The Rest of the Annotated Flummeries
Philosophers spend their lives trying to develop a consistent view of the world. They fail. But anthropologists and cultural historians sometimes assume that primitive tribes somehow manage this feat.
From time to time, I get the idea of writing a general account of all the world’s great ideas as they are generally misunderstood. And then I remember that such an enterprise has been long in the works under the heading of intellectual history.
Realities are preferred because in the end they are cheaper than dreams and often require less talent to create.
The object of the game is not part of the rules since there's no penalty for ignoring it except losing, which is no real penalty if you aren’t trying to win.
Information sickness is like constipation since for the most part it only affects those who worry about suffering from it.
The self-sufficiency of the virtuous Stoic (or libertarian) is a consequence of a human world that makes meaningful individuality possible in the first place.
I don't believe in blaming the tyrants for tyranny—not because I want to let the tyrants off the hook, but because the usual demonization of the Stalins and Hitlers gives them too much credit as if a single person could create an entire world of malevolence by themselves.
Science advanced when discovery became the precondition for a new form of social climbing.
Where there really isn't anything very important to discover, the quest for truth tends to become a cleverness contest.
A dream in which I was involved in a debate as to whether Orthodox pigs are permitted to eat Jews.
The assumption is that the difficult philosophers are hiding a secret in their tortuous phrases. But I'm inclined to think the complexity of the surface is necessary precisely because the content is so simple.
We don't live under the gaze of an infinitely solicitous God, but we are embedded in a temporarily forgiving body.
Mystical philosophers have a problem analogous to avant-garde artists, but the content they have for sale— states of mind that are much the same everywhere and at all times— do not adequately differentiate their brand. Hence the need for another kind of transcendence, a rhetorical one pursued by the elaboration of paradoxes and hieroglyphics.
I could have been a successful married man in the old days when you weren't supposed to talk to your wife anyhow and marriage was just another kind of solitude.
Everything is here in this poem, having been left out on purpose.
When I found out that I had been cloned, I was beside myself.
The Encyclopedia turns up in nature even before man's arrival on the scene, for example in the sensory homunculus, which, after all, was a little possum or lizard before it was an inward man.
Intelligence is like a category five hurricane that can't keep its strength when it makes landfall over reality.
I’d rather believe I was a criminal than that my activities were the consequence of some brain dysfunction. Responsibility can also be a useful dodge, romancing the lesion instead of acknowledging it.
Like certain Romans who wanted to command armies so that they'd eventually be better historians.
Just as the planned death of certain cells is an integral part of the development of the adult animal, certain reasonable ideas have to die in order to yield a fully developed theory.
Just as it is very difficult to erase the hard disk without leaving a trace, cultural messages persist through history, though like old files, they often lose their names.
In every generation young intellectuals discover some often repeated idea in one of its recent appearances and proclaim it a great novelty. They are like someone who buys a new comb even though there are plenty of them under the sofa.
Preaching to the laity was a dubious innovation pioneered by urban heretics in the Middle Ages before it was taken up by their enemies. Just as the cops are our criminals, the preaching friars were the church’s heretics.
Reverting once again to weed
To put the chronic in fatigue
No sensible conservative encourages intense belief in anything since principles are most vulnerable when they are taken seriously.
The suspicion that being utterly clear about something might actually be clever, at least if you used the tactic sparingly and didn’t go overboard.
An apple strudel could, after all, be considered the kind of metamorphic rock that results from the application of heat at low pressure to sedimentary deposits of phyllo dough. Granted we don’t usually think of bakers as geological agents like erosion or volcanic eruptions, but the geology textbooks do consider bacteria and diatoms in this way and, under the hood, a macrobe isn’t much different than a microbe.
As was once said of a crucial moment in a badly played chess match, “I don’t see how either side can save the game.”
Mass movements sometimes take place and there have been tremendously influential individuals, but I tend to favor the theory that the activities of small groups explain most of what happens.
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Friday, March 05, 2010
Proverbs of Heck, Anti-Pensées, Fragments of Heraclitus of Aphasia
In an effort to train a dictation program for my computer, I’ve been reading out assorted sentences from the copybook I keep next to my bed. A lot of these lines come more or less directly from dreams. The exercise has taught me a lot, for example that I mumble dreadfully.
The monuments sloth builds to her own glory are not likely to challenge the heavens.
We Americans should make good classicists since we have no great literature of our own to obsess about.
You are perfectly entitled to be skeptical about the Enlightenment. But why do you have to embrace such ripe and stinking superstitions in order to express your disappointment with reason?
It shouldn't bother you to be accused of elitism. It ought to bother you not to be elite.
As with other serious conditions, apotheosis often has an insidious onset. Strokes of luck occur with suspicious frequency. Old women with startling blue eyes fall on their knees in spontaneous adoration, an occurrence that is always embarrassing and often quite inconvenient for everybody, especially on crowded buses.
Nanotechnology has been under way for hundreds of years under the title of chemistry.
It was late winter and the vampires were tapping the diabetics to make syrup.
Reading Marsden's life of Jonathan Edwards, I was struck by the practical similarity of the Christian quest for conversion and a Zen Buddhist quest for enlightenment. Both enterprises are deeply irrational. Both promote the power of religious teachers. Both have a distinct flavor of sadism—which is not to deny either their due as spiritual adventures highly meaningful to the participants. Religion would make a lot more sense if its goal were temporary spiritual thrills instead of permanent beatitude or definitive insight.
Despite its greater rationality, science is much more dispersed than common sense because it addresses the real diversity of the world while the popular mind is fixed on a tiny subset of topics. The people talk a lot, but they don't talk about much.
Like would-be novelists, philosophers think their ideas are shocking, but both the daring sex scenes and the revolutionary concepts generally put the readers to sleep.
"Being" is the Maginot line of the theologians, impregnable but easy to go around.
I've encountered so many grand theories of everything that I've become quite indifferent to them. Explaining anything is so much harder than explaining everything.
The quirkiness of dreams is like the diction of people writing in a foreign language. The combinations don't outrage logic or probability so much as usage.
Culture is a subgroup of nature, not its opposite or rival.
I have to remind myself that most people have never followed a complicated proof or the argument of the serious novel. Forget about what it is to be like a bat. Do philosophers know what it is to be a normal man?
In tightly argued scholarly books, every footnote is like a piton driven into the granite face of a sheer cliff.
Life really is too short to worry about extremely unlikely hypotheses just because they are sacred to the majority of human beings.
Thinking is much easier once you accept the unlikelihood of reaching definitive results just as soldiers fight better when they assume they won't survive the war.
The affairs of men are much simpler than the doings of atoms. We call them complex, but they are really just more interesting to us.
The Republicans fear we will become too much like Europe, but much of what they fear from Europe is what Europe learned from us.
As frequently happens, their love affair ended in marriage.
Self-education is highly problematic, but every original thinker has to turn autodidact for the same reason you can't become the valedictorian by copying the other guy’s answers.
Any detailed passage of history has to be normalized to fit in with the rest. It isn't enough to simplify what happened or merely summarize it as one reduces a body of data to the mean and variance. The events have to be systematically distorted so they will play for a single mind just as the notes are tempered so they can be sounded on a single piano. In my experience, however, historians do a lot more cheating than piano tuners.
The secret principle that explains cosmic inflation: every word deserves its commentary, but once that's admitted there is no place to stop even if in the beginning there was only a single word. Eventually you wind up with the world of glossed glosses and glossing glosses expanding to infinity. What would really be comforting is the assurance that there'll eventually be a reader at the end, a God of love, which is to say, a celestial pedant (for whose love surpasses the pedant’s who cherishes every detail long after the others have closed the book in scorn or mere boredom).
Basic problem: the absence of a large class of people who can afford to tell the rest of us to fuck off.
It says a great deal about our situation that one of the greatest corporations created in the last 10 years is dedicated to answering the old man's question, "where the hell are my keys?"
It was the historians who taught me the strategy of willful stupidity, and I am sincerely grateful to them for that.
In an effort to train a dictation program for my computer, I’ve been reading out assorted sentences from the copybook I keep next to my bed. A lot of these lines come more or less directly from dreams. The exercise has taught me a lot, for example that I mumble dreadfully.
The monuments sloth builds to her own glory are not likely to challenge the heavens.
We Americans should make good classicists since we have no great literature of our own to obsess about.
You are perfectly entitled to be skeptical about the Enlightenment. But why do you have to embrace such ripe and stinking superstitions in order to express your disappointment with reason?
It shouldn't bother you to be accused of elitism. It ought to bother you not to be elite.
As with other serious conditions, apotheosis often has an insidious onset. Strokes of luck occur with suspicious frequency. Old women with startling blue eyes fall on their knees in spontaneous adoration, an occurrence that is always embarrassing and often quite inconvenient for everybody, especially on crowded buses.
Nanotechnology has been under way for hundreds of years under the title of chemistry.
It was late winter and the vampires were tapping the diabetics to make syrup.
Reading Marsden's life of Jonathan Edwards, I was struck by the practical similarity of the Christian quest for conversion and a Zen Buddhist quest for enlightenment. Both enterprises are deeply irrational. Both promote the power of religious teachers. Both have a distinct flavor of sadism—which is not to deny either their due as spiritual adventures highly meaningful to the participants. Religion would make a lot more sense if its goal were temporary spiritual thrills instead of permanent beatitude or definitive insight.
Despite its greater rationality, science is much more dispersed than common sense because it addresses the real diversity of the world while the popular mind is fixed on a tiny subset of topics. The people talk a lot, but they don't talk about much.
Like would-be novelists, philosophers think their ideas are shocking, but both the daring sex scenes and the revolutionary concepts generally put the readers to sleep.
"Being" is the Maginot line of the theologians, impregnable but easy to go around.
I've encountered so many grand theories of everything that I've become quite indifferent to them. Explaining anything is so much harder than explaining everything.
The quirkiness of dreams is like the diction of people writing in a foreign language. The combinations don't outrage logic or probability so much as usage.
Culture is a subgroup of nature, not its opposite or rival.
I have to remind myself that most people have never followed a complicated proof or the argument of the serious novel. Forget about what it is to be like a bat. Do philosophers know what it is to be a normal man?
In tightly argued scholarly books, every footnote is like a piton driven into the granite face of a sheer cliff.
Life really is too short to worry about extremely unlikely hypotheses just because they are sacred to the majority of human beings.
Thinking is much easier once you accept the unlikelihood of reaching definitive results just as soldiers fight better when they assume they won't survive the war.
The affairs of men are much simpler than the doings of atoms. We call them complex, but they are really just more interesting to us.
