Put Not Your Faith in Princes…

Isn’t necessarily a dig at princes. Like everything else, treachery and triangulation can be overdone; but politics isn’t about noble gestures. Indeed, in the context of a struggle for power, the noble gesture is just another P.R. tactic; and principled leaders sometimes have to be trimmers in order to accomplish what needs to be done. Which is why I haven’t been automatically hostile when the Congressional Democrats have spoken with exaggerated moderation about the Bush Administration. Whether or not it is a good idea to push for censure now, it probably wouldn’t have been politic in 2002, though the unwisdom if not the illegality of Republican policies was already perfectly clear. Fact was, it wasn’t clear to a frightened and passive population. And even when I think that the public is ready to hear some plain talk for a change, I remind myself that it might actual happen that somebody else’s judgment about these things is better that my own. All that said, the continuing timidity of the Democrats no longer makes strategic sense to me. Or rather, it is perfectly sensible, but only on the assumption that it is a strategy pursued for aims I do not share in a game I wish our leaders weren’t playing.

I don’t blame the politicians for attempting to put together a winning coalition, but it pains me to recognize yet again that Congress’ real constituents are not the voters but the individuals, families, and organizations that pay them off with bribes and campaign contributions. The true constitution of our state is rather similar to the charter of a corporation in which one has as many votes as shares. It doesn’t matter very often what the citizens as a whole think—and Bush and his policies are vastly unpopular—so long as there is no consensus among the real electorate, the boni homines of what may soon be referred to as the Late Republic in more ways than one. The mealy-mouthed calls for an investigation of the President’s wiretapping exploits makes no legal sense—since he admitted his crimes, there’s nothing to investigate—but the interests that count, though not necessarily happy about what’s going on, are terrified of rocking the boat. The Democrat’s craven excess of caution is aimed at winning them over, not the public. The public is very ready to listen. Indeed, that’s what scares the political classes most.

The Evasion of Responsibility

Any number of Law and Order episodes end with the DA explaining why the murderer can’t be let off the hook because of an unhappy childhood/genetic defect/the bad influence of television shows/whatever because to allow such excuses would destroy all personal responsibility. I’m still waiting for the show in which it is pointed out how often the infliction of heavy penalties on individuals is itself an evasion of responsibility. The semi-moronic monsters routinely put to death in Texas may deserve what they get, but their executions have an added advantage. These grim ceremonies of self-righteousness deflect attention from the fact that the authorities couldn’t be bothered by the abuse and neglect so many of these criminals suffered as children.

The recent efforts of the Federal government to put Zacarias Moussaoui to death have an analogous logic. A number of people have complained about the procedural abuses of the prosecutors in the case—reasonably enough since in an ordinary trial or before a judge with a modicum of integrity, the death penalty would have been taken off the table in the face of such behavior—but I haven’t encountered very many people who recognize the essential dishonesty of the entire proceeding. Moussaoui admitted to planning a terror attack and certainly belongs in prison, but holding him responsible for the 9/11 attacks, which nobody seems to think he had anything to do with, is simply a way for the administration to shift the blame for its own negligence. Moussaoui may not have provided an indirect warning of the possibility of an aerial attack but lots of other warnings were indeed given without effect. 9/11 wasn’t Moussaoui’s fault. It was the fault of Bush, Rice, Ashcroft, and Chaney. Indeed, if you’re in the market for complicated and far-fetched theories to justify prosecutions, it would be marginally more reasonable to execute the five Supreme Court justices who put Bush in office than the bumling, clownish Moussaouoi. Since the competent and vigilant Gore was intensely aware of the danger posed by Ben Laden, et. al, it is extremely unlikely that 9/11 would have occurred under his watch.

Sugar Water

Mystical philosophers have a problem analogous to the challenges that face the marketers of soft drinks. The content they have for sale—states of mind that are same everywhere and at all times—do not differentiate their brands. Coke is too much like Pepsi, Atman is too much like the Urgrund. Hence the need for escalating rhetoric and a huge budget for advertising. Since use and custom dull the appreciation of any insight, it is endlessly necessary to improvise fresh depths of spiritual understanding, not because the world really is infinitely deep, but for the same reason the even baking soda comes in a box labeled “New and Improved!”

Thoughts on the Ludendorf Complex

Intellectuals who desire power but understand their own lack of nerve and charisma are always cruising for a glamorous thug. Of course they tell themselves they’ll be able to steer the beast in the right direction. Unfortunately, the beasts routinely turn out to have their own ideas, and the users end up being used. We know what happened to Plato in Sicily: the bright young man types in the Bible apparently fared better with the kings and the pharaohs; but it should be kept in mind that the successes of the Josephs and the Daniels are more than legendary. They’re mythical.

Synergies

Recent studies suggest that the gradual warming of the oceans brought about by increasing greenhouse gases will result in more powerful hurricanes. That hardly seems unlikely, granted that hotter water means more energy is available to power up storms; but even if global warming doesn’t result in Hurricane Gimel bearing down on Biloxi one fine autumn morning, the enormous increase in the population of people living in areas subject to catastrophic floods guarantees that the next century will be the golden age of (semi-)natural disasters. As Mike Davis points out in his incredibly depressing book, Planet of Slums, “With the majority of the world’s urban population now concentrated on or near active tectonic plate margins, especially along Indian and Pacific Ocean littorals, several billion people are at risks from earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis, as well as from storm surges and typhoons.” If Davis had been writing copy for CNN, he would have added, “Even worse, upper middle class Americans may not be able to buy flood insurance for their second homes along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts…”

Speaking about reality’s irritating habit of letting more than one thing happen at once: it has been occasionally noticed that technological progress is proving far better at lowering the cost and increasing the performance of electronics than at supplying safe drinking water, affordable transportation, or decent health care. The inhabitants of the reeking slums of Mumbai may indeed be able to watch the irresistible advance of the ultimate tsunami on a HDTV, even if they have literally no place to go to deposit the bowel movements inspired by the brilliant visuals. What is less often noticed are the military implications of the unevenness of technological progress. I don’t know if SONY has a line of affordable IEDs in the works, but it’s a good bet that the wretched of the earth are going to be able to adapt the universally available consumer electronics to the work of vengeance. The presumption is that the Malthusian die back of the next hundred years will not discommode the First World very much because the poorer countries and peoples don’t have access to the means to so anything about it. Aside from the fact that the haves are vastly outnumbered by the have nots, it is far from clear that even the enormous investment in armaments of the U.S. can defeat the military potential of cheap electronics in the hands of sufficiently determined enemies. Does anybody know?

Joss in Translation

When somebody in these parts says that an act is good or bad karma, they aren’t usually implying much more than the belief that “that sort of thing usually ends well or badly.” What’s invoked is not an iron law of causality as ineluctable as arithmetic but a statistical tendency, a rule of thumb rather than the Dharma. Users of this language certainly aren’t signing on to the dubious hypothesis of rebirth. There is, however, a Sanskrit word that answers to the California usage of karma pretty closely. The term is mangala, which is generally translated rather grandly as auspicious—a reasonable equivalent if you think of such sentences as “If you find yourself constantly lying to your girlfriend, it’s a bad sign.” The terminological niceties are meaningful. Eliding the difference between karma and mangala makes it easy to think that Buddhism is a straightforward elaboration of commonsense that radically differs from other religions by avoiding the assertion of astonishing counterfactual claims. After all, we all eventually learn that actions have consequences. But Buddhism is a religion—a family of religions—after all, which is to say it is a system of false propositions. Taken seriously, dependent origination, the spiritual physics that underlies Karmic law, is as fantastic as transubstantiation.

Many practicing Buddhists, like many practicing Christians, regard doctrinal formulations with a sense of humor. Just as liberal Protestants aren’t scouring Mt. Ararat for the anchor of the ark, undogmatic Buddhists don’t really think that Buddha had a headache because as a child in a former life he hit a fish over the head. Promoting the notion that a comprehensive and implacable system of moral bookkeeping governs the actions of all conscious beings is an edifying claim useful in dealing with the lay people, but such skillful methods (upaya) should be taken with a grain of salt. The question for both contemporary Christians and Buddhists is how much of the fantastic element of their religious traditions they can jettison without jettisoning the tradition itself. In the Buddhist instance, for example, it’s one thing to admit that universe isn’t a despotic retribution and reward machine, but if there is no dharma at all, if some kind of moral law isn’t built into the machine language of the cosmos, karma really is just mangala. But maybe that’s not such a terrible thing to realize. The fact that quite a few Buddhists do seem to realize it is part of the reason the Buddhist tradition continues to appeal to me even though I’m well aware that it comes festooned with the same assortment of warts and boils as the other religions. It isn’t true, but maybe it’s mangala.

Take Home Exam

1. Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson write: “To get the benefits of social learning, human beings have to be credulous, for the most part accepting the ways that they observe in their society as sensible and proper, but such credulity opens human minds to the spread of maladaptive beliefs. The problem is one of information costs. The advantage of culture is that individuals don’t have to invent everything for themselves. We get wondrous adaptations like kayaks and blowguns on the cheap. The trouble is that a greed for easy adaptive traditions easily leads to perpetuating maladaptions that somehow arise.” Discuss.

2. It has been suggested* that dada is to Surrealism what Theravada is Mahayana. To what extent is this analogy accurate? Your answer can be in either Pali or Sanskrit.

*In this sentence.

