Forward to the Past

While I’m only knowledgeable about 18th Century English political history because as the Scrooge McDuck of cultural capital, I’m knowledgeable about everything, a great many Conservatives are buffs on the era of Old Corruption out of sheer nostalgia. They feel a deep affinity for a frankly oligarchic system in which all elections were stage managed by insiders, Parliament spent much of its time expanding the death penalty to cover the theft of silverware, and George III and his minions could control government by paying off their supporters with government contracts. Like the followers of our George, the King’s party benefited from the many rotten boroughs that returned an MP despite their tiny populations—think Wyoming or Alaska. Relatively inexpensive favors could buy a vote in those tiny constituencies just as it is fairly cheap to buy off the cattle and mining interests that dominate the empty pith and frozen rind of the American continent. Meanwhile, general public opinion was also for sale. The English system provided a good living for a large class of flacks and publicists who defended the powers that be with purchased sarcasm.

The Anglophilia of the rightists explains a lot. For example. The administration and its posse is thought to be hostile to things French because of the opposition of France to the Conquest of Iraq, but the pundits never manage a comparable level of anger for the Germans or any of the many other peoples who opposed the war. You might think that the Germans, whose government is officially socialist, would be a more obvious target than the French, who are led by a conservative. Anger at the French, however, is more rewarding to our Conservatives on the level of fantasy because these guys still think of themselves as William Pitt. Over and beyond the normal hostility of Conservatives to the Enlightenment, in denouncing Paris, they are channeling the English beefsteak patriotism of 1796. Somehow it goes with bow ties.

I advise the pundits to be careful with the historical analogies. They’d like to believe that contemporary America is in the situation of late 18th Century England, a nation that eventually triumphed over its great continental enemy despite its diplomatic isolation. It is perfectly true that England did survive the loss of its American colonies and went on to flourish economically despite the hostility of most of Europe. England, however, did several things that we are not doing. While the English were in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, we are busily dismantling our own manufacturing economy. While the English pioneered a sound system of public finance, we are destroying our own national credit. While English patriotism made it possible to increase taxes during wartime, we’re unwilling to pay the price for our aggressive foreign policy. In fact, in our ideological posturing, national vanity, and feckless bravado, we’re acting precisely like cartoon versions of 18th Century Frenchmen. Moreover, as a declining but militarily formidable power, we’re very much in the situation of late Bourbon France. Unlike the English, we don’t have the prospect of lording it over a worldwide power vacuum where obsolete empires and helpless natives await exploitation. This time the heirs to the Moguls and Manchus are coming for us.

The Oxycontin of the Masses

According to Marx, the preoccupation of the German intellectuals of his time with religious issues was evidence of their political immaturity. How else explain why grownups were seriously debating the divinity of Christ as late as the year 1848? Similarly impatient sentiments are often enough expressed today about the growing salience of religion in American political affairs. Most outlooks on history view religion as a kind of pedagogy and separate its message, which is more or less endorsed, from the nursery story format in which it is conveyed to the people. In this narrative, the advance of education and enlightenment eventually make it possible to dispense with the crude symbolism and miracle mongering in favor of plain speaking and a respect for the truth. So why does every political candidate have to make a public confession of faith in order to get a hearing at all?

Most conservatives are not surprised by the persistence of irrational styles of faith since they don’t believe in progress of any kind, except perhaps scientific progress. Religion has no intelligible core for them. It is merely a method of crowd control whose content is irrelevant to the clear-eyed elites who in the best case run the world with virtuous cynicism. Religion and reason address different strata of the public, not different ages of history, so one should hardly be surprised that religion neither declines nor becomes more reasonable over time. Indeed, a public that reasons is a great evil so the right subscribes to the Taoist admonition to “fill their bellies and empty their minds,” or at least to the part about emptying their minds.

Although I retain enough of my Left-Hegelian upbringing to think that religion does have a cognitive significance and really does represent a way in which people understand themselves and their world, I have to admit that the Conservative take on religion does provide a useful if partial perspective. But even to the extent that the telos of religion is not truth, it does have a history. It progresses, albeit as a technology progresses, getting better and better at mobilizing the resentments and hopes of people. In my lifetime, for example, television evangelists have pioneered entirely new ways of exploiting a huge audience of vulnerable listeners just as earlier operators colonized the radio waves back in the 30s and their distant ancestors figured out how to exploit moveable type.

Even aspects of religion that appear to be thematic to particular faiths can be understood as technological breakthroughs. Religious entrepreneurship has a history—traditional religious personnel sacrificed cattle, they didn’t propagandize their followers. Once a group discovers how to establish a secret sect, the technique will be copied by other groups just as religious fanaticism, a Persian and Jewish invention, quickly escaped copyright. Indeed, the practice of religious devotion itself, like so much else, seems to have been a Hellenistic invention that got picked up by the Christians and eventually spread to the ends of Asia as bhakti. Whom one adores is less important than the practice of adoration. The original man who was proclaimed the savior (Soter) by his PR department may have been Ptolemy the First, but Christ, Rama, Kannon, Guru Nanak, and various Sufis and Saints have filled the same role since. The absence of truth in religion leaves the field wide open for the advance of technique.

Now it may be that modern man is suffering from an especially bad case of existential anguish and that the religious revivals of the time are a response to a deeply felt need. I’m skeptical. From an objective point of view, the human condition has always been pretty desperate. Perhaps something about contemporary conditions does make the resentful plankton of our kind more aware of its humiliating situation and therefore easier to manipulate. On the other hand, just as the automobile was not introduced to meet the challenge of a worldwide horse shortage, the current obsession with religion may simply be a consequence of a wave of entrepreneurial activity that is exploiting the latest developments in the technology of superstition.

Somewhere Under the Radar

My Dad was convinced to the day he died that the Japanese and Chinese would one day get together and stab us in the back. Where he got this notion I have no idea. It wasn’t that he harbored bad feelings about Asians—he didn’t have any discernable animus towards the many Nisei who lived in our town—and his prophesy was certainly not based on any knowledge of the history of the region or the culture or languages of the peoples involved–he didn’t have any of that either. When he would pronounce on the matter, I tried to suggest that the Chinese had every reason to hate the Japanese, but he waved that off with a smile as if I were being naïve. The strangest thing about his conviction on this issue is that he never acted as if the forthcoming reversal of alliances was at all important. It was just something he absolutely, positively could foresee. What was impressive was his perfect assurance that he was right.

Maybe Beijing and Tokyo will get together one of these days, possibly inspired by old Fu Manchu novels. That’s not why I recall this bit. It’s just that I get my own premonitions from time to time and have to remind myself that they may sound—or be—as quirky and unsupported as Dad’s offhanded warnings about the Yellow Peril. For example, I’m quite sure that the Star Wars anti-missile system is a fraud; and my skepticism about it has very little to do with the widely-held opinion in the scientific community that the whole thing is a crock. I mean that’s a good reason not to think the thing will work, but it’s not my reason. After all, from that kind of reasoning one could arrive at the reasonable guess that the system is impractical but never achieve the kind of total confidence that runs in my family. On the other hand, unlike my father, who was as absolute in his oracles as a Priestess of Apollo, I do have some reason for what I think though maybe my syllogisms are only suitable for a Sibyl. Anyhow.

This is the theory that I have and the theory that is mine. If there were any real prospect of an anti-missile missile system really working, we wouldn’t have heard a word about it. Whenever practical and important weapon systems are in the works, they are treated as the darkest of state secrets as in the case of the Manhattan Project and more recently of stealth aircraft, which never appeared on the radar until they didn’t appear on the radar. The technical possibility of atom bombs and undetectable planes was indeed suggested long before the realization of either—my Dad, for example, had heard about the possibility of nuclear weapons from his physics profs at UCLA in the early 30s—but once the technology became something that could be realized in a matter of years, all mention was squelched. Indeed, I understand that the Germans gleaned some inkling of what was up when many topics in atomic physics disappeared from journal articles in the 40s. On the other hand, since we hear a very great deal about Star Wars indeed, it’s obvious that nobody in the military expects it to work. QED.

Next week: news about Knight Templars.

The Fact Deficit

I’ve been unfair to many of Bush’s supporters, believing that they were being arrogant in dismissing foreign criticism of our policies. Like many others, I cited, at least in my mind, the phrase in the Declaration of Independence about “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.” But this criticism assumes that the people are aware of what the world thinks. A recent study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) shows that the Bush base is largely unaware of the depth and breadth of anti-American feeling and even imagines that most Europeans and even Muslims support the war and have a high opinion of Mr. Bush. The Bush supporters are ill-informed in general, supposing, for example, that he is promoting a multilateral approach to global warming and other international issues and continuing to think that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and significant ties to Al Qaeda.

One should not be entirely surprised, though inevitably one is. It takes a huge investment of time and money to teach the alphabet and other basics to a reasonable proportion of the population; and at least in that enterprise the effort to inform is not opposed by a large and well-financed group circulating falsified multiplication tables. The human mind may not be a perfectly blank slate; but, to paraphrase a familiar maxim of the Scholastics, “Nothing is in the Intellect that is not first on Prime Time.” It requires real effort to create a society in which important matters of fact are generally understood by everyone—you certainly can’t expect the average person to exert even a tiny effort to find out for themselves. In this instance, however, not everything can be chalked up to the inertness of the public mind. Kerry supporters are far more aware of the state of the world and, crucially, have a much more accurate picture of the positions of their own candidate than Bush supporters. Why are they so much better at registering the facts of the case?

