Making the Short List
The mathematical romance Flatland takes place in a two-dimensional world whose inhabitants are mystified by the occasional visits of three-dimensional interlopers who can effortlessly accomplish such amazing stunts as escaping from a loop without breaking the line. We don’t live in Flatland, of course, but to judge from our public discourse, we have decided to act as if we did, ignoring the depth of the world in a search for radical simplicity. It would be dubious enough to operate with the notion that particular individuals and groups have an essence that is unchangeable without divine intervention. We go beyond that to claim that this postulated center or axis is either good or evil, which is to say that our fundamental category of judgment is actually not even two-dimensional or simply linear but binary. No wonder that our thoughts are like infantile graffiti scrawled in smeary crayon on the nursery wall. But it’s not that we don’t know better. Stupidity, long promoted to the laboring and servile classes as the virtue of simplicity, is also admired in leaders as a sign of strength and a token of solidarity with the People. We chose to be crude. But maybe this sort of thing can be overdone.
Mind you, I don’t dispute the value of oversimplification. Even the most elaborate theory is a cartoon version of an intractably complex reality; and my own thinking is exceedingly narrow, an obsessive meditation on the theme of selection itself. For me, culture does not transcend nature or differ from it in essence or operate according to novel laws. It is simply an infinitesimal subset or subgroup of nature insulated from the remainder by various active mechanisms. To complain about this situation is pointless since it is constitutive of any possible human world—you might as well curse the nature of things—but my objection is not to the fact that the human agenda is so narrow but that it is often the wrong agenda, a poor selection. That, and the fact we often seem to omit the recognition of the narrowness from the list of the six permissible ideas.
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Monday, September 27, 2004
Revolutionary Justice?
Effective political action always involves the mobilization of unpleasant human emotions. Lately the right has been better than the left in playing on the resentments of the population. While dismissing concerns about material inequality as class hatred, the Republicans have played on the envy that so many middling people have for the possessors of disproportionate amounts of cultural capital. True, the merest idiot can become rich by inheriting millions while even the most privileged child has to work to become educated, but this modest element of fairness makes things worse. Even the saddest loser can identify with one of our lumpenmillionaires since the difference between the wretchedness of the pleb and the splendor of the mogul is mostly just luck or can be imagined to be luck. The sorriest specimen on earth can identify with Donald Trump. Indeed, being a sorry specimen makes it all the easier. Meanwhile the hateful thing about cultured people is not the possibility that they are fakes, but the suspicion that they aren’t. As Nietzsche pointed out over a hundred years ago, it is not the presumption of merit that offends. It’s merit itself.
There is no general way of getting around the human propensity to hate the competition. A worker who works too hard will be restrained by the other workers. A black kid who tries to escape the Inner City will be pulled back by his friends and relations—the so-called crab bucket effect. In their endless celebration of mediocrity, the Republicans merely apply the same principle to politics. One can fight this tactic by promoting candidates like Clinton, the Galactic Mule of American politics, whose tremendous charm made people forgive him his competence; but there aren’t very many Clintons around. And the situation gets worse because our form of civilization really does tend to debase and infantilize most people, thus increasing their need for psychic compensation.
What’s needed is an appeal to some equally problematic but powerful psychological mechanism. Unfortunately, the obvious and probably necessary choice is the premeditated awakening of the sense of political justice, by which I do not mean the benign and healing process of assessing responsibility for what happens, but the reckless and imperative desire to punish political enemies.
Effective political action always involves the mobilization of unpleasant human emotions. Lately the right has been better than the left in playing on the resentments of the population. While dismissing concerns about material inequality as class hatred, the Republicans have played on the envy that so many middling people have for the possessors of disproportionate amounts of cultural capital. True, the merest idiot can become rich by inheriting millions while even the most privileged child has to work to become educated, but this modest element of fairness makes things worse. Even the saddest loser can identify with one of our lumpenmillionaires since the difference between the wretchedness of the pleb and the splendor of the mogul is mostly just luck or can be imagined to be luck. The sorriest specimen on earth can identify with Donald Trump. Indeed, being a sorry specimen makes it all the easier. Meanwhile the hateful thing about cultured people is not the possibility that they are fakes, but the suspicion that they aren’t. As Nietzsche pointed out over a hundred years ago, it is not the presumption of merit that offends. It’s merit itself.
There is no general way of getting around the human propensity to hate the competition. A worker who works too hard will be restrained by the other workers. A black kid who tries to escape the Inner City will be pulled back by his friends and relations—the so-called crab bucket effect. In their endless celebration of mediocrity, the Republicans merely apply the same principle to politics. One can fight this tactic by promoting candidates like Clinton, the Galactic Mule of American politics, whose tremendous charm made people forgive him his competence; but there aren’t very many Clintons around. And the situation gets worse because our form of civilization really does tend to debase and infantilize most people, thus increasing their need for psychic compensation.
What’s needed is an appeal to some equally problematic but powerful psychological mechanism. Unfortunately, the obvious and probably necessary choice is the premeditated awakening of the sense of political justice, by which I do not mean the benign and healing process of assessing responsibility for what happens, but the reckless and imperative desire to punish political enemies.
Friday, September 24, 2004
Picky, Picky
The President of the United Nations recently opined that the U.S. invasion of Iraq had been illegal under international law. So far as I can tell, the story didn’t get much play in these parts, perhaps because Koffee Annan’s remarks were actually delivered in a rather offhand manner as a passing acknowledgement of an obvious fact. To the extent that they bothered to form an opinion on the matter, I expect that much of the right and much of the public discounted the charge of illegality because, at worst, all we did was violate a dictate of a despised organization, dominated by foreigners. If so, allow me to raise a niggling little problem with this not very apologetic bit of apologetics.
International law was not invented in 1945 and its legitimacy is not dependent upon the U.N. Charter or any other single document or agreement. The principle that nations are not entitled to initiate preventative wars grew up over a long period of diplomatic history from the grim experience of a great many pointless wars. The validity of the doctrine, however, rests on more than precedent. If a group of intelligent agents had gotten together the day after the Creation of the World, they would certainly come to the same conclusion about preventative war. For that matter, if you were suddenly elected ruler of the universe, you’d legislate against preventative war. (Wouldn’t you?) The mere suspicion that some other nation might be a threat in some unspecified way at some unspecified future date simply isn’t a legitimate excuse for aggression.
As it happens, we did sign the U.N. Charter, which inconveniently and unambiguously outlaws what we did in Iraq. Indeed, in large measure, we wrote the Charter. As its unilateral abrogation of many treatises shows, the Bush administration does not feel bound to obligations contracted by Democratic administrations or even earlier Republican administrations. Obviously, our word is not our bond, and the only principle in operation is that everything we can get away with is legitimate. As in the German jurisprudence of the 30’s, it’s enough for a policy to have the form of law to be legal even if the content of the law is the replacement of legality with mere force.
The mad emperor Cambyses fell in love with his sister and asked the wise men of his court whether it was legal to marry her. The sages replied, “We haven’t found a law that says that the king of Persia can marry his sister, but there is a law that says he can do whatever he wants.”
Note: after writing these paragraphs, I Googled Koffee Annan’s name and discovered an immense body of right wing hatred directed at the man. ABC and CNN may not have made much about Koffee’s remarks, but they sure riled up the radicals. Typical rant, Annan: Useless Douche Bag or Incompetent Fuckwit.
The President of the United Nations recently opined that the U.S. invasion of Iraq had been illegal under international law. So far as I can tell, the story didn’t get much play in these parts, perhaps because Koffee Annan’s remarks were actually delivered in a rather offhand manner as a passing acknowledgement of an obvious fact. To the extent that they bothered to form an opinion on the matter, I expect that much of the right and much of the public discounted the charge of illegality because, at worst, all we did was violate a dictate of a despised organization, dominated by foreigners. If so, allow me to raise a niggling little problem with this not very apologetic bit of apologetics.
International law was not invented in 1945 and its legitimacy is not dependent upon the U.N. Charter or any other single document or agreement. The principle that nations are not entitled to initiate preventative wars grew up over a long period of diplomatic history from the grim experience of a great many pointless wars. The validity of the doctrine, however, rests on more than precedent. If a group of intelligent agents had gotten together the day after the Creation of the World, they would certainly come to the same conclusion about preventative war. For that matter, if you were suddenly elected ruler of the universe, you’d legislate against preventative war. (Wouldn’t you?) The mere suspicion that some other nation might be a threat in some unspecified way at some unspecified future date simply isn’t a legitimate excuse for aggression.
As it happens, we did sign the U.N. Charter, which inconveniently and unambiguously outlaws what we did in Iraq. Indeed, in large measure, we wrote the Charter. As its unilateral abrogation of many treatises shows, the Bush administration does not feel bound to obligations contracted by Democratic administrations or even earlier Republican administrations. Obviously, our word is not our bond, and the only principle in operation is that everything we can get away with is legitimate. As in the German jurisprudence of the 30’s, it’s enough for a policy to have the form of law to be legal even if the content of the law is the replacement of legality with mere force.
