To Hume it may Concern

One can only learn from experience when there is something to learn. As a general method, empiricism is simply a recipe for superstition. Indeed, the history of religion is in large part the history of an interminable research project, an attempt to figure out the wishes of the gods. The ancients were quite methodical about it: the Mesopotamians carefully correlated the configurations of the stars and the shapes of the livers of sacrificed animals with what happened later, and the Roman priesthoods and the Senate itself noted the political results of prayers and supplications to the various gods and tried to learn from experience as best they could. One thinks of theology as a largely deductive operation, but a great deal of scholastic logic chopping is devoted to explaining away the apparent failures of an underlying inductive methodology.

You often hear that science is made possible by the faith that the universe operates according to regular and comprehensible laws, but that thesis can only be valid to the extent that a certain amount of hopefulness is indeed a psychological precondition for persistent inquiry. Nevertheless, the fact that the fisherman who goes on fishing is the one who may actually catch something doesn’t mean that the optimism that motivated his patience is really warranted. After all, as we all know, lots of the time it isn’t, just as for the most part the things in the universe don’t make any damned sense at all. Induction works, when it works, which isn’t often, not because of some theological or metaphysical principle but because detectable regularities do govern a tiny proportion of possible cases. It looks like it works in general only because in general we focus on the exceptions, the relationship between the temperature and volume of a gas, for example, instead of the relationship between a person’s temperament and the position of the planets at her birth or the likelihood of my coming down with a cold and the color of my shirt last Thursday. The much-mooted problem of induction, like the unreasonable utility of mathematics, is a chimera, an accident of sampling. I thought you should know.

What is Corruption?

We let our public people and ourselves off easy. If a congressman hasn’t violated a statute in a provable way, we won’t call him corrupt. For several centuries, however, political corruption wasn’t understood as a crime, though it often enough resulted in bribery and other specific crimes. Corruption was simply the commandeering of public institutions by private interests. By that definition, of course, our entire political system is deeply corrupt. Indeed, under the effective, as opposed to the paper constitution of the nation, the corporations are the fourth branch of the Federal government; and any attempt to limit their power and income amounts to an insurrection. The health care companies and arms manufacturers have a prerogative right to their exorbitant profits, which is why their supporters, who have internalized the American religion of corruption, are sincerely scandalized by suggestions that the public good should sometimes impinge on private interests. Thus in the current debate about health care, we hear that a public option is impermissible because it would provide better services at lower cost than private insurance firms and thus lower their returns to capital or even drive them out of business.

Intelligent Design: Part Deux

Although I’ve been frequently told that the sage does nothing and everything is accomplished, I have reason to believe that the non-sages sometimes do get results by doing something and that they haven’t just been following their noses all this time. Paleontology certainly suggests that the pace of cultural evolution—the development of new tools, the succession of artistic styles—picked up sharply someplace between homo erectus and yours truly with the implication that a greatly increased capacity for insight and planning was involved in that giddy acceleration. In the history and prehistory of our species, intelligent design has resulted in rapid change, in drastic contrast to biological evolution, whose incredibly slow pace reflects the absence of even a moronic mind.

Various people have pointed out the irony that the same people who insist that a divine intellect has to be postulated to explain the emergence of the machinery of life are big fans of the master role of non-intelligent processes in the working of human societies. Automatic market mechanisms are trusted to turn blind selfishness into effective cooperation. Simple instincts allow termites to build arches from their own shit; why look for a fundamentally different kind of explanation for the rise of Microsoft? Even scholarly non-ideologues sometimes show a predilection for this sort of thing. Hence attempts to reconstruct the early history of agriculture usually assume that these developments just naturally happened because hunter-gathers dropped seeds near their huts and one thing led to another. Or consider accounts of the invention of writing that finesse the transition from pictographs to a system that can actually reproduce a specific language as if this process didn’t require figuring out something that wasn’t obvious at all.