The authors of the PIPA study suggest that Bush’s supporters can’t hear evidence contrary to their high estimation of Bush because to do so would result in cognitive dissonance. If, as was famously proclaimed on the Daily Show, the facts are biased, so much the worse for the facts. People don’t want to accept that we invaded Iraq on false premises, and they certainly don’t want to admit that they were taken in. Bush, after all, had been made into the hero of 9/11. Indeed, if you recall the way the events were covered, he performed brilliantly in the aftermath even before he did anything at all, so strong was the imperative of the story line. Once you’ve decided that Bush is the necessary man, it’s easy to simply assume that he shares your opinions even when he obviously doesn’t because, to speak the language of physical chemistry, the default case is energetically favorable and, to speak the language of clinical psychology, you’re frightened and desperate to believe whatever Daddy says.

Snark aside, I don’t know whether the average Bush supporter is stupider than the average Kerry supporter. The more important difference may be that the greater insecurity of Bush supporters makes them easier marks for the cynical propaganda that exploits their fears and thus spreads disinformation. The deeper or rather the more important question here is how a large group of people gradually became so vulnerable to manipulation.

I’ve often written that it is the American public and not the Bush administration that will bear the responsibility for what we’re doing to ourselves and the world. In making this point, I’ve descended into prophetic denunciation from time to time. To be fair, I ought to make it clear that the relevant moral category in politics is karma, not sin. I love to dress up as Jeremiah, but what History is likely to punish is not the unrighteousness of the people but their stupidity and cowardice. While each of us has some responsibility for the kind of person we become, specifically ethical condemnation should mostly be reserved for the individuals in politics and the media who have self-consciously promoted popular ignorance and timidity for power and gain. Unfortunately, karma, a merely statistical tendency, often passes over the worst malefactors. Showered with honors, they die in their beds and wind up buried next to their libraries.

The Postmodern Condition

It’s already been ten years or so since I suggested that it was time for the local bookstore to start a Used Postmodernism section. The folks at Green Apple didn’t think that was very funny, but whatever point I had is perhaps a little less over subtle in the wake of Jacques Derrida’s death. The amorphous set of themes and assumptions formerly known as Poststructuralism and then Postmodernism is indeed long in the tooth.

Of course the philosophical interesting ideas of the French never really circulated as such. The influence of serious thought is surely indirect; what appears in public is a crude parody of the original. The parody can be significant in itself however. Postmodernism really doesn’t name a philosophy; but perhaps it identifies a historical condition; and it may be that historical condition rather than any fragments of credible philosophy that lingers on and on.

The philosophers, at least the pros among ‘em, may have decided that there is something outside the text and that no amount of sociology can dissolve the results that crystallize out of the sciences. They’ve taken notice that you can do things with words but also realized that you can’t do very much—the effectiveness of performative utterances such as the universally invoked example of the “I do” depends upon the pre-existence of an entire system of laws and customs and has no force outside of the tribe. Being married is merely a legal state, not a natural fact.

Only God Almighty is able to bring a world into existence by a WORD. “Let there be light,” works for Him. For us, “Let there be a terrible rumpus!” is more like it. To listen to the television, however, you’d think that what people wish or intend or decree is what creates all the facts, especially in politics. The talking heads endlessly rediscover that appearances are more important than realities and retail this profound truth to an audience that is supposed to be surprised by an idea that had been banal for two generations in 399 B.C. Let us not criticize this venerable sophistry, however; but ask instead the why it seems so apropos circa 2004 A.D.

If the Postmodern condition is one in which the realities that matter are cultural artifacts and what’s important is simply what people think, we must be somehow be insulated from realities that are non-human or at least alien to our own society. Under what circumstances can the physics of the atmosphere can be ignored in relationship to global warming? How can we get away with ignoring arithmetic in deciding a fiscal policy? In which universe do the opinions of the rest of the world have no relevance for American foreign policy? The presidential aide interviewed by Ron Suskind in an already celebrated article supplied the answer. “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” But if we’re really going to create a new reality and revalue all values by virtue of our redoubtable Will to Power, we’re going to need not merely the belief that we have the power, but the power itself.

Children can live in fantasy worlds because the adults protect them. Nobody’s protecting us, but we’ve inherited a splendid playpen. We’re able to conduct our politics by the postmodern rules of fantasy, if only temporarily, because it has fallen out that we acquired a huge advantage over the other nations. Our military preponderance, for example, though universally overestimated, is quite real and all the more formidable because we are crazy enough to use it. More importantly, we haven’t maxed out the credit cards yet, so we can go on imagining that we’re wealthy even though we’re obviously going bankrupt. We can also outrage the environment, not because we can repeal the laws of nature but because technological karma works with a time lag. A dying man can eat anything. On the other hand, as the German’s say, “Erst Kommt das Fressen, denn der Moral.” (= I can’t believe I ate the whole thing!)

Antibiotic Resistance

Inadequate doses of antibiotics have the predictable effect of promoting resistant strains of bacteria by natural selection. Which is why all those pill bottles bear a tag encouraging the patient to finish the prescription. I think we should take this advice to heart in our military policy, but half measures seem to be the rule both in Afghanistan and Iraq where we are running what amounts to a training program for terrorists. We certainly don’t have the overwhelming presence that would be required to put down the multifaceted rebellion by main force, and it’s a good bet that our enemies will gradually figure out how to evade or defeat the military technology we are so dependent upon. Many right-wingers think of themselves as military philosophers, but they seem to have forgotten the rule of thumb they themselves formerly invoked to criticize previous administrations: only the long-term application of a considerable numerical advantage can defeat a popular insurgency. Absent that, random violence and torture merely toughens and strengthens the opposition. We are breeding a generation of superbugs.

At this point I should insert a bit of boiler plate about how the Bush strategy in Iraq is of a piece with many other policies based on a principled contempt for the lessons of experience. These folks are addicted to wishful thinking.

Semi-Crow

American racial politics have modulated over the years. The segregationists who migrated to the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil Rights movements are not the stone racists of the past. I don’t think they are being disingenuous when they insist that they aren’t prejudiced against black people in general. In 2004, class probably is more salient than race as a factor in judging people, which is to say that a black guy who sounds and looks middle-class might as well be a Caucasian, just as Japanese and Chinese Americans have once again become honorary Aryans. Poor blacks are still despised, however. By the same token, although Republicans are perfectly happy that the franchise extends to Negroes so long as they vote Republican, Jim Crow policies are back in favor for those that do not. The great issue of the Florida election of 2000 had nothing to do with hanging chads, after all, but with the premeditated disenfranchisement of thousands and thousands of black voters who were likely to vote for and elect Al Gore absent the criminal behavior of Jeb Bush and other state officials. The same game is once again underway in Florida and many other places in the United States, not all of them in the South.

From my intensely cynical perspective, the most interesting thing about this issue is the indifference of the Press and the public to very credible reports of utterly unprincipled and often thoroughly illegal attempts to keep people from voting. In Oregon, for example, Republicans are registering Democrats and Republicans to vote and then throwing away the democratic applications but what we hear on the news has to do with Mr. Chaney’s gay daughter. In Florida, people erroneously removed from the voting lists because they have the same names as felons are being prevented from reregistering by various bureaucratic dodges, but the news shows have calculated, with some plausibility, that a mostly White audience won’t care. Indeed, such actions probably strike a good many Americans as desirable so long as the people who are kept from voting aren’t real Americans. Why should they get riled about civil rights violations when they obviously aren’t upset that people in Cuba and Iraq are being tortured in their name? In this respect, it’s no use blaming the degradation of American public life on Bush, Chaney, or Rove or G.E. or Fox. The fault lies with the People. The election is really a judgment about them.

You Don’t Have to Outrun the Bear

Despite the recent increase in the price of crude oil, the world economy seems to be doing pretty well. Indeed, much more than fears of political instability, it is the growth of countries like China and India that has caused the rise in oil prices and will surely cause further price increases in the future. In this context, the poor performance of the American economy cannot be blamed on the business cycle or a lack of international demand. And America’s economy is performing dismally. Numbers released today show that our trade deficit is increasing. September was the second worse deficit on record. 2004 will be the worst year on record. Meanwhile, claims for first time unemployment insurance were up this morning for the fifth week in a row and the economic recovery from the recession is easily the slowest and weakest of the last 60 years.

Defenders of the administration’s economic policies like to contrast our situation with Europe’s—they are notably quiet about China, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, and the other Asian nations. Unfortunately, the European comparison is not really favorable either. The unemployment rate in France and German is higher than ours, but that result is a statistical artifact that reflects the way that unemployment is counted in those countries. Truly comparable numbers, the percentage of adults gainfully employed, for example, tell a different story. The lower growth rates of some European countries is also systematically misleading because the populations of many European nations are stable. In view of the demographic dynamism of the U.S., our lackluster GNP growth is all-the-more significant.

