Why Second Base is Scoring Position
You may have encountered a news story about the effect of the hormone oxytocin on the human propensity to trust other people. Sprayed in the nose, it apparently makes the subject more willing to risk giving money to a stranger. That’s really not so surprising. It has been known for quite a while that the hormone elicits maternal behavior so that it wouldn’t be surprising if it played a role in other kinds of bonding. But I expect that other conclusions remain to be drawn. For example:
Oxytocin, which does many other things as well, plays a key role in lactation. When the nipples of a nursing mammal are stimulated, oxytocin is rapidly released from the hypothalamus and stimulates the initial step of milk secretion. Which is supposedly why the washing and manipulation of the utter is an important preliminary to milking a cow. But the oxytocin not only promotes milk but also the milk of human kindness; and presumably, it is not only released when a baby does the sucking. Sexual caresses of the breasts probably also lead to oxytocin release and thereby increase willingness of a woman to take the plunge, always a risky choice.
In the Frogs of Aristophanes, Euripides quotes one of his own lines, “Persuasion, save in speech, no temple hath.” But Persuasion, who the Greeks imagined to be a goddess who helped out the bridegroom on the wedding night, might have another temple or two after all.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
Monday, May 30, 2005
Minerva’s Kingdom
It has been repeatedly pointed out that the E.U. is not Holy, Roman, or an Empire. After the other day, it may be supposed that it is hardly even a union. I take a more hopeful view, though perhaps only because of a near total ignorance of European politics. Speaking parochially, I’d like to see Europe stick together, but not too well. In the ideal case, the E.U. would form a conglomeration of states far too strong to mess with but rather too loosely organized to throw its weight around aggressively.
It has been repeatedly pointed out that the E.U. is not Holy, Roman, or an Empire. After the other day, it may be supposed that it is hardly even a union. I take a more hopeful view, though perhaps only because of a near total ignorance of European politics. Speaking parochially, I’d like to see Europe stick together, but not too well. In the ideal case, the E.U. would form a conglomeration of states far too strong to mess with but rather too loosely organized to throw its weight around aggressively.
House Rules
Finding things out has never been easier, at least for people who are already well educated and want to know. Unfortunately, the availability of reliable information does not guarantee that the public will be well informed. Very few take the trouble to educate themselves; and it remains exceedingly difficult and very expensive to convey simple facts to the mass of the population; and that’s true even in the minority of cases where corporations, political parties, and religions aren’t actively promoting ignorance and spreading lies.
I think we routinely overestimate human curiosity. People are fond of trivial novelty, of course, but the real surprises in this world require effort to comprehend. My nephew quotes a line from a song that goes (more or less): “Each household appliance’s another new science;” but an unknown idea is more hateful to most of us than a new fangled telephone is to your grandpa. Heraclitus said, “If one does not expect the unexpected one will not find it out.” If follows, apparently, that one will not find it out. Which partly explains why most of our political debates are fought over obsolete issues that have only an indirect or symbolic relationship to the real problems of the time. At great personal cost, the participants finally learned how to argue about abortion or state’s rights or stem-cell research. It’s just too much to ask that they learn a new game just because the old one is largely irrelevant; and any political agent who tries to alter the stale agenda has to fight not only his opponents but human inertia, which, contrary to Cicero, is the real power against which the Gods themselves struggle in vain.
We pretend that the ideological struggles of the day revolve around technical economic issues or the specifics of constitutional law as if whether prices are set by a governments or cartels is the most important problem with world trade and gridlock in Washington is a consequence of a quarrel over the proper construal of the doctrine of Federalism. Privatization arguments are particularly irrelevant, or so it seems to me, since the enormous corporations that stand to inherit traditional governmental functions are more like states than firms anyhow—the real issue is whether you prefer dirigisme or feudalism since, at least for the time being, a true third way is a very notional option. The great contests of our time are not about the how as much as the for whom, the cui in cui bono. Of course the shills for the various interests have every reason to perfume their advocacy with an incense of academic disinterest; and the people, for their part, would prefer to think that there is a nonpolitical solution to political problems; but over and beyond, or perhaps beneath, these particular motives is the tendency of minds once at rest to remain at rest.
Finding things out has never been easier, at least for people who are already well educated and want to know. Unfortunately, the availability of reliable information does not guarantee that the public will be well informed. Very few take the trouble to educate themselves; and it remains exceedingly difficult and very expensive to convey simple facts to the mass of the population; and that’s true even in the minority of cases where corporations, political parties, and religions aren’t actively promoting ignorance and spreading lies.
I think we routinely overestimate human curiosity. People are fond of trivial novelty, of course, but the real surprises in this world require effort to comprehend. My nephew quotes a line from a song that goes (more or less): “Each household appliance’s another new science;” but an unknown idea is more hateful to most of us than a new fangled telephone is to your grandpa. Heraclitus said, “If one does not expect the unexpected one will not find it out.” If follows, apparently, that one will not find it out. Which partly explains why most of our political debates are fought over obsolete issues that have only an indirect or symbolic relationship to the real problems of the time. At great personal cost, the participants finally learned how to argue about abortion or state’s rights or stem-cell research. It’s just too much to ask that they learn a new game just because the old one is largely irrelevant; and any political agent who tries to alter the stale agenda has to fight not only his opponents but human inertia, which, contrary to Cicero, is the real power against which the Gods themselves struggle in vain.
We pretend that the ideological struggles of the day revolve around technical economic issues or the specifics of constitutional law as if whether prices are set by a governments or cartels is the most important problem with world trade and gridlock in Washington is a consequence of a quarrel over the proper construal of the doctrine of Federalism. Privatization arguments are particularly irrelevant, or so it seems to me, since the enormous corporations that stand to inherit traditional governmental functions are more like states than firms anyhow—the real issue is whether you prefer dirigisme or feudalism since, at least for the time being, a true third way is a very notional option. The great contests of our time are not about the how as much as the for whom, the cui in cui bono. Of course the shills for the various interests have every reason to perfume their advocacy with an incense of academic disinterest; and the people, for their part, would prefer to think that there is a nonpolitical solution to political problems; but over and beyond, or perhaps beneath, these particular motives is the tendency of minds once at rest to remain at rest.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
A Base Line
A classic way to torpedo a historian’s reputation is to check the accuracy of the victim’s footnotes. When the procedure yields evidence of carelessness, the critic can argue a lack of professional standards. This technique would not pass muster in the sciences. Until and unless it could be established that the rate of error in the target’s work were greater than the average for his cohorts, the detected mistakes might as well be taken as evidence of the general sloppiness of historians rather than the particular incompetence of a single historian. As a matter of fact, since the reported background error rate in citations is on the order of 35 to 40%, you have to be a sorry researcher indeed to come in under the existing deplorable standard. Under the circumstances, one has to agree with Doctor House that full-body scans of patients are useless in making a diagnosis because they mostly just reveal that human bodies have lots of little suspicious lumps and shadows.
As my old boss Kay Chamberlain used to say, don’t tell me a number unless you’ve got another number to compare it to. And if that simple methodological maxim suffices for the book business, it ought to hold for historians, too, and perhaps other folks. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. When politicians are attacked for their sexual quirks, for example, nobody ever stops to ask to what extent the quirks are quirks and the accused are damned not for violating norms but simply for getting caught. All these years after Kinsey, we’re still acting shocked that people routinely commit adultery, cross-dress, or engage in homosexual behavior. Of course in mass societies, the factor that determines whether you suffer for your offenses is not the offense, which, indeed, you may not even have committed, but the ability of your enemies to make a dog and pony show out of your supposed taste for dogs and ponies. On the evidence, Conservatives are at least as prone to what is commonly mislabeled as sexual irregularity as the supposedly lascivious liberals whose morals they relentlessly denounce even as they don their seamed nylons and size 11 fuck-me shoes.
I have this recurrent dream in which I’m falsely accused of some crime or other. I’m on the stand and the prosecutor is raking me over the coals for assorted personal foibles irrelevant to my purported crime. I finally respond, “If I known you were charging me with original sin, I would have plead guilty.”
A classic way to torpedo a historian’s reputation is to check the accuracy of the victim’s footnotes. When the procedure yields evidence of carelessness, the critic can argue a lack of professional standards. This technique would not pass muster in the sciences. Until and unless it could be established that the rate of error in the target’s work were greater than the average for his cohorts, the detected mistakes might as well be taken as evidence of the general sloppiness of historians rather than the particular incompetence of a single historian. As a matter of fact, since the reported background error rate in citations is on the order of 35 to 40%, you have to be a sorry researcher indeed to come in under the existing deplorable standard. Under the circumstances, one has to agree with Doctor House that full-body scans of patients are useless in making a diagnosis because they mostly just reveal that human bodies have lots of little suspicious lumps and shadows.
As my old boss Kay Chamberlain used to say, don’t tell me a number unless you’ve got another number to compare it to. And if that simple methodological maxim suffices for the book business, it ought to hold for historians, too, and perhaps other folks. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. When politicians are attacked for their sexual quirks, for example, nobody ever stops to ask to what extent the quirks are quirks and the accused are damned not for violating norms but simply for getting caught. All these years after Kinsey, we’re still acting shocked that people routinely commit adultery, cross-dress, or engage in homosexual behavior. Of course in mass societies, the factor that determines whether you suffer for your offenses is not the offense, which, indeed, you may not even have committed, but the ability of your enemies to make a dog and pony show out of your supposed taste for dogs and ponies. On the evidence, Conservatives are at least as prone to what is commonly mislabeled as sexual irregularity as the supposedly lascivious liberals whose morals they relentlessly denounce even as they don their seamed nylons and size 11 fuck-me shoes.
I have this recurrent dream in which I’m falsely accused of some crime or other. I’m on the stand and the prosecutor is raking me over the coals for assorted personal foibles irrelevant to my purported crime. I finally respond, “If I known you were charging me with original sin, I would have plead guilty.”
Saturday, May 21, 2005
What is Enmerdement?
Ralph Sorensen, a biologist friend of mine currently on sabbatical writes:
“Being in Germany, I reflect on the question of how so bright, charming, and sly a group of people could have, in the person of their parents and grandparents, been seduced by Nazism. This leads me to reflect on Bush and the current American zeitgeist I am presently avoiding. I am awaiting publication of "The Eternal Liberal," given the vacuity of a term as abused by people who appear oblivious of a) the enlightenment b) the etymology of the term, and c) the fallacy of reducing all political thought to a single axis. Yes, being a "liberal" is not constitutive, but, rather, facultative (existential, not essential), but the definition of "Jew" had the same flexibility, did it not?”
What saddens me is the way in which the erstwhile liberals, eternal or temporary, duplicate so many of the responses of the German Jews to their own demonization, including insincere conversions to the religion of their oppressors, gratuitous professions of loyalty to the Reich, and endless self criticism. Nobody spends more time and ingenuity figuring out ways to bad mouth the Enlightenment and its values than liberal public intellectuals. The right-wing press harps on liberal arrogance and elitism, but it is the liberals themselves who compulsively elaborate the theme and provide the demagogues with complicated historical analyses explaining what’s wrong with progress and rationality. After all, the red-state folks don’t know much about the historical period or movement traditionally called the Enlightenment. At most they’ve heard the term someplace and don’t like the sound of it because it gives them the same bad feeling they get from the expression “Civil Liberties.”
Ralph Sorensen, a biologist friend of mine currently on sabbatical writes:
“Being in Germany, I reflect on the question of how so bright, charming, and sly a group of people could have, in the person of their parents and grandparents, been seduced by Nazism. This leads me to reflect on Bush and the current American zeitgeist I am presently avoiding. I am awaiting publication of "The Eternal Liberal," given the vacuity of a term as abused by people who appear oblivious of a) the enlightenment b) the etymology of the term, and c) the fallacy of reducing all political thought to a single axis. Yes, being a "liberal" is not constitutive, but, rather, facultative (existential, not essential), but the definition of "Jew" had the same flexibility, did it not?”
What saddens me is the way in which the erstwhile liberals, eternal or temporary, duplicate so many of the responses of the German Jews to their own demonization, including insincere conversions to the religion of their oppressors, gratuitous professions of loyalty to the Reich, and endless self criticism. Nobody spends more time and ingenuity figuring out ways to bad mouth the Enlightenment and its values than liberal public intellectuals. The right-wing press harps on liberal arrogance and elitism, but it is the liberals themselves who compulsively elaborate the theme and provide the demagogues with complicated historical analyses explaining what’s wrong with progress and rationality. After all, the red-state folks don’t know much about the historical period or movement traditionally called the Enlightenment. At most they’ve heard the term someplace and don’t like the sound of it because it gives them the same bad feeling they get from the expression “Civil Liberties.”
Monday, May 16, 2005
The Deacon’s Masterpiece
As the Roman Empire in the West declined, the grandees of the time continued to build huge baths and basilicas as monuments to their greatness, though the dearth of resources and the decline of taste resulted in a showy but shabby grandeur reminiscent of Las Vegas. Better maintenance of existing structures would have been much more cost effective; but, then as now, janitors didn’t get much respect; and the cities gradually decayed. A somewhat similar pattern is emerging in our times. Our political economists and politicians promote policies that are obsessed with endless growth even though the problem we have to manage is precisely the end of growth. We celebrate the ethos—and ethics—of the entrepreneur even though the situation calls for a different kind of agent altogether. You often encounter young business types who like to make speeches about the need to welcome risk—a motivational theme that makes old CEOs smile since they know that the whole point is to make sure you’re shooting fish in a barrel—but taking risks when there isn’t anything worthwhile to win is just stupid. While opportunities for sensible risk taking will surely continue to occur in the future, the larger challenge will be to preserve as much of what we have as possible and that will require an outlook completely opposite to the current vogue for free-market boosterism in business and Neocon ruthlessness in politics.
Unfortunately, what ought to be the Golden Age of Maintenance Engineering will probably turn out to be something quite different. Though that would be unfortunate, it does offer the philosophical observer a special opportunity to study how things fail and, more specifically, why so many people are surprised when they do. On that second question, for example, I note that the threats to our continuing prosperity are not unknown or even unacknowledged, even by supporters of the status quo, who, however, typically address and dismiss them one by one as manageable as, indeed, they are if taken one by one. We could spend the necessary resources to fix up the roads, bridges, and harbors. We could stop increasing the Federal deficit. We could address the imbalance of trade. We could take steps to manage the consequences of global warming. We could find substitutes for liquid fuels as petroleum production declines. The problem, obviously, is that we have to do all these things at once and we’re currently not doing any of them.
One frequently encounters middle-aged ruins who point out that many alcoholics live long lives, that many smokers don’t get cancer, and that plenty of fat people are perfectly healthy. Our politicians have adopted this cheerful system of evasion on our behalf by incorporating a whole raft of optimistic estimates into their projections. Claiming, not without reason, that each element of the national system can withstand normal stresses, they ignore the evidence of how things fail. Like the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay of Oliver Wendell Holmes, each component of the whole may be equally strong—or, as is more accurate in our case, equally infected with a general flavor of mild decay—but the shocks that it will encounter on road are not similarly homogenous. We don’t know what’s going to tip over the cart—-perhaps some calamity of war, financial panic, religious strife, epidemic disease, or terrorism—but the scale of the bad consequences are likely to be very great since the overall strength of the fabric has been compromised by years of neglect.
As the Roman Empire in the West declined, the grandees of the time continued to build huge baths and basilicas as monuments to their greatness, though the dearth of resources and the decline of taste resulted in a showy but shabby grandeur reminiscent of Las Vegas. Better maintenance of existing structures would have been much more cost effective; but, then as now, janitors didn’t get much respect; and the cities gradually decayed. A somewhat similar pattern is emerging in our times. Our political economists and politicians promote policies that are obsessed with endless growth even though the problem we have to manage is precisely the end of growth. We celebrate the ethos—and ethics—of the entrepreneur even though the situation calls for a different kind of agent altogether. You often encounter young business types who like to make speeches about the need to welcome risk—a motivational theme that makes old CEOs smile since they know that the whole point is to make sure you’re shooting fish in a barrel—but taking risks when there isn’t anything worthwhile to win is just stupid. While opportunities for sensible risk taking will surely continue to occur in the future, the larger challenge will be to preserve as much of what we have as possible and that will require an outlook completely opposite to the current vogue for free-market boosterism in business and Neocon ruthlessness in politics.
Unfortunately, what ought to be the Golden Age of Maintenance Engineering will probably turn out to be something quite different. Though that would be unfortunate, it does offer the philosophical observer a special opportunity to study how things fail and, more specifically, why so many people are surprised when they do. On that second question, for example, I note that the threats to our continuing prosperity are not unknown or even unacknowledged, even by supporters of the status quo, who, however, typically address and dismiss them one by one as manageable as, indeed, they are if taken one by one. We could spend the necessary resources to fix up the roads, bridges, and harbors. We could stop increasing the Federal deficit. We could address the imbalance of trade. We could take steps to manage the consequences of global warming. We could find substitutes for liquid fuels as petroleum production declines. The problem, obviously, is that we have to do all these things at once and we’re currently not doing any of them.
One frequently encounters middle-aged ruins who point out that many alcoholics live long lives, that many smokers don’t get cancer, and that plenty of fat people are perfectly healthy. Our politicians have adopted this cheerful system of evasion on our behalf by incorporating a whole raft of optimistic estimates into their projections. Claiming, not without reason, that each element of the national system can withstand normal stresses, they ignore the evidence of how things fail. Like the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay of Oliver Wendell Holmes, each component of the whole may be equally strong—or, as is more accurate in our case, equally infected with a general flavor of mild decay—but the shocks that it will encounter on road are not similarly homogenous. We don’t know what’s going to tip over the cart—-perhaps some calamity of war, financial panic, religious strife, epidemic disease, or terrorism—but the scale of the bad consequences are likely to be very great since the overall strength of the fabric has been compromised by years of neglect.
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Going Down
I don’t know whether Newsweek’s story about interrogators at Gitmo flushing the Koran down the toilet was true or false, though my guess is that the story was essentially correct and that its government source has simply recanted under pressure. A great many former prisoners have reported similar outrages. Why we should credit members of this administration over these victims is unclear to me. If the Secretary of State can insist that we didn’t ask for the Iraqi War (“This war came to us”), if senators like McCain can deny the plain message of the recently revealed British memo (“I do not believe that the Bush administration decided that they would set up a scenario that gave us the rationale for going into Iraq.”), if the military justice system can put the blame for Abu Greib on a handful of noncoms, it’s pretty clear that both the administration and its legions of enablers are deeply into the Big Lie.
