No Thinking Please
The right-wingers who make random denunciations of their ideological enemies as Stalinists or fellow travelers live in an aboriginal dreamtime in which the political obsessions of 1935 are suspended eternally like the grapes and cherries in a jello salad. But not even Stalin would be a Stalinist at this stage of the game, any more than a resurrected Genghis Khan would be more alarming than any other guy on a horse in the suburbs of Ulan Batur. As late as the 50s, there were still a fair number of intellectuals making excuses for the Great Purges—I date back to that period and encountered some of them—but even the radicals of the next generation had given up that game. Indeed, the remaining traditional communists tended to look down on them for that very reason, and the sympathies of susceptible cultural lefties accrued to Black Panthers rather than candidate apparatchiks.
Only pinheaded pedants remember historical dates, I suppose; but it does matter when things actually happened. For example, when Truman and Marshall thwarted the Soviets in Berlin in 1947 or Kennedy went head-to-head against Khrushchev in 1962, they were exercising genuine courage against a veritable threat; but when Reagan made the Evil Empire speech in 1982, he was like a hunter’s kid exalting over an expiring bear as if he were the one who shot the animal. The ideological mojo of communism dissipated long before the regime’s military and economic power; and by Brezhnev’s era, the empire wasn’t even particularly evil as empires go—the aging bureaucrats who ran the show lacked the ruthlessness of their predecessors. The Commissar class had been among the victims of Stalin’s purges. They weren’t interested in reverting to a system of terror; and they were no longer true believers themselves. Their system was indeed authoritarian and repressive, but it was also utterly lacking in dynamism. Critics of the redoubtable Communism of the 30’s wrote tragic novels like Darkness at Noon. The favored genre of great age of Samzdat was satire that made rueful fun of a decaying social system and the moral and intellectual mediocrity that went with it.
I danced with delight as the Soviet Union collapsed and Eastern Europe and the various republics regained their independence; but I have since come to wonder whether the Fall of Communism, or more accurately, the way that Communism fell, made things better or worse. Certainly the Russian people have paid an enormous biological cost for the collapse of the old order—the life expectancy and infant mortality statistics are quite dismaying—but it isn’t even clear that the end of the Cold War was good for the West since America without a credible rival may itself turn out to be an evil empire.
Friday, January 20, 2006
Thursday, January 19, 2006
The BS in the BA
Children are able to do many things with the help of parents and teachers that they would be quite incapable of managing on their own, but all the coaxing and encouragement is a bit mendacious like the ads for miracle golf equipment that promise to give us all a brilliant short game. At some point, the learner needs to get the bad news; and that’s especially true in formal education. Unfortunately, the message is seldom delivered until grad school unless the students themselves figures it out and the country is full of college-educated people who think they have a right to an opinion about all sorts of things because they have little understanding of what would be involved in seriously coming to terms with real questions. The writers of non-fiction books, magazine articles, and op/eds don’t provide much of a remedy. We have no tradition of what the French call haute vulgarisation—the non-technical but otherwise uncompromising explanation of scholarly, philosophical, and scientific ideas—so the popularizers simply continue the hand holding and the hand waving of retail higher education.
Children flourish in the famous zone of proximal development, but eventually they have to learn to fly solo. Or, to vary the metaphor, eventually you throw the kid in the pool. Since our educational system is so indulgent, however, the kids are going to have to jump in themselves. We grownups need to resume our educations if we really want to know what was going on; and that requires, among other things, that we start reading grownup books.
Children are able to do many things with the help of parents and teachers that they would be quite incapable of managing on their own, but all the coaxing and encouragement is a bit mendacious like the ads for miracle golf equipment that promise to give us all a brilliant short game. At some point, the learner needs to get the bad news; and that’s especially true in formal education. Unfortunately, the message is seldom delivered until grad school unless the students themselves figures it out and the country is full of college-educated people who think they have a right to an opinion about all sorts of things because they have little understanding of what would be involved in seriously coming to terms with real questions. The writers of non-fiction books, magazine articles, and op/eds don’t provide much of a remedy. We have no tradition of what the French call haute vulgarisation—the non-technical but otherwise uncompromising explanation of scholarly, philosophical, and scientific ideas—so the popularizers simply continue the hand holding and the hand waving of retail higher education.
Children flourish in the famous zone of proximal development, but eventually they have to learn to fly solo. Or, to vary the metaphor, eventually you throw the kid in the pool. Since our educational system is so indulgent, however, the kids are going to have to jump in themselves. We grownups need to resume our educations if we really want to know what was going on; and that requires, among other things, that we start reading grownup books.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
No Risk, No Reward
Congress has declined in legitimacy and power for many reasons but above all because most of its members no longer win their seats in real elections against credible opponents. The situation has many analogies to the old soviet political system, though our current arrangement is impeccably American, deriving as it does from the one-party politics of the South, where filigrees of democratic forms decorated the metallic surface of the oligarchic machine. Of course it is true that some districts are safe for the Republicans, others for the Democrats, but that does not mean we have a genuine two-party system because in most districts there is only one party. Under this circumstance, congressional elections are mere plebiscites; and the pols they consecrate are, as it were, structurally contemptible since whatever they represent, it certainly isn’t the Will of the People.
Congress has declined in legitimacy and power for many reasons but above all because most of its members no longer win their seats in real elections against credible opponents. The situation has many analogies to the old soviet political system, though our current arrangement is impeccably American, deriving as it does from the one-party politics of the South, where filigrees of democratic forms decorated the metallic surface of the oligarchic machine. Of course it is true that some districts are safe for the Republicans, others for the Democrats, but that does not mean we have a genuine two-party system because in most districts there is only one party. Under this circumstance, congressional elections are mere plebiscites; and the pols they consecrate are, as it were, structurally contemptible since whatever they represent, it certainly isn’t the Will of the People.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Simper Fidelis
It is a commonplace that women outlive men, but this demographic factoid only holds under modern conditions of sanitation and medicine. In most of history, the husbands buried the wives because of the high mortality associated with childbirth. The physiological advantages of femininity, like many another natural fact, is a function of context. The same can be said of the relative abilities of the genders. We know from anthropology and the historical record that in the vast majority of instances the men lord it over the women—the relative equality of the sexes in modern times is very much an outlier in a statistical sense. In a peaceful world where competition is based on intelligence and social skill rather than violence and sheer strength, women may be superior to men. Under more normal conditions, the females can be easily intimidated by the larger and more aggressive males, especially where a higher birth rate guarantees that they will be a vulnerable state for much of the time. Indeed, in many contemporary situations, women still live in fear from their menfolk; and we’re not that far in time from the era when beating your wife was as legal as paddling your kids, permissible when not obligatory.
My impression—and it’s only that—is that women, at least in this country, are losing much of the ground they won over the last century. Walking about in the cloak of invisibility that is late middle age, I eavesdrop on the conversations of young women in coffee bars and on busses; and I hear America simpering. Women do not dress and act like amateur trollops in eras of sexual freedom and gender equality. Playing up to men flourishes on in times when fewer girls aspire to their own power and place in the world and more calculate that latching on to a useful male is the way to go. Of course, even if my admittedly anecdotal impression is correct, it may be that what’s going on is merely a cultural fluctuation—after all, women were also trying out for Stepford wife during the Eisenhower administration—but I suspect that the fluctuation is embedded in a wider trend with far more serious consequences than the proliferation of girls-gone-wild videos.
In many countries, the fall of Marxist regimes was accompanied by a decline in the political and social standing of women. Muslim fundamentalism is deeply anti-feminist and the status of women is also at risk in non-Muslim developing countries as evidenced by the widespread practice of aborting female offspring. In the rapidly emerging Post-post-industrial world, the largest fraction of the population is made up of what Pierre Bourdieu called the subproletariat. These peasants and the offspring of peasants, displaced factory workers, and underemployed college grads depend for their survival and sense of identity upon membership in non-economic groups such as clans, religious sects, mafias, and political parties—just the kind of organizations in which testosterone counts much more than brains. Small wonder that women, like drugs and guns, have become a major trade good in the underside of the global economy.
It is a commonplace that women outlive men, but this demographic factoid only holds under modern conditions of sanitation and medicine. In most of history, the husbands buried the wives because of the high mortality associated with childbirth. The physiological advantages of femininity, like many another natural fact, is a function of context. The same can be said of the relative abilities of the genders. We know from anthropology and the historical record that in the vast majority of instances the men lord it over the women—the relative equality of the sexes in modern times is very much an outlier in a statistical sense. In a peaceful world where competition is based on intelligence and social skill rather than violence and sheer strength, women may be superior to men. Under more normal conditions, the females can be easily intimidated by the larger and more aggressive males, especially where a higher birth rate guarantees that they will be a vulnerable state for much of the time. Indeed, in many contemporary situations, women still live in fear from their menfolk; and we’re not that far in time from the era when beating your wife was as legal as paddling your kids, permissible when not obligatory.
My impression—and it’s only that—is that women, at least in this country, are losing much of the ground they won over the last century. Walking about in the cloak of invisibility that is late middle age, I eavesdrop on the conversations of young women in coffee bars and on busses; and I hear America simpering. Women do not dress and act like amateur trollops in eras of sexual freedom and gender equality. Playing up to men flourishes on in times when fewer girls aspire to their own power and place in the world and more calculate that latching on to a useful male is the way to go. Of course, even if my admittedly anecdotal impression is correct, it may be that what’s going on is merely a cultural fluctuation—after all, women were also trying out for Stepford wife during the Eisenhower administration—but I suspect that the fluctuation is embedded in a wider trend with far more serious consequences than the proliferation of girls-gone-wild videos.
