined sexual misbehavior opens up vast prospects of blackmail and political extortion to public and private sex police and other entrepreneurs.

In most respects, Harmful to Minors is an unremarkable effort. Levine, a journalist, is neither a remarkably good or remarkably inept writer, and her book features the mix of anecdote and generalization usual in general nonfiction. In any case, making a case for the obvious isn’t all that difficult. What makes the book notable is that it was published at all, even by a minor university press. Indeed, I expect that the University of Minnesota Press wishes it had stuck to learned treatises on phenomenology since the publication of Harmful to Minors was greeted with gouts of venom from the usual spitting cobras. Levine is not a pamphleteer for NAMBLA or a promoter of sexual liberation ala Reich; but she was nevertheless denounced, and not just on AM radio, as a debaucher of children and an agent of the Prince of Darkness. The dogmas of American sexual politics are far too fragile to be defended without fanaticism.

An Unfortunate Consideration

A good many people seem to think that only God can establish moral rules and that without supernatural fiat and sanction we wouldn’t be able to figure out what we should do or bring ourselves to do the right thing if we somehow managed to guess what that might be. This belief is problematic in a practical way. If a theological irrationalist gets up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and decides he can no longer hypnotize himself into believing he believes, a potential psychopath is born. Unfortunately, one has to be very optimistic indeed to think this is only a theoretical possibility.

Has Anybody Pointed Out

Conservatives continue to insist that the observed warming of the Earth has a natural rather than a human cause. To judge from the tendency of articles I’ve read in various journals, the consensus against this proposition is pretty strong and getting stronger—the most recent issue of SCIENCE included a paper reporting evidence that the troposphere, the lowest level of the atmosphere, is swelling, a phenomenon consistent with anthropogenic warming—but the issue of why the Earth is warming may be less important than the more imperious fact that it is warming. Mankind may have to take collective action to deal with the consequences of global warming whatever its cause. And even if, contrary to the current evidence, greenhouse gases aren’t responsible for the warming the Earth, reducing emissions of such gases would remain an obvious way to counter a rise in average temperatures.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Without any particular strain or great expense, I drove more than 5,000 miles in the last month; but I was able to move so effortlessly only because I stayed to well-beaten paths like a marble rolling in a groove. At right angles to the Interstates, I could barely have traveled at all. The freedom of the open road is freedom in much the same way and to the same degree that Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride is an adventure—keep your hands inside the car at all times.

Technical Note: Accounts of the “inner” history of mankind sometimes leave the impression that what has changed in the last couple of centuries is an affair of worldviews or mentalities. What made parts of the Earth into Our World is not something primarily psychological but a real physical process. Dasein really is a clearing in the woods, often enough a clear cut; and our experience is a communal fantasy structured by a physical network of narrow but well-greased pathways paved with concrete and lined with Quality Inns and Burger Kings.

Report from the Heartland

On my recent inspection tour of the continental United States, I mostly inspected the mile or so on either side of various Interstates. I sampled the airwaves more adequately, however, even though with the car in drive and my mind in neutral, what was actually being said in the broadcasts didn’t stick with me. I listened as dogs listen, not to the words but to the tone of the voice. Clear Channel D.J.’s sound a trademark note on every station even when it isn’t literally the same person celebrating the vibrant personality of Amarillo, the Athens of Potter county, on Wednesday and the pioneer spirit of the old Northwest in Terre Haute two days later. On Clear Channel stations, however, it often is the same person.I could also usually tell I had tuned into right-winger talk show by the perpetual snarl. Similarly, NPR announcers almost always sound like psychiatric nurses trying to calm excitable patients. There are exceptions. The musical segues on NPR seem to feature Mongolian throat singing with remarkable frequency, and conservative commentators spend a certain part of every hour flattering their listeners as if the entire middle of the country was suffering from a perpetual crisis of low self esteem.

Travelers to this country often remark on the monotony of its commercial landscapes, the identical strip of brand name stores and restaurants plunked down in an astonishing variety of physical settings; but, to judge by the radio, anyway, America’s feelings are as franchised as the burger joints.

Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, edited by Ibn Warraq

[Note] I tell myself that the best thing is to be satisfied with your fate and get on with it. For example, if you’re a Superhero, it doesn’t do to bitch that you are an off-brand superhero. True, I’m not as strong as the Hulk, as mysterious as the Shadow, or even as stretchy as Plasticman, but I do read a lot. Think of me as what would have happened if the guy in the Twilight Zone episode hadn’t broken his glasses. In that spirit, the first of innumerable very brief notices of mostly unnoticed books:

Ibn Warraq is probably the most prominent anti-Muslim writer who comes from the Muslim world. Leaving Islam and his earlier book, Why I Am Not a Muslim, are effective if unoriginal polemic. You don’t have to be a great shot when you’re shooting an elephant at close range but you do have to keep your nerve—Ibn Warraq, whose real identity is understandably kept secret, is under a death sentence for apostasy as are all male apostates under Muslim law as interpreted by all four schools of Islamic jurisprudence. In any case, as the narratives in Leaving Islam make clear, criticisms of religion that have been commonplace in the West since the Enlightenment are still news in Pakistan and Egypt. Indeed, one of the benefits of reading these first-person accounts is to recover the force of the old arguments. Other themes are perhaps more surprising: many male and female apostates cite the deep hostility of traditional Islam to women and many non-Arabs see Islam as an Arabic imperial ideology. I was also interested to read that many ex-Muslims are as unimpressed with the literary quality of the Koran as I am.

While works like Leaving Islam may have a more immediate impact, I expect that Ibn Warraq’s more academic books will turn out to more important in the long haul. In his What the Koran Really Says, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, and The Origins of the Koran, all anthologies of serious scholarship, Ibn Warraq examines the remarkably thin evidence that lies behind the official story of how Islam and the Koran came to be. Sympathetic Western accounts of Islam have left many people with the impression that, unlike Moses or Jesus, Muhammad’s career unfolded in the light of history. In fact, contemporary Byzantine accounts of the Arab invasion of Syria and Egypt don’t even mention Muhammad, and the familiar just-so story of his activities is based on biographies and histories written down two centuries after the death of the Prophet. It is also quite impossible to squeeze a coherent narrative out of the Koran itself, surely the worst edited as well as the worst written of the major scriptures. In any case, while Jewish and Christian writings have been subjected to four hundred years of serious philological research, the corresponding process has barely been initiated for the Koran. Ibn Warraq’s own conjectures about the origins of Islam may not prove to be accurate or even on the right track—he is perfectly well aware of how tentative all such reconstructions must be given the state of the evidence—but the effort itself is a vital precedent and a huge improvement on the thinly disguised apologetics (Watt!) that often pass for serious scholarship on Islam.

Putting Lessons

Golf is supposed to be a cruel game, but it is also capriciously merciful. No matter how badly you play, some of your shots will go in the hole because the idiot optimism of your club selection and the mere stupidity of your course management will sometimes combine in one golden moment with a feeble swing and geriatric nerves to produce a brilliant result. This occurs surprisingly often. If you both misread and miss hit all your putts, for example, half of them will go wildly off line but half will move in the general direction of the target because the errors counteract one another. An analogue of this mechanism operates in the occasional cases in which journalists get something right. The universal corruption of our Press is sometimes moderated by an incompetence that is equally chronic but much more erratic in its effects. Thus, as Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler website (www.dailyhowler.com) points out, the pundits routinely get the facts wrong when they report on the current WMD scandal. They rightly attack a deeply dishonest regime but with misunderstood particulars. Unfortunately, the golf analogy quickly breaks down, because even the worst golfer really is trying to get the ball in the hole, whereas telling the truth about the public world is not the object of the sport of journalism.

A Memorable Fancy or Phylum and Forget ‘Em

I used to have a recurrent dream that recast the Oedipus legend in modern dress, rather in the style of the Brazilian movie about Orpheus. The only scene I remember with some clarity involved the encounter with the Sphinx, who in this version is a very cool but somewhat sinister jazz pianist, a demonic Ray Charles. The sphinx/hipster registers my approach somehow and, flashing the exaggerated grin of a blind man, lays the riddle on me, “Say, babe, at what temperature does meat keep best?” I answer instantly, “98.6°!” and win, though only for the time being.

Meat can keep for quite a while, several billion years in my case, though temperature isn’t necessarily the most critical parameter, some of my ancestors having been pretty cold fish long before they were really cool cats. The fundamental thing is the unbroken maintenance of a definable chemical tension between what is inside and what is outside. Thus life persists only so long as cells contain a lot more adenosine triphosphate than adenosine diphosphate—8 to 10 times more, I’m told. Since ATP spontaneously breaks down into ADP, only the perpetual uphill synthesis of ATP keeps everybody going. The treadmill must never be allowed to stop. It’s like the children’s pastime of seeing how long you can bounce a ball on a paddle. “A zillion and one. A zillion and two. A zillion and three. Oops!” Life also depends on a continuity of genetic information, of course; but the thermodynamic imperative is even more despotic since it rules every moment of every life.