As befits this new age of faith, all of this has a theological explanation. What you have to understand is that there are really two Purgatories, the one Dante wrote about where venal sins are purged in preparation for eternal bliss and the other purgatory where falling souls, still hampered by residual decency, undergo basic training for full-blown Hell. America is currently on the down escalator, but we’ve got a ways to go. Which is why Conservatives still bother with excuses. We aren’t torturing anybody. We aren’t torturing anybody without extreme need. We aren’t torturing anybody too much. Good people aren’t evil just because they do evil things. We can quit anytime. Torture is manly and admirable.
I don’t know whether Newsweek’s story about interrogators at Gitmo flushing the Koran down the toilet was true or false, though my guess is that the story was essentially correct and that its government source has simply recanted under pressure. A great many former prisoners have reported similar outrages. Why we should credit members of this administration over these victims is unclear to me. If the Secretary of State can insist that we didn’t ask for the Iraqi War (“This war came to us”), if senators like McCain can deny the plain message of the recently revealed British memo (“I do not believe that the Bush administration decided that they would set up a scenario that gave us the rationale for going into Iraq.”), if the military justice system can put the blame for Abu Greib on a handful of noncoms, it’s pretty clear that both the administration and its legions of enablers are deeply into the Big Lie.
As befits this new age of faith, all of this has a theological explanation. What you have to understand is that there are really two Purgatories, the one Dante wrote about where venal sins are purged in preparation for eternal bliss and the other purgatory where falling souls, still hampered by residual decency, undergo basic training for full-blown Hell. America is currently on the down escalator, but we’ve got a ways to go. Which is why Conservatives still bother with excuses. We aren’t torturing anybody. We aren’t torturing anybody without extreme need. We aren’t torturing anybody too much. Good people aren’t evil just because they do evil things. We can quit anytime. Torture is manly and admirable.
Saturday, May 14, 2005
Archimboldian Philosophy
If only because it saves effort, we routinely overestimate the consistency of our world. In the formula of Mary Douglas, dirt is matter out of place, but if we don’t care to notice the disarray, the dirt doesn’t really matter. That there are chambermaids with the souls of duchesses and duchesses with the souls of chambermaids may occasion an observation or two in Proust, but it hardly threatens the class system. That our stream of consciousness is “a shitty run of category mistakes and non sequiturs” is equally inconsequential. Which is a good thing, because our Zeitgeist, like the clothes of the lady in the limerick, is surely in patches with everybody out of kilter in time, genre, register, and discipline. While there are certainly plenty of 21st Century polemicists with the outlook (and talents) of off-brand 18th Century philosophes, the serious discussion of real issues is sometimes reminiscent of that ancient precursor of the Internet, the Talmud, except that the sages aren’t talking with one another in the same language. Reading Brian Joseph and Richard Janda’s long and extremely eccentric introductory chapter to the Handbook of Historical Linguistics the other day, I couldn’t decide if I was more reminded of the Baroque splendor of the Nuova Scienza of Giambattista Vico or the oppressively relentless whimsy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The motley is not merely stylistic. Trying to come to terms with language change, Joseph and Janda manage to meander through the particulars of a half a dozen intricate debates in other fields including thermodynamics, history, paleontology, developmental biology, theology, and philosophy as if wrestling with the Great Vowel Shift or the etymology of “Bunk” requires a comprehensive theory of Time itself in the historical linguist. The first sentence of an Old Chronicle of the City of Barcelona reads “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” Similar quirk. The odd thing about this performance, however, is its reasonableness under the circumstances. These guys are presumptuous, but they have as good a right to be presumptuous as anybody else. Hubris is sometimes a duty.
Joseph and Janda face the problem, ubiquitous in our age, of dealing with the general in the absence of the universal. Instead of relating linguistic change and (for example) evolutionary change by abstracting out a purified philosophical sense of change, the authors use professional-level concepts of each alternatively to traverse the broken ground of various theoretical and practical issues. Sometimes punctuated equilibrium is good to think with, sometimes the ergodic hypothesis, sometimes the properly linguistic notion of grammaticalization. The absence of a master level of discourse rules out the drafting of a map, but not the writing out of an itinerary, always provided we can put up with the inelegance of literary forms required to match such a jumpy methodology. It’s not that anybody who wants to deal seriously with great issues has much choice, after all. Veritable knowledge cannot be any more compact and homogeneous than the reality it addresses. Coming up against the real strangeness and multiplicity of the world, it has at last become necessary for thought to conform to its object at the cost of forgoing the dream of an integral knowing subjects or even of integral totalizing disciplines. In the Bible, God inflicted the confusion of tongues on the people for trying to build a tower to heaven. In this version, we’re actively promoting that same confusion precisely in order to build the tower.
By the way, the advent of what I’m call Archimboldian thought, hardly spells the end of traditional philosophy. Much of what professional philosophers do is appropriately specialized and technical and can be cannibalized to good purpose by the scavenging bricoleur. Meanwhile more traditional “Great Ideas” philosophy also endures and prospers as a specialized form of public relations that satisfies the public’s metaphysical needs. The whole is just another one of the parts, but that’s hardly fatal to the commercial prospects of the next dozen versions of retail holism.
—the Librarian
If only because it saves effort, we routinely overestimate the consistency of our world. In the formula of Mary Douglas, dirt is matter out of place, but if we don’t care to notice the disarray, the dirt doesn’t really matter. That there are chambermaids with the souls of duchesses and duchesses with the souls of chambermaids may occasion an observation or two in Proust, but it hardly threatens the class system. That our stream of consciousness is “a shitty run of category mistakes and non sequiturs” is equally inconsequential. Which is a good thing, because our Zeitgeist, like the clothes of the lady in the limerick, is surely in patches with everybody out of kilter in time, genre, register, and discipline. While there are certainly plenty of 21st Century polemicists with the outlook (and talents) of off-brand 18th Century philosophes, the serious discussion of real issues is sometimes reminiscent of that ancient precursor of the Internet, the Talmud, except that the sages aren’t talking with one another in the same language. Reading Brian Joseph and Richard Janda’s long and extremely eccentric introductory chapter to the Handbook of Historical Linguistics the other day, I couldn’t decide if I was more reminded of the Baroque splendor of the Nuova Scienza of Giambattista Vico or the oppressively relentless whimsy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The motley is not merely stylistic. Trying to come to terms with language change, Joseph and Janda manage to meander through the particulars of a half a dozen intricate debates in other fields including thermodynamics, history, paleontology, developmental biology, theology, and philosophy as if wrestling with the Great Vowel Shift or the etymology of “Bunk” requires a comprehensive theory of Time itself in the historical linguist. The first sentence of an Old Chronicle of the City of Barcelona reads “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” Similar quirk. The odd thing about this performance, however, is its reasonableness under the circumstances. These guys are presumptuous, but they have as good a right to be presumptuous as anybody else. Hubris is sometimes a duty.
Joseph and Janda face the problem, ubiquitous in our age, of dealing with the general in the absence of the universal. Instead of relating linguistic change and (for example) evolutionary change by abstracting out a purified philosophical sense of change, the authors use professional-level concepts of each alternatively to traverse the broken ground of various theoretical and practical issues. Sometimes punctuated equilibrium is good to think with, sometimes the ergodic hypothesis, sometimes the properly linguistic notion of grammaticalization. The absence of a master level of discourse rules out the drafting of a map, but not the writing out of an itinerary, always provided we can put up with the inelegance of literary forms required to match such a jumpy methodology. It’s not that anybody who wants to deal seriously with great issues has much choice, after all. Veritable knowledge cannot be any more compact and homogeneous than the reality it addresses. Coming up against the real strangeness and multiplicity of the world, it has at last become necessary for thought to conform to its object at the cost of forgoing the dream of an integral knowing subjects or even of integral totalizing disciplines. In the Bible, God inflicted the confusion of tongues on the people for trying to build a tower to heaven. In this version, we’re actively promoting that same confusion precisely in order to build the tower.
By the way, the advent of what I’m call Archimboldian thought, hardly spells the end of traditional philosophy. Much of what professional philosophers do is appropriately specialized and technical and can be cannibalized to good purpose by the scavenging bricoleur. Meanwhile more traditional “Great Ideas” philosophy also endures and prospers as a specialized form of public relations that satisfies the public’s metaphysical needs. The whole is just another one of the parts, but that’s hardly fatal to the commercial prospects of the next dozen versions of retail holism.
—the Librarian
Friday, May 13, 2005
Stories Just So or So So
The air went out of the tire back in the early 70s when a generation of young people suddenly realized that their educations weren’t going to automatically result in a higher status or even necessarily pay the bills. The economy, rapidly cooling down from a once in a millennium growth spurt, simply didn’t have room for so many college-educated people. Besides, there was always something contradictory about the American project of democratizing privilege. The disappointment of so many individuals played itself out in a great many forms of self-destructive behavior over and beyond the obvious trio of drugs, disco, and deconstruction. Much of the continuing political prosperity of the Right derives from a search for psychic compensation for shipwrecked hopes.
Whether you call it a talking point, a meme, or just a commonplace, modern conservatives frequently claim that their liberal opponents are mediocre characters who like the idea of social safety nets because they aren’t up to the bracing struggle of life. Implicit in this bit are the assumptions that the only things worth fighting for are money and perhaps power and, on a deeper level, that fighting is the inevitable form of meaningful activity. Apparently, they find it astonishing that anybody might aspire to something different and perhaps better than wealth or that many people don’t want to obsess about stocks and bonds because they have better things to do. In fact, what we have here is a simply projection. Having renounced ambitions they themselves think are more worthwhile, they detect a failure of ambition in those who have made other choices.
I doubt if even the most of the promoters of the religion of the market really think that there is something particularly wonderful about getting rich. Their avidity is often just the public face of a fear of loosing out and becoming déclassé, a motive that has turned more than one child of well-educated hippies into a CFO. Perhaps that’s why our new billionaires are such notable flops as patrons of the high culture. Unlike other ruling classes, they haven’t figured out how to make an art out of being rich or even enjoy themselves very much. Lefties attack them for their greed, but perhaps even that isn’t quite authentic.
At some point in the future, if there is very much of a future, the mentality of our times is going to be a puzzle. One can understand how the figure of the saint, the sage, the artist, the statesmen, the builder, the warrior, the inventor or the industrialist can capture the imagination of an age. What can you say about a civilization whose hero is the crony capitalist?
The air went out of the tire back in the early 70s when a generation of young people suddenly realized that their educations weren’t going to automatically result in a higher status or even necessarily pay the bills. The economy, rapidly cooling down from a once in a millennium growth spurt, simply didn’t have room for so many college-educated people. Besides, there was always something contradictory about the American project of democratizing privilege. The disappointment of so many individuals played itself out in a great many forms of self-destructive behavior over and beyond the obvious trio of drugs, disco, and deconstruction. Much of the continuing political prosperity of the Right derives from a search for psychic compensation for shipwrecked hopes.
Whether you call it a talking point, a meme, or just a commonplace, modern conservatives frequently claim that their liberal opponents are mediocre characters who like the idea of social safety nets because they aren’t up to the bracing struggle of life. Implicit in this bit are the assumptions that the only things worth fighting for are money and perhaps power and, on a deeper level, that fighting is the inevitable form of meaningful activity. Apparently, they find it astonishing that anybody might aspire to something different and perhaps better than wealth or that many people don’t want to obsess about stocks and bonds because they have better things to do. In fact, what we have here is a simply projection. Having renounced ambitions they themselves think are more worthwhile, they detect a failure of ambition in those who have made other choices.
I doubt if even the most of the promoters of the religion of the market really think that there is something particularly wonderful about getting rich. Their avidity is often just the public face of a fear of loosing out and becoming déclassé, a motive that has turned more than one child of well-educated hippies into a CFO. Perhaps that’s why our new billionaires are such notable flops as patrons of the high culture. Unlike other ruling classes, they haven’t figured out how to make an art out of being rich or even enjoy themselves very much. Lefties attack them for their greed, but perhaps even that isn’t quite authentic.
At some point in the future, if there is very much of a future, the mentality of our times is going to be a puzzle. One can understand how the figure of the saint, the sage, the artist, the statesmen, the builder, the warrior, the inventor or the industrialist can capture the imagination of an age. What can you say about a civilization whose hero is the crony capitalist?
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
That’s More than We Know
This has got to be a rotten time to be an honorable soldier, spy, or bureaucrat. With the fix permanently in place, the guilty have every prospect of getting away with civil and military crimes so long as they are of sufficiently high rank. The innocent, however, can no longer be exonerated because the courts and commissions that might serve that purpose have no credibility. Once the government has solemnly announced that obvious malefactors such as Sanchez, Gonzalez, and Rumsfeld have no culpability for the mistreatment of prisoners, the presumption becomes that everyone is complicit, though the fairer conclusion is simply that we can no longer draw any conclusions about the behavior of individuals.
This has got to be a rotten time to be an honorable soldier, spy, or bureaucrat. With the fix permanently in place, the guilty have every prospect of getting away with civil and military crimes so long as they are of sufficiently high rank. The innocent, however, can no longer be exonerated because the courts and commissions that might serve that purpose have no credibility. Once the government has solemnly announced that obvious malefactors such as Sanchez, Gonzalez, and Rumsfeld have no culpability for the mistreatment of prisoners, the presumption becomes that everyone is complicit, though the fairer conclusion is simply that we can no longer draw any conclusions about the behavior of individuals.
Monday, May 09, 2005
Risk and Integrity
Moral theories make history more or less unintelligible if they explain the fate of nations as the consequence of whether individuals act well or badly as if their choices were ultimate causes in themselves and not susceptible of further explanation. Though we’re the only actors in this play and what occurs is our doing, the consequences of our actions and therefore the meaning of what we do are at the mercy of a social context that escapes our control. It’s not that we aren’t free. We can do whatever we like inside the narrow set of options created by our cultural and social setting. Escaping that agenda is a vastly more difficult performance.
I love to rail against the mass-market journalists, but my petit bourgeois indignation is largely beside the point because their lack of integrity and competence is a consequence rather than a cause of the viciousness of the institutions they staff. It is perfectly possible for individuals to opt out of the propaganda machine. Indeed, many people do opt out; but whether or not absenting yourself from the scene of the crime is good for the soul, it is utterly inconsequential because thousands of replacements wait to carry on the thankless but hardly unrewarding task of corrupting public discourse. Dissident journalists are in the same boat as corporate whistleblowers. They can chose to tell the truth, but their actions are more likely to result in professional self-destruction than to effect change. The moral act thus becomes a gesture, theater without an audience. Indeed, the ruling professional mentality positively discourages such actions as juvenile acting out. If moral behavior has bad consequences for the moral agent, it cannot be moral. The categorical imperative is not a suicide pact.
America’s general lack of integrity is a consequence of other changes in our social and political system and does not imply that people have suffered an inexplicable loss of virtue. As Pravda used to put things, none of this is an accident. In 1950, many Americans had stable jobs in a growing economy. The government and the unions protected the rights of working people, and the college-educated could always teach. Since then, while most of us have not become impoverished, almost everybody’s livelihood and health are at much greater perceived risk and a bachelor’s degree guarantees nothing. At the same time, the level of income required to maintain a middle-class status has steadily increased and wealth and celebrity have replaced a plethora of other values as the bases for self-definition. To be sure, there are still scholars, poets, and even saints (of a sort); but the notion of respectable poverty is a museum piece. Certain criminals aside, one simply cannot be famous and poor—even Maya Angelou is a millionaire. Under these circumstances, people do what they have to do to win because coming in second has become disastrous while to live in a merely decent fashion is barely decent. The increase in social risk guarantees that the nation will be full of trimmers and ass kissers.
Moral theories make history more or less unintelligible if they explain the fate of nations as the consequence of whether individuals act well or badly as if their choices were ultimate causes in themselves and not susceptible of further explanation. Though we’re the only actors in this play and what occurs is our doing, the consequences of our actions and therefore the meaning of what we do are at the mercy of a social context that escapes our control. It’s not that we aren’t free. We can do whatever we like inside the narrow set of options created by our cultural and social setting. Escaping that agenda is a vastly more difficult performance.
I love to rail against the mass-market journalists, but my petit bourgeois indignation is largely beside the point because their lack of integrity and competence is a consequence rather than a cause of the viciousness of the institutions they staff. It is perfectly possible for individuals to opt out of the propaganda machine. Indeed, many people do opt out; but whether or not absenting yourself from the scene of the crime is good for the soul, it is utterly inconsequential because thousands of replacements wait to carry on the thankless but hardly unrewarding task of corrupting public discourse. Dissident journalists are in the same boat as corporate whistleblowers. They can chose to tell the truth, but their actions are more likely to result in professional self-destruction than to effect change. The moral act thus becomes a gesture, theater without an audience. Indeed, the ruling professional mentality positively discourages such actions as juvenile acting out. If moral behavior has bad consequences for the moral agent, it cannot be moral. The categorical imperative is not a suicide pact.
America’s general lack of integrity is a consequence of other changes in our social and political system and does not imply that people have suffered an inexplicable loss of virtue. As Pravda used to put things, none of this is an accident. In 1950, many Americans had stable jobs in a growing economy. The government and the unions protected the rights of working people, and the college-educated could always teach. Since then, while most of us have not become impoverished, almost everybody’s livelihood and health are at much greater perceived risk and a bachelor’s degree guarantees nothing. At the same time, the level of income required to maintain a middle-class status has steadily increased and wealth and celebrity have replaced a plethora of other values as the bases for self-definition. To be sure, there are still scholars, poets, and even saints (of a sort); but the notion of respectable poverty is a museum piece. Certain criminals aside, one simply cannot be famous and poor—even Maya Angelou is a millionaire. Under these circumstances, people do what they have to do to win because coming in second has become disastrous while to live in a merely decent fashion is barely decent. The increase in social risk guarantees that the nation will be full of trimmers and ass kissers.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Darkness at Noon
One is encouraged to love the sinner but hate the sin. That’s pretty much how I feel about Catholics and Catholicism. The laity is infinitely better than the secretive and tyrannical institution that routinely abuses them financially, intellectually, and sexually. Outside the hierarchy, one often encounters a tolerant and modest spirituality that understands the church as a community of loving people rather than a rigid, exclusionist organization in which a self-perpetuating priesthood lords it over a passive flock. Inside, in the service of the paramount goal, the sheer survival of the divine machine, even thoughtful and cultivated men become toadeaters and tyrants, cutting endless dishonorable deals with secular thugs and crushing internal dissent.