In many countries, the fall of Marxist regimes was accompanied by a decline in the political and social standing of women. Muslim fundamentalism is deeply anti-feminist and the status of women is also at risk in non-Muslim developing countries as evidenced by the widespread practice of aborting female offspring. In the rapidly emerging Post-post-industrial world, the largest fraction of the population is made up of what Pierre Bourdieu called the subproletariat. These peasants and the offspring of peasants, displaced factory workers, and underemployed college grads depend for their survival and sense of identity upon membership in non-economic groups such as clans, religious sects, mafias, and political parties—just the kind of organizations in which testosterone counts much more than brains. Small wonder that women, like drugs and guns, have become a major trade good in the underside of the global economy.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Inspired by a Niall Ferguson OpEd
What needs to be understood is that the think-tank military philosophers and counterfactual historians who dream up scenarios are no more likely to be right than the hack novelists who concoct the plots for the novels you buy in airports, which is to say, they all can be counted upon to come up with eventualities that are as sensational as they are wrong. One can indeed speak about the future in a meaningful way, but only to the extent that general trends indicate a class of outcomes. As in thermodynamics, the most likely future state can be described, but not the path that leads to it. Thus it’s a pretty good bet that the history of the next hundred years will revolve around overpopulation, environmental degradation, and energy shortages; but the human response to these challenges is literally incalculable. Or, to pick an example resolved at a slightly finer grain, it’s very likely that the State of Israel will be destroyed, not because one can devise some plausible just-so story about its downfall, but simply because it is such an impossible outlier. What nobody seems to notice is that there is something highly peculiar about a country that has a population roughly the same as Burundi or El Salvador, which somehow maintains the third largest nuclear arsenal on the planet crammed into a cultural and religious enclave surrounded by sworn enemies. When a bunch of 4th graders are playing with a live hand grenade, who knows (or much cares) if it will be Ernie or Alice who pulls the pin?
What needs to be understood is that the think-tank military philosophers and counterfactual historians who dream up scenarios are no more likely to be right than the hack novelists who concoct the plots for the novels you buy in airports, which is to say, they all can be counted upon to come up with eventualities that are as sensational as they are wrong. One can indeed speak about the future in a meaningful way, but only to the extent that general trends indicate a class of outcomes. As in thermodynamics, the most likely future state can be described, but not the path that leads to it. Thus it’s a pretty good bet that the history of the next hundred years will revolve around overpopulation, environmental degradation, and energy shortages; but the human response to these challenges is literally incalculable. Or, to pick an example resolved at a slightly finer grain, it’s very likely that the State of Israel will be destroyed, not because one can devise some plausible just-so story about its downfall, but simply because it is such an impossible outlier. What nobody seems to notice is that there is something highly peculiar about a country that has a population roughly the same as Burundi or El Salvador, which somehow maintains the third largest nuclear arsenal on the planet crammed into a cultural and religious enclave surrounded by sworn enemies. When a bunch of 4th graders are playing with a live hand grenade, who knows (or much cares) if it will be Ernie or Alice who pulls the pin?
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Recurso
I am a dreadful housekeeper and keep losing things like combs and scissors. I rummage around for them until I get frustrated and simply buy replacements. Of course once I have the new comb or scissors, all the old ones magically reappear. History has a similar logic. Philosophical questions get asked anew from time to time, for example, not only because they were never fully answered, but in some cases because perfectly adequate answers got lost someplace in the back of the library—a classic instance being the 20th Century debate over metaethics that took about fifty years to catch up with Aristotle. Unfortunately, when the misplaced truth is not a set of academic propositions, but hard won historical experience, the political consequences do more than waste the ample time available to Oxford dons. At present a great many low-level intellectuals and journalists are treading the once well-worn but now mostly overgrown path that led so many liberals and leftists to authoritarian populism at the beginning of the 20th Century. The same themes—integral nationalism, cultural destiny, the moral beauty of violence, the need for external and internal enemies, premeditated political myth, the superiority of will to reason and the leader to the constraints of law—that one finds in Sorel or Gentile or Schmitt are reappearing in new variations, elaborated or, more often, coarsened by assorted op-ed writing profs and television personalities. I don’t know how many of these deep thinkers are aware that what they are proposing is a reprise of a set of proposals that didn’t turn out too well on their first try out. Maybe some of them figure that they’ll do fascism right this time, but I expect that most of them have forgotten or never learned the sad lesson, which, after all, costs more to replace than a comb or a pair of sox.
I am a dreadful housekeeper and keep losing things like combs and scissors. I rummage around for them until I get frustrated and simply buy replacements. Of course once I have the new comb or scissors, all the old ones magically reappear. History has a similar logic. Philosophical questions get asked anew from time to time, for example, not only because they were never fully answered, but in some cases because perfectly adequate answers got lost someplace in the back of the library—a classic instance being the 20th Century debate over metaethics that took about fifty years to catch up with Aristotle. Unfortunately, when the misplaced truth is not a set of academic propositions, but hard won historical experience, the political consequences do more than waste the ample time available to Oxford dons. At present a great many low-level intellectuals and journalists are treading the once well-worn but now mostly overgrown path that led so many liberals and leftists to authoritarian populism at the beginning of the 20th Century. The same themes—integral nationalism, cultural destiny, the moral beauty of violence, the need for external and internal enemies, premeditated political myth, the superiority of will to reason and the leader to the constraints of law—that one finds in Sorel or Gentile or Schmitt are reappearing in new variations, elaborated or, more often, coarsened by assorted op-ed writing profs and television personalities. I don’t know how many of these deep thinkers are aware that what they are proposing is a reprise of a set of proposals that didn’t turn out too well on their first try out. Maybe some of them figure that they’ll do fascism right this time, but I expect that most of them have forgotten or never learned the sad lesson, which, after all, costs more to replace than a comb or a pair of sox.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Pitiful and Helpless Anyhow
Professional journalists, especially of the video tribe, denounce the bloggers for their careless fact checking; but anybody who keeps score knows that getting the story right is a minor concern on the networks. The delay between the discovery of something interesting and important and its appearance on the news is often protracted, but not because the reporters want to make sure of their facts. The normal debate is about whether or not it benefits the corporation. Absent economic and political angles, fact checking is irrelevant, as in the recent mine disaster where the irresistible allure of an apparent miracle instantly overruled any scruples the professionals supposedly acquired at journalism school. On the other hand, where telling the plain truth can land the company in hot water, no amount of caution is too much. Thus the New York Times knew for 14 months that the administration had been conducting illegal wiretaps, but only broke the story because James Risen was going to publish it in a book in any case.
One usually bewails ownership of the media by six or seven corporations on the Madisonian theory that concentration of power in the hands of a few is dangerous to a Republican form of government, but it is the weakness rather than the strength of the corporations that causes the worst problems. What’s hurting us most isn’t the programmatic semi-fascism of Fox but the premeditated cowardice of CNN. The sheer size of the media giants makes them enormous targets. With so much to lose from the hostility of the government, the big papers, magazines, and T.V. networks cannot afford to act honorably. It wouldn’t be fair to the stockholders. Monopolies are bound to be risk adverse since the bigger they get, the less the prospect for further growth and greater the abyss below. They are inevitably timid, like everything else in the Universe with more to fear than to hope.
Professional journalists, especially of the video tribe, denounce the bloggers for their careless fact checking; but anybody who keeps score knows that getting the story right is a minor concern on the networks. The delay between the discovery of something interesting and important and its appearance on the news is often protracted, but not because the reporters want to make sure of their facts. The normal debate is about whether or not it benefits the corporation. Absent economic and political angles, fact checking is irrelevant, as in the recent mine disaster where the irresistible allure of an apparent miracle instantly overruled any scruples the professionals supposedly acquired at journalism school. On the other hand, where telling the plain truth can land the company in hot water, no amount of caution is too much. Thus the New York Times knew for 14 months that the administration had been conducting illegal wiretaps, but only broke the story because James Risen was going to publish it in a book in any case.
One usually bewails ownership of the media by six or seven corporations on the Madisonian theory that concentration of power in the hands of a few is dangerous to a Republican form of government, but it is the weakness rather than the strength of the corporations that causes the worst problems. What’s hurting us most isn’t the programmatic semi-fascism of Fox but the premeditated cowardice of CNN. The sheer size of the media giants makes them enormous targets. With so much to lose from the hostility of the government, the big papers, magazines, and T.V. networks cannot afford to act honorably. It wouldn’t be fair to the stockholders. Monopolies are bound to be risk adverse since the bigger they get, the less the prospect for further growth and greater the abyss below. They are inevitably timid, like everything else in the Universe with more to fear than to hope.
Monday, January 09, 2006
Courageously Making Decisions for Other People
Back in the 60s, campus radicals used to sit around plotting revolution in order to liberate the working man from the soulless monotony of the assembly line. Of course by 2006, a great many working men would be extremely happy to sign on for 40 years of deadening routine so long as this rather notional alienation included retirement benefits and health care. Indeed, although the fact is not so obvious when you’re 20, people commonly prefer predictability and stagnation over adventure and personal growth even when it doesn’t pay that well. The SDS philosopher wasn’t giving voice to a mankind immured in spiritual bondage. He was simply channeling the value system of Marx—readers of a certain age and educational background will supply the inevitable proof text here—as Marx was himself channeling the humanistic values of German Idealism, albeit in a cause that a Goethe or Herder would not have necessarily endorsed.
