Relativistic Effects

Huge old institutions distort logic in their vicinity much as massive bodies warp nearby space-time. As the 1919 poem had it, “This much is certain and the rest debate: Light rays near the sun do not go straight.” Similarly, the rules of evidence don’t apply in the normal way when applied near the event horizon of ideologies or religions. How else explain complicated philological arguments summoned up to buttress or dispute the historicity of religious figures who were said to be able to walk on water or rise from the dead? Absent the political and cultural power of Christianity, no rational man would entertain the reality of Christ for a minute anymore than he would suppose that Hercules was once a real baby that strangled snakes in his crib. Truth told, nobody would give much credence to the mere existence of a natural man named Jesus either if it weren’t for the people who make such a fuss about it. If you were snoozing your way through a treatise on Sumerian history, you wouldn’t waste two seconds rejecting the historicity of a name so feebly attested by reliable sources. In the twisted metric of religious polemic, however, the fact that a thesis is not impossible is taken as evidence of its truth. It would hardly surprise anybody, after all, if there turned out to have really been an itinerant preacher named Jesus. But there’s always room for one more obscure Mesopotamian nobleman, too, and that doesn’t make Smargil of Ur a real guy. By the same peculiar rationale, a certain very common kind of rare spirit will triumphantly explain that we can trust the literal truth of Exodus because the Israelites crossed the Reed Sea during a wind storm and not the Red Sea during a special effect. But there is no better evidence for the non miracle than for the miracle, which is to say there is no credible evidence for either.

None of this matters a great deal to the people. Even if there really was a King Arthur, the cultural significance of his story would reside in the grandeur of the fictions that accumulated around some dimly remembered Celt. It’s the mythic figure, not the postulated barbarian that moves us. By the same token, all the detail and pathos of the Christ story belongs to its elaboration—all the good stuff is embroidery on what may already by a fiction. People are obviously genuinely moved by the Passion of Christ movie, but they also get upset about how Scarlet O’Hara treated Rhett Butler. Whether the film offers three or four handkerchiefs worth of catharsis has nothing whatsoever to do with the extent to which it is a true story. It obviously isn’t. But over and beyond the political power of myth, which no one can safely ignore, the halo of goofiness that surrounds religious issues has a definite effect on educated folks who should know better. Besides creating the fly-paper-like presumption that these questions have two sides, the piety, good manners, or mere prudence of the impious makes it hard to figure out how Christianity really did get started.

Lately I’ve been pursuing the implications of a largely uncontroverted philological conclusion, the fact that the letters of Paul were all written before the first gospel and make almost no references to any biographical facts about Christ over and beyond the bare assertion that he was crucified at some indeterminate time in the past. This information is highly relevant to a debate about the veracity of the gospels or rather, would be, if that were still a meaningful argument. What I’m interested in is Paul himself and his utterly Gnostic, indeed docetic, Christology. Apparently, in the history of Christianity, the heresy is older than the orthodoxy.

Thinking Out Loud

Nietzsche made fun of people who strain and struggle to stay 15 minutes ahead of the Zeitgeist. I heard him loud and clear and resolved to do what ever it took to get stretch out my lead to a half hour. In that spirit, may I reiterate my request for a little thinking that looks beyond this election year to a future that won’t be a lot easier without George Bush than with him—and that’s assuming we do get rid of the current gang. In particular:

1. How do we break up the media monopoly or counteract its anti-democratic tendencies? If the journalists could stand by and let a major party run an obvious incompetent on an incoherent platform, they can and surely will do it again.

2. What steps can we take to prepare for the economic shock of increasing oil prices? We probably waited too long to avoid a difficult transition from the SUV era to something more sustainable. Whoever is in the White House is going to have trouble explaining to Americans why gas costs $4 a gallon.

3. How do we address global warming or at least get ready for its consequences?

4. How do we deal with such structural inefficiencies in the American economy as its heavily bureaucratic and wasteful health system?

5. How do we accommodate millions of immigrants in a listless economy?

6. How do we lessen our international obligations to a sustainable level without destabilizing the world?

7. How do we manage the transition from an economy powered by demographic growth to one that depends on technology to grow?

8. How do we reverse the trend towards a society divided into rich and poor or at least ameliorate the degradation of the mass of people?

Plots Hatched in the Rec Room

Back in the run up to the Second Iraqi War, the loudest voices raised in opposition to our invasion were the usual radicals. ANSWER, et. al., however, were hardly representative of the bulk of the people I met at rallies and marches last year. The really angry people were the moderates. Unlike the eternal left, which has long since grown comfortable playing the algae to the right-wing fungus in the lichen of symbolic politics, we wanted something to actually happen, which is to say, we weren’t calling for an impossible revolution or expecting perpetual peace on Earth. We just wanted our country to act responsibly in world affairs or, if honorable behavior were out of the question, at least to promote our own self-interest in a rational way by avoiding wars we can neither win nor afford. Ideology didn’t have anything to do with it, and the idealism most in play was not very different than what used to be called prudence.

I challenge anybody to question the impurity of my motives. My skin is white, but O my heart is black. For example, like decent Americans everywhere, I have no principled objection to using military force as an instrument of national policy. Indeed, I think it is a very good idea for the United States to maintain its military preponderance for as long as possible. Unfortunately, to manage this trick, which is not going to be easy in any case in view of the inevitable decline in our economic strength relative to the rest of the world, we should be avoiding everything we’re doing now. If we really want to stay strong, we should be keeping our national finances in order instead of running up a huge debt. We should be avoiding operational military expenditures in order to pay for continual technical research and capital military expenditures. Instead of alienating the world, we should be figuring out how to get our allies to foot a large part of the bill for international activities. We should be spending our money on what’s effective and relatively cheap—an unchallengeable navy and air force—and spending as little as possible on what’s ineffective and hugely expensive—large land armies bogged down fighting insurgencies and science fiction fantasies like that golden dildo, missile defense.

Confessions of a Test Particle

Maybe a lot of people buy lottery tickets in the expectation of winning, but I suspect a fair number bet merely as an aid to daydreaming. Once you’ve bet, you don’t need to imagine a separate chain of circumstances that leads to waking up rich. Winning the lottery on a given occasion is much less likely than having a stroke during the same period of time, but at least it’s definitely on the sunny side of possibility and that fact economizes on the energy needed to fantasize. Writing a blog has a rather similar rationale. I don’t expect to be read very often or by very many, but the fact that any given message might find a reader is meaningful to me. The hobby does have a downside, however. Indeed, it can be extremely corrupting.

Writing is a blind trade where seller and buyer do not normally meet. But that doesn’t preclude an element of negotiation. Over reasonable stretch of time, the message maker learns what the message receiver is willing or able to hear. It turns out that the market for surprising ideas is exceedingly small, though the universal resistance to anything substantively new is masked by an insatiable desire for superficial variety. It would be quite unjust for a writer to think badly of his audience because of this fact. The writer, after all, shares with his readers the same reluctance to hear when it is his turn to listen. Unwillingness to hearken is an ineluctable aspect of the primal stupidity (Urdummheit) that rules the human condition. Besides, in this instance, it is the writer who displays the most blameworthy sloth. Just writing down something simply because it is true, profound, and apropos is a very self-indulgent practice. All the art and, lord knows, the effort, lies in mudding the message and flattering the readers as necessary. In this respect, a virtuous writer is like a moral politician, who isn’t really moral at all unless he compromises his principles enough to give them effect.

Calculations

The Roman army of Trajan’s time was more powerful than the forces of the Parthians with which it contended for the province of Mesopotamia. Even so, the emperor was only able to secure the region for three years, probably because the area was far more important to the nearby Persians than it was to the distant Latins. Where the price of victory is greater than the prize, every victory is a defeat, which is why the analysts who claim that the Tet Offensive was an American victory are both quite correct and utterly wrong and also why we’ll probably show ourselves to the door in Iraq even more quickly than Trajan did.

The Persian Gulf is just about as far away from the United States as you can get on this planet. By the same rule that every suspicious mole will be located on the center of your back, fate seems determined to locate the center of gravity of world politics in the most inconvenient spot. But what is most relevant strategically is not linear distance but a more complicated interval that takes into account cultural as well as geographical remoteness. It costs a lot to ship men and material to the Middle East. It costs even more to figure out who's who and what’s what in the Iraqi world.

As it is, we’re like some rube who horns in on a conversation in a bar, a conversation about things we don’t understand conducted in a language we don’t speak. True, the fact that we’re packing a gun and distributing bribes gets us noticed, but that doesn’t change the fact that our childishly simple view of the world is quite incommensurate with the concerns and values of the patrons. Shooting some of them for looking at us funny turns out to have only a marginal and temporary benefit.

You have to be a fanatical ideologue or a cynical opportunist to believe that this sort of thing is really justifiable as a rational strategy. Imposing your will by main force on other people surely implies that you know what is best for them, unless, of course, it just means you don’t give a damn about them at all. But does anybody think that Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the inevitability of democracy is any better as a justification for imperialism than earlier enthusiasms for Romanitas, the conversion of the Indians, or the classless society? Theories of historical rationality inevitably turn into exercises of collective will. Just as those who believed in the eventual triumph of the proletariat quickly concluded that the dialectic helps those who help themselves, those who insist on the irresistible advance of the American Way have discovered that cluster bombs are the necessary secondary causes of the victory of the Good. It finally comes back to a question of will and power, and we just don’t have enough of either.