The Republicans fear we will become too much like Europe, but much of what they fear from Europe is what Europe learned from us.
As frequently happens, their love affair ended in marriage.
Self-education is highly problematic, but every original thinker has to turn autodidact for the same reason you can't become the valedictorian by copying the other guy’s answers.
Any detailed passage of history has to be normalized to fit in with the rest. It isn't enough to simplify what happened or merely summarize it as one reduces a body of data to the mean and variance. The events have to be systematically distorted so they will play for a single mind just as the notes are tempered so they can be sounded on a single piano. In my experience, however, historians do a lot more cheating than piano tuners.
The secret principle that explains cosmic inflation: every word deserves its commentary, but once that's admitted there is no place to stop even if in the beginning there was only a single word. Eventually you wind up with the world of glossed glosses and glossing glosses expanding to infinity. What would really be comforting is the assurance that there'll eventually be a reader at the end, a God of love, which is to say, a celestial pedant (for whose love surpasses the pedant’s who cherishes every detail long after the others have closed the book in scorn or mere boredom).
Basic problem: the absence of a large class of people who can afford to tell the rest of us to fuck off.
It says a great deal about our situation that one of the greatest corporations created in the last 10 years is dedicated to answering the old man's question, "where the hell are my keys?"
It was the historians who taught me the strategy of willful stupidity, and I am sincerely grateful to them for that.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest
I imagine a mad mathematician, suffering from the effects of some atypical stroke or perhaps just an extremely severe case of OCD, who could derive the most amazing results except that he kept going back to make sure that his earlier proofs worked. “Did I really prove the bit about the square on the hypotenuse? Maybe I should go over it just one more time…” If your understanding of modern biology depends upon the popular press, you may think that we’re stuck in the same fix. No matter how much evidence piles up for the gold-standard validity of natural selection and evolution in general, somebody is always on hand to insist that we need to re-examine the evidence. Of course, the public debate, like so much else in America, is queered by ideology and religion—the Creationist calling for a fresh look at old fossils is exactly as honest as a Republican insisting that we ought to start over again with health care reform. However, in biology, at least, the PR efforts of the cultural conservatives have an ironic effect. By endlessly focusing attention on the issues related to traditional Darwinism, they ensure that most people won’t notice that much of the most important new work in evolution doesn’t have much to do with the preoccupations of what is often called the New Synthesis—natural selection and speciation among multi-cellular animals and plants. I’m not just referring to the work done under the heading of Evo-Devo: that the development of individual organisms would shed light on the historical relationships between species and vice versa was already bruited in the 19th Century, though the advance of biochemistry means that the current version of ontology and phylogeny is less talk and more HOX. I’m also not talking about attempts to rethink evolution in the light of Odling-smee’s concept of niche selection, the various ways that the activities of organisms determine the selection pressures on their offspring—I think that idea is very important, but I recognize that we’re talking about a reversal in perspective here, vases and faces, rather than a new assertion about how things work. What has changed most drastically, it seems to me, is our understanding of what there is to explain.
The famous names of evolutionary biology in the last century were mostly zoologists, botanists, and paleontologists who shared a preoccupation with large and showy organisms, even if large and showy sometimes meant nematodes and fruit flies. For the most part, the makers of the synthesis demonstrated a disdain for the microorganisms that represent so much of the biomass and biochemical diversity of life on earth. While these bird watchers and entomologists weren’t paying all that much attention, the microbiologists decided to get evolutionary and in the process discovered that life on earth is rather different than we imagined. When I first began to read biology books, there were two and only two kingdoms of living things, animals and plants. Subsequently, it was noticed that the more salient division was between organisms with and without nuclei, the eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Circa 1960, you got points for knowing about that. A little later, things were broken down more finely with Robert Whittaker’s five-kingdom system (bacteria, protists, fungi, plants, and animals), but that didn’t last very long either. The analysis of ribosomal RNA led Woese and his allies to the discovery that some of the erstwhile bacteria were as genetically different from bacteria as they were from animals, plants, and fungi, indeed, that these organisms, which eventually came to be classified under the new taxon Archaea, were, if anything, more similar to us than to E. coli. These newly discovered creatures obviously had a history, and their existence also put the possible origins of already familiar organism in a new light that evidently demanded rather different kinds of explanations than what had been dreamed of in Ernst Mayr’s hundred years, including, for example, the dramatic episodes of symbiosis that apparently gave rise to the eukaryotes by endowing them with vital organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts and, more generally, the possibility that a much greater degree of genetic interchange occurs between organisms, thus not simply making it much harder to discover the true tree of life but raising the possibility that it wasn’t always a tree at all.
Much as modern literature is sometimes successful in making the reader aware of the strangeness of experience, recent discoveries have revealed how little we understand of the living things around us, how down right weird the biosphere actually is. Cthulu isn’t lurking in an adjoining dimension: half a mile underground, in boiling hot springs, in chemical spills, at the bottom of the sea, and—it’s a good bet—in your large intestines, microbes are exploiting every energetic chemical bond on the planet in ways more exotic than any brain-eating alien. Genetic probes inform us that thousands and thousands of such beings exist, though we don’t know how to culture many of them yet or identify them under a microscope—one coccus looks much like another—but their modes of life, metabolisms, and chemistries mark them off as more radically diverse than the all the animals, plants, and fungi put together. And that’s what a complete theory of evolution would have to explain.
The people at Panda Thumb and other venues who fight the good but thankless fight against the Creationists and Intelligent Design devotees have to repeatedly point out to their theologically inspired opponents that the theory of evolution is not the same thing as a theory of the origin of life. Nobody is claiming that Darwin had an explanation for biogenesis—at most he had a few odd thoughts on the topic. It is also the case that no knowledgeable person would suggest that any consensus has formed since Darwin as to how life began on this planet. Granted that the primary evidence is probably 4 billion years old, that problem may not be insoluble but it is definitely a cold case. Distinguishing theories of the origin of life from theories of the origin of species thus makes excellent sense. Thing is, I wonder if it goes far enough. Granted what we’re learning about the deeper diversity of existing life, especially the wide range of ways that energy flows in living things, shouldn’t we expect that an adequate and truly general theory of evolution is likely to require us to intercalate several stages between biogenesis and the era when life began to evolve according to the familiar rules and patterns of the modern synthesis?
For the record, these thoughts were inspired by Jan Sapp’s recent book The New Foundations of Evolution, which provides a detailed history of the advent of the new understandings of phylogeny inspired by microbiological research. Reading his book was rather like listening to a golden oldies CDs since so many of the important discoveries have taken place during my lifetime and, as something of a scientific fellow traveler or male groupie, I remember what I was doing when caught wind of them even if I didn’t really understand their importance.
I imagine a mad mathematician, suffering from the effects of some atypical stroke or perhaps just an extremely severe case of OCD, who could derive the most amazing results except that he kept going back to make sure that his earlier proofs worked. “Did I really prove the bit about the square on the hypotenuse? Maybe I should go over it just one more time…” If your understanding of modern biology depends upon the popular press, you may think that we’re stuck in the same fix. No matter how much evidence piles up for the gold-standard validity of natural selection and evolution in general, somebody is always on hand to insist that we need to re-examine the evidence. Of course, the public debate, like so much else in America, is queered by ideology and religion—the Creationist calling for a fresh look at old fossils is exactly as honest as a Republican insisting that we ought to start over again with health care reform. However, in biology, at least, the PR efforts of the cultural conservatives have an ironic effect. By endlessly focusing attention on the issues related to traditional Darwinism, they ensure that most people won’t notice that much of the most important new work in evolution doesn’t have much to do with the preoccupations of what is often called the New Synthesis—natural selection and speciation among multi-cellular animals and plants. I’m not just referring to the work done under the heading of Evo-Devo: that the development of individual organisms would shed light on the historical relationships between species and vice versa was already bruited in the 19th Century, though the advance of biochemistry means that the current version of ontology and phylogeny is less talk and more HOX. I’m also not talking about attempts to rethink evolution in the light of Odling-smee’s concept of niche selection, the various ways that the activities of organisms determine the selection pressures on their offspring—I think that idea is very important, but I recognize that we’re talking about a reversal in perspective here, vases and faces, rather than a new assertion about how things work. What has changed most drastically, it seems to me, is our understanding of what there is to explain.
The famous names of evolutionary biology in the last century were mostly zoologists, botanists, and paleontologists who shared a preoccupation with large and showy organisms, even if large and showy sometimes meant nematodes and fruit flies. For the most part, the makers of the synthesis demonstrated a disdain for the microorganisms that represent so much of the biomass and biochemical diversity of life on earth. While these bird watchers and entomologists weren’t paying all that much attention, the microbiologists decided to get evolutionary and in the process discovered that life on earth is rather different than we imagined. When I first began to read biology books, there were two and only two kingdoms of living things, animals and plants. Subsequently, it was noticed that the more salient division was between organisms with and without nuclei, the eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Circa 1960, you got points for knowing about that. A little later, things were broken down more finely with Robert Whittaker’s five-kingdom system (bacteria, protists, fungi, plants, and animals), but that didn’t last very long either. The analysis of ribosomal RNA led Woese and his allies to the discovery that some of the erstwhile bacteria were as genetically different from bacteria as they were from animals, plants, and fungi, indeed, that these organisms, which eventually came to be classified under the new taxon Archaea, were, if anything, more similar to us than to E. coli. These newly discovered creatures obviously had a history, and their existence also put the possible origins of already familiar organism in a new light that evidently demanded rather different kinds of explanations than what had been dreamed of in Ernst Mayr’s hundred years, including, for example, the dramatic episodes of symbiosis that apparently gave rise to the eukaryotes by endowing them with vital organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts and, more generally, the possibility that a much greater degree of genetic interchange occurs between organisms, thus not simply making it much harder to discover the true tree of life but raising the possibility that it wasn’t always a tree at all.
Much as modern literature is sometimes successful in making the reader aware of the strangeness of experience, recent discoveries have revealed how little we understand of the living things around us, how down right weird the biosphere actually is. Cthulu isn’t lurking in an adjoining dimension: half a mile underground, in boiling hot springs, in chemical spills, at the bottom of the sea, and—it’s a good bet—in your large intestines, microbes are exploiting every energetic chemical bond on the planet in ways more exotic than any brain-eating alien. Genetic probes inform us that thousands and thousands of such beings exist, though we don’t know how to culture many of them yet or identify them under a microscope—one coccus looks much like another—but their modes of life, metabolisms, and chemistries mark them off as more radically diverse than the all the animals, plants, and fungi put together. And that’s what a complete theory of evolution would have to explain.