The mad emperor Cambyses fell in love with his sister and asked the wise men of his court whether it was legal to marry her. The sages replied, “We haven’t found a law that says that the king of Persia can marry his sister, but there is a law that says he can do whatever he wants.”
Note: after writing these paragraphs, I Googled Koffee Annan’s name and discovered an immense body of right wing hatred directed at the man. ABC and CNN may not have made much about Koffee’s remarks, but they sure riled up the radicals. Typical rant, Annan: Useless Douche Bag or Incompetent Fuckwit.
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Many Times Many Ways
I used to write a good many letters to the editor back in the early years of the Clinton administration when defenders of his policies were notably scarce and everybody seemed to assume that the Whitewater stories were more or less true. Monitoring the letters sections of several papers, I soon discovered that the same paragraphs and often enough the same letters would appear over different names in various places while identical boilerplate also surfaced in editorials, evidently copied verbatim from some sort of press release though even high school students have the decency to rephrase the stuff they swipe from the encyclopedia. This process created the illusion of a grass root protest against Clinton and everything he stood for, but the grass in question was Astroturf, much of it manufactured in Texas. The Republicans still use the technique, though by now it has been thoroughly exposed—a good many patriotic letters from soldiers in Iraq are cooked up at the RNC, for example. Transparent fraud remains effective when perpetrated on the willfully blind by operators of principled cynicism.
While repetition of whole phrases or paragraphs betrays premeditated inverse plagiarism, the expression of similar thoughts in different ways indicates the emergence of a genuinely shared perception. I’ve recently noticed, for example, that a great many people in a great many places in print and on the Internet have come to the same conclusion as I have about the meaning of the forthcoming election. My version:
Our policies are extremely unpopular in most of the world, but for the moment this unhappiness has not produced a general revulsion against America because it has been possible for the Europeans, the Asians, and even some of the Muslims to blame it all on the aberrant behavior of one American leader of dubious legitimacy. If Bush is actually elected President, however, the blame will devolve on the country as a whole since we will have endorsed his arrogant and violent policies and made them our own. This reassessment is likely to have unpleasant real world consequences for us over time—you don’t have to believe in some iron Karmic law to think that the usual excesses will probably result in the usual penalties—but the consequences are not the worst thing. The worst thing is that the world will be right. We will be at fault. Having missed the opportunity to reject unilateralism, preventive war, and the torture of prisoners, we and not the Bush administration become the real criminals.
I used to write a good many letters to the editor back in the early years of the Clinton administration when defenders of his policies were notably scarce and everybody seemed to assume that the Whitewater stories were more or less true. Monitoring the letters sections of several papers, I soon discovered that the same paragraphs and often enough the same letters would appear over different names in various places while identical boilerplate also surfaced in editorials, evidently copied verbatim from some sort of press release though even high school students have the decency to rephrase the stuff they swipe from the encyclopedia. This process created the illusion of a grass root protest against Clinton and everything he stood for, but the grass in question was Astroturf, much of it manufactured in Texas. The Republicans still use the technique, though by now it has been thoroughly exposed—a good many patriotic letters from soldiers in Iraq are cooked up at the RNC, for example. Transparent fraud remains effective when perpetrated on the willfully blind by operators of principled cynicism.
While repetition of whole phrases or paragraphs betrays premeditated inverse plagiarism, the expression of similar thoughts in different ways indicates the emergence of a genuinely shared perception. I’ve recently noticed, for example, that a great many people in a great many places in print and on the Internet have come to the same conclusion as I have about the meaning of the forthcoming election. My version:
Our policies are extremely unpopular in most of the world, but for the moment this unhappiness has not produced a general revulsion against America because it has been possible for the Europeans, the Asians, and even some of the Muslims to blame it all on the aberrant behavior of one American leader of dubious legitimacy. If Bush is actually elected President, however, the blame will devolve on the country as a whole since we will have endorsed his arrogant and violent policies and made them our own. This reassessment is likely to have unpleasant real world consequences for us over time—you don’t have to believe in some iron Karmic law to think that the usual excesses will probably result in the usual penalties—but the consequences are not the worst thing. The worst thing is that the world will be right. We will be at fault. Having missed the opportunity to reject unilateralism, preventive war, and the torture of prisoners, we and not the Bush administration become the real criminals.
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
A Matter of Policy
Life really is too short to worry about extremely unlikely hypotheses just because they are sacred to the vast majority of human beings. If you’re chatting with somebody over lunch or brokering peace in Northern Ireland or engaged in some other civilian pursuit, it is simply good manners to respect tender sensibilities. If you are determined to understand the world, however, being fair or considerate is more than a waste of time, though it certainly is that. Extending the courtesy of listening creates the presumption that the alternative notion is worth considering, indeed that it is the alternative notion instead of just an alternative notion.
Americans are suckers for this sort of thing. Once the Creationists failed in their efforts to suppress all mention of evolution in textbooks and classrooms, they began to claim that they just wanted a fair debate so that students could choose for themselves what to believe. But this tactic, though a rhetorical winner, implies that a creator god is somehow the inevitable alternative explanation of the development of living things when it is only one of an infinite number of possible explanations and a notion of David Lynchian weirdness at that. Why would anybody entertain the theory that the existence and nature of things is the result of an action? There is an obvious political explanation for why many people want the theme of the divine designer to be raised in a high school class and an obvious psychological explanation for why people find the idea commonsensical. What’s utterly lacking is a scientific or even philosophical justification for entertaining Creationism for an instant. Affording the “theory” or its proponents due respect is a methodological error.
Life really is too short to worry about extremely unlikely hypotheses just because they are sacred to the vast majority of human beings. If you’re chatting with somebody over lunch or brokering peace in Northern Ireland or engaged in some other civilian pursuit, it is simply good manners to respect tender sensibilities. If you are determined to understand the world, however, being fair or considerate is more than a waste of time, though it certainly is that. Extending the courtesy of listening creates the presumption that the alternative notion is worth considering, indeed that it is the alternative notion instead of just an alternative notion.
Americans are suckers for this sort of thing. Once the Creationists failed in their efforts to suppress all mention of evolution in textbooks and classrooms, they began to claim that they just wanted a fair debate so that students could choose for themselves what to believe. But this tactic, though a rhetorical winner, implies that a creator god is somehow the inevitable alternative explanation of the development of living things when it is only one of an infinite number of possible explanations and a notion of David Lynchian weirdness at that. Why would anybody entertain the theory that the existence and nature of things is the result of an action? There is an obvious political explanation for why many people want the theme of the divine designer to be raised in a high school class and an obvious psychological explanation for why people find the idea commonsensical. What’s utterly lacking is a scientific or even philosophical justification for entertaining Creationism for an instant. Affording the “theory” or its proponents due respect is a methodological error.
Monday, September 20, 2004
Parallel Lives
One of the celebrated ironies of the age is how Osama Ben Laden, a cherished ally in our proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, became our deadly enemy once the tanks rolled out of Kabul and we became the intolerable occupier of sacred lands. In fact, though the ironies are more muted, the end of the Cold War made plenty of other heroes into problematic characters. Consider the case of Karol Jozef Wojtyla, a Polish patriot who became Pope John Paul II and whose leadership probably really did have something to do with the success of Solidarity in his native land—Polish nationalism has been inseparable from Catholicism since the incursions of Lutheran Swedes back in the 17th Century. With the fall of the Soviets, the same intellectual and moral characteristics that made the Pope such a force against Communism may well turn out to be harmful to his church in the sequel. John Paul has proven himself to be a very effective reactionary, reinforcing the arbitrary authority of the hierarchy and briskly rolling back the Vatican II reforms. These victories, however, have had a cost as the corruption inevitable in a rigid and secretive system has inspired a lay revolt in the United States and elsewhere that almost amounts to a new Reformation.
One of the celebrated ironies of the age is how Osama Ben Laden, a cherished ally in our proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, became our deadly enemy once the tanks rolled out of Kabul and we became the intolerable occupier of sacred lands. In fact, though the ironies are more muted, the end of the Cold War made plenty of other heroes into problematic characters. Consider the case of Karol Jozef Wojtyla, a Polish patriot who became Pope John Paul II and whose leadership probably really did have something to do with the success of Solidarity in his native land—Polish nationalism has been inseparable from Catholicism since the incursions of Lutheran Swedes back in the 17th Century. With the fall of the Soviets, the same intellectual and moral characteristics that made the Pope such a force against Communism may well turn out to be harmful to his church in the sequel. John Paul has proven himself to be a very effective reactionary, reinforcing the arbitrary authority of the hierarchy and briskly rolling back the Vatican II reforms. These victories, however, have had a cost as the corruption inevitable in a rigid and secretive system has inspired a lay revolt in the United States and elsewhere that almost amounts to a new Reformation.