Historians of technology sometimes distinguish inventions that want to be invented from those that don’t, airplanes as opposed to helicopters, buttons as opposed to zippers; and there may be something worthwhile about this idea. Nevertheless, it is obvious that not only all innovation, but also the ordinary operations of civilization require thoughtfulness. Heraclitus asserted that every cow is driven to pasture by a blow. That may work for cattle, but no human economic system would even succeed in getting its floors swept if the janitors didn’t have an idea of what it meant to clean things up. Rewards and punishments—the cattle prods and the cookies—motivate systems of action patterned by language. They are useless in the absence of higher mental functions. For better or worse, we just don’t act like ants in an anthill, a fact that can be verified by comparing San Francisco to the actual anthills described in Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson’s most recent book, Superorganism. All that said, arriving at a new pattern of behavior does require a more conscious intrusion of mind into habit than routine work; and developing and implementing a cooperative plan is still more problematic, which is probably part of the reason we’d like to think that it’s all automatic.

The definitive tome on the history of premeditation in human history remains to be written. It’s certainly the right time to address the topic because, short of relying on the mercy of God, current circumstances demand that we get together and figure out how to fly the plane. We need to look at the precedents. Autopilot is simply not an option in the face of resource depletion and environmental degradation, not to mention the California constitution. Instinct and custom are far more comfortable, far more loveable, than thoughtful action; and in eras when the consequences of bad innovations are likely to be worse than the results of going with the flow, automatism may even be adaptive. Under contemporary conditions, however, the principled rejection of reason and responsibility we call conservatism is simply suicidal, though, to be fair, you have to admit it doesn’t require as much committee work as doing the right thing.

Friendly Advice

With all the problems that Obama will face as he takes office, prosecuting members of the previous administration for their many violations of the law will surely be a low priority. It would seem vindictive and unnecessary. If I were a principled and canny Republican, however, I would insist on a full accounting with all the trimmings even if it meant that some of my friends and colleagues did hard time. Allowing the guilty to escape may seem like a good thing from a partisan point of view, but what it would actually do is establish the precedent that the executive can get away with anything. The last administration invented a utopian solution to many of its problems by essentially legalizing crime, but the Republicans won’t like it when and if the Democrats play by the same rules or lack of rules. I won’t like it either.

I’d like to believe that the people who are currently taking power are morally better than those who they are supplanting, if only because they don’t have to meet a very high standard to do that. However, I also suspect that part of the reason the old order broke the law so freely was not simply a function of their ideology, which at its margins was pretty close to a combination of the Fuhrer Prinzip and a Tammany Hall license to steal, but also resulted from a generally low level of competence. Criminals tend to be stupid and conversely the stupid tend to be criminals. Just as man-eating lions are usually just the animals too old and sick to take their proper prey, dangerous men are often simply not clever enough or disciplined enough to achieve their aims in a constructive, lawful manner. For all their jabbering about John Galt, nothing so characterized the outgoing bunch more than its consistent mediocrity. They weren’t good at much and stole because they didn’t know how to earn. But even if the new men and women turn out to be more able, even considerably more able, and therefore capable of accomplishing their aims without cheating, the power of precedent is so great that I’m afraid that the executive will continue to abuse the Constitution under their charge. If Chaney and Gonzales go to prison, that will be less likely. Maybe somebody at the National Review could make this point in a featured article…

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Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray.

In Backgammon, It’s Called the Running Game

McCain is suspending his campaign for the moment and calling for a postponement of the Friday debate. The dramatic (or erratic) moves are understandable granted the marked decline in his fortunes that has taken place over the last ten days or so as the financial crisis made even the lowest information voters notice how badly his party has handled the economy. He’s in the situation of a chess player with a bad position who complicates the game even at the cost of making inferior moves—a perfectly rational strategy that many losing candidates have tried, though it does seem to work better in chess than politics. McCain’s desperation did not just begin, however.