The Bubble Boy

As part of the set up of several Star Trek episodes, an alien intelligence maintains a earth-like conditions inside a small bubble on an otherwise inhospitable planet. The protected zone serves as a stage setting for the delicate dramas of the fragile humans. Now I don’t think the habitable part of the Earth was laid out by any intelligence whatsoever—I’m on the record that Tom Fool Nature did it—but our actual situation is strikingly similar except that the playground we inhabit is not a symmetrical volume in the midst of a wilderness, but an exceedingly complicated network of intersecting passageways that from very far off or very close in looks like a continuous space. I may think I can wander freely in these parts but a random excursion to the middle of Gerry Avenue or even a trip out of my clothes and then down the hall will disabuse me of this theory.

Spinoza famously suggested that a conscious stone would believe it was acting freely as it tumbled down a hill. I think we are more like a counter on an abacus that somehow manages to ignore the rod upon which it slides. I do not point out the fact to provide an occasion for existential anguish, however. It is part of a general explanation of how beings of limited power and intellect can function at all.

There is also a thermodynamic way of making this point. An individual, thinking human is a very high peak of negative entropy, but the exception we all represent to the usual law of ruin is only possible because we are located in a region already maintained at low entropy, indeed at the center of a concentric set of such regions: the brain in the body, the body in the city, the city in the human world, the human world in the biosphere, each shell excreting its disorder to the next.

Democracy Again

I’m a believer in the iron law of oligarchy. States are governed by minorities and always will be. Authoritarian regimes do not differ from democracies because elites are in charge but because the rulers in such polities are not loyal to the peoples they serve or feel any obligation to consult their wishes or promote their interests. Elections are only meaningful when the power structure of a nation allows them to be, where the holders of power wager some of their power on an outcome that is genuinely in doubt. Absent that willingness, elections are a way of asserting control, not of seeking consent, much as public opinion polls, supposedly a means for finding out what people are thinking, are merely the means by which commercial and political interests impose an agenda on a passive and thoughtless population.

Where politically effective people lack the will to maintain a government with a popular element, no constitutional or legal mechanism will prevent abuses. We have laws against political corruption, but they are simply not enforced. We have congressional elections, but they are rigged by gerrymandering to the benefit of incumbents so that very few districts are actually up for grabs in any given year. We have de jure freedom of the Press, but a de facto monopoly of what counts, the means of propaganda.

There is nothing remarkable about any of this. Functioning democracy is a rare and fragile condition that can only be maintained by continuous effort while a corporatist state is a more or less natural endpoint, especially for an Imperial state in decline. Indeed, at the present, populism is more likely to make things worse than better since the right is far better than the left at flattering and frightening the just plain folks.

The Rest of the Phrase

I was just perusing Richard Clarke’s book when I suddenly recognized the implication of its title, “Against All Enemies.” I’m sure everybody else got the point right off the bat, i.e. that the whole phrase in the oath reads “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

The Other Shoe

The fall of the Soviet Union left the United States as the sole superpoweron the planet. It also left only one ideology standing, a quasi-theological version of economic liberalism that is every bit as dogmatic as Marxist-Leninism. The Cold War era will not really be over until this relic also passes from the scene, replaced, so we hope, by a more pragmatic political economics that can learn from experience.

The Contents of Our Character

My last piece about Central Asia was not calculated to promote tourism to Tashkent, but I note that ads for hotels in Uzbekistan mysteriously appeared on this site after I posted it. For that matter, the Republican Party regularly visits this page after I accuse it of all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors. One would like to believe that evil partisans are carefully reading my words and vainly attempting to counteract them with their own propaganda—not for nothing do delusions of grandeur commonly accompany delusions of persecution—but obviously the Google folks are using some sort of keyword search to identify the right markets for various advertisers. Amazon does something similar. Vainly trying to identify the buying habits of the world’s most desultory reader, they always suggest exactly the wrong thing by proposing the items most similar to my last purchase. That’s pretty harmless, although the Amazon computer apparently believed I was a seminary student for most of last year, which was a bit spooky. Similar technology can be truly scary, however, if the government agencies read your email and qualify you as a person of interest on the basis of content analysis—I assume that’s what the NSA does with all those computers.

Many people have likened the evolving Internet to an enormous brain. It would be more accurate to liken it to a set of ganglia, however, since it has only rudimentary pattern recognition capability, no ability to understand or generate true language, and therefore operates with a crude, associational psychology. In this respect, it is well suited to interface with the American people, who are evolving or devolving convergently towards a similar mode of functioning. Note that the ‘logic’ of the Internet and public opinion have many formal similarities, in particular the inability to process negation. From a content point of view, “it is not the case that x” and “x” are both count as x, just as all publicity is good publicity. I used to call this phenomena the “hold the onions” effect because I discovered that asking a waitress to hold the onions resulted in no onions or a tremendous number of onions because what mostly got registered was just onions. The communication was subpropositional. Whether I got lots of onions or not probably depended upon how much she liked ‘em herself.

I look on the bright side. Understanding the world through an instrument organized like an invertebrate’s nervous system seems appropriate to our political condition, which, after all, has a lot of similarities to life in a tide pool. Anyhow the built-in stupidities make using the Internet rather like playing Madlibs. In the spirit of that game, let’s see what ads come up in response to this:

A twisted young fellow named Wallace
Once had an affair with a mollusk,
But that’s not as odd
As the brachiopod
Who buggered an ostrich for solace.

The Great Game

My friend Iris from Osh tells me that the Ferghana Valley resembles the Big Valley of California. Those central Asian place names—Tashkent, Samarkand, Bishkek—may conjure more exotic associations than Modesto; but their unfamiliarity is just a consequence of our ignorance. A lot of history has taken place in the various Stans, which, if you bother to look, are the geographical and cultural center of the Eastern hemisphere and mediated the interchanges between the great civilizations for thousands of years. All the great religions and diseases staged through these oases and bazaars; and now, following the Persians, Greeks, Hindus, Arabs, Chinese, Turks, Mongols, Russians, and Britons, we’ve arrived to place a piece or two on the venerable chess board. Central Asia, however, is distinctly different than Hades. Getting there isn’t easy; staying there is very hard indeed. In this respect, though I don’t know if the terrorist attacks and public riots in Uzbekistan last week are a real threat to the regime of Islam Karimov or the American garrison at Khanabad, the disturbances should serve to remind us that taking on Imperial responsibilities in this part of the world is far easier than living with them over the long run.

The Demon of Nonanalogy

I’ve been reading Henry Kamen’s sweeping history Empire: How Spain Became a World Power with the reverb on, even though I’m aware that the echoes of the present I detects in the adventures of the Prudent King are largely a literary effect. Agreeing with Hegel that no nation ever learned a thing from the past, I don’t buy the idea that history is philosophy teaching by example. Mostly we discover similarities between one situation and other because the historian has hidden them there like Easter eggs. The Spaniards had an empire once, and we’ve got one now; but the meaning, indeed, the reality of empire is totally different 400 years later. On the other hand, if positive metaphors such as “America is like Hapsburg Spain” are literally false, negative metaphors such as “America is not like Hapsburg Spain” are literally true; and the reasons America is not like Hapsburg Spain can be highly illuminating and perhaps even useful in thinking about current policy issues. One example:

Although the Hapsburg’s pioneered many of the techniques of modern administration—whatever else he was, Philip II was a tireless bureaucrat—the Spanish empire of the 16th and 17th Centuries was an astonishingly ramshackle structure that exerted only the most tenuous control over its immense domain. After absorbing Portugal and its dominions, the empire comprised all of the Iberian peninsula; the southern Netherlands; various principalities in what is now eastern France; many parts of Italy, including Milan, Naples, Sardinia, and Sicily; various enclaves on the North African shore; forts and trading stations in West Africa, the Azores and Canary Islands, all of the New World south of Florida, the Philippines; the Spice Islands; Malacca; Ceylon; and bits and pieces of India—a list comparable in scope and heterogeneity to the foreign deployment of American military personnel charted in Chalmers Johnson’s Sorrows of Empire. But we’ve got spy satellites, computers, cell phones, and drone surveillance aircraft armed with rockets to keep our imperium under the thumb. They had memos written in long hand, warships propelled by oars, and Jesuits. Moral issues aside—and I’m far more inclined to buy into the Black Legend version of Spanish history than Kamen—Philip’s empire just didn’t have the technical means to dominate its subjects on a modern scale. An empire with Xerox machines and security cameras is potentially a far worse threat to human freedom.

Braille Billboards

I hold no brief against advertising. In fact, I’ve written many, many ads myself over the years and much enjoyed the process. Of course, I was mostly advertising technical products. When you’re flogging linear programming software, the whole point is to efficiently inform the potential buyer of exactly what the product does. That doesn’t necessarily preclude humor or flash; and a suspicious number of subtly sexy biologists appear in journal ads for DNA sequencers; but the object is normally to sell your product rather than to increase the demand for a class of products. Contrast that situation with mass-market advertising. Ads for cars sell SUVs as well as Fords or BMWs. Ads for fast food promote gluttony as well as Big Macs.