There aren’t a huge number of radicals around any more, and if anybody is still writing essays on the Young Marx, I haven’t seen ‘em. The temptation to practice ideological ventriloquism continues, however, only it takes place at different venues. Instead of scruffy would-be Bakunins plotting in the grimy common rooms of grad school dormitories, one finds Stanford economists in three-piece suits imposing their free market ideology in the paneled conference rooms of a Hilton. As with the earlier revolutionaries, it never seems to occur to these folks that their political economies all involve assumptions about what people want, assumptions that repeatedly turn out to be simply false. Deregulation of the electric power industry, for example, was promoted on the “reasonable” assumption that people will be willing to put up with interruptions of service in return for lower average power bills; but when the lights went out, this convenient theory turned out to be politically impossible. What made and makes perfectly good sense for a business man, doesn’t fly with the public at large because people don’t want to live like business men, at least not all the time. What the economists promote as an inevitable result, the unique solution to a giant optimization problem, is simply a way of insisting that everybody adopt the value system of a technologically savvy pirate. As with so many issues in political economy, what matters are the boundary conditions, not the equations.
Back in the 60s, campus radicals used to sit around plotting revolution in order to liberate the working man from the soulless monotony of the assembly line. Of course by 2006, a great many working men would be extremely happy to sign on for 40 years of deadening routine so long as this rather notional alienation included retirement benefits and health care. Indeed, although the fact is not so obvious when you’re 20, people commonly prefer predictability and stagnation over adventure and personal growth even when it doesn’t pay that well. The SDS philosopher wasn’t giving voice to a mankind immured in spiritual bondage. He was simply channeling the value system of Marx—readers of a certain age and educational background will supply the inevitable proof text here—as Marx was himself channeling the humanistic values of German Idealism, albeit in a cause that a Goethe or Herder would not have necessarily endorsed.
There aren’t a huge number of radicals around any more, and if anybody is still writing essays on the Young Marx, I haven’t seen ‘em. The temptation to practice ideological ventriloquism continues, however, only it takes place at different venues. Instead of scruffy would-be Bakunins plotting in the grimy common rooms of grad school dormitories, one finds Stanford economists in three-piece suits imposing their free market ideology in the paneled conference rooms of a Hilton. As with the earlier revolutionaries, it never seems to occur to these folks that their political economies all involve assumptions about what people want, assumptions that repeatedly turn out to be simply false. Deregulation of the electric power industry, for example, was promoted on the “reasonable” assumption that people will be willing to put up with interruptions of service in return for lower average power bills; but when the lights went out, this convenient theory turned out to be politically impossible. What made and makes perfectly good sense for a business man, doesn’t fly with the public at large because people don’t want to live like business men, at least not all the time. What the economists promote as an inevitable result, the unique solution to a giant optimization problem, is simply a way of insisting that everybody adopt the value system of a technologically savvy pirate. As with so many issues in political economy, what matters are the boundary conditions, not the equations.
Inaugurating A Dark New Year
This site is more a personal notebook than a blog. I don’t write easily or often, and I fuss too much about the English. My writing, such as it is, is more like a completed crossword or sudoku than transcribed speech; and I have been told that figuring it out is more like solving a puzzle than reading a paragraph. Meanwhile, the content, at least the non-political content, is also hermetically repellent since I write on the far side of a lifetime of mostly solitary thought and research and pursue questions and obsessions that only accidentally coincide with the interests of others. A real reader who matched up the implied reader of these pages would be a rare bird indeed and should perhaps seek professional help. The fundamental problem, however, is that I practice philosophy.
I’m not bragging. A philosopher is not somebody who possesses a special kind of knowledge or skill, though those attributes might define a good philosopher. As I use the term—and it has many other historically warranted and reasonable meanings—a philosopher is simply somebody who puts an unreasonably high value on truth without expecting the truth in question to begin with a capital t. Philosophy so defined is incurably anarchistic and probably deserving of hemlock, though the authorities have long since discovered that ignoring it is a better way of neutralizing the threat. For most people, perhaps rightly and certainly inevitably, thought is the least free of activities, policed as it is by employers, governments, religions, public opinion, the emotional blackmail of friends and family, and most of all by the hopes and fears of the thinker. To be a philosopher is to disregard all that, not in some operatic fashion or as a spiritual exercise, but as a matter of bureaucratic routine.
This assertion of principled philistinism probably sounds paradoxical. After all, Philosophers are often satirized for maintaining utterly incredible ideas and not just by op ed writers and other lumbering ungulates. Bob Fogelin, himself a professional philosopher, once wondered aloud in my hearing whether J.P. Sartre ever actually believed what he wrote in Being and Nothingness; and I’ve had more than one occasion to look up from the Monadology with similar incredulity. Years of reflection have convinced me that the apparent goofiness of philosophical ideas is something of an illusion, however. That is, the various philosophical ideas are indeed wild guesses, but they are as sensible as a dictionary compared to common sense. Anyhow, philosophers are obliged to make leaps because they are people in a terrible hurry. While the most credible self-understanding the universe will ever achieve takes place in the essentially social form of the sciences, philosophy is about how much of the world can be comprehended by an individual in a single lifetime. With a goal like that, you care a lot about probabilities and nothing whatsoever about plausibilities. You aren’t in the business of contriving likely stories—achieving verisimilitude is only important in the realms of courtesy, politics, and marketing.
Having enunciated (or confessed) my principles, I return, however sporadically, to blogging.
This site is more a personal notebook than a blog. I don’t write easily or often, and I fuss too much about the English. My writing, such as it is, is more like a completed crossword or sudoku than transcribed speech; and I have been told that figuring it out is more like solving a puzzle than reading a paragraph. Meanwhile, the content, at least the non-political content, is also hermetically repellent since I write on the far side of a lifetime of mostly solitary thought and research and pursue questions and obsessions that only accidentally coincide with the interests of others. A real reader who matched up the implied reader of these pages would be a rare bird indeed and should perhaps seek professional help. The fundamental problem, however, is that I practice philosophy.
I’m not bragging. A philosopher is not somebody who possesses a special kind of knowledge or skill, though those attributes might define a good philosopher. As I use the term—and it has many other historically warranted and reasonable meanings—a philosopher is simply somebody who puts an unreasonably high value on truth without expecting the truth in question to begin with a capital t. Philosophy so defined is incurably anarchistic and probably deserving of hemlock, though the authorities have long since discovered that ignoring it is a better way of neutralizing the threat. For most people, perhaps rightly and certainly inevitably, thought is the least free of activities, policed as it is by employers, governments, religions, public opinion, the emotional blackmail of friends and family, and most of all by the hopes and fears of the thinker. To be a philosopher is to disregard all that, not in some operatic fashion or as a spiritual exercise, but as a matter of bureaucratic routine.
This assertion of principled philistinism probably sounds paradoxical. After all, Philosophers are often satirized for maintaining utterly incredible ideas and not just by op ed writers and other lumbering ungulates. Bob Fogelin, himself a professional philosopher, once wondered aloud in my hearing whether J.P. Sartre ever actually believed what he wrote in Being and Nothingness; and I’ve had more than one occasion to look up from the Monadology with similar incredulity. Years of reflection have convinced me that the apparent goofiness of philosophical ideas is something of an illusion, however. That is, the various philosophical ideas are indeed wild guesses, but they are as sensible as a dictionary compared to common sense. Anyhow, philosophers are obliged to make leaps because they are people in a terrible hurry. While the most credible self-understanding the universe will ever achieve takes place in the essentially social form of the sciences, philosophy is about how much of the world can be comprehended by an individual in a single lifetime. With a goal like that, you care a lot about probabilities and nothing whatsoever about plausibilities. You aren’t in the business of contriving likely stories—achieving verisimilitude is only important in the realms of courtesy, politics, and marketing.
Having enunciated (or confessed) my principles, I return, however sporadically, to blogging.
Thursday, December 08, 2005
The Other Kind of Self-Fulfilling Prophesy
If the dish can run away with the spoon and the umbrella can get jiggy with the sewing machine there on the dissecting table, I guess it’s possible that George Bush has something in common with Pericles. Anyhow I was reminded of Bush’s situation by a famous anecdote about the great Athenian politician. The King of Sparta asked one of Pericles’ political rivals who was the better wrestler. Thucydides replied, “When I have thrown him, he insists that he didn’t take a fall and eventually makes the bystanders believe him in spite of their own eyes and thus gets the better of me.” Of course Pericles’ mastery of spin resulted from his famous oratorical skills while Bush needs an army of handlers and a compliant press to attempt the analogous feat. It takes more than a turn of rhetoric to enforce the claim that Iraq is a famous victory, and even the dogged loyalty of an army of purchased pundits may not succeed. What is certain is that they won’t stop trying. Any outcome in Iraq will be defined as a victory.
If the dish can run away with the spoon and the umbrella can get jiggy with the sewing machine there on the dissecting table, I guess it’s possible that George Bush has something in common with Pericles. Anyhow I was reminded of Bush’s situation by a famous anecdote about the great Athenian politician. The King of Sparta asked one of Pericles’ political rivals who was the better wrestler. Thucydides replied, “When I have thrown him, he insists that he didn’t take a fall and eventually makes the bystanders believe him in spite of their own eyes and thus gets the better of me.” Of course Pericles’ mastery of spin resulted from his famous oratorical skills while Bush needs an army of handlers and a compliant press to attempt the analogous feat. It takes more than a turn of rhetoric to enforce the claim that Iraq is a famous victory, and even the dogged loyalty of an army of purchased pundits may not succeed. What is certain is that they won’t stop trying. Any outcome in Iraq will be defined as a victory.
