Separating Out

Ian Hacking remarks in one of the essays in his Historical Ontology that the “renaissance medical, alchemical, and astrological doctrines of resemblance and simultude are well nigh incomprehensible. One does not find our modern notions of evidence deployed in these arcane pursuits.” That’s not exactly wrong, but only if the “our” in “our modern notions” is defined narrowly enough. In fact a great many people, even people who don’t live in Taos, still practice these “arcane pursuits” as evidenced by the large Metaphysics sections in bookstores. Indeed, if folks addicted to resemblence and simultude don’t constitute an actual majority of the population, it’s only because so many of the rest haven’t got as far as Paracelsus. The Medieval lies far ahead of most of mankind, especially in America where, even for elites, the gains of the Enlightenment were mostly given back in the succeeding Enmerdement, so that a nation founded by cosmopolitan philosophers is now ruled by superstitious dullards.

What we (but which we?) count as general cultural advance is more often just a separating out of a tiny self-conscious minority who only think they typify the others. Just as the world of living things started out as a bunch of bacteria and mostly remains a bunch of bacteria after three and a half billion years of evolution, intellectual progress hasn’t moved the average very much either. Well-educated people are often upbraided for their sense of superiority, but in my experience they tend to offend more often by giving their fellow man too much credit than too little. They are certainly ignorant about ignorance, mistakenly taking their idea of the human mean from the highly untypical sample of people with whom they themselves interact. Indeed, with this background, encountering a truly typical human being can be quite a shock. Nothing is quite so painful as listening to an honorable, good-natured biologist getting destroyed in a pubic debate over Darwinism because his cynical opponent has a much more realistic understanding of the mentality of a lay audience whose common sense is decidedly prescientific and utterly lacking in “our modern notions of evidence.”

Ends and Means

When I hear people criticize politicians for letting the ends justify the means, I find myself wondering what else is supposed to justify the means. In my experience, the graver errors and crimes of leaders stem from an infatuation with the means themselves for which the purported end of the action simply provides an excuse or occasion. The use of torture to extract information, for example, is commonly defended by an appeal to necessity, as in the current war on terror during which we have promoted the use of torture by our allies when we haven’t practiced it ourselves under various euphemisms. Historical experience suggests, however, that torture is not a very useful technique for gathering information precisely because it is all too effective at eliciting the desired answer. Thus if what you need to do is convince yourselves of the rightness of some crazy theory, for example that old women are powerful agents of the devil or that a wrecked Middle Eastern country is a deadly immediate threat, torture works. More generally, torture makes sense, at least to its devotees, as a way of asserting power through the moral annihilation of a hated enemy. Forcing the bad guy to disclose where he planted the bomb, a very rare occurrence, is treated as the paradigm case for apologetic purposes; but, for the most part, the powerful electrocute a captive’s balls for the same reason a dog licks his—because he can.

Terrible things must sometimes be done by decent people, though even in the most defensible instances, the good can only do what they must my waking their own dark impulses. Thus in the inevitable example—though the case of Roosevelt is probably more illuminating—Churchill waged pitiless war on Hitler because it was the necessary thing to do, but he was able to act ruthlessly, as he himself understood perfectly, because he loved war and destruction for itself. Hitler was a godsend to Churchill, just as the tragedy of the Civil War was a gift to Lincoln, something Lincoln also acknowledged. But in these cases the ends really did justify the means. The great objection to America’s behavior in the world over the last couple of years is not that we have used violent and coercive means, but that we have used them despite the absence of a great national emergency and with a vehemence all out of proportion to any real threat. Bin Laden and Saddam are just excuses for the arrogant and highly pleasurable exercise of sheer power. And the proof of this will be that when these hyped and misidentified villains are gone, there will be others.

Most Dreaded Nation Status

In a recent exchange with Christopher Hitchens, Eric Alterman referred to surveys showing that Europeans think Mr. Bush is more dangerous than Osama Ben Laden. Alterman criticized the administration policies that had led to this perception but was quick to assure everybody that he didn’t share the opinion himself. I presume he was observing the current taboo that mandates piety about American leaders, but I suppose it’s just possible he was sincere. In that case, one has to ask how anybody could doubt that George Bush is not more dangerous than Ben Laden?