In an old fantasy of mine, an advertising expert persuades Coke to buy advertising space on the bottom of coffin lids, “It’s a cheap buy; and you know if the dead really do rise at the Last Judgment, they’re going to be thirsty.” I don’t know if final victory over Pepsi would be worth this expense, but it doesn’t really matter. Winning a commercial contest is not as important to the bottom line as increasing the overall consumption of carbonated sugar water. In this respect, commercial competition is really a form of collusion.

The Arnold Rimmer Institute of International Relations

Debates about foreign policy are often represented as a fight between realists and idealists, but this way of posing the issues is deeply wrong headed. Attention to Real Politik and respect for international law are not alternatives. They aren’t on the same level. No sensible political figure can ignore the collisions of will and interest that structure world politics just because they are unpleasant. And nobody who ignores the need for legitimacy in the world can properly be said to be realistic. History, indeed, has a name for those who run roughshod over the sensibilities of other nations and their people in the name of manly cynicism. They are called losers.

It seems to me that there is an awful lot of little-boys-playing-with-tin-soldiers about the various tough guys who have surfaced in American public life while I’ve been watching the show. The Neo-con defense intellectuals are only the latest batch for whom it is not enough to win if you don’t crush somebody’s will or produce a satisfactory series of explosions. From a real Real Politik point of view, if you’ll allow the expression, the United States was actually better off with Saddam Hussein in power. A powerless, increasingly ridiculous, but completely secular tyrant would have kept the terrorists out of Iraq while giving us an excuse to maintain a presence in the region that didn’t seem to the locals to be part of a culture war. But waiting out the old monster wouldn’t have been any fun—or personal profit—to Richard Perle and the gang. The kids were itching to play war, having recently been denied that adolescent satisfaction by the celebrated quiet ending of the Soviet Union. It’s absurd to call their policies realistic: they are essentially recreational despite all the scowls and heavy breathing that are part of the fun.

Figures of Merit

It would certainly save time and bother if economics were really the physics of money instead of a branch of sociology that deals with how certain cultures organize their material life. In particular, people are very reluctant to give up the dream that wealth has an unambiguous standard—gold, food, labor, energy, or whatever—so that whatever policy maximizes that value would be economically best. In fact, at times successive theories of value have provided more or less adequate indices of prosperity, but only for particular purposes and specific groups. Bullion really was crucial in the Age of Mercantilism, at least for governments whose effective power depended on ready money and credit, just as labor power was critical in the Industrial Revolution. For that matter, one could make a case in 1850 that the wealthiest nations were those that produced the most pollution. Where there’s muck, there’s brass. But reeking rivers and lakes of coal tar are at best signs of economic activity. In themselves, they are anything but wealth. Similarly, though per capita energy use correlated with other measures of wealth in the 20th Century, no company every increased its profits by using more energy to produce the same output. Measures of wealth are like the figures of merit that engineers use to rate refrigerators or electric motors. They sometimes help the designer to improve a product, but if the better freezer has the worse figure of merit, you junk the figure of merit, not the freezer. With this characteristically elaborate preface, may I suggest that it’s about time we recognize that statistical measures such as the GDP, which apparently show growth, are actually masking the gradual impoverishment of the United States?

So What’s the Matter with Vengeance?

It is said to be virtuous to eschew political bickering in the 9/11 debate. To very slightly paraphrase Aaron Brown, the ventriloquist dummy of Sweet Reason, let us stop assigning blame and try to be constructive. And so forth. May I suggest that nothing in the current situation would be half as constructive as an accurate identification of who is to blame?

As quite a few people have noticed lately—it isn’t just me—the on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand bit automatically rewards those shrewd and ruthless enough to break the rules with maximum cynicism. It can make sense to remind everybody that there are failings on both sides, but if and only if the failings of both sides are equivalent in scale and character. In the case of the run up to 9/11, they pretty clearly are not. The Clinton administration sweated bullets over Bin Laden and his crew. The Bush administration simply ignored the threat, botched the response, and then changed the subject. Berger, Albright, and Cohen obviously failed to destroy Al-Qaeda and can and should be second-guessed for tactical and strategic mistakes; but they didn’t lie to the public, reflexively pass the buck, relentlessly vilify their critics, and stonewall investigations as Rice, Powell, and Rumsfeld did and continue to do. And despite 10,000 Xeroxed op ed pieces, it wasn't Clinton who wagged the dog: it was Bush. He’s the one who used a national tragedy for selfish political gain, and he and his gang deserve to pay the penalty for their failures and duplicities.

Indirect Vindication

On being advised never to eat anything bigger than my head, I took immediate steps to have my head enlarged. The administration has often followed analogous strategies. When Paul O’Neill published unclassified documents that revealed the ignorance and sloth of the President, Mr. Bush’s aides immediately tightened the rules for classifying documents.

Affirmative Action

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good. For example, the unwillingness of the administration to respond to criticism with any acknowledgement of error amounts to guaranteed job security for obviously incompetent public officials like Condi Rice. Removing her would be an inadmissible acknowledgement of failure or error so she stays on no matter how big a fool she makes of herself on the Sunday news shows. You can be forced out of the administration if you thwart some powerful insider. Crossing Rumsfeld cost Thomas White his job as Secretary of the Army—it sure wasn’t his significant role in the Enron scandal—but letting terrorists fly airplanes into large buildings is OK.

This Republican version of affirmative action is not intrinsically racial, but it is probably true that mediocre African-Americans have benefited from it disproportionately, correctly recognizing that their lack of talent will be overlooked in consideration of their political utility and dog-like loyalty. And negritude has other uses in this White House. For example, it allows Colin Powell to claim that his nose was brown before he took the job.

A Character Trait

Shortly after 9/11 it became clear that the administration had dropped the ball on anti-terrorism in the first months of its term. If you’ll recall, what seemed to be in the offing in the spring of that year was a confrontation with China; and that, rather than Ben Laden or the Israeli-Palestine problem, took up most of their energy and attention. This emphasis was an obvious error, but I wasn’t initially inclined to blame the Bush people too harshly. In foreign policy, administrations usually begin badly; and mistakes aren’t automatically criminal, even when they have terrible consequences. What already bothered me then, however, and strikes me as the most damning fact now is the utter refusal of anybody in the Bush administration to take any responsibility for what happened or to acknowledge any shortcomings whatsoever. In this respect, you have to admit they are consistent. This administration never, ever admits error about anything. I expect they have circulated a memo about it. It seems to be part of their premeditated general contempt for everyone else in the country and, indeed, the planet.

Unremarked Graves

After 9/11, a violent American reaction was inevitable. Mahatma Gandhi would have bombed Afghanistan. It was no more surprising that the enemies of the Taliban automatically became our friends, regardless of their own questionable behavior. We don’t criticize the dictators-for-life of Egypt or Pakistan either. In fact, we didn’t have anything but praise for the Taliban and Ben Laden when they were on our side in the Cold War. None of this bothers or at least surprises me since Real Politik makes for peculiar alliances, even discounting the ideology affinity, bordering on envy, that the current administration has consistently shown for authoritarian regimes. We should be clear headed about whom we’re supporting, however; and that’s yet another reason to bewail the absence of a free press in the United States.

The Northern Alliance did most of the fighting for us during the initial Afghanistan operation. In the process, they are now reported to have massacred something on the order of 3,000 prisoners and buried them in a mass grave. Story. Of course the story may turn out to be false or exaggerated. It may just as easily be understated. My point is that in the United States, it is simply unreported.

Doing the Time Warp Again

I moved to Connecticut just after the summer of love and experienced there for a second time and in the same sequence the fads, enthusiasms, and disappointments I had lived through in California. Like a golf tournament on television, the Cultural Revolution aired in New Haven with a tape delay. Two years later I spend a couple of days in Jonesboro, Arkansas where tie-die tee shirts were just appearing after an even longer lag. And for all I know, the Jefferson Airplane is finally touching down in Burkina-Faso even as I write this note.

News can’t travel faster the speed of light, but it can certainly travel slower. Most of human history has taken place in eras before the telegraph and radio allowed the events of war and diplomacy to take place more or less contemporaneously—the well-known instance of the Battle of New Orleans, fought weeks after the combatants had made peace, was no anomaly. But the time warp still applies to the spread of political facts among the general population, because such information travels through the retarding medium of the popular media and it’s transmission is slowed still more by the time it takes bemused, preoccupied, and poorly informed people to register it and pass it on—flatworms can learn a Y-maze in fewer reps than it takes the average American to notice that George Bush is a liar.

It sure isn’t September 1967, but deja vous has set in again for those of us who’ve been paying attention. It is quite startling to encounter media accounts that are just now taking notice of the extraordinary failures and deceptions of the Bush administration when the facts were in evidence years ago. It was often enough to read past the leads in newspaper articles or simply to apply commonsense to big, obvious facts. Richard Clarke’s “revelations,” for example, offer very little that wasn’t easily accessible in the public record back in 2001 and 2002. Similarly, the world press knew that the alarmist stories about the aluminum tubes, the mobile bioterror lab, and the Niger yellowcake were sheer propaganda the same week the administration put them out. I certainly did and I wasn’t trying that hard. And how can anybody possibly be surprised that the Bush policies are driving the deficit to historic levels? The man ran on an economic platform that asserted that 2 + 2 = 5. Although you don’t need to know how to calculate a hypergeometric distribution to detect the teensy error in that mathematics, the arduous journey from the premises to the conclusion is still under way for many Americans.