The Palin nomination was already a capitulation to circumstances, a Pearl Harbor attack that inflicted temporary pain on the enemy but probably guaranteed defeat. So long as McCain had real faith in his prospects, he kept his distance from the crazy right faction of his own party and tried to run as a moderate. By signing up Palin, he ensured himself of the fanatical support of 40% of the country; but he also gave up on winning the middle. The most probable result of his surrender to the Culture War right is an increased prospect of losing less badly purchased at the cost of forgoing any reasonable chance of eking out a win.

Der Alte

John McCain got confused again last night in an interview about American foreign policy towards Latin America. The details aren’t particularly important—nobody really thinks McCain is unaware that Spain is in Europe. He’s not Palin, after all—but the episode and the somewhat panic-stricken way his spokesmen covered for him is getting to be routine. There’s nothing mysterious going on. McCain is simply getting senile, a fact that is hardly surprising in view of the man’s age and medical history. Time, torture, boxing, cancer treatments, and heavy drinking will do that to you. And blaming the guy is also beside the point since he has far more serious things to apologize for than mere decrepitude. The question is, do we really want to witness a long process of increasingly embarrassing public gaffes, all relentlessly denied and covered up by the PR sharks while a subterranean succession-struggle plays out in the White House basement? That wouldn’t be a very pleasant spectacle even in settled times, but it might be fatal in an age in which great power competition is awakening from its post-Cold War slumber and economic and environmental crisis require an energetic response.

Of course it is possible that McCain’s mental state is better than it appears to be, and the remarkably uninformed or merely strange remarks he makes reflect his previous level of ignorance rather than the advent of dementia. If so, his age remains a serious issue because one can hardly expect a 72-year old to learn on the job—heck, I’m 63 and you can’t teach me anything! McCain is certainly not going to rethink his assumptions or listen to new ideas. What you get it is some fraction of what the man was ten or twenty years ago; and if that wasn’t all that much to begin with, you can’t expect that McCain will turn out to be an American version of Adenauer, Mandela, or Gladstone.

By the way, is it decent or patriotic for Republicans to support the candidacy of an obviously incompetent man? Why do they keep nominating people like that?

A Proverb from the Chinese

The Federal bailout of AIG is demonstrating an important point: the alternative to regulation is not laissez faire; it’s socialism.

You Can’t Get Behind the Man Behind

A right-wing hippy of my acquaintance was giving Obama trouble the other day for trying to buy votes. I didn’t immediately get what she meant, until she explained that the Obama tax plan, which, according to her, would reduce the tax bill of families making around $40,000 by a couple of thousand, counted as a bribe . I was going to point out that the McCain plan, which would save billionaires something like half a million a year, was presumably pretty motivating for them as well. In fact, the issue had little to do with pandering. The lady simply doesn’t believe that income tax should be progressive in the first place. Along with astrology, astral bodies, acupuncture, and seventy-two other kinds of woo, she buys into the flat tax mythology, presumably because, due to a failure of nerve, she chickened out of going all the way to belief in the flat earth. To be fair, she actually doesn’t believe in any kind of income tax. Indeed, for her the very idea of an income tax is so unconstitutional, even an amendment to the Constitution couldn’t make it constitutional.

To me it very much matters to make the following point clearly: Obama’s tax policy is not buying votes or anything of the sort. In favoring a tax system that redistributes wealth, he’s simply supporting policies that are an integral part of the general outlook of the Democratic Party as they are of most political parties of the left, center, and moderate right all over the world. Similarly, Democrats are hardly pandering or buying votes when the call for universal health care. They’ve been calling for that since Truman’s time at least. If you are opposed to progressive taxation, health care, or indoor plumbing, you are of course perfectly within your rights to do so; but it hardly seems fair to equate support for such things with what Republicans do when they grudgingly come up phony health care schemes or float the notion of a gas tax holiday they don’t believe in themselves. That’s pandering. What Obama is proposing may or may not be wise policy, but it is in line with what he and most Democrats think is right.