My point is not polemical. I’m not looking for new ways to deplore Mr. Bush. I have plenty of those already. What’s at stake is the need for some clarity about obvious realities. Whatever the personal characteristics of Ben Laden or Castro or even the poufy-haired supreme leader of the North Koreans, their actual power to harm is sharply limited by the poverty and military weakness of the organizations they lead. Mr. Bush, by contrast, could incinerate five continents in half an hour. Since the dangerousness of a regime is the product of its capacity to inflict harm and the malevolence or stupidity of its policies and our country is a thousand times more capable than its enemies, our leaders would have to me a thousand times wiser or more moral just to break even. QED.

It is an undisputed maxim of sound strategy that we should prepare to deal with what the enemy can do, not what we think he wants to do. I apply this principle to my own country and its current master. Intentions are not facts of the same order as capabilities; they are often inscrutable and can always be dissembled. Besides, to say that America would never play the bully is to ignore a great deal of historical experience, especially the parts relating to the business end of the Monroe Doctrine. To date, America’s reputation, especially in America, owes a lot to the general ignorance of history and the fact that we’ve mostly played the villain to marginal and despised people and inflicte horrors on nations that had previously acted horribly themselves. I am particularly skeptical of the seldom-articulated but frequently reasoned from premise that America has an especially virtuous national character that guarantees it will not act as badly as all the other empires of history. National character is not unchanging. The Italians used to be Romans; and two hundred years ago it was the French who the military beasts, the Germans who were the people of the poets and thinkers. Unless you believe in divine providence, why should you think that the Americans, whose culture and germplasm is an amalgam of every people on the planet, are somehow above falling into the normal sins of the Nations? The only thing beyond dispute is this: if we go on a rampage, it will be some rampage.

One Hundred Views of Clement Street

The Elizabethans loved finery and display, but their world, like that of practically all human beings for most of history, was very poor in images. Aside from public religious art and a few paintings in the homes of the rich or at court, the only representative art a Londoner regularly encountered were a few black and white figures in books and the crude woodcuts used to decorate humble walls. Artists were scarce, the choice of media limited, and means of reproduction rudimentary. Even the subject matter of pictures was constrained by tradition to a small number of types. The contrast with our experience is stark. We are absolutely awash in images: drawings, paintings, cartoons, prints, movies, videos, photographs, micrographs, charts, clip art, computer displays, even iconic road signs and identification badges. A large proportion of the surfaces of things now bear the likeness of something. The cumulative effect can be overwhelming or at least wearying, but under the circumstances, you’d think we at least know what the world looks like.

It was once a commonplace of Freudian dream analysis that the multiplication of phalluses or phallic symbols such as digits or swords actually figured castration, the lack of even one phallus. Art historians refer to something similar under the rubric of horror vacui. The same logic obtains in the original Matrix movie in which the spectral unreality of the projected world is made clear by the gratuitous multiplication of images–remember the scene where the hero asks for weapons and gets a universe of Uzis that noisily materialize in infinite parallel racks? The effect was subsequently plagiarized in a TV ad for an Internet company that sells cars; and, for that matter, was anticipated in Eastern art where infinite arrays of identical selfless Buddhas are regularly depicted appearing in a golden sky. If we have expanded on these motifs and now fill our entire lives with representations, part of the reason is surely the simple fact that we have the technical means to do so; but the ubiquity of picturing, a sort of objective neurosis of the age, also obsessively stages the inescapable fact that the world remains essentially invisible.

