Confessions
I have often been unjust to the television journalists by denouncing them as incompetent as well as venal. Venal they are, as is probably inevitable in any entertainment business where thousands compete for a tiny number of very lucrative jobs; but in calling them incompetent, I’m being a little unfair because they actually fulfill their duties very well. I am being disingenuous, after all, to act as if their job description actually called for them to determine the most important facts about public events and accurately and effectively disseminate this information. In fact, as I once wrote to Aaron Brown in an offhand email—to judge by his reply, he wasn’t in complete agreement— journalism is a cheesy entertainment and propaganda medium. Watching the tube, it’s very easy to get huffy and exclaim, “That’s not news, it’s an infomertial;” but the point is that news is an infomertial. Atavisms from the 50’s and 20 minutes of PBS a week aside, journalism just is the business of telling people those parts of what they want to hear that the owners of the networks want to tell them. The heroic version of what journalism is supposed to be is largely illusory: an ideal the journalists can trot out to defend the dignity of their low trade, a standard that provides carping critics like me with a convenient, if blunt, weapon.
While I’m in a confessional frame of mine, I should also apologize for writing as if I thought it was advisable or even possible to squelch commercial journalism. Over and beyond the obvious likelihood that censorship of the media would just provide a new venue for even worse abuses, I have a principled objection to kicking against the pricks. It makes sense to find ways to ameliorate problems that can never be cured without remedies worse than the disease, but it is dishonest to pretend either that there is a cure or that the situation is hopeless. Though journalism, like herpes, is incurable, it is also mostly a nuisance that can be treated topically by scorn and derision. Or, if you like grander, Joseph Cambellian language, you might say journalism is part of the eternal balance of things. Three rats ceaselessly gnaw on the roots of the cosmic tree, Yggdrasal; but for some profound reason you can’t simply exterminate the rats. All you can do is encourage the three Norns to counteract the rats by their ministrations.
The anchors and pundits rise every morning and recommit themselves to their sacred occupation of making their countrymen a little stupider and more ignorant and their nation a little cheaper and nastier. It is the way of things and has been for a very long time—even Fox would have a hard time living up to the standards of scurrility of Reformation broadsides. It remains possible, indeed, necessary, however, to do the Norn thing, especially since the rats seem to have multiplied considerably over the last couple of decades.
Politics, including cultural politics, is like cooking. If you get too much salt in the pot, you can only save the dish by adding something else. By the same token, it isn’t practical to fish the superfluous pundits out of the soup or even cut back very much on the coverage of the Lacy Peterson murder. It is possible to add something to the recipe, though; and that seems to be happening. If they insist on shitting in the swimming pool, we’re going to have to make the pool bigger.
The professional journalists covering the convention at Boston have complained about the invasion of the Bloggers, but they themselves called political blogging into existence by their own failings.
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Sunday, July 25, 2004
Putting Two and Two Together
I used to imagine the Platonic Realm of the Forms as an enormous and rather dull museum in which, like the standard meter in Paris, the exemplars of every conceivable thing are in display under bell jars. But maybe the actual Noosphere is a more going place, a rave where cruising concepts troll for pickups and ecstasy. One recent meeting of strangers in the dark:
It has been recently reported that the human lifespan took a big jump some 32,000 years ago, the same time period as the great florescence of Paleolithic art. Increased longevity may have been a key feature in human evolution since older individuals are carriers of cultural memory and it is culture that makes it worthwhile to spend all that metabolic energy on a big brain. But there’s another connection, and that’s where the second idea comes in. We know from the research of Robert Zajonc and others that birth order correlates with intelligence. First born and only children tend to be smarter than the others, presumably because they spend more time around adults. But that explanation implies that anything that increases the amount of time children spend around older people is likely to increase their intelligence. Increasing longevity is likely to do just that. In turn, greater intelligence in the phenotypes means more cultural innovation, more longevity, and more selection pressure for the genotypes that correlate with intelligence. In retrospect, you can see how the thing got out of hand.
I used to imagine the Platonic Realm of the Forms as an enormous and rather dull museum in which, like the standard meter in Paris, the exemplars of every conceivable thing are in display under bell jars. But maybe the actual Noosphere is a more going place, a rave where cruising concepts troll for pickups and ecstasy. One recent meeting of strangers in the dark:
It has been recently reported that the human lifespan took a big jump some 32,000 years ago, the same time period as the great florescence of Paleolithic art. Increased longevity may have been a key feature in human evolution since older individuals are carriers of cultural memory and it is culture that makes it worthwhile to spend all that metabolic energy on a big brain. But there’s another connection, and that’s where the second idea comes in. We know from the research of Robert Zajonc and others that birth order correlates with intelligence. First born and only children tend to be smarter than the others, presumably because they spend more time around adults. But that explanation implies that anything that increases the amount of time children spend around older people is likely to increase their intelligence. Increasing longevity is likely to do just that. In turn, greater intelligence in the phenotypes means more cultural innovation, more longevity, and more selection pressure for the genotypes that correlate with intelligence. In retrospect, you can see how the thing got out of hand.
Friday, July 23, 2004
Something for the Koan Brothers to Make a Movie About
The critique of nationalism associated with Eric Hobsbawm can be pushed too far. Kilts and tartans and other patriotic clichés are commonly cooked up by the marketing department; but nationalities do possess distinct and identifiable folkways and mentalities. After all this time, it really does mean something to be a Frenchman. The important point, however, is that what Volkish philosophers and entrepreneurs of Fundamentalism pick up as the basis for their constructions are seldom still living traditions. It is only by chance that the beliefs and practices of real people will be appropriate to a program designed to address specifically contemporary concerns. The universal demand for particularism so characteristic of the 20th Century and very much with us in the endlessly attacks on liberalism are obviously rooted in the international culture of universities, not the parochial world of peasants. Indeed, if the genuine institutions and values of a people conflict with what the conservatives want, so much the worst for tradition. The requirements of ideology come first, as when the Enlightenment ideals of the American Revolution, still very much alive in many hearts, are denounced in the name of patriotism.
If you meet Thomas Jefferson on the road, kill him.
The critique of nationalism associated with Eric Hobsbawm can be pushed too far. Kilts and tartans and other patriotic clichés are commonly cooked up by the marketing department; but nationalities do possess distinct and identifiable folkways and mentalities. After all this time, it really does mean something to be a Frenchman. The important point, however, is that what Volkish philosophers and entrepreneurs of Fundamentalism pick up as the basis for their constructions are seldom still living traditions. It is only by chance that the beliefs and practices of real people will be appropriate to a program designed to address specifically contemporary concerns. The universal demand for particularism so characteristic of the 20th Century and very much with us in the endlessly attacks on liberalism are obviously rooted in the international culture of universities, not the parochial world of peasants. Indeed, if the genuine institutions and values of a people conflict with what the conservatives want, so much the worst for tradition. The requirements of ideology come first, as when the Enlightenment ideals of the American Revolution, still very much alive in many hearts, are denounced in the name of patriotism.
If you meet Thomas Jefferson on the road, kill him.
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
The Silence of the Oracles
When Stephen Hawking proposed that black holes give off radiation some years ago, the idea wasn’t very surprising to me. No physicist, obviously, I did have a liberal artsy appreciation of quantum mechanical tunneling, the principle behind Hawking radiation. Hawking’s new claim about black holes is much more opaque. He now says that he can solve an old paradox—a paradox he himself created, as it happens—by showing that black holes do not violate a basic rule of quantum physics by destroying all information about the particles that fall into them. But while information may indeed escape from black holes, damned little of it escaped from the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation. Apparently the argument’s got something to do with what actually occurs at the event horizon of a black hole—reports on scientific websites are very vague.
What amuses me about all this has nothing to do with the physics of it, about which I’m certainly not competent to comment, but about the popular presumption that Hawking’s change of heart on the issue is somehow decisive, presumably because he will once play poker with Newton, Einstein, and Data. Unfortunately, very bright and accomplished scientists make claims all the time that turn out to be false or, worse, foolish. Hawking, after all, is 61, an age at which famous scientists, their previous triumphs having grown stale, get enthusiastic about Vitamin C or Grand Unification or the Implicate Order or the successor to the Duotronic Brain. But maybe Hawking did solve the problem. I understand he managed to cheat on his wife despite being confined in a wheelchair with ALS. In comparison to that, psyching out black holes is trifling.
When Stephen Hawking proposed that black holes give off radiation some years ago, the idea wasn’t very surprising to me. No physicist, obviously, I did have a liberal artsy appreciation of quantum mechanical tunneling, the principle behind Hawking radiation. Hawking’s new claim about black holes is much more opaque. He now says that he can solve an old paradox—a paradox he himself created, as it happens—by showing that black holes do not violate a basic rule of quantum physics by destroying all information about the particles that fall into them. But while information may indeed escape from black holes, damned little of it escaped from the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation. Apparently the argument’s got something to do with what actually occurs at the event horizon of a black hole—reports on scientific websites are very vague.
What amuses me about all this has nothing to do with the physics of it, about which I’m certainly not competent to comment, but about the popular presumption that Hawking’s change of heart on the issue is somehow decisive, presumably because he will once play poker with Newton, Einstein, and Data. Unfortunately, very bright and accomplished scientists make claims all the time that turn out to be false or, worse, foolish. Hawking, after all, is 61, an age at which famous scientists, their previous triumphs having grown stale, get enthusiastic about Vitamin C or Grand Unification or the Implicate Order or the successor to the Duotronic Brain. But maybe Hawking did solve the problem. I understand he managed to cheat on his wife despite being confined in a wheelchair with ALS. In comparison to that, psyching out black holes is trifling.