Finding Your Niche

Evolutionary theory continues to develop far from the noise of irrelevant public controversies about intelligent design. Recent thinking not only departs from the so-called Neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 40s and 50s, but has already gone beyond more recent, but already long-in-the-tooth enthusiasms such as punctuated equilibrium, selfish genes, and sociobiology. Much of what’s new is largely inaudible, not because it is impossibly complicated but simply because it has yet to find its Huxley, Gould, or Dawkins. Nobody has figured out how to glamorize what may turn out to be a slow revolution in how we think about evolution. I don’t know if I can solve this public relation’s problem, but perhaps I can provide a useful oversimplification of what’s going on. After all, though I was inspired to write this little piece by a recent book, Niche Construction: the Neglected Process in Evolution by F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman, I’ve been thinking down these lines myself for decades and can perhaps offer, if not new ideas, at least some new ways of explaining the new ideas.

The usual account maintains that the environment of organisms guides their evolution by establishing the rules of the game. Natural selection tends to favor individuals better suited to existing conditions, and these better-adapted organisms produce more offspring. What the organisms themselves do or experience is irrelevant to the process because acquired characteristics are not passed on to the next generation. What’s becoming obvious is that this very general picture is quite misleading, not because Lamarck was right and Weismann wrong, but because the activities of living things change their environment and therefore change the selection pressures that govern subsequent natural selection. To paraphrase Marx, and not accidentally, environments make organisms; but organisms make environments. Or, to quote Odling-Smee, et. al, “Rather than acting as an ‘enforcer’ of natural selection through the standard physically static elements of, for example, temperature, humidity, or salinity, because of the actions of organisms, the environment [can be] viewed as changing and coevolving with the organisms on which it acts selectively.”

Let’s begin simply. Many organisms move purposively; even bacteria can and do choose their environments to some degree. The planktonic species that rise and sink in the water column on a daily basis are not adapted to the ocean in general. They’re adapted to a narrow spatial and temporal zone inside the ocean. Many simple organisms pick their poison in more active ways. The bacteria that rot your teeth are not adapted to your mouth. They cultivate a much narrower plantation whose chemical and mechanical properties are maintained by their own collective activities. On a larger scale, innumerable species of animals burrow and have accordingly developed physiological and behavioral characteristics that make sense in a protected subterranean world but not outside of it. Or consider us. Distinctly human characters such as extended infancy and jumbo brains only make adaptive sense in a human world where vulnerable babies can be protected for many years and surpluses of food make it possible to maintain an energetically expensive nervous system.

It would be exceedingly easy to multiple examples. Indeed, once the principle is recognized, the relevant database is essentially coextensive with natural history. Charts in the Niche Construction list page after page of examples from every kingdom and phylum. What’s involved is not so much a discovery as a gestalt switch, seeing vases instead of faces. That sort of mutation has happened before in the history of the sciences. Thus the equations in Einstein’s 1905 relativity paper would have seemed quite familiar to many of the physicists of his time because the originality of the work did not lie in the discovery of any novel physical phenomena but in a reversal of perspective that suddenly made sense of a whole series of earlier results. Einstein didn’t invent the Lorentz transformations, which already, among many other things, implied that e = mc2 to anybody who passed Intermediate Algebra. Einstein looked at something old in a new way. But the Einsteinian eureka moment wasn’t just edifying: new science, including new discoveries flowed from it. Even granting the conceptual validity of the perspective, does rethinking evolution with an emphasis on the initiative of the organism and the evolution of environments change anything? In particular, will it allow biologists to solve existing puzzles in evolution and ecology; manage the environment; improve public health; or, crucially, attract grant money, the crankshaft and sine qua non of the scientific juggernaut?

Let me suggest two areas where the notion of niche construction seems to me to have immediate explanatory value: explaining the pace of evolution and explaining the evolution of complicated nervous systems:

1. Niche construction can result in positive feedback, thus drastically accelerating genotypic as well as phenotypic change. It’s likely that the practice of herding cattle greatly increased the adaptive value of tolerance to milk sugars for pastoral people, for example; but as a larger percentage of the population became lactose tolerant, dairy farming became more valuable. Or consider what may be the most sumptuous niche construction project on the planet, human language—The House of Being, according to Martin Heidegger. Absent language and the ability to accumulate knowledge that it makes possible, it’s hard to see how the enormous energetic cost of the human brain could have been amortized, not to mention the many physiological and behavioral alterations required by an oversized head and an interminable childhood. A smart animal without words is very like the proverbial Michelangelo without hands. The appearance of even rudimentary language surely had a significant multiplier effect on the adaptive value of intelligence.

I expect that evolution as a whole has been accelerated—if not simply made possible, period—by the niche construction mechanism. Over and beyond what specific adaptations become feasible in a partly controlled environment, the activities of living things make their surroundings generally more predictable and thus focus natural selection in much the same way a judge makes a trial manageable by narrowing down what is at issue in each case. In a safer world, the right ones are more likely to die without reproducing, the trap door spider who isn’t good making a trap rather than the spider who just happened to get stepped on. There are relatively few truly random deaths in the human world, for example, so that the deaths that do occur are likely to have biological significance while in a postulated state of nature, the signal provided by differential mortality would be largely swamped by the background noise. Civilization may indeed allow some of the weak and sick to survive and even reproduce, but it also spares many healthy and strong individuals who would otherwise have died of irresistible illnesses or accidents.

Odling-Smee, et. al. point out that niche construction can also retard evolutionary change. The Galapagos woodpecker finch has adopted a life style similar to woodpeckers, for example, but without the developing a similarly sharp, pointed bill or long tongue. The culturally transmitted use of a cactus spine as a tool to peck for insects has apparently rendered these anatomical adaptations unnecessary much as knives, forks, and fire allow people to eat meat without fangs or claws.

2. The learning that organisms do in their lifetimes can have an effect on subsequent generations by providing offspring with a better environment or by the cultural transmission of useful information. The value of learning, however, depends crucially on the regularity of the environment. In a chaotic world, drawing conclusions is risky or pointless since there is literally nothing to learn. Where fine-grained knowledge of the world doesn’t avail, the most adaptive strategy may be learn to slowly so that only the big, coarse lessons are absorbed after many trials. In a world that makes sense, the fastest learners have a huge advantage. One of the general consequences of niche construction, therefore, may be to make greater intelligence more adaptive by ensuring that animals grow up in a simplified, if not positively dumbed-down world.

Protecting a Trademark

Taken together, the deceptions of the Bush administration are like one of those ten dollar chocolate decadence desserts that features chocolate chip chocolate ice cream on top of a brownie swimming in fudge sauce with semi-sweet chocolate shavings on top. Though a little monotonous, the stylistic unity of the confection is impressive. Under the circumstances it’s easy to be distracted by the small lies that garnish the big ones. If you look carefully, however, you can see that the claim that the administration favors democracy is the largest item on the plate and easily dwarfs items like the bit about the African uranium or Bush’s military record or even the comprehensive and continuing misrepresentation about tax policy and the budget. At the very least, when an administration spokesperson writes about democracy, they should print the word as Democracy™ since we can be sure that the product in question has nothing to do with the consent of the governed and has about as much similarity to its notional referent as non-fat lard has to pig blubber. True, if the people of a weak and despised state vote as we wish them to, we may not invade or bankroll a coup. In this respect, we are exactly as fervent in our support of the popular franchise as the Soviets who, after all, also steadfastly supported the people’s inalienable right to vote for the government candidate.

Wonderful Life 3 — Direct to Tape

The first “It’s a Wonderful Life” was a sentimental but inevitable movie much loved by my reactionary but good-hearted nephew. The second was Stephen Jay Gould’s paleontological romance about the weird critters in the Burgess Shale. The third, should it ever appear, would be a memoir about my career as an Epicurean god. There’s no getting around it. Here’s the shit pool and there’s the sign, “The Pig is In.”

Between the Big Bang and the Long Whimper, there will have been only the briefest instant of awareness in cosmic history. It’s almost too good to find yourself not only in the general vicinity of the only action in town, but with a front row seat. Even inside human history, the late 20th/ early 21st Century are surely privileged since, to speak of the sciences anyway, very little was understood before 1900 and the stuff that will get figured out after 2050 is likely to be small potatoes. The secrets of nature, like fossil hydrocarbons, are a wasting asset; but for the time being we get to drive SUVs.

The Pornographic Theater of Morality

Nobody’s in jail for smoking cigarettes, but hundreds of thousands are incarcerated for illegal drug use. Meanwhile, the use of tobacco has declined drastically with 40% fewer smokers and half as many cigarettes smoked per capita than 1960. Anti-drug efforts have not had anything like this success despite the obvious human suffering they inflict on drug users and their families. No mystery here: the anti-tobacco people want to improve public health while the anti-drug forces have allowed morality to get in the way of doing the right thing. If you’re in the business of putting on passion plays, the last thing you want to do is actually convert the devil. As Augustine almost said, “Save them, but not yet!”