Were there absolutely no light in the Platonic Cave, we would not even be aware of the darkness. What disturbs complacency is not the impossibility of knowing but the implications of what we know and can’t doubt in good faith. Authentic but indirect knowledge allows us to gauge our massive, constitutive ignorance. I’ve lived in these parts for almost a quarter of a century, for example, but I have only recently admitted that I don’t know what Clement Street looks like. I have acquired this insight through a thought experiment. Let there be hundred representations of Clement Street, but let them be truly representative for once, which is to say, let them be random perspectives that reflect the objective reality of Clement Street rather than the customary iconography. A photographer would probably pick a vantage point from which the interesting features of the scene could be observed, but that choice imposes a human principle of selection and drastically reduces the possible images. For our purposes, the view from underneath a dead pigeon or looking straight down from a light post must have equal rights. Indeed, since the nearly universal practice of holding the camera level is also hugely arbitrary, we also have to expect images shot at every angle. Pictures should be made at every focus, at every magnification, at every shutter speed, and with film sensitive to every possible set of frequencies. Like a bee, we should see the street in the ultraviolet. Like a sniper, we should see it in the infrared. It should appear as an X-ray, a spectrogram; and, atom-by-atom, as an image formed by scanning tunneling microscopy—and that’s just to consider mechanical forms of representation. The complete set of views of Clement Street would also include paintings and models produced not only in every known style of art from cave painting to Peter Max but in every possible style of art and executed with every degree of virtuosity at every scale from the microminiature to the monumental, including full-scale duplications of the street made out of everything from bricks and wood to play dough or cottage cheese. Baring miraculous chance, none of the hundred representations selected at random from this thinkable but unimaginable ensemble would look like anything at all we could recognize or interpret but they would be views of Clement Street for all that and representive of what the world looks like in general.

Never Asked by Charlie Rose

I was interested to learn from a recent public service ad that marijuana is a major cause of unwanted pregnancy. For some reason, I was under the impression that beer and tequila shooters often had something to do with that. I don’t discount the deleterious side effects of cannabis, however. For example, pot causes politicians to lie on television and incites police officers and judges to ruin the lives of total strangers—a powerful drug, indeed, especially considering that it isn’t a powerful drug at all.

I was going to write that American society is hung up about pot and drugs in general, not because of their public health significance, which is small potatoes relative to the medical significance of tobacco, cheeseburgers, and even computer games, but because drug use symbolizes the hugely menacing because hugely attractive appeal of consciousness itself, the master addiction. That may be so, but I can’t claim to know why we inflict such terrible grief on each other over what should be trivialities. The anti-drug mania, after all, is not the only witch-hunt under way in this country. Why have we turned the sexual abuse of children into a crime so horrible, so sacred that people have to apologize in advance for speaking about it without hysteria? Even stating the obvious statistical fact that children are far more harmed by poverty than by child abuse can land you in trouble. The level headed Ian Hacking has shown that “child abuse,” far from naming an eternal evil, assumed in current absolute form around 1960. So why are we suddenly so obsessed with what was, not so long ago, more often an occasion for gossip and sniggering than inquisition and judicial condemnation?

My usual procedure is the reverse of Jeopardy. I regularly phrase my questions in the form of an answer. But in this case I’ll break with my own tradition and ask the plain question: “What accounts for our crazy public behavior about drugs and juvenile sex?” Of course it is possible that there is no natural class composed of irrational public obsessions and that the persecution of potheads, short eyes, and wicked old women has no common measure. It is also possible that the explanation or explanations will be rather disappointing since in human affairs there is no proportion between cause and effect.

Is Democracy Finished?

Charlie Rangel, the New York democrat, raised a minor ruckus a few months ago by suggesting that we ought to reinstate the draft. His comments may have been effective as rhetorical brickbats, but even he probably knew that the era of mass armies is over with. Even were the reinstatement of universal service politically possible, it would be militarily absurd. Low-tech soldiers have no earthly purpose except to serve as victims to high tech soldiers, like the hapless Iraqi orcs in the recent Mesopotamian Dungeon Siege episode. But properly trained and equipped soldiers are extraordinarily expensive. The rate-limiting variable in military power is, for the time being anyhow, money, not manpower. This fact cannot be changed by a political decision, but it has enormous political consequences.

It has been plausibly argued that developments in military technology are the single most powerful cause of structural political change. Thus the military revolution of the 16th Century made political absolutism more or less inevitable because only powerful, centralized states could field and finance effective armies and fleets while the mass armies of the 19th and 20th Centuries required rulers to redefine themselves as national leaders and to pay attention to the welfare of their citizens in order to mobilize entire populations. I don’t know to what extent I subscribe to this account of history; but, like everybody else who lived through the Vietnam era, I remember the end of the draft in the United States as the day the world changed, when the air went out of the tires to use a metaphor all the more apropos because it is as flat and stale as the event it describes.