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Rebels without a Cause
I don’t know what a 21st Century American theocracy would look like and I certainly hope neither I nor my heirs will ever find out, but I doubt if most conservatives would really like the reality of a no-fooling-around American Crusader state. The German conservatives from whom our rightists derive many of their ideas didn’t necessarily want the gangster regime that emerged from the last great defeat of liberalism, either, though their support was essential to the triumph of the Nazis. People like Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, and Hans Freyer were far clearer on what they hated about soulless modernity and parliamentary government than on what kind of new dispensation could underlie a new and unified Germany. People whose political program amounts to waiting for a miracle aren’t likely to be very choosy. Which is probably also accounts for the surprising enthusiasm so many conservatives evince for authoritarian forms of traditional religion. It isn’t that any of these decrepit belief systems have become even slightly more plausible over the last decades—if anything, just the reverse. What has changed is the level of cultural anxiety. The right doesn’t know what it wants. It just knows that it wants it very badly. If you’re impatient enough for the Second Coming, you can even manage to be rapturous about the Reverend Moon.
For a long period after the end of the Second World War, conservatives in America and Europe accepted that welfare state capitalism and the extension of human rights to minorities were irresistible and that a meaningful conservatism should dedicate itself to preserving what remained valid in tradition while countering the utopian and potentially despotic tendencies of the dogmatic Left. That’s not enough any more.
Unfortunately, the real enemy of these folks is not the political ideology of liberalism, but social, economic, and cultural trends that are far more stubborn than a few Democrats. Religious enthusiasm can perhaps cow the feminists, but it doesn’t change the fact that the economy depends on everybody working. One can resist gay marriage and call for family values, but the demographic fact that most people aren’t going to have more than a kid or two isn’t going to change. Kansas may not teach evolution to high school kids, but using religious politics to squelch the autonomy of the sciences gets self-defeating very quickly. Does anybody really think that the spiritual situation of the age is going to be fundamentally altered by outlawing condoms and stem-cell research?
I don’t know what a 21st Century American theocracy would look like and I certainly hope neither I nor my heirs will ever find out, but I doubt if most conservatives would really like the reality of a no-fooling-around American Crusader state. The German conservatives from whom our rightists derive many of their ideas didn’t necessarily want the gangster regime that emerged from the last great defeat of liberalism, either, though their support was essential to the triumph of the Nazis. People like Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, and Hans Freyer were far clearer on what they hated about soulless modernity and parliamentary government than on what kind of new dispensation could underlie a new and unified Germany. People whose political program amounts to waiting for a miracle aren’t likely to be very choosy. Which is probably also accounts for the surprising enthusiasm so many conservatives evince for authoritarian forms of traditional religion. It isn’t that any of these decrepit belief systems have become even slightly more plausible over the last decades—if anything, just the reverse. What has changed is the level of cultural anxiety. The right doesn’t know what it wants. It just knows that it wants it very badly. If you’re impatient enough for the Second Coming, you can even manage to be rapturous about the Reverend Moon.
For a long period after the end of the Second World War, conservatives in America and Europe accepted that welfare state capitalism and the extension of human rights to minorities were irresistible and that a meaningful conservatism should dedicate itself to preserving what remained valid in tradition while countering the utopian and potentially despotic tendencies of the dogmatic Left. That’s not enough any more.
Unfortunately, the real enemy of these folks is not the political ideology of liberalism, but social, economic, and cultural trends that are far more stubborn than a few Democrats. Religious enthusiasm can perhaps cow the feminists, but it doesn’t change the fact that the economy depends on everybody working. One can resist gay marriage and call for family values, but the demographic fact that most people aren’t going to have more than a kid or two isn’t going to change. Kansas may not teach evolution to high school kids, but using religious politics to squelch the autonomy of the sciences gets self-defeating very quickly. Does anybody really think that the spiritual situation of the age is going to be fundamentally altered by outlawing condoms and stem-cell research?
Monday, July 19, 2004
Jus Fetiales
By ancient Roman law, the state was forbidden to engage in aggressive war. A college of 20 priests, the fetiales, had to establish in each case that some king or other had offended the senate and people before war could properly begin by casting a bloody spear into the territory of the enemy or, when that wasn’t convenient, from the Temple of Bellona to the ager hostilis. Amazingly, this scrupulosity did not prevent Rome from expanding from a hilltop refuge for horse thieves to the greatest empire the History Channel has ever known and thus demonstrated once and for all that counterpunchers can be champs. The Etruscans, Samnites, Carthaginians, Greeks, Macedonians, Illyrians, Spaniards, Gauls, Thracians, Egyptians, Numidians, Arabs, Persians, and Britons probably had a different take on things, but all Roman wars were officially defensive.
Granted the durable success of Roman hypocrisy, Bush may be right in invoking in his doctrine of Preventative War an American version of the Jus Fetiales. If, on the other hand, we really don’t have the resources or the will to enforce universal empire, we might be better off with attitudes that suit a powerful but not all-powerful nation in its dealings with other nations. It used to be possible for a country to assert its interests in an international dispute without claiming that its foreign policy echoed the obvious principles of Natural Law if not the will of Almighty God. Before the first Gulf war, for example, Bush the First could and should have informed Hussein that the United States had a vital interest in the independence of Kuwait, an interest that didn’t have to be defended theologically but would be defended with guns and bombs. We didn’t need to represent ourselves as Pure and Good in every way in order to act decently. Indeed, absent the interminable rhetoric about how wonderful we are, other countries and their people would probably find it easier to accommodate our wishes. Even being recognized as a non-equal is an improvement on not being recognized at all except as a law-breaker.
They finally got Bush to stop talking about crusades, but his policy is remains “Love me, love my Sun God,” an interminable exercise in self-righteousness and national egotism. Unfortunately, Bush the Second didn’t invent American highhandedness; and the notion that we are always and obviously the offended party has been intoned on many previous occasions by the journalists who make up the local Fetial College. Too bad. I think we’d be less dangerous if we didn’t always have to be right.
By ancient Roman law, the state was forbidden to engage in aggressive war. A college of 20 priests, the fetiales, had to establish in each case that some king or other had offended the senate and people before war could properly begin by casting a bloody spear into the territory of the enemy or, when that wasn’t convenient, from the Temple of Bellona to the ager hostilis. Amazingly, this scrupulosity did not prevent Rome from expanding from a hilltop refuge for horse thieves to the greatest empire the History Channel has ever known and thus demonstrated once and for all that counterpunchers can be champs. The Etruscans, Samnites, Carthaginians, Greeks, Macedonians, Illyrians, Spaniards, Gauls, Thracians, Egyptians, Numidians, Arabs, Persians, and Britons probably had a different take on things, but all Roman wars were officially defensive.
Granted the durable success of Roman hypocrisy, Bush may be right in invoking in his doctrine of Preventative War an American version of the Jus Fetiales. If, on the other hand, we really don’t have the resources or the will to enforce universal empire, we might be better off with attitudes that suit a powerful but not all-powerful nation in its dealings with other nations. It used to be possible for a country to assert its interests in an international dispute without claiming that its foreign policy echoed the obvious principles of Natural Law if not the will of Almighty God. Before the first Gulf war, for example, Bush the First could and should have informed Hussein that the United States had a vital interest in the independence of Kuwait, an interest that didn’t have to be defended theologically but would be defended with guns and bombs. We didn’t need to represent ourselves as Pure and Good in every way in order to act decently. Indeed, absent the interminable rhetoric about how wonderful we are, other countries and their people would probably find it easier to accommodate our wishes. Even being recognized as a non-equal is an improvement on not being recognized at all except as a law-breaker.
They finally got Bush to stop talking about crusades, but his policy is remains “Love me, love my Sun God,” an interminable exercise in self-righteousness and national egotism. Unfortunately, Bush the Second didn’t invent American highhandedness; and the notion that we are always and obviously the offended party has been intoned on many previous occasions by the journalists who make up the local Fetial College. Too bad. I think we’d be less dangerous if we didn’t always have to be right.
Saturday, July 17, 2004
Spammed by Maxwell’s Demon
What we think of as the norm is, after all, just what we’re used to. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, if some oddball thing we happen on turns out on closer examination to be exemplary. Since our existence is only possible because we are located in the bull’s eye of a nested set of improbabilities, inductions on everyday experience are risky. The Firesign Theater may be overstating matters to claim that everything you know is wrong, but everything is certainly likely to be anomalous. Many of the regularities we mistake for laws of nature are just ground rules and only apply in this one ballpark and then only for the duration of a game that may be called at any time for bad weather. I’ll mention some highfalutin instances in a moment, but the phenomenon is already captured by the puzzled look of a soon-to-be run over pedestrian who doesn’t understand how a taxi could be bearing down on him since the light is red. And then there’s the case of the extremely virginal girl I knew in high school who, when informed that her best friend was pregnant, cheerfully informed everybody that there must be some sort of error since her friend wasn’t married. Unlike Janet, Leibniz wasn’t, so far as I know, a Christian Scientist; but his belief that all curves have simple formulas has some of her endearing naïvite. It could not last, not for Janet, probably, and certainly not for the mathematicians, who having laboriously defined a few pathological functions in the 19th Century had to admit by the 20th that almost all functions are pathological and that the exceptions are the rule.
What I’m talking about only seems to be a rare pattern. Some more examples: in ordinary life, we assume that knowing more about what’s going on in some competitive situation will improve our chance of prevailing. That expectation may or not be valid in these parts and for the nonce, but it certainly can’t be generalized. Years ago, the game theory folks devised games in which having more accurate information puts a player at a disadvantage. Subsequently, they realized that these monsters were not curiosities at all. Having more information turns out to be disadvantageous in most possible games. Again, Kurt Godel proved the existence of propositions whose truth could not be decided by deductions from the axioms of the system in question. Naturally, it turns out that essentially all possible true propositions are in this set.