Now Democratic candidates certainly hope that people will vote for them because of the benefits they will gain from their policies. I’m not clear what’s wrong with that. Or is the problem that the wrong sort of people will benefit? After all, Republican policies are also aimed to benefit somebody, just not the majority of people. The structural difference between the two parties is that the more democratic party doesn’t have to lie as much as the oligarchic party to get elected by popular vote. McCain is setting some kind of record for bald-faced lying on television; but the fundamental reason he is lying is not a character flaw, but a deep political necessity. When Democrats get dishonest, as they surely do from time to time, it is a moral defect. It isn’t a part of the partly platform.

A Whiff of Sauerkraut

It is a misunderstanding to suppose that human beings descended from chimpanzees or gorillas. In reality, both modern apes and modern men have a common ancestor, albeit one that would have struck an observer as distinctly apelike. Anybody who suggests that the current administration is analogous to Hitler’s regime falls into a similar error. Bush and his cohort are obviously not Nazis. They simply share a common ancestor with them, namely, the Second Reich. Bush is not very much like Hitler, but he’s quite a bit like Kaiser Wilhelm II and he’s surrounded by quite a few Ludendorff wannabes—McCain is more in the tradition of Hindenburg, a dullard who looks good in a uniform. Unfortunately, many of the people with a spiritual kinship with pre-1918 Germany are not part of the Bush administration or even necessarily Republicans.

It is well known that the American system of postgraduate education follows a German model. Unfortunately, the Ph.D. is not the only institution we borrowed from them. Our military was formed on a German model. If you read old American army textbooks on the conduct of war, you’ll find that our ideas of how to deal with insurgencies are distinctly Teutonic, featuring bland instructions to take civilian hostages and burn down villages. The similarities are small wonder since the infantry manuals recommend, with footnotes, no less, the methods the Germans used against French guerillas during the Franco-Prussian War and against the Herero in Southwest Africa. Of course all modern militaries borrowed a lot from the technical innovations of the German military. What worries me, however, is not that our men go into battle in German helmets or that we have a general staff, but the way in which the military has become for us as it was for the Germans: the moral model for national behavior.

The German Empire was characterized less by an ideology than by a set of practices, a general admiration for authority and violence, and a tendency to automatically justify any action by appeal to military necessity. Long before Bush and Chaney dispensed with international law, the Germans were abusing prisoners, engaging in preventative wars, and using terror weapons such as gas, not because a threat to national survival justified these transgressions but because victory was thought to depend upon them. The precedent for our occupation of Iraq was the German occupation of Belgium and Eastern Europe in the years 1914 to 1918; and the methods of occupation were not dissimilar either, i.e., they were both characterized by the extraordinary levels of incompetence and corruption that are routine in areas run by military fiat. The Republicans may give lip service to the virtues of a competitive market economy, but in giving carte blanche to the military industrial complex they are really opting for a command economy.

The Teutonic/American idealization of the military has a disastrous effect on strategy, which, contrary to the usual bleat, is not about winning victories. That’s simply not the point of rational policy. It’s the object of a game of tin soldiers. Serious strategy may certainly include resort to violence, but the German example shows what you get when you make a fetish of the glorious decisive battle. Before World War I, the military philosophers of the Reich endlessly dreamed of repeating the triumph of Hannibal at the Battle of Cannae and contemplated with rapture (if not tumescence) the neat diagram of his paradigmatic double envelopment. They spent much less time noticing that Carthage lost the war. Many Americans also make a fetish of purely operational and technical military efficiency as if a big, smash up victory solves all problems. Of course, at least in the case of the Second Iraq War, it was the civilian authorities who imposed this mind set on the military and not the other way around since many professionals in the American army have a far more adult conception of war and politics than the average right-wing politician.