New World Order
Almost universally, philosophers are or try to be nominalists. People at large, however, are realists and think that words name essences. They imagine, for example, that it makes sense to talk about the human consequences of Capitalism without specifying the which, when, and where of the capitalism in question. That’s unfortunately because it is especially important to check the expiration dates on the concepts we use to think about the world. We’re just now entering an unprecedented period of economic and political history, not only or perhaps not even especially because of drastic changes in technology, but because for the first time we’re going to see what Capitalism is like without the moderating force of effective opposing powers. In the long 19th Century, business interests were opposed by landed money, assorted dynasts, labor unions, socialists, anarchists, and populists. In the short 20th Century, the threat and appeal of Communism and the necessity of mobilizing the populace at large for war likewise limited aggrandizement by corporate interests. As of the current juncture, though mopping up operations may continue for some time, there is no effective organized opposition to corporate power—rioting in Davos doesn’t count.

Unlikely Justice

When NYPD isn’t teaching every cop in the country when and how to beat up suspects, it’s advertising the therapeutic value of vengeance. The detectives never fail to assure family members devastated by personal loss that they’ll get the bastards as if jailing or executing some marginal human wreck is a sovereign remedy for human tragedy or even necessarily very relevant. Politicians also endlessly cultivate the theme of revenge—“ we’ll ever rest until we get Osama or Saddam or Castro or the drug dealers, or…” Psychiatrists speak about people who are trying to be mad. As a culture, it sometimes seems that we’re engaged in an analogous effort to turn ourselves into spiteful Balkan peasants. Turning the other cheek is definitely out and the much better thing is apparently preventative face slapping. That said, it is ironic that so much of our troubles stems from a failure of retribution.

For the past thirty-five years American politics has been dominated not by a class of people but by a group of people who got their start with Richard Nixon. From that time to this, as has been proven not merely in books or public opinion but in actual courtrooms, these individuals have ceaselessly plotted against free government, committing break-ins, illegal wiretaps, show trials, extortion, perjury, war crimes in Central America and the Middle East, obstruction of justice, and theft of an election. The Nixonians are thugs who have never paid any real price for their actions and have drawn from their experience the apparently correct lesson that the more they get away with the more they will be able to get away with.

It is probably whistling past the graveyard to make the suggestion; but if we ever manage to bring down the Bush regime, there really must be a reckoning this time, not primarily to inflict pain on the guilty but to rectify the record and, above all, to drive the Nixonians out of public life once and for all. Justice is the point, not the self-indulgence of payback. The recent South African example shows that such an accounting is both feasible and deeply helpful.

Why It’s OK to Eat Turkeys

The administrations own analysis of the tax cuts shows that the net effect is to increase the proportion of the tax burden paid by the middle class. No surprise there. Abusing the lower orders more than we already do is not rational, even for a plutocrat, since the earned income tax credit and other tax breaks to the working poor amount to a subsidy to the corporations who would otherwise have to pay a living wage to their more benighted employees just to allow them to live and reproduce. Meanwhile, the subsidy in question gets paid by the middling people, who are actually just working people with an expensive addiction to vanity. Well, you can’t blame a cannibal for preferring victims that have a little meat on their bones; and beasts that are easily herded as well as highly edible are the best of all.

By the way, to properly evaluate who really pays, it is necessary to take into account not only who pays what but who gets what. Thus the middling people only pay a slightly greater proportion than the rich under the tax plan, but they also get less and less for their money as the programs that benefit them die away while funding for the programs that benefit the wealthy increase.

Here Be Dragons

According to Jose Ortiz, my old anthropology professor, the Tewa Indians inhabit a rectangular sacred universe bounded by four mountain peaks. The finitude of their world, however, does not preclude them from dealing with outsiders; and Indian truck drivers routinely drive their rigs to Chicago and other nonplaces without being particularly impressed with the feat. Evidently a “world,” though perhaps emotively and cognitively more, is also something less, and worlds come into being not by some miraculous positive act but by a drastic truncation of experience.

The rabbis often spoke of creation in this negative way. God made the world by limiting his own omnipotence, by shrinking back and thus leaving room for lesser beings. That’s the sense of the “let” in “let there be light.” Whether this is an adequate explanation of the presence of things, it works very well as an explanation of the origin of Judaism and other religions. The canonical Jewish Bible, for example, is the result of a wholesale massacre of pre-existing texts, the domestication and emasculation of the remnant by arbitrary editing, and the policing of the pacified book by orthodox methods of interpretation. The parts of scripture are vastly greater than the whole, but they don’t add up to the foundations of a faith, which is to say they don’t subtract up.