Reaction Norms

Biologists know that a given gene can only be said to be adaptive or maladaptive in the context of the other genes and in a particular environment. In the absence of malaria, the sickle cell trait, even in the heterozygous case, is a drag on the organism. Similarly, the mutation responsible for the paleness of Caucasians is simply a genetic defect in Australia where everybody’s hide is menaced by too much sun. The value of political principles is similarly situational. It isn’t just cases that are altered by circumstances.

If a presumptive prejudice in favor of civil rights made sense in the era of breeches and wigs and was even more important when bureaucrats and cops keep track of dissidents with human informants and file cabinets full of manila folders, it stands to reason that the advent of computers and omnipresent electronic surveillance makes such quaint taboos absolutely critical. Everybody talks about the Internet as if it were obviously an invention that promotes individual freedom, but it is actually the answer to the secret policeman’s dearest dream, the nearest thing yet to the TV’s in Orwell’s 1984 that watch the watchers. Every intemperate word written on every blog, every irritated comment typed into a comment section in the dead of night, every visit to a racy website gives the prosecutor and the political publicist another way to control the citizenry through the traditional combination of extortion and selective prosecution. In the face of such a drastic increase in the technical capability of oppression, a correspondingly absolute and uncompromising defense of individual rights is critical. The ACLU needs the bomb.

Generosity and Spite: A Linear Programming Problem

As an ideal, equality has little appeal for me. I’m not morally offended if some people are better off than others, at least if everyone can live decently. I don’t doubt that measures that artificially level wealth tend to result in lower or negative growth rates since it is the prospect of doing better than the others that fuels effort and enterprise. Insisting on equality of outcome amounts to adding an expensive constraint to the problem of maximizing the performance of an economy. The point is often missed, however, that an ideological insistence on a high level of inequality is just as artificial and perhaps just as likely to lower the overall outcome. In this connection, I note that the wealthiest Americans are currently rich beyond all measure, but the economy isn’t performing very well. With this much inequality, everybody–not just the contemporary Croesuses–should be rich as Croesus.

Divine Right Monarchy, the Worst Form of Government Except for All the Others

Does anybody actually believe in democracy? It’s easy to make fun of the Bush administration’s version of popular sovereignty, the Breshnevian doctrine that people have the absolute right to vote for candidates of the government’s choosing; but American politicians of all stripes have repeatedly found democracy inconvenient and have repeatedly amended the people’s errors by invasions, coups, and assassinations—recall Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua, Iran, Chile, and Cuba. When you bring up this track record, people regularly respond not by admitting that they don’t seriously believe in democracy, but by explaining why it was such a good idea to bump off Allende or prevent the Algerians from voting in an Islamic government. This is an evasion that becomes all the more problematic as the real power of voters declines at home as well as abroad. It isn’t just third-world wogs who are bombed if they do something foolish that hurts American interests, after all. Our domestic political arrangements, the contrivance of both Republicans and Democrats, are mostly a series of barricades and fortifications against the public will. In the first hundred or so years of our national history, government became more democratic in this country with the expansion of the franchise, the deepening of civil rights, and the direct election of senators. For a hundred years or more, however, the tide has been flowing in the other direction.

I’m not suggesting that the majority rule ought to be absolute. I directed my initial question as much at myself as at anybody else because I’m as distrustful of the people as any Conservative. Anybody who reads these pages knows that I could care less what the man in the street thinks about scientific or philosophical issues. Indeed, I don’t think that anybody has a right to an opinion about matters they know nothing about. What offends me is the Orwellian doublespeak of politicians who claim to promote democracy with high tech terror weapons while working tirelessly to ensure that the liberated masses, appropriately grateful, shut the fuck up and do what we want. And I have also come to believe as a matter of prudence that states in which the people have a real ability to influence policy are likely to be more stable, less corrupt, and less dangerous to the peace of the world than oligarchic republics like the contemporary United States. I got to thinking. Since democracy isn’t sacred, maybe it’s sometimes worthwhile.

We Had to Destroy the Civilization to Save It

Unlike Groucho, I’m willing to belong to a club that will have me as a member. On the other hand, like other readers of my vintage, I do tend to distrust the seriousness of any idea I can actually understand. Since the object of the game—an object of the game—is to know things that the others don’t, one is as likely to have sour grapes about low hanging fruit as about the unattainable varieties. Writers know that, of course, so one of the characteristic cons of our age is to find complicated and rebarbative ways to phrase rather simple ideas, a perversity all the more deplorable when, as does happen, the mystified content is actually important. I’m struggling through such an exercise right now, Alan Cole’s Text as Father, an attempt to read the most important Mahayana sutras without the usual irrelevant reverence. Cole’s chapters probably ought to be paragraphs, but that doesn’t mean the paragraphs wouldn’t be worth it. Heck, there might also be something to Lacan if we only knew what it was.

I used to think there were only two ways to excel in prose: a writer can say something simple in a complicated way or say something complicated in a simple way. For what are basically sociological reasons, the first alternative was dominant in the recent past and practitioners of the second way were likely to be dismissed as superficial. That’s changing, but I think the lingering prejudice explains the reception of the writings of the Amartya Sen. Since anybody can follow his arguments, how important can they be? He won the Nobel Prize in economics but his works aren’t crammed with equations. He is a determined critic of the reigning system of political economy but his radicalism doesn’t sound radical and he isn’t retailing a grand and intellectually challenging synthesis about hegemony or EMPIRE.

I picked up Sen’s most recent book without any particular expectations. If I hadn’t chanced upon a cheap review copy I probably wouldn’t have bought it. Since the Argumentative Indian is an essay collection, I expected it would have the usual unevenness and repetitiveness of such compilations, but I persevered because of my interests in the prospects of India. One hundred and fifty years ago, history looked like it was going to revolve around a confrontation between the United States and Russia. Today, it might be reasonable guess that the world’s axle will run from Peking to Dehli while we ride in the trunk and the Russians grumble in the glove compartment. It isn’t just that the demographic center of gravity of the human race is in South and East Asia or even that the Chinese and Indian economies have much more dynamism than the economies of Europe or America. India and China possess civilizations with values and traditions with the potential to stand on their own against the continuing prestige of Western ideas.

Sen deals with several important issues about India’s role in the world and its relationship with the West, but I was most impressed by his polemic against the nationalism of the Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) and its promotion of Hindutva, a narrowly Hindu view of Indian civilization. Sen, who is at home with the classic literature of India—his grandfather was a professional sanskritist—protests a politically convenient, Clash-of-Civilization version of Indian civilization that, like the other ersatz cultural nationalisms of the last century or so, ignores the internal diversity of the traditions it purports to defend and glorify. The subcontinent has been home to rationalists as well as mystics, and its civilization is anything but autochthonous. Indian philosophy, for example, obviously developed in a long-range dialogue of equals with the Greeks, which is why, incidentally, people with a serious education in Western philosophy find themselves very much at home in classical Sanskrit texts on logic and metaphysics. One is accustomed to thinking of the impact of Indian Buddhism on China, but recent scholarship suggests that the development of the Mahayana in India owed a great deal to Chinese ideas, practices, and images. And one easily forgets that India is the second largest Muslim country on the face of the Earth—the nationalists who would like to claim that Islamic inhabitants aren’t real Indians simply evince a bias for old invaders since the Vedic fathers were interlopers themselves.

The civilizations that matter have the capacity to assimilate external challenges. Cultural conservatives who insist on shutting out the world in the name of national purity are undergoing a crisis of confidence. Kids with functioning immune systems don’t have to live in bubbles. Besides, a defensive obsession with identity automatically perverts philosophy, piety, and art. A real rain dance is supposed to bring rain, not ethnic pride. A real science aims to figure out the world, not express a national essence.

You don’t have to be a Hegelian to note the dialectical irony involved in the various versions of Hindutva currently abroad in the world. The invariable consequence of trying to achieve identity by insisting on cultural particularity is yet another xeroxed nativism, which, because it is motivated by exactly the same aim as the other nativisms, invariably harms the richness and specificity of live tradition—one is reminded of the cartoon penguin singing "I've got to be me!" Something similar is going on right now in this country where flags are endlessly waved in honor of an American outlook that represents a drastically truncated version of our cultural traditions. Just as the Hindu nationalist don’t want to talk about the many atheists, skeptics, and free thinkers of their past, our pundits dispense with the deists, radicals, and eccentrics so characteristic of our history—America but without Thomas Paine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Robert Ingersoll, William James, H.L.Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, Henry Miller, Truman Capote, Alfred Kinsey, Henry Adams, B.F. Skinner, Ezra Pound, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, or Thorsten Veblen. Indeed, it is hard to say exactly what names will be left in the rump pantheon after the cultural purge. On the evidence, the talking heads on Fox aren’t big fans of the Library of America.

If a Tree Falls in a Forest and Only the Squirrels Hear It….

In suspense movies and the thrillers you buy at airport bookshops, the discovery of one single significant piece of evidence—an incriminating letter, a tape recording, a computer disk—suffices to bring down the government. In the real world, the state of the evidence is apparently quite irrelevant. We know perfectly well that the current administration conducts aggressive wars on the basis of fudged intelligence, tortures suspects, taps phones without a warrant in direct violation of black letter law, engages in endless character assassination, buys television personalities, suppresses scientific information from public agencies, helps energy companies rip off states, and winks as its corporate supporters rip off the treasury through sweetheart contracts. Only a tobacco lobbyist could raise doubts about the reality of this pattern of wrongdoing. We’re not talking about vague allegations that the President was once seen with a dubious character. Ken Lay isn’t somebody Bush met once. Kenny Boy was Bush’s number one political supporter. And Ken Lay was only one of a host of felonious corporation capos who collectively make up Bush’s social circle. By the same token, DeLay didn’t just happen to drop in on an Albramoff family bar mitzvah once as a courtesy. The men are joined at the hip—I use a cliché to reflect the banality of a criminal association central to the success of the Republican Party over the last couple of years. And that’s not to bring up the cesspool that is Ohio politics or the election rigging in Florida or many other things. Corruption deluxe, currently holding the World and Olympic records.