Un Petit Combination…

is a little gimmick in a game of chess that secures a tiny but significant advantage without the flash and noise of some complicated strategem. Such elegance finesses characterized the style of the former world champion, J.R. Capablanca. They are impressive because everybody can understand them, but very few can find them during a game. I ran across something like a petit combination in an early chapter of Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, the posthumous masterpiece of E.T. Jaynes, a book which has finally been published after a long and almost legendary career in manuscript. Jaynes manages to duplicate in a couple of paragraphs the famous Kurt Godel finding that no mathematical system can prove its own consistency. Since, fraud that I am, page 45 of this tome is probably as far into the work as I’m going to get with any detectable level of understanding, I take this opportunity to boil the argument down still further for the benefit of anybody whose aptitude for higher math is even more fraudulent than mine:

It is a well known that any conclusion whatsoever can be validly drawn from contradictory premises. In particular, the conclusion, “This system is consistent” can easily be derived from inconsistent premises.

Worked out example:

If Ernie is a drunken sot and Ernie is not a drunken sot, then Ernie is a drunken sot. But if it’s true that Ernie is a drunken sot, it’s also true that either Ernie is a drunken sot or these premises are consistent. But if Ernie is a drunken sot and Ernie is not a drunken sot, then Ernie is not a drunken sot. And if Ernie is not a drunken sot and it’s true that either Ernie is a drunken sot or these premises are consistent, these premises are consistent. QED. Repeat until you are a drunken sot.

Reducing the Sauce

The Hegelian Encyclopedia begins with Being but immediately asserts that “this mere Being, as it is mere abstraction, is therefore the absolutely negative: which, in a similarly immediate aspect, is just Nothing.” J.N. Findley, a grand old Hegel scholar whose voice, stately and sonorous, could easily be taken for the voice of the Absolute Spirit itself or, alternatively, the reverberating echoes of the Malabar Caves, strictly forbid graduate students from writing papers about this particular dialectical move. It was too easy. Thinking the ALL may impress a certain sort of suburban mystic; but it is, after all, a piece of cake. You want to see me think the ALL? I can do it again if you weren’t watching—six times before lunch if necessary. Extremely general theories of history can also amount to a similarly grandiose nullity since, from a long way off, everything looks like a fly.

David Christian’s Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History is not that empty, though anybody who has spent a fair amount of the last thirty years reading attempts to think what happened in history will recognize that what is synthesized in its pages is not human history with all the trimmings but the arguments of perhaps two dozen books. That’s not a small labor in itself. The books that seem to matter for the author—Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel; William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples; Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism; Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony; K.N. Chaudhuri’s Asia Before Europe; Gordon Child’s Man Makes Himself; Carlo Chipolla’s Before the Industrial Revolution; Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism; Terrance Deacon’s the Symbolic Species; Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process; Ernest Gellner’s Plough, Sword, and Book; Marvin Harris’ Culture, People, Nature; E.J. Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes; Karl Jasper’s Origin and Goal of History; Michael Mann’s The Sources of Social Power; Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China; Geoffrey Parker’s The Military Revolution; Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Revolution; E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class; Charles Tilly’s Coercion, Capital, and European States; Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World System; Eric Wolfe’s Europe and the People without History; and a couple of oldies but goodies like works by Marx and Weber—comprise a pretty formidable Freshman reading list, from which, incidentally, I’ve omitted most of the cosmic and evolutionary material. Not bad for the view from down under in 2003. And Christian’s distilling does leave a residue: no matter how much you’d like to avoid admitting it, human history really is about how minority groups have gone about exploiting majorities.

I have adapted my own boiled down version of history from Hegel. According to Hegel, there have been three ages of history that correspond to the successive recognitions that one person is free (Asiatic despotism), some people are free (Greek city states); and everybody is free (Germanic modernity). I’ve improved on that outline by adding a dialectical next stage in which the moderns, disappointed by the largely formal freedoms of the contemporary state, insist that everybody ought to be as free as an ancient tyrant.

“The Workhorse of Mammal Penis Research, the Armadillo”

In the oldest literary works, the first word or words of the body of the text served as the title as well. Thus Bereshit, “In the beginning,” is the Hebrew name for Genesis and the title of the Babylonian creation epic, Enumah Elish, is simply “When what is above was not yet called the sky…” Early Greek works were often called “About x”—according to Diogenes Laertes, the Pre-Socratic philosophers normally titled their main works About Nature (Peri Phusis); but most ancient works were given their names by anonymous editors long after they were compiled. More complicated and intriguing titles, presumably contrived by individual authors, came later. Plutarch’s titles are rather more fun than the essays they name: How a Young Man Should Listen to Poems, On the Malice of Herodotus, Whether and Elderly Man Should Engage in Politics. Rabelais recognized that titles didn’t even need a text. Chapter 7 of the First Book of First Book of Pantagruel is mostly a list of books from the Library of Saint Victor, including the useful Ars honeste petandi in sociatate (The Proper Method of Farting in Public) and the indispensable Advanced Ass Kissing for Graduate Students as well as the How to Eat Goats with Artichokes, Even When the Church Forbids It and the classic Quaestio subtilissima, utrum Chimera in vacuo bombinastans possit comedere secundus intentione, et fuit debatuta per decem hebdomadas in concilio Constantiensis (The Infinitely Suble Question of Whether the Chimera, Bombinasting in the Void, Can be Nourished on Second Intentions—Debated for ten weeks at the Council of Constance). I suppose the collection would now include several recent plays such as Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad, The Death and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Clarendon Under the Direction of the Marquise de Sade, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Constipated by Tom Stoppered. But titles don’t have to be jokes to be memorable. Consider the grave Victorian music of Darwin’s titles: The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilized by Insects or The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms or, indeed, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.

I love titles almost as much as footnotes. It’s only the body of the books that puts me off; for I subscribe to the theory, universally held by bookworms like me, that the sole function of the text is to keep the table of contents from running into the bibliography. In this spirit, I make it a practice to use apparently arbitrary titles to conceal the secret and profound meaning of my own little essays by way of a make work project for graduate students in the alternative universe where my texts will be expanded upon as interminably as the works of Moses or Freud or Marx are in these parts.

Stunned Ox Pills

Since things conspire to make you more and more of a fool all the time, it makes sense to stupefy yourself even more than necessary just to regain helm control. Or, to put things more prosaically, which is, after all, kinda the point, it sometimes helps to squint at the world and attend only to the looming outlines of things instead of the details. Anyhow, displays of professional subtlety are irrelevant when you aren’t up for tenure. Instead of attempting to get it just right, how about replacing the exquisitely specific question with a coarser, more easily answered question? In political discussions, for example, it often helps to look not at legalistic particulars but at the envelope of the debate, the strategies served by the tactics. Outside of a courtroom, where atomic facts are rightly dispositive, it doesn’t matter very much what you decide about this, that, or the other nicety of international diplomacy. What you must understand, to understand anything at all, are irrefutable general facts such as the implacable hostility of American foreign policy to popular government in the Western hemisphere. We will work to overthrow any regime whatsoever that reflects the interests and desires of the mass of the population. A government doesn’t have to be a Marxist to be marked for destruction. As the current Haitian instance demonstrates, winning a legitimate election is enough. The record is quite clear: though the vicissitudes of Real Politik might oblige us to tolerate a Caribbean democracy now and then, the Monroe Doctrine is very much about propping up oligarchs. Let’s not be too clever about it.

The Particulars

I find it remarkable that really fundamental new facts about how living things work turn up all the time. The 5 March issue of SCIENCE, for example, features the discovery of a previously unknown way that an important class of white blood cells, the neutrophils, attack and disable bacteria. As any textbook will inform you, these cells engulf and destroy bacteria by phagocytosis; but it turns out they also know another trick. They can release DNA and various proteins that form a tangle of fibers, neutrophil extracellular traps or NETs, that immobilize and neutralize bacteria outside the cell. The cover of the 5 March issue is a scanning electron microscope image of Staphylococcus aureus caught in such a web. The bacteria look like oranges stuck in macramé. Apparently, the NET mechanism is a routine feature of innate immunity, activated in every pimple in Christendom. You have to wonder why it was so hard to identify the process and what else is going on all over the place that we haven’t discovered yet. And these things aren’t the details. They’re the particulars.

What Counts as Vanilla?

Public health professionals have long complained that they lack reliable information about human sexual behavior. No entomologist would publish a paper on the maculated okra beetle without knowing more about its natural history than anybody knows about the doings of our own kind. Who does what to whom and how often is highly relevant to policy issues ranging from population control to the spread of HIV, but any attempt to find out automatically raises a hell of a fight and not out of concern about privacy or personal rights. The presumption is that the professors are obsessed with sex and already know too much when, in fact, our ignorance is quite comprehensive. But sex isn’t the area in which endless discussion goes along with a lack of baseline information. For example:

We supposedly live in an era of rampant scientism. This presumption allows devotees of various alternative points of view to represent themselves as daring rebels. I have to wonder whether they are really entitled to romanticize themselves in this fashion, however, since nearly everybody I meet is into astrology or Chinese herbal medicine or homeopathy or intelligent design or morphic resonance or spiritualized quantum mechanics or telekinesis or tarot or ESP or, in one memorable recent instance, traditional alchemy. Amid these dense flocks, it’s the stray positivist who appears as the lone eagle; and that’s in the context of the kind of people I meet, hardly a random sample. To judge by the membership and financial clout of various literalist religious groups, the population as a whole is even more haunted—literally. Many even claim that the dead rise. Survey sampling provides some information on what people actually believe, but the method is a very blunt instrument. Granted that people only seldom think the way they are supposed to as members of a high-tech, postmodern civilization, it would be useful to understand the real worldview of the tribe.