Physicists describe the motion of things as world lines in space-time. The careers of living things form world tubes, cylinders enclosing small regions rich in energetic molecules. If we could view the Earth and its history from a fifth dimension, we would see trillions and trillions of these mostly microscopic tubes emerging from what was, presumably, a single primal mass. Many of the tubes ramify; but the overwhelming majority dead end almost immediately; and, in all probability, all the tubes end eventually. If you look very closely, you can just make out exceedingly thin tubes branching out from the rare thicker sections. A tiny fraction of these very tiny tubes connect with other tiny tubes and themselves grow into thick tubes. Despite these rare instances of joining, the overall shape of life is, as Darwin recognized, a rather bushy shrub. Topologically, the whole assembly appears to be a single volume in space-time but, because of sex, is actually multiply connected when you look at it closely.

Non-Prophet Organizations

It is a commonplace of Biblical studies that prophets are not fortunetellers and should not be graded by how often their predictions are fulfilled—their calling, presumably, having been something rather different and more important than a gig as a night club card reader or political pundit. I’m merely a gypsy nabi (on the analogy with a gypsy taxi driver), but these days even an unlicensed prophet knows better than to foretell elections or forecast wars. The prudential reason for my reticence is the embarrassment of guessing wrong. Afflicted as I am with a reasonably good memory and random fits of integrity, I’m liable to admit I’m wrong and suffer the consequences to my self-esteem. But the likelihood of error is not the main thing. After all, I might also be right once and a while. I oppose the enterprise of fortunetelling because, finally, I believe in the reality of time and the freedom of the will. History is a surpassingly exciting adventure because not even God knows how it will turn out. So if, for example, I excoriate George Bush, it isn’t because I know whether his face will end up on a stamp or his head on a pole. Good actions turn out badly. Bad actions turn out well. Meanwhile the guy who insists on drawing to an inside strait is still an idiot.

All of this was supposed to be a brief preface to a couple of remarks about Nonprofit Organizations—I guess as a person with a philosophical education, I couldn’t resist the temptation to begin at the beginning and work backwards. The introduction was also meant to display a note of piquant irony, for having rejected the notion of making predictions, I was going to make one, namely that there will be a whole series of scandals involving NPOs in the next few years.

As prophesies go, that one isn’t very thrilling, I suppose. It is also largely ex eventu, that is, there have already been quite a few scandals involving NPOs. Just as the fabricator of the Book of Daniel could accurately predict the downfall of the Babylonians and Persians because these events had already occurred when he wrote the book, I can confidently assert the increasing prevalence of serious dishonesty in the non profits because high officials of Goodwill, the Red Cross, and various church groups have recently been caught with their hands in the till. More than that, however, my prediction is based on the increasing reliance our society places on charitable foundations to the wake of the retreat of the welfare state. NPOs offer a magic or at least very convenient solution to the problems of the world or at least to the problems of the compassionate conservatives. For reasons never exactly explained, the managers of NPOs are supposed to be morally better than government officials and the inefficiency of their bureaucracies somehow a nonissue to the same people who otherwise can’t type the word “bureaucracy” without putting the word “bloated” in front of it. While everybody complains that the CEOs of unsuccessful companies shouldn’t be rewarded with enormous salaries and bonuses, at least CEOs can be judged by the profits of their firms. What constitutes good performance in a top NPOs manager is much more difficult to define. The potential for abuse is enormous.

Oddly, the only general criticism of NPOs I have heard lately comes from the Right. The American Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society recently held an all-day conference entitled NGOs: The Growing Power of an Un-elected Few. Why these two organizations should be unhappy about un-elected power is not clear, but you don’t succeed in the world of foundations by being consistent or intellectually honest. Characteristically, the conference turned into a day long attack on precisely those NPOs — Amnesty International, CARE, Oxfam, and Friends of the Earth—whose activities interfere with the prerogatives of the corporations and America’s imperial foreign policy. The political irresponsibility of the NPOs was just a convenient stick to beat up hated greens and internationalists. That it was an available line of attack, however, is telling. The AEI critique applies far more to the deeply corrupt religious organizations and propaganda mills on their own side than Amnesty International or Doctors without Borders, but it is a valid in principle.