The policies of the current administration are obviously not the fundamental reason for our competitive disadvantage since the problem has been building for many years. The Bush response to the challenge has been inadequate and wrong-headed, however. Even the steps that made some economic sense—fiscal stimulus, for example—were carried out in the least effective and most expensive way. The recession provided a new excuse for a tax policy whose true motives were a mix of political cynicism and ideological fervor. In any case, economic stimulus is properly a short-term measure that addresses a business cycle problem and not a policy designed to address a long-term structural problem. Indeed, because the tax cuts are essentially permanent, they have put us at an continuing disadvantage relative to other countries by weakening our national credit, especially in view of the huge increases in government spending necessitated by our aggressive foreign policy,

Reasonable people can disagree about what economic policy is best; and even if they aren’t reasonable, you still have to deal with them. I certainly don’t claim any prescience in these matters. What does seem clear, however, is that the economic health of the United States is not the first priority of this administration; and that treating it as an important but secondary goal does not suffice. I’m sure that Mr. Bush would prefer healthy job growth—I don’t think he kicks his dog, either—but the record indicates that in practice rewarding the political base comes first. It has been reported that when Bush himself worried aloud about the bias of the tax cuts, Carl Rove admonished him to stick to the program. Rove’s probably right. Bush’s political support is rooted in those who benefit from the current economic system and he cannot cross them. Everybody understands, for example, that companies are reluctant to hire because of the rapidly increasing cost of the health insurance they have to provide full-time workers. Any serious attempt to improve American competitiveness must address the gross inefficiency of a medical system that delivers a mediocre standard of care at an inflated price. Bush dare not undertake such reforms because the insurance and drug companies are among his most important supporters and potentially his deadliest enemies. Dealing with the health problem is hard enough. Dealing with the health problem while continuing to pay off your friends is simply impossible.

Deus lo Volt!

In the Middle Ages, poorly informed people in northern Europe believed that the Muslims were pagan idolaters; but just as anybody with a modicum of education knew that the world was round, the well informed knew that Muhammad had actually been a monotheist. They understood Islam as a Christian heresy rather than an alien faith and treated Allah and God as names for one and the same Power. One of the alarming things about the current scene is the way in which many Fundamentalists seem to approach the Arab world with the rather tribal notion that what’s involved is a fight between our God and your God and that religious strife can only be settled World Wrestling Federation style Deo a Deo. The neo-cons know better. Following Aristotle’s advice on dealing with the masses, they regard their theological allies with light irony. But the cultured apologists for the Crusade in Mesopotamia operate with some fairly rustic notions of their own.

The justification of the invasion as a way to bring the light of the West to the benighted people of Asia is not so different from the line taken by many generations of intellectuals in the Latin West. The monks and bishops also believed that their ideology would be welcomed with open arms once the natives recognized its obvious superiority though I don’t know if any abbot of Cluny who ever actually suggested that the citizens of Babylon would name a square after the Pope. At all events, whether in 1095 or 2003, the respective publicists never seemed to have seriously entertained the question, “What gives us the right to decide what people in a foreign land should believe and/or how they should govern themselves?” In both cases, the obvious superiority of the Roman Faith or Democracy was beyond debate. The Saracens weren’t and aren’t entitled to an opinion on the matter since the truth of Christianity is proven by the Gospels and the inevitability of Democracy has been settled once and for all because a man named Francis Fukuyama wrote a book.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, REX, blah, blah, blah

Trying to figure out who won a political debate is a difficult cognitive feat because the point is not usually whether or not one side or the other was convincing to you but whether they were convincing to some other group of people—the only thing that mattered about the Vice Presidential debate, after all, was its effect on the mysterious undecided voters. Listening with somebody else’s ears is no mean feat, especially when their assumptions, values, and habits of thought are alien to your own. It’s quite possible to learn from experience that certain appeals will succeed with uninformed people, but that kind of constructed understanding is clumsy and slow. Many scientists have discovered, for example, that arguments about evolution decisive to biologists are utterly unconvincing to lay audiences; but this understanding doesn’t necessarily make them any more effective in public venues because it seldom becomes intuitive and requires indirection if not deviousness from individuals trained to be literal minded. Napoleon used to say the great talent commanders needed was the ability to guess how their subordinates would hear an order in the heat of battle, something not easy to acquire for those of us who were not born to the manner. Scoring a debate requires a similar skill, a kind of ventriloquism in reverse in which we cast not our voice but our hearing into another body.

I certainly don’t know what the undecideds thought they heard last night, though the CBS poll suggested they thought Edwards won by a fairly large margin. It may be that the messages that mattered were as simple as “Gee, maybe it’s permissible to have doubts about what the President says,” or “Now that you mention it, the economy is pretty punk,” or simply that there is a guy named Edwards whose running and he seems normal enough. If nothing else, the debate may have been the first time in a long time that the voters have heard a word about issues of any kind—I gather that discussion of substantial matters is pretty much taboo on the evening news. I wouldn’t know. I read the papers where such matters are sometimes discussed, though usually in the back along with the car ads.

How the Irish Became Catholics

Left to their own devices people come to a bewildering array of conclusions on matters of religion. National religious uniformity doesn’t just happen. When it is not imposed by sheer force, it usually comes into being because a particular religion becomes a symbol of national unity in the face of foreign aggression. In the first century of the Reformation, for example, Poland was famous for its religious diversity and toleration. It was only after the repeated invasions of the Lutheran Swedes that the Poles became increasingly Catholic, an identity which was reinforced in our times by resistance to the atheistic Soviets. Similarly, it wasn’t some mysterious national piety that made the Irish so loyal to Rome. The Jesuits wouldn’t have been anything like so successful without Cromwell and King William.

Our activities in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East are underwriting the popularity of fundamentalist Islam in the region, an outcome by no means likely in the absence of our troops and bombs. Of course the Arabs would probably have called themselves Muslims in any case; but Islam, like Christianity, can be peaceable as well as fanatic. Indeed, because religions have no objective truth, they can become anything at all. Unfortunately we seem to be determined to reawaken what are precisely the most unpleasant elements of the Muslim tradition and to make skepticism or secularism into cultural treason.

These things work both ways. Creating a huge and permanent enemy in the Middle East has certain advantages from a rightist perspective because a hostile Islamic world automatically provides America with a unifying other that has been lacking since the Reds wimped out on us. Many Neocons accept the thesis of Carl Schmitt that real politics absolutely requires an enemy. If you really want to have a nation that amounts to more than a contemptible mutual aid society, you simply must pick a fight with someone. Unfortunately, the obvious bogyman, China, is already too formidable to challenge. In this respect, the terrorists are a godsend. True, they had nothing at all to do with the fascist regime in Iraq; but they can be made to have something to do with Iraq retroactively. And the prospect that conflict in the region will be interminable is actually a selling point since what is needed is a reliable, permanent foe to discipline the Americans and justify an authoritarian, one-party state at home.

You Gotta Know When to Fold ‘Em

The player with the most chips can win a lot of hands by betting on everything, but eventually the table gets wise and the bluffs have to be larger and larger to be impressive. Once and a while, the cowboy will get very lucky indeed and survive his recklessness; but most nights end predictably with a ridiculous showdown where we learn once again that a pair of sevens isn’t a very good hand. I’ve played against macho types who kept raising me in a stud game even though no possible hole card would beat what my hand was already showing. “I guess you weren’t buyin’ it,” says Tex and one politely allows that you can’t beat Lady Luck.

The poker example is a pretty good allegory for a common historical pattern. A nation frustrated by its inability to secure a military victory against an elusive or inaccessible foe reacts by intensifying or widening the conflict as when Germany invaded Russia because it couldn’t invade England and France and later the United States invaded Cambodia because they couldn’t win in Vietnam. Sometimes the bluster and bluff involves an increase in barbarity rather than a geographical extension of the conflict as when the French became increasingly brutal as they lost ground to the insurgents in Algeria or we lose more and more of our inhibitions about bombing civilians in rebel-controlled cities in Iraq. All these moves have the flavor of the last despairing raise in a losing game. In the present case, unfortunately, there may be cards left to play. You often read that the administration will not be able to repeat its strategy of preventative war against Iran or even Syria because the cost of such an action has gone up drastically and our military resources are already dangerously drained. That optimistic thought ignores the routine irrationality of desperate militarists for whom folding is unmanly. Of course it would be dumb to pick a new fight. How smart do you think these guys are?

By the way, the best advice about international politics doesn’t come from poker but from chess. The fundamental error of the Bush administration was to ignore that cardinal Tartakowerism, “A threat is more powerful than its execution.”

Peel Me a Grape

Debates about the bias of the media universally misidentify the problem, which is not whether a range of opinions and ideas are available but whether one side has a decisive advantage in promoting its own interest by propagandistic means. If voters were intelligent agents who made reasonable efforts to figure things out, there would be no problem. Books and magazines of all persuasions are far more readily available now than in the past, and the Internet makes it possible to read most of the world’s newspapers. For the most part, however, the public is neither intelligent nor active. They don’t read and they certainly don’t think. One can make utopian suggestions about how to lift them out of their normal condition of sloth and ignorance—an excellent idea if you can do it and have lots and lots of time—but in the meanwhile, an objective observer has to be realistic about the boundary conditions of political life that guarantee that emotional appeals and sheer repetition are vastly more important than logic or accurate information.

As thoughtful rightists know very well, political rhetoric is about training, not education. The Neocons are quite correct in this, and it behooves anybody who cares about the preservation a free society to recognize the fact and prevent one group from seizing control of the means of propaganda. Thousands of hours of chest thumping chauvinism are not counteracted by a couple of sound bytes from the editor of Nation.

In my more curmudgeonly moments I grumble about the stupidity of people of normal intelligence as if it were part of the natural history of the human species, but the susceptibility of the public to propaganda is less a function of intellect than sheer inertia. The big political issues are not rocket science, after all. Recent studies show that the population is divided between a minority who draw their own conclusions and a majority who do not. The former are politically active, the later reactive. To move them, it is not enough to present the premises of an argument. No matter how simple the inference, they will not make it. It follows that the political operators who supply the answers will always beat out those who provide the evidence because the evidence only matters to a tiny group. The public, let us remember, is overwhelmingly made up of the kids who only cared about what was going to be on the test.