I once read a case study of a supposedly schizophrenic girl who reported that she could read minds and was hospitalized, in part because of this delusion. The shrink who studied her case took the trouble to interview her family and discovered that they one and all believed she could indeed read their minds. Like an unlucky medieval peasant, the girl made the mistake of maintaining a folk belief too obstinately before the wrong tribunal.

An Enthymeme

In the heyday of the old Soviet regime, Gosplan was the agency that managed the entire economy. Since Gosplan couldn’t evaluate the performance of a firm by looking at its balance sheet—Communism wasn’t about profits—it measured physical output instead. The results were predictable. The manager of the glassworks made very, very thin glass indeed because he was rewarded for putting out the most square meters of windowpane. The same mechanism guaranteed that steel beams would be immensely heavy in order to increase the total number of tons produced by a plant. Unfortunately, similar idiocies can and do occur in capitalist economies. An example:

American drug companies spend an enormous amount of money developing new drugs in order to increase their profits. Because their priorities are set by the market and the market reflects the buying power of people with money, this way of organizing things ensures that baldness will be a more attractive target for research dollars than, say, multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. Even ignoring this obvious fact, however, and focusing on the response to any given disease, the current system automatically misallocates research money because a huge proportion of research is conducted to match existing and effective drugs with related equivalents that aren’t covered by the same patent. Of course, the variants may be somewhat better than the originals or at least have more amusing side effects; but most of the time they are only sought as a way of making money to make money. The President of Pfizer is gaming the system no less than the commissars who ran the steel mills of Magnitogorsk. Because we’re a much wealthier nation than the USSR ever was, we’ve been able to tolerate this and many other built in inefficiencies with less obvious strain. That may be changing. After all, the Soviets were also able to compete globally for many decades with an economy distorted by ideology; eventually they paid the price.

Ex Parte

When criminal sentences are rigidly mandated by law, the branch that gains in power is not the legislature that makes the law but the executive that enforces it, especially when, as is so often the case, universal application of the law is impossible. Authoritarians love drug, obscenity, and vice laws, even though they are as likely as anybody else to violate them personally. The always highly arbitrary enforcement of such statutes gives them a useful weapon to destroy or silence their political rivals and keep the niggers down, and mandatory penalties ensure that no judge can temper injustice with equity. Since anybody conversant with political history knows how this game is played, it isn't decent to legislate as if such abuses were an accidental consequence of otherwise harmless demagogy. I don't know if we ought to legislate morality at all, but I'm sure we ought to legislate morally.

A Genuine Question

It has become something of a commonplace to claim that a leftist variety of anti-Semitism is on the rise, especially in Europe; but what I mostly encounter is hostility to Likud-style Zionism. Now some versions of this critical attitude may or may not be warranted or even licit, but I don’t think I’ve heard any leftist attacks on Jews per se, though I’d hardly be surprised if there were some. What seems more likely is that the neocons are engaging in an extension of an old rhetorical move. Just as McCarthy and his cohorts lumped New Deal democrats in with authentic communists and the contemporary right has more recently floated the merely stupid notion of a Marxist Hilary Clinton, people like Victor Davis Hanson speak as if an attack on a particular nationalistic ideology amounted to an assault on a whole race or religion, despite the fact that many of the loudest critics of Israel’s policies are not only Jews but Israelis (Ze’ev Sternhell) or even Zionists (Noam Chomsky). If there is a groundswell of genuine anti-Semitism—and maybe there is—I wish somebody would identify the perpetrators and lay off with the facile name-calling.

The Monkeys Tell No Tales in Zamboanga

A few hours after writing a note about our dubious activities in Guantanamo, I ran across this report on the BBC about American human rights violations at concentration camps in Afghanistan. Obviously I have no independent way of assessing whether the report over or understates the seriousness of the situation. But that’s a big part of the problem. Our toothless and corrupt media certainly can’t be counted on to inform the public. In this, as in every other real issue the Press maintains its normal position: finger in the wind, thumb up the ass. Meanwhile, even decently conducted wars are vile affairs; and a war conducted in secret by a violent and duplicitous administration is likely to be far worse than that.

Osama Has Already Won

While people argue endlessly as to how much damage Ashcroft’s antiterrorism campaign has inflicted on American civil liberties, a potentially more important consequence of our overreaction is largely undiscussed, at least outside of the science journals. Since 9/11 and in large part because of new immigration and visa policies, the United States has become a less attractive place for foreigners to go to school. The bright young engineers and scientists who used to travel here to grad school are more like to stay home or train in other countries rather than run the gauntlet of paranoid bureaucrats. [Reference] Since our economy has been dependent on draining talent from the rest of the world for a very long time, this change does not augur well for our continued prosperity, especially since it reinforces other developments that are gradually making the United States a less attractive destination.

Very few people pointed out at the time that Spain was hurting itself by expelling the Jews or dared to inform Louis XIV that the Huguenots made France rich. It’s about time somebody told somebody who matter in these parts that discouraging productive people from moving to the country is a very similar stupidity. At least the Catholic Kings were motivated by religious scruple and righteous bigotry. The explanation of our behavior—you can hardly call it a reason—is even less attractive. We just plain got scared all out of proportion to the realistic threat.

Martha and the Separation of Powers

I have no opinion as to the guilt or innocence of Martha Stewart, although I expect my Republican nephew is right that her support of Democratic candidates had something to do with the way in which the whole affair was conducted. Whatever the motives of the prosecutors, however, the case underlines how much power we’ve given these creatures of the executive at the same time that mandatory sentencing guidelines have turned trial judges into powerless clerks. Ever since Congress discovered that legislating draconic and automatic punishments could win them easy points with a vindictive or fearful public, judges have not have the ability to moderate excessive prosecutions with lenient sentences. All of the discretion vests with the prosecutors, who are responsible to no one. Ironically, this gradual change in our judicial system brings us in line with the traditional practices of Imperial China where it was felt that an independent judiciary would thwart the sacred will of the son of heaven and mandatory minimums were the universal rule.

Haiti and Iraq

Reality, as I like to say, may not be coherent; but it is stringy. The current Bush administration claims that it can do whatever it likes to the prisoners in Guantanamo because technically the base is located on Cuban rather than American soil and neither our constitution nor international law apply to those imprisoned there. This casuistry is not new. It was invented by the first Bush administration to cover the detention and brutalization of Haitian refugees back in 1992. The only difference, if it is indeed a difference, is that the mistreatment of the Haitians has long since been documented in detail whereas we don’t know what’s going on these days in Guantanamo, anymore than we know what horrors are being committed in our name in Iraq.

One-A-Day Brand

After obsessing over picky details and exquisite subtleties for years, newly minted PhDs can be counted on to terrorize their students for a year or two with pointless displays of erudition and the dreaded oral footnote. It usually takes a while to recognize that you’re doing very well if you communicate a single important idea in every class meeting and that 30 significant concepts a semester is a highly worthwhile goal. Learning is a physiological process that takes time and sleep. To speak like a chemist, the volume of input is not the rate-limiting step.

In the spirit of this observation, I offer a single thought:

Many historians and analysts have noted that periods of increased immigration have typically coincided with eras of reaction in the United States. Conversely, when immigration abates and formerly despised newcomers become familiar neighbors, Americans become more progressive because they are eager to help those perceived as their own kind. The complacent assumption behind many versions of this cyclical theory is that new groups will indeed eventually be assimilated. However—and this is the thought of the day—the process of assimilation always depended upon the dynamism of the American economy. It required exponential growth to absorb the millions who came. Failing some new economic revolution of the scale of the settlement of the empty lands of the west or the industrial revolution, why should we expect the new immigrants to be integrated into the American system except as the domestic representatives of the wretched lower caste of the neoliberal world economic order? And what kind of politics goes along with a huge, permanent underclass?

Believing is to Hearing what Lying is to Speaking

If God really is dead, then nothing is permitted since there’s nobody around to do any permitting. And that’s not just a logical deduction. Historical experience suggests the same thing. It isn’t the skeptics and liberals who demonstrate bloody resolve or commit the great historical crimes but those who operate in the service of History, Race, Allah, Yahweh, or some other absolute authority. There aren’t that many Raskolnikovs but there are lots and lots of Rasputins. Indeed, the most cogent objection to rationalism has always been that it makes people timid.

Most believers are neither ax murderers nor crazed monks, of course; but they do demonstrate a notable proclivity for lesser offenses. In particular, they lie efficiently and often because they lie with a good conscience. Those of us who do not possess the teacher’s edition of the book of life, the one with the answers in the back, tend to be careful about what we say because nothing supports our word except our own uncertain lights and whatever integrity we can muster. Meanwhile, the faithful have a highly convenient “for the sake of which” that covers all infractions and a host of motivational speakers to bolster their self esteem. So they talk to each other and themselves as one talks to children, promoting all sorts of things they know to be false because they assume that it’s for a higher good if not a higher truth. And even when they don’t open their mouths, they dissemble with their ears by listening approvingly to falsehoods.