A technical note: in the unread wastelands of the third part of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant attempted to define the concept of God. Leaving out the details, Kant’s account makes God the set of all sets, a being we conceptualize through the infinite disjunction “A or B or C or…” Kant’s notion is not untraditional, despite the terminological unfamiliarity. After all, the ancients engraved on the statute of the Goddess Isis, “I am all that is, or was, or will be; and no one has lifted my veil.” Same idea. And Kant’s God concept works very well in the context of Jewish thinking about creation as shrinking or even the Tewa view of the metaphysical status of Chicago. The only problem with this approach is that the set of all sets in a non-thing that cannot be. You can find the proof of this fact in any treatise on set theory—I recommend Naïve Set Theory by Paul Halmos, if you’re interested. Of course the mere fact that a thing cannot exist doesn’t prevent us from giving it a name or even from calling it the Name, ha Shem in Hebrew.

Something for Nothing

Neo-conservatives and other rightists with an authoritarian bent reject, or claim to reject, naturalistic theories of evolution such as natural selection. It is interesting to observe, however, that libertarians and Objectivists are, if anything, more Darwinian than Darwin. So Commentary features long articles extolling Intelligent Design proponents like Behe while Reason advertises the ideas of Stuart Kauffman, a University of Pennsylvania biologists and member of the Santa Fe Institute. Kauffman uses computer simulations to support the thesis that order—what he calls order for nothing—spontaneously arises from natural systems under a wide variety of circumstances. Authoritarians favor Intelligent Design because they like bosses. Libertarians favor Kauffman’s version of nature because they can read it as an allegory of the free market.

Unfortunately for the Libertarians, Kauffman’s vision of things really doesn’t offer any particular support for laissez faire economics. Kauffman’s arguments provide an explanation for how complicated and adapted organisms could have arisen without the intervention of an intelligent agent or rather, to take judicial notice of a very important nuance, Kauffman explains why no explanation is really necessary if, as he thinks his computer simulations demonstrate, the order exhibited in the natural world is in fact a minimum. It looks like there is something to explain because of a huge accident of sampling. For obvious reasons we only consider the showy outputs of evolution including, crucially, ourselves, the ones who are supposed to do the explaining. If we go back and for once count the innumerable number of failures along with the infinitesimal number of successes, we’ll recognize that there is no evolutionary mechanism at all—hard to get a patent on a method of chemical synthesis that takes billions of years to run and promises a yield of maybe .00000000000000001%. Now reverse the perspective. If you were standing a patch of cooled lava somewhere during the Hadean period of Earth history, what could you predict on Kauffman’s reasoning? The most you could say is that something complicated is likely to emerge because things can’t get more disordered on one respect without getting more ordered in another. And standing on the cooling patch of the floor of the stock exchange and using analogous statistical reasoning, we predict that a complicated economic structures will always emerge from trading but not that the results will be favorable to any particular human being or to human beings in general. To believe that the market will do us any favors is theological thinking even in an atheist.

Speaking of theology. I don’t know if Kauffman is right or not about self-organization, but his notions are congruent with one of my rare forays into Biblical exegesis. The first couple of verses of Genesis read “When God created heaven and earth, the earth was void and empty and darkness was on the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ ” Atheists have simply denied that God in fact created the world, but that’s a clumsy approach to the issue from my point of view. Logically, the prior question is whether the world every came into being at all. And of course it is my position that the earth is still void and empty. Which spares me the trouble of raising the second difficulty, namely, when God said, ‘Let there be light,’ who was he talking to?