The people at Panda Thumb and other venues who fight the good but thankless fight against the Creationists and Intelligent Design devotees have to repeatedly point out to their theologically inspired opponents that the theory of evolution is not the same thing as a theory of the origin of life. Nobody is claiming that Darwin had an explanation for biogenesis—at most he had a few odd thoughts on the topic. It is also the case that no knowledgeable person would suggest that any consensus has formed since Darwin as to how life began on this planet. Granted that the primary evidence is probably 4 billion years old, that problem may not be insoluble but it is definitely a cold case. Distinguishing theories of the origin of life from theories of the origin of species thus makes excellent sense. Thing is, I wonder if it goes far enough. Granted what we’re learning about the deeper diversity of existing life, especially the wide range of ways that energy flows in living things, shouldn’t we expect that an adequate and truly general theory of evolution is likely to require us to intercalate several stages between biogenesis and the era when life began to evolve according to the familiar rules and patterns of the modern synthesis?
For the record, these thoughts were inspired by Jan Sapp’s recent book The New Foundations of Evolution, which provides a detailed history of the advent of the new understandings of phylogeny inspired by microbiological research. Reading his book was rather like listening to a golden oldies CDs since so many of the important discoveries have taken place during my lifetime and, as something of a scientific fellow traveler or male groupie, I remember what I was doing when caught wind of them even if I didn’t really understand their importance.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Citizens United
The recent Supreme Court decision that gives corporations the right to make unlimited campaign contributions has been defended by some people, including, notably, Glenn Greenwald, who take an absolutist view of the First Amendment. On their view, the issue is not whether corporations are persons since the amendment merely states that Congress shall make no laws abridging the freedom of speech and does not refer to who does the speaking. I find this argument utterly unconvincing and not just because it seems to imply that Congress can’t limit the rights of tarot decks, Ouija boards, and Urim and Thummim to protected speech. Governments make corporations and grant them privileges and immunities that natural human persons do not possess. It is settled law, as I understand, that the speech of military officers, teachers, and doctors in clinics receiving federal funds can be limited so long as they are acting in their official capacity, so the rights of corporations, which are creatures of the state in an even more fundamental way, should not be sacrosanct either, especially since corporations aggregate money in ways that living human individuals cannot. Precisely because they surpass the citizens in actual power, it is wise and right to limit their legal status to prevent them from being more than persons under the law.
It has been suggested that the practical effect of Citizens United has been overestimated and that corporations will either not choose to or not be able to control elections by throwing around huge sums of money or, more plausibly, that the newly discovered rights of the corporate superpersons will turn out to be superfluous since they already own the political process. More optimistically, it might be also be pointed out that a vigilant public could find ways to get around the ruling: it is hard, after all, to write checks while hanging from a lamppost. The actual effects of legal rulings are always hard to predict, and ironic outcomes are quite likely. Unfortunately, ironic is not a reliable synonym for good.
I note in passing that I do agree with the majority of the Court in one respect. Neither one of us take the words or the meaning of the Constitution as sacred and inviolate. The majority bases its opinions on what it thinks is best for the Republican party at a given time while I read the fundamental documents by the light of what I find enduringly moral and defensible in them. I would probably try to respect precedent more than the Roger’s court because I perceive a huge practical value in the predictability of the law, but I recognize that you can’t dispense with special pleading just because you think you’re sincere. On some fundamental level, it isn’t the methodology but the ethics of these jurists that I find vicious.
The recent Supreme Court decision that gives corporations the right to make unlimited campaign contributions has been defended by some people, including, notably, Glenn Greenwald, who take an absolutist view of the First Amendment. On their view, the issue is not whether corporations are persons since the amendment merely states that Congress shall make no laws abridging the freedom of speech and does not refer to who does the speaking. I find this argument utterly unconvincing and not just because it seems to imply that Congress can’t limit the rights of tarot decks, Ouija boards, and Urim and Thummim to protected speech. Governments make corporations and grant them privileges and immunities that natural human persons do not possess. It is settled law, as I understand, that the speech of military officers, teachers, and doctors in clinics receiving federal funds can be limited so long as they are acting in their official capacity, so the rights of corporations, which are creatures of the state in an even more fundamental way, should not be sacrosanct either, especially since corporations aggregate money in ways that living human individuals cannot. Precisely because they surpass the citizens in actual power, it is wise and right to limit their legal status to prevent them from being more than persons under the law.
It has been suggested that the practical effect of Citizens United has been overestimated and that corporations will either not choose to or not be able to control elections by throwing around huge sums of money or, more plausibly, that the newly discovered rights of the corporate superpersons will turn out to be superfluous since they already own the political process. More optimistically, it might be also be pointed out that a vigilant public could find ways to get around the ruling: it is hard, after all, to write checks while hanging from a lamppost. The actual effects of legal rulings are always hard to predict, and ironic outcomes are quite likely. Unfortunately, ironic is not a reliable synonym for good.
I note in passing that I do agree with the majority of the Court in one respect. Neither one of us take the words or the meaning of the Constitution as sacred and inviolate. The majority bases its opinions on what it thinks is best for the Republican party at a given time while I read the fundamental documents by the light of what I find enduringly moral and defensible in them. I would probably try to respect precedent more than the Roger’s court because I perceive a huge practical value in the predictability of the law, but I recognize that you can’t dispense with special pleading just because you think you’re sincere. On some fundamental level, it isn’t the methodology but the ethics of these jurists that I find vicious.
Princes of Peace
Ecumenicalism, at least in Europe and the Americas, is largely a reaction to the threat of unbelief. Atheists are the only people that the Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Calvinists, Lutherans, Pentacostals, Muslims, and Jews hate more than each other; and this hatred draws them together. I think of Gregg Easterbrook as the anti-Aristotle of our age, the master of those who don’t know, but even Easterbrook seems to understand the essentially defensive character of the current vogue for a shared faith in merely having some sort of faith.
Now despising atheists is nothing new—John Locke thought atheism should be illegal and the public affirmation of disbelief in God has long been a capital crime in Muslim nations—but apparently the atheist menace had not seemed sufficiently urgent to compose religious divides that are centuries or millennia old and make priests, bonzes, and imams conveniently ignore the plain contradictions among their respective doctrines. The Enlightenment wasn’t quite enough, apparently, or even Marxism; but the New Atheism has at last done the trick and brought a truce to the religious wars. So let us give thanks to Dawkins and Hitchens and P.Z. Myers and the other princes of peace who have brought this blessing on mankind. I have often been critical of the New Atheists if only because I couldn’t detect anything new in what they had to say, but neither I nor anybody else should claim that they are not a force. Of course it may be that the effectiveness of their message is more a reflection of the startling fragility of religion than the intrinsic merit of their own point of view, which is often little more than unreflective positivism that seems to think the only thing besides science is some sort of theology. Thing is, though, pricks don’t have to be especially sharp to puncture a balloon.
Ecumenicalism, at least in Europe and the Americas, is largely a reaction to the threat of unbelief. Atheists are the only people that the Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Calvinists, Lutherans, Pentacostals, Muslims, and Jews hate more than each other; and this hatred draws them together. I think of Gregg Easterbrook as the anti-Aristotle of our age, the master of those who don’t know, but even Easterbrook seems to understand the essentially defensive character of the current vogue for a shared faith in merely having some sort of faith.
Momentary controversies over Islam aside, in America's contemporary spiritual landscape, the dividing line is not between Christians and non-Christians, nor drawn along any religious perimeter. It is between believers and nonbelievers. Persons of faith of almost any stripe have begun to embrace each other as allies against the encroachment of pure secularism, philosophical positivism, and legal hostility toward belief in the public square.
Now despising atheists is nothing new—John Locke thought atheism should be illegal and the public affirmation of disbelief in God has long been a capital crime in Muslim nations—but apparently the atheist menace had not seemed sufficiently urgent to compose religious divides that are centuries or millennia old and make priests, bonzes, and imams conveniently ignore the plain contradictions among their respective doctrines. The Enlightenment wasn’t quite enough, apparently, or even Marxism; but the New Atheism has at last done the trick and brought a truce to the religious wars. So let us give thanks to Dawkins and Hitchens and P.Z. Myers and the other princes of peace who have brought this blessing on mankind. I have often been critical of the New Atheists if only because I couldn’t detect anything new in what they had to say, but neither I nor anybody else should claim that they are not a force. Of course it may be that the effectiveness of their message is more a reflection of the startling fragility of religion than the intrinsic merit of their own point of view, which is often little more than unreflective positivism that seems to think the only thing besides science is some sort of theology. Thing is, though, pricks don’t have to be especially sharp to puncture a balloon.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Reality, What a Concept!
America appears to be paralyzed by discord; but a closer look at the evidence, for example, an hour or two reading comment threads on Internet discussion sites, will set you straight. There is plenty of conflict, obviously, but few actual differences of opinion, that is, if disagreement means I assert P and you assert non-P, there is almost none to be found. We don’t agree enough to meaningfully disagree. What one encounters instead of dialogue are fistfights and simultaneous monologues. Now by my lights, that’s exactly what we should expect granted the true volume of possible ideas—in that immensity actually encountering another is quite improbable, though the illusion of contact is not. If you think that all-that-is is a big room with stuff in it, you won’t agree, assuming, that is, I’ve correctly guessed what’s going on over there in the adjoining monads.
Consider the interminable struggle over abortion. One could construe the issue as revolving around whether or not one wishes there to be fewer abortions, but that is pretty clearly not the case since even those who, like me, don’t consider abortions an evil don’t consider them a good either while those who wave around the pictures of bloody fetuses seldom argue that outlawing abortion will actually reduce the number of abortions. They may assume that criminalization will have that result, but they mostly simply ignore the question of its real world consequences. What matters, apparently, is maintaining an attitude of official abhorrence towards the act. When pro-choice people argue that a policy of legalized abortion and free family planning services would probably make abortions less common, they are missing the point. Pro-lifers make the corresponding error in assuming that their opponents share their overwhelming concern about meanings. What is an argument about attitudes for one side is an argument about facts for the other. Sorting out the debate doesn’t call for moral philosophy but a better understanding of data types.