During the Cold War it was a commonplace to claim that Communism was a religion. The reverse analogy also holds. Just as the commissars always decided that the humane and universal goals of Marxism had to be sacrificed to maintain socialism in one country, the popes will always decide that the needs of suffering people are not as important as the survival of the church itself. Unlike the Reds and their own predecessors, the current batch of men in red hats can’t simply murder heretics but they can still humiliate them after secret ecclesiastical trials—the new Pope’s former job was to supervise these invisible, bureaucratic pageants. And over the centuries catholic intellectuals have found themselves again and again in the position of leftist writers, trying to defend the indefensible and remain loyal to an ideal that has no real presence in the visible church. When I read Cardinal Newman or Lord Acton or Hans Kung submitting to Roman discipline, I’m reminded of the way the French Communist party routinely vilified its non-proletarian supporters as second-class radicals and potential traitors to the cause and how all those academics and novelists willingly participated in their own abasement.
One is encouraged to love the sinner but hate the sin. That’s pretty much how I feel about Catholics and Catholicism. The laity is infinitely better than the secretive and tyrannical institution that routinely abuses them financially, intellectually, and sexually. Outside the hierarchy, one often encounters a tolerant and modest spirituality that understands the church as a community of loving people rather than a rigid, exclusionist organization in which a self-perpetuating priesthood lords it over a passive flock. Inside, in the service of the paramount goal, the sheer survival of the divine machine, even thoughtful and cultivated men become toadeaters and tyrants, cutting endless dishonorable deals with secular thugs and crushing internal dissent.
During the Cold War it was a commonplace to claim that Communism was a religion. The reverse analogy also holds. Just as the commissars always decided that the humane and universal goals of Marxism had to be sacrificed to maintain socialism in one country, the popes will always decide that the needs of suffering people are not as important as the survival of the church itself. Unlike the Reds and their own predecessors, the current batch of men in red hats can’t simply murder heretics but they can still humiliate them after secret ecclesiastical trials—the new Pope’s former job was to supervise these invisible, bureaucratic pageants. And over the centuries catholic intellectuals have found themselves again and again in the position of leftist writers, trying to defend the indefensible and remain loyal to an ideal that has no real presence in the visible church. When I read Cardinal Newman or Lord Acton or Hans Kung submitting to Roman discipline, I’m reminded of the way the French Communist party routinely vilified its non-proletarian supporters as second-class radicals and potential traitors to the cause and how all those academics and novelists willingly participated in their own abasement.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
The Elitism of the 80th Percentile
It’s been a while since Socrates recommended understanding the state as the soul writ big, but a host of philosophers and psychologists have followed his suggestion right up to the present. It has recently been suggested, for example, that the political pattern of the executive who decides among the options presented to him by his counselors mirrors the way that decisions are actually made in the brains of individuals as the frontal lobe presents alternatives to some central coin-flipper. In another version of the theme, one more faithful to Plato, the various classes of political actors are related to levels of mental functioning in an updated, psychometric version of the divided line. In this rendition, the public at large just has to be manipulated since it can only be register images and emotional appeals— inexplicable dumb shows and noise. Expecting to get anywhere with even straightforward arguments makes about as much sense as erecting Braille billboards to reach the blind market. Full rationality only sets in somewhere North of 120 and only applies to a small fraction of our species. Since individuals of normal intelligence are simply incapable of operating at a fully adult level, they must be governed by rigid rules backed up by overt rewards and punishments and can never be expected to govern themselves by universal rational principles, even assuming, as many people don’t, that there are universal rational principles of right and wrong.
Stated thus baldly, IQ elitism makes a bad impression; but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t appeal to a great many individuals, including quite a few who go out of their way to come across as just plain folks when they’re playing to the cheap seats. Anyhow, to be fair, everybody recognizes that children have to be trained before they are educated and that prohibitions have to come before explanations if you don’t want your kids to run over somebody or to be run over themselves. It isn’t much a stretch to conclude that the mass of the population will never grow up and that politics has to take this fact into account. Indeed, in my experience, the familiar denunciation of liberal moral relativism has nothing to do with asserting the objectivity of ethics and everything to do with pedagogic realism, especially since so many conservatives are committed to an irrationalist theory of ethics anyhow. It is the liberals who are more likely to be rigorous moralists of a Kantian or semi-Kantian stripe.
I hardly have democratic instincts, and I certainly think that de facto intellectual incapacity of the majority of mankind has all kinds of implications for practical politics. Unfortunately, assuming that most people cannot make reasonable choices about their own lives quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy as the public is saturated with violent emotional appeals conveyed by the latest in high-tech propaganda techniques. No fair spending billions to make people worse so your pessimistic assessments will be proven right or to denounce their stupidity after so many years of attempting to stupefy ‘em. Fact is, we don’t know how enlightened the mass of humanity may become. I expect a philosopher of the Roman Empire would have scoffed at the notion that the mass of people could ever be literate.
It’s been a while since Socrates recommended understanding the state as the soul writ big, but a host of philosophers and psychologists have followed his suggestion right up to the present. It has recently been suggested, for example, that the political pattern of the executive who decides among the options presented to him by his counselors mirrors the way that decisions are actually made in the brains of individuals as the frontal lobe presents alternatives to some central coin-flipper. In another version of the theme, one more faithful to Plato, the various classes of political actors are related to levels of mental functioning in an updated, psychometric version of the divided line. In this rendition, the public at large just has to be manipulated since it can only be register images and emotional appeals— inexplicable dumb shows and noise. Expecting to get anywhere with even straightforward arguments makes about as much sense as erecting Braille billboards to reach the blind market. Full rationality only sets in somewhere North of 120 and only applies to a small fraction of our species. Since individuals of normal intelligence are simply incapable of operating at a fully adult level, they must be governed by rigid rules backed up by overt rewards and punishments and can never be expected to govern themselves by universal rational principles, even assuming, as many people don’t, that there are universal rational principles of right and wrong.
Stated thus baldly, IQ elitism makes a bad impression; but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t appeal to a great many individuals, including quite a few who go out of their way to come across as just plain folks when they’re playing to the cheap seats. Anyhow, to be fair, everybody recognizes that children have to be trained before they are educated and that prohibitions have to come before explanations if you don’t want your kids to run over somebody or to be run over themselves. It isn’t much a stretch to conclude that the mass of the population will never grow up and that politics has to take this fact into account. Indeed, in my experience, the familiar denunciation of liberal moral relativism has nothing to do with asserting the objectivity of ethics and everything to do with pedagogic realism, especially since so many conservatives are committed to an irrationalist theory of ethics anyhow. It is the liberals who are more likely to be rigorous moralists of a Kantian or semi-Kantian stripe.
I hardly have democratic instincts, and I certainly think that de facto intellectual incapacity of the majority of mankind has all kinds of implications for practical politics. Unfortunately, assuming that most people cannot make reasonable choices about their own lives quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy as the public is saturated with violent emotional appeals conveyed by the latest in high-tech propaganda techniques. No fair spending billions to make people worse so your pessimistic assessments will be proven right or to denounce their stupidity after so many years of attempting to stupefy ‘em. Fact is, we don’t know how enlightened the mass of humanity may become. I expect a philosopher of the Roman Empire would have scoffed at the notion that the mass of people could ever be literate.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Extractive Industries
In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, miners believed that precious metals would grow back in exhausted mines if the digs were left fallow long enough. The Republican Party, perhaps because it harbors so many mining interests, seems to have a similar notion about the American middling classes. To judge from their taxation and debt policies, the Conservatives seem to think that they can indefinitely go on extracting a disproportionate share of resources from the ordinary folks without bringing about the permanent impoverishment of the class. Or maybe they figure that the middle-income stratum is as doomed as the Atlantic cod, and they may as well harvest as much of the wasting resource as possible. The bit about the fools rushing in does not apply either to fishermen or vultures.
For all their rhetoric about limited government, moneyed interests need a large and expensive government to protect them from enemies foreign and domestic, to keep the corporations from eating their own kind, and to subsidize the scientific research indispensable to economic growth. They also need the government to provide welfare services to the working poor because absent free clinics and public housing they’d eventually have to pay higher wages out of their own profits so that the proletarians can go on producing proles. The trick is to get all these benefits at a discount instead of bearing the costs of big government through an equitable tax system. Resources must be mined from somewhere, and the only available store of wealth is in the middle—not enough meat on the poor.
You’d think that the folks in the middle would eventually catch wise to all this; but the one tax that has gone up in every year of the Bush administration is the tax on stupidity; and the people in Kansas have yet to notice what a high bracket they’re in. They probably won’t notice for a while longer, either, because there are still family savings to go through to send the kids through college and home equity to borrow against. Above all, the Republican program is protected by the vanity of the small fry, who persist in believing that they are genuinely bourgeois when they are really just working people who have been flattered into thinking they are something grander.
The interesting question to me is what the right does as we pass the peaking point.
In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, miners believed that precious metals would grow back in exhausted mines if the digs were left fallow long enough. The Republican Party, perhaps because it harbors so many mining interests, seems to have a similar notion about the American middling classes. To judge from their taxation and debt policies, the Conservatives seem to think that they can indefinitely go on extracting a disproportionate share of resources from the ordinary folks without bringing about the permanent impoverishment of the class. Or maybe they figure that the middle-income stratum is as doomed as the Atlantic cod, and they may as well harvest as much of the wasting resource as possible. The bit about the fools rushing in does not apply either to fishermen or vultures.
For all their rhetoric about limited government, moneyed interests need a large and expensive government to protect them from enemies foreign and domestic, to keep the corporations from eating their own kind, and to subsidize the scientific research indispensable to economic growth. They also need the government to provide welfare services to the working poor because absent free clinics and public housing they’d eventually have to pay higher wages out of their own profits so that the proletarians can go on producing proles. The trick is to get all these benefits at a discount instead of bearing the costs of big government through an equitable tax system. Resources must be mined from somewhere, and the only available store of wealth is in the middle—not enough meat on the poor.
You’d think that the folks in the middle would eventually catch wise to all this; but the one tax that has gone up in every year of the Bush administration is the tax on stupidity; and the people in Kansas have yet to notice what a high bracket they’re in. They probably won’t notice for a while longer, either, because there are still family savings to go through to send the kids through college and home equity to borrow against. Above all, the Republican program is protected by the vanity of the small fry, who persist in believing that they are genuinely bourgeois when they are really just working people who have been flattered into thinking they are something grander.
The interesting question to me is what the right does as we pass the peaking point.
Friday, April 01, 2005
Providence
With the last bit of profit wrung from the passion of Terry Schaivo, the media looked anxiously around for its next obsession, trusting that just as Diana succeeded O.J. and Jackson followed Monica, some fundamentally trivial but sensational happening would provide the occasion for a fresh round of moral theater featuring artificially sweetened sentiment, recreational grief, and/or fabricated anger. It didn’t have to wait even a day. I guess it is appropriate that the Catholic Church got around to supplying the entertainment this time since the papacy pioneered the creation and exploitation of emotional hysteria. St. Bernardino, the Rush Limbaugh of the 16th century, could have stepped into a job at Fox without a moment of further training. Of course the death of a very old and very sick man is not remarkable or tragic; but properly spun it can supply yet another way to deflect public attention from important issues, including, in the case, the very important and very problematic things John Paul II did when he wasn’t dying.
With the last bit of profit wrung from the passion of Terry Schaivo, the media looked anxiously around for its next obsession, trusting that just as Diana succeeded O.J. and Jackson followed Monica, some fundamentally trivial but sensational happening would provide the occasion for a fresh round of moral theater featuring artificially sweetened sentiment, recreational grief, and/or fabricated anger. It didn’t have to wait even a day. I guess it is appropriate that the Catholic Church got around to supplying the entertainment this time since the papacy pioneered the creation and exploitation of emotional hysteria. St. Bernardino, the Rush Limbaugh of the 16th century, could have stepped into a job at Fox without a moment of further training. Of course the death of a very old and very sick man is not remarkable or tragic; but properly spun it can supply yet another way to deflect public attention from important issues, including, in the case, the very important and very problematic things John Paul II did when he wasn’t dying.
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Lines Masquerading as Volumes
Young historians attack the archives armed with hypotheses, which, though it is probably the best way to get your degree, has a signal disadvantage. It isn’t just that the people in the past weren’t doing their damnedest to give birth to the present. Their preoccupations don’t normally have much overlap with ours. An historian expecting to find Philip II obsessing about the rights of the unborn is like the gnat that asked Alice what insects she rejoiced in back home. Or, to reverse the temporality, imagine a time-traveling imperial chancellor asking W about his stand on the Investiture Controversy. Whole eras doubtless have more bandwidth than individual human beings, but the agenda is necessarily extremely narrow since in the absence of radical selectiveness, disagreement would be as impossible as consensus in the vast, deserted forest of the possible. It follows that to actually encounter the past, it is first of all necessary to become familiar with its hobbyhorses and that requires a certain amount of aimless rambling in the sources, not a very popular activity in our rapid age.
Young historians attack the archives armed with hypotheses, which, though it is probably the best way to get your degree, has a signal disadvantage. It isn’t just that the people in the past weren’t doing their damnedest to give birth to the present. Their preoccupations don’t normally have much overlap with ours. An historian expecting to find Philip II obsessing about the rights of the unborn is like the gnat that asked Alice what insects she rejoiced in back home. Or, to reverse the temporality, imagine a time-traveling imperial chancellor asking W about his stand on the Investiture Controversy. Whole eras doubtless have more bandwidth than individual human beings, but the agenda is necessarily extremely narrow since in the absence of radical selectiveness, disagreement would be as impossible as consensus in the vast, deserted forest of the possible. It follows that to actually encounter the past, it is first of all necessary to become familiar with its hobbyhorses and that requires a certain amount of aimless rambling in the sources, not a very popular activity in our rapid age.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Run Over by an Ambulance: Convenient (Traditional Chinese Saying)
Reverse plagiarism—claiming that somebody else wrote your words—used to be more common than direct plagiarism because authority was a much more valuable commodity than words, which, after all, can be improvised on the spot. Nowadays we fetishize originality, but reverse plagiarism still has its uses. The Soviet-era literary critic Michel Bahhtine, silenced by Stalin, published many of his most important critical works under the name of various party apparatchiks, and right-wing publicists regularly quote the pseudo-Abraham Lincoln to bolster their ideological prejudices with stolen prestige. For my part, I find that reverse plagiarism allows me to float more ideas than I have a license to conceive since it isn’t quite decent to contain multitudes. Besides, there are certain notions that not only deserve to circulate, but deserve to circulate as anonymous proverbial wisdom without the impediment of any author whatsoever. For example:
Every time somebody complains that liberals only love mankind and not men, I find myself reaching around for a folksy counter that might point out in a concise and earthy fashion that a statistical approach to human affairs reflects a basic ethical principle, the equal claim that every person has on our moral respect. By the time you’ve typed in that many words, you may as well deliver a lecture to the normal distribution and the Second Critique while you’re at it. So I’m very tempted to appeal to that old proverb, “One man’s blood has as much salt in it as another.”
Second instance: A number of books and articles have been written about the appeal of Republican politics to people whose interests are seriously harmed by Republican policies—on a per capita basis, the red states benefit vastly more from Federal money than the blue and good old boys are much more likely to go bankrupt than professional people in Connecticut. Just as few of the poor sods who got gunned down marching up Seminary Ridge owned slaves or benefited at all from the semi-feudal society of the South, working people support the initiatives of the Conservatives who routinely exploit them. Which is why I want to quote the saying, “Mistreated dogs are the most loyal” as if there were such a saying.
Reverse plagiarism—claiming that somebody else wrote your words—used to be more common than direct plagiarism because authority was a much more valuable commodity than words, which, after all, can be improvised on the spot. Nowadays we fetishize originality, but reverse plagiarism still has its uses. The Soviet-era literary critic Michel Bahhtine, silenced by Stalin, published many of his most important critical works under the name of various party apparatchiks, and right-wing publicists regularly quote the pseudo-Abraham Lincoln to bolster their ideological prejudices with stolen prestige. For my part, I find that reverse plagiarism allows me to float more ideas than I have a license to conceive since it isn’t quite decent to contain multitudes. Besides, there are certain notions that not only deserve to circulate, but deserve to circulate as anonymous proverbial wisdom without the impediment of any author whatsoever. For example:
Every time somebody complains that liberals only love mankind and not men, I find myself reaching around for a folksy counter that might point out in a concise and earthy fashion that a statistical approach to human affairs reflects a basic ethical principle, the equal claim that every person has on our moral respect. By the time you’ve typed in that many words, you may as well deliver a lecture to the normal distribution and the Second Critique while you’re at it. So I’m very tempted to appeal to that old proverb, “One man’s blood has as much salt in it as another.”
Second instance: A number of books and articles have been written about the appeal of Republican politics to people whose interests are seriously harmed by Republican policies—on a per capita basis, the red states benefit vastly more from Federal money than the blue and good old boys are much more likely to go bankrupt than professional people in Connecticut. Just as few of the poor sods who got gunned down marching up Seminary Ridge owned slaves or benefited at all from the semi-feudal society of the South, working people support the initiatives of the Conservatives who routinely exploit them. Which is why I want to quote the saying, “Mistreated dogs are the most loyal” as if there were such a saying.
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Uncle Fuckers of the Black Hills
I recently watched the first six or seven episodes of HBO’s Deadwood series. The characters in this revisionist Western swear interminably, and after a couple of nights of listening to them, I found myself casually telling a secretary on the phone, “Yeah, that’s the right report. I read the whole fucking thing.”
By the way, if you can avoid the consequences of spending so much time in bad company, you should certainly give Deadwood a try, precisely for its language. In between the “limber-pricked cocksuckers” and other Homeric epithets, the dialogue features a texture and density that exploits the whole range of registers from the merest expletives to self-conscious preciosity—a virtuoso instance of what Bahktine meant by the dialogic. Corking good story, too, though the principle villain is perhaps a bit too much like the Butcher in Gangs of New York.