Saturday, September 18, 2004
Counter Reformation for Dummies
If I were a praying man, I’d thank Providence every day that I wasn’t born as a person of literary ambitions in a 3rd World country. I have an intense sympathy for those poor souls who are more or less stuck with the scutwork of explaining how the ancient traditions of their people are—who would have thought it?—precisely relevant to contemporary problems because the positive features of modernity were all adumbrated by various dimly remembered prophets, sages, and poets. Armies of national intellectuals have found their widely varying talents herded into the defile of this historical situation. Nobody writes what they want, just what they can; but the predicament of so many 19th and 20th Century public men and women shows that the great constraint on creativity is not a lack of ability or some subtle psychological block or tragic and ineluctable abyss between conception and performance or even the suffocating, inescapable influence of the Zeitgeist, but often enough the absence of any other plausible career move.
A lot of what gets passed off as historical determinism is no more mysterious than the canalizing effect of available career options. And it’s just for this reason that the best way to assert ideological hegemony is not brainwashing or terror but the creation of opportunities for bright young comers. The Roman church wasn’t particularly successful in countering Protestantism by burning people at the stake, but restricting the best bureaucratic and academic jobs to the faithful had a powerful if gradual effect, especially in Hapsburg lands. Transubstantiation didn’t become any more plausible between 1500 and 1700, but it paid rather better to defend it just as it pays better to arrive at free market solutions to every conceivable problem in an intellectual world increasingly dominated by the patronage of highly ideological foundations. Overt persecution of opposing views is unnecessary and counterproductive so long as personal ambition can so easily be mobilized in the service of authority. Of course the very best minds are a little too proud to shill for anybody, but the mediocre always dominate the scene in the short run as one can easily verify by monitoring the Op Ed page of the New York Times.
If I were a praying man, I’d thank Providence every day that I wasn’t born as a person of literary ambitions in a 3rd World country. I have an intense sympathy for those poor souls who are more or less stuck with the scutwork of explaining how the ancient traditions of their people are—who would have thought it?—precisely relevant to contemporary problems because the positive features of modernity were all adumbrated by various dimly remembered prophets, sages, and poets. Armies of national intellectuals have found their widely varying talents herded into the defile of this historical situation. Nobody writes what they want, just what they can; but the predicament of so many 19th and 20th Century public men and women shows that the great constraint on creativity is not a lack of ability or some subtle psychological block or tragic and ineluctable abyss between conception and performance or even the suffocating, inescapable influence of the Zeitgeist, but often enough the absence of any other plausible career move.
A lot of what gets passed off as historical determinism is no more mysterious than the canalizing effect of available career options. And it’s just for this reason that the best way to assert ideological hegemony is not brainwashing or terror but the creation of opportunities for bright young comers. The Roman church wasn’t particularly successful in countering Protestantism by burning people at the stake, but restricting the best bureaucratic and academic jobs to the faithful had a powerful if gradual effect, especially in Hapsburg lands. Transubstantiation didn’t become any more plausible between 1500 and 1700, but it paid rather better to defend it just as it pays better to arrive at free market solutions to every conceivable problem in an intellectual world increasingly dominated by the patronage of highly ideological foundations. Overt persecution of opposing views is unnecessary and counterproductive so long as personal ambition can so easily be mobilized in the service of authority. Of course the very best minds are a little too proud to shill for anybody, but the mediocre always dominate the scene in the short run as one can easily verify by monitoring the Op Ed page of the New York Times.
Monday, September 13, 2004
Before and After the Fact
At any given time, a mind can only entertain 5 or 6 things. That’s not a bad performance for a single naked ape. Unfortunately, the group mind is just as limited. As a result, everything has to be articulated in terms of a tiny sample of current cant. It is exceedingly difficult to introduce a new idea or even to widen the repertory a bit if only for stylistic variety. Even using a different expression for the same concept loses readers. For example, in political contexts one inevitably ends up writing that the other guys remarks are “troubling,” a locution I, for one, find positively horripilatory and not in a good way. Sometimes cant is accidentally accurate, however. For example, it is quite correct and even apt to arraign the mass media as facilitators of the Republican Big Lie technique.
Television talking heads have picked up the preemptive defense that they are blamelessly innocent and objective because they simply report what both sides say about the issues of the day. Proclaiming this policy is the sheerest invitation to political thuggery. It’s like putting up posters in a bad neighborhood to let everybody know which warehouses are unlocked. If the media will not call even the most egregious whoppers, it will pay the unscrupulous to repeat them as they certainly have.
Simple minded people–and that means all of us most of the time—automatically assume that what people utter has a prima facie validity. We’re well aware that people can lie and misrepresent things, of course; but the default on our program is trust and it takes energy to listen critically. You have to do something. For this reason, even those of us who know better are influenced by the endless repetition of false information. Propaganda works and what makes it effective is repetition, not cogency. Since the radical right has the means to get its message endlessly repeated—think of the Swift Boat campaign—truth or falsity becomes irrelevant and even the opponents of the administration will end up doubting themselves about matters that are long past reasonable question. It is the sheerest vanity to think that one is immune to the spin. You aren’t just being partisan, dear readers. In fact things are worse than you think.
When the purveyors of information abdicate responsibility to keep things on the level, we all wind up living in the Winchester House of Mystery wondering why the short guys look tall and water seems to run up hill. If we had a free press in the United States, no major party would nominate an incompetent like Bush or allow such a figure to run on a platform of 2+2=5. As it is, practically anything can happen because the entire country is suffering from a breakdown in reality testing. Media facilitators bear a large share of the responsibility for this outcome and should be made to pay a personal penalty for their cowardly and convenient “objectivity.”
At any given time, a mind can only entertain 5 or 6 things. That’s not a bad performance for a single naked ape. Unfortunately, the group mind is just as limited. As a result, everything has to be articulated in terms of a tiny sample of current cant. It is exceedingly difficult to introduce a new idea or even to widen the repertory a bit if only for stylistic variety. Even using a different expression for the same concept loses readers. For example, in political contexts one inevitably ends up writing that the other guys remarks are “troubling,” a locution I, for one, find positively horripilatory and not in a good way. Sometimes cant is accidentally accurate, however. For example, it is quite correct and even apt to arraign the mass media as facilitators of the Republican Big Lie technique.
Television talking heads have picked up the preemptive defense that they are blamelessly innocent and objective because they simply report what both sides say about the issues of the day. Proclaiming this policy is the sheerest invitation to political thuggery. It’s like putting up posters in a bad neighborhood to let everybody know which warehouses are unlocked. If the media will not call even the most egregious whoppers, it will pay the unscrupulous to repeat them as they certainly have.
Simple minded people–and that means all of us most of the time—automatically assume that what people utter has a prima facie validity. We’re well aware that people can lie and misrepresent things, of course; but the default on our program is trust and it takes energy to listen critically. You have to do something. For this reason, even those of us who know better are influenced by the endless repetition of false information. Propaganda works and what makes it effective is repetition, not cogency. Since the radical right has the means to get its message endlessly repeated—think of the Swift Boat campaign—truth or falsity becomes irrelevant and even the opponents of the administration will end up doubting themselves about matters that are long past reasonable question. It is the sheerest vanity to think that one is immune to the spin. You aren’t just being partisan, dear readers. In fact things are worse than you think.
When the purveyors of information abdicate responsibility to keep things on the level, we all wind up living in the Winchester House of Mystery wondering why the short guys look tall and water seems to run up hill. If we had a free press in the United States, no major party would nominate an incompetent like Bush or allow such a figure to run on a platform of 2+2=5. As it is, practically anything can happen because the entire country is suffering from a breakdown in reality testing. Media facilitators bear a large share of the responsibility for this outcome and should be made to pay a personal penalty for their cowardly and convenient “objectivity.”
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Another Leni Riefenstahl Moment
I was repelled by the obvious political message of Hero, though like everybody else I did admire the color scheme. Though the movie overtly deals with the First Emperor, the ruthless king of Chin who reunited the Empire at the end of the Warring States period, it isn’t much of a stretch to understand the film at as a piece of revisionism about the Tiananmen Square massacre. What seems to be going on is this: A Chinese intellectual makes his peace with the powers that be by directing a movie about a group of transcendently skillful warriors who seek to assassinate a tyrant but eventually decide that the project of Chinese unification justifies his monumental crimes. Tellingly, two of the warriors are writers and in the movie’s finale, the hero, whose name is Nameless, willingly submits to execution in an immense public square. Zhang Yimou does portray the protesting swordsmen as honorable people, but he is just as insistent that they all must die to atone for their rebellion. Zhang gets off easier. He just has to make a movie.
I understand that for American audiences and reviewers who aren’t aware of Chinese history and politics, a movie like Hero will mostly register as an action flick. For a Chinese audience, it’s so tendentious it’s almost honest.
I was repelled by the obvious political message of Hero, though like everybody else I did admire the color scheme. Though the movie overtly deals with the First Emperor, the ruthless king of Chin who reunited the Empire at the end of the Warring States period, it isn’t much of a stretch to understand the film at as a piece of revisionism about the Tiananmen Square massacre. What seems to be going on is this: A Chinese intellectual makes his peace with the powers that be by directing a movie about a group of transcendently skillful warriors who seek to assassinate a tyrant but eventually decide that the project of Chinese unification justifies his monumental crimes. Tellingly, two of the warriors are writers and in the movie’s finale, the hero, whose name is Nameless, willingly submits to execution in an immense public square. Zhang Yimou does portray the protesting swordsmen as honorable people, but he is just as insistent that they all must die to atone for their rebellion. Zhang gets off easier. He just has to make a movie.