Something similar takes place in arguments about drug legalization. Drug warriors are not very interested in evidence that the criminalization of drugs may not decrease drug use, and they are especially not interested in weighing the bad consequences of drug use against the bad consequences of the legal efforts to suppress it. After all, it would be pretty hard to argue that the unfavorable health and economic consequences of smoking pot or even using heroin are remotely comparable to the obvious expense, suffering, and death that result from their legal suppression. One would have to be a moral monster to throw people in vile jails, destroy families, promote organize crime, subvert civil rights, and raise taxes in the name of what is obviously a futile effort to avoid the rather notional evils of marijuana use. But anti-drug people aren’t moral monsters; they simply put a tremendously high value on attitudes. Those of us who throw statistics at the crusaders are suffering from our own illusion.
America appears to be paralyzed by discord; but a closer look at the evidence, for example, an hour or two reading comment threads on Internet discussion sites, will set you straight. There is plenty of conflict, obviously, but few actual differences of opinion, that is, if disagreement means I assert P and you assert non-P, there is almost none to be found. We don’t agree enough to meaningfully disagree. What one encounters instead of dialogue are fistfights and simultaneous monologues. Now by my lights, that’s exactly what we should expect granted the true volume of possible ideas—in that immensity actually encountering another is quite improbable, though the illusion of contact is not. If you think that all-that-is is a big room with stuff in it, you won’t agree, assuming, that is, I’ve correctly guessed what’s going on over there in the adjoining monads.
Consider the interminable struggle over abortion. One could construe the issue as revolving around whether or not one wishes there to be fewer abortions, but that is pretty clearly not the case since even those who, like me, don’t consider abortions an evil don’t consider them a good either while those who wave around the pictures of bloody fetuses seldom argue that outlawing abortion will actually reduce the number of abortions. They may assume that criminalization will have that result, but they mostly simply ignore the question of its real world consequences. What matters, apparently, is maintaining an attitude of official abhorrence towards the act. When pro-choice people argue that a policy of legalized abortion and free family planning services would probably make abortions less common, they are missing the point. Pro-lifers make the corresponding error in assuming that their opponents share their overwhelming concern about meanings. What is an argument about attitudes for one side is an argument about facts for the other. Sorting out the debate doesn’t call for moral philosophy but a better understanding of data types.
Something similar takes place in arguments about drug legalization. Drug warriors are not very interested in evidence that the criminalization of drugs may not decrease drug use, and they are especially not interested in weighing the bad consequences of drug use against the bad consequences of the legal efforts to suppress it. After all, it would be pretty hard to argue that the unfavorable health and economic consequences of smoking pot or even using heroin are remotely comparable to the obvious expense, suffering, and death that result from their legal suppression. One would have to be a moral monster to throw people in vile jails, destroy families, promote organize crime, subvert civil rights, and raise taxes in the name of what is obviously a futile effort to avoid the rather notional evils of marijuana use. But anti-drug people aren’t moral monsters; they simply put a tremendously high value on attitudes. Those of us who throw statistics at the crusaders are suffering from our own illusion.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Continuous Fulgurations
The Karabogazköl is a huge supersalty lagoon that protrudes like a hernia from the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. Water from the Caspian rushes through a narrow straight and spreads out into the desert where it evaporates under the Turkmenistan sun, thus maintaining the difference in level between the lagoon and the sea. Only the steady input of new water allows it to persist. Some years ago, in fact, when the straight was dammed up to protect the Caspian during a drought, the lagoon dried up completely. I was fascinated by this geographic quirk when I read about it in a Scientific American article that made it seem as if the entrance to the Karabogazköl was practically a waterfall—I gather it is really more like a rapids, at least these days, but the photo in the article created a more spectacular impression. Somehow the place became a visible symbol for me of the theological idea, perhaps more characteristic of Islam than in of Christianity or Judaism, that the cosmos itself is utterly dependent on a Godhead that not only created it but maintains it in existence from moment to moment. In this view, all that is is much like this wretched gulf, except that the universe depends on a steady influx of being rather than of water to maintain its evanescent reality under the black sun of nothingness. I don’t accept this metaphysical picture these days, if I ever did, but I’ve retained it as a useful way to stage a thought. In particular, I find it has a number of applications to politics.
One would very much like to think that human institutions, once created, possess the power to persist by themselves and are only destroyed by some external force or perhaps by the ripening of an internal contradiction. One dreams of a political machinery that runs by itself, keeping its balance like a gyroscope, maintaining its internal environment like a thermostat. Entranced by this illusion, propounders of constitutions are often merely projectors of perpetual motion machines of the third kind. The more sober of the old thinkers knew better. There is no destination, telos, or simple basin of attraction, no stable utopia at the end of history or even, for that matter, a permanent state of collapse short of the end of days. Monarchies become aristocracies; aristocracies coarsen into oligarchies; oligarchies are overthrown by democracies; democracies degenerate into mobocracies, idiocracies, tyrannies, or maybe fresh monarchies. The founders of states can at most set a precedent for a form of government because willful intelligent action is required in every generation to constantly recreate what can never persist by its own inertia any more than a living thing can subsist without a continuous metabolism. Persistence, in history as well as organisms, is not stasis but the degree zero of reproduction.
It doesn’t matter if you are the most conservative of conservatives. Since history’s default case is change, staying in place requires ceaseless activity. Indeed, because the same formal institutions have a different meaning in different circumstances, the human world must be remade all the more thoroughly if there are going to be any enduring values. The history of the last thirty years in America shows how easily the meaning of a nation can be lost through political paralysis. Everyone wishes that the horse-trading and hard feelings would go away, that some sort of expert commission will absolve us of responsibility, that we don’t have to take any chances. There are two great problems with this wish to renounce politics: First, as Hannah Arendt frequently insisted—and granted the drastic foreshortening of our current sense of history these days, she practically counts as a contemporary of Aristotle—there is simply no nonpolitical way to do politics; and second, even after you give up on making the omelet, the eggs are going to go on getting broken.
The Karabogazköl is a huge supersalty lagoon that protrudes like a hernia from the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. Water from the Caspian rushes through a narrow straight and spreads out into the desert where it evaporates under the Turkmenistan sun, thus maintaining the difference in level between the lagoon and the sea. Only the steady input of new water allows it to persist. Some years ago, in fact, when the straight was dammed up to protect the Caspian during a drought, the lagoon dried up completely. I was fascinated by this geographic quirk when I read about it in a Scientific American article that made it seem as if the entrance to the Karabogazköl was practically a waterfall—I gather it is really more like a rapids, at least these days, but the photo in the article created a more spectacular impression. Somehow the place became a visible symbol for me of the theological idea, perhaps more characteristic of Islam than in of Christianity or Judaism, that the cosmos itself is utterly dependent on a Godhead that not only created it but maintains it in existence from moment to moment. In this view, all that is is much like this wretched gulf, except that the universe depends on a steady influx of being rather than of water to maintain its evanescent reality under the black sun of nothingness. I don’t accept this metaphysical picture these days, if I ever did, but I’ve retained it as a useful way to stage a thought. In particular, I find it has a number of applications to politics.
One would very much like to think that human institutions, once created, possess the power to persist by themselves and are only destroyed by some external force or perhaps by the ripening of an internal contradiction. One dreams of a political machinery that runs by itself, keeping its balance like a gyroscope, maintaining its internal environment like a thermostat. Entranced by this illusion, propounders of constitutions are often merely projectors of perpetual motion machines of the third kind. The more sober of the old thinkers knew better. There is no destination, telos, or simple basin of attraction, no stable utopia at the end of history or even, for that matter, a permanent state of collapse short of the end of days. Monarchies become aristocracies; aristocracies coarsen into oligarchies; oligarchies are overthrown by democracies; democracies degenerate into mobocracies, idiocracies, tyrannies, or maybe fresh monarchies. The founders of states can at most set a precedent for a form of government because willful intelligent action is required in every generation to constantly recreate what can never persist by its own inertia any more than a living thing can subsist without a continuous metabolism. Persistence, in history as well as organisms, is not stasis but the degree zero of reproduction.
It doesn’t matter if you are the most conservative of conservatives. Since history’s default case is change, staying in place requires ceaseless activity. Indeed, because the same formal institutions have a different meaning in different circumstances, the human world must be remade all the more thoroughly if there are going to be any enduring values. The history of the last thirty years in America shows how easily the meaning of a nation can be lost through political paralysis. Everyone wishes that the horse-trading and hard feelings would go away, that some sort of expert commission will absolve us of responsibility, that we don’t have to take any chances. There are two great problems with this wish to renounce politics: First, as Hannah Arendt frequently insisted—and granted the drastic foreshortening of our current sense of history these days, she practically counts as a contemporary of Aristotle—there is simply no nonpolitical way to do politics; and second, even after you give up on making the omelet, the eggs are going to go on getting broken.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
In Defense of Pat Robertson
Pat Robertson, the televangelist, is getting a lot of grief for claiming that the sufferings of the Haitians was a consequence of a deal they struck with the devil to win their independence in Napoleon’s time. A little research revealed that Robertson was referring to an old, not very credible legend about a revolutionary general who supposedly sacrificed a pig to a Voodoo spirit. Now I’m humorless enough to complain about the dubiousness of this tale—in the throes of early Alzheimer’s Pat has come to think that every implausible story he wants to believe is true, even the ones that aren’t two thousand years old—but I have to disagree with those who attack Robertson’s remark because they don’t think it’s fair that a whole nation should suffer because of something one or even many of their ancestors supposedly did long ago. One can complain, as I have, about the man’s astonishing credulity; but his theology is impeccable from a formal perspective. The plot pattern of communal guilt and its consequences is utterly central to his religion: to reject the structure of the tale is to reject Christianity itself.
People usually speak about religious faith as if it is a matter of believing in some amazing fact such as the resurrection of Christ, but the more essential element is belief in the admissibility of the theory that lies behind the fact. You not only have to believe that Jesus died to save your soul; you have to believe that it makes sense that the suffering and death of an innocent man can somehow change the spiritual state of another. It’s not just that the idea of vicarious atonement is harder to swallow than the idea of a particular instance of vicarious atonement and logically prior to it. It’s also more important. The world is full of people who don’t believe in the resurrection but remain enthralled by the Christian story because they go on hanging on its armature as witness the continuing allure and power of Christ substitutes in politics and literature. But here’s the thing. Vicarious atonement is simply the obverse of communal guilt, which is why the old theology regarded Adam as a type of Christ. “In Adam’s fall we sinned all,” just as Christ died for our sins. Reject the negative instance of moral action at a distance involved in the doctrine of original sin and you put in question the positive instance of salvation by the self-sacrifice of a divine figure. No wonder so many barrels of ink were spilt trying to make sense of the transmission of guilt from Adam to the whole human race. Better to raise this problematic issue some distance away from Jesus, especially since two thousand years of desperate ingenuity have already been squandered trying to explain these things.