We would be better off if the Republicans operated in secret. As it is, the demonstration that a political party with enough control over the courts, prosecutors, and media can get away with anything must surely encourage further excesses. Is there any behavior that would outrage Chris Matthews or Teddy Russert? The precedents are not encouraging. Meanwhile, like dogs, most people only hear the tone of their master’s voice. In the absence of audible signs of a guilty conscience, they won’t dare to draw any conclusions, at least publicly and all the more so because an appropriate proportionate response to the crimes of this administration would be drastic. In a rational world these guys die in prison.

I suppose one could be charitable and claim that something so enormous as this enormity is hard to identify because no one can’t fit its boggling bulk into a single eyegulp. Like the sailors in an old story, we can’t find the whale because we’ve beached our rowboat on its back. I don’t believe that for a minute. There are plenty of people who have seen the whale, excuse me, the elephant; but they apparently aren’t the ones that matter.

Strange Rendezvous

One of the first jokes I can remember is the bit about the guy who is skeptical about Carter’s Little Liver Pills because he doesn’t understand how the pills could figure out how to get to his liver. Similar issues come up in earnest in molecular biology. There are thousands of chemical species afloat in every eukaryotic cell. How do the various enzymes find that special substrate? You’d think that all those star-crossed proteins would usually suffer the ships-that-pass-in-the-night destiny of the separated lovers in Evangeline. Well, a lot of ‘em do, but the persistence of metabolism demonstrates that cute meets don’t just occur in light comedies. In both cases, of course, something is going on besides blind luck, thanks to the script in the later case, the compartmentalization of the cell into in the former.

The statistical mechanics of scholarly reference presents related problems. Serious books are supposed to be hard to read, but the real surprise is that they are possible to read at all since nobody’s intellectual formation could keep up with very much in a brief introduction to everything if the contents were as various as the world. Yet we can read books of philosophy, literary criticism, general science, politics, and theology whose subject matters are potentially limitless. The rather disappointing secret, of course, is that the “Everything” part of the Theory of Everything is actually an infinitesimal selection, a toy immensity suitable for children.

Any reader of grand syntheses quickly learns that the same titles endlessly resurface as nodes in the tangled bank of footnotes and bibliographies in such works. From decade to decade, the hubs change. The old Atlanta used to be de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics; the Old O’Hare was Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. A lot of traffic still stages through these cites as well as through key works (or paragraphs) of Braudel, Gould, Cavalli-Sforza and a few of older vintage that come in and out of common use like D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, Victor Shklovsky’s A Theory of Prose, and Michael Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. I haven’t run across an allusion to Sartre or even The 18th Brumaire for a while, though, or the First Critique for that matter. What gets you on the short list is apparently something other than sheer quality. Another very general characteristic of the collection, however, is that with a few exceptions the cited works are probably quite unknown to the general-purpose educated reader. Like the protagonist of To Be or Not to Be, they are world-famous in Poland.

I was reminded about all this as I read Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, a little book that manages to reference most of the texts I’ve identified. To judge by the rapidity with which Moretti’s book has been identified as a significant work by various websites including my favorite DEW line, Crooked Timber, and perhaps more tellingly, by less visited switchboards such as Pseudopodium, the book may eventually turn up on one of the short lists. (Heck, the fact that it has even turned up here in Ultima Thule tells you something.) The subject matter of the book also recalls the topic of the general shape of the Universe of Writing—it’s subtitled Abstract Models for a Literary Theory. Moretti figures that one way of finding out something important about the history of the word is to stand back from the particulars, to look at the whole scene through a blurry statistical glass for the same reason that artists squint at their models in order to see general configurations without the distraction of the details. His writings are very far away indeed from those “Relative Pronouns in the Later Movie Reviews of Pauline Keel” epics. For example, he uses graphs to compare the rise of the novel in Britain, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria thus finding a common pattern thanks to a drastic process of abstraction where other researchers had to rely on their own obtuseness to achieve the coarseness of perception necessary to discover really big facts—that’s why it formerly took an oaf like Auguste Comte to notice the Industrial Revolution. While I will probably continue to rely on my own native gifts to attempt similar feats, I see the methodological advantages of Moretti’s approach.

A lot of Moretti’s book deals with the life cycle of genres—he identifies 44 genres of the British novel between 1740 and 1900—and finds that their average duration, roughly 30 years, matches up pretty well with the length a human generation, thus allowing him to hook up with some notions about generations via the Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge node. One would like to have an internalist explanation of the turn over of genre, something analogous to the old biological notion of racial senescence. It is certainly not implausible to think that a certain kind of novel becomes decadent when all the changes have been wrung on its fundamental premises, but that wouldn’t explain why so many genres peter out or begin at the same time. “The causal mechanism must thus be external to the genres, and common to all: like a sudden, total change of the ecosystem. Which is to say, a change of their audience.” Of course appealing to the succession of generations creates its own puzzle. “Since people are born every day, not every twenty-five years, on what basis can the biological continuum be segmented into discrete units?” That’s where Mannheim comes in. It is external events that punctuate the sequence of the generations through “dynamic destabilization.” Mannetti is thinking of 1968—1776, 1789, 1848, 1914 are other examples. I think he misses a connection here. The procession of the genres finds an obvious analogy in the way that the circadian and circum annual clocks of animals and plants, internal but imperfect mechanisms, are reset by the external inputs of the astronomical day and year. The system still cycles in the absence of external events, but the periodicity gradually drifts, just as the activities of lab animals kept in a coal mine get out of synch with the sun. Thus, because the bell hasn’t been struck very forcibly for a while, Generations X through Z are looking increasingly like cheap knockoffs.

These considerations aside, I’m very much in sympathy with the style of Moretti’s approach, his way of laying out in extenso the mechanical operations of the spirit. For example, my own amateur thoughts about genre, though aimed at a different set of questions, are similarly abstract. Rather than considering the life span or timing of the appearance of genres, I’m interested in considering their cognitive psychology. It seems to me that genres are the practical answer to the problem of how it is possible to read a book, let alone write one, granted that human beings aren’t really all that smart. If the words we read were not already largely predictable, we wouldn’t have the memory and power of attention to make sense of them. Indeed, even though most of the conventions remain the same from one type of narrative to another, learning how to read a new genre takes considerable effort—which is why it was once such a terrible chore to read Silas Marner and why even adults resort to science fiction and mysteries at their leisure.

One last note on Morretti. I found an excellent essay on his book at the Valve. You really should read it in lieu of my vaporings. Oops! Too late.

Nostalgia as Amnesia

I have the recurrent fantasy of stopping off at a historical marker in the middle of nowhere and reading on the corroded plate: Site of the First Historical Marker. Our content-free regard for the past is perhaps not always this self-referential; but the parks and pageants seem to be heavier on the local color than the contemporary relevance. Going to Gettysburg can and should be a numinous and frightening experience, an encounter with guardian spirits and vengeful ghosts. For most of the tourists, the trip is more like visiting a foreign country and staying at a Radisson the whole time. Last year’s word of the year was truthiness. Perhaps we can speak of pastiness in the same spirit.

Against this grumpy and not very original complaint, it might be urged that the last few years have seen the publication and considerable commercial success of a remarkable number of serious historical works about the founding of the country. I agree that these books reflect a genuine desire on the part of at least some Americans to come to terms with their own history. David McCullough’s 1776, David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing, and Gary Wills’ book on Henry Adams; a whole series of new biographies of the founding fathers; and, above all, the more than magisterial Rise of American Democracy by Sean Wilentz all testify to a renewed commitment to history. But even the Wilentz book only covers political history to the advent of Lincoln. What strikes me as interesting and perhaps symptomatic is the absence of notable books about the whole era from Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt—the bona fide American historians I’ve consulted can’t come up with any recommendations. Now I suppose it is possible that the only Jeopardy contestants need to know about Rutherford B. Hayes and Grover Cleveland, but I wonder if the lack of focus on this period doesn’t have another meaning. Between 1865 and 1898, America became a world power and underwent profound social transformations in the process. It is hard to believe that nothing interesting happened in the inflation phase of our national cosmogony. I don’t dispute that the debates over the Constitution remain relevant to current concerns, but maybe they are less relevant to us than the regional and class struggles of the 70s and 80s. The Bush administration, after all, a lot more like Grant’s gang of thieves than Washington’s cabinet.

Obsessives aren’t really interested in their obsessions. The whole point of the ritual is to avoid thinking about that other thing. Let us therefore endlessly refight the Battle of Brooklyn rather than notice that the country is once again being sold to the highest bidder as it was in the times of McKinley.