I understand that for American audiences and reviewers who aren’t aware of Chinese history and politics, a movie like Hero will mostly register as an action flick. For a Chinese audience, it’s so tendentious it’s almost honest.
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Rum, Romanism, and Reaction
It is something of a commonplace by now that the various Islamic fundamentalisms are radically innovative relative to tradition, though this fact is kept quiet by the innovators because the tradition pointedly rejected innovation (Bid’ah). Backward looking Christian sects are also very creative. Since religions are soft-bodied organisms unstiffened by any extra-human reality, this flexibility shouldn’t be surprising. I confess, however, I have trouble processing some of the more recent mutations in American Protestantism, especially the increasing respect the right-wing theocrats express for Catholicism. Admiration for the Pope is the one thing I had never expected to hear emanating from an American bigot. Have these guys forgotten the Black Legend? I guess they haven’t reread Foxe’s Book of Martyrs lately.
The irony of ironies in all this is that Jerry Falwell et. al. are making nice to the Whore of Babylon at the same time that the catholic laity is in revolt against the corruption and rigidity of Papacy, often in the name of a fervent Augustinian spirituality uncannily reminiscent of the faith of the Reformers. Meanwhile, on the officially Protestant side of the aisle, there remain plenty of evangelicals who continue to support the separation of church and state for purely religious reasons and find Roman mummery and monarchism to be, if not actually repellent, at least utterly irrelevant to their deeper concerns. Another feature of the confusing ideological scene are the presumably secular figures like Niall Ferguson who manage to say nice things about Rome despite its exceedingly rancid historical record—the Black Legend bit is unfashionable, not inaccurate.
It is something of a commonplace by now that the various Islamic fundamentalisms are radically innovative relative to tradition, though this fact is kept quiet by the innovators because the tradition pointedly rejected innovation (Bid’ah). Backward looking Christian sects are also very creative. Since religions are soft-bodied organisms unstiffened by any extra-human reality, this flexibility shouldn’t be surprising. I confess, however, I have trouble processing some of the more recent mutations in American Protestantism, especially the increasing respect the right-wing theocrats express for Catholicism. Admiration for the Pope is the one thing I had never expected to hear emanating from an American bigot. Have these guys forgotten the Black Legend? I guess they haven’t reread Foxe’s Book of Martyrs lately.
The irony of ironies in all this is that Jerry Falwell et. al. are making nice to the Whore of Babylon at the same time that the catholic laity is in revolt against the corruption and rigidity of Papacy, often in the name of a fervent Augustinian spirituality uncannily reminiscent of the faith of the Reformers. Meanwhile, on the officially Protestant side of the aisle, there remain plenty of evangelicals who continue to support the separation of church and state for purely religious reasons and find Roman mummery and monarchism to be, if not actually repellent, at least utterly irrelevant to their deeper concerns. Another feature of the confusing ideological scene are the presumably secular figures like Niall Ferguson who manage to say nice things about Rome despite its exceedingly rancid historical record—the Black Legend bit is unfashionable, not inaccurate.
Monday, August 30, 2004
Intended Consequences
When the administration announced it was making drastic changes to overtime rules, the media dutifully reported that the effects of the policy change were unclear; but the administration would never have changed the rules if it were not sure that they would lower wages. Or do you suppose that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would have enthusiastically endorsed the changes if they were going to cost their constituents money?
This story has a context. The United States is running a huge trade deficit with the rest of the world at the same time that it the government is busy increasing the size of the national debt. As almost everybody admits, these excesses will be paid for sooner or later. What has become increasingly clear to me is that the restoration of balance is not some distant eventually but is already underway in the form of a de facto lowering of the real income of the majority of working people brought about by mechanisms such as the increasing use of temporary help and other forms of outsourcing, restrictions on health benefits, and the change in overtime rules. A decline in American wealth relative to the rest of the world is probably inevitable. The administration’s policies, especially its labor policies, make sense as a way of making sure that the burden of this decline falls squarely on the plebs.
When the administration announced it was making drastic changes to overtime rules, the media dutifully reported that the effects of the policy change were unclear; but the administration would never have changed the rules if it were not sure that they would lower wages. Or do you suppose that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would have enthusiastically endorsed the changes if they were going to cost their constituents money?
This story has a context. The United States is running a huge trade deficit with the rest of the world at the same time that it the government is busy increasing the size of the national debt. As almost everybody admits, these excesses will be paid for sooner or later. What has become increasingly clear to me is that the restoration of balance is not some distant eventually but is already underway in the form of a de facto lowering of the real income of the majority of working people brought about by mechanisms such as the increasing use of temporary help and other forms of outsourcing, restrictions on health benefits, and the change in overtime rules. A decline in American wealth relative to the rest of the world is probably inevitable. The administration’s policies, especially its labor policies, make sense as a way of making sure that the burden of this decline falls squarely on the plebs.
Saturday, August 28, 2004
Austrian Millionaires, Part Deux (the Third Installment will not be Forthcoming)
For a long time, I have had serious doubts about the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis that the characteristics of particular natural languages such as English or Navaho determine or at least seriously bias or influence the way in which the speakers of these languages understand the world. The vagueness and ambiguity of the hypothesis is part of the problem. Just as an individual determined to achieve atheism is doomed to frustration in the face of interminably mutable theological definitions, you can never be sure whether the Whorf hypothesis you refute is the relevant version or even worth refuting. At best you can raise objections that make a meaningful point against some versions of the hypothesis. Two such considerations:
1. The grammar of particular languages obliges the speaker to provide certain information to the listener. In English, for example, the third person singular pronoun always indicates gender, a linguistic fact that became a real issue in the last 40 years or so as the clumsiness of writing “he or she” over and over again drove many of us to “they.” It is far from clear, however, that it makes much difference whether or not a category like gender or tense is coded in the grammar since the same meaning can just as well be conveyed by extra words. The verb in Homeric Greek has a dual number, but exactly the same meaning can be expressed by words like “pair” in languages such as English that don’t have a dual. It has been claimed that the Arabs have a foggy notion of causality because of the rudimentary systems of tenses in classical Arabic; but the Arabs in fact have a huge historical literature as do the Chinese whose verbs so far from having tenses doesn’t even have conjugations. Meanwhile, the Indians, whose culture is notoriously unhistorical, wrote Sanskrit, a language with a complex and nuanced system of tenses. Arguably, the main effect of putting distinctions into the grammar is to make them less salient and easier to ignore. Why does it make a difference if distinctions are built into the grammar or have to be expressed lexically?
2. The Whorfians suggest that the structure of particular languages makes it hard to say or understand certain things; but this limitation, it seems to me, is an artifact of the methodology of linguistics. A person who studies a language from the outside has no business deciding what a native speaker should say in a particular instance. If there is no recorded instance of a 2nd person plural pluperfect subjunctive middle of the verb “to burp” in the available corpus of late Medieval Utopian, the linguist simply can’t say for sure whether there ever was such an animal or do more than guess what it might have been by analogy to known forms. But native speakers confront this situation all the time. For all I know, no English speaker has ever said “Had you have burped yourself immediately, you wouldn’t have been discommoded by the gas attack;” but the lack of a precedent didn’t slow me down because I have citizen’s rights in my own language and can make things up as I go along. By the same token, if I need of more ways to speak about kinds of snow, I’ll just make them up. It isn’t just people turning their doctoral dissertations into books that possess the magic power of neologism.
The words and expressions in use in a particular natural language doubtlessly betoken something about the culture of the speakers of the language, but it seems more appropriate to say that the culture expresses itself in the language than that the language molds the culture. I was reminded of this issue by an article in last week’s online edition of SCIENCE that reported on an Amazonian tribe that only has three numbers, one, two, and many. These Indians, it turns out, do very poorly on simple arithmetical tasks that involve counting or matching up rows of small objects—story problems were apparently completely out of the question. The finding, which is apparently well attested, was trotted out as a confirmation of Whorf as if the lack of counting numbers accounted for the poor math skills. In fact, what the anthropologists seem to have discovered is an instance of the extremely depauperate culture of a small and isolated group. Everything about these folks is minimalist. The tribe, seem have lost or discarded elements of culture. They don’t talk about much or build very much. In this regard, they are perhaps like the native Tasmanians who forgot how to build boats after they attained their isolated homeland.
This tribe raises the question of just how small a tool kit is enough for a viable human culture, a question analogous to the issue of how small a genome can be. The Indians are certainly economical with numbers. I hadn’t though anybody could improve on the famous Austrian millionaires mentioned in George Gamow’s book One, Two, Three, Infinity. These worthies challenged each other to come up with the biggest number. One millionaire hems and haws, takes a deep breath, grits his teeth, and comes up with “Three!” The other looks stricken, jumps up from his chair, paces around the room, grimaces, and finally despairs, “You win, damn it!” (Incidentally, George Gamow was a great contriver of names, who coined, among other terms, the expressions Big Bang and the Genetic Code, and thus exemplified the super-Worfian creativity of language users. By the way, I don’t know why Gamow settled on the nationality of the idiots in his joke; but I am sure that if he had been an amoeba, he would have called his book One, Two, Four, Infinity.)