Many apparently general procedures only work under very particular circumstances. One example is the simplex method of solving linear programming problems, the single most commonly used operation’s research technique. The simplex method is the means by which an enormous number of governmental, business, and military decisions are made because it can often quickly find the best available solution to real-world problems. But the method, which works splendidly in practice, shouldn’t be that efficient. Tested on randomly generated inputs, it takes a long time to find the answer. The utility of the method depends on something about our world and how we deal with it. Which really shouldn’t be too surprising. We know that the performance of other optimizing techniques also depends on the circumstances. It has been clear for a long time that natural selection only works in a small subset of possible environments; and, more generally, the efficiency of any learning algorithm depends on what there is to be learned. We can’t know in advance what method to use. It’s not just that it’s better to be lucky than good. You’ve got to be lucky to be good.
Meanwhile. All of these thoughts were occasioned as I set about the task of deleting a day’s worth of emails for advanced degrees, penile enlargements, photos of hot middle aged women, real estate deals, and work-at-home schemes from my computer. I suddenly realized that the spammers aspired to be Maxwell’s demons, agents that make a profit without doing any work. As you’ll recall, a Maxwell demon is a character in a thought experiment. The demon, acting as a gatekeeper between two gas-filled chambers, lets fast molecules go from left to right while only letting slow molecules go from right to left until one chamber is much hotter than the other. In this fashion, in apparent disregard of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, a temperature difference is created that can be used to drive a piston. The demon gets something for nothing, exactly what the Viagra salesmen are trying to get.
Now a Maxwell’s Demon is not really possible if only because it costs something to find out about the velocity and location of the particles and compute when to open or close the gate. But one of the reasons it costs to do the computation is rather subtle. Holding the intermediate results of your calculations in your head isn’t so expensive, but you not only have to remember things. You have to forget them, and that requires extra energy. When I encountered this argument years ago in an article in Scientific American, I never expected that it would turn out to have a real world application, but it does. It explains how the computer spammers succeed. They can impersonate Maxwell’s Demons by finessing the energetic costs of forgetfulness. They aren’t stuck with the vast amounts of garbage information they generate in the course of their operations, but only because they can get us to take out the trash for them.
What we think of as the norm is, after all, just what we’re used to. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, if some oddball thing we happen on turns out on closer examination to be exemplary. Since our existence is only possible because we are located in the bull’s eye of a nested set of improbabilities, inductions on everyday experience are risky. The Firesign Theater may be overstating matters to claim that everything you know is wrong, but everything is certainly likely to be anomalous. Many of the regularities we mistake for laws of nature are just ground rules and only apply in this one ballpark and then only for the duration of a game that may be called at any time for bad weather. I’ll mention some highfalutin instances in a moment, but the phenomenon is already captured by the puzzled look of a soon-to-be run over pedestrian who doesn’t understand how a taxi could be bearing down on him since the light is red. And then there’s the case of the extremely virginal girl I knew in high school who, when informed that her best friend was pregnant, cheerfully informed everybody that there must be some sort of error since her friend wasn’t married. Unlike Janet, Leibniz wasn’t, so far as I know, a Christian Scientist; but his belief that all curves have simple formulas has some of her endearing naïvite. It could not last, not for Janet, probably, and certainly not for the mathematicians, who having laboriously defined a few pathological functions in the 19th Century had to admit by the 20th that almost all functions are pathological and that the exceptions are the rule.
What I’m talking about only seems to be a rare pattern. Some more examples: in ordinary life, we assume that knowing more about what’s going on in some competitive situation will improve our chance of prevailing. That expectation may or not be valid in these parts and for the nonce, but it certainly can’t be generalized. Years ago, the game theory folks devised games in which having more accurate information puts a player at a disadvantage. Subsequently, they realized that these monsters were not curiosities at all. Having more information turns out to be disadvantageous in most possible games. Again, Kurt Godel proved the existence of propositions whose truth could not be decided by deductions from the axioms of the system in question. Naturally, it turns out that essentially all possible true propositions are in this set.
Many apparently general procedures only work under very particular circumstances. One example is the simplex method of solving linear programming problems, the single most commonly used operation’s research technique. The simplex method is the means by which an enormous number of governmental, business, and military decisions are made because it can often quickly find the best available solution to real-world problems. But the method, which works splendidly in practice, shouldn’t be that efficient. Tested on randomly generated inputs, it takes a long time to find the answer. The utility of the method depends on something about our world and how we deal with it. Which really shouldn’t be too surprising. We know that the performance of other optimizing techniques also depends on the circumstances. It has been clear for a long time that natural selection only works in a small subset of possible environments; and, more generally, the efficiency of any learning algorithm depends on what there is to be learned. We can’t know in advance what method to use. It’s not just that it’s better to be lucky than good. You’ve got to be lucky to be good.
Meanwhile. All of these thoughts were occasioned as I set about the task of deleting a day’s worth of emails for advanced degrees, penile enlargements, photos of hot middle aged women, real estate deals, and work-at-home schemes from my computer. I suddenly realized that the spammers aspired to be Maxwell’s demons, agents that make a profit without doing any work. As you’ll recall, a Maxwell demon is a character in a thought experiment. The demon, acting as a gatekeeper between two gas-filled chambers, lets fast molecules go from left to right while only letting slow molecules go from right to left until one chamber is much hotter than the other. In this fashion, in apparent disregard of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, a temperature difference is created that can be used to drive a piston. The demon gets something for nothing, exactly what the Viagra salesmen are trying to get.
Now a Maxwell’s Demon is not really possible if only because it costs something to find out about the velocity and location of the particles and compute when to open or close the gate. But one of the reasons it costs to do the computation is rather subtle. Holding the intermediate results of your calculations in your head isn’t so expensive, but you not only have to remember things. You have to forget them, and that requires extra energy. When I encountered this argument years ago in an article in Scientific American, I never expected that it would turn out to have a real world application, but it does. It explains how the computer spammers succeed. They can impersonate Maxwell’s Demons by finessing the energetic costs of forgetfulness. They aren’t stuck with the vast amounts of garbage information they generate in the course of their operations, but only because they can get us to take out the trash for them.
Friday, July 16, 2004
Malpractice, Good for Everybody
Vilifying John Edwards as a trial lawyer hasn’t worked very well for the Republicans, who seem to have misjudged to what degree the public shares their visceral hatred for personal injury attorneys—in their innocence, many Republicans simply do not realize how much their version of common sense simply reflects their class interests. It isn’t that very many thoughtful people think that expensive lawsuits and occasional lottery-scale payouts are a rational way to curb the greed and arrogance of corporations. It’s just that in our dysfunctional system, random legal remedies are getting to be the only check on the power of money. If regulators won’t regulate, if legislators won’t legislate, if journalists won’t denounce, what else? In a nation of people on the take, the worst excesses can only be moderated by other people on the take. Why the enormous amounts of money some lawyers make from injury cases upsets the Republicans beats me. Aren’t they the party in favor of enormous rewards for dubious services? In red-state, red meat America, the Land of Betting on the Come, high rolling is as honorable as holy rolling. Junk politics, junk bonds, junk religion aren’t that much different, or less profitable, than junk lawsuits. If it pays, it’s patriotic. So why the hostility to shysters by folks who love CEOs?
By the way, if you really wanted to cut down on frivolous injury lawsuits, the obvious first step to take would be ensure that everybody had a guaranteed access to decent health care since a huge proportion of suits begin not out of the prospect of a big payday but out of fear of being ruined by medical expenses—at the outset, all the scalded lady wanted was enough money to pay her hospital bill. An efficient, universal health care system is out of the question, however, since it would lower the profits of the medical industry and put untold thousands of insurance company bureaucrats out of work. Anyhow, and this is the obvious consideration that never seems to be considered, the malpractice suits have their good side for the health industry. Because of the endlessly hyped threat of lawsuits, the doctors and hospitals are obliged to practice defensive medicine and order a host of expensive tests and procedures, most of which are not performed pro bono. I’m not aware if anybody has done the arithmetic, but do we know that the increased cost of insurance is as great as the increased profits from all those extra X-rays and blood workups? Many doctors find it personally distasteful to waste their patient’s money. My point is that the system provides them both an incentive to overspend and a handy and elastic excuse. Meanwhile, the purported malpractice crisis is also useful to right-wing politicians, who can blame escalating medical costs on lawsuits and thus deflect attention from the grotesque structural inefficiency of the system.
Vilifying John Edwards as a trial lawyer hasn’t worked very well for the Republicans, who seem to have misjudged to what degree the public shares their visceral hatred for personal injury attorneys—in their innocence, many Republicans simply do not realize how much their version of common sense simply reflects their class interests. It isn’t that very many thoughtful people think that expensive lawsuits and occasional lottery-scale payouts are a rational way to curb the greed and arrogance of corporations. It’s just that in our dysfunctional system, random legal remedies are getting to be the only check on the power of money. If regulators won’t regulate, if legislators won’t legislate, if journalists won’t denounce, what else? In a nation of people on the take, the worst excesses can only be moderated by other people on the take. Why the enormous amounts of money some lawyers make from injury cases upsets the Republicans beats me. Aren’t they the party in favor of enormous rewards for dubious services? In red-state, red meat America, the Land of Betting on the Come, high rolling is as honorable as holy rolling. Junk politics, junk bonds, junk religion aren’t that much different, or less profitable, than junk lawsuits. If it pays, it’s patriotic. So why the hostility to shysters by folks who love CEOs?
By the way, if you really wanted to cut down on frivolous injury lawsuits, the obvious first step to take would be ensure that everybody had a guaranteed access to decent health care since a huge proportion of suits begin not out of the prospect of a big payday but out of fear of being ruined by medical expenses—at the outset, all the scalded lady wanted was enough money to pay her hospital bill. An efficient, universal health care system is out of the question, however, since it would lower the profits of the medical industry and put untold thousands of insurance company bureaucrats out of work. Anyhow, and this is the obvious consideration that never seems to be considered, the malpractice suits have their good side for the health industry. Because of the endlessly hyped threat of lawsuits, the doctors and hospitals are obliged to practice defensive medicine and order a host of expensive tests and procedures, most of which are not performed pro bono. I’m not aware if anybody has done the arithmetic, but do we know that the increased cost of insurance is as great as the increased profits from all those extra X-rays and blood workups? Many doctors find it personally distasteful to waste their patient’s money. My point is that the system provides them both an incentive to overspend and a handy and elastic excuse. Meanwhile, the purported malpractice crisis is also useful to right-wing politicians, who can blame escalating medical costs on lawsuits and thus deflect attention from the grotesque structural inefficiency of the system.