It’s About Russia

I just finished reading James W. Valentine’s new tome on the evolution of the big animal groups, On the Origin of Phyla. Valentine is a heavy hitter in the phylogeny business, but his book, whose title self-consciously echoes Darwin’s epochal book, doesn’t offer any similarly earthshaking insights. I think that’s a significant result in itself. Trying to work out the particulars of a process that occurred 600 million years ago is bound to be a long slog, especially since the precursors of the various groups were tiny worm-like creatures with soft bodies that leave few fossil remains. Scientists are winnowing down the available hypotheses, however, and nobody seems to see any need for explanations that involve notions beyond what is already familiar in evolutionary thinking. Indeed, the more-or-less automatic advance of molecular biology can be expected to provide more and more reliable family trees as time wears on, though as Valentine is careful to point out, interpreting the floods of data on the genetic affinities of living organisms is far from automatic and we may never precisely identify the sponge with an attitude that was the authentic metazoan Adam. The nature of the evidence may limit us to telling likely stories about our most distant ancestors, but the point is that the stories sound more likely all the time. The subject evolves. It isn’t in crisis.

In most of the sciences, books aren’t very important because the crucial developments appear in research articles. In evolutionary biology, however, books have a larger role because of the continuing challenge of putting together a vast and heterogeneous mass of evidence to draw meaningful conclusions about living things. The grand example is the Origin of Species, a masterpiece of synthesis that is still an inevitable work 145 years after its publication; but there are a number of important books by Mayr, Dobzhansky, Stanley, Grant, Gould, Simpson, Wilson, and others that are structurally similar to Origins. I don’t think physics or chemistry has a similar bibliography. There are wonderful books in these sciences, but, aside from Galileo’s Two World Systems and Newton’s Principia, they tend to be textbooks, not the primary exposition of new ideas. Valentine’s book is hardly in a league with Tempo and Mode in Evolution, let alone the original Origin; but it’s a worthwhile example of the type.

Valentine thinks that the earliest metazoans probably lived on the floor of shallow seas. I’m a benthic form, myself, a sort of intellectual brachiopod subsisting on whatever nutritious morsels lodge in my lophophore. It is hardly surprising I have a bias in favor of inductive methods. One of the larger pieces I’ve strained from reading Valentine and other such books is that most of the creativity of evolution normally occurs at the earliest stages of the emergence of a group of organisms when some lucky founder arrives in an empty geographic or ecological zone. In that absence of competition, anything works brilliantly if it works at all. Fundamental principle of evolution (and marketing): If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.

An evolutionary flowering doesn’t necessarily occur because an organism develops a new adaptation. Most often some Elmer Fudd of a worm lucks into a new scene and its offspring rapidly develop into a whole range of new forms, some of which include morphological novelties that could only emerge under conditions of lessened competition. When the ancestors of what would become insects diverged from the ancestor of what would become fish, there is little likelihood that the first members of the first group looked very different from the members of the second or that what differences they did have had anything to do with being like an insect or being like a fish. That probably came later. By the same logic, the fact that there are a limited number of types of animals at any taxonomic level doesn’t imply that there are only so many basic types that work. It may just be that “when some region of adaptive space is already occupied, novelties produced to reinvade that space will usually be less well adapted than are the inhabitants, and will lose out in any sorting. Thus the Cambrian radiations may have produced enough metazoan types to occupy the broad range of available marine environments, thereby foreclosing the production of additional bodyplans.”

We tend to think of the Theory of Evolution as the explanation of how new living things emerge but most evolutionary mechanisms ceaselessly work to prevent novelty. At the beginning of every new epoch, a thousand flowers bloom precisely because a disaster or some other contingency has created a temporary cessation of competition. In nature as in history, competition merely puts a high finish on conformity and routine—the perfected Brontosaurus, the New Improved Chevy, Brad Pitt.

Making the Short List

The mathematical romance Flatland takes place in a two-dimensional world whose inhabitants are mystified by the occasional visits of three-dimensional interlopers who can effortlessly accomplish such amazing stunts as escaping from a loop without breaking the line. We don’t live in Flatland, of course, but to judge from our public discourse, we have decided to act as if we did, ignoring the depth of the world in a search for radical simplicity. It would be dubious enough to operate with the notion that particular individuals and groups have an essence that is unchangeable without divine intervention. We go beyond that to claim that this postulated center or axis is either good or evil, which is to say that our fundamental category of judgment is actually not even two-dimensional or simply linear but binary. No wonder that our thoughts are like infantile graffiti scrawled in smeary crayon on the nursery wall. But it’s not that we don’t know better. Stupidity, long promoted to the laboring and servile classes as the virtue of simplicity, is also admired in leaders as a sign of strength and a token of solidarity with the People. We chose to be crude. But maybe this sort of thing can be overdone.

Mind you, I don’t dispute the value of oversimplification. Even the most elaborate theory is a cartoon version of an intractably complex reality; and my own thinking is exceedingly narrow, an obsessive meditation on the theme of selection itself. For me, culture does not transcend nature or differ from it in essence or operate according to novel laws. It is simply an infinitesimal subset or subgroup of nature insulated from the remainder by various active mechanisms. To complain about this situation is pointless since it is constitutive of any possible human world—you might as well curse the nature of things—but my objection is not to the fact that the human agenda is so narrow but that it is often the wrong agenda, a poor selection. That, and the fact we often seem to omit the recognition of the narrowness from the list of the six permissible ideas.

Revolutionary Justice?

Effective political action always involves the mobilization of unpleasant human emotions. Lately the right has been better than the left in playing on the resentments of the population. While dismissing concerns about material inequality as class hatred, the Republicans have played on the envy that so many middling people have for the possessors of disproportionate amounts of cultural capital. True, the merest idiot can become rich by inheriting millions while even the most privileged child has to work to become educated, but this modest element of fairness makes things worse. Even the saddest loser can identify with one of our lumpenmillionaires since the difference between the wretchedness of the pleb and the splendor of the mogul is mostly just luck or can be imagined to be luck. The sorriest specimen on earth can identify with Donald Trump. Indeed, being a sorry specimen makes it all the easier. Meanwhile the hateful thing about cultured people is not the possibility that they are fakes, but the suspicion that they aren’t. As Nietzsche pointed out over a hundred years ago, it is not the presumption of merit that offends. It’s merit itself.

There is no general way of getting around the human propensity to hate the competition. A worker who works too hard will be restrained by the other workers. A black kid who tries to escape the Inner City will be pulled back by his friends and relations—the so-called crab bucket effect. In their endless celebration of mediocrity, the Republicans merely apply the same principle to politics. One can fight this tactic by promoting candidates like Clinton, the Galactic Mule of American politics, whose tremendous charm made people forgive him his competence; but there aren’t very many Clintons around. And the situation gets worse because our form of civilization really does tend to debase and infantilize most people, thus increasing their need for psychic compensation.

What’s needed is an appeal to some equally problematic but powerful psychological mechanism. Unfortunately, the obvious and probably necessary choice is the premeditated awakening of the sense of political justice, by which I do not mean the benign and healing process of assessing responsibility for what happens, but the reckless and imperative desire to punish political enemies.

Picky, Picky

The President of the United Nations recently opined that the U.S. invasion of Iraq had been illegal under international law. So far as I can tell, the story didn’t get much play in these parts, perhaps because Koffee Annan’s remarks were actually delivered in a rather offhand manner as a passing acknowledgement of an obvious fact. To the extent that they bothered to form an opinion on the matter, I expect that much of the right and much of the public discounted the charge of illegality because, at worst, all we did was violate a dictate of a despised organization, dominated by foreigners. If so, allow me to raise a niggling little problem with this not very apologetic bit of apologetics.

International law was not invented in 1945 and its legitimacy is not dependent upon the U.N. Charter or any other single document or agreement. The principle that nations are not entitled to initiate preventative wars grew up over a long period of diplomatic history from the grim experience of a great many pointless wars. The validity of the doctrine, however, rests on more than precedent. If a group of intelligent agents had gotten together the day after the Creation of the World, they would certainly come to the same conclusion about preventative war. For that matter, if you were suddenly elected ruler of the universe, you’d legislate against preventative war. (Wouldn’t you?) The mere suspicion that some other nation might be a threat in some unspecified way at some unspecified future date simply isn’t a legitimate excuse for aggression.

As it happens, we did sign the U.N. Charter, which inconveniently and unambiguously outlaws what we did in Iraq. Indeed, in large measure, we wrote the Charter. As its unilateral abrogation of many treatises shows, the Bush administration does not feel bound to obligations contracted by Democratic administrations or even earlier Republican administrations. Obviously, our word is not our bond, and the only principle in operation is that everything we can get away with is legitimate. As in the German jurisprudence of the 30’s, it’s enough for a policy to have the form of law to be legal even if the content of the law is the replacement of legality with mere force.

The mad emperor Cambyses fell in love with his sister and asked the wise men of his court whether it was legal to marry her. The sages replied, “We haven’t found a law that says that the king of Persia can marry his sister, but there is a law that says he can do whatever he wants.”