Now it seems to me that it is a moral error to blame or punish the children for the sins of their parents; but I’m aware that Christians, at least those who cleave to the traditional faith, are pretty much stuck with accepting that God works in this fashion because the whole pathos of the cross is wrapped up in this belief and makes no sense without it. That’s why I’m inclined to forgive Robertson a little, not only in view of his obvious senility but because it’s hard not to be corrupted by an essentially immoral religion. Listening to him, though, I find myself thanking heaven that most Christians are better than their God, the God of Port au Prince.
Pat Robertson, the televangelist, is getting a lot of grief for claiming that the sufferings of the Haitians was a consequence of a deal they struck with the devil to win their independence in Napoleon’s time. A little research revealed that Robertson was referring to an old, not very credible legend about a revolutionary general who supposedly sacrificed a pig to a Voodoo spirit. Now I’m humorless enough to complain about the dubiousness of this tale—in the throes of early Alzheimer’s Pat has come to think that every implausible story he wants to believe is true, even the ones that aren’t two thousand years old—but I have to disagree with those who attack Robertson’s remark because they don’t think it’s fair that a whole nation should suffer because of something one or even many of their ancestors supposedly did long ago. One can complain, as I have, about the man’s astonishing credulity; but his theology is impeccable from a formal perspective. The plot pattern of communal guilt and its consequences is utterly central to his religion: to reject the structure of the tale is to reject Christianity itself.
People usually speak about religious faith as if it is a matter of believing in some amazing fact such as the resurrection of Christ, but the more essential element is belief in the admissibility of the theory that lies behind the fact. You not only have to believe that Jesus died to save your soul; you have to believe that it makes sense that the suffering and death of an innocent man can somehow change the spiritual state of another. It’s not just that the idea of vicarious atonement is harder to swallow than the idea of a particular instance of vicarious atonement and logically prior to it. It’s also more important. The world is full of people who don’t believe in the resurrection but remain enthralled by the Christian story because they go on hanging on its armature as witness the continuing allure and power of Christ substitutes in politics and literature. But here’s the thing. Vicarious atonement is simply the obverse of communal guilt, which is why the old theology regarded Adam as a type of Christ. “In Adam’s fall we sinned all,” just as Christ died for our sins. Reject the negative instance of moral action at a distance involved in the doctrine of original sin and you put in question the positive instance of salvation by the self-sacrifice of a divine figure. No wonder so many barrels of ink were spilt trying to make sense of the transmission of guilt from Adam to the whole human race. Better to raise this problematic issue some distance away from Jesus, especially since two thousand years of desperate ingenuity have already been squandered trying to explain these things.
Now it seems to me that it is a moral error to blame or punish the children for the sins of their parents; but I’m aware that Christians, at least those who cleave to the traditional faith, are pretty much stuck with accepting that God works in this fashion because the whole pathos of the cross is wrapped up in this belief and makes no sense without it. That’s why I’m inclined to forgive Robertson a little, not only in view of his obvious senility but because it’s hard not to be corrupted by an essentially immoral religion. Listening to him, though, I find myself thanking heaven that most Christians are better than their God, the God of Port au Prince.
Friday, January 08, 2010
O What an Angled Web We Weave
On Good Morning America, Rudy Giuliani claimed there were no terror attacks under Bush. This sort of comment is not new: Dana Perino had earlier asserted that the Bush administration inherited 9/11. Which points to an important general truth: liars don’t need a good memory so long as they can count on listeners who can’t remember anything very well and interviewers who will never call them on their premeditated falsehoods. Giuliani knew that the chronology of events in the distant past, i.e. eight years ago, was already becoming murky in the public mind and rightly calculated that George Stephanopolos, master of the convenient scruple, would find it in his own interest to let this studied lie pass on air and only correct the record later in the relative privacy of a blog.
On Good Morning America, Rudy Giuliani claimed there were no terror attacks under Bush. This sort of comment is not new: Dana Perino had earlier asserted that the Bush administration inherited 9/11. Which points to an important general truth: liars don’t need a good memory so long as they can count on listeners who can’t remember anything very well and interviewers who will never call them on their premeditated falsehoods. Giuliani knew that the chronology of events in the distant past, i.e. eight years ago, was already becoming murky in the public mind and rightly calculated that George Stephanopolos, master of the convenient scruple, would find it in his own interest to let this studied lie pass on air and only correct the record later in the relative privacy of a blog.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Can Religious People be Moral?
We’ve come distance since the time of Pierre Bayle, the early Enlightenment philosopher and journalist who got in trouble by suggesting that atheists can, after all, be decent people; but the concept of a moral atheist is still paradoxical to many—I heard the historian John Lukacs on CSPAN a couple of years ago expressing his astonishment that some of the atheists he had met over his lifetime turned out to be people of good character. Nevertheless, for many of us, the more salient question these days is becoming whether belief and morality are antithetical. It’s not just that bad behavior and religious fervor may be statistically associated. It isn’t encouraging for the apologist that Mississippi is the most religious state in the Union, but correlation isn’t the same as causation. The deeper suspicion is that religiosity, at least in its AM radio form, is intrinsically anti-ethical. There are several reasons to think so, none of which require you to think that dear old Aunt Maude is a moral monster:
1.Many religious people claim that actions are good because a transcendent power says they are good. Of course one can claim that shooting a doctor or flying a plane into a skyscraper is not actually praiseworthy behavior but only by asserting that the television preacher or Imam who sponsored this behavior was not really reporting God’s wishes. Thing is, though, it all becomes a game of theological he said, she said since, ex hypothesi, there is no way to judge the authenticity of revelation by reference to a rational standard of right and wrong. For all you know, Osama has been right all along.
2.Religious ways of thinking about morality promote the notion that ethics is some profoundly mysterious subject and that there aren’t sound and rather obvious reasons for most of the norms of civilized behavior. While there certainly are times when it is hard to decide on the right thing to do, focusing on dubious instances creates a false impression. For the most part, it’s quite obvious what the right thing to do is, which is why it is legitimate to hold people responsible for their actions. Pretending that ethics is rocket science just provides a second handy excuse for bad behavior that hasn’t already been blamed on original sin.
3.Religious people commonly suggest that we ought to try to be good; but this way of thinking, though an inevitable stage of moral education, confuses doing right with pleasing somebody. It’s a moral fault in a grownup that has more than theoretical consequences since it routinely leads people to abdicate responsibility to the nearest authority figure.
4.Religious thinking corrupts practical reasoning by introducing infinities into moral calculations. Pascal’s wager is a good example. It doesn’t matter how low one estimates the probability of the truth of religion so long as the postulated reward for accepting it is infinite: .0000000001 times infinity is still infinity. The bet will always be worthwhile. In fact, this kind of reasoning was the conceptual recipe for fanaticism long before Pascal, though in practice 72 virgins is apparently close enough to infinity for practical purposes. (I note, parenthetically, that the insistence of religious people on the infinity of rewards and punishments is more evidence of the profound vanity that underlies faith.)
5.Traditional religiosity leads to political immorality because it abdicates to God and the next world our responsibility to create a space for ourselves in this world in which good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior punished.
We’ve come distance since the time of Pierre Bayle, the early Enlightenment philosopher and journalist who got in trouble by suggesting that atheists can, after all, be decent people; but the concept of a moral atheist is still paradoxical to many—I heard the historian John Lukacs on CSPAN a couple of years ago expressing his astonishment that some of the atheists he had met over his lifetime turned out to be people of good character. Nevertheless, for many of us, the more salient question these days is becoming whether belief and morality are antithetical. It’s not just that bad behavior and religious fervor may be statistically associated. It isn’t encouraging for the apologist that Mississippi is the most religious state in the Union, but correlation isn’t the same as causation. The deeper suspicion is that religiosity, at least in its AM radio form, is intrinsically anti-ethical. There are several reasons to think so, none of which require you to think that dear old Aunt Maude is a moral monster:
1.Many religious people claim that actions are good because a transcendent power says they are good. Of course one can claim that shooting a doctor or flying a plane into a skyscraper is not actually praiseworthy behavior but only by asserting that the television preacher or Imam who sponsored this behavior was not really reporting God’s wishes. Thing is, though, it all becomes a game of theological he said, she said since, ex hypothesi, there is no way to judge the authenticity of revelation by reference to a rational standard of right and wrong. For all you know, Osama has been right all along.
2.Religious ways of thinking about morality promote the notion that ethics is some profoundly mysterious subject and that there aren’t sound and rather obvious reasons for most of the norms of civilized behavior. While there certainly are times when it is hard to decide on the right thing to do, focusing on dubious instances creates a false impression. For the most part, it’s quite obvious what the right thing to do is, which is why it is legitimate to hold people responsible for their actions. Pretending that ethics is rocket science just provides a second handy excuse for bad behavior that hasn’t already been blamed on original sin.
3.Religious people commonly suggest that we ought to try to be good; but this way of thinking, though an inevitable stage of moral education, confuses doing right with pleasing somebody. It’s a moral fault in a grownup that has more than theoretical consequences since it routinely leads people to abdicate responsibility to the nearest authority figure.
4.Religious thinking corrupts practical reasoning by introducing infinities into moral calculations. Pascal’s wager is a good example. It doesn’t matter how low one estimates the probability of the truth of religion so long as the postulated reward for accepting it is infinite: .0000000001 times infinity is still infinity. The bet will always be worthwhile. In fact, this kind of reasoning was the conceptual recipe for fanaticism long before Pascal, though in practice 72 virgins is apparently close enough to infinity for practical purposes. (I note, parenthetically, that the insistence of religious people on the infinity of rewards and punishments is more evidence of the profound vanity that underlies faith.)
5.Traditional religiosity leads to political immorality because it abdicates to God and the next world our responsibility to create a space for ourselves in this world in which good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior punished.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
And Another Thing
I wrote the following couple of paragraphs in a comment thread about the prospects for a split in the Democratic Party:
"I don't think the issue is capitalism versus anti-capitalism so much as democracy versus oligarchy. While the New Democrats and the Old Republicans disagree as to whether experts or billionaires should be in charge, they agree that the history of the last couple of hundred years has taught us that government by consent of the governed is a childish idea on a par with the fantasies such as legal equality. A certain faction of the Democratic Party base disagrees about all this and actually believes that, for example, if the majority of the country is in favor of having a public option or not invading Afghanistan, their wishes should mean something. For that matter, these feckless idealists believe that government agents should not be allowed to get away with torturing people. Imagine that!