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Silver Linings
When I read that the balance of trade improved slightly last month, I wasn’t surprised since the considerable recent decline in the value of the dollar has made imports more expensive while lowering the real price of export goods. That’s good or at least necessary, but only in the sense in which it is necessary to go to the dentist after years of sucking on hard candy. Like working off a bout of inflation or increasing the savings rate, redressing a gross imbalance of trade inevitably involves pain. Just who does most of the suffering is another question. Which is probably why right-wingers view the trade balance with equanimity. They are aware that the balance of trade will eventually be redressed, but that’s OK because under the current political economy of the United States, the cost of paying down the deficit can be shifted to the proles. No need to lower your profit rate to reflect the lower prices you get for your goods internationally when the difference can be more than made up by lowering the standard of living of your workers who will be buying more expensive consumer goods on lower wages. A utopian solution, always assuming, of course, you don’t end up with your head on a spear.
The prosperity of the United States is artificial to a considerable degree. Unless we really do figure out how to make empire pay on a grand scale, our standard of living must eventually come more into line with the rest of the world. Such an outcome is not necessarily tragic, both because the continual improvement of technology means that a relative decline doesn’t have to imply an absolute decline and because wealth simply isn’t the only measure of the well being of a nation. If the burden of a decline were equitably borne, paying down the trade imbalance wouldn’t have to unpleasant political consequences. Indeed, shared sacrifices can promote genuine unity in a country, something with which we’re completely unfamiliar after long decades of commercialized patriotism. It might also be a relief to have some goal in this life beyond the endless accumulation of things. I don’t expect things to work out in this happy fashion, however. As the American economy continues to come under competitive pressure, the natural reaction of the well off will be to compensate for declining national income by increasing their share of what’s left.
When I read that the balance of trade improved slightly last month, I wasn’t surprised since the considerable recent decline in the value of the dollar has made imports more expensive while lowering the real price of export goods. That’s good or at least necessary, but only in the sense in which it is necessary to go to the dentist after years of sucking on hard candy. Like working off a bout of inflation or increasing the savings rate, redressing a gross imbalance of trade inevitably involves pain. Just who does most of the suffering is another question. Which is probably why right-wingers view the trade balance with equanimity. They are aware that the balance of trade will eventually be redressed, but that’s OK because under the current political economy of the United States, the cost of paying down the deficit can be shifted to the proles. No need to lower your profit rate to reflect the lower prices you get for your goods internationally when the difference can be more than made up by lowering the standard of living of your workers who will be buying more expensive consumer goods on lower wages. A utopian solution, always assuming, of course, you don’t end up with your head on a spear.
The prosperity of the United States is artificial to a considerable degree. Unless we really do figure out how to make empire pay on a grand scale, our standard of living must eventually come more into line with the rest of the world. Such an outcome is not necessarily tragic, both because the continual improvement of technology means that a relative decline doesn’t have to imply an absolute decline and because wealth simply isn’t the only measure of the well being of a nation. If the burden of a decline were equitably borne, paying down the trade imbalance wouldn’t have to unpleasant political consequences. Indeed, shared sacrifices can promote genuine unity in a country, something with which we’re completely unfamiliar after long decades of commercialized patriotism. It might also be a relief to have some goal in this life beyond the endless accumulation of things. I don’t expect things to work out in this happy fashion, however. As the American economy continues to come under competitive pressure, the natural reaction of the well off will be to compensate for declining national income by increasing their share of what’s left.
Sunday, July 11, 2004
Enter the Dragon (Here and on Line 32)
Am I alone in thinking that the great problem of the left is not political but ideological? While Ehrenreich or Nader or Chomsky can score rhetorical points against the powers that be and turn out the usual crew of protesters, what are they offering as a coherent alternative to business as usual? What the heck is democratic socialism—or whatever—in the 21st Century? Acting as if a mass outbreak of virtue and compassion will solve our problems just doesn’t cut it.
I'm not writing this to carp. I keep looking around for a confident voice on the left that has something to offer but theoretical nuance or petit bourgeois moralizing. I'm not sure I'd buy into a fresh radical point of view, but I'd sure like to hear one. Capitalism itself seems to work much better when it is challenged and checked by a credible counterforce with serious ideas. Which probably requires the emergence of a group or class of people with a vital interest in changing things and some idea of what they want.
Incidentally, I don't have a clue what the title of this bit means either.
Am I alone in thinking that the great problem of the left is not political but ideological? While Ehrenreich or Nader or Chomsky can score rhetorical points against the powers that be and turn out the usual crew of protesters, what are they offering as a coherent alternative to business as usual? What the heck is democratic socialism—or whatever—in the 21st Century? Acting as if a mass outbreak of virtue and compassion will solve our problems just doesn’t cut it.
I'm not writing this to carp. I keep looking around for a confident voice on the left that has something to offer but theoretical nuance or petit bourgeois moralizing. I'm not sure I'd buy into a fresh radical point of view, but I'd sure like to hear one. Capitalism itself seems to work much better when it is challenged and checked by a credible counterforce with serious ideas. Which probably requires the emergence of a group or class of people with a vital interest in changing things and some idea of what they want.
Incidentally, I don't have a clue what the title of this bit means either.
Saturday, July 10, 2004
Back in that Forking Garden
I’m skeptical of meditations on history that appeal to the now familiar butterfly effect. As a matter of mathematics, arbitrarily small differences in the starting points of certain dynamic systems have huge consequences. If the world and therefore history is a chaotic system, however, that just means that any alteration of boundary conditions whatsoever suffices to change everything after a while. But this notion is perfectly empty, first, because one can never test or exploit the sensitivity of the system because no one can change anything at all, and, second, because all changes, meaningful or meaningless, are equivalently potent in this hypothesis. So far as I can see, chaos theory has nothing to tell us about what makes historical events decisive. It can never help us figure out what would have happened if Grant had been drinking at Appomattox.
Counterfactual historians like to underline the quirkiness of history by suggesting that plausible alternative decisions would have led to vastly different outcomes. I have no quarrel with this procedure as a way of thinking about what’s at stake in history, though in many cases I think it is employed mostly as a prophylactic or postphylactic against the apparently unbustable ghost of Marxism. But counterfactual history, as practiced, actually presumes a high degree of rationality in human affairs. It is anything but a celebration of the sovereignty of chance. Only in a highly organized world is it possible for an individual or a few individuals to make a decision that has recognizable, if not entirely predictable consequences. The paths fork—the government of Italy chooses to invade France or it doesn’t—but the options don’t splinter into thousands or billions of outcomes at every moment. If Croesus crosses the river Halys, he doesn’t know whose kingdom will be put at hazard, but somebody’s will. Atoms, molecules, rocks, and animals just don’t have that kind of leverage.
Counterfactual history only makes sense if human affairs mostly make sense. Niall Ferguson may not be a Hegelian, but his methodology strongly implies that the “Real is pretty rational: the pretty rational is real.” That’s not a small matter, and raises the preliminary question of how a region of reality got predictable enough to be uncertain in a game-like way.
I’m skeptical of meditations on history that appeal to the now familiar butterfly effect. As a matter of mathematics, arbitrarily small differences in the starting points of certain dynamic systems have huge consequences. If the world and therefore history is a chaotic system, however, that just means that any alteration of boundary conditions whatsoever suffices to change everything after a while. But this notion is perfectly empty, first, because one can never test or exploit the sensitivity of the system because no one can change anything at all, and, second, because all changes, meaningful or meaningless, are equivalently potent in this hypothesis. So far as I can see, chaos theory has nothing to tell us about what makes historical events decisive. It can never help us figure out what would have happened if Grant had been drinking at Appomattox.
Counterfactual historians like to underline the quirkiness of history by suggesting that plausible alternative decisions would have led to vastly different outcomes. I have no quarrel with this procedure as a way of thinking about what’s at stake in history, though in many cases I think it is employed mostly as a prophylactic or postphylactic against the apparently unbustable ghost of Marxism. But counterfactual history, as practiced, actually presumes a high degree of rationality in human affairs. It is anything but a celebration of the sovereignty of chance. Only in a highly organized world is it possible for an individual or a few individuals to make a decision that has recognizable, if not entirely predictable consequences. The paths fork—the government of Italy chooses to invade France or it doesn’t—but the options don’t splinter into thousands or billions of outcomes at every moment. If Croesus crosses the river Halys, he doesn’t know whose kingdom will be put at hazard, but somebody’s will. Atoms, molecules, rocks, and animals just don’t have that kind of leverage.
Counterfactual history only makes sense if human affairs mostly make sense. Niall Ferguson may not be a Hegelian, but his methodology strongly implies that the “Real is pretty rational: the pretty rational is real.” That’s not a small matter, and raises the preliminary question of how a region of reality got predictable enough to be uncertain in a game-like way.
Friday, July 09, 2004
That Time of Year
Reading through Stephen Owen’s Anthology of Chinese Literature I was struck again by how few themes dominate poetry, especially lyric poetry, and how few genuinely novel sentiments ever appear. According to the ancient Classic of Documents, “The Poem articulates what is on the mind intently.” Apparently nothing makes the mind more intent than the bloodshot dawn of old age, though there really isn’t more to say about it than there is to do about it; and the master plot of all those poems can be provided all too easily as in my contribution to the genre:
The Poet’s Keen Awareness of his Approaching Decrepitude
Crap!