Whispered

I have a problem with the policy debates I read on the Internet. They all seem to assume that the difficulties we face are technical. I don’t think that’s often true, which is not to say that there aren’t all sorts of technical issues to consider. If our political leaders were serious about confronting the dilemmas of the day, it would certainly be time to conduct a massive debate about ways and means. In the absence of a non-pathological politics, however, gestures towards solutions will just make things worse as we see in the current case of the new Medicare drug benefit. The Administration passed the new law solely and only to win an election, and the resulting bill is a monument to its bad faith. Like everything else the Bush team claims to do in the public interest—Homeland Security, New Orleans disaster relief, rebuilding Iraq—it is proving to be just another opportunity to plunder the national treasury for the benefit of the same bunch of financial interests and good old boys. The quote from Casablanca, though inevitable, is not really applicable—in the movie, the usual suspects were always rounded up but seldom guilty, whereas the members of the corresponding group in our country are always guilty but never rounded up.

It’s easy to get people to argue how to deal with the energy crisis. Should we be building new nuclear plants? Increasing research on alternative fuels? Putting more money into renewables such as solar and wind? Drastically improving gas mileage in cars? Increasing the efficiency of industrial processes for recovering petroleum from tar sands and oil shales? Figuring out how to limit carbon emissions and capture the carbon dioxide from smokestacks? Installing heat pumps in public buildings? We should we probably be doing all these things and great many more, but the better answer, the sine non qua of dealing with the very serious pickle in which we find ourselves, is neither increased conservation or alternative fuels. Absent a revolution in our politics, nothing is going to happen and nothing is going to help. Unless political power is somehow reconnected to the real interests of real people, the politicians will go on doing the bidding of people with the most ready money no matter how short their temporal horizons. I have no idea how to end the convertibility of dollars into votes; but absent such a political revolution, technological discussions won’t matter very much. And since power in our system has barricaded itself formidably against democracy and the Constitution itself is part of the problem, I doubt if normal political remedies will suffice. I’m afraid the oil isn’t going to stretch until and unless some necks get stretched first and not just figuratively.

No Thinking Please

The right-wingers who make random denunciations of their ideological enemies as Stalinists or fellow travelers live in an aboriginal dreamtime in which the political obsessions of 1935 are suspended eternally like the grapes and cherries in a jello salad. But not even Stalin would be a Stalinist at this stage of the game, any more than a resurrected Genghis Khan would be more alarming than any other guy on a horse in the suburbs of Ulan Batur. As late as the 50s, there were still a fair number of intellectuals making excuses for the Great Purges—I date back to that period and encountered some of them—but even the radicals of the next generation had given up that game. Indeed, the remaining traditional communists tended to look down on them for that very reason, and the sympathies of susceptible cultural lefties accrued to Black Panthers rather than candidate apparatchiks.

Only pinheaded pedants remember historical dates, I suppose; but it does matter when things actually happened. For example, when Truman and Marshall thwarted the Soviets in Berlin in 1947 or Kennedy went head-to-head against Khrushchev in 1962, they were exercising genuine courage against a veritable threat; but when Reagan made the Evil Empire speech in 1982, he was like a hunter’s kid exalting over an expiring bear as if he were the one who shot the animal. The ideological mojo of communism dissipated long before the regime’s military and economic power; and by Brezhnev’s era, the empire wasn’t even particularly evil as empires go—the aging bureaucrats who ran the show lacked the ruthlessness of their predecessors. The Commissar class had been among the victims of Stalin’s purges. They weren’t interested in reverting to a system of terror; and they were no longer true believers themselves. Their system was indeed authoritarian and repressive, but it was also utterly lacking in dynamism. Critics of the redoubtable Communism of the 30’s wrote tragic novels like Darkness at Noon. The favored genre of great age of Samzdat was satire that made rueful fun of a decaying social system and the moral and intellectual mediocrity that went with it.

I danced with delight as the Soviet Union collapsed and Eastern Europe and the various republics regained their independence; but I have since come to wonder whether the Fall of Communism, or more accurately, the way that Communism fell, made things better or worse. Certainly the Russian people have paid an enormous biological cost for the collapse of the old order—the life expectancy and infant mortality statistics are quite dismaying—but it isn’t even clear that the end of the Cold War was good for the West since America without a credible rival may itself turn out to be an evil empire.

The BS in the BA

Children are able to do many things with the help of parents and teachers that they would be quite incapable of managing on their own, but all the coaxing and encouragement is a bit mendacious like the ads for miracle golf equipment that promise to give us all a brilliant short game. At some point, the learner needs to get the bad news; and that’s especially true in formal education. Unfortunately, the message is seldom delivered until grad school unless the students themselves figures it out and the country is full of college-educated people who think they have a right to an opinion about all sorts of things because they have little understanding of what would be involved in seriously coming to terms with real questions. The writers of non-fiction books, magazine articles, and op/eds don’t provide much of a remedy. We have no tradition of what the French call haute vulgarisation—the non-technical but otherwise uncompromising explanation of scholarly, philosophical, and scientific ideas—so the popularizers simply continue the hand holding and the hand waving of retail higher education.

Children flourish in the famous zone of proximal development, but eventually they have to learn to fly solo. Or, to vary the metaphor, eventually you throw the kid in the pool. Since our educational system is so indulgent, however, the kids are going to have to jump in themselves. We grownups need to resume our educations if we really want to know what was going on; and that requires, among other things, that we start reading grownup books.

No Risk, No Reward

Congress has declined in legitimacy and power for many reasons but above all because most of its members no longer win their seats in real elections against credible opponents. The situation has many analogies to the old soviet political system, though our current arrangement is impeccably American, deriving as it does from the one-party politics of the South, where filigrees of democratic forms decorated the metallic surface of the oligarchic machine. Of course it is true that some districts are safe for the Republicans, others for the Democrats, but that does not mean we have a genuine two-party system because in most districts there is only one party. Under this circumstance, congressional elections are mere plebiscites; and the pols they consecrate are, as it were, structurally contemptible since whatever they represent, it certainly isn’t the Will of the People.

Simper Fidelis

It is a commonplace that women outlive men, but this demographic factoid only holds under modern conditions of sanitation and medicine. In most of history, the husbands buried the wives because of the high mortality associated with childbirth. The physiological advantages of femininity, like many another natural fact, is a function of context. The same can be said of the relative abilities of the genders. We know from anthropology and the historical record that in the vast majority of instances the men lord it over the women—the relative equality of the sexes in modern times is very much an outlier in a statistical sense. In a peaceful world where competition is based on intelligence and social skill rather than violence and sheer strength, women may be superior to men. Under more normal conditions, the females can be easily intimidated by the larger and more aggressive males, especially where a higher birth rate guarantees that they will be a vulnerable state for much of the time. Indeed, in many contemporary situations, women still live in fear from their menfolk; and we’re not that far in time from the era when beating your wife was as legal as paddling your kids, permissible when not obligatory.

My impression—and it’s only that—is that women, at least in this country, are losing much of the ground they won over the last century. Walking about in the cloak of invisibility that is late middle age, I eavesdrop on the conversations of young women in coffee bars and on busses; and I hear America simpering. Women do not dress and act like amateur trollops in eras of sexual freedom and gender equality. Playing up to men flourishes on in times when fewer girls aspire to their own power and place in the world and more calculate that latching on to a useful male is the way to go. Of course, even if my admittedly anecdotal impression is correct, it may be that what’s going on is merely a cultural fluctuation—after all, women were also trying out for Stepford wife during the Eisenhower administration—but I suspect that the fluctuation is embedded in a wider trend with far more serious consequences than the proliferation of girls-gone-wild videos.

In many countries, the fall of Marxist regimes was accompanied by a decline in the political and social standing of women. Muslim fundamentalism is deeply anti-feminist and the status of women is also at risk in non-Muslim developing countries as evidenced by the widespread practice of aborting female offspring. In the rapidly emerging Post-post-industrial world, the largest fraction of the population is made up of what Pierre Bourdieu called the subproletariat. These peasants and the offspring of peasants, displaced factory workers, and underemployed college grads depend for their survival and sense of identity upon membership in non-economic groups such as clans, religious sects, mafias, and political parties—just the kind of organizations in which testosterone counts much more than brains. Small wonder that women, like drugs and guns, have become a major trade good in the underside of the global economy.

Inspired by a Niall Ferguson OpEd

What needs to be understood is that the think-tank military philosophers and counterfactual historians who dream up scenarios are no more likely to be right than the hack novelists who concoct the plots for the novels you buy in airports, which is to say, they all can be counted upon to come up with eventualities that are as sensational as they are wrong. One can indeed speak about the future in a meaningful way, but only to the extent that general trends indicate a class of outcomes. As in thermodynamics, the most likely future state can be described, but not the path that leads to it. Thus it’s a pretty good bet that the history of the next hundred years will revolve around overpopulation, environmental degradation, and energy shortages; but the human response to these challenges is literally incalculable. Or, to pick an example resolved at a slightly finer grain, it’s very likely that the State of Israel will be destroyed, not because one can devise some plausible just-so story about its downfall, but simply because it is such an impossible outlier. What nobody seems to notice is that there is something highly peculiar about a country that has a population roughly the same as Burundi or El Salvador, which somehow maintains the third largest nuclear arsenal on the planet crammed into a cultural and religious enclave surrounded by sworn enemies. When a bunch of 4th graders are playing with a live hand grenade, who knows (or much cares) if it will be Ernie or Alice who pulls the pin?