Note: after writing these paragraphs, I Googled Koffee Annan’s name and discovered an immense body of right wing hatred directed at the man. ABC and CNN may not have made much about Koffee’s remarks, but they sure riled up the radicals. Typical rant, Annan: Useless Douche Bag or Incompetent Fuckwit.

Many Times Many Ways

I used to write a good many letters to the editor back in the early years of the Clinton administration when defenders of his policies were notably scarce and everybody seemed to assume that the Whitewater stories were more or less true. Monitoring the letters sections of several papers, I soon discovered that the same paragraphs and often enough the same letters would appear over different names in various places while identical boilerplate also surfaced in editorials, evidently copied verbatim from some sort of press release though even high school students have the decency to rephrase the stuff they swipe from the encyclopedia. This process created the illusion of a grass root protest against Clinton and everything he stood for, but the grass in question was Astroturf, much of it manufactured in Texas. The Republicans still use the technique, though by now it has been thoroughly exposed—a good many patriotic letters from soldiers in Iraq are cooked up at the RNC, for example. Transparent fraud remains effective when perpetrated on the willfully blind by operators of principled cynicism.

While repetition of whole phrases or paragraphs betrays premeditated inverse plagiarism, the expression of similar thoughts in different ways indicates the emergence of a genuinely shared perception. I’ve recently noticed, for example, that a great many people in a great many places in print and on the Internet have come to the same conclusion as I have about the meaning of the forthcoming election. My version:

Our policies are extremely unpopular in most of the world, but for the moment this unhappiness has not produced a general revulsion against America because it has been possible for the Europeans, the Asians, and even some of the Muslims to blame it all on the aberrant behavior of one American leader of dubious legitimacy. If Bush is actually elected President, however, the blame will devolve on the country as a whole since we will have endorsed his arrogant and violent policies and made them our own. This reassessment is likely to have unpleasant real world consequences for us over time—you don’t have to believe in some iron Karmic law to think that the usual excesses will probably result in the usual penalties—but the consequences are not the worst thing. The worst thing is that the world will be right. We will be at fault. Having missed the opportunity to reject unilateralism, preventive war, and the torture of prisoners, we and not the Bush administration become the real criminals.

A Matter of Policy

Life really is too short to worry about extremely unlikely hypotheses just because they are sacred to the vast majority of human beings. If you’re chatting with somebody over lunch or brokering peace in Northern Ireland or engaged in some other civilian pursuit, it is simply good manners to respect tender sensibilities. If you are determined to understand the world, however, being fair or considerate is more than a waste of time, though it certainly is that. Extending the courtesy of listening creates the presumption that the alternative notion is worth considering, indeed that it is the alternative notion instead of just an alternative notion.

Americans are suckers for this sort of thing. Once the Creationists failed in their efforts to suppress all mention of evolution in textbooks and classrooms, they began to claim that they just wanted a fair debate so that students could choose for themselves what to believe. But this tactic, though a rhetorical winner, implies that a creator god is somehow the inevitable alternative explanation of the development of living things when it is only one of an infinite number of possible explanations and a notion of David Lynchian weirdness at that. Why would anybody entertain the theory that the existence and nature of things is the result of an action? There is an obvious political explanation for why many people want the theme of the divine designer to be raised in a high school class and an obvious psychological explanation for why people find the idea commonsensical. What’s utterly lacking is a scientific or even philosophical justification for entertaining Creationism for an instant. Affording the “theory” or its proponents due respect is a methodological error.

Parallel Lives

One of the celebrated ironies of the age is how Osama Ben Laden, a cherished ally in our proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, became our deadly enemy once the tanks rolled out of Kabul and we became the intolerable occupier of sacred lands. In fact, though the ironies are more muted, the end of the Cold War made plenty of other heroes into problematic characters. Consider the case of Karol Jozef Wojtyla, a Polish patriot who became Pope John Paul II and whose leadership probably really did have something to do with the success of Solidarity in his native land—Polish nationalism has been inseparable from Catholicism since the incursions of Lutheran Swedes back in the 17th Century. With the fall of the Soviets, the same intellectual and moral characteristics that made the Pope such a force against Communism may well turn out to be harmful to his church in the sequel. John Paul has proven himself to be a very effective reactionary, reinforcing the arbitrary authority of the hierarchy and briskly rolling back the Vatican II reforms. These victories, however, have had a cost as the corruption inevitable in a rigid and secretive system has inspired a lay revolt in the United States and elsewhere that almost amounts to a new Reformation.

Counter Reformation for Dummies

If I were a praying man, I’d thank Providence every day that I wasn’t born as a person of literary ambitions in a 3rd World country. I have an intense sympathy for those poor souls who are more or less stuck with the scutwork of explaining how the ancient traditions of their people are—who would have thought it?—precisely relevant to contemporary problems because the positive features of modernity were all adumbrated by various dimly remembered prophets, sages, and poets. Armies of national intellectuals have found their widely varying talents herded into the defile of this historical situation. Nobody writes what they want, just what they can; but the predicament of so many 19th and 20th Century public men and women shows that the great constraint on creativity is not a lack of ability or some subtle psychological block or tragic and ineluctable abyss between conception and performance or even the suffocating, inescapable influence of the Zeitgeist, but often enough the absence of any other plausible career move.

A lot of what gets passed off as historical determinism is no more mysterious than the canalizing effect of available career options. And it’s just for this reason that the best way to assert ideological hegemony is not brainwashing or terror but the creation of opportunities for bright young comers. The Roman church wasn’t particularly successful in countering Protestantism by burning people at the stake, but restricting the best bureaucratic and academic jobs to the faithful had a powerful if gradual effect, especially in Hapsburg lands. Transubstantiation didn’t become any more plausible between 1500 and 1700, but it paid rather better to defend it just as it pays better to arrive at free market solutions to every conceivable problem in an intellectual world increasingly dominated by the patronage of highly ideological foundations. Overt persecution of opposing views is unnecessary and counterproductive so long as personal ambition can so easily be mobilized in the service of authority. Of course the very best minds are a little too proud to shill for anybody, but the mediocre always dominate the scene in the short run as one can easily verify by monitoring the Op Ed page of the New York Times.

Before and After the Fact

At any given time, a mind can only entertain 5 or 6 things. That’s not a bad performance for a single naked ape. Unfortunately, the group mind is just as limited. As a result, everything has to be articulated in terms of a tiny sample of current cant. It is exceedingly difficult to introduce a new idea or even to widen the repertory a bit if only for stylistic variety. Even using a different expression for the same concept loses readers. For example, in political contexts one inevitably ends up writing that the other guys remarks are “troubling,” a locution I, for one, find positively horripilatory and not in a good way. Sometimes cant is accidentally accurate, however. For example, it is quite correct and even apt to arraign the mass media as facilitators of the Republican Big Lie technique.

Television talking heads have picked up the preemptive defense that they are blamelessly innocent and objective because they simply report what both sides say about the issues of the day. Proclaiming this policy is the sheerest invitation to political thuggery. It’s like putting up posters in a bad neighborhood to let everybody know which warehouses are unlocked. If the media will not call even the most egregious whoppers, it will pay the unscrupulous to repeat them as they certainly have.

Simple minded people–and that means all of us most of the time—automatically assume that what people utter has a prima facie validity. We’re well aware that people can lie and misrepresent things, of course; but the default on our program is trust and it takes energy to listen critically. You have to do something. For this reason, even those of us who know better are influenced by the endless repetition of false information. Propaganda works and what makes it effective is repetition, not cogency. Since the radical right has the means to get its message endlessly repeated—think of the Swift Boat campaign—truth or falsity becomes irrelevant and even the opponents of the administration will end up doubting themselves about matters that are long past reasonable question. It is the sheerest vanity to think that one is immune to the spin. You aren’t just being partisan, dear readers. In fact things are worse than you think.

When the purveyors of information abdicate responsibility to keep things on the level, we all wind up living in the Winchester House of Mystery wondering why the short guys look tall and water seems to run up hill. If we had a free press in the United States, no major party would nominate an incompetent like Bush or allow such a figure to run on a platform of 2+2=5. As it is, practically anything can happen because the entire country is suffering from a breakdown in reality testing. Media facilitators bear a large share of the responsibility for this outcome and should be made to pay a personal penalty for their cowardly and convenient “objectivity.”

Another Leni Riefenstahl Moment
I was repelled by the obvious political message of Hero, though like everybody else I did admire the color scheme. Though the movie overtly deals with the First Emperor, the ruthless king of Chin who reunited the Empire at the end of the Warring States period, it isn’t much of a stretch to understand the film at as a piece of revisionism about the Tiananmen Square massacre. What seems to be going on is this: A Chinese intellectual makes his peace with the powers that be by directing a movie about a group of transcendently skillful warriors who seek to assassinate a tyrant but eventually decide that the project of Chinese unification justifies his monumental crimes. Tellingly, two of the warriors are writers and in the movie’s finale, the hero, whose name is Nameless, willingly submits to execution in an immense public square. Zhang Yimou does portray the protesting swordsmen as honorable people, but he is just as insistent that they all must die to atone for their rebellion. Zhang gets off easier. He just has to make a movie.

I understand that for American audiences and reviewers who aren’t aware of Chinese history and politics, a movie like Hero will mostly register as an action flick. For a Chinese audience, it’s so tendentious it’s almost honest.