Of course it could be that Chinese were wrong about what poetry is about and that “what’s on the mind intently” is just another formal element like rhyme or meter. Or maybe it is an instance of a deeper artifice to deny a really depressing fact by concentrating on it in a patterned way.
The Japanese poet Michizane’s line about the failure of the light: “It was not the wind—the oil is gone.” Let us consider the extent to which this loveliness helps and the extent to which it does not.
Reading through Stephen Owen’s Anthology of Chinese Literature I was struck again by how few themes dominate poetry, especially lyric poetry, and how few genuinely novel sentiments ever appear. According to the ancient Classic of Documents, “The Poem articulates what is on the mind intently.” Apparently nothing makes the mind more intent than the bloodshot dawn of old age, though there really isn’t more to say about it than there is to do about it; and the master plot of all those poems can be provided all too easily as in my contribution to the genre:
The Poet’s Keen Awareness of his Approaching Decrepitude
Crap!
Of course it could be that Chinese were wrong about what poetry is about and that “what’s on the mind intently” is just another formal element like rhyme or meter. Or maybe it is an instance of a deeper artifice to deny a really depressing fact by concentrating on it in a patterned way.
The Japanese poet Michizane’s line about the failure of the light: “It was not the wind—the oil is gone.” Let us consider the extent to which this loveliness helps and the extent to which it does not.
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
The Difficulty of Figuring Out Who’s Really on the Top in Wrestling and Religion or Mort Saul Among the Prophets
In my village atheist phase, I’m concerned by the influence of religion on politics because bigotry and irrationalism are catching. Religion is a very mixed bag, however; and though all faiths are obviously false if construed as systems of propositions, religious values are certainly not all malevolent or anti-democratic. The very notion of the separation of church and state originated on the church side of the line, for example. Indeed, it could be argued that the worst thing about the current confluence of politics and religion is the bad effect that politics is having on religion.
If slavery is the Punic curse of American history, imperial patronage plays the same role in history of every church. Preachers sometimes claim that Christianity triumphed because of the many miracles wrought by the saints and apostles; but, from a real politik point of view, the only miracle that mattered was the miracle of the Milvian Bridge in which Constantine saw a cross in the sky, won a battle, and became emperor. In one respect, of course, that cross was a good sign for the faithful since Christianity needed the coercive power of the state to become a universal religion, but it was a bad sign also since the empire provided its services at a high price. To this day, for example, the monarchical mummery, obsessive secrecy, and authoritarianism of the Catholic church derive from the imperial model; and it is these political characteristics much more than the doctrines of the faith that make abuse and corruption inevitable.
George Bush isn’t exactly Constantine, but he and his cohorts are offering the modern churches a new version of the imperial bargain. In return for votes and money, churches will get tax breaks, federal funds, and support for some but not all their cultural concerns. Go along with aggressive wars and your leader will endlessly profess his faith. Soft-pedal your opposition to the death penalty and we’ll recriminalize abortion and pester the pornographers. Rome has been making these kind of deals for centuries and will probably go along—it’s only the first moral compromise that keep you awake at night, the ten thousandth is easy—but some of the more traditional Protestant groups, especially the Baptists, are having second thoughts about making their services into pep rallies for the President or acknowledging that the Reverend Moon really is the Messiah.
In my village atheist phase, I’m concerned by the influence of religion on politics because bigotry and irrationalism are catching. Religion is a very mixed bag, however; and though all faiths are obviously false if construed as systems of propositions, religious values are certainly not all malevolent or anti-democratic. The very notion of the separation of church and state originated on the church side of the line, for example. Indeed, it could be argued that the worst thing about the current confluence of politics and religion is the bad effect that politics is having on religion.
If slavery is the Punic curse of American history, imperial patronage plays the same role in history of every church. Preachers sometimes claim that Christianity triumphed because of the many miracles wrought by the saints and apostles; but, from a real politik point of view, the only miracle that mattered was the miracle of the Milvian Bridge in which Constantine saw a cross in the sky, won a battle, and became emperor. In one respect, of course, that cross was a good sign for the faithful since Christianity needed the coercive power of the state to become a universal religion, but it was a bad sign also since the empire provided its services at a high price. To this day, for example, the monarchical mummery, obsessive secrecy, and authoritarianism of the Catholic church derive from the imperial model; and it is these political characteristics much more than the doctrines of the faith that make abuse and corruption inevitable.
George Bush isn’t exactly Constantine, but he and his cohorts are offering the modern churches a new version of the imperial bargain. In return for votes and money, churches will get tax breaks, federal funds, and support for some but not all their cultural concerns. Go along with aggressive wars and your leader will endlessly profess his faith. Soft-pedal your opposition to the death penalty and we’ll recriminalize abortion and pester the pornographers. Rome has been making these kind of deals for centuries and will probably go along—it’s only the first moral compromise that keep you awake at night, the ten thousandth is easy—but some of the more traditional Protestant groups, especially the Baptists, are having second thoughts about making their services into pep rallies for the President or acknowledging that the Reverend Moon really is the Messiah.
Monday, July 05, 2004
Democratic Vistas
It’s rather like the joke in which a clerical error results in a world where the cooks are English and the cops are French. America circa 2004 has all the bad features of a democracy with few of its redeeming qualities. As the vice president would put it, right wing populism stokes class resentment and envy big time. Even though the Republicans are far wealthier as a group than the Democrats, it’s John Kerry’s class standing that’s somehow the issue in a campaign where the other guy comes from the bluest blood in America. More generally, the people are encouraged to believe that majorities should rule in the sciences (Creationism) but not in economics or even politics where the interests of the contributing classes trump, as if by rule, the concerns of lower and middle class people. Meanwhile our billionaires have become just plain folks, at least in the Dogville sense. While 19th Century economic elites felt an obligation to get cultured, modern money parades its coarseness and ignorance. Noblesse oblige really is problematic attitude, of course, but dispensing with it altogether is not necessarily better. And it’s not just that our nouveau riche have learned how to have nouveau riche children. The grandchildren of Connecticut bankers have learned how to munch on pork rinds in public, and their great grand children have learned how to like ‘em. Mr. Bush would feel perfectly at home in a house trailer. Indeed, if anybody ever belonged in a trailer…
What’s missing from our ersatz democracy is a first of all the sense of responsibility that should accompany popular sovereignty. Many of the people I speak with act as if they would be doing somebody a favor if they voted. Perhaps because they realize that they have little or no voice in public life, they don’t think of themselves as actors but victims. If, as is unfortunately very likely, America’s arrogant foreign policy eventually results in domestic disaster, it’s a good bet everyone will look around the next day and blame “them” for what happened. “Why didn’t you tell us?” they’ll ask, though they certainly never tried to find out.
Of course it is arguably true that no nation was ever very democratic in the sense of having a truly well-informed and vigilant electorate—I mostly believe in the iron law of oligarchy myself—but in any case, the anti-democratic tendencies of the last thirty years are not just a matter of process. Whether our politics are by the people or of the people, they surely aren’t for the people. The last three Republican administrations have been dedicated to lowering wages and cutting benefits for the majority of the population with predictable results.
It’s rather like the joke in which a clerical error results in a world where the cooks are English and the cops are French. America circa 2004 has all the bad features of a democracy with few of its redeeming qualities. As the vice president would put it, right wing populism stokes class resentment and envy big time. Even though the Republicans are far wealthier as a group than the Democrats, it’s John Kerry’s class standing that’s somehow the issue in a campaign where the other guy comes from the bluest blood in America. More generally, the people are encouraged to believe that majorities should rule in the sciences (Creationism) but not in economics or even politics where the interests of the contributing classes trump, as if by rule, the concerns of lower and middle class people. Meanwhile our billionaires have become just plain folks, at least in the Dogville sense. While 19th Century economic elites felt an obligation to get cultured, modern money parades its coarseness and ignorance. Noblesse oblige really is problematic attitude, of course, but dispensing with it altogether is not necessarily better. And it’s not just that our nouveau riche have learned how to have nouveau riche children. The grandchildren of Connecticut bankers have learned how to munch on pork rinds in public, and their great grand children have learned how to like ‘em. Mr. Bush would feel perfectly at home in a house trailer. Indeed, if anybody ever belonged in a trailer…
What’s missing from our ersatz democracy is a first of all the sense of responsibility that should accompany popular sovereignty. Many of the people I speak with act as if they would be doing somebody a favor if they voted. Perhaps because they realize that they have little or no voice in public life, they don’t think of themselves as actors but victims. If, as is unfortunately very likely, America’s arrogant foreign policy eventually results in domestic disaster, it’s a good bet everyone will look around the next day and blame “them” for what happened. “Why didn’t you tell us?” they’ll ask, though they certainly never tried to find out.
Of course it is arguably true that no nation was ever very democratic in the sense of having a truly well-informed and vigilant electorate—I mostly believe in the iron law of oligarchy myself—but in any case, the anti-democratic tendencies of the last thirty years are not just a matter of process. Whether our politics are by the people or of the people, they surely aren’t for the people. The last three Republican administrations have been dedicated to lowering wages and cutting benefits for the majority of the population with predictable results.
Friday, July 02, 2004
Genuine Blogging for a Change
Today’s disappointing job report puzzled me a bit because I had expected more of a bounce off the bottom of the last recession granted what can be expected from a normal business cycle and the cumulative effective of massive deficit financing and ultra-low interest rates. Like many observers, I thought the tax cuts, overwhelmingly aimed at people in the upper brackets, were an inefficient way to stimulate the economy; but I thought they would provide some Keynesian stimulus if only as a side effect. At the recent rate, it will take years for employment to catch up with the population. In fact, at this month’s rate, it will never catch up. However you measure it, the current recovery is exceedingly sluggish, a fact somewhat obscured by the nonstop cheerleading of the financial press.