Sunday, November 27, 2005
The Emerging American Majority?
The crimes and confusion of American history appear tolerable in retrospect because of the great nation that emerged from all the blood and nonsense. When the expansion ends, we’ll find it harder to forgive our continuing moral and political errors. What’s cute or at least tolerable in a rambunctious teenager is merely pathetic in an aging biker. We need to grow up and develop—or restore—a civilization on these shores.
William Blake wrote “Bring out number, weight, and measure in a year of dearth.” From which I make the unromantic application that it’s getting to be time to bring out number, weight, and measure. Our ethic, which cherishes the brag and bluff and values effectiveness above efficiency, made excellent sense in the middle of a land rush. The question is whether we’ll be able to adapt to different circumstances where it behooves us to step gingerly without losing our respect for human rights. The temptation will be to lurch from anarchistic individualism to an authoritarian system that crushes independence and dissent through an endless series of emergency measures. What the economic and political situation calls for is a substitution of intelligence for force, but that prospect isn’t going to inspire very many tailgate parties.
The crimes and confusion of American history appear tolerable in retrospect because of the great nation that emerged from all the blood and nonsense. When the expansion ends, we’ll find it harder to forgive our continuing moral and political errors. What’s cute or at least tolerable in a rambunctious teenager is merely pathetic in an aging biker. We need to grow up and develop—or restore—a civilization on these shores.
William Blake wrote “Bring out number, weight, and measure in a year of dearth.” From which I make the unromantic application that it’s getting to be time to bring out number, weight, and measure. Our ethic, which cherishes the brag and bluff and values effectiveness above efficiency, made excellent sense in the middle of a land rush. The question is whether we’ll be able to adapt to different circumstances where it behooves us to step gingerly without losing our respect for human rights. The temptation will be to lurch from anarchistic individualism to an authoritarian system that crushes independence and dissent through an endless series of emergency measures. What the economic and political situation calls for is a substitution of intelligence for force, but that prospect isn’t going to inspire very many tailgate parties.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
The Far Slope
I haven’t written anything for weeks, partly because Fall is a busy season for us migratory farm workers but mostly because everybody is now aware that there is something seriously off about the current administration and its policies, that it isn’t simply ideologically problematic but frankly pathological. Thing is, I don’t like to rant in company, especially when I don’t like the company. After all, in the aftermath of its change of heart, the media hasn’t changed its methods. Whether at your feet or at your throat, the journalists can be counted on to get the story wrong. What can you say about an institution that waited for the wind to change before it took serious notice that the government was promoting torture? What we have here is a weather vane, not a moral compass.
I can’t claim that I don’t enjoy the sufferings of the Republicans—Lord knows they deserve far more than they are likely to get—but not even Schiller thought that Schadenfreude was the daughter of Elysium and there are more important questions to pose and ponder than how to phrase a fresh denunciation of a fallen foe. For example, I want to know why our system is so inept at vetting its potential leaders. I understand or think I understand how a guy like Bush can get elected. What I can’t understand is why and how a major party could nominate such a dubious character.
I haven’t written anything for weeks, partly because Fall is a busy season for us migratory farm workers but mostly because everybody is now aware that there is something seriously off about the current administration and its policies, that it isn’t simply ideologically problematic but frankly pathological. Thing is, I don’t like to rant in company, especially when I don’t like the company. After all, in the aftermath of its change of heart, the media hasn’t changed its methods. Whether at your feet or at your throat, the journalists can be counted on to get the story wrong. What can you say about an institution that waited for the wind to change before it took serious notice that the government was promoting torture? What we have here is a weather vane, not a moral compass.
I can’t claim that I don’t enjoy the sufferings of the Republicans—Lord knows they deserve far more than they are likely to get—but not even Schiller thought that Schadenfreude was the daughter of Elysium and there are more important questions to pose and ponder than how to phrase a fresh denunciation of a fallen foe. For example, I want to know why our system is so inept at vetting its potential leaders. I understand or think I understand how a guy like Bush can get elected. What I can’t understand is why and how a major party could nominate such a dubious character.
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Channeling Hari Seldon
Conservatives complain that liberal politics is fueled by envy, which is doubtless true. But anybody who has ever listened to Limbaugh knows that rightist politics depends on the very same motivations. To a very crude approximation, the mass politics of the left is based on resentment against people with too much material capital while the mass politics of the right is based on resentment against people with too much cultural capital. Unfortunately, the right has a certain advantage in this competition between dueling jealousies. In principle, anybody can be rich because anybody can win one of life’s many lotteries. In contrast, membership in the cultural elite is thought to have something to do with merit. In this respect, money is more democratic than talent since even an idiot can aspire to become a rich idiot in a nation ruled by rich idiots; but the mediocre can only imagine becoming a genius or a saint or simply a competent human being by imaging they are no longer themselves. Which is why the real virtues and accomplishments of an Al Gore inspire far more hatred than the undeserved successes of a George Bush, especially among journalists.
Conservatives complain that liberal politics is fueled by envy, which is doubtless true. But anybody who has ever listened to Limbaugh knows that rightist politics depends on the very same motivations. To a very crude approximation, the mass politics of the left is based on resentment against people with too much material capital while the mass politics of the right is based on resentment against people with too much cultural capital. Unfortunately, the right has a certain advantage in this competition between dueling jealousies. In principle, anybody can be rich because anybody can win one of life’s many lotteries. In contrast, membership in the cultural elite is thought to have something to do with merit. In this respect, money is more democratic than talent since even an idiot can aspire to become a rich idiot in a nation ruled by rich idiots; but the mediocre can only imagine becoming a genius or a saint or simply a competent human being by imaging they are no longer themselves. Which is why the real virtues and accomplishments of an Al Gore inspire far more hatred than the undeserved successes of a George Bush, especially among journalists.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Cause and Effect
After the cultural conservatives admit to you under their voices that they don’t believe in anything either, they invariably fall back on the claim that religion is necessary to promote social cohesion. This theme is so commonplace that one has to be reminded that there isn’t much evidence that faith improves people’s lives. A recent paper by Gregory S. Paul in the Journal of Religion and Society points to the opposite conclusion. In well-off modern nations at least, the rates of violent crime, drug use, teenage pregnancy, and even abortion are negatively correlated with secularism—it isn’t the people who believe in evolution who act like animals. Indeed, the more faith, the more violence. Although Paul admits that the associations he describes are far too weak and general to prove anything positive, they certainly tend to disconfirm the pragmatic justification for traditional religiosity. The absence of faith of the Spaniards and Swedes may not disincline them to manslaughter, but it hasn’t prevented them from living together much more peaceably than the much more religious and much more murderous Americans. All of which is congruent with the observation, easily reached after even a quick perusal of the Statistical Abstract, that it isn’t the faithless Blue States but the fervent Red States that have the high crime rates and general levels of social disorganization.
I don’t think one can draw very many conclusions from the kind of statistical studies that underlie Paul’s paper—in the social sciences descriptive statistical methods are much useful than inferential ones because societies are surely too diverse to be validly compared as if they were patients in a drug trial—but even if the sample sizes and correlations were on the up and up in this study, an association of religiosity with crime and other measures of social disorder would not establish that belief causes violence. I expect that the reverse is more often true. Sick people without health insurance fall back on cheap forms of self-medication like drugs and alcohol even though these expedients may well make them worse off. Poor and frightened people in societies that don’t take very good care of their members fall back on irrational systems of belief in order to get temporary relief from their miserable situations even though the cure often exacerbates the disease or at least fails to address its real causes.
It is sometimes implied that secularism is a mere default, what you believe when you no longer believe, the credo of Nietzsche’s last man. I don’t buy this theme any more, but it has at least this much going for it. Disbelief is not something achieved so much as something allowed. In the absence of fear, want, and political pressure, one naturally falls back on the truth, which, because it is largely negative, is utterly obvious. It takes ingenuity and a lot of heavy lifting to make a case for impossible conclusions. One relaxes into the acknowledgement of realities. I have to remind myself that being able to dispense with religion is a consequence of my own relatively happy situation. Like everybody else, I entertain myself with the fantasy that I live in an especially glamorous state of existential extremity; but I’m actually so unthreatened by the world that can afford to believe things simply because they are apparently true. By the same token, I’m as vain about the blackness of my heart as any television evangelist, but as a matter of fact I don’t have any serious inclination to harm anybody. The categorical imperative if not mere inertia suffices to keep me out of night court. No doubt I couldn’t and wouldn’t maintain these complacencies under less favorable internal and external circumstances any more than the orderly and rational societies of Europe and Oceania will retain their secularism if things go to Hell.