Accessories After the Fact

Did American military personnel kidnap Aristide? As usual, the press is asking the wrong question because the answer to the right question is not so easy to pettifog. Showing up with heavily armed men and making threats can perhaps be represented as a rescue, at least by PR professionals with experience in the tobacco industry; but there’s no way to spin the fact that our government has worked for three years to oust another elected leader in favor of unelected and violent oligarchs. The coup has our fingerprints all over it as, of course, everybody knows but very few care so long as the miserable and despised Haitians don’t try to come here. Aristides’ removal itself may be of minor direct benefit to the Bush regime, but it has the considerable merit of making the American public complicit in a violation of international law.

Drip, Drip, Drip

The Bush administration continues to stack the deck by appointing its ideological allies to important scientific commissions, in this case the group that advises on stem-cell research. (reference)

If you only hear about one or two of these moves, you may believe that critics of the regime are just paranoid. Allow me to make the Baysian point that this kind of sweet reasonableness makes perfectly good sense when dealing with sweetly reasonable people but not when you aren't.

The Suppressed Fifth Chapter of Ecce Homo: Why I am so fat

Recently published research shows that television leads to obesity in small children not so much because of the hours they spend in a motionless trance before the screen, but because of the irresistible advertisements for junk food they are exposed to. As one of the researchers commented in a radio interview, kids under seven believe everything they hear and see. Presumably adults do better; but tendency of people to believe what they hear is very strong. Under laboratory conditions, grownups may be capable of distinguishing between image and reality; but they seldom do so in the wild. You frequently read that the great thing to learn is how to learn, but it is just as important to learn how not to learn. My field research indicates that the second lesson is seldom successful.

I recall a freshman who was unhappy because he had to read the Republic. “What’s with this old stuff? Plato didn’t know about relativity and quantum mechanics like we do.” World-class naïf that I am, I responded, “Gee, I didn’t even know you were a physics major.” But if it is common for particular people to act as if they somehow possess the knowledge and capabilities that actually pertain to a few specialists, it is even more common to define humanity generically in terms of characteristics that are seldom in evidence in the day-to-day behavior of individuals. Is man a rational animal? Not very damned often. As Piaget showed, at a certain age people become capable of what he terms abstract operations and can, therefore understand why a tall beaker doesn’t necessarily contain more fluid than a short one. In the real world, however, individuals do not routinely function at this level, which is perhaps why wine makers go on putting a dimple in the bottom of the wine bottles.

Being rational means, if nothing else, having fully human language; and people certainly do talk. But while adult speech certainly can not be boiled down to a congeries of stimuli and responses as B.F.Skinner used to claim, from a natural history perspective a large proportion of our discourse does consist of bouncing ready-made phrases off one another. The creative aspect of language production, the human ability to produce an indefinite number of grammatical sentences at will, is seldom strenuously exercised; and as with music, most of the creativity on display is a matter of performance, not composition. The real problem, however, is not that new and relevant statements are not uttered often enough but that they aren’t heard often enough. Fully human speech reception requires the activation of the same capabilities as speech production. It is easier to react like a pigeon in a Skinner box and assimilate verbal input to a short list of expected signals, thus becoming a perfect victim for the reinforcement schedules of the political and corporate manipulators.

CSI Jerusalem

I haven’t seen Mel Gibson’s Jesus movie yet, and I won’t review anything before I see it. Whether a review is the right format for commentary on a work like this is not obvious, however, since the debate about the movie is not about how well a director handled a theme or an actor realized a character but about the ethical validity, political effects, and public health implications of putting out a modern Obergammau Passion play. Anything can be done well or badly. Some bodice rippers handle the conventions of the genre with panache, others just don’t stir the juices of middle-aged ladies. There are well conducted bull fights and bad ones, well filmed fisting scenes in pornos and others that just don’t come off, more or less believable snuff movies. Apparently, to take the word of many people who have seen the movie, Gibson produced something that works on its own terms. The issue is precisely the terms.

One thing is clear. Gibson is hardly breaking new ground. Christians have been working themselves into a state of morbid excitement over the wounds of Christ for a couple of thousand years now. The pleasure the faithful draw from this spiritual self-abuse is one of the engines of the religion, just as the Shiites gain energy by flagellating themselves every year in memory of the martyred Ali. It would be an error, therefore, to accuse Gibson of perverting the meaning of the Gospels since he isn’t introducing any novelties. What’s wrong with the movie is also wrong with Christianity, though obviously there is a lot more to Christianity than a sadomasochistic obsession with the Cross.

The Others

Five hundred years after Copernicus, many people are aware that the Earth isn’t in the middle; but we still think geocentrically as the view out the window had a special privilege. Now it may be true, to paraphrase Tip O’Neil, that all astronomy is local; yet I find it curious that we don’t seldom even bother to map our situation relative to nearby stars. Where is Sirius relative to Alpha Centauri or Arcturus?—just to mention a few neighborhood hot spots barely beyond Local Fluff and well within the Local Bubble. And where is superman or Captain Kirk supposed to find a road map? The only book I’m aware of that offers a cartographic look at our corner of the universe is Nigel Henbest and Heather Cooper’s Guide to the Galaxy. A sample.

Parochialism also rules our view of living things. Although we a perfectly aware, or should be, that the dominant life forms on earth are bacterial, not only in respect of their ubiquity, mass, and sheer numbers, but because the prokaryotes are a vastly more varied group than the relatively monotonous eukaryotes—biochemically speaking, it’s hard to distinguish a shitake mushroom from the governor of California and that’s not just this year. Even when people do deign to notice the microbes, it’s almost always in a medical context as if the bacteria never had anything better to do than give us the runs. That’s why I got a kick out of finding A Field Guide to the Bacteria by Betsy Dexter Dyer at Borders the other day. Checking out delta proteobacteria in sulfur-rich environments is unlikely to replace birdwatching as a popular hobby, but a natural history appreciation of bacteria corrects the same kind of error of perception that comes from thinking of the stars as bright lights on the inside of a sphere. (A more synoptic but equally genial tour of the whole world of living things may be found in the third edition of Five Kingdoms by Lynn Margulis and Karlene V. Schwartz.)

Two or More of You

Back in 1990, I met a charming grad student at a Thanksgiving party in Berkeley. I recognized her last name, and asked her about it. Sure enough, she really was a descendent of a certain Austrian military man. The general in question was notable for almost defeating Napoleon in Italy in1800. Indeed, by the afternoon of the critical battle, Melas had his army in full pursuit of the routed French. Unfortunately, as the wounded but apparently triumphant general was getting his head bandaged, an exploding caisson and a spontaneous cavalry charge reversed the results of the day, thus ensuring the young Napoleon would go on to become Emperor of the French, terrorize Europe for another decade and a half, and get his cook to invent chicken Marengo. My encounter with the general’s descendent was also fated thereby, along with the advice she gave me about a scholarly question. She was (and is) a comparative literature maven and an expert, among other things, on Greek literature. I asked her about recent work on Homer, and she recommended Gregory Nagy’s Best of the Achaeans. As much as I would have desired it, personal circumstances prevented me from encountering the lady again; but I’ve been reading Nagy ever since.

Homer has been important to me since childhood. I didn’t pull a Schliemann and dedicate my life to a search for the historical Troy because I had happened to hear a drunk German reciting the Iliad in Greek from a tabletop in a Latvian saloon; but sometime after I found my sister’s paperback copy of the Rouse prose translation, I determined to learn enough Greek to read the poem myself and eventually I did, sort of—my linguistic abilities were almost as feeble then as they are now. I may have inherited my taste for the epics from my father, who loved the Odyssey and whose memory was so remarkable that he could forget the poem entirely in two years and thus give himself the pleasure of reading it for the first time over and over again. (On the odd years he read Don Quixote.)

Granted my reverential attitude towards Homer, it was a shock to learn that many scholars believe that the epics were not written by a single author. The Homeric Question has been a live issue since Frederick William Wolf published his Prolegomena to Homer in 1795, but it was news to me in 1962. I thought it was an infamous heresy, an outrage to my youthful romanticism—I didn’t know anything yet about the Volkish variety of romanticism that actually celebrates collective authorship of the epics. But over and beyond wanting to keep my faith in genius and the productive imagination, I had a more substantial reason to reject the thesis of many Homers. The traditional argument for multiple authors has always depended on contradictions in the poem, but what struck me at 16 was just the reverse—the impressive consistency of the works, the perfection of the design, the unwavering objectivity of vision. Like Jesus in the Gospels, the heroes in the Iliad always seemed to say things in the best possible way on every occasion. I was much less impressed by gaffes like the three ambassadors to Achilles who turn into two in Book Nine. It didn’t strike me as particularly surprising if a single author made mistakes like that. If Cervantes, who presumably was an individual man and not a folk tradition, could get Don Quixote’s ass stolen and then mysteriously restored, a single, real Homer was likewise entitled to nod.

When I actually read the Greek text, my ideas gradually changed but not because of the often discussed contradictions. I came to believe in the collective authorship of the epics for the same reason I used to deny it. If the poems had a very specific kind of perfection, I decided, it was precisely because many years or centuries of singers and listeners had worked over the material. That’s where Nagy comes in. Working in the tradition of Albert Lord and Milman Parry and partly on the basis of their field observations of living traditions of oral poetry in the Balkans, Nagy fleshed out a performative theory of the origin of the epics and explored its implications. Nagy understands the current text of the Iliad as the outcome of a long series of creations and recreations of material from deep in the Indo-European past—he’s famous, or infamous, for finding a semantic and metrical cognate for the epithet kleos aphithiton (unperishable glory) in the Vedic Sanskrit sravas aksitam, which means the same thing. As speculative as these Dumezilian details of may be, Nagy’s general view of the origins of the epics is a revelation. In any case, having changed the terms of the debate without writing the last word, much as Noam Chomsky seems to have permanently changed linguistics without coming up with an adequate grammar of any language, the further ifs, and, and buts don’t seem so important.