I recently watched the first six or seven episodes of HBO’s Deadwood series. The characters in this revisionist Western swear interminably, and after a couple of nights of listening to them, I found myself casually telling a secretary on the phone, “Yeah, that’s the right report. I read the whole fucking thing.”
By the way, if you can avoid the consequences of spending so much time in bad company, you should certainly give Deadwood a try, precisely for its language. In between the “limber-pricked cocksuckers” and other Homeric epithets, the dialogue features a texture and density that exploits the whole range of registers from the merest expletives to self-conscious preciosity—a virtuoso instance of what Bahktine meant by the dialogic. Corking good story, too, though the principle villain is perhaps a bit too much like the Butcher in Gangs of New York.
Formal Constraints
The theory of history you espouse has a lot to do with how many sentences you’re willing to devote to its description. A one- paragraph history of the world has just enough room to promote idealism, but the one-liners are liable to sound rather Marxist:
History is the story of how various elites struggled with one another over who was going to get to abuse the mass of the population.
The theory of history you espouse has a lot to do with how many sentences you’re willing to devote to its description. A one- paragraph history of the world has just enough room to promote idealism, but the one-liners are liable to sound rather Marxist:
History is the story of how various elites struggled with one another over who was going to get to abuse the mass of the population.
Thursday, March 03, 2005
An Homage to Chesterton
Anybody who participates in an Internet discussion soon discovers that the range of audible opinions is extremely narrow. It’s not that original notions don’t appear. They do, but for the most part they rapidly disappear because they are not acknowledged. The Law of Least Hassles takes care of that. To put things in a Piagetian way, adults find it far easier to assimilate input to their existing kit of mental structures than to accommodate significant novelties by actually learning something new. But one shouldn’t assume that the apparent deafness of the public is absolute. From time to time, minds do get changed after all. Effect lags behind cause, however, because processing new ideas requires neurological changes and even more because most of us are too vain to lose an argument on the spot—it would be like taking a dump in public.
Like the catatonic and the comatose, normal individuals register more than they let on. Which is why, for example, radicals who become reactionaries and reactionaries who become radicals don’t have to learn any new rhetorical moves; and, more generally, why the Zeitgeist is able to lurch so rapidly from one set of unwarranted assumptions to another—it’s very easy to overlook the long period of preparation. The pattern is especially obvious in the case of intellectuals who support traditional versions of religion. Granted the prideful perversity natural in a strong mind, defending an indefensibly silly set of ideas is a great pleasure; but even great pleasures eventually stale. At that point it suffices to simply give up the game. One hardly has to be convinced of anything since the mere truth of the secular position had been registered long before.
Anybody who participates in an Internet discussion soon discovers that the range of audible opinions is extremely narrow. It’s not that original notions don’t appear. They do, but for the most part they rapidly disappear because they are not acknowledged. The Law of Least Hassles takes care of that. To put things in a Piagetian way, adults find it far easier to assimilate input to their existing kit of mental structures than to accommodate significant novelties by actually learning something new. But one shouldn’t assume that the apparent deafness of the public is absolute. From time to time, minds do get changed after all. Effect lags behind cause, however, because processing new ideas requires neurological changes and even more because most of us are too vain to lose an argument on the spot—it would be like taking a dump in public.
Like the catatonic and the comatose, normal individuals register more than they let on. Which is why, for example, radicals who become reactionaries and reactionaries who become radicals don’t have to learn any new rhetorical moves; and, more generally, why the Zeitgeist is able to lurch so rapidly from one set of unwarranted assumptions to another—it’s very easy to overlook the long period of preparation. The pattern is especially obvious in the case of intellectuals who support traditional versions of religion. Granted the prideful perversity natural in a strong mind, defending an indefensibly silly set of ideas is a great pleasure; but even great pleasures eventually stale. At that point it suffices to simply give up the game. One hardly has to be convinced of anything since the mere truth of the secular position had been registered long before.
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
The Unspeakable Gods of the Abyss
Creationists and Intelligent Design folks routinely resort to God-of-the-Gaps arguments in order to find room for a creator in the workings of nature, and biologists routinely remind them how many of the gaps have been filled in over the years. Gaps remain, however, including gaps that are perhaps not likely to be filled in any time soon, most obviously in such intrinsically difficult issues as the origin of living things. Even things that happened more recently than 4 billion years ago are also hard to figure out. For example, it has become more and more clear over the last few years that we don’t have a very good handle on what gives with the microbial majority of living things. Only a small percentage of single-celled organisms can be cultured by current methods, but we’ve know from DNA-sequencing experiments on natural samples that there must be many, many unknown forms, including lots of members of the mysterious domain of the Archaea, which, it transpires, are not a handful of weird relics lurking in thermal vents as they first appeared by in 1977, but ecologically important members of many ordinary environments. Our branch of the tree of life also turns out to be bushier than we thought—many unknown eukaryotes are also hidden somewhere if we could only figure out how to grow and identify them. Meanwhile, we have a more general problem than simply accounting for all these cryptic organisms. We have a basic problem in figuring out how to make sense of the phylogeny of all these bugs since they regularly swap genes, thus seriously tangling up the usual diagrams.
Traditional evolutionary theory was devised to make sense of multi-cellular eukaryotes. Indeed, as botanists like Verne Grant have complained, the historical bias of the theory has effectively been yet more parochial, privileging animals over plants, even though flowers and trees don’t evolve or speciate in exactly the same fashion as birds and beasts. In current phylogenies plants, animals, and even fungi occupy the same branch of the tree while most of the fundamental diversity of life lies elsewhere. To the extent that evolutionary theory is based on the usual suspects, it suffers from a serious sampling problem.
All in all, if you want to assert the possibility that big surprises may await us in the understanding of living things, you won’t have any trouble finding plenty of gaps that remain to be filled in. What the Creationists and other theists don’t seem to recognize, however, is that the existence of gaps is not an argument for their view of things. What emerges from dark is much more likely to be even less congruent with theological preconceptions than what is already known because the journey of the sciences is an expedition away from the comfortable territory of the human into an undefined Antarctica. If traditional evolutionary thinking is objectionably zoomorphic, theological reasoning is even more wedded to a view of things dependent on HOX genes. ID, for example, involves the notion of an agent that makes living things, a rather unimaginative piece of theorizing. So far as we know, the only entities in the universe that can be said to act at all are members of certain terrestrial phyla so the God, gods, or aliens who supposedly made life turn out to be a run-of-the-mill bilatrians, real or virtual organisms imagined in our image. Unfortuanately, the trend of discoveries in biology suggest that it’s a good bet that what dwells in the gaps will not turn out to be something so familiar as a deity or a Vulcan. Think of something from a Lovecraft story.
Creationists and Intelligent Design folks routinely resort to God-of-the-Gaps arguments in order to find room for a creator in the workings of nature, and biologists routinely remind them how many of the gaps have been filled in over the years. Gaps remain, however, including gaps that are perhaps not likely to be filled in any time soon, most obviously in such intrinsically difficult issues as the origin of living things. Even things that happened more recently than 4 billion years ago are also hard to figure out. For example, it has become more and more clear over the last few years that we don’t have a very good handle on what gives with the microbial majority of living things. Only a small percentage of single-celled organisms can be cultured by current methods, but we’ve know from DNA-sequencing experiments on natural samples that there must be many, many unknown forms, including lots of members of the mysterious domain of the Archaea, which, it transpires, are not a handful of weird relics lurking in thermal vents as they first appeared by in 1977, but ecologically important members of many ordinary environments. Our branch of the tree of life also turns out to be bushier than we thought—many unknown eukaryotes are also hidden somewhere if we could only figure out how to grow and identify them. Meanwhile, we have a more general problem than simply accounting for all these cryptic organisms. We have a basic problem in figuring out how to make sense of the phylogeny of all these bugs since they regularly swap genes, thus seriously tangling up the usual diagrams.
Traditional evolutionary theory was devised to make sense of multi-cellular eukaryotes. Indeed, as botanists like Verne Grant have complained, the historical bias of the theory has effectively been yet more parochial, privileging animals over plants, even though flowers and trees don’t evolve or speciate in exactly the same fashion as birds and beasts. In current phylogenies plants, animals, and even fungi occupy the same branch of the tree while most of the fundamental diversity of life lies elsewhere. To the extent that evolutionary theory is based on the usual suspects, it suffers from a serious sampling problem.
All in all, if you want to assert the possibility that big surprises may await us in the understanding of living things, you won’t have any trouble finding plenty of gaps that remain to be filled in. What the Creationists and other theists don’t seem to recognize, however, is that the existence of gaps is not an argument for their view of things. What emerges from dark is much more likely to be even less congruent with theological preconceptions than what is already known because the journey of the sciences is an expedition away from the comfortable territory of the human into an undefined Antarctica. If traditional evolutionary thinking is objectionably zoomorphic, theological reasoning is even more wedded to a view of things dependent on HOX genes. ID, for example, involves the notion of an agent that makes living things, a rather unimaginative piece of theorizing. So far as we know, the only entities in the universe that can be said to act at all are members of certain terrestrial phyla so the God, gods, or aliens who supposedly made life turn out to be a run-of-the-mill bilatrians, real or virtual organisms imagined in our image. Unfortuanately, the trend of discoveries in biology suggest that it’s a good bet that what dwells in the gaps will not turn out to be something so familiar as a deity or a Vulcan. Think of something from a Lovecraft story.
The Lay of the Land
Michael Jackson could have avoided all the unpleasantness by becoming a Republican politician. Whether scandals and trials occur in this country has far more to do with who controls the media and the Justice department than anything about the actual behavior of the people involved. Thus Clinton underwent grueling attacks because of old business dealings that proved to be utterly ethical, and Kerry was savaged for his heroic Vietnam record while drug use, desertion, insider trading, lying, torture, and war mongering somehow never counted against Bush because his side controls the machinery of demonization. Politics in these parts is like a game of football played on a hillside where one team permanently defends the heights, though in this case, the desirable terrain is scarcely the moral high ground.
What makes the tilt of playing field especially invidious is the way in which it affects everybody’s judgment and not just the casual observers. Liberals and moderates would very much like to believe that the game is fair even when devotion to fairness impairs objectivity. The strategy of lowered expectations works on all of us so that when something like the Iraqi election occurs, we applaud it for having happened at all even though it is a highly ambiguous development that may have more to do with the initiation of a civil war than the advent of democracy. In a world where everything that can possibly be credited to the maximum leader is hosannahed by a professional choir while everything that is problematic about his administration is excused by legions of well-paid shills, we need to make a general correction for the queered frame of reference of the public arena. Bush’s mistakes and crimes will look even worse, his accomplishments far smaller once the anesthesia wears off.
Michael Jackson could have avoided all the unpleasantness by becoming a Republican politician. Whether scandals and trials occur in this country has far more to do with who controls the media and the Justice department than anything about the actual behavior of the people involved. Thus Clinton underwent grueling attacks because of old business dealings that proved to be utterly ethical, and Kerry was savaged for his heroic Vietnam record while drug use, desertion, insider trading, lying, torture, and war mongering somehow never counted against Bush because his side controls the machinery of demonization. Politics in these parts is like a game of football played on a hillside where one team permanently defends the heights, though in this case, the desirable terrain is scarcely the moral high ground.
What makes the tilt of playing field especially invidious is the way in which it affects everybody’s judgment and not just the casual observers. Liberals and moderates would very much like to believe that the game is fair even when devotion to fairness impairs objectivity. The strategy of lowered expectations works on all of us so that when something like the Iraqi election occurs, we applaud it for having happened at all even though it is a highly ambiguous development that may have more to do with the initiation of a civil war than the advent of democracy. In a world where everything that can possibly be credited to the maximum leader is hosannahed by a professional choir while everything that is problematic about his administration is excused by legions of well-paid shills, we need to make a general correction for the queered frame of reference of the public arena. Bush’s mistakes and crimes will look even worse, his accomplishments far smaller once the anesthesia wears off.
Monday, February 28, 2005
The Short Circuit
The Assyriologist Bottero liked to imagine the glee with which the Sumerians greeted the invention of prostitution, which at the time must have seemed like the I-pod and sliced bread all in one. As any economist will tell you, money is an excellent way to manage access to scarce goods. Better still, with pros there is no commitment, children, or emotion; and, anyhow, hookers are often more polite than waitresses. But as Heidi Fleisch pointed out, the greatest thing about buying it is not so much that the whores arrive on schedule, but that they can be counted on to leave afterwards. Unfortunately, it would turn out that prostitution is not all that simple in practice for a host of ethical, psychological, and bacteriological reasons. Nevertheless, like many other market-based solutions to a fundamental problem, it surely must have seemed like a wonderful idea at the time, almost as wonderful as the scheme, recently repopularized by wealthy right wingers, to simply buy the human mind so that it can be counted on to promote the interests of its corporate sponsors.
You can pay somebody to act as if they desire you, and you can pay somebody to tell you that you’re right. Both cases have the same limitation. The love you rent is not real, and the truth you buy is not truth. If you’re rich and powerful enough to be able to ignore reality, that may not matter much. But you have to be careful on one point. One of the things that the journalists, public relations men, and purchased intellectuals were paid to discover was that you are indeed so grand that you don’t need to have any truck with realities because like the Word of God, your actions create a world ex nihilo. The truth of that conclusion, however, is only as reliable as a whore’s love.
Of course politicians and other grandees have been buying the services of flacks for a very long time. Things are getting more serious now, however, because the bought voices include an increasing number of academics, scientists, and supposedly objective journalists whose whole raison d’etre is their independence. The right may imagine that the universities are crammed with crazy lefties, but the profs who matter most are not Native American studies guys vaporing about little Eichmanns or comp lit mavens deconstructing deconstruction but the armies of engineers, scientists, and economists who hire themselves out to corporations and ideologically motivated think tanks at a time when the old ideals of intellectual objectivity and public service are increasingly corroded. Serious journalism is in even worse shape as punditry follows the money as surfers used to follow the sun. Armstrong Williams has a lot of company. His behavior is the rule, not the exception, though more august—and whiter—media hookers are more discrete about the connection between their opinions and the prospects for television airtime and lucrative speaking engagements.
Like wiring, the safe functioning of a civilization depends on the integrity of the insulation. The current set up has been designed to short circuit and can be expected to cause quite a few fires. Appearances aside, it was never that good an idea.
The Assyriologist Bottero liked to imagine the glee with which the Sumerians greeted the invention of prostitution, which at the time must have seemed like the I-pod and sliced bread all in one. As any economist will tell you, money is an excellent way to manage access to scarce goods. Better still, with pros there is no commitment, children, or emotion; and, anyhow, hookers are often more polite than waitresses. But as Heidi Fleisch pointed out, the greatest thing about buying it is not so much that the whores arrive on schedule, but that they can be counted on to leave afterwards. Unfortunately, it would turn out that prostitution is not all that simple in practice for a host of ethical, psychological, and bacteriological reasons. Nevertheless, like many other market-based solutions to a fundamental problem, it surely must have seemed like a wonderful idea at the time, almost as wonderful as the scheme, recently repopularized by wealthy right wingers, to simply buy the human mind so that it can be counted on to promote the interests of its corporate sponsors.
You can pay somebody to act as if they desire you, and you can pay somebody to tell you that you’re right. Both cases have the same limitation. The love you rent is not real, and the truth you buy is not truth. If you’re rich and powerful enough to be able to ignore reality, that may not matter much. But you have to be careful on one point. One of the things that the journalists, public relations men, and purchased intellectuals were paid to discover was that you are indeed so grand that you don’t need to have any truck with realities because like the Word of God, your actions create a world ex nihilo. The truth of that conclusion, however, is only as reliable as a whore’s love.
Of course politicians and other grandees have been buying the services of flacks for a very long time. Things are getting more serious now, however, because the bought voices include an increasing number of academics, scientists, and supposedly objective journalists whose whole raison d’etre is their independence. The right may imagine that the universities are crammed with crazy lefties, but the profs who matter most are not Native American studies guys vaporing about little Eichmanns or comp lit mavens deconstructing deconstruction but the armies of engineers, scientists, and economists who hire themselves out to corporations and ideologically motivated think tanks at a time when the old ideals of intellectual objectivity and public service are increasingly corroded. Serious journalism is in even worse shape as punditry follows the money as surfers used to follow the sun. Armstrong Williams has a lot of company. His behavior is the rule, not the exception, though more august—and whiter—media hookers are more discrete about the connection between their opinions and the prospects for television airtime and lucrative speaking engagements.
Like wiring, the safe functioning of a civilization depends on the integrity of the insulation. The current set up has been designed to short circuit and can be expected to cause quite a few fires. Appearances aside, it was never that good an idea.
Monday, February 21, 2005
The Motivation of the Work
I’m regularly accused of idealism for suggesting that people are motivated to do their jobs not only by the prospect of rewards or the sanction of punishments but because of the intrinsic pleasure of performing well. Sometimes my critics will allow that this automotivation takes place in certain highfalutin occupations in the arts or sciences but not for the girl who pours your coffee at the coffee shop or the pure schmuck who sweeps up the office—evidently these folks inhabit a world in which wage slavery is slavery indeed and life is perpetual degradation. They may be right. I do date back to an epoch in which people didn’t conceive of working as a straight-up trade of self-respect for money. If things have changed, however, I doubt if they’ve changed all that much. I certainly wouldn’t willingly hire a janitor who didn’t want to sweep clean, even when I wasn’t watching; and I wouldn’t want to be the janitor either. That said, I’m well aware that under the current dispensation lots of people feel like whores in a system of universal prostitution. I simply regard this state of affairs as pathological.
Speaking descriptively and not homiletically, I don’t think the human world would work even as well as it does if the only motivating forces were extrinsic rewards and punishments. The pay system that structures and energizes the activities of the workers in a firm couldn’t function if the various participants didn’t organize their efforts around more global goals than the next paycheck. Reward systems simply don’t supply enough information to organize or coordinate the complex activities of even small companies or motivate the particular intelligent actions that make up modern work. It says something about the screwiness of the times that this point has to be made.
The human willingness to work is hardly unproblematic. The owners of enterprises routinely exploit the motivation of the work to get more effort from their employees than they are willing to pay for and not just in a handful of glamorous businesses. Discount retailing in this country is parasitic on the absurdly good work habits of abused employees, for example, which is why the Wal-Mart happy face is properly drawn with fangs. It would be a sad world indeed, however, if the rewards and challenges of the job itself were not a third thing between the demands of the masters and the acquiescence of the slaves.