After the cultural conservatives admit to you under their voices that they don’t believe in anything either, they invariably fall back on the claim that religion is necessary to promote social cohesion. This theme is so commonplace that one has to be reminded that there isn’t much evidence that faith improves people’s lives. A recent paper by Gregory S. Paul in the Journal of Religion and Society points to the opposite conclusion. In well-off modern nations at least, the rates of violent crime, drug use, teenage pregnancy, and even abortion are negatively correlated with secularism—it isn’t the people who believe in evolution who act like animals. Indeed, the more faith, the more violence. Although Paul admits that the associations he describes are far too weak and general to prove anything positive, they certainly tend to disconfirm the pragmatic justification for traditional religiosity. The absence of faith of the Spaniards and Swedes may not disincline them to manslaughter, but it hasn’t prevented them from living together much more peaceably than the much more religious and much more murderous Americans. All of which is congruent with the observation, easily reached after even a quick perusal of the Statistical Abstract, that it isn’t the faithless Blue States but the fervent Red States that have the high crime rates and general levels of social disorganization.
I don’t think one can draw very many conclusions from the kind of statistical studies that underlie Paul’s paper—in the social sciences descriptive statistical methods are much useful than inferential ones because societies are surely too diverse to be validly compared as if they were patients in a drug trial—but even if the sample sizes and correlations were on the up and up in this study, an association of religiosity with crime and other measures of social disorder would not establish that belief causes violence. I expect that the reverse is more often true. Sick people without health insurance fall back on cheap forms of self-medication like drugs and alcohol even though these expedients may well make them worse off. Poor and frightened people in societies that don’t take very good care of their members fall back on irrational systems of belief in order to get temporary relief from their miserable situations even though the cure often exacerbates the disease or at least fails to address its real causes.
It is sometimes implied that secularism is a mere default, what you believe when you no longer believe, the credo of Nietzsche’s last man. I don’t buy this theme any more, but it has at least this much going for it. Disbelief is not something achieved so much as something allowed. In the absence of fear, want, and political pressure, one naturally falls back on the truth, which, because it is largely negative, is utterly obvious. It takes ingenuity and a lot of heavy lifting to make a case for impossible conclusions. One relaxes into the acknowledgement of realities. I have to remind myself that being able to dispense with religion is a consequence of my own relatively happy situation. Like everybody else, I entertain myself with the fantasy that I live in an especially glamorous state of existential extremity; but I’m actually so unthreatened by the world that can afford to believe things simply because they are apparently true. By the same token, I’m as vain about the blackness of my heart as any television evangelist, but as a matter of fact I don’t have any serious inclination to harm anybody. The categorical imperative if not mere inertia suffices to keep me out of night court. No doubt I couldn’t and wouldn’t maintain these complacencies under less favorable internal and external circumstances any more than the orderly and rational societies of Europe and Oceania will retain their secularism if things go to Hell.
Monday, September 26, 2005
The Great Work
Everything that can go around eventually gets around to going around. During most of my life, for example, various middle-aged ladies have explained to me how the alchemists were really interested in spiritual transformation rather than metallurgy; but of late scholarly historians of the Art have emphasized the empirical research conducted by adepts who often used mystical language to preserve their trade secrets in an age before patents. Just as a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, butter of antimony is sometimes just butter of antimony even if you call it the dizzy leopard to confuse the competition. But at least some of the time some of the alchemists were speaking neither about spiritual matters or material matters but about both at once, as if one could precipitate a metaphor in the bottom of a beaker. This program is not necessarily absurd.
I’m pretty big for a homunculus, but I myself am presumably the product of a chemical synthesis. The alchemical recipe for an artificial man usually involved hermetically sealing various ingredients in a vessel and incubating them for months and months in a steaming pile of horse dung, the so-called Mare. It turns out you have to have a lot of patience to pursue this crock-pot cookery to a successful conclusion. Three or four months of ferment hardly suffice and you need to think big. After all, the original run, conducted on a planetary scale, lasted for some 4.6 billion years. The point of alchemy, of course, is to accelerate and miniaturize nature; but an experiment with a fair prospect of a favorable outcome would still be a major undertaking. Stuart Kauffman, a theoretical biologist with the Santa Fe Institute of Complexity, has proposed a somewhat similar operation. In his book, the Origins of Order (1993), he suggests that life might spontaneously emerge from under the right conditions if a couple of thousand chemical species were mingled in a biochemical reactor. The results of such a trial would not be very impressive to look at, at best a very activated sludge, and would probably be exquisitely fragile, utterly defenseless against natural living things, which are all finalists in a very long Mortal Kombat tournament. So far as I know Kauffman never actually conducted this experiment—the financing might be harder to assemble than the chemicals and you don’t even want to think about the permits—but perhaps it could be adequately simulated on a sufficiently powerful computer. As one might also have said about the endeavors of the alchemists, Kauffman’s idea is perfectly reasonable even if it turns out that the available means are insufficient.
I expect that a lot of people would be alarmed at the prospect of a modern version of the Great Work—I imagine the farmers of central New Mexico stocking up on torches and pitchforks just in case—but the grave threat of such researches is metaphysical rather than environmental. As with genetic engineering, it isn’t so much the practical as the moral risks of such activities that alarm people. Many people still believe that life was created, after all, and that makes the artificial life a blasphemous parody of the action of God. The rationale for the commandment against graven images is that artists should not pretend to be able to make living things. Actually pulling off that feat would be even worse just as Bonaparte had to be institutionalized on St. Helena because he thought he was Napoleon. But even a nonbeliever might find the production of a couple of grams of metabolizing goo anti-edifying if the expense and difficulty of the process only served to underscore the general sterility of Mother Nature.
The original alchemists believed that material things harbored occult potentialities that could be released by their art. They credited nature with an intrinsic ability to make, which is part of the reason they were distrusted by the Church, which insisted that God had a monopoly on the creation business. The newer alchemy promotes a more depressing heresy. Life indeed arises from unliving matter, but only as the tiniest of impurities. Nature’s trade is disorder; but disorder has an irreducible minimum. As I wrote in the margin of Kauffman’s book, “The Devil only permitted good because he could produce a greater evil from it.” That’s a rather stupid joke, of course—I was sitting through jury duty when I wrote it and plead boredom. Life may be overwhelmingly rare, the residue of a residue like the faint glow of radium left in Madame Curie’s last crucible in the Greer Garson movie, but that doesn’t make it less valuable. Au contraire. Still…
The occasion of these thoughts was an argument I had on the Internet about Bush Administration plans to go back to the moon. I made the point that the motivation for manned space is not scientific—unmanned probes yield far more knowledge at far cheaper rates. Like so much of our politics, the program appeals to our fantasies. We persist in sending human beings into the abyss because we dream of traveling to the stars even though it is very unlikely that an expedition, let alone a migration, is feasible over interstellar distances. When I quoted the tee shirt “186,000 miles a second. It’s not only a good idea. It’s the law,” I was accused on underestimating human ingenuity, etc. But the consideration that really makes me doubt the possibility of leaving this neck of the woods is not physics—even if I were an expert on the subject, I couldn’t rule out the possibility of some loophole in the rules—but the evident fact that we aren’t up to our necks in aliens. If long-range space travel is possible, even at a very low rate, the mathematics of exponential growth guarantees that intelligent life would have long since infested the cosmos like bacteria in unrefrigerated soup. To which it was countered that we may be the first and only planet on which intelligent life emerged or—and this is where I was brought up short—intelligent life may routinely self-destruct before it seeds itself across the heavens.
The idea of the self-destructiveness of intelligence is familiar from many a science fiction novel and doesn’t much further a discussion of the advisability of manned space flight since the technical feasibility of rocketing off to Sirius wouldn’t make much difference if we’re doomed to blow ourselves up before we get around to making the trip. What the thought suddenly illuminated for me, however, was an error of my imagination. I have long been awed by the rarity of sentient life in space, but its rarity in time is probably just as sublime. It’s very likely that the Great Work is not only a mountain that gives birth to a mouse but that it can only produce a very temporary rodent. Our civilization is probably as evanescent as the homunculus of Paracelsus. Fueled by the rapid combustion of coal and petroleum that was build up over many millions of years, it is likely to run out of gas before it achieves escape velocity.
Everything that can go around eventually gets around to going around. During most of my life, for example, various middle-aged ladies have explained to me how the alchemists were really interested in spiritual transformation rather than metallurgy; but of late scholarly historians of the Art have emphasized the empirical research conducted by adepts who often used mystical language to preserve their trade secrets in an age before patents. Just as a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, butter of antimony is sometimes just butter of antimony even if you call it the dizzy leopard to confuse the competition. But at least some of the time some of the alchemists were speaking neither about spiritual matters or material matters but about both at once, as if one could precipitate a metaphor in the bottom of a beaker. This program is not necessarily absurd.
I’m pretty big for a homunculus, but I myself am presumably the product of a chemical synthesis. The alchemical recipe for an artificial man usually involved hermetically sealing various ingredients in a vessel and incubating them for months and months in a steaming pile of horse dung, the so-called Mare. It turns out you have to have a lot of patience to pursue this crock-pot cookery to a successful conclusion. Three or four months of ferment hardly suffice and you need to think big. After all, the original run, conducted on a planetary scale, lasted for some 4.6 billion years. The point of alchemy, of course, is to accelerate and miniaturize nature; but an experiment with a fair prospect of a favorable outcome would still be a major undertaking. Stuart Kauffman, a theoretical biologist with the Santa Fe Institute of Complexity, has proposed a somewhat similar operation. In his book, the Origins of Order (1993), he suggests that life might spontaneously emerge from under the right conditions if a couple of thousand chemical species were mingled in a biochemical reactor. The results of such a trial would not be very impressive to look at, at best a very activated sludge, and would probably be exquisitely fragile, utterly defenseless against natural living things, which are all finalists in a very long Mortal Kombat tournament. So far as I know Kauffman never actually conducted this experiment—the financing might be harder to assemble than the chemicals and you don’t even want to think about the permits—but perhaps it could be adequately simulated on a sufficiently powerful computer. As one might also have said about the endeavors of the alchemists, Kauffman’s idea is perfectly reasonable even if it turns out that the available means are insufficient.