For a long time, I have had serious doubts about the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis that the characteristics of particular natural languages such as English or Navaho determine or at least seriously bias or influence the way in which the speakers of these languages understand the world. The vagueness and ambiguity of the hypothesis is part of the problem. Just as an individual determined to achieve atheism is doomed to frustration in the face of interminably mutable theological definitions, you can never be sure whether the Whorf hypothesis you refute is the relevant version or even worth refuting. At best you can raise objections that make a meaningful point against some versions of the hypothesis. Two such considerations:
1. The grammar of particular languages obliges the speaker to provide certain information to the listener. In English, for example, the third person singular pronoun always indicates gender, a linguistic fact that became a real issue in the last 40 years or so as the clumsiness of writing “he or she” over and over again drove many of us to “they.” It is far from clear, however, that it makes much difference whether or not a category like gender or tense is coded in the grammar since the same meaning can just as well be conveyed by extra words. The verb in Homeric Greek has a dual number, but exactly the same meaning can be expressed by words like “pair” in languages such as English that don’t have a dual. It has been claimed that the Arabs have a foggy notion of causality because of the rudimentary systems of tenses in classical Arabic; but the Arabs in fact have a huge historical literature as do the Chinese whose verbs so far from having tenses doesn’t even have conjugations. Meanwhile, the Indians, whose culture is notoriously unhistorical, wrote Sanskrit, a language with a complex and nuanced system of tenses. Arguably, the main effect of putting distinctions into the grammar is to make them less salient and easier to ignore. Why does it make a difference if distinctions are built into the grammar or have to be expressed lexically?
2. The Whorfians suggest that the structure of particular languages makes it hard to say or understand certain things; but this limitation, it seems to me, is an artifact of the methodology of linguistics. A person who studies a language from the outside has no business deciding what a native speaker should say in a particular instance. If there is no recorded instance of a 2nd person plural pluperfect subjunctive middle of the verb “to burp” in the available corpus of late Medieval Utopian, the linguist simply can’t say for sure whether there ever was such an animal or do more than guess what it might have been by analogy to known forms. But native speakers confront this situation all the time. For all I know, no English speaker has ever said “Had you have burped yourself immediately, you wouldn’t have been discommoded by the gas attack;” but the lack of a precedent didn’t slow me down because I have citizen’s rights in my own language and can make things up as I go along. By the same token, if I need of more ways to speak about kinds of snow, I’ll just make them up. It isn’t just people turning their doctoral dissertations into books that possess the magic power of neologism.
The words and expressions in use in a particular natural language doubtlessly betoken something about the culture of the speakers of the language, but it seems more appropriate to say that the culture expresses itself in the language than that the language molds the culture. I was reminded of this issue by an article in last week’s online edition of SCIENCE that reported on an Amazonian tribe that only has three numbers, one, two, and many. These Indians, it turns out, do very poorly on simple arithmetical tasks that involve counting or matching up rows of small objects—story problems were apparently completely out of the question. The finding, which is apparently well attested, was trotted out as a confirmation of Whorf as if the lack of counting numbers accounted for the poor math skills. In fact, what the anthropologists seem to have discovered is an instance of the extremely depauperate culture of a small and isolated group. Everything about these folks is minimalist. The tribe, seem have lost or discarded elements of culture. They don’t talk about much or build very much. In this regard, they are perhaps like the native Tasmanians who forgot how to build boats after they attained their isolated homeland.
This tribe raises the question of just how small a tool kit is enough for a viable human culture, a question analogous to the issue of how small a genome can be. The Indians are certainly economical with numbers. I hadn’t though anybody could improve on the famous Austrian millionaires mentioned in George Gamow’s book One, Two, Three, Infinity. These worthies challenged each other to come up with the biggest number. One millionaire hems and haws, takes a deep breath, grits his teeth, and comes up with “Three!” The other looks stricken, jumps up from his chair, paces around the room, grimaces, and finally despairs, “You win, damn it!” (Incidentally, George Gamow was a great contriver of names, who coined, among other terms, the expressions Big Bang and the Genetic Code, and thus exemplified the super-Worfian creativity of language users. By the way, I don’t know why Gamow settled on the nationality of the idiots in his joke; but I am sure that if he had been an amoeba, he would have called his book One, Two, Four, Infinity.)
Friday, August 27, 2004
Many Carry the Thursis but Few Are Pseudo-Dionysus
Ascribing agency to the ultimate ground of reality is no less an instance of zoomorphism than imagining God to have a gender. An eternal and ubiquitous entity cannot do anything or even move because whatever it is supposed to do has always already happened and there is no place for it to go. The connoisseurs of negative theology came to this conclusion long ago, though, unlike me, they seem to have thought that some residue of meaning persists after or perhaps during the evaporation of all the divine attributes. The point is not academic. Many educated people assume that the divine science fiction of popular religion somehow adumbrates a defensible doctrine of Being qua Being, albeit in a charmingly childish way. But it is far from clear that the plausible elements of the postulated perennial philosophy have anything very interesting to say. It’s surprisingly easy to get bored with Enlightenment once you get over its novelty value since the glamour of the thing is something left over from all the engaging mythology and nonsense that precedes the moment of terminal sobriety.
Ascribing agency to the ultimate ground of reality is no less an instance of zoomorphism than imagining God to have a gender. An eternal and ubiquitous entity cannot do anything or even move because whatever it is supposed to do has always already happened and there is no place for it to go. The connoisseurs of negative theology came to this conclusion long ago, though, unlike me, they seem to have thought that some residue of meaning persists after or perhaps during the evaporation of all the divine attributes. The point is not academic. Many educated people assume that the divine science fiction of popular religion somehow adumbrates a defensible doctrine of Being qua Being, albeit in a charmingly childish way. But it is far from clear that the plausible elements of the postulated perennial philosophy have anything very interesting to say. It’s surprisingly easy to get bored with Enlightenment once you get over its novelty value since the glamour of the thing is something left over from all the engaging mythology and nonsense that precedes the moment of terminal sobriety.
Thursday, August 19, 2004
Not So Simple
Like other groups of highly educated individuals of superior intelligence, professional scientists tend to be more liberal than the American average—a fact documented in many places, for example, the Bell Curve. Whatever their political proclivities, however, scientist are not given to yelling and hooting. Indeed, as I can testify from many years of personal experience as a technical editor, it is very, very difficult to get a scientist to make an unguarded, unqualified statement, even when the facts warrant it. These folks have grown up in a system in which nobody has a right to an opinion, and every published utterance must be vetted in advance by well-informed critics who are often professional rivals. Meanwhile, the economic situation of scientist also encourages cautious speech. Those who best know what they are talking about work for businessmen and politicians who generally don’t know very much at all. Telling the truth in an asylum run by the patients requires continuous tact and, as the man said, abeunt studia in mores, i.e. you get used to it. All of which makes the current political activism of the science establishment all the more remarkable. The most recent issue of SCIENCE (13 August) is a case in point. The issue features a special section on the hydrogen economy that Bush has promoted as a pat answer to energy and environmental problems associated with global warming. The clear message of the issue is that the hydrogen initiative is politically useful but crucially flawed.
Hydrogen power may have a role in the fairly distant future, but it is hardly a panacea. Hydrogen has to be generated by processes that require energy and produce carbon dioxide. If we make hydrogen by burning coal, we’ll have to figure out how to somehow sequester the resulting CO2 to make net progress towards carbon emissions reduction. Carbon sequestration is a monumental technical problem. And producing hydrogen promises to be a very expensive proposition. Meanwhile, hydrogen presents many other technical challenges. To mention one simple but hard to solve problem: hydrogen is very light. Storing enough hydrogen to power a car for 300 miles of operation would require a fuel tank eight times larger than a normal gas tank even if the hydrogen were pressurized to 10,000 pounds per square inch. There are other options: liquefying the hydrogen or absorbing on in carbon nanotubes or hydrides but nobody knows if these techniques are practical or affordable.
Even if the hydrogen option pans out, it isn’t rational to pursue it in lieu of other measures against the looming problem of global warming. As Donald Kennedy wrote, “Our attention is deflected from the hard, even painful measures that would be needed to slow our business-as-usual carbon trajectory. Postponing action on emissions reduction is like refusing medication for a developing infection: It guarantees that greater costs will have to be paid for.”
Note: The articles in SCIENCE aren't available on line without a subscription.