In ancient literature at least, perfection seems to belong to those works that were essentially communal and oral. The works of the scribes are much less consistent. The authors of the various segments of the Jewish Bible are supposed to have been divinely inspired. It is a more stringent test of one’s faith to find the hand of God in the hacks who edited the final product, however, though their efforts were vastly better than whoever is guilty of the received version of the Koran. Meanwhile, the parts of scripture that do reflect a long oral tradition—some of the Psalms rework older non-Jewish poems we know from archeological digs at Ugarit and elsewhere—have the same inevitability as Homer’s language. I also believe that the great literary merit of the King James translation derives from its long incubation in a tradition of speaking. Generations of preachers worked on earlier versions of an English Bible so that the final product reflects an immense body of pulpit experience. The great old literary works were cooked up slowly in a broth of performative tradition.

The old joke has it that a camel is a horse built by a committee. The joke, like many others, is at best misleading. Most things produced by committees are outlandish or mediocre, but so are most things produced by individuals.

The Company He Chooses

I’ve heard quite a few television pundits suggests that it will be hard to convict or even indict Ken Lay for his activities at Enron. They educe every conceivable difficulty except the most obvious. Or has anyone heard anybody pointing out that Feds may be reluctant to go after Ken Lay because of his intimate connection to George Bush? Over the years, Ken Lay has been Bush’s number one backer. Their publicly available correspondence, more voluminous than many a packet of love letters, testifies to a very long affair indeed. Now this association doesn’t prove anything sinister, any more than the well-known business connection between the Bush family and the Ben Ladens, but it is surely relevant, especially since the then governor helped Lay with various deals in Texas.

Of course, the Feds may get Lay after all, perhaps striking a deal that offers him a reduced sentence in exchange for not helping them prosecute his accomplices.

The Latin Word for the Opposite of Trivia

You learn something new every day or, if you don’t, you simply aren’t trying. What surprises me, though, is how often what I encounter isn’t simply novel but in one way or another fundamental, a concept and not just another detail supplying local color to some corner or other of the cosmos.

If you think of the universe as a big box with things in it, you expect to find a new bird, beast, or rock from time to time; but discoveries of that order can’t satisfy a serious curiosity. It’s more rewarding but also more difficult to allow yourself to discover that the box itself has dimensions you hadn’t noticed. One of the problems with the Internet is that it encourages the notion that learning is just a matter of accumulating information as if all information were intrinsically equivalent, interchangeable blades of grass upon which the cattle peacefully graze. In fact, to digest the foliage that actually nourishes, us cows need to ruminate. When do we let that happen?

These thoughts were occasioned by a piece I read on the Nature site about avalanches. Somebody bothered to test whether the strength of snow can be reliably predicted from its density. What they discovered was that columns of snow of the same density broke under very different weights. Biologists and psychologists have known for a long time that under carefully controlled laboratory conditions experimental animals do what they damned well want to, but it is a bit shocking that even the inorganic displays erratic behavior. Because I work for engineers, I hear a lot about failure—how to calculate its probability, how to prevent it, how to live with it—but I don’t recall having thought about it in quite this way and also I hadn’t known that the measure of the variability of failure under loading is the Weibull modulus. The bigger the modulus, the more consistent the behavior, so that a piece of steel that can be counted on to fail when you expect it to has a Weibull modulus of about 30 while packed snow is 1 or 2. Having encountered this bit, I will now gradually come to think about many things differently including what it means to define the strength of anything, how well we can predict the future, and even what is defensible and indefensible about the old metaphysical notion of cause and effect. And that news is of a different order than the fact, which I also discovered, that the Weibull modulus was defined by one Waloddi Weibull, a Swede who died in 1979.

Quadrivia?

Used Postmodernism

The Federal Government funds something like a quarter of all research in this country, and even this number understates its true impact since the issues addressed by federally funded research tend to have important social and health implications. It is a matter of concern, then, that the Bush administration has intervened time and again to stack scientific committees with its partisans, hide or reverse research results it doesn’t like, and use government agencies to further the ideological and economic goals of its political supporters. Partly this pattern of behavior is simply corrupt in the usual way, but it also testifies to the trendiness of soi-disant conservatives who out postmodern the postmodernists in their relativism. For them, “there is neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so” doesn’t go far enough. Now some of us may think that it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature after all and that muzzling the people you hire to tell you what the score is like firing your dominatrix because she’s too uppity. I guess in this, as in many other things, I’m just old fashioned.

Gravy Ain’t Wavy

My title comes from an ancient and completely extinct comic strip called Smokey Stover. Whatever the phrase meant in the strip—I’m no longer sure—it somehow came to be part of my private language as shorthand for “what I’m thinking of now is distinctly different other members of its class so don’t tell me I’m wrong about it by appealing to generalities.” A worked out example:

I’ve been listening to the debate about limits to economic growth for almost fifty years now, and I’m well aware that the Earth-friendly side of these arguments has frequently resorted to alarmist or simply invalid arguments. Back in about 1970, for example, I recall a New York Time article I read over a hangover breakfast in the famous Revolutionary Kitchen of my grad dorm. The piece predicted doom or at least inflation because of the impending shortage of nonferrous metals—that was before a decade-long collapse in prices for these commodities. I was appropriately depressed by the prospect of a zinc famine.

Political environmentalists used to speak about vanishing resources without considering the effects of increasing prices on demand for a scarce input or the possibility of substitution. It didn’t occur to them that recycling was as inevitable with rising prices as it was unlikely before it paid. And folks confronted with dollar a gallon gas and long lines at the pump suddenly began to worry if there were enough aggregate energy available to power a modern civilization. Some of these ideas seem funny in retrospect, rather like the tendency of people to think that population growth is a threat because there won’t be any place to stand. But all environmental concerns are not equal, and dismissing them all because some or even most of them are foolish or are raised in a foolish manner is an error. Anyhow, one of the reasons that the petroleum issues caught my attention some years ago is that it isn’t just environmental types who were writing about it. World production of liquid fuels is going to peak within the next ten years give or take, and we are not doing a huge hell of a lot about it. Gravy ain’t wavy.

Human Interest

Bad popularizations of science, and that means most of ‘em, dilute their perfunctory treatment of the science with a large volume of human interest like Metamucil in orange juice and yet fail to identify any substantial connection between the scientist and the science. Some scientists really are interesting human beings—think of the tragic and problematic trickster Richard Feynman, for example—but the connection of their personalities to their discoveries remains largely contingent. One writes about Feynman and not Julius Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, not because these great physicists, who shared a Nobel Prize with Feynman, had less to do with the development of quantum electrodynamics but because Feynman makes an entirely better read. Yet what is original about the sciences is not something that takes place on the human side of the line between the human and inhuman. The Hobbits are all very nice, but they’ve got to leave the Shire to participate in the huge and scary world outside.

The same problem objections that applied against such accounts of science can be made to history in general; for history is, as it were, a popularization of what happened. Events are mapped onto a handful of moral tales—indeed, they are defined as events in the first place because they can be moralized—although the great changes may have owed more to natural occurrences such as climate change than any fault or merit of men. Even people like Mike Davis who have explored the role of fluctuations in El Nino in the downfall of the old regimes in Turkey, India, and China have a hard time escaping the genre conventions of history. It is also true that if it really is possible and useful to think history from an inhuman perspective, one still has to deal with the commercial imperatives. The true explanation of the rise and fall of states may have little or nothing to do with original sin, but the prophetic narrative will continue to sell so long as the potential readers remain animals fascinated by their own ethology.

Compounding an Error

I was a little surprised that some of my old friends and I were playing for $30,000 a hand in the Texas hold ‘em game in a rundown track house in Berkeley, but that was OK. I had just won the last pot with five aces, all different. What really caught my attention was the sign-off sermonette I could just make out through the snow on an ancient black and white TV. The Cato Institute chaplain was berating Judas for despairing at his betrayal of Christ. “Hanging himself from a fig tree did not help anybody. If Judas had bucked up and invested the 30 pieces of silver at even a lousy 3%, his heirs in 2004 would own a mass of silver approximately the size of the entire Earth.” I had no way of checking the padre’s arithmetic in a dream, of course; but even if the math were more or less accurate, there had to be something the matter with his reasoning...

It shouldn’t be a secret to anybody that compound interest is only a pencil and paper miracle. Real exponential growth, whether of bacteria, human beings, or stock prices, always and inevitably crashes. But even when people do recognize this absolutely basic fact, they go on betting on the come. If you asked people during the stock bubble whether they expected a crash, most of them said they did and then bought more Enron. O well, we also know that the continuing growth in the consumption of liquid fuels is unsustainable and that we’ll be lucky if the consequences of the looming crash is no worse than a disaster; yet we’ve prepared for this Gotterdammerung by letting our government fall into the hands of a bunch of oil industry CEOs.

These comments are intended as a contribution to the ongoing debate at the Royal Ground Coffee shop on the question of whether it is actually an advantage to have a window seat on a crashing airplane.