I expect that a lot of people would be alarmed at the prospect of a modern version of the Great Work—I imagine the farmers of central New Mexico stocking up on torches and pitchforks just in case—but the grave threat of such researches is metaphysical rather than environmental. As with genetic engineering, it isn’t so much the practical as the moral risks of such activities that alarm people. Many people still believe that life was created, after all, and that makes the artificial life a blasphemous parody of the action of God. The rationale for the commandment against graven images is that artists should not pretend to be able to make living things. Actually pulling off that feat would be even worse just as Bonaparte had to be institutionalized on St. Helena because he thought he was Napoleon. But even a nonbeliever might find the production of a couple of grams of metabolizing goo anti-edifying if the expense and difficulty of the process only served to underscore the general sterility of Mother Nature.
The original alchemists believed that material things harbored occult potentialities that could be released by their art. They credited nature with an intrinsic ability to make, which is part of the reason they were distrusted by the Church, which insisted that God had a monopoly on the creation business. The newer alchemy promotes a more depressing heresy. Life indeed arises from unliving matter, but only as the tiniest of impurities. Nature’s trade is disorder; but disorder has an irreducible minimum. As I wrote in the margin of Kauffman’s book, “The Devil only permitted good because he could produce a greater evil from it.” That’s a rather stupid joke, of course—I was sitting through jury duty when I wrote it and plead boredom. Life may be overwhelmingly rare, the residue of a residue like the faint glow of radium left in Madame Curie’s last crucible in the Greer Garson movie, but that doesn’t make it less valuable. Au contraire. Still…
The occasion of these thoughts was an argument I had on the Internet about Bush Administration plans to go back to the moon. I made the point that the motivation for manned space is not scientific—unmanned probes yield far more knowledge at far cheaper rates. Like so much of our politics, the program appeals to our fantasies. We persist in sending human beings into the abyss because we dream of traveling to the stars even though it is very unlikely that an expedition, let alone a migration, is feasible over interstellar distances. When I quoted the tee shirt “186,000 miles a second. It’s not only a good idea. It’s the law,” I was accused on underestimating human ingenuity, etc. But the consideration that really makes me doubt the possibility of leaving this neck of the woods is not physics—even if I were an expert on the subject, I couldn’t rule out the possibility of some loophole in the rules—but the evident fact that we aren’t up to our necks in aliens. If long-range space travel is possible, even at a very low rate, the mathematics of exponential growth guarantees that intelligent life would have long since infested the cosmos like bacteria in unrefrigerated soup. To which it was countered that we may be the first and only planet on which intelligent life emerged or—and this is where I was brought up short—intelligent life may routinely self-destruct before it seeds itself across the heavens.
The idea of the self-destructiveness of intelligence is familiar from many a science fiction novel and doesn’t much further a discussion of the advisability of manned space flight since the technical feasibility of rocketing off to Sirius wouldn’t make much difference if we’re doomed to blow ourselves up before we get around to making the trip. What the thought suddenly illuminated for me, however, was an error of my imagination. I have long been awed by the rarity of sentient life in space, but its rarity in time is probably just as sublime. It’s very likely that the Great Work is not only a mountain that gives birth to a mouse but that it can only produce a very temporary rodent. Our civilization is probably as evanescent as the homunculus of Paracelsus. Fueled by the rapid combustion of coal and petroleum that was build up over many millions of years, it is likely to run out of gas before it achieves escape velocity.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Contexts
Reading the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when I was a kid permanently deformed my prose style so I suppose I have an excuse for abusing the memory of Edward Gibbon by trotting out the following quotation for the millionth time: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” My motive in resurrecting this Lazarus is not to attack the religious right, however. In fact, as even a brief Google search verifies, the fundamentalists frequently quote it approvingly themselves and demonstrate in the process a better understanding of what Gibbon meant than the average village atheist. Gibbon wasn’t writing about the spiritual and political atmosphere of the decline, but explaining the rationale of the consistent tolerance followed by the Empire at its height. Gibbon, who was both a philosopher and a magistrate, doubtless approved of Antiquity’s version of multiculturalism. The American theocrats just as obviously despise it along with its contemporary avatars. They are, however, talking about the same thing.
In fact, one could hardly apply Gibbon’s quote justly to either the 5th Century or the 21st. The intellectual classes of late Antiquity, even the remaining Pagans, were deeply superstitious. They may have despised the coarser practices of the Many, but they commonly embraced the notion of reincarnation, poured over horoscopes, practiced magic, and summoned spirits. Even their serious philosophy was theosophy. The erstwhile freethinkers of our own times are no less susceptible to the appeal of irrational religious ideas. Business for alternative forms of medicine, astrology, and memory regression is always good in University towns. The dry and sober rationalism of high antiquity is not much in evidence. Meanwhile, just as the magistrates of the era of the Decline found that fanaticism had political uses, the politicians of our times have rediscovered the motive power of true belief.
Reading the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when I was a kid permanently deformed my prose style so I suppose I have an excuse for abusing the memory of Edward Gibbon by trotting out the following quotation for the millionth time: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” My motive in resurrecting this Lazarus is not to attack the religious right, however. In fact, as even a brief Google search verifies, the fundamentalists frequently quote it approvingly themselves and demonstrate in the process a better understanding of what Gibbon meant than the average village atheist. Gibbon wasn’t writing about the spiritual and political atmosphere of the decline, but explaining the rationale of the consistent tolerance followed by the Empire at its height. Gibbon, who was both a philosopher and a magistrate, doubtless approved of Antiquity’s version of multiculturalism. The American theocrats just as obviously despise it along with its contemporary avatars. They are, however, talking about the same thing.
In fact, one could hardly apply Gibbon’s quote justly to either the 5th Century or the 21st. The intellectual classes of late Antiquity, even the remaining Pagans, were deeply superstitious. They may have despised the coarser practices of the Many, but they commonly embraced the notion of reincarnation, poured over horoscopes, practiced magic, and summoned spirits. Even their serious philosophy was theosophy. The erstwhile freethinkers of our own times are no less susceptible to the appeal of irrational religious ideas. Business for alternative forms of medicine, astrology, and memory regression is always good in University towns. The dry and sober rationalism of high antiquity is not much in evidence. Meanwhile, just as the magistrates of the era of the Decline found that fanaticism had political uses, the politicians of our times have rediscovered the motive power of true belief.
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Neap, Spring, Ebb, Flood
Time, one hears, is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. If that’s true, it must have gotten the position as a political favor from Karl Rove because it hasn’t been doing a very good job lately. The present situation is hard to address either analytically or politically because what’s important about it relates simultaneously to so many trends and cycles, each of which has a different scale and rhythm. Thus the Bush regime, which in many ways reprises the familiar program of other corrupt American administrations (Grant, Harding, Reagan), practices its entrepreneurial politics at a time when the consequences of looting the nation have far greater consequences, not only domestically in a nation with far less margin for error than before but abroad, too, since the gears of the conservative machine mesh with the operation of the whole world. Ideological stupidity and political criminality that once has largely local consequences becomes something quite different when it takes place at or near the inflection point of so many fundamental historical trends including the end of cheap oil and the demographic transition of the human population and at a time when the planet itself is undergoing an ecological, meteorological, and even chemical revolution. And that’s not to factor in the spiritual and civilizational fits underway in the realm of culture, the migration vast numbers of people across the globe, and the incalculable prospect of the wild cards dealt into the game at random intervals by the scientists. What we’re dealing with here is the motorized version of Russian dolls— “their construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel” (Ezekiel 1:16). Or maybe the Mayans, whose conception of time featured a whole set of nested cycles, were right in understanding that calamity or creation naturally occur when all the digits of the cosmic odometer turn over at once, as, by the way, they are scheduled to do when the Long Count begins again on December 21, 2012.
As the acronym SNAFU indicates, problems are not anomalies and normally provide no occasion for panic. Indeed, managing, like walking, is essential a controlled stumble. What we’re dealing with, unfortunately, is a reduplication of crises, a crisis crisis, which the public mind is especially ill suited to comprehend since of all the cycles in play, the narrowest is the news cycle.
Time, one hears, is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. If that’s true, it must have gotten the position as a political favor from Karl Rove because it hasn’t been doing a very good job lately. The present situation is hard to address either analytically or politically because what’s important about it relates simultaneously to so many trends and cycles, each of which has a different scale and rhythm. Thus the Bush regime, which in many ways reprises the familiar program of other corrupt American administrations (Grant, Harding, Reagan), practices its entrepreneurial politics at a time when the consequences of looting the nation have far greater consequences, not only domestically in a nation with far less margin for error than before but abroad, too, since the gears of the conservative machine mesh with the operation of the whole world. Ideological stupidity and political criminality that once has largely local consequences becomes something quite different when it takes place at or near the inflection point of so many fundamental historical trends including the end of cheap oil and the demographic transition of the human population and at a time when the planet itself is undergoing an ecological, meteorological, and even chemical revolution. And that’s not to factor in the spiritual and civilizational fits underway in the realm of culture, the migration vast numbers of people across the globe, and the incalculable prospect of the wild cards dealt into the game at random intervals by the scientists. What we’re dealing with here is the motorized version of Russian dolls— “their construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel” (Ezekiel 1:16). Or maybe the Mayans, whose conception of time featured a whole set of nested cycles, were right in understanding that calamity or creation naturally occur when all the digits of the cosmic odometer turn over at once, as, by the way, they are scheduled to do when the Long Count begins again on December 21, 2012.