In the absence of a sense of specific purpose, a military will more or less inevitably pursue the abstract, almost tautological goal of absolute power. That’s what happened in Germany before World War I. In the quest for the ability to crush all enemies, the Germans guaranteed a non-stop arms race that they could only lose and alienated much of the world. Our situation is similar. We keep pouring money into the military, not to defend ourselves from any particular threat, but in pursuit of the dream of total world dominance. Now it may be that we can afford to spend more money on arms than the rest of the world put together, though I doubt if that will remain possible indefinitely or even very much longer; but unless you plan on actually dominating the world, all the money you spend over and beyond what it would take to remain safe is in any case a sheer waste. Worse, since the other countries are aware of what we are doing and will take steps to match our endless build up. The most important strategic consequence of the anti-ballistic missile program, for example, is likely to be an increase in the number of Russian and, more importantly, Chinese weapons aimed at us. Our endless quest for overwhelming power also has the effect of encouraging the development of non-conventional ways to thwart our power. Terrorism is the most obvious asymmetric response. There will be others.

Northern Lights

Obama is certainly wise to avoid commenting on the Palin situation. It’s not a good idea to interfere when your opponent is committing political suicide. You will only impede the process. But I strongly disagree with the idea that private citizens are somehow out of line when they address the many policy issues that are raised by recent developments. Democrats aren’t the ones who like to hide under beds with tape recorders. We are entitled, however, to read the papers.

To be absolutely clear, nobody on the planet is trying to give a pregnant teenager a hard time. We are simply pointing out

a. The rampant hypocrisy of Governor Palin in regards to sex education and abortion. c.f. bragging about her daughter's supposedly free choice and also her own free choice about her own pregnancy even though she is on the record as opposing the right of any woman to have a choice in such situations.

b. The way in which the whole affair points out the stupidity of abstinence only sex education.

c. The willingness of Palin to mislead the public--she only fessed up to the family problem because of pressure from Daily Kos and a few other journalists. She obviously planned to keep her daughter's pregnancy quiet until after the election.

d. The political cynicism of McCain in making a rash and spasmodic decision about a running mate for temporary political advantage.

e. The remarkable ineptitude shown by McCain and his staff in handling the whole affair.

f. The way in which picking Palin reflects McCain's subservience to the radical Christian right. Far from being a soaring eagle, he is only a bird in a gilded cage.

For these and many other reasons, the Palin problem is not going to go away, nor should it. But, once again, nobody, except Mrs Palin, of course, is guilty of willfully putting a pregnant teenager through the wringer.

A Face the Color of Sepulchers

The issue that matters in the forthcoming election is not about foreign policy or health care or, more generally, the choice between Neoliberalism and Social Democracy, though these and many other issues are in play. The great question of the day is about whether the United States will be an ethnic state dominated by white males or an inclusive state where everyone is welcome and citizenship depends upon allegiance to a set of ideas. If McCain, wins at a time when his party has made a mess of everything for the last eight years, the reason can only be that a decisive mass of Americans has opted for a racial definition of membership in the nation. It’s almost as if the Republicans, driven by an unconscious logic, have selected a candidate so obviously inferior in order to make things as clear as possible. Just as committed monarchists best show their principles by supporting the birthright of a moronic prince, nativist Conservatives want to make the point that even a senile mediocrity is preferable to a brilliant and dynamic black man so long as he is white. And McCain is perfect for that role.

I don’t mean to claim that there aren’t lots of other reasons that people will vote for McCain. If you are very well off, the Republican tax plan and hostility to unions will mean money in your pockets. The Republican foreign policy is also a meal ticket for a significant group of people. And there are plenty of non-racist innocents who continue to believe against all the evidence that the Republicans stand for small government, sound economic policies, and individual rights, though their actions mark them as cynical authoritarians. If there are any rational reasons to vote for McCain, however, they have to be balanced against the consequences of going down the road of culture war. White supremacy, which really means the dominance of a certain kind of white, has no future. Whitebread Americans are shortly going to be in the minority in this country, and the Republican policy of us versus them is going to look pretty foolish once the tables are turned and they decisively outnumber us. I suppose somebody might argue that the Call of the Blood really is more important than the merely rational appeal of Enlightenment ideals; but from a practical point of view, cultural politics is a dead end. A multi-cultural America may well fail, but a monochrome America is not possible and just saying never is a prescription for disaster. Voting Republican at this historical juncture is simply unpatriotic.