Snark aside, I just don't encounter very many people who are interested in nationalizing the toilet paper factories. What I do hear are voices that oppose the current organization of American business, not because the corporations are private but because they are politically powerful and deeply irresponsible, even to their erstwhile owners. Like feudal barons, the corporations have taken over part of the sovereignty of the state—they even maintain their own courts. The perceived problem is at root more political than straightforwardly economic. Is this our country or theirs?"
I would ask for unanimous consent to revise and extend my remarks, except that the Talmud of ifs, ands, and buts I would ideally like to append to this tiny Torah would run to at least as many volumes as the Short History of Human Vanity. Nevertheless, a few additional thoughts:
1. A serious critique of how American society is organized would have to look as hard at the NGOs as at the for-profit corporations. The mentality and often enough the salaries of top bureaucrats are comparable to those of private CEOs. Anyhow, the term “corporatism” is too unspecific to capture the essence of the current conjuncture.
2. Property rights are not natural facts but historical constructions, and the proof of their artificiality is that they have obviously changed dramatically over the two and third centuries of our national existence. In particular, one form of property, the modern corporation, was a 19th Century invention like the cotton gin. The point of insisting on the social construction of property is not, as Conservatives always assume, to badmouth property rights in general. Indeed what bothers me about corporations is the way in which they weaken one of the great advantages of private property by disassociating ownership and responsibility. Nobody washes a rented car, and no stockholder or executive gives a damn what happens to General Motors after he sells out or retires. Limited liability may be a good thing insofar as it promotes the flow of capital to productive uses and yet a bad thing insofar as it serves as an all purpose mechanism for dumping externalities on the public. The point is not to restore some sort of Jeffersonian utopia of yeomen farmers holding forty acres in fee simple, but to work towards new legal forms that restore some accountability in a knowledge economy.
3. The usual complaint about Democracy is that the people are too ignorant to make meaningful decisions, but the irony is this notion is trotted out most often in connection with issues like war and peace or social equity where the public often turns out to be wiser than the self-appointed wise men. Where the public really is wretchedly informed, for example, on issues like global warming or the true state of the American health care system, it’s vox populi, vox dei. I have a different perspective. I don’t think there is anything sacred about democracy—as ought to be obvious, I don’t think there is anything sacred at all—and I certainly don’t believe that the majority is always right or should have unlimited sway; but my reading of history has led me to conclusion that societies are both more stable and more dynamic when they are responsive to the wishes and interests of their members and do the many things that are necessary to ensure that the People are something different and better than a mob. Where the leading classes don’t recognize—and fear—the authority of the population, they won’t be zealous in looking after their interests either. They may make populist appeals for strategic or tactical reasons and they will certainly continue to repeat the usual pieties, but they will inevitably end up favoring the interests of themselves and their class.
I wrote the following couple of paragraphs in a comment thread about the prospects for a split in the Democratic Party:
"I don't think the issue is capitalism versus anti-capitalism so much as democracy versus oligarchy. While the New Democrats and the Old Republicans disagree as to whether experts or billionaires should be in charge, they agree that the history of the last couple of hundred years has taught us that government by consent of the governed is a childish idea on a par with the fantasies such as legal equality. A certain faction of the Democratic Party base disagrees about all this and actually believes that, for example, if the majority of the country is in favor of having a public option or not invading Afghanistan, their wishes should mean something. For that matter, these feckless idealists believe that government agents should not be allowed to get away with torturing people. Imagine that!
Snark aside, I just don't encounter very many people who are interested in nationalizing the toilet paper factories. What I do hear are voices that oppose the current organization of American business, not because the corporations are private but because they are politically powerful and deeply irresponsible, even to their erstwhile owners. Like feudal barons, the corporations have taken over part of the sovereignty of the state—they even maintain their own courts. The perceived problem is at root more political than straightforwardly economic. Is this our country or theirs?"
I would ask for unanimous consent to revise and extend my remarks, except that the Talmud of ifs, ands, and buts I would ideally like to append to this tiny Torah would run to at least as many volumes as the Short History of Human Vanity. Nevertheless, a few additional thoughts:
1. A serious critique of how American society is organized would have to look as hard at the NGOs as at the for-profit corporations. The mentality and often enough the salaries of top bureaucrats are comparable to those of private CEOs. Anyhow, the term “corporatism” is too unspecific to capture the essence of the current conjuncture.
2. Property rights are not natural facts but historical constructions, and the proof of their artificiality is that they have obviously changed dramatically over the two and third centuries of our national existence. In particular, one form of property, the modern corporation, was a 19th Century invention like the cotton gin. The point of insisting on the social construction of property is not, as Conservatives always assume, to badmouth property rights in general. Indeed what bothers me about corporations is the way in which they weaken one of the great advantages of private property by disassociating ownership and responsibility. Nobody washes a rented car, and no stockholder or executive gives a damn what happens to General Motors after he sells out or retires. Limited liability may be a good thing insofar as it promotes the flow of capital to productive uses and yet a bad thing insofar as it serves as an all purpose mechanism for dumping externalities on the public. The point is not to restore some sort of Jeffersonian utopia of yeomen farmers holding forty acres in fee simple, but to work towards new legal forms that restore some accountability in a knowledge economy.
3. The usual complaint about Democracy is that the people are too ignorant to make meaningful decisions, but the irony is this notion is trotted out most often in connection with issues like war and peace or social equity where the public often turns out to be wiser than the self-appointed wise men. Where the public really is wretchedly informed, for example, on issues like global warming or the true state of the American health care system, it’s vox populi, vox dei. I have a different perspective. I don’t think there is anything sacred about democracy—as ought to be obvious, I don’t think there is anything sacred at all—and I certainly don’t believe that the majority is always right or should have unlimited sway; but my reading of history has led me to conclusion that societies are both more stable and more dynamic when they are responsive to the wishes and interests of their members and do the many things that are necessary to ensure that the People are something different and better than a mob. Where the leading classes don’t recognize—and fear—the authority of the population, they won’t be zealous in looking after their interests either. They may make populist appeals for strategic or tactical reasons and they will certainly continue to repeat the usual pieties, but they will inevitably end up favoring the interests of themselves and their class.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Another Modest Suggestion
According to the Supreme Court, money is speech, which is hard to argue against since we all know that money talks. On the other hand, unlimited political contributions erode one of the most fundamental preconditions of a lawful society, the establishment of an artificial realm of legal equality in which reasons can be heard above the din of power. Men are not made equal, after all. We make them equal by agreeing to treat them as equal for certain specific purposes. Of course in the real world, even if we refrain from settling law suits by holding a public auction, wealth already lays a heavy thumb on the scales of justice. Which is why we don’t need to find other ways to safeguard the prerogatives of privilege. Dollars are already more effectual than votes, and even formal equality, far from being a looming threat, is a departing dream. Which leads to my suggestion: in order to form a more perfect Union, let us level the playing field a little by imposing a progressive tax on political contributions. Token contributions, the $20s and $50, would pay little or nothing, while the $1,000s would get nicked significantly. Let us allow anybody to contribute any amount of money to any candidate or cause, but let a portion of that contribution go to the public treasury. Monsanto and Pfizer and rest can go on purchasing senators just as they do right now, but they would at least have to pay some reasonable levy, say 50%, every time they did so. Think of it as a sales tax. After all, their intent is to buy the country or at least rent it. It’s only fair that the rest of us get a cut of the profits they intend to make from the transaction.
According to the Supreme Court, money is speech, which is hard to argue against since we all know that money talks. On the other hand, unlimited political contributions erode one of the most fundamental preconditions of a lawful society, the establishment of an artificial realm of legal equality in which reasons can be heard above the din of power. Men are not made equal, after all. We make them equal by agreeing to treat them as equal for certain specific purposes. Of course in the real world, even if we refrain from settling law suits by holding a public auction, wealth already lays a heavy thumb on the scales of justice. Which is why we don’t need to find other ways to safeguard the prerogatives of privilege. Dollars are already more effectual than votes, and even formal equality, far from being a looming threat, is a departing dream. Which leads to my suggestion: in order to form a more perfect Union, let us level the playing field a little by imposing a progressive tax on political contributions. Token contributions, the $20s and $50, would pay little or nothing, while the $1,000s would get nicked significantly. Let us allow anybody to contribute any amount of money to any candidate or cause, but let a portion of that contribution go to the public treasury. Monsanto and Pfizer and rest can go on purchasing senators just as they do right now, but they would at least have to pay some reasonable levy, say 50%, every time they did so. Think of it as a sales tax. After all, their intent is to buy the country or at least rent it. It’s only fair that the rest of us get a cut of the profits they intend to make from the transaction.
The Kiss of Death
The idea of making Medicare available to everybody over 55 was wildly popular, even more so than the public option. That, and not the vanity of one Connecticut Lukudnik, probably sealed its fate. Both American parties are terrified of democracy. It’s not much of a secret that our system of government amounts to a series of bulwarks against the will of the people. What the health care fiasco is demonstrating is that frustrating the wishes of the majority is no longer enough. The system is also determined to hurt their interests. “For the people” is apparently just as bad as the widely despised “Of the people and by the people.”
The idea of making Medicare available to everybody over 55 was wildly popular, even more so than the public option. That, and not the vanity of one Connecticut Lukudnik, probably sealed its fate. Both American parties are terrified of democracy. It’s not much of a secret that our system of government amounts to a series of bulwarks against the will of the people. What the health care fiasco is demonstrating is that frustrating the wishes of the majority is no longer enough. The system is also determined to hurt their interests. “For the people” is apparently just as bad as the widely despised “Of the people and by the people.”
Friday, November 20, 2009
The Price of Vanity
The debate about Afghanistan is usually framed as a matter of dueling moralisms. The hawks, supposedly, are the ones who insist that the Taliban must be defeated because of their support for terrorism and their oppression of women and Afghanis in general. The doves are represented as unhappy with our military intervention because of a generalized rejection of war as an instrument of policy. I have my doubts if this version of the argument has much to do with the real opinions and motives of the participants since both sides use ethical appeals to pretty up positions taken for Real Politik reasons and like to paint their adversaries as, respectively, brutal cynics or feckless idealists. Well, I don’t know what really gives with the military experts, IR mavens, and talking heads: my own thinking about our Afghanistan policy isn’t about morals or motives. I simply don’t think we can win the war.