The Temperance Oath

I’m reluctant to recommend serious books to people who don’t read much, especially if they have the native intelligence to understand them. Accustomed to the pabulum of the popular press, self-help books, and the Management Secrets of Attila the Hun, they are very likely to get upset when the first time they go beyond formula. Real books present real arguments, and real arguments actually can persuade, the more so when the listener has no experience of arguments and no context in which to place them. For most people the uncertainty and sustained effort involved in thinking are painful and unfamiliar. They wrap both arms around the first notion they comprehend, hoping that it will turn out to be the key the universe. In a college kid, the resulting enthusiasm and conviction can be charming because it is likely to be temporary. In adults it can and has had significant consequences. Think of all those earnest workers who, having puzzled out the bit about surplus value in the first book of Capital, decided that Marxism was as indisputable as arithmetic just as a later generation would be mesmerized by the Laffer curve—economics seems particularly prone to generating the fetishism of the concept.

Word Problems

In one of my earlier avatars, after Rama but before Kalki, I edited math textbooks and in the process learned three things from my interviews with thousands of mathematicians. First, mathematicians are cheap dates—statisticians order the oysters, mathematicians the soup. Second, mathematicians are lousy at judging the qualifications of the people they meet—my contacts regularly assumed that I had a PhD in math when my transcripts show that I took my last math class at Gardena High School in 1963. What math I know I picked up as an anthropologist, going native, might learn how to shrink heads. The third insight was more substantive. The secret reason math folks want to inflict calculus on so many undergraduates is not that very many people will ever integrate a function in anger but because passing calculus absolutely requires a student to finally learn algebra and, Woody Allen to the contrary, lots of people need that. By the same logic, if you really need to understand calculus, you need to take differential equations. And so on. The general rule is that it makes sense to take one more course than it makes any sense to take. Generalized still further, an analogous logic works in the Liberal Arts.

Literary criticism has a terrible reputation just now, and various pundits bewail the fact that all theory gets between the common reader and the various sacred texts. But commentary, whatever its intrinsic value, can serve to enforce the careful reading of books in the absence of snap quizzes. Though the notion of a virgin reading is simply incoherent on this side of the Moon, I suppose the very best readers can dispense with overt mediation if they are willing to fall in love with a text, and there really isn’t any substitute for memorizing poetry, but very few of us are in the situation of Abraham Lincoln puzzling out Shakespeare by the fireplace light. We need indirections to enforce our attention and, above all, to slow us down until we catch up with the text.

Phantom Menaces

In his mathematical fantasy Flatland, Abbott imagined a 2-dimensional world whose inhabitants have a hard time understanding the mysteries of the third dimension. In its own way, our public discourse is also a Flatland; but what Americans have trouble comprehending, besides an argument more than two sentences long, is anything that takes more than a few months to take place. Our politicians are never penalized for promoting policies that will obviously harm us over the long or even the medium haul. Reagan ran up the deficit back in the ‘80s, but the consequences of his financial policies were perfectly invisible. The economic growth we missed out on as a result wasn’t anything you could see, feel, or make a headline about. Indeed, the bad consequence is the area between two curves, the increase in wealth we would have had with lower interest rates and the actual increase. Try running a political ad on the basis of that calculus problem!

Incidentally, I don’t think the more thoughtful Republicans are unaware of the predictable consequences of their economic policies. Some of them may be counting on the Rapture to zero out their MasterCards, but for many of them the advantages of a big national debt outweigh its costs. Over and beyond bankrupting and perhaps destroying the social programs the Right hates, deficit financing results in vastly better yields for bondholders. To a remarkable extent, the Republican platform is a very well thought out answer to the exam question, “How do we get people who work for a living to support those who don’t work at all?”

The absence of imagination had itself to be imagined

In Being and Time Martin Heidegger attempted to describe the basic facts of human existence, the structures that characterize all conscious experience. In important ways, the book is more than brilliant; it is simply right; and its insights surface in surprising places, for example, theoretical computer science. Philosophically trained people regard those unfamiliar with Kant, the “precritically naïve,” with amused condescension as if they were children who don’t know how babies are made. It’s not that philosophers are all Kantians—far from it—but they have first-hand knowledge of how an encounter with the Critique of Pure Reason forever changes how you think. Some of Heidegger’s ideas are enlightening in the same sense. One can correctly say of Being and Time what Goethe said about the Critique, “It’s like walking into a brightly lit room.” The good lighting in question, however, does not refer to the clarity of the writing.