As the acronym SNAFU indicates, problems are not anomalies and normally provide no occasion for panic. Indeed, managing, like walking, is essential a controlled stumble. What we’re dealing with, unfortunately, is a reduplication of crises, a crisis crisis, which the public mind is especially ill suited to comprehend since of all the cycles in play, the narrowest is the news cycle.
Saturday, September 17, 2005
Scrambled Eggs and Brains
Two recent papers in SCIENCE (9 September 2005) report on a couple of variants in genes associated with increased brain size have increased in frequency rapidly, too rapidly to be explicable as instances of genetic drift. Statistical tests indicate that one of the variants in the gene Microcephalin arose about 37,000 years ago. The second, haplogroup D of the ASPM gene, is more recent and probably began to occur around 5800 years ago.
The press noted that the two variants occur less frequently in sub-Saharan Africa than elsewhere, which doubtlessly reinforced the belief, nearly universal in America, that blacks are genetically inferior to Europeans. What the newspapers didn’t notice, however, is that the incidence of the genes is highest not in Europe but in places like Pakistan. Some 78.6% of the French population tested possessed the Microcephalin variant, but 98% of the Siberian Ubermenschen. 45% of tested North Italians had haplotype D, but they couldn’t compete with Papua, New Guinea where the sample came it at just under 60%.
Well, the ifs, and, and buts never impress anybody. They are routinely dismissed as liberal piety. It probably doesn’t help to point out that a host of genetic variants affect brain development and that there is no way of determining from purely statistical studies whether the Microcephalin variant or haplotype D are particularly important determinants of better cognitive functions or, indeed, whether they in fact improve cognitive function at all. Natural selection obviously favored these genes, but what phenotypical effects account for their greater fitness is unknown. Genes typically have multiple effects so it is perfectly possible that the variants in question flourished because they boosted immunity to some pathogen or directly increased fertility like another rapidly spreading gene variant recently identified in Iceland.
The authors of the papers go so far as to speculate that the timing of the appearance of the two genetic variants matches up with important milestones in human cultural evolution; but if cave painting or agriculture were somehow made possible by these mutations, they must have been potent indeed since at the outset and for many generations afterwards, only a tiny percentage of individuals possessed them. I’m more inclined to look at things from a reversed perspective. Every cultural accomplishment increases the value of intelligence and makes it likely that any mutation that improves cognitive functioning will spread through the population. What occurs is analogous to a common pattern in the history of technology, the invention of a new practice—extracting motive power from fuel, telephony, flying—inspires an often motley series of secondary inventions that implement or exploit the primary innovation. No point in having more brains if there’s nothing to do with them. It might be that cultural changes circa 38,000 BCE or 5600 BCE made the genetic changes more likely to spread rather than the other way around.
If civilization persists long enough, the genetic basis of human cognitive performance will eventually be elucidated and the results may be ideologically embarrassing to everybody, though probably not in foreseeable ways. In the meantime, it’s a good bet that every isolated research result will be taken as confirmation of the prevailing tribal prejudices. A true statement is validly implied by every other statement, true or false–trust me, it’s logic—so if you are an absolute believer in some tenet, it is perfectly though insanely reasonable to assume that everything you hear is further evidence of its truth. Which is why, incidentally, every surprising result in biology can be instantly seized upon as evidence for intelligent design and people can actually be edified by the sufferings of marching penguins. This sort of thing makes me very dubious about the whole enterprise of popular science.
By the way, there is at least one widely held belief that really is challenged by results like the papers in SCIENCE. I refer to the endlessly repeated notion that the advent of anatomically modern human beings signaled the replacement of genetic evolution with cultural evolution. This commonplace never made any sense at all. Natural selection is inevitable whenever heritable phenotypical characteristics lead to differential rates of successful reproduction. Since not everybody has the same number of live offspring and their relative fertility is surely not a matter of mere chance, evolution will proceed, although its action will often take the form of apparent stasis under the action of what is usually called stabilizing selection, the biological version of quality control. Anyhow, as I previously pointed out, the emergence of culture actually promotes directional evolution—the development of animal husbandry led to the rapid spread of genes that allow adults to drink liquid milk, for example—and I wouldn’t be surprised if ever more complex technological civilization eventually leads to one or more speciation events.
Two recent papers in SCIENCE (9 September 2005) report on a couple of variants in genes associated with increased brain size have increased in frequency rapidly, too rapidly to be explicable as instances of genetic drift. Statistical tests indicate that one of the variants in the gene Microcephalin arose about 37,000 years ago. The second, haplogroup D of the ASPM gene, is more recent and probably began to occur around 5800 years ago.
The press noted that the two variants occur less frequently in sub-Saharan Africa than elsewhere, which doubtlessly reinforced the belief, nearly universal in America, that blacks are genetically inferior to Europeans. What the newspapers didn’t notice, however, is that the incidence of the genes is highest not in Europe but in places like Pakistan. Some 78.6% of the French population tested possessed the Microcephalin variant, but 98% of the Siberian Ubermenschen. 45% of tested North Italians had haplotype D, but they couldn’t compete with Papua, New Guinea where the sample came it at just under 60%.
Well, the ifs, and, and buts never impress anybody. They are routinely dismissed as liberal piety. It probably doesn’t help to point out that a host of genetic variants affect brain development and that there is no way of determining from purely statistical studies whether the Microcephalin variant or haplotype D are particularly important determinants of better cognitive functions or, indeed, whether they in fact improve cognitive function at all. Natural selection obviously favored these genes, but what phenotypical effects account for their greater fitness is unknown. Genes typically have multiple effects so it is perfectly possible that the variants in question flourished because they boosted immunity to some pathogen or directly increased fertility like another rapidly spreading gene variant recently identified in Iceland.
The authors of the papers go so far as to speculate that the timing of the appearance of the two genetic variants matches up with important milestones in human cultural evolution; but if cave painting or agriculture were somehow made possible by these mutations, they must have been potent indeed since at the outset and for many generations afterwards, only a tiny percentage of individuals possessed them. I’m more inclined to look at things from a reversed perspective. Every cultural accomplishment increases the value of intelligence and makes it likely that any mutation that improves cognitive functioning will spread through the population. What occurs is analogous to a common pattern in the history of technology, the invention of a new practice—extracting motive power from fuel, telephony, flying—inspires an often motley series of secondary inventions that implement or exploit the primary innovation. No point in having more brains if there’s nothing to do with them. It might be that cultural changes circa 38,000 BCE or 5600 BCE made the genetic changes more likely to spread rather than the other way around.
If civilization persists long enough, the genetic basis of human cognitive performance will eventually be elucidated and the results may be ideologically embarrassing to everybody, though probably not in foreseeable ways. In the meantime, it’s a good bet that every isolated research result will be taken as confirmation of the prevailing tribal prejudices. A true statement is validly implied by every other statement, true or false–trust me, it’s logic—so if you are an absolute believer in some tenet, it is perfectly though insanely reasonable to assume that everything you hear is further evidence of its truth. Which is why, incidentally, every surprising result in biology can be instantly seized upon as evidence for intelligent design and people can actually be edified by the sufferings of marching penguins. This sort of thing makes me very dubious about the whole enterprise of popular science.
By the way, there is at least one widely held belief that really is challenged by results like the papers in SCIENCE. I refer to the endlessly repeated notion that the advent of anatomically modern human beings signaled the replacement of genetic evolution with cultural evolution. This commonplace never made any sense at all. Natural selection is inevitable whenever heritable phenotypical characteristics lead to differential rates of successful reproduction. Since not everybody has the same number of live offspring and their relative fertility is surely not a matter of mere chance, evolution will proceed, although its action will often take the form of apparent stasis under the action of what is usually called stabilizing selection, the biological version of quality control. Anyhow, as I previously pointed out, the emergence of culture actually promotes directional evolution—the development of animal husbandry led to the rapid spread of genes that allow adults to drink liquid milk, for example—and I wouldn’t be surprised if ever more complex technological civilization eventually leads to one or more speciation events.
Friday, September 16, 2005
Unparallel Lives
I could only shrug my shoulders at a recent survey in which Ronald Reagan emerged as the greatest American president. Ideologies aside, anybody with even a rudimentary knowledge of history has to wonder how a one-dimensional figure like Reagan, who spent most of his life as an actor or corporate spokesman, didn’t write even his own speeches, and never led his nation through a war or comparable crisis could be compared to, for example, Abraham Lincoln, who having given himself a profound, if narrow education, became a great orator, the emancipator of an entire race, and the tragic hero of a desperate civil war. The worst disaster Reagan ever faced was the loss of the 300 marines in Lebanon, a blow to his political image that he conveniently recouped three days later by invading a small and defenseless island in the Caribbean. It is difficult to imagine Reagan dealing with the costs and sorrows of an Antietem or a Gettysburg. I do give him credit for resisting the worst impulses of his right-wing advisors and allowing himself to listen to Gorbachev. But Gorbachev, after all, was the great man of the era while Reagan was never much more than a PR confection, a masterpiece of audioanimatronics even before he fetched up in Disneyland. Yet Reagan outpolled Abraham Lincoln. You might as well compare Thomas Jefferson and George Bush.