Recurso

I am a dreadful housekeeper and keep losing things like combs and scissors. I rummage around for them until I get frustrated and simply buy replacements. Of course once I have the new comb or scissors, all the old ones magically reappear. History has a similar logic. Philosophical questions get asked anew from time to time, for example, not only because they were never fully answered, but in some cases because perfectly adequate answers got lost someplace in the back of the library—a classic instance being the 20th Century debate over metaethics that took about fifty years to catch up with Aristotle. Unfortunately, when the misplaced truth is not a set of academic propositions, but hard won historical experience, the political consequences do more than waste the ample time available to Oxford dons. At present a great many low-level intellectuals and journalists are treading the once well-worn but now mostly overgrown path that led so many liberals and leftists to authoritarian populism at the beginning of the 20th Century. The same themes—integral nationalism, cultural destiny, the moral beauty of violence, the need for external and internal enemies, premeditated political myth, the superiority of will to reason and the leader to the constraints of law—that one finds in Sorel or Gentile or Schmitt are reappearing in new variations, elaborated or, more often, coarsened by assorted op-ed writing profs and television personalities. I don’t know how many of these deep thinkers are aware that what they are proposing is a reprise of a set of proposals that didn’t turn out too well on their first try out. Maybe some of them figure that they’ll do fascism right this time, but I expect that most of them have forgotten or never learned the sad lesson, which, after all, costs more to replace than a comb or a pair of sox.

Pitiful and Helpless Anyhow

Professional journalists, especially of the video tribe, denounce the bloggers for their careless fact checking; but anybody who keeps score knows that getting the story right is a minor concern on the networks. The delay between the discovery of something interesting and important and its appearance on the news is often protracted, but not because the reporters want to make sure of their facts. The normal debate is about whether or not it benefits the corporation. Absent economic and political angles, fact checking is irrelevant, as in the recent mine disaster where the irresistible allure of an apparent miracle instantly overruled any scruples the professionals supposedly acquired at journalism school. On the other hand, where telling the plain truth can land the company in hot water, no amount of caution is too much. Thus the New York Times knew for 14 months that the administration had been conducting illegal wiretaps, but only broke the story because James Risen was going to publish it in a book in any case.

One usually bewails ownership of the media by six or seven corporations on the Madisonian theory that concentration of power in the hands of a few is dangerous to a Republican form of government, but it is the weakness rather than the strength of the corporations that causes the worst problems. What’s hurting us most isn’t the programmatic semi-fascism of Fox but the premeditated cowardice of CNN. The sheer size of the media giants makes them enormous targets. With so much to lose from the hostility of the government, the big papers, magazines, and T.V. networks cannot afford to act honorably. It wouldn’t be fair to the stockholders. Monopolies are bound to be risk adverse since the bigger they get, the less the prospect for further growth and greater the abyss below. They are inevitably timid, like everything else in the Universe with more to fear than to hope.

Courageously Making Decisions for Other People

Back in the 60s, campus radicals used to sit around plotting revolution in order to liberate the working man from the soulless monotony of the assembly line. Of course by 2006, a great many working men would be extremely happy to sign on for 40 years of deadening routine so long as this rather notional alienation included retirement benefits and health care. Indeed, although the fact is not so obvious when you’re 20, people commonly prefer predictability and stagnation over adventure and personal growth even when it doesn’t pay that well. The SDS philosopher wasn’t giving voice to a mankind immured in spiritual bondage. He was simply channeling the value system of Marx—readers of a certain age and educational background will supply the inevitable proof text here—as Marx was himself channeling the humanistic values of German Idealism, albeit in a cause that a Goethe or Herder would not have necessarily endorsed.

There aren’t a huge number of radicals around any more, and if anybody is still writing essays on the Young Marx, I haven’t seen ‘em. The temptation to practice ideological ventriloquism continues, however, only it takes place at different venues. Instead of scruffy would-be Bakunins plotting in the grimy common rooms of grad school dormitories, one finds Stanford economists in three-piece suits imposing their free market ideology in the paneled conference rooms of a Hilton. As with the earlier revolutionaries, it never seems to occur to these folks that their political economies all involve assumptions about what people want, assumptions that repeatedly turn out to be simply false. Deregulation of the electric power industry, for example, was promoted on the “reasonable” assumption that people will be willing to put up with interruptions of service in return for lower average power bills; but when the lights went out, this convenient theory turned out to be politically impossible. What made and makes perfectly good sense for a business man, doesn’t fly with the public at large because people don’t want to live like business men, at least not all the time. What the economists promote as an inevitable result, the unique solution to a giant optimization problem, is simply a way of insisting that everybody adopt the value system of a technologically savvy pirate. As with so many issues in political economy, what matters are the boundary conditions, not the equations.

Inaugurating A Dark New Year

This site is more a personal notebook than a blog. I don’t write easily or often, and I fuss too much about the English. My writing, such as it is, is more like a completed crossword or sudoku than transcribed speech; and I have been told that figuring it out is more like solving a puzzle than reading a paragraph. Meanwhile, the content, at least the non-political content, is also hermetically repellent since I write on the far side of a lifetime of mostly solitary thought and research and pursue questions and obsessions that only accidentally coincide with the interests of others. A real reader who matched up the implied reader of these pages would be a rare bird indeed and should perhaps seek professional help. The fundamental problem, however, is that I practice philosophy.

I’m not bragging. A philosopher is not somebody who possesses a special kind of knowledge or skill, though those attributes might define a good philosopher. As I use the term—and it has many other historically warranted and reasonable meanings—a philosopher is simply somebody who puts an unreasonably high value on truth without expecting the truth in question to begin with a capital t. Philosophy so defined is incurably anarchistic and probably deserving of hemlock, though the authorities have long since discovered that ignoring it is a better way of neutralizing the threat. For most people, perhaps rightly and certainly inevitably, thought is the least free of activities, policed as it is by employers, governments, religions, public opinion, the emotional blackmail of friends and family, and most of all by the hopes and fears of the thinker. To be a philosopher is to disregard all that, not in some operatic fashion or as a spiritual exercise, but as a matter of bureaucratic routine.

This assertion of principled philistinism probably sounds paradoxical. After all, Philosophers are often satirized for maintaining utterly incredible ideas and not just by op ed writers and other lumbering ungulates. Bob Fogelin, himself a professional philosopher, once wondered aloud in my hearing whether J.P. Sartre ever actually believed what he wrote in Being and Nothingness; and I’ve had more than one occasion to look up from the Monadology with similar incredulity. Years of reflection have convinced me that the apparent goofiness of philosophical ideas is something of an illusion, however. That is, the various philosophical ideas are indeed wild guesses, but they are as sensible as a dictionary compared to common sense. Anyhow, philosophers are obliged to make leaps because they are people in a terrible hurry. While the most credible self-understanding the universe will ever achieve takes place in the essentially social form of the sciences, philosophy is about how much of the world can be comprehended by an individual in a single lifetime. With a goal like that, you care a lot about probabilities and nothing whatsoever about plausibilities. You aren’t in the business of contriving likely stories—achieving verisimilitude is only important in the realms of courtesy, politics, and marketing.

Having enunciated (or confessed) my principles, I return, however sporadically, to blogging.

The Other Kind of Self-Fulfilling Prophesy

If the dish can run away with the spoon and the umbrella can get jiggy with the sewing machine there on the dissecting table, I guess it’s possible that George Bush has something in common with Pericles. Anyhow I was reminded of Bush’s situation by a famous anecdote about the great Athenian politician. The King of Sparta asked one of Pericles’ political rivals who was the better wrestler. Thucydides replied, “When I have thrown him, he insists that he didn’t take a fall and eventually makes the bystanders believe him in spite of their own eyes and thus gets the better of me.” Of course Pericles’ mastery of spin resulted from his famous oratorical skills while Bush needs an army of handlers and a compliant press to attempt the analogous feat. It takes more than a turn of rhetoric to enforce the claim that Iraq is a famous victory, and even the dogged loyalty of an army of purchased pundits may not succeed. What is certain is that they won’t stop trying. Any outcome in Iraq will be defined as a victory.

The Emerging American Majority?

The crimes and confusion of American history appear tolerable in retrospect because of the great nation that emerged from all the blood and nonsense. When the expansion ends, we’ll find it harder to forgive our continuing moral and political errors. What’s cute or at least tolerable in a rambunctious teenager is merely pathetic in an aging biker. We need to grow up and develop—or restore—a civilization on these shores.

William Blake wrote “Bring out number, weight, and measure in a year of dearth.” From which I make the unromantic application that it’s getting to be time to bring out number, weight, and measure. Our ethic, which cherishes the brag and bluff and values effectiveness above efficiency, made excellent sense in the middle of a land rush. The question is whether we’ll be able to adapt to different circumstances where it behooves us to step gingerly without losing our respect for human rights. The temptation will be to lurch from anarchistic individualism to an authoritarian system that crushes independence and dissent through an endless series of emergency measures. What the economic and political situation calls for is a substitution of intelligence for force, but that prospect isn’t going to inspire very many tailgate parties.

The Far Slope

I haven’t written anything for weeks, partly because Fall is a busy season for us migratory farm workers but mostly because everybody is now aware that there is something seriously off about the current administration and its policies, that it isn’t simply ideologically problematic but frankly pathological. Thing is, I don’t like to rant in company, especially when I don’t like the company. After all, in the aftermath of its change of heart, the media hasn’t changed its methods. Whether at your feet or at your throat, the journalists can be counted on to get the story wrong. What can you say about an institution that waited for the wind to change before it took serious notice that the government was promoting torture? What we have here is a weather vane, not a moral compass.