The Trouble with Evil Enemies

There is remarkably little daylight between the policy positions of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama but their more rapid partisans talk about their intraparty opponents in much the same way that Martin Luther described the Pope. I hope and mostly expect that most of this bad feeling will drain away. How are the feminist supporters of Clinton ever going to explain to themselves support for a candidate like McCain whose hostility to women’s interests goes a long way beyond a desire to overturn Roe vs Wade? Still, the vehemence of the rhetoric during the Democratic primaries calls for a more specific explanation than the usual bit about politics being all about hating.

Over the last two decades American politics has been dramatically coarsened by the increasingly pathological behavior of the Republicans. Long before Bush and Company established their authoritarian kleptocracy, the Congressional Republicans had decisively broken with the normal rules of engagement that had governed politics for most of the last century. The dynamic core of the Republican party isn't simply made up of people you disagree with. It really is a criminal conspiracy that lies, steals, tortures, and kills—everybody laughs at Kusinch’s omnibus bill of Impeachment but they do so out of cynicism or as accomplices and not because the accusations are not largely true. Opposing our domestic evil empire by any means necessary is the obligation of all Americans and, for that matter, all decent human beings. A Manichean episode in our history has, unfortunately, the side effect of promoting a Manichean approach to all political disputes so that Keith Olberman trots out his Edward R. Murrow imitation to denounce a Clinton campaign gaffe in the same terms as the actions of a war criminal who ought to die in prison and not just lose a primary.

Good Omen

Back in the run-up to World War II, a German general was asked who would win the approaching war. “Whoever isn’t allied with the Italians.” Looking at a photo of Joe Lieberman’s mournful face the other day, it occurred to me that his defection to McCain had its positive side. Of course, no one can categorically assert that the man is the true anti-palladium; but he sure didn’t do Gore any good and if I were a Republican, I’d want him to endorse Bob Barr.

Whig History with Real Whigs

I was maybe two-thirds of the way through Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought when I heard that the book had won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. This work, the most recent installment of the Oxford History of America, covers the period from the end of War of 1812 to the end of the Polk administration. In the single sentence of this 855-page the reviewers singled out, Howe writes, “This book tells a story; it does not argue a thesis.” I don’t know if anybody much believes this expression of innocence, however; for, though Howe is indeed a storyteller and a very good one, his tale is narrated in continuous counterpoint to three previous and equally magisterial accounts of the same era: Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Age of Jackson, Charles Sellers’ The Market Revolution, and Sean Wilentz’ Rise of American Democracy. In the Bibliographical Essay at the end of his book, Howe writes “All three books celebrate the Democratic Party of the time as the agent and defender of democracy against its Whig rival. I disagree with these works…” The mechanical operation of this disagreement takes the form of highlighting the technological and economic benefits of the emerging market economy during the first half of the 19th Century (against Sellers) and soft pedaling the chicane and class interest of the Whigs (against Schlesinger and Wilentz). This is not an illegitimate or unfruitful strategy—every history means by leaving things out—but Howe does sometimes sound like Henry Clay’s campaign manager. The more interesting thing, however, is that he also sounds like Barack Obama’s campaign manager.