Heidegger has come in for sustained criticism over the last couple of decades because of his dubious political connections, but I have been more concerned about what his style betokens. In fact, Heidegger’s way of staging his ideas bears on his relationship with the Nazis. The pedantic pomp of the syntax and the majestic obscurity of the terminology don’t make Being and Time into a conceptual Nuremberg rally, but there is an element of stage management about Heidegger’s presentation that furthers an agenda not obviously related to the underlying argument. Partly the monumentality and pretentiousness of the text reflects nothing more alarming than the status anxiety or mere vanity of a Heidelberg philosophy professor, but the implication remains that the philosopher is a Mage or Hero who can conjure a special truth by dint of a mysterious act of will. The language is an aesthetic, which is to say cosmetic, solution to the problem of how to maintain or establish privilege and sacrality in an utterly profane and disenchanted world. Taken literally, Being and Time presents a vision as stark in its own way as the atoms and void of Lucretius, but the Heideggerian censer puts out enough aromatic smoke to obscure the industrial landscape. The theological tone worked: whatever effective support Heidegger lent to the Reich, he certainly managed to give aid, comfort, and thesis topics to a great many nuns.

Calling something primal, ontological, archaic, or even Ur doesn’t automatically change anything. One is, we presume, the Ur Integer; but it isn’t any oner for all that. Which suggests a project for the industrious. What would the Heideggerian philosophy look like transposed into a more neutral key? I’m certainly not industrious, but I can offer a very small sample of what it might be like to rethink the Heidegger without the heavy breathing—technically speaking, without the ontological difference.

Heidegger calls the universal characteristics of existence existentials. They are what every one of us shares despite and because of our utter uniqueness. He calls one of them “thrownness,” the fact or circumstance that we always find ourselves in the middle of things. The world and its affairs are always already underway when we take an eternally belated notice of them. The Divine Comedy begins “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” Imagine that this line described not a particular moment in a particular life but every particular moment of every life. Alternately the pris de conscience can be exemplified by the moment at the party when you sober up enough to notice the cigarette butt floating in the half empty cup of lukewarm Everclear and Welch’s grape juice.

I assert a quotidian, earthly, mundane, reductive, statistical, nonphenomenological, thoroughly ontic counterpart to this insight. The fundamental thing to realize when and whenever we begin to realize anything is that the jig is up. Everyone’s existence is the most recent consequence of an unbroken string of happy chances. A gipsy wizard might feel special because he’s the seventh son of a seventh son, but our complacency is founded on winning millions of genetic lotteries back to back. That we are here is the sheerest miracle, but nothing about the situation guarantees that the miracles will keep on coming. To the contrary. We are as subject as anybody else to the prevailing rotten odds. It follows that the fundamental realization, if not exactly a Viconian thunder word, is “Gulp!”

Gaming the System

Everybody would like to believe that political and social problems could be resolved once and for all by some clever mechanism or universal rule. Reform the Electoral College and restore democracy. Limit campaign contributions and eliminate corruption. All of which is not very different from the universal fantasy of golfers that a new putter will miraculously improve their putting. But politics, like swinging a golf club, is not something done once. As Hannah Arendt wrote to Karl Jaspers, “There is no nonpolitical way of escaping politics.” Every reform generates its own counter reform because what’s at play are the creative and destructive energies and intelligence of real human beings. We know from the prophet Jeremiah that the “heart of man is devious and desperately corrupt.” Meanwhile it is a theorem of theoretical computer science that there can be no universal defense against parasites. Consequently…

All of which is supposed to serve as a highfalutin introduction to an observation about one particular class of parasites and their practices. The recent scandals at the New York Times made a peculiar impression on me because the same editors and executives that are currently wringing their hands about the deceptions and plagiarisms of Jayson Blair, a relatively junior reporter whose stories were human interest pieces whose authenticity or falsity had no larger significance, cheerfully harbor and indeed honor Jeff Gerth whose dishonest journalism figured in the fabrication of the Whitewater scandal and the later martyrdom of Dr. Lee. From there own perspective, the editors are right. While Gerth indeed habitually misrepresents the truth, he follows all the regs, writes every word himself, and always has two sources for everything, albeit sources he has reason to believe are unreliable. He deserved his Pulitzer Prize because he excelled at journalism, which is, after all, the manufacture of stories for money. Of course Gerth would be out of the running if there were a prize for the activity of accurately reporting on important matters, but we don’t have a name for that.