I can’t claim that I don’t enjoy the sufferings of the Republicans—Lord knows they deserve far more than they are likely to get—but not even Schiller thought that Schadenfreude was the daughter of Elysium and there are more important questions to pose and ponder than how to phrase a fresh denunciation of a fallen foe. For example, I want to know why our system is so inept at vetting its potential leaders. I understand or think I understand how a guy like Bush can get elected. What I can’t understand is why and how a major party could nominate such a dubious character.

Channeling Hari Seldon

Conservatives complain that liberal politics is fueled by envy, which is doubtless true. But anybody who has ever listened to Limbaugh knows that rightist politics depends on the very same motivations. To a very crude approximation, the mass politics of the left is based on resentment against people with too much material capital while the mass politics of the right is based on resentment against people with too much cultural capital. Unfortunately, the right has a certain advantage in this competition between dueling jealousies. In principle, anybody can be rich because anybody can win one of life’s many lotteries. In contrast, membership in the cultural elite is thought to have something to do with merit. In this respect, money is more democratic than talent since even an idiot can aspire to become a rich idiot in a nation ruled by rich idiots; but the mediocre can only imagine becoming a genius or a saint or simply a competent human being by imaging they are no longer themselves. Which is why the real virtues and accomplishments of an Al Gore inspire far more hatred than the undeserved successes of a George Bush, especially among journalists.

Cause and Effect

After the cultural conservatives admit to you under their voices that they don’t believe in anything either, they invariably fall back on the claim that religion is necessary to promote social cohesion. This theme is so commonplace that one has to be reminded that there isn’t much evidence that faith improves people’s lives. A recent paper by Gregory S. Paul in the Journal of Religion and Society points to the opposite conclusion. In well-off modern nations at least, the rates of violent crime, drug use, teenage pregnancy, and even abortion are negatively correlated with secularism—it isn’t the people who believe in evolution who act like animals. Indeed, the more faith, the more violence. Although Paul admits that the associations he describes are far too weak and general to prove anything positive, they certainly tend to disconfirm the pragmatic justification for traditional religiosity. The absence of faith of the Spaniards and Swedes may not disincline them to manslaughter, but it hasn’t prevented them from living together much more peaceably than the much more religious and much more murderous Americans. All of which is congruent with the observation, easily reached after even a quick perusal of the Statistical Abstract, that it isn’t the faithless Blue States but the fervent Red States that have the high crime rates and general levels of social disorganization.

I don’t think one can draw very many conclusions from the kind of statistical studies that underlie Paul’s paper—in the social sciences descriptive statistical methods are much useful than inferential ones because societies are surely too diverse to be validly compared as if they were patients in a drug trial—but even if the sample sizes and correlations were on the up and up in this study, an association of religiosity with crime and other measures of social disorder would not establish that belief causes violence. I expect that the reverse is more often true. Sick people without health insurance fall back on cheap forms of self-medication like drugs and alcohol even though these expedients may well make them worse off. Poor and frightened people in societies that don’t take very good care of their members fall back on irrational systems of belief in order to get temporary relief from their miserable situations even though the cure often exacerbates the disease or at least fails to address its real causes.

It is sometimes implied that secularism is a mere default, what you believe when you no longer believe, the credo of Nietzsche’s last man. I don’t buy this theme any more, but it has at least this much going for it. Disbelief is not something achieved so much as something allowed. In the absence of fear, want, and political pressure, one naturally falls back on the truth, which, because it is largely negative, is utterly obvious. It takes ingenuity and a lot of heavy lifting to make a case for impossible conclusions. One relaxes into the acknowledgement of realities. I have to remind myself that being able to dispense with religion is a consequence of my own relatively happy situation. Like everybody else, I entertain myself with the fantasy that I live in an especially glamorous state of existential extremity; but I’m actually so unthreatened by the world that can afford to believe things simply because they are apparently true. By the same token, I’m as vain about the blackness of my heart as any television evangelist, but as a matter of fact I don’t have any serious inclination to harm anybody. The categorical imperative if not mere inertia suffices to keep me out of night court. No doubt I couldn’t and wouldn’t maintain these complacencies under less favorable internal and external circumstances any more than the orderly and rational societies of Europe and Oceania will retain their secularism if things go to Hell.

The Great Work

Everything that can go around eventually gets around to going around. During most of my life, for example, various middle-aged ladies have explained to me how the alchemists were really interested in spiritual transformation rather than metallurgy; but of late scholarly historians of the Art have emphasized the empirical research conducted by adepts who often used mystical language to preserve their trade secrets in an age before patents. Just as a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, butter of antimony is sometimes just butter of antimony even if you call it the dizzy leopard to confuse the competition. But at least some of the time some of the alchemists were speaking neither about spiritual matters or material matters but about both at once, as if one could precipitate a metaphor in the bottom of a beaker. This program is not necessarily absurd.

I’m pretty big for a homunculus, but I myself am presumably the product of a chemical synthesis. The alchemical recipe for an artificial man usually involved hermetically sealing various ingredients in a vessel and incubating them for months and months in a steaming pile of horse dung, the so-called Mare. It turns out you have to have a lot of patience to pursue this crock-pot cookery to a successful conclusion. Three or four months of ferment hardly suffice and you need to think big. After all, the original run, conducted on a planetary scale, lasted for some 4.6 billion years. The point of alchemy, of course, is to accelerate and miniaturize nature; but an experiment with a fair prospect of a favorable outcome would still be a major undertaking. Stuart Kauffman, a theoretical biologist with the Santa Fe Institute of Complexity, has proposed a somewhat similar operation. In his book, the Origins of Order (1993), he suggests that life might spontaneously emerge from under the right conditions if a couple of thousand chemical species were mingled in a biochemical reactor. The results of such a trial would not be very impressive to look at, at best a very activated sludge, and would probably be exquisitely fragile, utterly defenseless against natural living things, which are all finalists in a very long Mortal Kombat tournament. So far as I know Kauffman never actually conducted this experiment—the financing might be harder to assemble than the chemicals and you don’t even want to think about the permits—but perhaps it could be adequately simulated on a sufficiently powerful computer. As one might also have said about the endeavors of the alchemists, Kauffman’s idea is perfectly reasonable even if it turns out that the available means are insufficient.

I expect that a lot of people would be alarmed at the prospect of a modern version of the Great Work—I imagine the farmers of central New Mexico stocking up on torches and pitchforks just in case—but the grave threat of such researches is metaphysical rather than environmental. As with genetic engineering, it isn’t so much the practical as the moral risks of such activities that alarm people. Many people still believe that life was created, after all, and that makes the artificial life a blasphemous parody of the action of God. The rationale for the commandment against graven images is that artists should not pretend to be able to make living things. Actually pulling off that feat would be even worse just as Bonaparte had to be institutionalized on St. Helena because he thought he was Napoleon. But even a nonbeliever might find the production of a couple of grams of metabolizing goo anti-edifying if the expense and difficulty of the process only served to underscore the general sterility of Mother Nature.

The original alchemists believed that material things harbored occult potentialities that could be released by their art. They credited nature with an intrinsic ability to make, which is part of the reason they were distrusted by the Church, which insisted that God had a monopoly on the creation business. The newer alchemy promotes a more depressing heresy. Life indeed arises from unliving matter, but only as the tiniest of impurities. Nature’s trade is disorder; but disorder has an irreducible minimum. As I wrote in the margin of Kauffman’s book, “The Devil only permitted good because he could produce a greater evil from it.” That’s a rather stupid joke, of course—I was sitting through jury duty when I wrote it and plead boredom. Life may be overwhelmingly rare, the residue of a residue like the faint glow of radium left in Madame Curie’s last crucible in the Greer Garson movie, but that doesn’t make it less valuable. Au contraire. Still…

The occasion of these thoughts was an argument I had on the Internet about Bush Administration plans to go back to the moon. I made the point that the motivation for manned space is not scientific—unmanned probes yield far more knowledge at far cheaper rates. Like so much of our politics, the program appeals to our fantasies. We persist in sending human beings into the abyss because we dream of traveling to the stars even though it is very unlikely that an expedition, let alone a migration, is feasible over interstellar distances. When I quoted the tee shirt “186,000 miles a second. It’s not only a good idea. It’s the law,” I was accused on underestimating human ingenuity, etc. But the consideration that really makes me doubt the possibility of leaving this neck of the woods is not physics—even if I were an expert on the subject, I couldn’t rule out the possibility of some loophole in the rules—but the evident fact that we aren’t up to our necks in aliens. If long-range space travel is possible, even at a very low rate, the mathematics of exponential growth guarantees that intelligent life would have long since infested the cosmos like bacteria in unrefrigerated soup. To which it was countered that we may be the first and only planet on which intelligent life emerged or—and this is where I was brought up short—intelligent life may routinely self-destruct before it seeds itself across the heavens.

The idea of the self-destructiveness of intelligence is familiar from many a science fiction novel and doesn’t much further a discussion of the advisability of manned space flight since the technical feasibility of rocketing off to Sirius wouldn’t make much difference if we’re doomed to blow ourselves up before we get around to making the trip. What the thought suddenly illuminated for me, however, was an error of my imagination. I have long been awed by the rarity of sentient life in space, but its rarity in time is probably just as sublime. It’s very likely that the Great Work is not only a mountain that gives birth to a mouse but that it can only produce a very temporary rodent. Our civilization is probably as evanescent as the homunculus of Paracelsus. Fueled by the rapid combustion of coal and petroleum that was build up over many millions of years, it is likely to run out of gas before it achieves escape velocity.