Rum, Romanism, and Reaction

It is something of a commonplace by now that the various Islamic fundamentalisms are radically innovative relative to tradition, though this fact is kept quiet by the innovators because the tradition pointedly rejected innovation (Bid’ah). Backward looking Christian sects are also very creative. Since religions are soft-bodied organisms unstiffened by any extra-human reality, this flexibility shouldn’t be surprising. I confess, however, I have trouble processing some of the more recent mutations in American Protestantism, especially the increasing respect the right-wing theocrats express for Catholicism. Admiration for the Pope is the one thing I had never expected to hear emanating from an American bigot. Have these guys forgotten the Black Legend? I guess they haven’t reread Foxe’s Book of Martyrs lately.

The irony of ironies in all this is that Jerry Falwell et. al. are making nice to the Whore of Babylon at the same time that the catholic laity is in revolt against the corruption and rigidity of Papacy, often in the name of a fervent Augustinian spirituality uncannily reminiscent of the faith of the Reformers. Meanwhile, on the officially Protestant side of the aisle, there remain plenty of evangelicals who continue to support the separation of church and state for purely religious reasons and find Roman mummery and monarchism to be, if not actually repellent, at least utterly irrelevant to their deeper concerns. Another feature of the confusing ideological scene are the presumably secular figures like Niall Ferguson who manage to say nice things about Rome despite its exceedingly rancid historical record—the Black Legend bit is unfashionable, not inaccurate.

Intended Consequences

When the administration announced it was making drastic changes to overtime rules, the media dutifully reported that the effects of the policy change were unclear; but the administration would never have changed the rules if it were not sure that they would lower wages. Or do you suppose that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would have enthusiastically endorsed the changes if they were going to cost their constituents money?

This story has a context. The United States is running a huge trade deficit with the rest of the world at the same time that it the government is busy increasing the size of the national debt. As almost everybody admits, these excesses will be paid for sooner or later. What has become increasingly clear to me is that the restoration of balance is not some distant eventually but is already underway in the form of a de facto lowering of the real income of the majority of working people brought about by mechanisms such as the increasing use of temporary help and other forms of outsourcing, restrictions on health benefits, and the change in overtime rules. A decline in American wealth relative to the rest of the world is probably inevitable. The administration’s policies, especially its labor policies, make sense as a way of making sure that the burden of this decline falls squarely on the plebs.

Austrian Millionaires, Part Deux (the Third Installment will not be Forthcoming)

For a long time, I have had serious doubts about the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis that the characteristics of particular natural languages such as English or Navaho determine or at least seriously bias or influence the way in which the speakers of these languages understand the world. The vagueness and ambiguity of the hypothesis is part of the problem. Just as an individual determined to achieve atheism is doomed to frustration in the face of interminably mutable theological definitions, you can never be sure whether the Whorf hypothesis you refute is the relevant version or even worth refuting. At best you can raise objections that make a meaningful point against some versions of the hypothesis. Two such considerations:

1. The grammar of particular languages obliges the speaker to provide certain information to the listener. In English, for example, the third person singular pronoun always indicates gender, a linguistic fact that became a real issue in the last 40 years or so as the clumsiness of writing “he or she” over and over again drove many of us to “they.” It is far from clear, however, that it makes much difference whether or not a category like gender or tense is coded in the grammar since the same meaning can just as well be conveyed by extra words. The verb in Homeric Greek has a dual number, but exactly the same meaning can be expressed by words like “pair” in languages such as English that don’t have a dual. It has been claimed that the Arabs have a foggy notion of causality because of the rudimentary systems of tenses in classical Arabic; but the Arabs in fact have a huge historical literature as do the Chinese whose verbs so far from having tenses doesn’t even have conjugations. Meanwhile, the Indians, whose culture is notoriously unhistorical, wrote Sanskrit, a language with a complex and nuanced system of tenses. Arguably, the main effect of putting distinctions into the grammar is to make them less salient and easier to ignore. Why does it make a difference if distinctions are built into the grammar or have to be expressed lexically?

2. The Whorfians suggest that the structure of particular languages makes it hard to say or understand certain things; but this limitation, it seems to me, is an artifact of the methodology of linguistics. A person who studies a language from the outside has no business deciding what a native speaker should say in a particular instance. If there is no recorded instance of a 2nd person plural pluperfect subjunctive middle of the verb “to burp” in the available corpus of late Medieval Utopian, the linguist simply can’t say for sure whether there ever was such an animal or do more than guess what it might have been by analogy to known forms. But native speakers confront this situation all the time. For all I know, no English speaker has ever said “Had you have burped yourself immediately, you wouldn’t have been discommoded by the gas attack;” but the lack of a precedent didn’t slow me down because I have citizen’s rights in my own language and can make things up as I go along. By the same token, if I need of more ways to speak about kinds of snow, I’ll just make them up. It isn’t just people turning their doctoral dissertations into books that possess the magic power of neologism.

The words and expressions in use in a particular natural language doubtlessly betoken something about the culture of the speakers of the language, but it seems more appropriate to say that the culture expresses itself in the language than that the language molds the culture. I was reminded of this issue by an article in last week’s online edition of SCIENCE that reported on an Amazonian tribe that only has three numbers, one, two, and many. These Indians, it turns out, do very poorly on simple arithmetical tasks that involve counting or matching up rows of small objects—story problems were apparently completely out of the question. The finding, which is apparently well attested, was trotted out as a confirmation of Whorf as if the lack of counting numbers accounted for the poor math skills. In fact, what the anthropologists seem to have discovered is an instance of the extremely depauperate culture of a small and isolated group. Everything about these folks is minimalist. The tribe, seem have lost or discarded elements of culture. They don’t talk about much or build very much. In this regard, they are perhaps like the native Tasmanians who forgot how to build boats after they attained their isolated homeland.

This tribe raises the question of just how small a tool kit is enough for a viable human culture, a question analogous to the issue of how small a genome can be. The Indians are certainly economical with numbers. I hadn’t though anybody could improve on the famous Austrian millionaires mentioned in George Gamow’s book One, Two, Three, Infinity. These worthies challenged each other to come up with the biggest number. One millionaire hems and haws, takes a deep breath, grits his teeth, and comes up with “Three!” The other looks stricken, jumps up from his chair, paces around the room, grimaces, and finally despairs, “You win, damn it!” (Incidentally, George Gamow was a great contriver of names, who coined, among other terms, the expressions Big Bang and the Genetic Code, and thus exemplified the super-Worfian creativity of language users. By the way, I don’t know why Gamow settled on the nationality of the idiots in his joke; but I am sure that if he had been an amoeba, he would have called his book One, Two, Four, Infinity.)

Many Carry the Thursis but Few Are Pseudo-Dionysus

Ascribing agency to the ultimate ground of reality is no less an instance of zoomorphism than imagining God to have a gender. An eternal and ubiquitous entity cannot do anything or even move because whatever it is supposed to do has always already happened and there is no place for it to go. The connoisseurs of negative theology came to this conclusion long ago, though, unlike me, they seem to have thought that some residue of meaning persists after or perhaps during the evaporation of all the divine attributes. The point is not academic. Many educated people assume that the divine science fiction of popular religion somehow adumbrates a defensible doctrine of Being qua Being, albeit in a charmingly childish way. But it is far from clear that the plausible elements of the postulated perennial philosophy have anything very interesting to say. It’s surprisingly easy to get bored with Enlightenment once you get over its novelty value since the glamour of the thing is something left over from all the engaging mythology and nonsense that precedes the moment of terminal sobriety.

Not So Simple

Like other groups of highly educated individuals of superior intelligence, professional scientists tend to be more liberal than the American average—a fact documented in many places, for example, the Bell Curve. Whatever their political proclivities, however, scientist are not given to yelling and hooting. Indeed, as I can testify from many years of personal experience as a technical editor, it is very, very difficult to get a scientist to make an unguarded, unqualified statement, even when the facts warrant it. These folks have grown up in a system in which nobody has a right to an opinion, and every published utterance must be vetted in advance by well-informed critics who are often professional rivals. Meanwhile, the economic situation of scientist also encourages cautious speech. Those who best know what they are talking about work for businessmen and politicians who generally don’t know very much at all. Telling the truth in an asylum run by the patients requires continuous tact and, as the man said, abeunt studia in mores, i.e. you get used to it. All of which makes the current political activism of the science establishment all the more remarkable. The most recent issue of SCIENCE (13 August) is a case in point. The issue features a special section on the hydrogen economy that Bush has promoted as a pat answer to energy and environmental problems associated with global warming. The clear message of the issue is that the hydrogen initiative is politically useful but crucially flawed.

Hydrogen power may have a role in the fairly distant future, but it is hardly a panacea. Hydrogen has to be generated by processes that require energy and produce carbon dioxide. If we make hydrogen by burning coal, we’ll have to figure out how to somehow sequester the resulting CO2 to make net progress towards carbon emissions reduction. Carbon sequestration is a monumental technical problem. And producing hydrogen promises to be a very expensive proposition. Meanwhile, hydrogen presents many other technical challenges. To mention one simple but hard to solve problem: hydrogen is very light. Storing enough hydrogen to power a car for 300 miles of operation would require a fuel tank eight times larger than a normal gas tank even if the hydrogen were pressurized to 10,000 pounds per square inch. There are other options: liquefying the hydrogen or absorbing on in carbon nanotubes or hydrides but nobody knows if these techniques are practical or affordable.

Even if the hydrogen option pans out, it isn’t rational to pursue it in lieu of other measures against the looming problem of global warming. As Donald Kennedy wrote, “Our attention is deflected from the hard, even painful measures that would be needed to slow our business-as-usual carbon trajectory. Postponing action on emissions reduction is like refusing medication for a developing infection: It guarantees that greater costs will have to be paid for.”