Even observers like Paul Krugman who are decidedly hostile to the administration’s economic policy tend to suggest that the price we pay for running enormous deficits in the federal budget and the balance of trade is mostly long term. Indeed, they imply that one of the structural problems with the nation’s real constitution is that there is no political cost for promoting bad economic policies since the public is too stupid or too distracted to register consequences that occur incrementally over a long time period. Opportunistic political economics such as unsustainable tax cuts are rational in the same sense that knowingly operating a polluting factory is rational. The malefactors get the benefits and leave everybody else with the costs. It may be, however, that the piper will have to be paid in real time on this go round.
One other economic thought, a question really: Critics of the Bush tax cuts have generally complained that drastically lowering the higher tax brackets was an inefficient way to stimulate the economy because well off people don’t spend as high a proportion of their income as poorer people. But doesn’t it also matter what the tax cut dollars are spent on? Less affluent people spend extra money on food, shelter, clothing, health care, and education. More affluent people spend extra money on recreation, prestige items, second homes, and fancy rides. Even if high bracket tax payers spent the same proportion of their tax cuts as the less well off, their dollars would be stimulating different segments of the economy. Doesn’t the quality as well as the quantity of effective demand have an effect? For example, doesn’t a pro-wealth policy result in more capital going into the development of gated communities rather than affordable housing? Just asking.
Today’s disappointing job report puzzled me a bit because I had expected more of a bounce off the bottom of the last recession granted what can be expected from a normal business cycle and the cumulative effective of massive deficit financing and ultra-low interest rates. Like many observers, I thought the tax cuts, overwhelmingly aimed at people in the upper brackets, were an inefficient way to stimulate the economy; but I thought they would provide some Keynesian stimulus if only as a side effect. At the recent rate, it will take years for employment to catch up with the population. In fact, at this month’s rate, it will never catch up. However you measure it, the current recovery is exceedingly sluggish, a fact somewhat obscured by the nonstop cheerleading of the financial press.
Even observers like Paul Krugman who are decidedly hostile to the administration’s economic policy tend to suggest that the price we pay for running enormous deficits in the federal budget and the balance of trade is mostly long term. Indeed, they imply that one of the structural problems with the nation’s real constitution is that there is no political cost for promoting bad economic policies since the public is too stupid or too distracted to register consequences that occur incrementally over a long time period. Opportunistic political economics such as unsustainable tax cuts are rational in the same sense that knowingly operating a polluting factory is rational. The malefactors get the benefits and leave everybody else with the costs. It may be, however, that the piper will have to be paid in real time on this go round.
One other economic thought, a question really: Critics of the Bush tax cuts have generally complained that drastically lowering the higher tax brackets was an inefficient way to stimulate the economy because well off people don’t spend as high a proportion of their income as poorer people. But doesn’t it also matter what the tax cut dollars are spent on? Less affluent people spend extra money on food, shelter, clothing, health care, and education. More affluent people spend extra money on recreation, prestige items, second homes, and fancy rides. Even if high bracket tax payers spent the same proportion of their tax cuts as the less well off, their dollars would be stimulating different segments of the economy. Doesn’t the quality as well as the quantity of effective demand have an effect? For example, doesn’t a pro-wealth policy result in more capital going into the development of gated communities rather than affordable housing? Just asking.
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
It’s Not a Well?
Watching television informercials on the golf channel, you have to wonder why Ernie Els and Tiger Woods don’t get themselves one of those patented rescue clubs so they, too, can reliably hit 200 yard shots out of deep bunkers. Since it is likely that they can afford the three easy payments of $69.99, it must be pride. Or, perhaps what we have here is the commercial version of something that happens all the time in the realm of religion and the occult. Mystics and gurus of all sorts perpetually advertise amazing secrets that must be kept from the profane mob, but what they reveal in their more exoteric statements is typically far more extreme, lurid, and downright screwy than the vastly more guarded remarks they make to their actual students. Thus, for example, of the two attested works of the philosopher and shaman Empedocles, the Purifications, which is addressed to all the citizens of the city of Acragas, teaches an elaborate doctrine of reincarnation with many mythological trimmings while the book On Nature, which is addressed to a fellow philosopher, offers a reasoned and admittedly provisional physical account of the universe. In this instance, as in many others, the esoteric is less exotic than the exoteric.
Nothing is more plebian than the rhetoric of secret wisdom. Since the content of popular religion is a mix of banalities and science fiction, it is absolutely necessary to tart things up with mystifications about things hidden since the foundation of the world. Meanwhile, the conversations of people seriously interested in figuring things out are extraordinarily modest and matter of fact since the object of the game is not to impress the natives by claiming to possess God’s unlisted phone number and actual knowledge, as opposed to humbug, is damned hard to come by. There is a secret about real thinking, however. Most people will never understand how grounded you can feel once you’ve acknowledged to yourself that neither you nor anybody else can see through walls by sheer concentration.
Watching television informercials on the golf channel, you have to wonder why Ernie Els and Tiger Woods don’t get themselves one of those patented rescue clubs so they, too, can reliably hit 200 yard shots out of deep bunkers. Since it is likely that they can afford the three easy payments of $69.99, it must be pride. Or, perhaps what we have here is the commercial version of something that happens all the time in the realm of religion and the occult. Mystics and gurus of all sorts perpetually advertise amazing secrets that must be kept from the profane mob, but what they reveal in their more exoteric statements is typically far more extreme, lurid, and downright screwy than the vastly more guarded remarks they make to their actual students. Thus, for example, of the two attested works of the philosopher and shaman Empedocles, the Purifications, which is addressed to all the citizens of the city of Acragas, teaches an elaborate doctrine of reincarnation with many mythological trimmings while the book On Nature, which is addressed to a fellow philosopher, offers a reasoned and admittedly provisional physical account of the universe. In this instance, as in many others, the esoteric is less exotic than the exoteric.
Nothing is more plebian than the rhetoric of secret wisdom. Since the content of popular religion is a mix of banalities and science fiction, it is absolutely necessary to tart things up with mystifications about things hidden since the foundation of the world. Meanwhile, the conversations of people seriously interested in figuring things out are extraordinarily modest and matter of fact since the object of the game is not to impress the natives by claiming to possess God’s unlisted phone number and actual knowledge, as opposed to humbug, is damned hard to come by. There is a secret about real thinking, however. Most people will never understand how grounded you can feel once you’ve acknowledged to yourself that neither you nor anybody else can see through walls by sheer concentration.
Monday, June 28, 2004
The Will of Zeus Was Being Accomplished
The official handoff of sovereignty to the provisional Iraqi government wasn’t a very grand affair and not simply because it took place in deep secrecy two days before its scheduled date. The sovereignty in question, at least so far, is utterly notional. The initial affect of today’s proceedings is simply to transfer effective power from the American administrator to the American ambassador. Before leaving, Bremer underscored the hollowness of the gesture by committing Iraq to a series of laws that include legal immunity for foreign contractors and a fairly low (15%) ceiling on the highest income tax bracket. Since the new government will be dependent on the American military, their freedom of action will be sharply limited in any case. I, for one, find it hard not to feel sympathy for the members of the new government, at least some of whom appear to be sincere Iraqi patriots. Since ’75, the personal prospects of members of American puppet regimes have not been proven very good from an actuarial point of view.
As in antiquity, the temporarily victorious powers establish their form of government in occupied states. Sparta set up oligarchies. Athens set up democracies. In much later history but in the same vein, the Soviet Union set up People’s Republics in its Eastern European empire. Now we’re establishing what we are calling a democracy in Iraq. Democracy, however, is a very elastic term. For the most part, its semantic value in our political discourse is the equivalent of a grunted “Good.” It certainly doesn’t mean popular sovereignty or anything like it. Our foreign policy maintains a steady hostility to that—an electoral victory by the wrong guy amounts to sending the Marines an invitation with an RSVP. But “Democracy” can’t be used to refer to a general preference for the rule of law over arbitrary executive power either since this administration famously asserts the supremacy of presidential authority over both the courts and congress. In this respect, Bush, though personally innocent of any knowledge of political philosophy, is just following the lead of the Neocons in his administration. In turn, the Neocons are following the influential German rightist, Carl Schmitt, who asserted back at the end of the Weimar Republic that political legitimacy is logically and materially superior to legality. The current administration idea of democracy also seems to derive from Schmitt, for whom it referred to a regime legitimized by the Will of the People as defined by a charismatic leader ruling by plebiscite. That pretty much captures what the administration stands for in Iraq and, for that matter, at home: an authoritarian regime that overrules juridical and legislative authority in the name of the Nation. Writes Schmitt, “Every democracy rests on the presupposition of the indivisibly similar, entire, unified people.” While this Republican version of democracy indeed uses populist, demagogic methods to promote itself, in practice it defends the interests of wealthy people against the liberals or socialists who threaten the sacred rights of property, conceived of, as conservatives always do, as natural.
As everybody admits, it will not be easy to establish democracy in Iraq; but that’s especially true if the democracy in question is the kind contemplated by our government. Conservative ideologies are hard to disseminate because they are particularistic. If you don’t mind the mumbo jumbo, it makes some kind of sense to pledge allegiance to the mystical body of your own country. You can hardly expect the Iraqis to be similarly worshipful about the American Way. Besides, although we hear more about religious objections to our policy, a lot of opposition in Iraq, perhaps most of it, is completely secular and derives in large part from the accurate perception that the non-negotiable privatization policies foisted on the country at gun point amount to the theft of the national wealth of Iraq and its distribution to a politically connected elite. Some of the insurgents are determined to prevent their nation from being ripped off. Unfortunately, the bulk of them are probably just determined to get cut in on the swag.