Contexts

Reading the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire when I was a kid permanently deformed my prose style so I suppose I have an excuse for abusing the memory of Edward Gibbon by trotting out the following quotation for the millionth time: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” My motive in resurrecting this Lazarus is not to attack the religious right, however. In fact, as even a brief Google search verifies, the fundamentalists frequently quote it approvingly themselves and demonstrate in the process a better understanding of what Gibbon meant than the average village atheist. Gibbon wasn’t writing about the spiritual and political atmosphere of the decline, but explaining the rationale of the consistent tolerance followed by the Empire at its height. Gibbon, who was both a philosopher and a magistrate, doubtless approved of Antiquity’s version of multiculturalism. The American theocrats just as obviously despise it along with its contemporary avatars. They are, however, talking about the same thing.

In fact, one could hardly apply Gibbon’s quote justly to either the 5th Century or the 21st. The intellectual classes of late Antiquity, even the remaining Pagans, were deeply superstitious. They may have despised the coarser practices of the Many, but they commonly embraced the notion of reincarnation, poured over horoscopes, practiced magic, and summoned spirits. Even their serious philosophy was theosophy. The erstwhile freethinkers of our own times are no less susceptible to the appeal of irrational religious ideas. Business for alternative forms of medicine, astrology, and memory regression is always good in University towns. The dry and sober rationalism of high antiquity is not much in evidence. Meanwhile, just as the magistrates of the era of the Decline found that fanaticism had political uses, the politicians of our times have rediscovered the motive power of true belief.

Neap, Spring, Ebb, Flood

Time, one hears, is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. If that’s true, it must have gotten the position as a political favor from Karl Rove because it hasn’t been doing a very good job lately. The present situation is hard to address either analytically or politically because what’s important about it relates simultaneously to so many trends and cycles, each of which has a different scale and rhythm. Thus the Bush regime, which in many ways reprises the familiar program of other corrupt American administrations (Grant, Harding, Reagan), practices its entrepreneurial politics at a time when the consequences of looting the nation have far greater consequences, not only domestically in a nation with far less margin for error than before but abroad, too, since the gears of the conservative machine mesh with the operation of the whole world. Ideological stupidity and political criminality that once has largely local consequences becomes something quite different when it takes place at or near the inflection point of so many fundamental historical trends including the end of cheap oil and the demographic transition of the human population and at a time when the planet itself is undergoing an ecological, meteorological, and even chemical revolution. And that’s not to factor in the spiritual and civilizational fits underway in the realm of culture, the migration vast numbers of people across the globe, and the incalculable prospect of the wild cards dealt into the game at random intervals by the scientists. What we’re dealing with here is the motorized version of Russian dolls— “their construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel” (Ezekiel 1:16). Or maybe the Mayans, whose conception of time featured a whole set of nested cycles, were right in understanding that calamity or creation naturally occur when all the digits of the cosmic odometer turn over at once, as, by the way, they are scheduled to do when the Long Count begins again on December 21, 2012.

As the acronym SNAFU indicates, problems are not anomalies and normally provide no occasion for panic. Indeed, managing, like walking, is essential a controlled stumble. What we’re dealing with, unfortunately, is a reduplication of crises, a crisis crisis, which the public mind is especially ill suited to comprehend since of all the cycles in play, the narrowest is the news cycle.

Scrambled Eggs and Brains

Two recent papers in SCIENCE (9 September 2005) report on a couple of variants in genes associated with increased brain size have increased in frequency rapidly, too rapidly to be explicable as instances of genetic drift. Statistical tests indicate that one of the variants in the gene Microcephalin arose about 37,000 years ago. The second, haplogroup D of the ASPM gene, is more recent and probably began to occur around 5800 years ago.

The press noted that the two variants occur less frequently in sub-Saharan Africa than elsewhere, which doubtlessly reinforced the belief, nearly universal in America, that blacks are genetically inferior to Europeans. What the newspapers didn’t notice, however, is that the incidence of the genes is highest not in Europe but in places like Pakistan. Some 78.6% of the French population tested possessed the Microcephalin variant, but 98% of the Siberian Ubermenschen. 45% of tested North Italians had haplotype D, but they couldn’t compete with Papua, New Guinea where the sample came it at just under 60%.

Well, the ifs, and, and buts never impress anybody. They are routinely dismissed as liberal piety. It probably doesn’t help to point out that a host of genetic variants affect brain development and that there is no way of determining from purely statistical studies whether the Microcephalin variant or haplotype D are particularly important determinants of better cognitive functions or, indeed, whether they in fact improve cognitive function at all. Natural selection obviously favored these genes, but what phenotypical effects account for their greater fitness is unknown. Genes typically have multiple effects so it is perfectly possible that the variants in question flourished because they boosted immunity to some pathogen or directly increased fertility like another rapidly spreading gene variant recently identified in Iceland.

The authors of the papers go so far as to speculate that the timing of the appearance of the two genetic variants matches up with important milestones in human cultural evolution; but if cave painting or agriculture were somehow made possible by these mutations, they must have been potent indeed since at the outset and for many generations afterwards, only a tiny percentage of individuals possessed them. I’m more inclined to look at things from a reversed perspective. Every cultural accomplishment increases the value of intelligence and makes it likely that any mutation that improves cognitive functioning will spread through the population. What occurs is analogous to a common pattern in the history of technology, the invention of a new practice—extracting motive power from fuel, telephony, flying—inspires an often motley series of secondary inventions that implement or exploit the primary innovation. No point in having more brains if there’s nothing to do with them. It might be that cultural changes circa 38,000 BCE or 5600 BCE made the genetic changes more likely to spread rather than the other way around.

If civilization persists long enough, the genetic basis of human cognitive performance will eventually be elucidated and the results may be ideologically embarrassing to everybody, though probably not in foreseeable ways. In the meantime, it’s a good bet that every isolated research result will be taken as confirmation of the prevailing tribal prejudices. A true statement is validly implied by every other statement, true or false–trust me, it’s logic—so if you are an absolute believer in some tenet, it is perfectly though insanely reasonable to assume that everything you hear is further evidence of its truth. Which is why, incidentally, every surprising result in biology can be instantly seized upon as evidence for intelligent design and people can actually be edified by the sufferings of marching penguins. This sort of thing makes me very dubious about the whole enterprise of popular science.

By the way, there is at least one widely held belief that really is challenged by results like the papers in SCIENCE. I refer to the endlessly repeated notion that the advent of anatomically modern human beings signaled the replacement of genetic evolution with cultural evolution. This commonplace never made any sense at all. Natural selection is inevitable whenever heritable phenotypical characteristics lead to differential rates of successful reproduction. Since not everybody has the same number of live offspring and their relative fertility is surely not a matter of mere chance, evolution will proceed, although its action will often take the form of apparent stasis under the action of what is usually called stabilizing selection, the biological version of quality control. Anyhow, as I previously pointed out, the emergence of culture actually promotes directional evolution—the development of animal husbandry led to the rapid spread of genes that allow adults to drink liquid milk, for example—and I wouldn’t be surprised if ever more complex technological civilization eventually leads to one or more speciation events.

Unparallel Lives

I could only shrug my shoulders at a recent survey in which Ronald Reagan emerged as the greatest American president. Ideologies aside, anybody with even a rudimentary knowledge of history has to wonder how a one-dimensional figure like Reagan, who spent most of his life as an actor or corporate spokesman, didn’t write even his own speeches, and never led his nation through a war or comparable crisis could be compared to, for example, Abraham Lincoln, who having given himself a profound, if narrow education, became a great orator, the emancipator of an entire race, and the tragic hero of a desperate civil war. The worst disaster Reagan ever faced was the loss of the 300 marines in Lebanon, a blow to his political image that he conveniently recouped three days later by invading a small and defenseless island in the Caribbean. It is difficult to imagine Reagan dealing with the costs and sorrows of an Antietem or a Gettysburg. I do give him credit for resisting the worst impulses of his right-wing advisors and allowing himself to listen to Gorbachev. But Gorbachev, after all, was the great man of the era while Reagan was never much more than a PR confection, a masterpiece of audioanimatronics even before he fetched up in Disneyland. Yet Reagan outpolled Abraham Lincoln. You might as well compare Thomas Jefferson and George Bush.

Speaking of Jefferson and Bush, there is actually a formal basis of comparison. Jefferson came into office with a minimalist view of government, but the opportunity to acquire Louisiana quickly changed his mind about what the Federal government should or should not undertake. Bush is also finding that New Orleans can make you change your tune about the proper responsibilities of the state. Supposedly a proponent of small government, Bush was heard last night trying to sound like FDR, though his version of the New Deal, supervised by fixer-in-chief, Karl Rove, is likely to come off like a botched bank robbery. Indeed, it is likely to come off as a botched bank robbery.

It should be noted, of course, that the hurricane is not the first disaster to derail Bush’s plans—9/11, the failure of the Iraq invasion, and the oil crunch kept him in Brownian motion even before his problems with Brown. Every president sooner or later finds his preconceptions defeated by events, but Bush was a hostage to fortune from the beginning. He gets blown about by every unforeseen contingency, which means he gets blown about quite a bit since he doesn’t do much foreseeing. He may be stubborn and prejudiced, but he certainly isn’t steadfast and principled. With his utter lack of substance, in fact, he might eventually be a worthy competitor to Ronald Reagan in some future greatest American poll.