Arguments between historians about events that happened hundreds of years ago often come across as allegorical debates about contemporary politics. Howe is an Englishman, but his reinterpretation of Jackson and his enemies is highly relevant to the redefinition of the American party system that has been going on for most of my lifetime. I don’t know if one can reasonably claim that the Democrats have become the party of John Quincy Adams, but they are surely now the party of Lincoln. In the process of absorbing all those Southerners, the Republicans have not only absorbed the racism that was a hallmark of the Democrats right up to FDR, but also adopted as their own Jackson’s lawlessness, demagoguery, and glorification of violence. They have also revived the spoils system—big time as Chaney would say—so that the election of every new Republican president has become the occasion for a riotous looting of the Treasury by thieves in suits. Meanwhile, the Democrats, who are hardly angels, are at least aware that you aren’t supposed to act like that and have taken over the role of defenders of fiscal sobriety from Republicans whose notion of public finance currently owes a lot more to Huey Long than Howard Taft. The Democrats have become the dour proponents of individual and collective responsibility—the realities of universal health care, effective environmental stewardship, and improved educational availability will turn out to be anything but a free lunch—while the Republicans have become the advocates of something for nothing. Go ahead, buy a Hummer. Something will turn up.

Not that I Haven’t Written it Before

Whoever gets the Democratic presidential nomination, we can be sure that the television talking heads will line up behind McCain once the issue is settled. Unfortunately, their obvious prejudice will matter because the vast majority of Americans get their news and from a mass media that is owned by six corporations. There is no monopoly on the dissemination of information and ideas in the United States, but there is a monopoly of the means of propaganda. While our press is not completely unfree, it is just not the case that we have a free press, which is to say, we don’t have a press free enough to maintain a decent country.

The problem is structural. While the television personalities surely bear a moral responsibility for what they have inflicted on the country and the world, our journalism is not mediocre because its personnel are mediocre. The causation runs the other way around. The plum jobs are straight up trades of self-respect for money and airtime. Who else but a contemptible person would be willing to front a gossip hour and call it news? Only dubious characters need apply; and when, as happens once in a while, somebody shows a little integrity and rebels, they end up with a teaching job.

If Jack McCoy were a real person, I expect he’d want to indict several TV anchors on 250,000 counts of second-degree murder for their guilty complicity in electing Bush. It was a clear-cut case of depraved indifference homicide since putting a person like that in charge of a nation had foreseeable consequences. From a policy point of view, however, what’s needed is political action to break up an intolerable concentration of media power in irresponsible hands so that honorable and intelligent people can again find an audience. We need to break up G.E., Time Warner, CBS, Clear Channel, Fox, and the rest and to do what ever else is necessary to ensure that all points of view have access to mass markets.

Translatio Imperii

Chalmers Johnson, echoing an old theme of political philosophy, points out that a nation clings to empire at the cost of eroding the domestic liberties of its own people. He praises the British for giving up their empire and thereby preserving a liberal form of government. As a general proposition, I agree with Johnson; but I think he gives the British rather too much credit because their renunciation was made entirely more palatable because they ceded dominion to a kindred people who spoke their language and shared many of their values and institutions. The translation of empire was a family affair. If the United States ever brings itself to forgo hegemony, this consolation will not be available.

The really alarming thing is not that the next imperial power will not be Anglo-Saxon or even Western, but that there is no obvious heir to the throne of any kind. India and China are obviously rising powers, but it is rather hard to imagine them attaining anything like the pre-eminence the British enjoyed in the 19th Century and we’ve had since World War II. It will be a tremendous accomplishment for them to maintain their own unity and prosperity in the face of exhausted resources and environmental degradation. Projecting power globally is probably beyond their capabilities and, aside from attaining specific purposes such as securing oil, wouldn’t be in their national interests. In any case, the Chinese and the Indians simply don’t have the Messianic ideologies necessary to aspire to universal domination. Marxism is out of gas, and Indian cultural nationalism is intrinsically parochial. We’re willing to blow foreigners to smithereens in the name of Democracy. What would the Indians kill for? Ahimsa?