At this point, I should anticipate an objection. Confronted with the evidence, journalists always respond to radical criticisms of their profession by reciting the speech about how free societies need watch dogs. But nobody disagrees with that sentiment. The problem is that journalism as it is actually practiced is anything but a watchdog. For the most part, it’s a lap dog. Changing the technical rules of journalism or burning Jayson Blair at the stake won’t help that. Somebody has to judge themselves and their profession by whether or not it succeeds in informing the public and not by a set of guild rules. It isn’t really a sonnet just because it has fourteen lines and rhymes ababcdcdefefgg.

Party Line/Story Line

I remain skeptical of the current Roadmap to Peace Initiative, even after the supposedly historic decision of the Israeli cabinet to agree to a Palestinian state. What actually happened in Jerusalem and what is being reported in the United States are not entirely congruent. For example, the implication is that Sharon and his people have accepted the Bush plan or at least its important provisions. But the cabinet ruled out in advance any consideration of the so-called right of return and Sharon will go to the summit with a secret list of 14 non-negotiable reservations. On the critical issue of settlements, the prime minister reiterated that only building on sites not approved by the Israeli Government will be stopped. One can find all these “details” on the BBC world service. CNN isn’t reporting them, at least this morning on its website.

By the way, agreeing to a Palestinian state is less of a concession than it appears to be, especially in the aftermath of the conquest of Iraq. It is perfectly clear that a rump Palestine will have no more genuine sovereignty relative to Israel than Panama does relative to us. Why would Sharon have any more compunction about bombing the state of Palestine than he had about bombing the West Bank? International law didn’t restrain his activities in Lebanon, and the strictures against preventative war have greatly lessoned in the Bushzeit.

Without Fear or Fava Beans

According to Aristotle, the Pythagoreans understood everything by reference to a list of ten contraries: limited and unlimited, odd and even, one and plurality, right and left, male and female, resting and moving, straight and curved, light and darkness, good and bad, square and oblong. These terms are not just a set of dimensions or co-ordinates. All the first terms and all the second terms were believed to go together as if they reflected a single cosmic polarity. Now presumably there aren’t a great many Pythagoreans around any more, but their way of thinking endlessly resurfaces because it is, formally speaking, the default strategy of the indolent mind, which is to say the default strategy of the mind. We’d still like to believe that if something is left-handed (or just leftist), female, and oblong, it’s very likely to be devious, dark, and evil or—to be fair-minded for once—to think that all conservatives are racists because both terms are found in the right hand column of our personal list of contraries. That’s perhaps permissible in the context of the coarse games of politics, where all sides have to forgo the truth in order to play at all, but it’s just a vice if we want to understand something, even something political.

The Layout of the Plant

To a first approximation, the human world is a system of funnels. The mouth of the funnels can be of any width, but their outlets are always very, very narrow because human beings are only capable of processing a few bits of information a second. The content that flows through this system is further attenuated by a series of social mechanisms that constrict the effective diameter of the nozzles. The messages we receive have already been filtered thousands or millions of times, and we do our part to purify the broth of banality even more.

Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense

To judge by their obvious delight in the practice, you might think that the spokesmen for the Bush administration just discovered how to lie. They’re like 12-year olds who’ve just stumbled on the miracle of self-abuse and now retreat to the bathroom at every opportunity. In all probability, however, Chaney, Powell, and Rumsfeld were familiar with this basic political tool before they took office. The elaborate, studied prevarications habitual to this administrations reflect, not a change in the behavior of the personnel, but a change in the public world in which they operate. There is simply no cost to lying to the public right now. Republicans can lie about the budget as they have from the beginning. They can lie about weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqi connection to Ben Laden. They can invent and film thrilling war stories like the Jessica Lynch fable and the staged demolition of Saddam Hussein’s statue. They aren’t going to be called on these lies in any politically meaningful way and they know it.

To be fair, Republicans have never really had much of a choice in regards to veracity, though they used to pay more of a price for programmatic dishonesty. All politicians regard truth as optional, but politicians who actually work for the interests of a large percentage of their constituents can sometimes afford to play it straight. In a democracy, politicians dedicated to the defense of privilege simply have to lie. They can only prevail by force or fraud.