The official handoff of sovereignty to the provisional Iraqi government wasn’t a very grand affair and not simply because it took place in deep secrecy two days before its scheduled date. The sovereignty in question, at least so far, is utterly notional. The initial affect of today’s proceedings is simply to transfer effective power from the American administrator to the American ambassador. Before leaving, Bremer underscored the hollowness of the gesture by committing Iraq to a series of laws that include legal immunity for foreign contractors and a fairly low (15%) ceiling on the highest income tax bracket. Since the new government will be dependent on the American military, their freedom of action will be sharply limited in any case. I, for one, find it hard not to feel sympathy for the members of the new government, at least some of whom appear to be sincere Iraqi patriots. Since ’75, the personal prospects of members of American puppet regimes have not been proven very good from an actuarial point of view.
As in antiquity, the temporarily victorious powers establish their form of government in occupied states. Sparta set up oligarchies. Athens set up democracies. In much later history but in the same vein, the Soviet Union set up People’s Republics in its Eastern European empire. Now we’re establishing what we are calling a democracy in Iraq. Democracy, however, is a very elastic term. For the most part, its semantic value in our political discourse is the equivalent of a grunted “Good.” It certainly doesn’t mean popular sovereignty or anything like it. Our foreign policy maintains a steady hostility to that—an electoral victory by the wrong guy amounts to sending the Marines an invitation with an RSVP. But “Democracy” can’t be used to refer to a general preference for the rule of law over arbitrary executive power either since this administration famously asserts the supremacy of presidential authority over both the courts and congress. In this respect, Bush, though personally innocent of any knowledge of political philosophy, is just following the lead of the Neocons in his administration. In turn, the Neocons are following the influential German rightist, Carl Schmitt, who asserted back at the end of the Weimar Republic that political legitimacy is logically and materially superior to legality. The current administration idea of democracy also seems to derive from Schmitt, for whom it referred to a regime legitimized by the Will of the People as defined by a charismatic leader ruling by plebiscite. That pretty much captures what the administration stands for in Iraq and, for that matter, at home: an authoritarian regime that overrules juridical and legislative authority in the name of the Nation. Writes Schmitt, “Every democracy rests on the presupposition of the indivisibly similar, entire, unified people.” While this Republican version of democracy indeed uses populist, demagogic methods to promote itself, in practice it defends the interests of wealthy people against the liberals or socialists who threaten the sacred rights of property, conceived of, as conservatives always do, as natural.
As everybody admits, it will not be easy to establish democracy in Iraq; but that’s especially true if the democracy in question is the kind contemplated by our government. Conservative ideologies are hard to disseminate because they are particularistic. If you don’t mind the mumbo jumbo, it makes some kind of sense to pledge allegiance to the mystical body of your own country. You can hardly expect the Iraqis to be similarly worshipful about the American Way. Besides, although we hear more about religious objections to our policy, a lot of opposition in Iraq, perhaps most of it, is completely secular and derives in large part from the accurate perception that the non-negotiable privatization policies foisted on the country at gun point amount to the theft of the national wealth of Iraq and its distribution to a politically connected elite. Some of the insurgents are determined to prevent their nation from being ripped off. Unfortunately, the bulk of them are probably just determined to get cut in on the swag.
Saturday, June 26, 2004
Where’s Waldo?
The Gods have smiled on me by staging a series of really stupid miracles as if they were determined to teach me an important lesson about synchronicity. Back in the 60’s, for example, I had a night of truly obsessive dreams, all of which involved the unlikely theme of tuna spaghetti sauce. Like golf dreams in which you never actually get to tee off, like sex dreams in which you actually never get to get off, the tuna spaghetti sauce dream was intensely frustrating. Though I courteously informed everybody I didn’t know the recipe for the dish, indeed, had never actually heard of such a thing, people of all kinds kept insisting that I cook it for them. One and after another and then in choruses, women, men, children, talking animals, cartoon characters on television shows, midgets with Munchkin voices, even rows and rows of newborn babies in the hospital all chanted: “Tuna spaghetti sauce! Tuna spaghetti sauce!” And I tried to make what they wanted but either I couldn’t get the stove to light or there wasn’t any pasta or there wasn’t any tuna, always something. I think I must have spent half a sweaty Connecticut summer night tossing and turning as I moaned to myself “Tuna spaghetti sauce! Tuna spaghetti sauce!” I woke up several times during the night, but it didn’t help. No sooner had I got back in bed and fallen asleep than a new variation of the Tuna spaghetti sauce dream would begin. As you’d imagine, when morning finally came, I was relieved to hear the clock radio come on. Relieved that is, until I heard the unmistakable nasal tones of Myra Waldo, New York radio personality and food expert, announcing “Today’s recipe: tuna spaghetti sauce!”
Now I suppose that someone with a more spiritual turn of mind than my own would find some meaning in this episode as I might have myself had the subject matter been less trivial. I’ve never had a similar experience involving the death of a loved one or some other event emotionally significant enough to turn a quirky coincidence into a portent. I do continue to experience equally screwy conjunctures, however. The other day when I was trying to think of an especially odd incident in the Bible to exemplify all the things in scripture that nobody remembers, I considered the story in First Samuel of how God inflicted the Philistines with a plague of hemorrhoids for capturing the Ark of the Covenant. In order to appease Yahweh, the Philistines not only returned the Ark but also sent with it an offering of five golden hemorrhoids and five golden mice. I didn’t use this bit, settling instead on the tale of Ehud and Eglon King of Moab as my example, but I certainly had in mind a day later when I more or less accidentally caught a few minutes from a television interview of Ashley Judd. She was talking to Conan O’Brien about her role in the new movie about Cole Porter. They were talking about somebody’s jewelry and I was suddenly struck with a premonition that she had actually encountered a copy of one of the golden hemorrhoids. Of course that’s exactly what happened. I guess there really is a God.
The well understood arithmetic of coincidence guarantees that this sort of thing will not be especially rare, especially for someone like me who, as I am fond of saying, lives as a kind of intellectual oyster or barnacle that filters an immense stream of information through my brain every day. If I got it into my head to be superstitious, I could be very superstitious indeed. Besides, no doubt as a further consequence of an off-brand nervous system that’s been out of warrantee a very long time, I’ve had a host of uncanny experiences that a more enterprising type could have made into a career as a retail mystic. I used to sleep walk and on one memorable occasion woke up with muddy feet and dressed only in the jacket of a tuxedo. I’ve had repeated and memorable hypnagogic visions and even a couple of ecstasies and long ago learned how to throw myself into a passable imitation of a shamanic trance, though I’ve never been moved to send back a post card from the Land of the Dead. The net effect of all these interior adventures, like the prophetic dream of tuna spaghetti sauce, has been to make me highly skeptical of the value of mysticism itself. Extreme psychological states and uncanny coincidences are like exclamation marks. No matter how much they impress you, they owe whatever meaning they have to the words that precede them.
The Gods have smiled on me by staging a series of really stupid miracles as if they were determined to teach me an important lesson about synchronicity. Back in the 60’s, for example, I had a night of truly obsessive dreams, all of which involved the unlikely theme of tuna spaghetti sauce. Like golf dreams in which you never actually get to tee off, like sex dreams in which you actually never get to get off, the tuna spaghetti sauce dream was intensely frustrating. Though I courteously informed everybody I didn’t know the recipe for the dish, indeed, had never actually heard of such a thing, people of all kinds kept insisting that I cook it for them. One and after another and then in choruses, women, men, children, talking animals, cartoon characters on television shows, midgets with Munchkin voices, even rows and rows of newborn babies in the hospital all chanted: “Tuna spaghetti sauce! Tuna spaghetti sauce!” And I tried to make what they wanted but either I couldn’t get the stove to light or there wasn’t any pasta or there wasn’t any tuna, always something. I think I must have spent half a sweaty Connecticut summer night tossing and turning as I moaned to myself “Tuna spaghetti sauce! Tuna spaghetti sauce!” I woke up several times during the night, but it didn’t help. No sooner had I got back in bed and fallen asleep than a new variation of the Tuna spaghetti sauce dream would begin. As you’d imagine, when morning finally came, I was relieved to hear the clock radio come on. Relieved that is, until I heard the unmistakable nasal tones of Myra Waldo, New York radio personality and food expert, announcing “Today’s recipe: tuna spaghetti sauce!”
Now I suppose that someone with a more spiritual turn of mind than my own would find some meaning in this episode as I might have myself had the subject matter been less trivial. I’ve never had a similar experience involving the death of a loved one or some other event emotionally significant enough to turn a quirky coincidence into a portent. I do continue to experience equally screwy conjunctures, however. The other day when I was trying to think of an especially odd incident in the Bible to exemplify all the things in scripture that nobody remembers, I considered the story in First Samuel of how God inflicted the Philistines with a plague of hemorrhoids for capturing the Ark of the Covenant. In order to appease Yahweh, the Philistines not only returned the Ark but also sent with it an offering of five golden hemorrhoids and five golden mice. I didn’t use this bit, settling instead on the tale of Ehud and Eglon King of Moab as my example, but I certainly had in mind a day later when I more or less accidentally caught a few minutes from a television interview of Ashley Judd. She was talking to Conan O’Brien about her role in the new movie about Cole Porter. They were talking about somebody’s jewelry and I was suddenly struck with a premonition that she had actually encountered a copy of one of the golden hemorrhoids. Of course that’s exactly what happened. I guess there really is a God.
The well understood arithmetic of coincidence guarantees that this sort of thing will not be especially rare, especially for someone like me who, as I am fond of saying, lives as a kind of intellectual oyster or barnacle that filters an immense stream of information through my brain every day. If I got it into my head to be superstitious, I could be very superstitious indeed. Besides, no doubt as a further consequence of an off-brand nervous system that’s been out of warrantee a very long time, I’ve had a host of uncanny experiences that a more enterprising type could have made into a career as a retail mystic. I used to sleep walk and on one memorable occasion woke up with muddy feet and dressed only in the jacket of a tuxedo. I’ve had repeated and memorable hypnagogic visions and even a couple of ecstasies and long ago learned how to throw myself into a passable imitation of a shamanic trance, though I’ve never been moved to send back a post card from the Land of the Dead. The net effect of all these interior adventures, like the prophetic dream of tuna spaghetti sauce, has been to make me highly skeptical of the value of mysticism itself. Extreme psychological states and uncanny coincidences are like exclamation marks. No matter how much they impress you, they owe whatever meaning they have to the words that precede them.