In many respects, Afghanistan is not very much like Vietnam—there is vastly more international support for our efforts in Afghanistan than there ever was for our Southeast Asian adventure, for example, and Vietnam never harbored terrorists who attacked us at home—but in one way, the two situations are similar. As Nixon understood just as well as LBJ or McGovern, there was never a prospect of prevailing in Indochina. Thing is, there is no prospect of prevailing in Afghanistan either. It’s not just that the American public would not stand for the level of expenditure required for victory. Victory wouldn’t be worth it even if it we were willing—or able—to pay the price. The real question for Obama is whether deferring defeat for a few years is worth some lesser but still enormous cost.
Of course there are always people who will claim that America can do anything if it weren’t for the defeatists among us. From their point of view, I’m not very patriotic to suggest that my country has limitations just like any other.
The debate about Afghanistan is usually framed as a matter of dueling moralisms. The hawks, supposedly, are the ones who insist that the Taliban must be defeated because of their support for terrorism and their oppression of women and Afghanis in general. The doves are represented as unhappy with our military intervention because of a generalized rejection of war as an instrument of policy. I have my doubts if this version of the argument has much to do with the real opinions and motives of the participants since both sides use ethical appeals to pretty up positions taken for Real Politik reasons and like to paint their adversaries as, respectively, brutal cynics or feckless idealists. Well, I don’t know what really gives with the military experts, IR mavens, and talking heads: my own thinking about our Afghanistan policy isn’t about morals or motives. I simply don’t think we can win the war.
In many respects, Afghanistan is not very much like Vietnam—there is vastly more international support for our efforts in Afghanistan than there ever was for our Southeast Asian adventure, for example, and Vietnam never harbored terrorists who attacked us at home—but in one way, the two situations are similar. As Nixon understood just as well as LBJ or McGovern, there was never a prospect of prevailing in Indochina. Thing is, there is no prospect of prevailing in Afghanistan either. It’s not just that the American public would not stand for the level of expenditure required for victory. Victory wouldn’t be worth it even if it we were willing—or able—to pay the price. The real question for Obama is whether deferring defeat for a few years is worth some lesser but still enormous cost.
Of course there are always people who will claim that America can do anything if it weren’t for the defeatists among us. From their point of view, I’m not very patriotic to suggest that my country has limitations just like any other.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Down with Religious Freedom?
It has always made a huge difference in American politics whether the liberty that matters will be the rights of individuals to stand against collectivities or the rights of collectivities such as churches, local governments, landlords, corporations, and families to oppress individuals without the interference of the central government. I was reminded of this distinction while reading Jonathan Israel’s account of Baruch Spinoza’s opinions on religious freedom and how his views contrasted with those of John Locke. Both wrote in favor of toleration, but Spinoza, though he favored an absolute right of individuals to believe in any faith and practice it privately, thought that the state should restrain the public activities of dissenting religions because they were likely to be combinations against the public peace and engines of oppression—not an unreasonable suspicion in his century as, for that matter, it is not in ours. Locke’s version of toleration was almost exactly the reverse. He maintained that the state should tolerate, within limits, dissenting churches but not dissenting individuals. His notion of tolerance is sometimes criticized because it did not extend to atheists or Catholics, but it was even more narrow than that.
Maybe Spinoza was on to something. When the politically actively churches of our day complain about government action, they are usually unhappy because the state is preventing them from telling individuals what to do. It’s as if the Mormons and Baptists and Catholics were asserting a First Amendment right to persecute others. Legalizing same sex marriage or abortion doesn’t obligate anybody to do anything. These reforms simply deny religious groups the authority to impose their own morality on nonbelievers. In essence, their plaint that somebody else’s rights diminish theirs duplicates the arguments of Southerners, who claimed that the government has no right to tell them that they can’t own human beings.
The neocons and others still promote the ancient thesis that organized, obligatory religiosity is necessary to maintain social cohesion; but the 700 Clubs, Muslim brotherhoods, and Unification churches have exactly the reverse tendency. They promote division and hatred as, with some few exceptions, politically active religions always have.
I’m not suggesting that the government should attempt to suppress particular sects or churches, but I think it is time we stopped giving them special rights such as the tax exemption for their non-charitable activities. One can only give freedom of conscience to artificial persons like churches by compromising the freedom of real persons.
It has always made a huge difference in American politics whether the liberty that matters will be the rights of individuals to stand against collectivities or the rights of collectivities such as churches, local governments, landlords, corporations, and families to oppress individuals without the interference of the central government. I was reminded of this distinction while reading Jonathan Israel’s account of Baruch Spinoza’s opinions on religious freedom and how his views contrasted with those of John Locke. Both wrote in favor of toleration, but Spinoza, though he favored an absolute right of individuals to believe in any faith and practice it privately, thought that the state should restrain the public activities of dissenting religions because they were likely to be combinations against the public peace and engines of oppression—not an unreasonable suspicion in his century as, for that matter, it is not in ours. Locke’s version of toleration was almost exactly the reverse. He maintained that the state should tolerate, within limits, dissenting churches but not dissenting individuals. His notion of tolerance is sometimes criticized because it did not extend to atheists or Catholics, but it was even more narrow than that.
Maybe Spinoza was on to something. When the politically actively churches of our day complain about government action, they are usually unhappy because the state is preventing them from telling individuals what to do. It’s as if the Mormons and Baptists and Catholics were asserting a First Amendment right to persecute others. Legalizing same sex marriage or abortion doesn’t obligate anybody to do anything. These reforms simply deny religious groups the authority to impose their own morality on nonbelievers. In essence, their plaint that somebody else’s rights diminish theirs duplicates the arguments of Southerners, who claimed that the government has no right to tell them that they can’t own human beings.
The neocons and others still promote the ancient thesis that organized, obligatory religiosity is necessary to maintain social cohesion; but the 700 Clubs, Muslim brotherhoods, and Unification churches have exactly the reverse tendency. They promote division and hatred as, with some few exceptions, politically active religions always have.
I’m not suggesting that the government should attempt to suppress particular sects or churches, but I think it is time we stopped giving them special rights such as the tax exemption for their non-charitable activities. One can only give freedom of conscience to artificial persons like churches by compromising the freedom of real persons.
Monday, November 02, 2009
The Enemy
Intellectually ambitious right-wingers like to appeal to the ideas of the German Carl Schmitt, who famously asserted that one cannot have a politics without an enemy. I don’t go along with that, but I also don’t agree with a certain tribe of sweetness and light commentators that objects to acknowledging the existence of real enemies even when the antagonists in question have already defined you as their enemy. When the Conservatives shriek their “Juden heraus!” message to liberals and even moderates, I don’t feel obligated to make excuses for their eliminationist rhetoric. They are dangerous enemies not only of me, but of my country. I have no desire to emigrate to Madagascar.
It’s not that I propose an inverse of AM radio hatred, mind you. People here in San Francisco may not want to live in Mississippi or Texas, but we’ve never proposed to eject these benighted states from the Union even if their adherence to democracy and even their loyalty to the United States was and remains highly dubious. Despite the non-stop provocation that comes from the red states and which is only unremarkable because we don’t remark about it, we refuse to be like the Limbaughs and Becks, who dream out loud of driving the vermin out of their sanctuaries on the coasts or like their more consistent followers such as Jim David Adkisson who have already acted on their exortation to “Go Kill Liberals.” Nevertheless, as far as I’m concerned, if my enemies want enemies, they’ve got ‘em.
Intellectually ambitious right-wingers like to appeal to the ideas of the German Carl Schmitt, who famously asserted that one cannot have a politics without an enemy. I don’t go along with that, but I also don’t agree with a certain tribe of sweetness and light commentators that objects to acknowledging the existence of real enemies even when the antagonists in question have already defined you as their enemy. When the Conservatives shriek their “Juden heraus!” message to liberals and even moderates, I don’t feel obligated to make excuses for their eliminationist rhetoric. They are dangerous enemies not only of me, but of my country. I have no desire to emigrate to Madagascar.
It’s not that I propose an inverse of AM radio hatred, mind you. People here in San Francisco may not want to live in Mississippi or Texas, but we’ve never proposed to eject these benighted states from the Union even if their adherence to democracy and even their loyalty to the United States was and remains highly dubious. Despite the non-stop provocation that comes from the red states and which is only unremarkable because we don’t remark about it, we refuse to be like the Limbaughs and Becks, who dream out loud of driving the vermin out of their sanctuaries on the coasts or like their more consistent followers such as Jim David Adkisson who have already acted on their exortation to “Go Kill Liberals.” Nevertheless, as far as I’m concerned, if my enemies want enemies, they’ve got ‘em.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Believe It or Not
An old Believe It or Not comic I read as a child breathlessly announced that common table salt was actually made out of two violent poisons, chlorine and sodium. I don’t remember if this attempt to make chemistry lurid explained what happens if you throw sodium in water—that information may have been restricted to an R-rated version I wasn’t allowed to read. The bit did make an impression on me, though; and it has since become part of my own private transcendental apparatus, one of the synthetic a priori propositions in the Swiss army knife of my mind. I find it especially useful in thinking about politics.
I know too much history to romanticize revolutions or long for radical change, but the endlessly harped upon themes of bipartisanship and civility have no appeal for me either and not just because they are bleated out with such transparency insincerity by apologists for the status quo whose idea of social peace is the permanent triumph of one side. I prefer to recognize that there really are conflicting interests in the world, beginning with, but certainly not limited to the haves and the have nots. A rational political chemistry seeks to compound something more savory than endlessly strife or endless oppression from these ingredients, but it doesn’t pretend that conflict is just a misunderstanding. Indeed, thinking there is no conflict is the misunderstanding.
An old Believe It or Not comic I read as a child breathlessly announced that common table salt was actually made out of two violent poisons, chlorine and sodium. I don’t remember if this attempt to make chemistry lurid explained what happens if you throw sodium in water—that information may have been restricted to an R-rated version I wasn’t allowed to read. The bit did make an impression on me, though; and it has since become part of my own private transcendental apparatus, one of the synthetic a priori propositions in the Swiss army knife of my mind. I find it especially useful in thinking about politics.
I know too much history to romanticize revolutions or long for radical change, but the endlessly harped upon themes of bipartisanship and civility have no appeal for me either and not just because they are bleated out with such transparency insincerity by apologists for the status quo whose idea of social peace is the permanent triumph of one side. I prefer to recognize that there really are conflicting interests in the world, beginning with, but certainly not limited to the haves and the have nots. A rational political chemistry seeks to compound something more savory than endlessly strife or endless oppression from these ingredients, but it doesn’t pretend that conflict is just a misunderstanding. Indeed, thinking there is no conflict is the misunderstanding.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
The Crux
As many commentators have remarked, the health care systems of the rest of the industrialized world have little in common except for the fact they each and every one of them is better than ours. The debate about health care isn’t, or shouldn’t be, yet another argument between the virtues of socialism or capitalism, public or private. Things are really simpler than that. The issue is whether one particular industry, the health insurers, will be allowed to go on siphoning off 5% of American GNP. The insurers understand what’s at stake perfectly. What matters isn’t public options or cooperatives or single payer insurance schemes. If we’re ever going to have a decent system, the insurance companies simply have to go or at least change their business model beyond recognition so that instead of making money by denying care, they make money by supplying it. Small wonder then if no American politician or journalist goes unbribed in the next couple of months. People fight harder for their privileges than for their rights, and few privileges are so succulent as the license to steal currently enjoyed by the insurance industry.