Judicial Notice

With a resounding title like the Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Bryan Ward-Perkins’ new book figures to be a magisterial brick. In fact it is more accurate to call it an extended pamphlet—it’s barely more than 200 pages. Written for a polemical purpose, it is a move in the on-going debate about the advent of the Dark Ages. Over the last twenty or thirty years, several influential historians have tried to re-imagine the era between 200 and 800 AD as “a quite decisive period of history that stands on its own” rather than a depressing coda to a glorious antiquity. Ward-Perkins is not entirely hostile to some of this work. He obviously respects Peter Brown, for example, though he points out that such books as the World of Late Antiquity and the Rise of Western Christendom focus on the spiritual and intellectual dimensions of the era rather than its economics and politics. But Ward-Perkins dissents when revisionist historians attempt to downplay the gravity and violence of the fall of the Empire in favor of an irenic vision in which the Romans and barbarians gradually accommodate to one another. In the West, at least, there was indeed a catastrophe in the 5th Century, a comprehensive crash comparable to the collapses of civilizations documented by Jared Diamond.

Mentalities are fine, but Ward-Perkins concerns himself with piles of broken pottery, the remains of old villages, and the bones of ancient cattle to address realities. The contrast in material conditions before and after the 5th Century is startling. One easily forgets how wealthy and comfortable the Empire had become, not only for a tiny elite but also for farmers and tradesmen who lived in well-build houses with tile roofs and emptied the wine and oil from mountains of amphora. Literally mountains. A view of Rome from 1625 shows Monte Testaccio, a 50-meter high hill made of some 53 million amphora imported from southern Spain.

Before the Barbarian invasions, the prosperity of the Western Empire depended on the long-distance exchange of cash crops and other goods. When first Gaul and Spain and then Africa fell to invaders, the dismembered parts could not sustain themselves either economically or demographically. The enormous manufacturing industries that used standardized methods to gin out good quality clothing, pottery, and weapons failed. As Ward-Perkins documents, domestic animals became smaller as farmers reverted to less efficient subsistence agriculture. Though the book doesn’t address the issue directly, one can only assume that people were similarly stunted. Things really, genuinely, no fooling, went to Hell.

I think Ward-Perkins makes his case effectively, but it’s telling that he needs so few pages to do so. The point of view he combats was never very strong in arguments and evidence. Its appeal was and is extrinsic. Ward-Perkins claims that it has become convenient to find nice things to say about the barbarians since most of the E.U. nations are heirs to the barbarian kingdoms; but I think there is something else at work besides multicultural sweetness and light, though the fetching picture of the barbarian couple he reproduces from a recent French book suggests he’s got a point. I note that, as it did in late antiquity, much of our intellectual life has turned inward—Derrida and Lacan are highly reminiscent of Plotinus and Proclus—so that the mental life of the Church fathers and Neoplatonics seems more interesting to many scholars than the noise and numbers of economics and demography. Writers who obsess about what people think and feel instead of what they do and make have become idealists in practice if not in theory. They just aren’t interested in what used to be quaintly called the external world.

Of Some of the People, By Some of the People, For Some of the People

The administration is spending billions of dollars in response to Katrina. One is supposed to be grateful that they have finally decided to do something, but it is quite likely that they are going to waste an enormous amount of public money in the process. The same cost-plus, no-bid contracts that were awarded to Bush’s political allies in Iraq are very much a feature of the current relief effort. Of course from a purely partisan point of view, this sort of looting of the treasury is not a waste at all since it’s going into the right pockets; but for those of us who aren’t in on the swag, it’s just more looting. And the damage is not merely fiscal. Bush et. al. are past masters of using emergency situations as cover for passing laws that continue their settled policy of dismantling unions and weakening environmental protections.

The Republicans harm us, as much when they are driven to address genuine public needs as when they pursue more overtly selfish ends. Last year’s Medicare bill, for example, ostensibly enacted to provide drug benefits to seniors, has turned out to be a gruesomely expensive boondoggle that provides minimum help at maximum cost while containing a host of deal sweeteners for the political connected drug firms. No bill at all would have been much preferable to this measure, which not even the conservatives have bothered to defend except as a more or less necessary piece of political cynicism in an election year.

In lieu of encouraging the government to do anything at all over the next three years, responsible politicians need to follow a consistent program of obstructionism. Nothing good will come from this corrupt crew, whose defenders are more accurately described as accomplices than supporters. What we have here is a new version of the Grant administration, except that it was possible to believe that the President in that case was simply naïve. It was said that Grant never met a businessman he didn’t trust. But Bush is a businessman who, absent amnesia, should surely know better than to trust himself.

The Inextinguishable Laughter of the Blessed Gods

While everyone except salaried administration personnel and pundits on Fox has denounced the conduct of the Iraqi war, criticism of the war itself remains strangely muted beyond the radical left. A great many Democrats, including self-defined liberal Democrats, favored the invasion even though most of them thought the PR preparation was inadequate. For them no less than for Rumsfeld or Bush, international laws and treaties are just scraps of paper; and the doctrine of preemption is unproblematic. But the liberal hawks have more in common with the administration than the traditional sociopathy of the international relations professional. They share the right’s belief that America can do anything it likes because of its enormous military and economic preponderance. Beneath their purported political realism lies a thick deposit of nationalist fantasy. They seem to actually believe that we can get away with almost any level of incompetence.

The theologians missed something when they didn’t include complacency among the divine attributes. A God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal is necessarily also immune to anxiety. I mildly care about such things, because I’ve always liked the first person of the Trinity. Some fictions are more lovable than others—I’ve still got the hots for Elizabeth Bennett, for example—and part of the appeal of the figure of Father to me is the attraction of somebody, someplace who has everything under control. It would be similarly gratifying to imagine that one lived in a nation so powerful as to be unmenaced even by its own errors. I’ve got a head cold just now, so I can’t say with 100% certainty that our shit doesn’t stink. Nevertheless, I believe as an article of rational faith that it does. I don’t think that any country ever has or ever could achieve so transcendent a status.

The Moral Hazard Hazard

The voice in your head that orders you to do bad things is not necessarily a demon or a black dog. In many cases it turns out to be some theoretical conclusion you learned in school. Economists, for example, have internalized a notion of how markets are supposed to function that is far more attractive than mere empirical information. “Who you gonna believe? Conclusions that follow validly from convenient axioms or your lying eyes?” Back before the California energy crunch, proponents of deregulation made calculations from reasonable assumptions that putting up with occasional blackouts was worth it if it made the system more efficient overall. In the event, however, people just would not put up with unreliable service; and it turned out that the “reasonable assumptions” had only been reasonable on somebody’s blackboard. Politically, they were simply impossible. What’s going on with New Orleans is similar. The social Darwinists of the administration have been brought up short by the sudden revelation that the nation as a whole thinks of itself as a nation and doesn’t think that even poor blacks are disposable at 3/5ths a head. As a result, we’ve learned how fast even an incompetent government can act when confronted with a catastrophic public relation’s disaster.

Certain ideas mesmerize their thinkers. They are like drugs. For example, discussions of the state of America’s health system almost always get caught up on the issue of moral hazard, the terrifying prospect that adequate health care insurance would encourage people to go to the doctor too often. Such an eventuality is certainly possible since making anything cheaper is liable to increase demand, but the issue has got to be the reddest red herring of them all in a country where, on the evidence, the current incentives often discourage people from going to the doctor when they should and the largest single reason we pay more for health care is the expense of maintaining an enormous bureaucracy dedicated to keeping people from getting care. Whatever the notional cost of moral hazard, the real—and staggering—costs arise from the levees and dykes erected to hold it off. Meanwhile, the nations that have capitulated to universal care and succumbed to a terminal case of moral hazard have been penalized with better medicine at a much lower cost, a fact that, unfortunately, is no match for a fascinating idea.

The Law of Intended Consequences

It gives the play a lousy plot, but much of what happens is simply what somebody wanted. They may not like it when they get it, but that’s a separate issue. For example, I don’t doubt that many Republicans were momentarily unhappy to read that poverty had increased in every year of the Bush administration as it routinely does in Republican administrations; but that result, though unedifying, began life as an intention. One can imagine a universe in which destroying unions, eliminating public services, and promoting lower wages ironically results in general prosperity, but that’s an alternative reality. In our world, if the ruling party sets out to benefit its people at the expense of those people, it’s very likely to succeed.

Liberals and moderates like to argue about policies, but often what matters is not how the law reads but who administers it. One is reminded of the old and thankfully obsolete joke about the German daddy who complained that when he followed the directions on assembling his son’s bicycle, it always turned out to be a machine gun.

Sometimes it is a fallacy not to argue ad hominem.

A Hopeful Note

Maybe things really will get better in Iraq. The Bush administration is notorious for rewarding failure and ineptitude, but this policy is finally running up against its natural limit. In several cases there is simply no honor or office left to give to the incompetents so that people like Condi Rice may no longer motivated to invite fresh catastrophic terrorist attacks through their negligence or to promote another disastrous and illegal war by lying to the public. Unfortunately, the law of effect takes time to alter behavior; and sheer momentum may produce further calamities just as Katrina remained a destructive storm for a long time after it made landfall. Nevertheless, though the administration is still made up of people immune to the bad consequences of their own behavior, malfeasance is no longer a guarantee of further riches and higher offices so perhaps some of them will at last learn.