Like other groups of highly educated individuals of superior intelligence, professional scientists tend to be more liberal than the American average—a fact documented in many places, for example, the Bell Curve. Whatever their political proclivities, however, scientist are not given to yelling and hooting. Indeed, as I can testify from many years of personal experience as a technical editor, it is very, very difficult to get a scientist to make an unguarded, unqualified statement, even when the facts warrant it. These folks have grown up in a system in which nobody has a right to an opinion, and every published utterance must be vetted in advance by well-informed critics who are often professional rivals. Meanwhile, the economic situation of scientist also encourages cautious speech. Those who best know what they are talking about work for businessmen and politicians who generally don’t know very much at all. Telling the truth in an asylum run by the patients requires continuous tact and, as the man said, abeunt studia in mores, i.e. you get used to it. All of which makes the current political activism of the science establishment all the more remarkable. The most recent issue of SCIENCE (13 August) is a case in point. The issue features a special section on the hydrogen economy that Bush has promoted as a pat answer to energy and environmental problems associated with global warming. The clear message of the issue is that the hydrogen initiative is politically useful but crucially flawed.
Hydrogen power may have a role in the fairly distant future, but it is hardly a panacea. Hydrogen has to be generated by processes that require energy and produce carbon dioxide. If we make hydrogen by burning coal, we’ll have to figure out how to somehow sequester the resulting CO2 to make net progress towards carbon emissions reduction. Carbon sequestration is a monumental technical problem. And producing hydrogen promises to be a very expensive proposition. Meanwhile, hydrogen presents many other technical challenges. To mention one simple but hard to solve problem: hydrogen is very light. Storing enough hydrogen to power a car for 300 miles of operation would require a fuel tank eight times larger than a normal gas tank even if the hydrogen were pressurized to 10,000 pounds per square inch. There are other options: liquefying the hydrogen or absorbing on in carbon nanotubes or hydrides but nobody knows if these techniques are practical or affordable.
Even if the hydrogen option pans out, it isn’t rational to pursue it in lieu of other measures against the looming problem of global warming. As Donald Kennedy wrote, “Our attention is deflected from the hard, even painful measures that would be needed to slow our business-as-usual carbon trajectory. Postponing action on emissions reduction is like refusing medication for a developing infection: It guarantees that greater costs will have to be paid for.”
Note: The articles in SCIENCE aren't available on line without a subscription.
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
The Earliest Stages of Withdrawal
It’s a commonplace by now that the most ignorant and thoughtless segment of the electorate decides American elections, thus guaranteeing the juvenile tone of our political campaigns. One simply has to talk baby talk to babies. It also seems to be an invariable rule that the most pressing issues of the day may not be the subject of public debate in an election year. How else explain the remarkable silence that met Bush’s proposal to remove the bulk of our troops in Germany, Japan, and Korea? In itself, the Iraq imbroglio may well prove to be of marginal importance; but overturning the fundamental basis of world politics is definitely going to make the cut in the nth edition of R.R.Palmer. Indeed, what may turn out to be the most important consequence of the invasion of Iraq could well be the impetus it gave for a thoughtless and spasmodic redefinition of the foundations of American foreign policy.
In principle, I’m not unhappy with the general idea of reducing our garrisons in Europe and Asia; but I recognize, as apparently the administration does not, that much more is at stake than a cheap fix for our imperial overstretch. There are so many consequences. For example, in the short term, pulling the troops out of Germany may be a way to punish a recalcitrant ally. That seems to have been the principle rationale when the idea was first floated six months ago. Over even the middle term, however, the absence of a substantial American presence is likely to lead to a more independent and assertive Europe, exactly what sets this administration crazy. The Germans may have liked the economic benefits of the permanent occupation, but golden fetters are still fetters. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Earth, a stand down in Korea and Japan may have analogous effects. I don’t happen to be very worried about the North Koreans in this regard—they would be obliterated if they attacked the South whether or not we have a couple of extra divisions there—but the de facto lessening of American military guarantees may well lead to Japanese rearmament, not because of North Korea but because of China. I guess the administration figures it has plenty of time to adjust to this development since it would take Sony a good three months to come up with nuclear weapons. But the military consequences of withdrawal may not be the most important issue.
More by accident than design, the continued presence of American forces in Europe and Northwest Asia has worked out very well. The Americans weren’t threatening, not only because of our general benignity but because it was perceived that we were never strong enough to actually occupy or dominate Western Europe or Japan or to actively threaten the Soviets or China. That made us tolerable to our enemies who knew we wouldn’t get aggressive and welcome to our allies who benefited hugely from a geopolitical system frozen in place for forty years. Which is a large part of the reason why the industrial world has been willing to subsidize our economy. They were getting value for the money. Things are fixing to look different. We ought to be thinking about that. We ought to be thinking about a lot of things. We aren’t.
It’s a commonplace by now that the most ignorant and thoughtless segment of the electorate decides American elections, thus guaranteeing the juvenile tone of our political campaigns. One simply has to talk baby talk to babies. It also seems to be an invariable rule that the most pressing issues of the day may not be the subject of public debate in an election year. How else explain the remarkable silence that met Bush’s proposal to remove the bulk of our troops in Germany, Japan, and Korea? In itself, the Iraq imbroglio may well prove to be of marginal importance; but overturning the fundamental basis of world politics is definitely going to make the cut in the nth edition of R.R.Palmer. Indeed, what may turn out to be the most important consequence of the invasion of Iraq could well be the impetus it gave for a thoughtless and spasmodic redefinition of the foundations of American foreign policy.
In principle, I’m not unhappy with the general idea of reducing our garrisons in Europe and Asia; but I recognize, as apparently the administration does not, that much more is at stake than a cheap fix for our imperial overstretch. There are so many consequences. For example, in the short term, pulling the troops out of Germany may be a way to punish a recalcitrant ally. That seems to have been the principle rationale when the idea was first floated six months ago. Over even the middle term, however, the absence of a substantial American presence is likely to lead to a more independent and assertive Europe, exactly what sets this administration crazy. The Germans may have liked the economic benefits of the permanent occupation, but golden fetters are still fetters. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Earth, a stand down in Korea and Japan may have analogous effects. I don’t happen to be very worried about the North Koreans in this regard—they would be obliterated if they attacked the South whether or not we have a couple of extra divisions there—but the de facto lessening of American military guarantees may well lead to Japanese rearmament, not because of North Korea but because of China. I guess the administration figures it has plenty of time to adjust to this development since it would take Sony a good three months to come up with nuclear weapons. But the military consequences of withdrawal may not be the most important issue.
More by accident than design, the continued presence of American forces in Europe and Northwest Asia has worked out very well. The Americans weren’t threatening, not only because of our general benignity but because it was perceived that we were never strong enough to actually occupy or dominate Western Europe or Japan or to actively threaten the Soviets or China. That made us tolerable to our enemies who knew we wouldn’t get aggressive and welcome to our allies who benefited hugely from a geopolitical system frozen in place for forty years. Which is a large part of the reason why the industrial world has been willing to subsidize our economy. They were getting value for the money. Things are fixing to look different. We ought to be thinking about that. We ought to be thinking about a lot of things. We aren’t.
Monday, August 16, 2004
A Promising Fact
When little Portugal found a route to the Indies and therefore a source of enormous wealth, it’s leaders realized they had a problem. Their monopoly, though recognized by Spain and the Pope, was not backed up with demographic and financial strength at home. They were like a frail grandmother trying to cash a winning lottery ticket in a very bad neighborhood. As narrated in the first volume of Donald Lach’s Asia in the Making of Europe, they did a remarkable job in preserving their advantage; but the penetration of their markets by the Dutch, French, and English was inevitable because their cannonballs and pamphlets could only do so much against the more numerous cannonballs and longer pamphlets of their rivals.
The Portuguese case casts some light on the struggle over intellectual property rights, one of the great themes of contemporary economic history. The Vasco da Gamases (Vascos da Gamas?) of our time are American and European tech outfits, especially pharmaceutical firms, that are trying to extend their temporary monopoly on crucial inventions to maintain competitive advantage in the face of the disparity of size and potential power between the Western nations and Asia. The cannonball part of this program revolves around using the temporary military and political preponderance of the United States to enforce an unrealistically strong system of intellectual property rights on a mostly unwilling world. The Portuguese precedent suggests the limitations of this sort of arm-twisting. Threats and bribes produce a lot more lip service and evasion than compliance. Pamphleteering doesn’t necessarily work any better.
As with any justification of property rights, the defenders of intellectual property run up against a serious problem when they attempt to justify perpetual ownership. John Locke explained the claim of a person over his land by supposing that the proprietor mixed his labor with the land he worked, but this sweat equity rationale fails to explain why the children and grandchildren of the pioneer should maintain their rights without a further investment of effort. In the case of technological research, it makes a lot of sense that the agencies that spend the time and effort to discover and market new drugs or devices be rewarded for a time because that prospect encourages others to undertake fresh research. Why it is either right or beneficial for a firm to keep its monopoly into a second or third generation is far more problematic. Indeed, at some point, the ability to continue squeezing profits out of old discoveries results in a disincentive to innovate—why should the greyhounds keep on running if they can actually catch the rabbit?