Principalities and Powers
I admit that Bush exercises a certain fascination, rather like something alarming and mysterious you find sticking to the bottom of your shoe; and, certainly, the American system gives him staggering official power and very real actual power. Political combinations aside, he still commands the loyalty of the dull normals, an enormous voting block. All that said—and these are not insignificant considerations—Bush just isn’t the problem. Evicting him from office may be an indispensable step towards restoring a decent state of affairs, but it is not a sufficient step and it makes a very great difference how he is removed and by whom. That’s why I have very mixed feelings about recent evidence that the CIA is working to unseat Bush.
One can hardly blame the professional spooks for despising an administration that has used them so badly and in so many ways. But it goes beyond making Tenet the in-house fall guy for every disaster or even the cynical and, indeed, criminal outing of Valerie Plane, now in the late cover-up stage. The CIA, in common with many other career defense and intelligence people like Richard Clarke, see the Bush doctrine as potentially fatal to their own much subtler approach to dominating the world. Almost everybody’s an imperialist at this point. The issue is whether the empire should be managed with a certain amount of tact and an awareness of the very real limits of American power or whether we can afford to rub the world’s nose in our endlessly advertised righteousness.
There are plenty of signs that CIA people are busy undermining the administration. Retired intelligence people have been furiously criticizing our unilateral foreign policy, and an active CIA man, writing as Anonymous, will shortly publish a ferocious attack on Bush that predicts that Bin Laden will make a point of undertaking a showy terrorist attack in the United States before the election in order to get his favorite candidate a second term—nothing could have furthered the cause of Islamic radicalism so much as the invasion of Iraq. The appearance of Imperial Hubris is especially significant since active intelligent agents have to get company permission before publishing. It would have been very easy for the CIA to have delayed the book beyond the election if they wished. They didn’t.
We do not know what other actions CIA people are undertaking. They are, after all, accustomed to operating clandestinely. In the first three years of the administration, very little embarrassing paper surfaced about the Bush administration. I suspect the increasing appearance of secret documents and memos over the last six months or so owes something to the activities of disgruntled insiders. Bush is not quite the Lone Ranger in his own administration, but he is having some serious What-You-Mean-We-White-Man moments. Of course the CIA is not the only power group with an ax to grind. I’m sure that plenty of generals would like to get even with Rumsfeld for his highhandedness and micromanagement. The administration should keep an eye on those folks—high-ranking officers are far more intelligent and vastly better trained than the average political hack—and the heads of the various commands are used to exercising independent power.
Military and intelligence groups have long exercised extra-constitutional power in the United States. Democratic presidents, in particular, haven’t been able to rely on the loyalty of the cops, spies, and generals for a very long time; and if some renegade admiral torpedoes a Republican at some point, I guess turn about is fair play. The net effect of the process, however, is to continue the erosion of responsible government in the country. Most of the time, I believe liberal empire is the best available short-term outcome, but it worries me that a Kerry administration is going to have to kiss a lot of rings to achieve even that.
I admit that Bush exercises a certain fascination, rather like something alarming and mysterious you find sticking to the bottom of your shoe; and, certainly, the American system gives him staggering official power and very real actual power. Political combinations aside, he still commands the loyalty of the dull normals, an enormous voting block. All that said—and these are not insignificant considerations—Bush just isn’t the problem. Evicting him from office may be an indispensable step towards restoring a decent state of affairs, but it is not a sufficient step and it makes a very great difference how he is removed and by whom. That’s why I have very mixed feelings about recent evidence that the CIA is working to unseat Bush.
One can hardly blame the professional spooks for despising an administration that has used them so badly and in so many ways. But it goes beyond making Tenet the in-house fall guy for every disaster or even the cynical and, indeed, criminal outing of Valerie Plane, now in the late cover-up stage. The CIA, in common with many other career defense and intelligence people like Richard Clarke, see the Bush doctrine as potentially fatal to their own much subtler approach to dominating the world. Almost everybody’s an imperialist at this point. The issue is whether the empire should be managed with a certain amount of tact and an awareness of the very real limits of American power or whether we can afford to rub the world’s nose in our endlessly advertised righteousness.
There are plenty of signs that CIA people are busy undermining the administration. Retired intelligence people have been furiously criticizing our unilateral foreign policy, and an active CIA man, writing as Anonymous, will shortly publish a ferocious attack on Bush that predicts that Bin Laden will make a point of undertaking a showy terrorist attack in the United States before the election in order to get his favorite candidate a second term—nothing could have furthered the cause of Islamic radicalism so much as the invasion of Iraq. The appearance of Imperial Hubris is especially significant since active intelligent agents have to get company permission before publishing. It would have been very easy for the CIA to have delayed the book beyond the election if they wished. They didn’t.
We do not know what other actions CIA people are undertaking. They are, after all, accustomed to operating clandestinely. In the first three years of the administration, very little embarrassing paper surfaced about the Bush administration. I suspect the increasing appearance of secret documents and memos over the last six months or so owes something to the activities of disgruntled insiders. Bush is not quite the Lone Ranger in his own administration, but he is having some serious What-You-Mean-We-White-Man moments. Of course the CIA is not the only power group with an ax to grind. I’m sure that plenty of generals would like to get even with Rumsfeld for his highhandedness and micromanagement. The administration should keep an eye on those folks—high-ranking officers are far more intelligent and vastly better trained than the average political hack—and the heads of the various commands are used to exercising independent power.
Military and intelligence groups have long exercised extra-constitutional power in the United States. Democratic presidents, in particular, haven’t been able to rely on the loyalty of the cops, spies, and generals for a very long time; and if some renegade admiral torpedoes a Republican at some point, I guess turn about is fair play. The net effect of the process, however, is to continue the erosion of responsible government in the country. Most of the time, I believe liberal empire is the best available short-term outcome, but it worries me that a Kerry administration is going to have to kiss a lot of rings to achieve even that.
Monday, June 21, 2004
What Caesar Rendered Unto
Recent surveys show that a majority of Americans claim to believe in the literal truth of such Bible stories as the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, and the parting of the Red Sea. Although American piety doesn’t seem to extend much beyond the Golden Oldies—who remembers what happened when Ehud stabbed Eglon?—the poll does show an increase in belief. In the most recent studies I’ve seen, however, church attendance and other indexes of religious behavior continue to decline. For most Americans, religion is adherence to a form of words rather than the practice of a form of life, which is a bit of a comfort to us infidels. The government recently argued before the Supreme Court that the “Under God” clause in the Pledge of Allegiance was constitutionally permissible because nobody took it seriously anyway. To judge by what people do, as opposed to what they say, affirming the existence of the Almighty to a pollster is similarly lacking in existential force. However.
A real, as opposed to notional, religious revival is not impossible granted the pathological state of our public discourse and the extremism and irrationality of our political leaders. One should remember that all the great historical religions achieved political and cultural domination through political coercion. Universal religions are systems of compulsion. Before the Conversion of Constantine, Christians were a considerable minority but no more than that. Islam was always an affair of the sword, and even Buddhism only spread widely with the help of the Mauryan emperors. The Church Fathers were well aware that it was Roman imperial power that made their success possible. From their point of view the Empire was a work of providence, part of what they called the preparation for the gospel.
It’s hard to imagine a real theocracy in America, of course; but the right obviously does not believe in the separation of church and state—according to one of the planks in the platform of the Texas Republican Party, the United States should define itself overtly as a Christian country. Professions of traditional belief are already a de facto requirement for high political office in these parts. Free thinkers like Jefferson couldn’t pass the test and the Spinozistic Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have much of a chance either. Much rightwing support for religion is completely cynical—neoconservatives from Leo Strauss on down regard popular faith as a useful fraud—but people like Bush appear to be completely sincere. We don’t know what may happen now that an authentic bigot has the bomb.
Recent surveys show that a majority of Americans claim to believe in the literal truth of such Bible stories as the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, and the parting of the Red Sea. Although American piety doesn’t seem to extend much beyond the Golden Oldies—who remembers what happened when Ehud stabbed Eglon?—the poll does show an increase in belief. In the most recent studies I’ve seen, however, church attendance and other indexes of religious behavior continue to decline. For most Americans, religion is adherence to a form of words rather than the practice of a form of life, which is a bit of a comfort to us infidels. The government recently argued before the Supreme Court that the “Under God” clause in the Pledge of Allegiance was constitutionally permissible because nobody took it seriously anyway. To judge by what people do, as opposed to what they say, affirming the existence of the Almighty to a pollster is similarly lacking in existential force. However.
A real, as opposed to notional, religious revival is not impossible granted the pathological state of our public discourse and the extremism and irrationality of our political leaders. One should remember that all the great historical religions achieved political and cultural domination through political coercion. Universal religions are systems of compulsion. Before the Conversion of Constantine, Christians were a considerable minority but no more than that. Islam was always an affair of the sword, and even Buddhism only spread widely with the help of the Mauryan emperors. The Church Fathers were well aware that it was Roman imperial power that made their success possible. From their point of view the Empire was a work of providence, part of what they called the preparation for the gospel.
It’s hard to imagine a real theocracy in America, of course; but the right obviously does not believe in the separation of church and state—according to one of the planks in the platform of the Texas Republican Party, the United States should define itself overtly as a Christian country. Professions of traditional belief are already a de facto requirement for high political office in these parts. Free thinkers like Jefferson couldn’t pass the test and the Spinozistic Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have much of a chance either. Much rightwing support for religion is completely cynical—neoconservatives from Leo Strauss on down regard popular faith as a useful fraud—but people like Bush appear to be completely sincere. We don’t know what may happen now that an authentic bigot has the bomb.