Note: The articles in SCIENCE aren't available on line without a subscription.

The Earliest Stages of Withdrawal

It’s a commonplace by now that the most ignorant and thoughtless segment of the electorate decides American elections, thus guaranteeing the juvenile tone of our political campaigns. One simply has to talk baby talk to babies. It also seems to be an invariable rule that the most pressing issues of the day may not be the subject of public debate in an election year. How else explain the remarkable silence that met Bush’s proposal to remove the bulk of our troops in Germany, Japan, and Korea? In itself, the Iraq imbroglio may well prove to be of marginal importance; but overturning the fundamental basis of world politics is definitely going to make the cut in the nth edition of R.R.Palmer. Indeed, what may turn out to be the most important consequence of the invasion of Iraq could well be the impetus it gave for a thoughtless and spasmodic redefinition of the foundations of American foreign policy.

In principle, I’m not unhappy with the general idea of reducing our garrisons in Europe and Asia; but I recognize, as apparently the administration does not, that much more is at stake than a cheap fix for our imperial overstretch. There are so many consequences. For example, in the short term, pulling the troops out of Germany may be a way to punish a recalcitrant ally. That seems to have been the principle rationale when the idea was first floated six months ago. Over even the middle term, however, the absence of a substantial American presence is likely to lead to a more independent and assertive Europe, exactly what sets this administration crazy. The Germans may have liked the economic benefits of the permanent occupation, but golden fetters are still fetters. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Earth, a stand down in Korea and Japan may have analogous effects. I don’t happen to be very worried about the North Koreans in this regard—they would be obliterated if they attacked the South whether or not we have a couple of extra divisions there—but the de facto lessening of American military guarantees may well lead to Japanese rearmament, not because of North Korea but because of China. I guess the administration figures it has plenty of time to adjust to this development since it would take Sony a good three months to come up with nuclear weapons. But the military consequences of withdrawal may not be the most important issue.

More by accident than design, the continued presence of American forces in Europe and Northwest Asia has worked out very well. The Americans weren’t threatening, not only because of our general benignity but because it was perceived that we were never strong enough to actually occupy or dominate Western Europe or Japan or to actively threaten the Soviets or China. That made us tolerable to our enemies who knew we wouldn’t get aggressive and welcome to our allies who benefited hugely from a geopolitical system frozen in place for forty years. Which is a large part of the reason why the industrial world has been willing to subsidize our economy. They were getting value for the money. Things are fixing to look different. We ought to be thinking about that. We ought to be thinking about a lot of things. We aren’t.

A Promising Fact

When little Portugal found a route to the Indies and therefore a source of enormous wealth, it’s leaders realized they had a problem. Their monopoly, though recognized by Spain and the Pope, was not backed up with demographic and financial strength at home. They were like a frail grandmother trying to cash a winning lottery ticket in a very bad neighborhood. As narrated in the first volume of Donald Lach’s Asia in the Making of Europe, they did a remarkable job in preserving their advantage; but the penetration of their markets by the Dutch, French, and English was inevitable because their cannonballs and pamphlets could only do so much against the more numerous cannonballs and longer pamphlets of their rivals.

The Portuguese case casts some light on the struggle over intellectual property rights, one of the great themes of contemporary economic history. The Vasco da Gamases (Vascos da Gamas?) of our time are American and European tech outfits, especially pharmaceutical firms, that are trying to extend their temporary monopoly on crucial inventions to maintain competitive advantage in the face of the disparity of size and potential power between the Western nations and Asia. The cannonball part of this program revolves around using the temporary military and political preponderance of the United States to enforce an unrealistically strong system of intellectual property rights on a mostly unwilling world. The Portuguese precedent suggests the limitations of this sort of arm-twisting. Threats and bribes produce a lot more lip service and evasion than compliance. Pamphleteering doesn’t necessarily work any better.

As with any justification of property rights, the defenders of intellectual property run up against a serious problem when they attempt to justify perpetual ownership. John Locke explained the claim of a person over his land by supposing that the proprietor mixed his labor with the land he worked, but this sweat equity rationale fails to explain why the children and grandchildren of the pioneer should maintain their rights without a further investment of effort. In the case of technological research, it makes a lot of sense that the agencies that spend the time and effort to discover and market new drugs or devices be rewarded for a time because that prospect encourages others to undertake fresh research. Why it is either right or beneficial for a firm to keep its monopoly into a second or third generation is far more problematic. Indeed, at some point, the ability to continue squeezing profits out of old discoveries results in a disincentive to innovate—why should the greyhounds keep on running if they can actually catch the rabbit?

Of course very few are promoting the notion that intellectual property rights should be perpetual. Keeping a monopoly as long as it is likely to remain profitable suffices, though the recently proposed extension of the term for copyrights, a boon for the grandchildren of novelists, shows how long that can be. In this issue, the struggle over the mores or lesses does matter, however, especially in the case of efficacious drugs where the dogged defense of intellectual property rights serves the larger purpose of keeping medical costs artificially high.

The Portuguese eventually lost; and the imperial power gradually turned into an inexpensive vacation destination; but that declension hardly harmed the world as a whole. Similarly, a rational revision of the rights of intellectual property would probably hurt the bottom line of Big Pharma, but it might well benefit most people if ways could be found to reward innovators who do an especially good job of giving away their productions once the cost of discovery has been amortized. Anyhow, rights and wrongs aside, it’s hard to see how intellectual property rights can be successfully maintained, let alone expanded, in the face of the underlying realities of power. And the 3-dimensional Xerox machine hasn’t even been invented yet.

Confessions of a Test Particle

When people worry about the increasing concentration of ownership in the major media, they are usually afraid that the monopolist will have too much power. To judge from the coverage of the Second Iraq War, however, the more immediate danger is just the reverse. The larger and more profitable these outfits become, the more they have to lose and the more cowardly they behave as when Disney caved about Fahrenheit 911 or the Washington Post decided it just had to play cheerleader to the Bush administration. The giant media combinations depend on government favors for their continued prosperity and aren’t about to speak truth to power even in the cases when they don’t completely agree with the emerging semi-fascist corporatist consensus. These outfits are big as in big targets.

A somewhat similar logic explains the consistent venality of individual media stars. It’s one thing to risk your job when you only make a hundred thousand a year and quite another to forgo millions and millions just for the sake of principle, especially since whistleblowing has become a meaningless gesture—in the absence of a free press, the whistleblowers will be personally destroyed as Scott Ritter knows and Joe Wilson is learning. Anyhow, at least for the present, the public despises people who rock the boat at the risk of oodles of money—it’s un-American.

To be fair, it is all too easy for somebody without responsibility or vulnerability to say what they think without a lot of preliminary calculations of profit and loss. If you live in a barrel in the dump, you can afford to tell Alexander the Great to get out of your light. Appearances to the contrary, however, I’m not playing the cynic here and making a moral criticism of the managers of big media or of the talking heads. The ethical dimension of the problem is secondary. Even in a rational world decent behavior requires courage and integrity, but the point is we don’t have a rational world. At this point, honestly reporting the news would land you in Butler’s Lives of the Saints; and that wouldn’t help anybody since sainthood is itself a media scam.

Boundary Conditions

Of the two engines of economic growth, the demographic dynamic is notably flagging these days, especially in Europe and Japan. Meanwhile, nobody really knows what opportunities or disappointments will emerge from technology, the other motor. Promoters of nanotechnology, the most recent Caucasian cargo cult, await the arrival of artificial paradise with more impatience than anxiety while others are worried precisely because the hype may pan out. I’m told that science fiction writers speculate about a point in history they call the Vingian Singularity in honor of Vernor Vinge, a writer who proposed that we were rapidly approaching the moment when “technological change speeds up to such a degree that society becomes incomprehensible even to the people living in it.” But maybe the Vingian Singularity, like the Second Coming, is destined to an interminable postponement; and whether we desire or fear its advent, we’ll eventually have to deal with the failure of prophecy.

It is commonly pointed out that Marx never fully realized how productive industry could become. It doesn’t matter very much if labor is exploited if the exploited masses are living high on the hog. But we may be falling into the reverse error of assuming that the projected triumphant advance of science will make the social and political structure of society irrelevant. If technology isn’t quite so miraculous as advertised and fails to generate economic growth, it becomes very important indeed who gets the biggest share of the pie. To judge by the renewed fervor of their defense of privilege, the conservatives seem to have recognized this possibility ahead of the rest of us.

More Excuses

Marx famously said that the obsession of the Germans with religion testified to their political and economic backwardness. But maybe it would be simpler to point out that people who are interested in ideas but have no connection to power naturally gravitate to subjects that sound important. The vanity of these earnest small timers calculated that the loftiness of the topic would compensate for their own insignificance. Hey, works for me. But there are perhaps better excuses for thinking about religion now if not in 1848. I don’t refer only or especially to the power of religious pressure groups in the U.S. or the salience of religious language in expressing cultural dissatisfaction. To use, not without premeditation, a Levi-Straussian expression, religion is good to think.

One can learn a lot about mankind from a consideration of the history of science or mathematics, but those cognitive enterprises are contaminated with authentic, non-human content. The errors of science may teach us about ourselves, but its truths teach us about triangles, moths, or neutrinos. For the philosophical anthropologist, theology is a much better object of study because its development has not been deformed by non-human input. In the absence of real gods, spirits, and devils, theology’s elaborate doctrines have been prepared in a vacuum like the especially pure chemicals they crystallize on the space shuttle.