Of course very few are promoting the notion that intellectual property rights should be perpetual. Keeping a monopoly as long as it is likely to remain profitable suffices, though the recently proposed extension of the term for copyrights, a boon for the grandchildren of novelists, shows how long that can be. In this issue, the struggle over the mores or lesses does matter, however, especially in the case of efficacious drugs where the dogged defense of intellectual property rights serves the larger purpose of keeping medical costs artificially high.
The Portuguese eventually lost; and the imperial power gradually turned into an inexpensive vacation destination; but that declension hardly harmed the world as a whole. Similarly, a rational revision of the rights of intellectual property would probably hurt the bottom line of Big Pharma, but it might well benefit most people if ways could be found to reward innovators who do an especially good job of giving away their productions once the cost of discovery has been amortized. Anyhow, rights and wrongs aside, it’s hard to see how intellectual property rights can be successfully maintained, let alone expanded, in the face of the underlying realities of power. And the 3-dimensional Xerox machine hasn’t even been invented yet.
When little Portugal found a route to the Indies and therefore a source of enormous wealth, it’s leaders realized they had a problem. Their monopoly, though recognized by Spain and the Pope, was not backed up with demographic and financial strength at home. They were like a frail grandmother trying to cash a winning lottery ticket in a very bad neighborhood. As narrated in the first volume of Donald Lach’s Asia in the Making of Europe, they did a remarkable job in preserving their advantage; but the penetration of their markets by the Dutch, French, and English was inevitable because their cannonballs and pamphlets could only do so much against the more numerous cannonballs and longer pamphlets of their rivals.
The Portuguese case casts some light on the struggle over intellectual property rights, one of the great themes of contemporary economic history. The Vasco da Gamases (Vascos da Gamas?) of our time are American and European tech outfits, especially pharmaceutical firms, that are trying to extend their temporary monopoly on crucial inventions to maintain competitive advantage in the face of the disparity of size and potential power between the Western nations and Asia. The cannonball part of this program revolves around using the temporary military and political preponderance of the United States to enforce an unrealistically strong system of intellectual property rights on a mostly unwilling world. The Portuguese precedent suggests the limitations of this sort of arm-twisting. Threats and bribes produce a lot more lip service and evasion than compliance. Pamphleteering doesn’t necessarily work any better.
As with any justification of property rights, the defenders of intellectual property run up against a serious problem when they attempt to justify perpetual ownership. John Locke explained the claim of a person over his land by supposing that the proprietor mixed his labor with the land he worked, but this sweat equity rationale fails to explain why the children and grandchildren of the pioneer should maintain their rights without a further investment of effort. In the case of technological research, it makes a lot of sense that the agencies that spend the time and effort to discover and market new drugs or devices be rewarded for a time because that prospect encourages others to undertake fresh research. Why it is either right or beneficial for a firm to keep its monopoly into a second or third generation is far more problematic. Indeed, at some point, the ability to continue squeezing profits out of old discoveries results in a disincentive to innovate—why should the greyhounds keep on running if they can actually catch the rabbit?
Of course very few are promoting the notion that intellectual property rights should be perpetual. Keeping a monopoly as long as it is likely to remain profitable suffices, though the recently proposed extension of the term for copyrights, a boon for the grandchildren of novelists, shows how long that can be. In this issue, the struggle over the mores or lesses does matter, however, especially in the case of efficacious drugs where the dogged defense of intellectual property rights serves the larger purpose of keeping medical costs artificially high.
The Portuguese eventually lost; and the imperial power gradually turned into an inexpensive vacation destination; but that declension hardly harmed the world as a whole. Similarly, a rational revision of the rights of intellectual property would probably hurt the bottom line of Big Pharma, but it might well benefit most people if ways could be found to reward innovators who do an especially good job of giving away their productions once the cost of discovery has been amortized. Anyhow, rights and wrongs aside, it’s hard to see how intellectual property rights can be successfully maintained, let alone expanded, in the face of the underlying realities of power. And the 3-dimensional Xerox machine hasn’t even been invented yet.
Thursday, August 12, 2004
Confessions of a Test Particle
When people worry about the increasing concentration of ownership in the major media, they are usually afraid that the monopolist will have too much power. To judge from the coverage of the Second Iraq War, however, the more immediate danger is just the reverse. The larger and more profitable these outfits become, the more they have to lose and the more cowardly they behave as when Disney caved about Fahrenheit 911 or the Washington Post decided it just had to play cheerleader to the Bush administration. The giant media combinations depend on government favors for their continued prosperity and aren’t about to speak truth to power even in the cases when they don’t completely agree with the emerging semi-fascist corporatist consensus. These outfits are big as in big targets.
A somewhat similar logic explains the consistent venality of individual media stars. It’s one thing to risk your job when you only make a hundred thousand a year and quite another to forgo millions and millions just for the sake of principle, especially since whistleblowing has become a meaningless gesture—in the absence of a free press, the whistleblowers will be personally destroyed as Scott Ritter knows and Joe Wilson is learning. Anyhow, at least for the present, the public despises people who rock the boat at the risk of oodles of money—it’s un-American.
To be fair, it is all too easy for somebody without responsibility or vulnerability to say what they think without a lot of preliminary calculations of profit and loss. If you live in a barrel in the dump, you can afford to tell Alexander the Great to get out of your light. Appearances to the contrary, however, I’m not playing the cynic here and making a moral criticism of the managers of big media or of the talking heads. The ethical dimension of the problem is secondary. Even in a rational world decent behavior requires courage and integrity, but the point is we don’t have a rational world. At this point, honestly reporting the news would land you in Butler’s Lives of the Saints; and that wouldn’t help anybody since sainthood is itself a media scam.
When people worry about the increasing concentration of ownership in the major media, they are usually afraid that the monopolist will have too much power. To judge from the coverage of the Second Iraq War, however, the more immediate danger is just the reverse. The larger and more profitable these outfits become, the more they have to lose and the more cowardly they behave as when Disney caved about Fahrenheit 911 or the Washington Post decided it just had to play cheerleader to the Bush administration. The giant media combinations depend on government favors for their continued prosperity and aren’t about to speak truth to power even in the cases when they don’t completely agree with the emerging semi-fascist corporatist consensus. These outfits are big as in big targets.
A somewhat similar logic explains the consistent venality of individual media stars. It’s one thing to risk your job when you only make a hundred thousand a year and quite another to forgo millions and millions just for the sake of principle, especially since whistleblowing has become a meaningless gesture—in the absence of a free press, the whistleblowers will be personally destroyed as Scott Ritter knows and Joe Wilson is learning. Anyhow, at least for the present, the public despises people who rock the boat at the risk of oodles of money—it’s un-American.
To be fair, it is all too easy for somebody without responsibility or vulnerability to say what they think without a lot of preliminary calculations of profit and loss. If you live in a barrel in the dump, you can afford to tell Alexander the Great to get out of your light. Appearances to the contrary, however, I’m not playing the cynic here and making a moral criticism of the managers of big media or of the talking heads. The ethical dimension of the problem is secondary. Even in a rational world decent behavior requires courage and integrity, but the point is we don’t have a rational world. At this point, honestly reporting the news would land you in Butler’s Lives of the Saints; and that wouldn’t help anybody since sainthood is itself a media scam.
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Boundary Conditions
Of the two engines of economic growth, the demographic dynamic is notably flagging these days, especially in Europe and Japan. Meanwhile, nobody really knows what opportunities or disappointments will emerge from technology, the other motor. Promoters of nanotechnology, the most recent Caucasian cargo cult, await the arrival of artificial paradise with more impatience than anxiety while others are worried precisely because the hype may pan out. I’m told that science fiction writers speculate about a point in history they call the Vingian Singularity in honor of Vernor Vinge, a writer who proposed that we were rapidly approaching the moment when “technological change speeds up to such a degree that society becomes incomprehensible even to the people living in it.” But maybe the Vingian Singularity, like the Second Coming, is destined to an interminable postponement; and whether we desire or fear its advent, we’ll eventually have to deal with the failure of prophecy.
It is commonly pointed out that Marx never fully realized how productive industry could become. It doesn’t matter very much if labor is exploited if the exploited masses are living high on the hog. But we may be falling into the reverse error of assuming that the projected triumphant advance of science will make the social and political structure of society irrelevant. If technology isn’t quite so miraculous as advertised and fails to generate economic growth, it becomes very important indeed who gets the biggest share of the pie. To judge by the renewed fervor of their defense of privilege, the conservatives seem to have recognized this possibility ahead of the rest of us.
Of the two engines of economic growth, the demographic dynamic is notably flagging these days, especially in Europe and Japan. Meanwhile, nobody really knows what opportunities or disappointments will emerge from technology, the other motor. Promoters of nanotechnology, the most recent Caucasian cargo cult, await the arrival of artificial paradise with more impatience than anxiety while others are worried precisely because the hype may pan out. I’m told that science fiction writers speculate about a point in history they call the Vingian Singularity in honor of Vernor Vinge, a writer who proposed that we were rapidly approaching the moment when “technological change speeds up to such a degree that society becomes incomprehensible even to the people living in it.” But maybe the Vingian Singularity, like the Second Coming, is destined to an interminable postponement; and whether we desire or fear its advent, we’ll eventually have to deal with the failure of prophecy.