I’m regularly accused of idealism for suggesting that people are motivated to do their jobs not only by the prospect of rewards or the sanction of punishments but because of the intrinsic pleasure of performing well. Sometimes my critics will allow that this automotivation takes place in certain highfalutin occupations in the arts or sciences but not for the girl who pours your coffee at the coffee shop or the pure schmuck who sweeps up the office—evidently these folks inhabit a world in which wage slavery is slavery indeed and life is perpetual degradation. They may be right. I do date back to an epoch in which people didn’t conceive of working as a straight-up trade of self-respect for money. If things have changed, however, I doubt if they’ve changed all that much. I certainly wouldn’t willingly hire a janitor who didn’t want to sweep clean, even when I wasn’t watching; and I wouldn’t want to be the janitor either. That said, I’m well aware that under the current dispensation lots of people feel like whores in a system of universal prostitution. I simply regard this state of affairs as pathological.
Speaking descriptively and not homiletically, I don’t think the human world would work even as well as it does if the only motivating forces were extrinsic rewards and punishments. The pay system that structures and energizes the activities of the workers in a firm couldn’t function if the various participants didn’t organize their efforts around more global goals than the next paycheck. Reward systems simply don’t supply enough information to organize or coordinate the complex activities of even small companies or motivate the particular intelligent actions that make up modern work. It says something about the screwiness of the times that this point has to be made.
The human willingness to work is hardly unproblematic. The owners of enterprises routinely exploit the motivation of the work to get more effort from their employees than they are willing to pay for and not just in a handful of glamorous businesses. Discount retailing in this country is parasitic on the absurdly good work habits of abused employees, for example, which is why the Wal-Mart happy face is properly drawn with fangs. It would be a sad world indeed, however, if the rewards and challenges of the job itself were not a third thing between the demands of the masters and the acquiescence of the slaves.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Keeping the Canaries in the Air
The marked increase in income and wealth disparities in the United States over the last couple of decades makes it appear that we gave grown far more than we actually have. If the enormous paper assets of high-income people were magically redistributed to ordinary people, the value of the dollar would plummet because the economy lacks the productive capacity to back up monies of account with real goods and services. Does anybody think that the U.S. has the medical facilities, equipment, and trained personnel to provide adequate health care to its entire population or enough teachers and schools to educate them all adequately?
I don’t mean to overstate the case. The U.S. is surely a very wealthy country that could probably afford to do better by all of its inhabitants without drastic dislocations. I do think it is likely, however, that those of us who promote more egalitarian tax and income policies should recognize that there is no boundless store of wealth to divvy up. The profits of the corporations are only sky high because they don’t get spent. The very, very wealthy mostly get immunity to risk and social and political power rather than increased consumption out of their privilege. If their share of wealth were diminished, it would hardly increase the prosperity of middling people dollar for dollar. Over a longer period of time, an increase in the spending power of ordinary people would probably tend to increase the real productive capacity of the nation; but in the short run, it might well result in inflation and lower stock prices.
The marked increase in income and wealth disparities in the United States over the last couple of decades makes it appear that we gave grown far more than we actually have. If the enormous paper assets of high-income people were magically redistributed to ordinary people, the value of the dollar would plummet because the economy lacks the productive capacity to back up monies of account with real goods and services. Does anybody think that the U.S. has the medical facilities, equipment, and trained personnel to provide adequate health care to its entire population or enough teachers and schools to educate them all adequately?
I don’t mean to overstate the case. The U.S. is surely a very wealthy country that could probably afford to do better by all of its inhabitants without drastic dislocations. I do think it is likely, however, that those of us who promote more egalitarian tax and income policies should recognize that there is no boundless store of wealth to divvy up. The profits of the corporations are only sky high because they don’t get spent. The very, very wealthy mostly get immunity to risk and social and political power rather than increased consumption out of their privilege. If their share of wealth were diminished, it would hardly increase the prosperity of middling people dollar for dollar. Over a longer period of time, an increase in the spending power of ordinary people would probably tend to increase the real productive capacity of the nation; but in the short run, it might well result in inflation and lower stock prices.
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
The Hills are Dead with Mounds of Fossils
If the Democrats want some advice about how to defeat Bush’s Social Security phaseout, they would be well advised to spend some time over at Panda’s Thumb, a website dedicated to defending biology against the well-funded assaults of Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents. The rhetorical problem is the same in either case. How do you contrive effective arguments in an open and shut case? It turns out to be remarkably disorientating to find yourself searching for yet more reasons why 5 plus 7 does indeed equal 12. Indeed, the very act of coming up with novel things to say in a debate that should have been over long ago creates the impression that there is something left to debate and impressions are all that matters in these cases.
With negligibly small exceptions, people don’t register the logic of arguments and simply follow the lead of whoever flatters them most effectively and doesn’t challenge what they heard as small children. Under the circumstances, nothing is less useful than a cogent argument. Thus the most effective weapon deployed by biologists is the old bit about how evolution is the way that God uses natural selection as his means of creation—an utterly irrelevant sentiment that doesn’t in fact bear thinking through since what occurs in evolution is nothing like a process fit to any purpose, divine or otherwise. That it takes 4.5 billion years to synthesize the likes of me is not much of a recommendation for a chemical engineer. The yield is miniscule, the quality control deplorable. None of which matters since the point of the rhetoric about secondary causes is not to make a point but to pacify the listeners or, in many cases, to pacify the scientists who wish to go on believing themselves. A pacifier doesn’t have to yield milk. The Democrats, cursed with the right side of the Social Security debate, will probably need to contrive similarly invalid appeals in order to prevail.
If the Democrats want some advice about how to defeat Bush’s Social Security phaseout, they would be well advised to spend some time over at Panda’s Thumb, a website dedicated to defending biology against the well-funded assaults of Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents. The rhetorical problem is the same in either case. How do you contrive effective arguments in an open and shut case? It turns out to be remarkably disorientating to find yourself searching for yet more reasons why 5 plus 7 does indeed equal 12. Indeed, the very act of coming up with novel things to say in a debate that should have been over long ago creates the impression that there is something left to debate and impressions are all that matters in these cases.
With negligibly small exceptions, people don’t register the logic of arguments and simply follow the lead of whoever flatters them most effectively and doesn’t challenge what they heard as small children. Under the circumstances, nothing is less useful than a cogent argument. Thus the most effective weapon deployed by biologists is the old bit about how evolution is the way that God uses natural selection as his means of creation—an utterly irrelevant sentiment that doesn’t in fact bear thinking through since what occurs in evolution is nothing like a process fit to any purpose, divine or otherwise. That it takes 4.5 billion years to synthesize the likes of me is not much of a recommendation for a chemical engineer. The yield is miniscule, the quality control deplorable. None of which matters since the point of the rhetoric about secondary causes is not to make a point but to pacify the listeners or, in many cases, to pacify the scientists who wish to go on believing themselves. A pacifier doesn’t have to yield milk. The Democrats, cursed with the right side of the Social Security debate, will probably need to contrive similarly invalid appeals in order to prevail.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Is There Such a Thing as Nature?
Every time Star Trek needed a new plot device Spock or one of his successors would discover yet another piece of physics just in the nick of time. You’d think that things would have been pretty well figured out in 200 years and certainly in 300, but the sequels continue to feature novel “I’ve-never-seen anything-like-it!” L rays and M rays and N rays ad infinitum and it’s a good bet they’ll keep on finding ‘em even when the intergalactic Borders is featuring the latest thriller, WC is for Water Closet. That’s OK for television science fiction, which has no more need of plausibility than my recent strenuous but rewarding dream involving Lindsey Davenport and Charlotte Church, In policy discussions, however, it is more problematic to begin with the premise that nature has limitless depths that will make possible a technological fix to any problem. Some economists and others such as Michael Creighton seem to think that the laws of fiction apply to the real world and that some thing will turn up to save the day after we’ve exhausted the oil and fresh water and good soil. Willing to recognize that any material resource is limited, they fail to consider that human ignorance is also a finite good and that we are using it up at a furious pace. Of course, I don’t know for sure that nanobots won’t turn the Arctic Ocean into lemonade. The point is, I don’t know they will either and neither do they.
Science and technology look very different when you view them prospectively instead of retrospectively. It’s easy to make a very long list of amazing discoveries and inventions, many of which were so surprising that it took a long time to figure out something they were good for. But that’s looking backwards. The tract record of predicted technical triumphs is less impressive, even if you discount the business about the gyrocopters. AI was the wave of the future in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and remains the wave of the future today. In disdain of innumerable announcements to the contrary, some in the New York Times, cancer remains largely incurable except in mice who, by a tragic irony, seldom have adequate health insurance. It’s even remotely possible that hydrogen cars just aren’t going to work. In twenty years of working on technology transfer, I’ve seen far brilliant ideas crash than triumph, which is not, of course, an indictment of brilliant ideas but a consequence of the fact that the sciences really are empirical, i.e. they are a form of wagering. Scientific triumphalists are like moronic statisticians who estimate the odds at the tables by interviewing people who are cashing in their chips. No wonder they’re so optimistic. But in science as the rest of life, it’s much easier to find something you like than to get exactly what you want.
Meanwhile, we are aware of various physical limits that seem to affirmatively rule out some of the fondest dreams of teenagers and libertarians. Perhaps some of these limits are not absolute or can be worked around, but limits like the speed of light sure look serious; and the onus on maintaining that they are defeasible surely ought to fall on those who blithely assume we can escape our ravaged planet and whip off to Alpha Centuri and will, too, as soon as the demand line crosses the supply line at the right price.
Truth told, I resist technological optimism for a personal reason. I find the notion that nature cannot stand before the human will somewhat sickening. My Father, who had a engineering outlook, used to pronounce “Whatever the mind of man can imagine, he can accomplish;” but even as a child this sort of 1930s, Raymond Massey-style Prometheanism repelled me. If nature offers the mind no limit, if it cannot stand before our wishes, it sublimes like dry ice, invisible in its perfect transparency. All that’s left is the likes of us, the little or not so little god of the world. I hadn’t even heard of Martin Heidegger in those days, but I guess even then I recognized that Being-in didn’t quite work without the-World because the content of our humanity is bound up with the things and their opacity. And I kinda like the things.
Of course reality is not really going to go away—the Periodic table and the Balmer series are not fads. Unfortunately a partial and temporary triumph of human will over the traditional limits of human life also presents a great danger, not only because the city in the clouds is going to come tumbling down one of these days but because even before that denouncement, the erstwhile happy citizens of that gated community are doomed to a terminal case of anomie and loneliness. As they used to say in Pravda, it is not accidental that some these folks are dreaming about the end of the world, some as Götterdämmerung, some as the Rapture.
Every time Star Trek needed a new plot device Spock or one of his successors would discover yet another piece of physics just in the nick of time. You’d think that things would have been pretty well figured out in 200 years and certainly in 300, but the sequels continue to feature novel “I’ve-never-seen anything-like-it!” L rays and M rays and N rays ad infinitum and it’s a good bet they’ll keep on finding ‘em even when the intergalactic Borders is featuring the latest thriller, WC is for Water Closet. That’s OK for television science fiction, which has no more need of plausibility than my recent strenuous but rewarding dream involving Lindsey Davenport and Charlotte Church, In policy discussions, however, it is more problematic to begin with the premise that nature has limitless depths that will make possible a technological fix to any problem. Some economists and others such as Michael Creighton seem to think that the laws of fiction apply to the real world and that some thing will turn up to save the day after we’ve exhausted the oil and fresh water and good soil. Willing to recognize that any material resource is limited, they fail to consider that human ignorance is also a finite good and that we are using it up at a furious pace. Of course, I don’t know for sure that nanobots won’t turn the Arctic Ocean into lemonade. The point is, I don’t know they will either and neither do they.
Science and technology look very different when you view them prospectively instead of retrospectively. It’s easy to make a very long list of amazing discoveries and inventions, many of which were so surprising that it took a long time to figure out something they were good for. But that’s looking backwards. The tract record of predicted technical triumphs is less impressive, even if you discount the business about the gyrocopters. AI was the wave of the future in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and remains the wave of the future today. In disdain of innumerable announcements to the contrary, some in the New York Times, cancer remains largely incurable except in mice who, by a tragic irony, seldom have adequate health insurance. It’s even remotely possible that hydrogen cars just aren’t going to work. In twenty years of working on technology transfer, I’ve seen far brilliant ideas crash than triumph, which is not, of course, an indictment of brilliant ideas but a consequence of the fact that the sciences really are empirical, i.e. they are a form of wagering. Scientific triumphalists are like moronic statisticians who estimate the odds at the tables by interviewing people who are cashing in their chips. No wonder they’re so optimistic. But in science as the rest of life, it’s much easier to find something you like than to get exactly what you want.
Meanwhile, we are aware of various physical limits that seem to affirmatively rule out some of the fondest dreams of teenagers and libertarians. Perhaps some of these limits are not absolute or can be worked around, but limits like the speed of light sure look serious; and the onus on maintaining that they are defeasible surely ought to fall on those who blithely assume we can escape our ravaged planet and whip off to Alpha Centuri and will, too, as soon as the demand line crosses the supply line at the right price.
Truth told, I resist technological optimism for a personal reason. I find the notion that nature cannot stand before the human will somewhat sickening. My Father, who had a engineering outlook, used to pronounce “Whatever the mind of man can imagine, he can accomplish;” but even as a child this sort of 1930s, Raymond Massey-style Prometheanism repelled me. If nature offers the mind no limit, if it cannot stand before our wishes, it sublimes like dry ice, invisible in its perfect transparency. All that’s left is the likes of us, the little or not so little god of the world. I hadn’t even heard of Martin Heidegger in those days, but I guess even then I recognized that Being-in didn’t quite work without the-World because the content of our humanity is bound up with the things and their opacity. And I kinda like the things.
Of course reality is not really going to go away—the Periodic table and the Balmer series are not fads. Unfortunately a partial and temporary triumph of human will over the traditional limits of human life also presents a great danger, not only because the city in the clouds is going to come tumbling down one of these days but because even before that denouncement, the erstwhile happy citizens of that gated community are doomed to a terminal case of anomie and loneliness. As they used to say in Pravda, it is not accidental that some these folks are dreaming about the end of the world, some as Götterdämmerung, some as the Rapture.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Let Us Now Braise Famous Men
Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse is one of the few books that have some prospect of actually affecting public opinion and political debate in the United States because its author has a gift for calm and even-handed discussion of issues that are mostly just yelled about and because, unlike most academics, he manages not to reach. As one says of competent second basemen, he plays within himself. Since the fundamental facts of our environmental situation are not that complex, there’s no reason to get theoretical on anybody’s ass. In this respect, Diamond is like Clinton, another persuasive man who recognized the inutility of complex arguments in public venues. There are lots of important questions that are beyond simple explication, but you might as well stick with the simple stuff because that’s all that can be heard anyway.
I’m guessing that folks who find their way to this site have already heard quite a bit about Diamond and his book even if they haven’t read it yet. Besides, if you’ll put up with me, you probably have a taste for something slightly more challenging or maybe just something slightly more perverse and pretentious (in a good way) than Diamond. If Collapse is for the freshmen, the most recent work of Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides, is for us juniors and seniors—the grads won’t find it sufficiently recherché. It’s also about issues of great contemporary relevance, but its argument requires a few paragraphs to summarize and a modicum of historical knowledge to appreciate fully, all of which limit its commercial possibilities. By speaking at length and perhaps at gunpoint, you could convey the gist of what Sahlins has to say to almost anyone; but that wouldn’t help much. People can appreciate a joke whose point has to be explained; but it won’t make them laugh.
Sahlins is an anthropologist who is generally identified—and dismissed—as the last of the purebred cultural relativists in the lineage of Franz Boas. This characterization is not entirely wrong. In Apologies to Thucydides, as in his other books, Sahlins does defend the thesis that the actions of nations and individuals are only explicable in terms of their cultural setting. He doesn’t leave it at that, however, since culture, indispensable in the explanation of history, is itself a product of history and history, in turn, is embedded in nature. The dialectical-minded Sahlins isn’t an immaterialist, but he is determined to take mediations into account. He is critical, for example, of explanations of international politics that treat “that restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death” as the beginning or ending of an explanation because he sees the war of all against all beloved of the hardboiled realists as a historical contingency rather than a given of human nature that has always obtained and can never really be transcended. Like every other game, the Great Game has rules and a history. It is a cultural artifact. To think otherwise is as silly as to imagine that the rook has a natural proclivity, no doubt coded in its nucleic acids, to travel in straight lines up or across the board.
It was hardly an accident that Thucydides evolved his tough and cynical view of the human condition in this context of the Peloponnesian war. Machiavelli’s habitat was the Italy of the Borgia for similar reasons, and the Big Fish Eat Little Fish doctrine of the Arthashastra whose author actually calls his basic principle fish logic (Matsya nyaya) grew up in the tide pool of Mauryan India. Ruthless regimes of international politics come into existence under specific historical circumstances. The Athenians may have been sincere in arguing to the Melians, “Of the Gods we believe, and of the men we know, that by a necessary law of nature, they rule whatever they can,” but their resort to extortion and terror in order to maintain an unstable thalassocracy was actually a historical novelty. As Cleon explained to them, “Your empire is a despotism and your subjects disaffected conspirators.” In the wake of a series of historical contingencies, Athens had become a state that had to lord it over its neighbors in order to remain prosperous and independent. Although the cultural prestige of the city and its role as the defender of the Greeks against the Persians put an attractive face on its hegemony, soft power was never going to be enough to maintain its hegemony.
Sahlins compares Athens in the Peloponnesian War to the Kingdom of Bau in the Fiji Islands during its long war with Rewa, the Sparta of the tale. Drawing a parallel between the School of Greece and the dominant power of the Cannibal Isles is a bit of a jeu d’esprit—Sahlins is well aware of the limitations of this kind of analogy—but the real key of the allegory is neither Hellenic nor Polynesian. According to Sahlins, both Athens and Bau exercised a novel form of imperium, which he calls Arche, hegemony without sovereignty. Unlike the European colonial empires, these powers did not directly rule their dependencies by conquest or administration. They lacked anything like the economic resources or sheer manpower to do that. Instead, they “relied on awe and fear—which is to say, on a reputation for power, confirmed by strategic displays of it. Rather than mild, the Athenians and Bauans could be all the more brutal, so they would be known for it.”