Speaking of Jefferson and Bush, there is actually a formal basis of comparison. Jefferson came into office with a minimalist view of government, but the opportunity to acquire Louisiana quickly changed his mind about what the Federal government should or should not undertake. Bush is also finding that New Orleans can make you change your tune about the proper responsibilities of the state. Supposedly a proponent of small government, Bush was heard last night trying to sound like FDR, though his version of the New Deal, supervised by fixer-in-chief, Karl Rove, is likely to come off like a botched bank robbery. Indeed, it is likely to come off as a botched bank robbery.
It should be noted, of course, that the hurricane is not the first disaster to derail Bush’s plans—9/11, the failure of the Iraq invasion, and the oil crunch kept him in Brownian motion even before his problems with Brown. Every president sooner or later finds his preconceptions defeated by events, but Bush was a hostage to fortune from the beginning. He gets blown about by every unforeseen contingency, which means he gets blown about quite a bit since he doesn’t do much foreseeing. He may be stubborn and prejudiced, but he certainly isn’t steadfast and principled. With his utter lack of substance, in fact, he might eventually be a worthy competitor to Ronald Reagan in some future greatest American poll.
I could only shrug my shoulders at a recent survey in which Ronald Reagan emerged as the greatest American president. Ideologies aside, anybody with even a rudimentary knowledge of history has to wonder how a one-dimensional figure like Reagan, who spent most of his life as an actor or corporate spokesman, didn’t write even his own speeches, and never led his nation through a war or comparable crisis could be compared to, for example, Abraham Lincoln, who having given himself a profound, if narrow education, became a great orator, the emancipator of an entire race, and the tragic hero of a desperate civil war. The worst disaster Reagan ever faced was the loss of the 300 marines in Lebanon, a blow to his political image that he conveniently recouped three days later by invading a small and defenseless island in the Caribbean. It is difficult to imagine Reagan dealing with the costs and sorrows of an Antietem or a Gettysburg. I do give him credit for resisting the worst impulses of his right-wing advisors and allowing himself to listen to Gorbachev. But Gorbachev, after all, was the great man of the era while Reagan was never much more than a PR confection, a masterpiece of audioanimatronics even before he fetched up in Disneyland. Yet Reagan outpolled Abraham Lincoln. You might as well compare Thomas Jefferson and George Bush.
Speaking of Jefferson and Bush, there is actually a formal basis of comparison. Jefferson came into office with a minimalist view of government, but the opportunity to acquire Louisiana quickly changed his mind about what the Federal government should or should not undertake. Bush is also finding that New Orleans can make you change your tune about the proper responsibilities of the state. Supposedly a proponent of small government, Bush was heard last night trying to sound like FDR, though his version of the New Deal, supervised by fixer-in-chief, Karl Rove, is likely to come off like a botched bank robbery. Indeed, it is likely to come off as a botched bank robbery.
It should be noted, of course, that the hurricane is not the first disaster to derail Bush’s plans—9/11, the failure of the Iraq invasion, and the oil crunch kept him in Brownian motion even before his problems with Brown. Every president sooner or later finds his preconceptions defeated by events, but Bush was a hostage to fortune from the beginning. He gets blown about by every unforeseen contingency, which means he gets blown about quite a bit since he doesn’t do much foreseeing. He may be stubborn and prejudiced, but he certainly isn’t steadfast and principled. With his utter lack of substance, in fact, he might eventually be a worthy competitor to Ronald Reagan in some future greatest American poll.
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Judicial Notice
With a resounding title like the Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Bryan Ward-Perkins’ new book figures to be a magisterial brick. In fact it is more accurate to call it an extended pamphlet—it’s barely more than 200 pages. Written for a polemical purpose, it is a move in the on-going debate about the advent of the Dark Ages. Over the last twenty or thirty years, several influential historians have tried to re-imagine the era between 200 and 800 AD as “a quite decisive period of history that stands on its own” rather than a depressing coda to a glorious antiquity. Ward-Perkins is not entirely hostile to some of this work. He obviously respects Peter Brown, for example, though he points out that such books as the World of Late Antiquity and the Rise of Western Christendom focus on the spiritual and intellectual dimensions of the era rather than its economics and politics. But Ward-Perkins dissents when revisionist historians attempt to downplay the gravity and violence of the fall of the Empire in favor of an irenic vision in which the Romans and barbarians gradually accommodate to one another. In the West, at least, there was indeed a catastrophe in the 5th Century, a comprehensive crash comparable to the collapses of civilizations documented by Jared Diamond.
Mentalities are fine, but Ward-Perkins concerns himself with piles of broken pottery, the remains of old villages, and the bones of ancient cattle to address realities. The contrast in material conditions before and after the 5th Century is startling. One easily forgets how wealthy and comfortable the Empire had become, not only for a tiny elite but also for farmers and tradesmen who lived in well-build houses with tile roofs and emptied the wine and oil from mountains of amphora. Literally mountains. A view of Rome from 1625 shows Monte Testaccio, a 50-meter high hill made of some 53 million amphora imported from southern Spain.
Before the Barbarian invasions, the prosperity of the Western Empire depended on the long-distance exchange of cash crops and other goods. When first Gaul and Spain and then Africa fell to invaders, the dismembered parts could not sustain themselves either economically or demographically. The enormous manufacturing industries that used standardized methods to gin out good quality clothing, pottery, and weapons failed. As Ward-Perkins documents, domestic animals became smaller as farmers reverted to less efficient subsistence agriculture. Though the book doesn’t address the issue directly, one can only assume that people were similarly stunted. Things really, genuinely, no fooling, went to Hell.
I think Ward-Perkins makes his case effectively, but it’s telling that he needs so few pages to do so. The point of view he combats was never very strong in arguments and evidence. Its appeal was and is extrinsic. Ward-Perkins claims that it has become convenient to find nice things to say about the barbarians since most of the E.U. nations are heirs to the barbarian kingdoms; but I think there is something else at work besides multicultural sweetness and light, though the fetching picture of the barbarian couple he reproduces from a recent French book suggests he’s got a point. I note that, as it did in late antiquity, much of our intellectual life has turned inward—Derrida and Lacan are highly reminiscent of Plotinus and Proclus—so that the mental life of the Church fathers and Neoplatonics seems more interesting to many scholars than the noise and numbers of economics and demography. Writers who obsess about what people think and feel instead of what they do and make have become idealists in practice if not in theory. They just aren’t interested in what used to be quaintly called the external world.
With a resounding title like the Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Bryan Ward-Perkins’ new book figures to be a magisterial brick. In fact it is more accurate to call it an extended pamphlet—it’s barely more than 200 pages. Written for a polemical purpose, it is a move in the on-going debate about the advent of the Dark Ages. Over the last twenty or thirty years, several influential historians have tried to re-imagine the era between 200 and 800 AD as “a quite decisive period of history that stands on its own” rather than a depressing coda to a glorious antiquity. Ward-Perkins is not entirely hostile to some of this work. He obviously respects Peter Brown, for example, though he points out that such books as the World of Late Antiquity and the Rise of Western Christendom focus on the spiritual and intellectual dimensions of the era rather than its economics and politics. But Ward-Perkins dissents when revisionist historians attempt to downplay the gravity and violence of the fall of the Empire in favor of an irenic vision in which the Romans and barbarians gradually accommodate to one another. In the West, at least, there was indeed a catastrophe in the 5th Century, a comprehensive crash comparable to the collapses of civilizations documented by Jared Diamond.
Mentalities are fine, but Ward-Perkins concerns himself with piles of broken pottery, the remains of old villages, and the bones of ancient cattle to address realities. The contrast in material conditions before and after the 5th Century is startling. One easily forgets how wealthy and comfortable the Empire had become, not only for a tiny elite but also for farmers and tradesmen who lived in well-build houses with tile roofs and emptied the wine and oil from mountains of amphora. Literally mountains. A view of Rome from 1625 shows Monte Testaccio, a 50-meter high hill made of some 53 million amphora imported from southern Spain.
Before the Barbarian invasions, the prosperity of the Western Empire depended on the long-distance exchange of cash crops and other goods. When first Gaul and Spain and then Africa fell to invaders, the dismembered parts could not sustain themselves either economically or demographically. The enormous manufacturing industries that used standardized methods to gin out good quality clothing, pottery, and weapons failed. As Ward-Perkins documents, domestic animals became smaller as farmers reverted to less efficient subsistence agriculture. Though the book doesn’t address the issue directly, one can only assume that people were similarly stunted. Things really, genuinely, no fooling, went to Hell.
I think Ward-Perkins makes his case effectively, but it’s telling that he needs so few pages to do so. The point of view he combats was never very strong in arguments and evidence. Its appeal was and is extrinsic. Ward-Perkins claims that it has become convenient to find nice things to say about the barbarians since most of the E.U. nations are heirs to the barbarian kingdoms; but I think there is something else at work besides multicultural sweetness and light, though the fetching picture of the barbarian couple he reproduces from a recent French book suggests he’s got a point. I note that, as it did in late antiquity, much of our intellectual life has turned inward—Derrida and Lacan are highly reminiscent of Plotinus and Proclus—so that the mental life of the Church fathers and Neoplatonics seems more interesting to many scholars than the noise and numbers of economics and demography. Writers who obsess about what people think and feel instead of what they do and make have become idealists in practice if not in theory. They just aren’t interested in what used to be quaintly called the external world.