I’m aware that this take on religions sounds rather like a well-known thesis of Feuerbach. In part it is, which is rather inconvenient granted Feuerbach’s dubious reputation. On the other hand, Auguste Comte was also right about several very important issues; and he’s even duller than Feuerbach. If they’re right, they’re right. But I draw more modest conclusions from all this than Feuerbach did. In studying the sociology of religion I don’t expect to discover a grand, though alienated human essence because I don’t see much evidence that there is such a thing. I expect that the realities that underlie the fictive rationality of religion comprise a pretty irregular collection headlined by the immutable laws of marketing.

Continuous Fulgurations

In their deep distrust of one another, the Americans look for some mechanism that can preserve social equilibrium and public decency in the face of the vanity, greed, and lust for power of individuals and organizations. But society has no automatic thermostat and will never devise one. The nation—any nation—holds together because enough people share and implement an understanding of what is permissible and what has to be done. Absent that will, constitutional checks and balances, independent commissions, bureaucratic procedures, automatic penalties, referenda, and similar gear automatically fail. Indeed, the selective implementation of rigid and impractical laws is an excellent way for unscrupulous political groups to persecute their enemies and extort campaign contributions from potential targets. No nation has stronger laws against corruption than Italy.

Both the Iraq prison abuse investigations and this week’s settlement of the Halliburton accounting fraud case underline the principle that justice isn’t an automatic device. In the former instance, it has already become clear that the military tribunals are being used to protect general officers by limiting accountability to low-level personnel. In the Halliburton case, a large fine was imposed because the company secretly changed the way it reported profits in order to pump up stock prices. Despite the fact that the largest single beneficiary of this scheme was the CEO, whose already enormous pay package was inflated by performance bonuses he did not honestly earn, the FCC did not hold Mr. Cheney liable, however. In effect, Halliburton stockholders got screwed twice, once by the future vice president and then again when the fine got paid out of corporation assets, thus lowering the value of the company. Apparently government agencies are simply not going to prosecute their bosses except in those cases where public pressure makes it expedient to sacrifice somebody, but public pressure would have to be organized by the media, another group full of men and women of convenient principle.

At this point in American history, it’s easy to believe that it would take more than 50,000 gallons of lighter fluid in an abandoned gold mine to provide a detector sensitive enough to register a particle of integrity in our public life. In fact, I believe that things would be very much worse were it not for the largely invisible effect of thousands of individuals doing the right thing in a conspiracy so secret that the conspirators themselves are hardly conscious of it. In the Legends of the Jews we read that God allows the world to persist because of the existence of ten good men. I’m more optimistic than the rabbis—or more matter of fact. I think that, as a plain matter of the physics of the situation, civil society and government function as well as they do, not because of mechanical laws and simple feedback loops, but because of the shared, tacit understanding of what needs to be done. It isn’t that ten wholly good men must exist somewhere, but that there is enough fractional rationality in enough of us fallible men to hold the world together. When that mediocre but foundational virtue weakens at the margins because of an incremental increase in the cowardice of individuals, the rule of law doesn’t work and nations decline. Conversely, if more of us, especially more of those of us who have power and privilege, find a little more courage to do what we know we should, things will get better.

Confessions

I have often been unjust to the television journalists by denouncing them as incompetent as well as venal. Venal they are, as is probably inevitable in any entertainment business where thousands compete for a tiny number of very lucrative jobs; but in calling them incompetent, I’m being a little unfair because they actually fulfill their duties very well. I am being disingenuous, after all, to act as if their job description actually called for them to determine the most important facts about public events and accurately and effectively disseminate this information. In fact, as I once wrote to Aaron Brown in an offhand email—to judge by his reply, he wasn’t in complete agreement— journalism is a cheesy entertainment and propaganda medium. Watching the tube, it’s very easy to get huffy and exclaim, “That’s not news, it’s an infomertial;” but the point is that news is an infomertial. Atavisms from the 50’s and 20 minutes of PBS a week aside, journalism just is the business of telling people those parts of what they want to hear that the owners of the networks want to tell them. The heroic version of what journalism is supposed to be is largely illusory: an ideal the journalists can trot out to defend the dignity of their low trade, a standard that provides carping critics like me with a convenient, if blunt, weapon.

While I’m in a confessional frame of mine, I should also apologize for writing as if I thought it was advisable or even possible to squelch commercial journalism. Over and beyond the obvious likelihood that censorship of the media would just provide a new venue for even worse abuses, I have a principled objection to kicking against the pricks. It makes sense to find ways to ameliorate problems that can never be cured without remedies worse than the disease, but it is dishonest to pretend either that there is a cure or that the situation is hopeless. Though journalism, like herpes, is incurable, it is also mostly a nuisance that can be treated topically by scorn and derision. Or, if you like grander, Joseph Cambellian language, you might say journalism is part of the eternal balance of things. Three rats ceaselessly gnaw on the roots of the cosmic tree, Yggdrasal; but for some profound reason you can’t simply exterminate the rats. All you can do is encourage the three Norns to counteract the rats by their ministrations.

The anchors and pundits rise every morning and recommit themselves to their sacred occupation of making their countrymen a little stupider and more ignorant and their nation a little cheaper and nastier. It is the way of things and has been for a very long time—even Fox would have a hard time living up to the standards of scurrility of Reformation broadsides. It remains possible, indeed, necessary, however, to do the Norn thing, especially since the rats seem to have multiplied considerably over the last couple of decades.

Politics, including cultural politics, is like cooking. If you get too much salt in the pot, you can only save the dish by adding something else. By the same token, it isn’t practical to fish the superfluous pundits out of the soup or even cut back very much on the coverage of the Lacy Peterson murder. It is possible to add something to the recipe, though; and that seems to be happening. If they insist on shitting in the swimming pool, we’re going to have to make the pool bigger.

The professional journalists covering the convention at Boston have complained about the invasion of the Bloggers, but they themselves called political blogging into existence by their own failings.

Putting Two and Two Together
I used to imagine the Platonic Realm of the Forms as an enormous and rather dull museum in which, like the standard meter in Paris, the exemplars of every conceivable thing are in display under bell jars. But maybe the actual Noosphere is a more going place, a rave where cruising concepts troll for pickups and ecstasy. One recent meeting of strangers in the dark:

It has been recently reported that the human lifespan took a big jump some 32,000 years ago, the same time period as the great florescence of Paleolithic art. Increased longevity may have been a key feature in human evolution since older individuals are carriers of cultural memory and it is culture that makes it worthwhile to spend all that metabolic energy on a big brain. But there’s another connection, and that’s where the second idea comes in. We know from the research of Robert Zajonc and others that birth order correlates with intelligence. First born and only children tend to be smarter than the others, presumably because they spend more time around adults. But that explanation implies that anything that increases the amount of time children spend around older people is likely to increase their intelligence. Increasing longevity is likely to do just that. In turn, greater intelligence in the phenotypes means more cultural innovation, more longevity, and more selection pressure for the genotypes that correlate with intelligence. In retrospect, you can see how the thing got out of hand.

Something for the Koan Brothers to Make a Movie About

The critique of nationalism associated with Eric Hobsbawm can be pushed too far. Kilts and tartans and other patriotic clichés are commonly cooked up by the marketing department; but nationalities do possess distinct and identifiable folkways and mentalities. After all this time, it really does mean something to be a Frenchman. The important point, however, is that what Volkish philosophers and entrepreneurs of Fundamentalism pick up as the basis for their constructions are seldom still living traditions. It is only by chance that the beliefs and practices of real people will be appropriate to a program designed to address specifically contemporary concerns. The universal demand for particularism so characteristic of the 20th Century and very much with us in the endlessly attacks on liberalism are obviously rooted in the international culture of universities, not the parochial world of peasants. Indeed, if the genuine institutions and values of a people conflict with what the conservatives want, so much the worst for tradition. The requirements of ideology come first, as when the Enlightenment ideals of the American Revolution, still very much alive in many hearts, are denounced in the name of patriotism.

If you meet Thomas Jefferson on the road, kill him.

The Silence of the Oracles

When Stephen Hawking proposed that black holes give off radiation some years ago, the idea wasn’t very surprising to me. No physicist, obviously, I did have a liberal artsy appreciation of quantum mechanical tunneling, the principle behind Hawking radiation. Hawking’s new claim about black holes is much more opaque. He now says that he can solve an old paradox—a paradox he himself created, as it happens—by showing that black holes do not violate a basic rule of quantum physics by destroying all information about the particles that fall into them. But while information may indeed escape from black holes, damned little of it escaped from the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation. Apparently the argument’s got something to do with what actually occurs at the event horizon of a black hole—reports on scientific websites are very vague.

What amuses me about all this has nothing to do with the physics of it, about which I’m certainly not competent to comment, but about the popular presumption that Hawking’s change of heart on the issue is somehow decisive, presumably because he will once play poker with Newton, Einstein, and Data. Unfortunately, very bright and accomplished scientists make claims all the time that turn out to be false or, worse, foolish. Hawking, after all, is 61, an age at which famous scientists, their previous triumphs having grown stale, get enthusiastic about Vitamin C or Grand Unification or the Implicate Order or the successor to the Duotronic Brain. But maybe Hawking did solve the problem. I understand he managed to cheat on his wife despite being confined in a wheelchair with ALS. In comparison to that, psyching out black holes is trifling.