I don’t know how accurately Sahlins analyzes thing Fijian—a good part of the book is historical ethnography. His take on the Athenians, on the other hand, strikes me as plausible and even partly congruent with some of the views of experts like Donald Kagan whose writings on the Peloponnesian War are often cited by the neocons apropos of contemporary foreign policy dilemmas. The right, with its trademark taste for paranoia, draws very different conclusions from these analyses than a leftist like Sahlins, however. Conservatives believe that the current historical situation reflects the natural condition of our kind so that we may as well be happy warriors in the war of all against all even if a quick calculation shows that we are seriously outnumbered. The alternative is to recognize that we can call off Ragnarok and help the world system evolve in a peaceable direction.
Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse is one of the few books that have some prospect of actually affecting public opinion and political debate in the United States because its author has a gift for calm and even-handed discussion of issues that are mostly just yelled about and because, unlike most academics, he manages not to reach. As one says of competent second basemen, he plays within himself. Since the fundamental facts of our environmental situation are not that complex, there’s no reason to get theoretical on anybody’s ass. In this respect, Diamond is like Clinton, another persuasive man who recognized the inutility of complex arguments in public venues. There are lots of important questions that are beyond simple explication, but you might as well stick with the simple stuff because that’s all that can be heard anyway.
I’m guessing that folks who find their way to this site have already heard quite a bit about Diamond and his book even if they haven’t read it yet. Besides, if you’ll put up with me, you probably have a taste for something slightly more challenging or maybe just something slightly more perverse and pretentious (in a good way) than Diamond. If Collapse is for the freshmen, the most recent work of Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides, is for us juniors and seniors—the grads won’t find it sufficiently recherché. It’s also about issues of great contemporary relevance, but its argument requires a few paragraphs to summarize and a modicum of historical knowledge to appreciate fully, all of which limit its commercial possibilities. By speaking at length and perhaps at gunpoint, you could convey the gist of what Sahlins has to say to almost anyone; but that wouldn’t help much. People can appreciate a joke whose point has to be explained; but it won’t make them laugh.
Sahlins is an anthropologist who is generally identified—and dismissed—as the last of the purebred cultural relativists in the lineage of Franz Boas. This characterization is not entirely wrong. In Apologies to Thucydides, as in his other books, Sahlins does defend the thesis that the actions of nations and individuals are only explicable in terms of their cultural setting. He doesn’t leave it at that, however, since culture, indispensable in the explanation of history, is itself a product of history and history, in turn, is embedded in nature. The dialectical-minded Sahlins isn’t an immaterialist, but he is determined to take mediations into account. He is critical, for example, of explanations of international politics that treat “that restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death” as the beginning or ending of an explanation because he sees the war of all against all beloved of the hardboiled realists as a historical contingency rather than a given of human nature that has always obtained and can never really be transcended. Like every other game, the Great Game has rules and a history. It is a cultural artifact. To think otherwise is as silly as to imagine that the rook has a natural proclivity, no doubt coded in its nucleic acids, to travel in straight lines up or across the board.
It was hardly an accident that Thucydides evolved his tough and cynical view of the human condition in this context of the Peloponnesian war. Machiavelli’s habitat was the Italy of the Borgia for similar reasons, and the Big Fish Eat Little Fish doctrine of the Arthashastra whose author actually calls his basic principle fish logic (Matsya nyaya) grew up in the tide pool of Mauryan India. Ruthless regimes of international politics come into existence under specific historical circumstances. The Athenians may have been sincere in arguing to the Melians, “Of the Gods we believe, and of the men we know, that by a necessary law of nature, they rule whatever they can,” but their resort to extortion and terror in order to maintain an unstable thalassocracy was actually a historical novelty. As Cleon explained to them, “Your empire is a despotism and your subjects disaffected conspirators.” In the wake of a series of historical contingencies, Athens had become a state that had to lord it over its neighbors in order to remain prosperous and independent. Although the cultural prestige of the city and its role as the defender of the Greeks against the Persians put an attractive face on its hegemony, soft power was never going to be enough to maintain its hegemony.
Sahlins compares Athens in the Peloponnesian War to the Kingdom of Bau in the Fiji Islands during its long war with Rewa, the Sparta of the tale. Drawing a parallel between the School of Greece and the dominant power of the Cannibal Isles is a bit of a jeu d’esprit—Sahlins is well aware of the limitations of this kind of analogy—but the real key of the allegory is neither Hellenic nor Polynesian. According to Sahlins, both Athens and Bau exercised a novel form of imperium, which he calls Arche, hegemony without sovereignty. Unlike the European colonial empires, these powers did not directly rule their dependencies by conquest or administration. They lacked anything like the economic resources or sheer manpower to do that. Instead, they “relied on awe and fear—which is to say, on a reputation for power, confirmed by strategic displays of it. Rather than mild, the Athenians and Bauans could be all the more brutal, so they would be known for it.”
I don’t know how accurately Sahlins analyzes thing Fijian—a good part of the book is historical ethnography. His take on the Athenians, on the other hand, strikes me as plausible and even partly congruent with some of the views of experts like Donald Kagan whose writings on the Peloponnesian War are often cited by the neocons apropos of contemporary foreign policy dilemmas. The right, with its trademark taste for paranoia, draws very different conclusions from these analyses than a leftist like Sahlins, however. Conservatives believe that the current historical situation reflects the natural condition of our kind so that we may as well be happy warriors in the war of all against all even if a quick calculation shows that we are seriously outnumbered. The alternative is to recognize that we can call off Ragnarok and help the world system evolve in a peaceable direction.
Monday, February 07, 2005
Fool’s Paradise
In my last comment, I alluded to the best known of Basho’s haikus in a rare attempt to connect with actual readers, who are more likely to have heard about the crow and the frog than other examples. Part of the point of reading a book like Ueda’s Basho and His Interpreters, however, is to wander away from the usual guided tour and get a slightly better idea what Basho’s oeuvre is like in itself. The poems that strike a Western reader as Zen-like exemplify a by now thoroughly domesticated variety of the exotic, at least for a West coast kid like me who grew up in the heyday of the Beats; but many of Basho’s poems are rather like 19th Century vers de societe or classical epigrams and most of them depend for their full effect on literary echoes inaudible to outsiders or historical and geographic references. Ueda’s book has another virtue. Because he quotes several Japanese interpretations of each poem, his book reveals that their obscurity is not simply a function of cultural distance. The locals aren’t sure what they mean either. One might expect that different readers would have differing takes on the metaphysical implications of such brief and allusive verses, but the literal meaning is not settled either. We shouldn’t make the school kid assumption that the grown ups have the answers in the answer book, even to something as tractable as the plain sense of seventeen syllables.
Old men often become indecent, showing less and less respect for cherished vanities like the fantasy that people have attained, if not the truth, then at least a stable consensus of error. As a matter of fact very little is ever really settled, but I suppose it’s a bit malicious of me to enjoy rubbing it in. Since I’m not that old yet, I guess it must be precocity.
In my last comment, I alluded to the best known of Basho’s haikus in a rare attempt to connect with actual readers, who are more likely to have heard about the crow and the frog than other examples. Part of the point of reading a book like Ueda’s Basho and His Interpreters, however, is to wander away from the usual guided tour and get a slightly better idea what Basho’s oeuvre is like in itself. The poems that strike a Western reader as Zen-like exemplify a by now thoroughly domesticated variety of the exotic, at least for a West coast kid like me who grew up in the heyday of the Beats; but many of Basho’s poems are rather like 19th Century vers de societe or classical epigrams and most of them depend for their full effect on literary echoes inaudible to outsiders or historical and geographic references. Ueda’s book has another virtue. Because he quotes several Japanese interpretations of each poem, his book reveals that their obscurity is not simply a function of cultural distance. The locals aren’t sure what they mean either. One might expect that different readers would have differing takes on the metaphysical implications of such brief and allusive verses, but the literal meaning is not settled either. We shouldn’t make the school kid assumption that the grown ups have the answers in the answer book, even to something as tractable as the plain sense of seventeen syllables.
Old men often become indecent, showing less and less respect for cherished vanities like the fantasy that people have attained, if not the truth, then at least a stable consensus of error. As a matter of fact very little is ever really settled, but I suppose it’s a bit malicious of me to enjoy rubbing it in. Since I’m not that old yet, I guess it must be precocity.
Saturday, January 29, 2005
Of Mere Being
Reading a recent translation with commentary of the poems of Basho, I found myself reminded of Lucretius, another philosophical poet living in an age of political consolidation. Dactylic hexameter may be an elaborate instrument compared to the minimalism of haiku, but the flatness conveyed by these contrasting means is similar. For both the Roman and the Japanese, the most refined and difficult of tropes is literal speech. What is astonishing about the Nature of Things is the possibility that atoms and void are not a myth but a fact. What is amazing about the frog and its plop is the possibility that the frog stands for nothing more than a frog, the plop for nothing more than a plop. Of course it is highly likely that Basho’s poem doesn’t record a singular event in a specific swamp anymore than Lucretius could automatically arrive at an accurate version of how things actually are by purely literary means—after all atomism isn’t the true physics. The everyday absolute is a stylistic effect like all the others. The ethic behind these contrivances is perhaps more substantive.
Historians of philosophy sometimes imply that the Epicurus claimed that merely existing is a pleasure in order to avoid a reputation for promoting immorality—the expensive and lurid enjoyments that hedonism might be expected to recommend are counterproductive and unnecessary if it suffices to breath and think. I’ve finally decided that the judgment of Epicurus reflected a veritable perception instead of or perhaps in addition to a dialectical finesse. I’m not scholar enough to judge whether a similar insight is expressed in the Mahayana notion of the Buddha’s body of bliss, which seems to imply that pleasure is the ground note of every sensation, even agony. It’s certainly a bit eccentric of me to arrive at the Fire Sermon with marshmallows and popcorn, but if this is indeed the other world, as I have so often suggested, the drip of the saline solution in the I.V. beside the death bed is as good a transcendental instance as any other and the shivering crow on the bald branch is, if anything, objectionably gemütlich.
Reading a recent translation with commentary of the poems of Basho, I found myself reminded of Lucretius, another philosophical poet living in an age of political consolidation. Dactylic hexameter may be an elaborate instrument compared to the minimalism of haiku, but the flatness conveyed by these contrasting means is similar. For both the Roman and the Japanese, the most refined and difficult of tropes is literal speech. What is astonishing about the Nature of Things is the possibility that atoms and void are not a myth but a fact. What is amazing about the frog and its plop is the possibility that the frog stands for nothing more than a frog, the plop for nothing more than a plop. Of course it is highly likely that Basho’s poem doesn’t record a singular event in a specific swamp anymore than Lucretius could automatically arrive at an accurate version of how things actually are by purely literary means—after all atomism isn’t the true physics. The everyday absolute is a stylistic effect like all the others. The ethic behind these contrivances is perhaps more substantive.
Historians of philosophy sometimes imply that the Epicurus claimed that merely existing is a pleasure in order to avoid a reputation for promoting immorality—the expensive and lurid enjoyments that hedonism might be expected to recommend are counterproductive and unnecessary if it suffices to breath and think. I’ve finally decided that the judgment of Epicurus reflected a veritable perception instead of or perhaps in addition to a dialectical finesse. I’m not scholar enough to judge whether a similar insight is expressed in the Mahayana notion of the Buddha’s body of bliss, which seems to imply that pleasure is the ground note of every sensation, even agony. It’s certainly a bit eccentric of me to arrive at the Fire Sermon with marshmallows and popcorn, but if this is indeed the other world, as I have so often suggested, the drip of the saline solution in the I.V. beside the death bed is as good a transcendental instance as any other and the shivering crow on the bald branch is, if anything, objectionably gemütlich.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
An Unpleasant Consideration
The President’s efforts to privatize Social Security appear to be faltering, but I take little pleasure in this development. Second term presidents thwarted in their domestic ambitions inevitably switch their attention to foreign affairs where they have much more freedom of action. If Bush bombs in Congress, he’s all the more likely to bomb in Tehran.
The President’s efforts to privatize Social Security appear to be faltering, but I take little pleasure in this development. Second term presidents thwarted in their domestic ambitions inevitably switch their attention to foreign affairs where they have much more freedom of action. If Bush bombs in Congress, he’s all the more likely to bomb in Tehran.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Mo
Just as a arrow shot into the air approaches its zenith long after has exhausted most of its impetus and the shortest day of the year is the beginning of Winter, political movements are often merely coasting in their hour of triumph. Hubris has its own physics. The Conservative tide in the United States, for example, has finally awakened countervailing forces even among the hapless Democrats. The Republicans may continue to prevail for some time just as it keeps on getting colder after December 21 even though the sun is rising in the skies every day; but the underlying trends are actually quite unfavorable for them and not simply because any ruling party is vulnerable to failures. Republican policies only make sense on the assumption of continuing American predominance, but this premise becomes less and less plausible with every new report on the trade deficits. Meanwhile, as every survey shows, the administration is far to the right of the public on most issues, though people remain ignorant of Bush’s stated objectives and policies because of the absence of a free press in the United States. The likelihood that the second derivatives are unfavorable to the right is not necessarily a happy fact, however, because movements can become violent when they sense that time is no longer on their side.
Just as a arrow shot into the air approaches its zenith long after has exhausted most of its impetus and the shortest day of the year is the beginning of Winter, political movements are often merely coasting in their hour of triumph. Hubris has its own physics. The Conservative tide in the United States, for example, has finally awakened countervailing forces even among the hapless Democrats. The Republicans may continue to prevail for some time just as it keeps on getting colder after December 21 even though the sun is rising in the skies every day; but the underlying trends are actually quite unfavorable for them and not simply because any ruling party is vulnerable to failures. Republican policies only make sense on the assumption of continuing American predominance, but this premise becomes less and less plausible with every new report on the trade deficits. Meanwhile, as every survey shows, the administration is far to the right of the public on most issues, though people remain ignorant of Bush’s stated objectives and policies because of the absence of a free press in the United States. The likelihood that the second derivatives are unfavorable to the right is not necessarily a happy fact, however, because movements can become violent when they sense that time is no longer on their side.
Saturday, January 08, 2005
Thinking Out Loud
One of the right-wing themes that’s getting a lot of play—if not payola—is the idea that the Europeans are lagging behind us in economic growth because of their socialist or at least social democratic policies. I’m not competent nor particularly interested in determining if lower pension payments would have resulted in another point of GDP in Oslo—for all I know that could be the case—but I would like to raise a few niggling points whose generality will not endanger my amateur standing:
1. As Alan Greenspan remarked in a speech last year, economic growth results from increases in population and increases in efficiency. Since the population of the United States is still growing, other things being equal, one would expect its economy to grow more rapidly than a region without much population growth. The Europeans, especially the Germans, are also still dealing with the aftermath of the Cold War—absorbing East Germany was and is an enormous and expensive task.
2. GDP is merely a figure of merit. A serious assessment of relative wealth has to go beyond such aggregate measures, especially since we know of large and significant factors that make it unreliable. The inefficiency of American medicine, for example, increases its dollar value and contributes to a larger GDP, but it is hard to think that America is wealthier because its medicine is grossly overpriced. Hedonic accounting and other perfectly reasonable adjustments also distort comparative judgments—better computers are obviously worth more, but they aren’t worth more to very many people. I doubt if there is a value neutral way of measuring wealth. By my values, however, it is at least unclear that we do as well as the Europeans or that we’re even catching up.
3. Despite huge tax breaks for the rich, the economy of the United States has not grown very much over the last four years by any measure. We may have benefited in earlier periods of our history from relatively large disparities of wealth and income because huge pools of capital, however acquired, were useful in periods of weed-like growth. It doesn’t follow, however, that limitless private aggrandizement will benefit anybody but the rentiers now. To use a distinction I encountered most recently in Geerat Vermeij’s book, we’re apparently moving from an economic world in which effectiveness is critical to one in which the important thing is efficiency. In the U.S., the big, sloppy dinosaurs are in political charge, but the future, one guesses, belongs to the sleek, clever mammals. Our love of the gigantic seems an ever more pointless exercise—recreational elephantiasis.
4. As even the most confirmed Tory should understand, political stability is worth something. If, as I keep maintaining, the great fact of the age is a demographic transition that spells the end of explosive growth, it will be increasingly difficult to maintain or increase disparities of wealth and income by conventional political means. As they used to say in Pravda, it is not accidental that the old economy conservatives promote one-party government, irrational forms of religion, official oppression, aggressive nationalism, and cultural paranoia. There’s no guarantee that these shifts will suffice, however. It’s not that I think spears are being sharpened for Republican heads. Granted the traditions of the country, a violently rightist populism that would appall even the traditional conservatives is the more likely threat, not only to this country but to the world at large. A political economy that sacrifices a couple of percentage points of largely meaningless growth in the interest of national amity may be the rational choice in comparison to the divisive policies of the “At Least We Ain’t Niggers” party.
One of the right-wing themes that’s getting a lot of play—if not payola—is the idea that the Europeans are lagging behind us in economic growth because of their socialist or at least social democratic policies. I’m not competent nor particularly interested in determining if lower pension payments would have resulted in another point of GDP in Oslo—for all I know that could be the case—but I would like to raise a few niggling points whose generality will not endanger my amateur standing:
1. As Alan Greenspan remarked in a speech last year, economic growth results from increases in population and increases in efficiency. Since the population of the United States is still growing, other things being equal, one would expect its economy to grow more rapidly than a region without much population growth. The Europeans, especially the Germans, are also still dealing with the aftermath of the Cold War—absorbing East Germany was and is an enormous and expensive task.
2. GDP is merely a figure of merit. A serious assessment of relative wealth has to go beyond such aggregate measures, especially since we know of large and significant factors that make it unreliable. The inefficiency of American medicine, for example, increases its dollar value and contributes to a larger GDP, but it is hard to think that America is wealthier because its medicine is grossly overpriced. Hedonic accounting and other perfectly reasonable adjustments also distort comparative judgments—better computers are obviously worth more, but they aren’t worth more to very many people. I doubt if there is a value neutral way of measuring wealth. By my values, however, it is at least unclear that we do as well as the Europeans or that we’re even catching up.