As many commentators have remarked, the health care systems of the rest of the industrialized world have little in common except for the fact they each and every one of them is better than ours. The debate about health care isn’t, or shouldn’t be, yet another argument between the virtues of socialism or capitalism, public or private. Things are really simpler than that. The issue is whether one particular industry, the health insurers, will be allowed to go on siphoning off 5% of American GNP. The insurers understand what’s at stake perfectly. What matters isn’t public options or cooperatives or single payer insurance schemes. If we’re ever going to have a decent system, the insurance companies simply have to go or at least change their business model beyond recognition so that instead of making money by denying care, they make money by supplying it. Small wonder then if no American politician or journalist goes unbribed in the next couple of months. People fight harder for their privileges than for their rights, and few privileges are so succulent as the license to steal currently enjoyed by the insurance industry.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Rectification Part III: Jumping the Shark
All this rectification business came to a head for me in the wake of the ACORN fiasco as politicians of all stripes fell over one another to denounce the organization because a couple of its most junior employees in a couple of its offices said some dumb things. Serial killers caught red handed are granted the courtesy title “alleged” even on Fox News, but no judge or jury was necessary in the face of a few minutes of handheld video of a guy in a pimp suit. One understands that for the Republicans, the real crime of ACORN was not a crime at all, but the organization’s success in registering the wrong kind of voters—most of the Conservatives I know would love to limit the franchise to the right kind of people. The interesting thing has been how eagerly the Democrats have gone along with the Republicans in the ritual denunciation of ACORN and even supported a clearly unconstitutional Bill of Attainder against the organization in Congress. The teabaggers may believe that the Democrats are a bunch of reds; but to judge from their overt behavior, the Democrats are as eager to distance themselves from any underclass effort to organize as any member of the Chamber of Commerce.
I don’t know a great deal about ACORN, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if some of its chapters engage in dealings I’d disapprove of. The outfit is very loosely organized, after all, and its membership doesn’t have the social connections and cultural finish that allow other pressure groups to flaunt the law without upsetting anybody who matters. Thing is, I do know that far more credible allegations of far more heinous behavior have been lodged against Hallilburton and Blackwater without giving the pundits a case of the vapors. ACORN hasn’t stolen billions or killed and raped hundreds, but they obviously just aren’t our kind of people. The law was never meant to be applied equally in these cases just as a deal’s a deal when it comes to the compensation of higher management in a bailed-out bank, but not when the ones who lose what they were promised don’t have any political or social clout. A contract with a union, in particular, has pretty much the same force as a 19th Century treaty with a tribe of Indians.
The Republicans and the Democrats have genuine differences, but they are both what an old lefty would call bourgeois parties. When Obama is done being a Communist/Socialist/Fascist/Nazi/Muslim or whatever, he is as dedicated to capitalism as anybody else. There just isn’t any major group in this country eager to nationalize the toilet paper factories. There aren’t even a great many of what one could reasonably call social democrats about; and that brand of socialism, let us remember, isn’t very revolutionary even in places like Sweden where, right wing propaganda aside, the bulk of the economy remains in the hands of private firms and people do their sweating in saunas, not concentration camps. In not recognizing the notable absence of would-be commissars in this country, the neocons and their less erudite allies are simply stuck in a time warp, still trying to understand our politics as if the same groupings were at war now that were fighting it out in the 1930s. They aren’t. The Democrats still draw some strength from what’s left of organized labor, but the dynamism of the party comes from the knowledge industries and the professional classes, groups and businesses that want government to help them make money and grow the country by promoting better education, regularizing our national finances, fixing the health care mess, and subsidizing research and development. Their program isn’t radical: in terms of American history, it’s rather similar to the ideology of the early 19th Century Whigs who were similarly committed to national improvement and skeptical of imperial adventures. There’s a lot more John Quincy Adams than Karl Marx about Barack Obama. Indeed, it is not completely inaccurate to claim that as the Republicans have gradually turned into Dixiecrats, if not full-blown 1840-style Jacksonian democrats, the Democrats have gradually become the Party of Lincoln. As for leftist radicals in the U.S., hay no moros in la costa.
All this rectification business came to a head for me in the wake of the ACORN fiasco as politicians of all stripes fell over one another to denounce the organization because a couple of its most junior employees in a couple of its offices said some dumb things. Serial killers caught red handed are granted the courtesy title “alleged” even on Fox News, but no judge or jury was necessary in the face of a few minutes of handheld video of a guy in a pimp suit. One understands that for the Republicans, the real crime of ACORN was not a crime at all, but the organization’s success in registering the wrong kind of voters—most of the Conservatives I know would love to limit the franchise to the right kind of people. The interesting thing has been how eagerly the Democrats have gone along with the Republicans in the ritual denunciation of ACORN and even supported a clearly unconstitutional Bill of Attainder against the organization in Congress. The teabaggers may believe that the Democrats are a bunch of reds; but to judge from their overt behavior, the Democrats are as eager to distance themselves from any underclass effort to organize as any member of the Chamber of Commerce.
I don’t know a great deal about ACORN, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if some of its chapters engage in dealings I’d disapprove of. The outfit is very loosely organized, after all, and its membership doesn’t have the social connections and cultural finish that allow other pressure groups to flaunt the law without upsetting anybody who matters. Thing is, I do know that far more credible allegations of far more heinous behavior have been lodged against Hallilburton and Blackwater without giving the pundits a case of the vapors. ACORN hasn’t stolen billions or killed and raped hundreds, but they obviously just aren’t our kind of people. The law was never meant to be applied equally in these cases just as a deal’s a deal when it comes to the compensation of higher management in a bailed-out bank, but not when the ones who lose what they were promised don’t have any political or social clout. A contract with a union, in particular, has pretty much the same force as a 19th Century treaty with a tribe of Indians.
The Republicans and the Democrats have genuine differences, but they are both what an old lefty would call bourgeois parties. When Obama is done being a Communist/Socialist/Fascist/Nazi/Muslim or whatever, he is as dedicated to capitalism as anybody else. There just isn’t any major group in this country eager to nationalize the toilet paper factories. There aren’t even a great many of what one could reasonably call social democrats about; and that brand of socialism, let us remember, isn’t very revolutionary even in places like Sweden where, right wing propaganda aside, the bulk of the economy remains in the hands of private firms and people do their sweating in saunas, not concentration camps. In not recognizing the notable absence of would-be commissars in this country, the neocons and their less erudite allies are simply stuck in a time warp, still trying to understand our politics as if the same groupings were at war now that were fighting it out in the 1930s. They aren’t. The Democrats still draw some strength from what’s left of organized labor, but the dynamism of the party comes from the knowledge industries and the professional classes, groups and businesses that want government to help them make money and grow the country by promoting better education, regularizing our national finances, fixing the health care mess, and subsidizing research and development. Their program isn’t radical: in terms of American history, it’s rather similar to the ideology of the early 19th Century Whigs who were similarly committed to national improvement and skeptical of imperial adventures. There’s a lot more John Quincy Adams than Karl Marx about Barack Obama. Indeed, it is not completely inaccurate to claim that as the Republicans have gradually turned into Dixiecrats, if not full-blown 1840-style Jacksonian democrats, the Democrats have gradually become the Party of Lincoln. As for leftist radicals in the U.S., hay no moros in la costa.
Rectification Redux
If we’re really going to use more accurate names for the political tendencies of our time, perhaps we should consider going back a little further in history for inspiration. I’m not talking about reverting to the Plebs and the Patricians or even the Optimates and the Populares. Our politics, a struggle between elites, has no room for anything like a people’s party. I’m thinking more about the Tories and Whigs of 18th Century Britain. Especially in foreign policy, their George the Third had much in common with our George the Least. As Brendon Simms exhaustively documents in his recent book Three Victories and a Defeat, the English, mostly under Whig leadership, had been very careful to cultivate alliances in their long struggle with the French right up to the triumphant climax of the Seven Year’s War—what we call the French and Indian War. The Tories, on the other hand, didn’t have any use for diplomacy or the continent. Their sovereign, the first king from the House of Hannover who didn’t have a German accent, simply posited that England was the greatest nation on earth and didn’t need or much appreciate anybody’s help in ruling the world or keeping her colonies. Which is why when the Revolution came, England, faced by a continent full of determined enemies and hostile neutrals, was utterly alone, overmatched, and finally defeated. If you read the political pamphlets of the time, the clueless Tories even sound like American neocons and share a similarly impractical program of world domination. Pointing out that England was, after all, a rather small country was regarded as unpatriotic, just as our tub-thumpers regard any acknowledgement of the limits of our power as craven defeatism.
If we’re really going to use more accurate names for the political tendencies of our time, perhaps we should consider going back a little further in history for inspiration. I’m not talking about reverting to the Plebs and the Patricians or even the Optimates and the Populares. Our politics, a struggle between elites, has no room for anything like a people’s party. I’m thinking more about the Tories and Whigs of 18th Century Britain. Especially in foreign policy, their George the Third had much in common with our George the Least. As Brendon Simms exhaustively documents in his recent book Three Victories and a Defeat, the English, mostly under Whig leadership, had been very careful to cultivate alliances in their long struggle with the French right up to the triumphant climax of the Seven Year’s War—what we call the French and Indian War. The Tories, on the other hand, didn’t have any use for diplomacy or the continent. Their sovereign, the first king from the House of Hannover who didn’t have a German accent, simply posited that England was the greatest nation on earth and didn’t need or much appreciate anybody’s help in ruling the world or keeping her colonies. Which is why when the Revolution came, England, faced by a continent full of determined enemies and hostile neutrals, was utterly alone, overmatched, and finally defeated. If you read the political pamphlets of the time, the clueless Tories even sound like American neocons and share a similarly impractical program of world domination. Pointing out that England was, after all, a rather small country was regarded as unpatriotic, just as our tub-thumpers regard any acknowledgement of the limits of our power as craven defeatism.