It is commonly pointed out that Marx never fully realized how productive industry could become. It doesn’t matter very much if labor is exploited if the exploited masses are living high on the hog. But we may be falling into the reverse error of assuming that the projected triumphant advance of science will make the social and political structure of society irrelevant. If technology isn’t quite so miraculous as advertised and fails to generate economic growth, it becomes very important indeed who gets the biggest share of the pie. To judge by the renewed fervor of their defense of privilege, the conservatives seem to have recognized this possibility ahead of the rest of us.
Monday, August 09, 2004
More Excuses
Marx famously said that the obsession of the Germans with religion testified to their political and economic backwardness. But maybe it would be simpler to point out that people who are interested in ideas but have no connection to power naturally gravitate to subjects that sound important. The vanity of these earnest small timers calculated that the loftiness of the topic would compensate for their own insignificance. Hey, works for me. But there are perhaps better excuses for thinking about religion now if not in 1848. I don’t refer only or especially to the power of religious pressure groups in the U.S. or the salience of religious language in expressing cultural dissatisfaction. To use, not without premeditation, a Levi-Straussian expression, religion is good to think.
One can learn a lot about mankind from a consideration of the history of science or mathematics, but those cognitive enterprises are contaminated with authentic, non-human content. The errors of science may teach us about ourselves, but its truths teach us about triangles, moths, or neutrinos. For the philosophical anthropologist, theology is a much better object of study because its development has not been deformed by non-human input. In the absence of real gods, spirits, and devils, theology’s elaborate doctrines have been prepared in a vacuum like the especially pure chemicals they crystallize on the space shuttle.
I’m aware that this take on religions sounds rather like a well-known thesis of Feuerbach. In part it is, which is rather inconvenient granted Feuerbach’s dubious reputation. On the other hand, Auguste Comte was also right about several very important issues; and he’s even duller than Feuerbach. If they’re right, they’re right. But I draw more modest conclusions from all this than Feuerbach did. In studying the sociology of religion I don’t expect to discover a grand, though alienated human essence because I don’t see much evidence that there is such a thing. I expect that the realities that underlie the fictive rationality of religion comprise a pretty irregular collection headlined by the immutable laws of marketing.
Marx famously said that the obsession of the Germans with religion testified to their political and economic backwardness. But maybe it would be simpler to point out that people who are interested in ideas but have no connection to power naturally gravitate to subjects that sound important. The vanity of these earnest small timers calculated that the loftiness of the topic would compensate for their own insignificance. Hey, works for me. But there are perhaps better excuses for thinking about religion now if not in 1848. I don’t refer only or especially to the power of religious pressure groups in the U.S. or the salience of religious language in expressing cultural dissatisfaction. To use, not without premeditation, a Levi-Straussian expression, religion is good to think.
One can learn a lot about mankind from a consideration of the history of science or mathematics, but those cognitive enterprises are contaminated with authentic, non-human content. The errors of science may teach us about ourselves, but its truths teach us about triangles, moths, or neutrinos. For the philosophical anthropologist, theology is a much better object of study because its development has not been deformed by non-human input. In the absence of real gods, spirits, and devils, theology’s elaborate doctrines have been prepared in a vacuum like the especially pure chemicals they crystallize on the space shuttle.
I’m aware that this take on religions sounds rather like a well-known thesis of Feuerbach. In part it is, which is rather inconvenient granted Feuerbach’s dubious reputation. On the other hand, Auguste Comte was also right about several very important issues; and he’s even duller than Feuerbach. If they’re right, they’re right. But I draw more modest conclusions from all this than Feuerbach did. In studying the sociology of religion I don’t expect to discover a grand, though alienated human essence because I don’t see much evidence that there is such a thing. I expect that the realities that underlie the fictive rationality of religion comprise a pretty irregular collection headlined by the immutable laws of marketing.
Friday, August 06, 2004
Continuous Fulgurations
In their deep distrust of one another, the Americans look for some mechanism that can preserve social equilibrium and public decency in the face of the vanity, greed, and lust for power of individuals and organizations. But society has no automatic thermostat and will never devise one. The nation—any nation—holds together because enough people share and implement an understanding of what is permissible and what has to be done. Absent that will, constitutional checks and balances, independent commissions, bureaucratic procedures, automatic penalties, referenda, and similar gear automatically fail. Indeed, the selective implementation of rigid and impractical laws is an excellent way for unscrupulous political groups to persecute their enemies and extort campaign contributions from potential targets. No nation has stronger laws against corruption than Italy.
Both the Iraq prison abuse investigations and this week’s settlement of the Halliburton accounting fraud case underline the principle that justice isn’t an automatic device. In the former instance, it has already become clear that the military tribunals are being used to protect general officers by limiting accountability to low-level personnel. In the Halliburton case, a large fine was imposed because the company secretly changed the way it reported profits in order to pump up stock prices. Despite the fact that the largest single beneficiary of this scheme was the CEO, whose already enormous pay package was inflated by performance bonuses he did not honestly earn, the FCC did not hold Mr. Cheney liable, however. In effect, Halliburton stockholders got screwed twice, once by the future vice president and then again when the fine got paid out of corporation assets, thus lowering the value of the company. Apparently government agencies are simply not going to prosecute their bosses except in those cases where public pressure makes it expedient to sacrifice somebody, but public pressure would have to be organized by the media, another group full of men and women of convenient principle.
At this point in American history, it’s easy to believe that it would take more than 50,000 gallons of lighter fluid in an abandoned gold mine to provide a detector sensitive enough to register a particle of integrity in our public life. In fact, I believe that things would be very much worse were it not for the largely invisible effect of thousands of individuals doing the right thing in a conspiracy so secret that the conspirators themselves are hardly conscious of it. In the Legends of the Jews we read that God allows the world to persist because of the existence of ten good men. I’m more optimistic than the rabbis—or more matter of fact. I think that, as a plain matter of the physics of the situation, civil society and government function as well as they do, not because of mechanical laws and simple feedback loops, but because of the shared, tacit understanding of what needs to be done. It isn’t that ten wholly good men must exist somewhere, but that there is enough fractional rationality in enough of us fallible men to hold the world together. When that mediocre but foundational virtue weakens at the margins because of an incremental increase in the cowardice of individuals, the rule of law doesn’t work and nations decline. Conversely, if more of us, especially more of those of us who have power and privilege, find a little more courage to do what we know we should, things will get better.
In their deep distrust of one another, the Americans look for some mechanism that can preserve social equilibrium and public decency in the face of the vanity, greed, and lust for power of individuals and organizations. But society has no automatic thermostat and will never devise one. The nation—any nation—holds together because enough people share and implement an understanding of what is permissible and what has to be done. Absent that will, constitutional checks and balances, independent commissions, bureaucratic procedures, automatic penalties, referenda, and similar gear automatically fail. Indeed, the selective implementation of rigid and impractical laws is an excellent way for unscrupulous political groups to persecute their enemies and extort campaign contributions from potential targets. No nation has stronger laws against corruption than Italy.
Both the Iraq prison abuse investigations and this week’s settlement of the Halliburton accounting fraud case underline the principle that justice isn’t an automatic device. In the former instance, it has already become clear that the military tribunals are being used to protect general officers by limiting accountability to low-level personnel. In the Halliburton case, a large fine was imposed because the company secretly changed the way it reported profits in order to pump up stock prices. Despite the fact that the largest single beneficiary of this scheme was the CEO, whose already enormous pay package was inflated by performance bonuses he did not honestly earn, the FCC did not hold Mr. Cheney liable, however. In effect, Halliburton stockholders got screwed twice, once by the future vice president and then again when the fine got paid out of corporation assets, thus lowering the value of the company. Apparently government agencies are simply not going to prosecute their bosses except in those cases where public pressure makes it expedient to sacrifice somebody, but public pressure would have to be organized by the media, another group full of men and women of convenient principle.
At this point in American history, it’s easy to believe that it would take more than 50,000 gallons of lighter fluid in an abandoned gold mine to provide a detector sensitive enough to register a particle of integrity in our public life. In fact, I believe that things would be very much worse were it not for the largely invisible effect of thousands of individuals doing the right thing in a conspiracy so secret that the conspirators themselves are hardly conscious of it. In the Legends of the Jews we read that God allows the world to persist because of the existence of ten good men. I’m more optimistic than the rabbis—or more matter of fact. I think that, as a plain matter of the physics of the situation, civil society and government function as well as they do, not because of mechanical laws and simple feedback loops, but because of the shared, tacit understanding of what needs to be done. It isn’t that ten wholly good men must exist somewhere, but that there is enough fractional rationality in enough of us fallible men to hold the world together. When that mediocre but foundational virtue weakens at the margins because of an incremental increase in the cowardice of individuals, the rule of law doesn’t work and nations decline. Conversely, if more of us, especially more of those of us who have power and privilege, find a little more courage to do what we know we should, things will get better.