3. Despite huge tax breaks for the rich, the economy of the United States has not grown very much over the last four years by any measure. We may have benefited in earlier periods of our history from relatively large disparities of wealth and income because huge pools of capital, however acquired, were useful in periods of weed-like growth. It doesn’t follow, however, that limitless private aggrandizement will benefit anybody but the rentiers now. To use a distinction I encountered most recently in Geerat Vermeij’s book, we’re apparently moving from an economic world in which effectiveness is critical to one in which the important thing is efficiency. In the U.S., the big, sloppy dinosaurs are in political charge, but the future, one guesses, belongs to the sleek, clever mammals. Our love of the gigantic seems an ever more pointless exercise—recreational elephantiasis.
4. As even the most confirmed Tory should understand, political stability is worth something. If, as I keep maintaining, the great fact of the age is a demographic transition that spells the end of explosive growth, it will be increasingly difficult to maintain or increase disparities of wealth and income by conventional political means. As they used to say in Pravda, it is not accidental that the old economy conservatives promote one-party government, irrational forms of religion, official oppression, aggressive nationalism, and cultural paranoia. There’s no guarantee that these shifts will suffice, however. It’s not that I think spears are being sharpened for Republican heads. Granted the traditions of the country, a violently rightist populism that would appall even the traditional conservatives is the more likely threat, not only to this country but to the world at large. A political economy that sacrifices a couple of percentage points of largely meaningless growth in the interest of national amity may be the rational choice in comparison to the divisive policies of the “At Least We Ain’t Niggers” party.
Thursday, January 06, 2005
The Flowers that Bloom in Vermeij
Georges Sorel was more an amphibious than an ambiguous figure in intellectual history. When he died both the communists and the fascists sent a delegation to his funeral. He is largely remembered for his insistence on the importance of myth in contemporary life. Sorel claimed that only myth could make the revolution possible, but I’ve believed for some time that it was important to him for a more personal reason. Famous and indeed sometimes lampooned for having read libraries of books, he simply had to figure out ways of withstanding the floods of information he unleashed on himself. Since a true and comprehensive Theory of Everything was unavailable, his synthesis was bound to be synthetic. At least the man had the decency to file his ideas under the rubric of myth.
You could argue with considerable justice that Sorel was responsible for his own shortcomings, but what’s problematic about him was not his ambition, which was honorable enough, but the way his egoism and taste for violence colored the result. After all, anybody who tries to take a synoptic glance at the world faces a similar challenge even if they are highly respectable academics instead of wild-eyed revolutionary hermits. As someone once said (Thomas Kuhn? Steven Jay Gould? Stephen Wolfram?) “Sure learning about modern science is like having a swarm of bees in your head: but there they are.” And that brings me to a recent attempt to make sense of it all—well, of a lot of it—Geerat Vermeij’s Nature: an Economic History.
Vermeij is an evolutionary theorist who is probably best known outside of biology for his engaging memoir, Privileged Hands, which told the story of how a blind man became a world-class scientist. Like Steven Jay Gould, Vermeij began as an expert on molluscs—there’s apparently something about snails that inspires grand theory. He has written a great deal about ecology and biogeography and is associated with the application of the strategic concept of the escalation to the study of predator/prey interactions.
Vermeij’s most recent book argues, “economic principles applicable to humans are the same as those that govern all other forms of life.” As several reviewers have pointed out, Vermeij doesn’t quite pull this off, because what he points out are analogies rather than homologies, instances of suggestive similarities rather than underlying identities. The ability of organisms to store food, for example, is indeed reminiscent of the process of capital formation, but wealth, at least as it is defined in neoclassical economics, simply isn’t measurable in calories. In physics and chemistry, concepts have univocal definitions and mean exactly the same thing whether they are applied to understanding the motive power of steam or the collisions of billiard balls—establishing these identities was the great accomplishment of 19th Century science. No common measures yet unify ecology and economics, however. Economics remains emic, which is technical jargon for a science that accepts the validity of the cultural constructs it studies. Like language, money is a conventional system, which is why economics is more like linguistics than physics. It isn’t obvious that economic analysis can even be usefully applied to the analysis of precapitalist human material culture—a pitched battle has been going on among the anthropologists over this issue for a long time. Applying economics to non-human nature is still more problematic. Indeed, it may be that ideas drawn from population genetics, ethology, ecology, and game theory will do more to make sense out of the foundations of economics than the other way around.
Vermeij’s analogies are often illuminating. He points out, for example, that the adaptive radiations do not immediately follow mass extinction events such as the great Cretaceous die off because adaptive radiations not only require a relaxation of selection pressure in the wake of the disappearance of previously dominant forms but a sufficient mass of energetic resources (think capital) that is not available in the impoverished post-catastrophe environment. Eventually you get a zoo full of new birds and mammals, but for a long time its just ferns and possums. Vermeij also does a good job in making the more general point of the role of predation and parasitism in enriching, enlarging, and diversifying the biosphere over geological time, though the parallels he draws with the creative role of economic inequality in human history are liable to make the reader a little nervous. Vermeij himself doesn’t draw the obvious Social Darwinian conclusions in the last chapter of his book, but it’s hard to escape the impression that he is obsessed with themes of competition and domination.
As has been pointed out in various reviews, many of Vermeij’s substantive conclusions about evolution can be made in terms of the concept of niche construction and coevolution. To some extent, focusing on competition instead of cooperation is a rhetorical or aesthetic decision because the notions are correlative–one cooperates to compete effectively and competes for the sake of collectivities larger than oneself. Vermeij’s emphasis is thus a choice and presumably reflects something beyond the science. The choice involved, however, may not be a simple matter of the author’s psychological proclivities. As the philosopher of science Gerald Holton pointed out some years ago, the specific terms that come to be used to describe scientific discoveries are colored by cultural tendencies. Thus, modern physics is a bunch of differential equations too distant from ordinary human thinking even to be strange. Its public face, all the talk and terminology that emphasizes disconnection, indeterminacy, fission, and relativity, owes more to the Zeitgeist of early 20th Century modernism than anything about its conceptual content. By the same token, the current and sometimes hobbyhorsical fascination with competition evinced by Vermeij and thousands of others is probably also a symptom, specifically, a response to the great fact that the demographic transition is turning this phase of history into a giant game of musical chairs.
Georges Sorel was more an amphibious than an ambiguous figure in intellectual history. When he died both the communists and the fascists sent a delegation to his funeral. He is largely remembered for his insistence on the importance of myth in contemporary life. Sorel claimed that only myth could make the revolution possible, but I’ve believed for some time that it was important to him for a more personal reason. Famous and indeed sometimes lampooned for having read libraries of books, he simply had to figure out ways of withstanding the floods of information he unleashed on himself. Since a true and comprehensive Theory of Everything was unavailable, his synthesis was bound to be synthetic. At least the man had the decency to file his ideas under the rubric of myth.
You could argue with considerable justice that Sorel was responsible for his own shortcomings, but what’s problematic about him was not his ambition, which was honorable enough, but the way his egoism and taste for violence colored the result. After all, anybody who tries to take a synoptic glance at the world faces a similar challenge even if they are highly respectable academics instead of wild-eyed revolutionary hermits. As someone once said (Thomas Kuhn? Steven Jay Gould? Stephen Wolfram?) “Sure learning about modern science is like having a swarm of bees in your head: but there they are.” And that brings me to a recent attempt to make sense of it all—well, of a lot of it—Geerat Vermeij’s Nature: an Economic History.
Vermeij is an evolutionary theorist who is probably best known outside of biology for his engaging memoir, Privileged Hands, which told the story of how a blind man became a world-class scientist. Like Steven Jay Gould, Vermeij began as an expert on molluscs—there’s apparently something about snails that inspires grand theory. He has written a great deal about ecology and biogeography and is associated with the application of the strategic concept of the escalation to the study of predator/prey interactions.
Vermeij’s most recent book argues, “economic principles applicable to humans are the same as those that govern all other forms of life.” As several reviewers have pointed out, Vermeij doesn’t quite pull this off, because what he points out are analogies rather than homologies, instances of suggestive similarities rather than underlying identities. The ability of organisms to store food, for example, is indeed reminiscent of the process of capital formation, but wealth, at least as it is defined in neoclassical economics, simply isn’t measurable in calories. In physics and chemistry, concepts have univocal definitions and mean exactly the same thing whether they are applied to understanding the motive power of steam or the collisions of billiard balls—establishing these identities was the great accomplishment of 19th Century science. No common measures yet unify ecology and economics, however. Economics remains emic, which is technical jargon for a science that accepts the validity of the cultural constructs it studies. Like language, money is a conventional system, which is why economics is more like linguistics than physics. It isn’t obvious that economic analysis can even be usefully applied to the analysis of precapitalist human material culture—a pitched battle has been going on among the anthropologists over this issue for a long time. Applying economics to non-human nature is still more problematic. Indeed, it may be that ideas drawn from population genetics, ethology, ecology, and game theory will do more to make sense out of the foundations of economics than the other way around.
Vermeij’s analogies are often illuminating. He points out, for example, that the adaptive radiations do not immediately follow mass extinction events such as the great Cretaceous die off because adaptive radiations not only require a relaxation of selection pressure in the wake of the disappearance of previously dominant forms but a sufficient mass of energetic resources (think capital) that is not available in the impoverished post-catastrophe environment. Eventually you get a zoo full of new birds and mammals, but for a long time its just ferns and possums. Vermeij also does a good job in making the more general point of the role of predation and parasitism in enriching, enlarging, and diversifying the biosphere over geological time, though the parallels he draws with the creative role of economic inequality in human history are liable to make the reader a little nervous. Vermeij himself doesn’t draw the obvious Social Darwinian conclusions in the last chapter of his book, but it’s hard to escape the impression that he is obsessed with themes of competition and domination.
As has been pointed out in various reviews, many of Vermeij’s substantive conclusions about evolution can be made in terms of the concept of niche construction and coevolution. To some extent, focusing on competition instead of cooperation is a rhetorical or aesthetic decision because the notions are correlative–one cooperates to compete effectively and competes for the sake of collectivities larger than oneself. Vermeij’s emphasis is thus a choice and presumably reflects something beyond the science. The choice involved, however, may not be a simple matter of the author’s psychological proclivities. As the philosopher of science Gerald Holton pointed out some years ago, the specific terms that come to be used to describe scientific discoveries are colored by cultural tendencies. Thus, modern physics is a bunch of differential equations too distant from ordinary human thinking even to be strange. Its public face, all the talk and terminology that emphasizes disconnection, indeterminacy, fission, and relativity, owes more to the Zeitgeist of early 20th Century modernism than anything about its conceptual content. By the same token, the current and sometimes hobbyhorsical fascination with competition evinced by Vermeij and thousands of others is probably also a symptom, specifically, a response to the great fact that the demographic transition is turning this phase of history into a giant game of musical chairs.
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
The Cartoon Channel
In my quest to understand absolutely everything, I’m afraid I’ve made the freshman error of over researching the topic. After all, even if you could get it right, a complete explanation would be as useless as a map as large as the territory. The whole point is to leave things out; and by whole point, I really mean the whole point since the general action of time is subtractive right from the collapse of quantum indeterminacy into classical observables to the reduction of our national discourse to a series of commentaries on the Peterson trial. The trick is to leave a beautiful corpse when you murder the possibilities. To that end, the poet Rimbaud insisted that it is necessary to be drunk. For some of us, glue’s more like it. So here’s what’s happening in world history.
We’re at the end of the exponential increase in the human population. The birth rate has stabilized or begun to fall in most countries, and the inflection of the curve is the great fact of the age. With one of the great motors of economic growth turned off, political elites are faced with a new situation. As long as the rising tide was lifting all boats, they could afford to be generous without losing ground to the plebs. Indeed, practical egalitarianism paid. That easy liberalism is increasingly obsolete, and new options have to be explored. I see four responses taking shape:
1. The modern liberals bet that technological progress will be able to maintain economic growth and underwrite a society that remains relatively rational and democratic provided its members are willing to live in the responsible, sober, and rather boring fashion that goes along with the information economy.
2. The thoughtful conservatives accept the likelihood that the economy will stagnate and plan to maintain or improve their privileged position by getting more of the pie. They recognize that this can only be accomplished by force or fraud. To take care of your family, you do what you have to do.
3. The thoughtless conservatives live in denial, proposing to maintain an expanding standard of living by deficit financing and the accelerating exploitation of finite resources like oil. Some of them rationalize their unsustainable policies by taking apocalyptic fantasies literally or by dreaming of magic technological fixes—nanotechnology as the Great Pig, Star Wars as the bulletproof shirt.
4. The utopian radicals propose to deal with the end of material progress by embracing a virtuous egalitarian poverty. One may be allowed a certain skepticism about the prospects of ahimsa in a tide pool.
Mix and match.
In my quest to understand absolutely everything, I’m afraid I’ve made the freshman error of over researching the topic. After all, even if you could get it right, a complete explanation would be as useless as a map as large as the territory. The whole point is to leave things out; and by whole point, I really mean the whole point since the general action of time is subtractive right from the collapse of quantum indeterminacy into classical observables to the reduction of our national discourse to a series of commentaries on the Peterson trial. The trick is to leave a beautiful corpse when you murder the possibilities. To that end, the poet Rimbaud insisted that it is necessary to be drunk. For some of us, glue’s more like it. So here’s what’s happening in world history.
We’re at the end of the exponential increase in the human population. The birth rate has stabilized or begun to fall in most countries, and the inflection of the curve is the great fact of the age. With one of the great motors of economic growth turned off, political elites are faced with a new situation. As long as the rising tide was lifting all boats, they could afford to be generous without losing ground to the plebs. Indeed, practical egalitarianism paid. That easy liberalism is increasingly obsolete, and new options have to be explored. I see four responses taking shape:
1. The modern liberals bet that technological progress will be able to maintain economic growth and underwrite a society that remains relatively rational and democratic provided its members are willing to live in the responsible, sober, and rather boring fashion that goes along with the information economy.
2. The thoughtful conservatives accept the likelihood that the economy will stagnate and plan to maintain or improve their privileged position by getting more of the pie. They recognize that this can only be accomplished by force or fraud. To take care of your family, you do what you have to do.
3. The thoughtless conservatives live in denial, proposing to maintain an expanding standard of living by deficit financing and the accelerating exploitation of finite resources like oil. Some of them rationalize their unsustainable policies by taking apocalyptic fantasies literally or by dreaming of magic technological fixes—nanotechnology as the Great Pig, Star Wars as the bulletproof shirt.
4. The utopian radicals propose to deal with the end of material progress by embracing a virtuous egalitarian poverty. One may be allowed a certain skepticism about the prospects of ahimsa in a tide pool.
Mix and match.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Authorized Leaks
I love to badmouth journalists, but it’s quite unfair to blame them for the absence of general public outrage at reports of the use of torture by American forces. The story was reported. The people simply didn’t care, believing, apparently, that terrorism justifies extreme measures. Which is why, incidentally, the administration was not completely unhappy the stories got out. Publicity makes everyone complicit. We knew and we did nothing. Indeed, we reelected the ultimate sponsor of the atrocities and made it possible for him to make the principal apologist for state-sponsored terror his attorney general while the generals who encouraged their troops to apply electrodes to Islamic testicles got a free pass and only the noncoms were left holding the bag. If there is ever a proper accounting of the deeds of the Bush administration, you can be sure that the defendants will point out that the public raised no objections at the time though they certainly knew what was going on.
I love to badmouth journalists, but it’s quite unfair to blame them for the absence of general public outrage at reports of the use of torture by American forces. The story was reported. The people simply didn’t care, believing, apparently, that terrorism justifies extreme measures. Which is why, incidentally, the administration was not completely unhappy the stories got out. Publicity makes everyone complicit. We knew and we did nothing. Indeed, we reelected the ultimate sponsor of the atrocities and made it possible for him to make the principal apologist for state-sponsored terror his attorney general while the generals who encouraged their troops to apply electrodes to Islamic testicles got a free pass and only the noncoms were left holding the bag. If there is ever a proper accounting of the deeds of the Bush administration, you can be sure that the defendants will point out that the public raised no objections at the time though they certainly knew what was going on.
Sunday, December 19, 2004
All In
Poker players know that it’s often easier to bluff when your hand is unambiguously bad than when it has some real strength. The possibility of actually drawing the flush distracts from the crucial work of bluster and deception. Which explains in large measure why the innumerable arguments against Bush’s social security reforms are strangely irrelevant despite their obvious cogency. It simply doesn’t matter that partial privatization is indefensible. It proponents have no intention of playing defense. Just as rightists really don’t care that Star Wars is technologically infeasible or that there really is no scientific merit to intelligent design, they are quite indifferent to the fiscal and moral objections to the proposed changes to Social Security. Of course it’s a bad idea. How could it be a triumph for an aggressive minority if it were a good one? What’s the glory in winning a hand with a full house?
Poker players know that it’s often easier to bluff when your hand is unambiguously bad than when it has some real strength. The possibility of actually drawing the flush distracts from the crucial work of bluster and deception. Which explains in large measure why the innumerable arguments against Bush’s social security reforms are strangely irrelevant despite their obvious cogency. It simply doesn’t matter that partial privatization is indefensible. It proponents have no intention of playing defense. Just as rightists really don’t care that Star Wars is technologically infeasible or that there really is no scientific merit to intelligent design, they are quite indifferent to the fiscal and moral objections to the proposed changes to Social Security. Of course it’s a bad idea. How could it be a triumph for an aggressive minority if it were a good one? What’s the glory in winning a hand with a full house?
Thesis, Antithesis, Prosthesis
Years ago I had to prove that I could read French in my degree program. I expected that I’d have to take an intensive French course to get past the requirement, but just for fun I took the achievement exam to see what I was up against. Though I’d never studied French, I didn’t go in quite unprepared. In the week before the test, I spent a couple of evenings looking over one of those laminated crib sheets for French grammar. Nevertheless, I certainly couldn’t read, speak, or understand the language in any meaningful sense. As a consequence, I was a bit surprised when I not only passed the test but scored well above the cutoff line. I remember thinking to myself that it was too bad I hadn’t taken the Chinese, Arabic, and Sanskrit tests on the same occasion so I could be fluent in those languages too.
Lots of folks denounce multiple choice tests. Frank McCourt, the genial author of Angela’s Ashes and himself a former school teacher, once referred to them as “the most hideous invention America has ever come up with.” I used to be dead set against them myself and inflicted essay exams on my students in a former life, but I’ve come to think that my dislike of them was mere ingratitude in view of the business about the French requirement and the many other occasions in which standardized tests have rewarded my superficial cleverness. Besides, multiple choice tests really are quintessentially American and patriotic to boot, having been invented for the benefit of our army by Arthur S. Otis in 1917. After 9/11 one is advised not to knock our heritage, at least publicly. Anyhow, multiple choice tests also have a metaphysical significance that marks them as something more important than just another piece of cultural detritus. They implement a powerful historical tendency, the grand process of simplification that allows us to live with the complexity our own activities create. In this way, multiple choice tests help fend off the never quite looming menace of epistemia gravis, aka information sickness or, to use a quaint old term, Harrison’s Fatheadedness.
Just as human beings are not adapted to live in nature without clothes, we are hardly prepared to learn about history, science, and literature without a host of mediating instrumentalities that protect our egos from the awful truth about how hard it is to figure things out. And that’s true even for people who happen to have the motivation and aptitude for learning. If the goal is to create an entire nation of people with some intellectual self respect and, moreover, to do it on the cheap—always the American way!—the intelligible world will have to be turned into a cartoon. Pretending there are at most four or five alternative responses to each mental challenge is a good start especially when you remember what it was like to grade blue books.
Years ago I had to prove that I could read French in my degree program. I expected that I’d have to take an intensive French course to get past the requirement, but just for fun I took the achievement exam to see what I was up against. Though I’d never studied French, I didn’t go in quite unprepared. In the week before the test, I spent a couple of evenings looking over one of those laminated crib sheets for French grammar. Nevertheless, I certainly couldn’t read, speak, or understand the language in any meaningful sense. As a consequence, I was a bit surprised when I not only passed the test but scored well above the cutoff line. I remember thinking to myself that it was too bad I hadn’t taken the Chinese, Arabic, and Sanskrit tests on the same occasion so I could be fluent in those languages too.
Lots of folks denounce multiple choice tests. Frank McCourt, the genial author of Angela’s Ashes and himself a former school teacher, once referred to them as “the most hideous invention America has ever come up with.” I used to be dead set against them myself and inflicted essay exams on my students in a former life, but I’ve come to think that my dislike of them was mere ingratitude in view of the business about the French requirement and the many other occasions in which standardized tests have rewarded my superficial cleverness. Besides, multiple choice tests really are quintessentially American and patriotic to boot, having been invented for the benefit of our army by Arthur S. Otis in 1917. After 9/11 one is advised not to knock our heritage, at least publicly. Anyhow, multiple choice tests also have a metaphysical significance that marks them as something more important than just another piece of cultural detritus. They implement a powerful historical tendency, the grand process of simplification that allows us to live with the complexity our own activities create. In this way, multiple choice tests help fend off the never quite looming menace of epistemia gravis, aka information sickness or, to use a quaint old term, Harrison’s Fatheadedness.
Just as human beings are not adapted to live in nature without clothes, we are hardly prepared to learn about history, science, and literature without a host of mediating instrumentalities that protect our egos from the awful truth about how hard it is to figure things out. And that’s true even for people who happen to have the motivation and aptitude for learning. If the goal is to create an entire nation of people with some intellectual self respect and, moreover, to do it on the cheap—always the American way!—the intelligible world will have to be turned into a cartoon. Pretending there are at most four or five alternative responses to each mental challenge is a good start especially when you remember what it was like to grade blue books.
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Anymore than Drag is Flattering to Women
What bothers me most about the right-wing fundamentalists is their political power, but then I’m an infidel. A believer might be even more unhappy with the Fallwells and the Dobsons and the Robertsons because they have created the impression you have to be a bigoted know-nothing to be a Christian. That’s not so healthy for the future of the real, which is to say, invisible church because even those who have signed on for the moment to reactionary religiosity may eventually weary of its somewhat artificial extremism while the merely ill-informed won’t be aware of the humane and highly-defensible outlook of people like Garry Wills or Jimmy Carter.
To the extent that professing Christianity involves adherence to elaborate metaphysical notions about things people are in no position to know, it makes a peculiar impression on an old philosopher like me, but not even I am down on practical agape. It would be a real loss if the braying Elmer Gantrys succeed in drowning out the quieter voices of the decent evangelicals, the thoughtful liberal Protestants, and the lay Catholics. And that’s true even though a seriously Christian politics would be far to the left of my own.
What bothers me most about the right-wing fundamentalists is their political power, but then I’m an infidel. A believer might be even more unhappy with the Fallwells and the Dobsons and the Robertsons because they have created the impression you have to be a bigoted know-nothing to be a Christian. That’s not so healthy for the future of the real, which is to say, invisible church because even those who have signed on for the moment to reactionary religiosity may eventually weary of its somewhat artificial extremism while the merely ill-informed won’t be aware of the humane and highly-defensible outlook of people like Garry Wills or Jimmy Carter.
To the extent that professing Christianity involves adherence to elaborate metaphysical notions about things people are in no position to know, it makes a peculiar impression on an old philosopher like me, but not even I am down on practical agape. It would be a real loss if the braying Elmer Gantrys succeed in drowning out the quieter voices of the decent evangelicals, the thoughtful liberal Protestants, and the lay Catholics. And that’s true even though a seriously Christian politics would be far to the left of my own.
Monday, December 13, 2004
Gone Phishing
As I purge my inbox of three dozen pieces of spam every morning I’m reminded of a nature film I saw on cable a couple of years ago that showed a giraffe dying from an overwhelming infestation of fleas. The electronic equivalent of the giraffe may not be quite dead, but the technology of email has lost much of its value over the last several years because of the non-stop parasitical assault, not only because of the direct damage inflicted by all the spam but because of the side effects of the filters that have been put in place to hold back the tide.
The problem has become personal for me. My business requires me to send large documents to my clients on a daily basis. Years ago, FedEx was a huge expense for me; and every exchange of paper took a couple of days. Email increased my personal productivity enormously, but its value has steadily decreased because corporate defenses against spam intercept my attachments. In many cases, I have to follow up the submission of work product with phone calls so that busy managers can wade through a trash pile to rescue documents. I can’t blame the firms for reinforcing their defenses—I get from 100 to 150 pieces of spam a day, some of my clients get as much as a 1000—but the incremental cost of dodging the spam blocker adds up. Meanwhile, I have to be careful not to lose their messages in my own spam blocker.
Some of the costs of spam are obvious, and one can only guess how many of the same elderly population already ripped off by junk mail solicitations have already fallen victim to sales pitches for phony pharmaceuticals or have sent their credit card number to criminals claiming to be their internet service providers. There are hidden opportunity costs as well. Email could be a useful channel for legitimate advertising, for example, if it weren’t overwhelmed with trash, obscenity, and fraud. That’s a real loss, and not just for the corporations. Everybody’s so accustomed to complaining about advertising that it’s easy to forget its indispensable role as a source of information in an extraordinarily complicated world—imagine how much it would cost to provide public education about new technologies.
While serious law enforcement efforts might be able ameliorate the spam crisis—you have to wonder why more identity thieves and purveyors of bogus drugs aren’t prosecuted—the fundamental problem with email is structural. It doesn’t cost enough. As many people have noticed, spam would not be profitable if it cost even a few pennies to send a message. Even junk-mail advertisers have to worry about picking the right mailing list because a response rate of a percent or two is necessary to pay the freight. Meanwhile, since it’s free, the same spammers who send me an ad for breast implants at 10:12 follow it up with a pitch for penile enhancement at 10:13 and not because they know how eager I am to please everybody. At a nickel a pop, an ad would have to have something to do with its recipient. At a nickel a pop, also, sending targeted Internet ads for my own services might become economical.
I know nothing of the technicalities, but I gather that the only feasible way of creating a system with appropriate fees would be to create an entirely new and separate system. That may be a utopian suggestion, rather like the dream of getting rid of QWERTY. Over and beyond practical obstacles to reforming the system, any call for even a small amount of central control runs afoul of the libertarian ideology of many computer mavens. They maintain an almost theological faith that systems will organize themselves perfectly if only we let them alone. One small nickel for the man is one giant step on the road to serfdom for mankind. There’s another problem, too. If email generated a public revenue, we’d have to decide what to do with the proceeds—the point of the tax, after all, would not be to fix potholes on the information superhighway. That doesn’t bother me. If the swag from a spam tax went to build a swimming pool for Mayor Quimby, I figure we’d still be better off. But that’s me. I expect the universe to be perverse in spots. The others will go ballistic about the unnecessary taxation.
Things do not look good for the giraffe.
As I purge my inbox of three dozen pieces of spam every morning I’m reminded of a nature film I saw on cable a couple of years ago that showed a giraffe dying from an overwhelming infestation of fleas. The electronic equivalent of the giraffe may not be quite dead, but the technology of email has lost much of its value over the last several years because of the non-stop parasitical assault, not only because of the direct damage inflicted by all the spam but because of the side effects of the filters that have been put in place to hold back the tide.
The problem has become personal for me. My business requires me to send large documents to my clients on a daily basis. Years ago, FedEx was a huge expense for me; and every exchange of paper took a couple of days. Email increased my personal productivity enormously, but its value has steadily decreased because corporate defenses against spam intercept my attachments. In many cases, I have to follow up the submission of work product with phone calls so that busy managers can wade through a trash pile to rescue documents. I can’t blame the firms for reinforcing their defenses—I get from 100 to 150 pieces of spam a day, some of my clients get as much as a 1000—but the incremental cost of dodging the spam blocker adds up. Meanwhile, I have to be careful not to lose their messages in my own spam blocker.
Some of the costs of spam are obvious, and one can only guess how many of the same elderly population already ripped off by junk mail solicitations have already fallen victim to sales pitches for phony pharmaceuticals or have sent their credit card number to criminals claiming to be their internet service providers. There are hidden opportunity costs as well. Email could be a useful channel for legitimate advertising, for example, if it weren’t overwhelmed with trash, obscenity, and fraud. That’s a real loss, and not just for the corporations. Everybody’s so accustomed to complaining about advertising that it’s easy to forget its indispensable role as a source of information in an extraordinarily complicated world—imagine how much it would cost to provide public education about new technologies.
While serious law enforcement efforts might be able ameliorate the spam crisis—you have to wonder why more identity thieves and purveyors of bogus drugs aren’t prosecuted—the fundamental problem with email is structural. It doesn’t cost enough. As many people have noticed, spam would not be profitable if it cost even a few pennies to send a message. Even junk-mail advertisers have to worry about picking the right mailing list because a response rate of a percent or two is necessary to pay the freight. Meanwhile, since it’s free, the same spammers who send me an ad for breast implants at 10:12 follow it up with a pitch for penile enhancement at 10:13 and not because they know how eager I am to please everybody. At a nickel a pop, an ad would have to have something to do with its recipient. At a nickel a pop, also, sending targeted Internet ads for my own services might become economical.
I know nothing of the technicalities, but I gather that the only feasible way of creating a system with appropriate fees would be to create an entirely new and separate system. That may be a utopian suggestion, rather like the dream of getting rid of QWERTY. Over and beyond practical obstacles to reforming the system, any call for even a small amount of central control runs afoul of the libertarian ideology of many computer mavens. They maintain an almost theological faith that systems will organize themselves perfectly if only we let them alone. One small nickel for the man is one giant step on the road to serfdom for mankind. There’s another problem, too. If email generated a public revenue, we’d have to decide what to do with the proceeds—the point of the tax, after all, would not be to fix potholes on the information superhighway. That doesn’t bother me. If the swag from a spam tax went to build a swimming pool for Mayor Quimby, I figure we’d still be better off. But that’s me. I expect the universe to be perverse in spots. The others will go ballistic about the unnecessary taxation.
Things do not look good for the giraffe.
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Chicken Little or Just a Little Chicken?
Neither actually. The title is in honor of today’s publication in Nature of the genome of the domestic chicken. Meanwhile, I’m not particularly alarmed by recent political developments, though I certainly expect the outcome to be unfavorable for the United States. I’ve reached the time in my life when I find that external events have little lasting effect on my equipoise, either because I have an ever decreasing stake in the game or, more likely, because I’ve finally finished bulletproofing my vanity. My selfesteem unthreatened, I’ve risen above it all like a soap bubble, trivial and very temporary but round and perfect. Besides, though unfortunately my money's not in Euros, I mostly share the complacent European take on the Grand Fiasco. I calculate that the American empire is more likely to blow itself out in a noisy squall than to take the planet down with it in a terminal hurricane. So far, at least, we’ve been very careful to avoid a confrontation with anybody really dangerous so our Middle Eastern adventures have something of the staged and cheesy quality of a professional wrestling match, albeit the phony contest leaves all too many real corpses lying around. In this respect, Mr. Bush’s obvious lack of personal courage is a very positive factor. It’s hard to imagine these blowhards picking a fight with the Russians or Chinese.
America is not the world, and our misfortune is not necessarily a tragedy for humankind. Indeed, as Emmanuel Todd points out, loss of primacy may not even be a disaster for the Americans. The U.S. is a very rich and powerful country and will probably remain relatively rich and political significant even after it finishes impoverishing and humiliating itself—200 years after Napoleon, Paris remains a wonderful place to live and Washington may turn out to be a similarly agreeable monument to vanished pretension. Anyhow, as a rule, though everybody claims to be surprised when it finally happens, the decline of states and societies always takes longer than expected. It’s not quite time to start selling sombreros and colorful plaster piggybanks to Canadian tourists.
I go through phases of being similarly sanguine about the consequences of our neglect of the environment. Despite the interminable attempts of right-wing op-ed writers, most people knowledgeable about global warming don’t expect the Northern hemisphere to turn into a double boiler. Indeed, unless there really is some catastrophic tipping point, a real but modest possibility, global warming won’t ruin the Earth because its inexorably increasing effects will make international countermeasures inevitable. The people who project future energy prices for the utilities already routinely factor in the cost of CO2 recapture into their estimates of the economics of coal-burning power plants because in the long and even medium run, the opinions of this or that politician won’t matter. Willy-nilly we’ll have to restrain greenhouse gas emissions because, by definition, realities don’t give a damn about what anybody thinks. Just as the U.S. will eventually have to cut back on deficit financing even if Bush becomes dictator for life, even the Cato Institute will end up supporting global emission caps. Because the administration dragged its feet—and knuckles! —about global warming, the price of dealing with the problem will much higher than necessary but the resulting poverty, sickness, and death won’t necessarily make a good special effects movie. Let’s look on the bright side.
I also moderate my pessimism with a sometime belief in the Caucasian Cargo Cult of science. Like any other projection, guesses about the economic, political, and environmental future are based on assumptions about boundary conditions. For example, Marx’s prediction of the collapse of capitalism, indeed, his whole view of the human prospect, was vitiated by a drastic underestimation of the productive power of technology. I’m well aware that my own thoughts about what may or may not happen in the next several years similarly depend upon an estimate of the advance of technology. Maybe nanotechnology or some other Great Pig will arrive at the last moment and usher in a Rabelaisian millennium of sausages and mustard or, at the very least, ensure that even the humblest family will be able to enjoy the apocalypse on a high definition plasma screen in their cozy abandoned coal mine.
Neither actually. The title is in honor of today’s publication in Nature of the genome of the domestic chicken. Meanwhile, I’m not particularly alarmed by recent political developments, though I certainly expect the outcome to be unfavorable for the United States. I’ve reached the time in my life when I find that external events have little lasting effect on my equipoise, either because I have an ever decreasing stake in the game or, more likely, because I’ve finally finished bulletproofing my vanity. My selfesteem unthreatened, I’ve risen above it all like a soap bubble, trivial and very temporary but round and perfect. Besides, though unfortunately my money's not in Euros, I mostly share the complacent European take on the Grand Fiasco. I calculate that the American empire is more likely to blow itself out in a noisy squall than to take the planet down with it in a terminal hurricane. So far, at least, we’ve been very careful to avoid a confrontation with anybody really dangerous so our Middle Eastern adventures have something of the staged and cheesy quality of a professional wrestling match, albeit the phony contest leaves all too many real corpses lying around. In this respect, Mr. Bush’s obvious lack of personal courage is a very positive factor. It’s hard to imagine these blowhards picking a fight with the Russians or Chinese.
America is not the world, and our misfortune is not necessarily a tragedy for humankind. Indeed, as Emmanuel Todd points out, loss of primacy may not even be a disaster for the Americans. The U.S. is a very rich and powerful country and will probably remain relatively rich and political significant even after it finishes impoverishing and humiliating itself—200 years after Napoleon, Paris remains a wonderful place to live and Washington may turn out to be a similarly agreeable monument to vanished pretension. Anyhow, as a rule, though everybody claims to be surprised when it finally happens, the decline of states and societies always takes longer than expected. It’s not quite time to start selling sombreros and colorful plaster piggybanks to Canadian tourists.
I go through phases of being similarly sanguine about the consequences of our neglect of the environment. Despite the interminable attempts of right-wing op-ed writers, most people knowledgeable about global warming don’t expect the Northern hemisphere to turn into a double boiler. Indeed, unless there really is some catastrophic tipping point, a real but modest possibility, global warming won’t ruin the Earth because its inexorably increasing effects will make international countermeasures inevitable. The people who project future energy prices for the utilities already routinely factor in the cost of CO2 recapture into their estimates of the economics of coal-burning power plants because in the long and even medium run, the opinions of this or that politician won’t matter. Willy-nilly we’ll have to restrain greenhouse gas emissions because, by definition, realities don’t give a damn about what anybody thinks. Just as the U.S. will eventually have to cut back on deficit financing even if Bush becomes dictator for life, even the Cato Institute will end up supporting global emission caps. Because the administration dragged its feet—and knuckles! —about global warming, the price of dealing with the problem will much higher than necessary but the resulting poverty, sickness, and death won’t necessarily make a good special effects movie. Let’s look on the bright side.
I also moderate my pessimism with a sometime belief in the Caucasian Cargo Cult of science. Like any other projection, guesses about the economic, political, and environmental future are based on assumptions about boundary conditions. For example, Marx’s prediction of the collapse of capitalism, indeed, his whole view of the human prospect, was vitiated by a drastic underestimation of the productive power of technology. I’m well aware that my own thoughts about what may or may not happen in the next several years similarly depend upon an estimate of the advance of technology. Maybe nanotechnology or some other Great Pig will arrive at the last moment and usher in a Rabelaisian millennium of sausages and mustard or, at the very least, ensure that even the humblest family will be able to enjoy the apocalypse on a high definition plasma screen in their cozy abandoned coal mine.