Imagining a world without a master requires more imagination than most of us can muster, and it is far from clear whether international commissions and regional condominiums can keep maintain order for very long. Chalmers Johnson is famously unhappy about the hundreds of bases that the United States maintains throughout the world, but what would actually happen if we gave up all those imperial outposts? I take it that’s anything but a rhetorical question, and it’s not a question for Americans only.

Old and decaying empires last as long as they do because the surrounding powers find it safer to preserve them than to deal with the chaos that would follow their destruction. The U.S. is not yet the sick old man of North America, but it is remarkable how willing the other countries have been to indulge our national vanity while underwriting our national debt. Apparently the legacy hunters want the geezer to survive, at least until they get to sneak a look at the will and assure themselves that they’ll inherit something valuable and not just a bunch of bills.

So Who’s Bitter?

The rural/working class population of the United States is hardly homogeneous. To a considerable degree, what we're really talking about here is the culture and politics of one big slice of the pie: Southern whites, whether in the South or in their diaspora. For them, as it was for Jackson, Polk, or Jefferson Davis, freedom just is the right of white men to do what they want, no matter the foreseeable consequences to other people or the health of the planet. Minorities and women can go hang or be hanged, as the case may be; and aggressive military adventures are automatically justified and enthusiastically promoted because they enlarge the domain of the real America. This group tends to gestures of adolescent rebellion combined with de facto cringing subservience to their betters, heroic levels of substance abuse, and an absurd glorification of noise, ignorance, and violence. The sentimental or hysterical worship of an idol named Jesus doesn't do much to moderate this bad behavior. Indeed, the Fundamentalist strain of Protestantism actually excuses pathological folkways by blaming avoidable failings on original sin. The continuing problem of American history is how to civilize this bunch or, failing that, how to limit the damage they do to themselves and the rest of us. For more than 200 years, the South has punched above its weight in American politics. To Hell with their purported bitterness and the cynical interests that incite and exploit it

One Hundred Years of Hebetude
Senator McCain did not in fact endorse a hundred-year war in Iraq. He imagines a future in which we maintain a peaceful military presence in the country in the same way we have kept large forces in Germany and South Korea since World War II. Unfortunately, even on a favorable (and accurate) interpretation of his much-debated remarks, the strategy he endorses reflects a serious misunderstanding of history and Real Politik.

The forces we keep in Europe and Northeast Asia have generally been understood to be defensive in character since no one seriously believed that the U.S. had the power or the will to use them as a springboard for military expansion—the Pax Americana worked as well as it did not only because we were powerful but because our power had obvious limits. The soldiers in Germany and Korea were not the vanguard of a potential invasion. They were hunkered down. They had, and to some extent still have, the role of hostages, reassuring our allies that any attack on them would automatically be an attack on us. A couple of divisions in the Fulda Gap probably couldn’t hold back the Soviets, but their sacrifice could trigger a nuclear response and that represented a credible disincentive. Meanwhile, propaganda aside, the Russians and the Chinese were not threatened in their own spheres and everybody benefited from a situation in which boundaries were frozen in place—I note that the postwar period is the longest stretch of time in recorded history in which no army crossed the Rhine with evil intent. Unfortunately, none of these considerations apply to an endless American occupation of Iraq.

We’re not in Iraq to fend off the aggression of a neighboring nation. There is no Soviet Union or Red China staring at us across the ridgeline of the Zagros. The notion that large military formations armed with terror weapons are necessary to fend off terrorism is really quite peculiar when you think about it: it’s a little like employing cavalry against submarines. While our existing bases in the Persian Gulf might possibly be characterized as defensive in purpose, the enormous facilities we’re building in the Mesopotamian desert are obviously intended to support further interventions in Iran and Central Asia while securing privileged access to petroleum resources. I doubt if Iraq can ever be a safe place for American soldiers. Insurgencies wax and wane; and enough bombs and troops can keep a lid on things for months or years; but the inflammation is probably incurable so long as the foreign body remains lodged in the victim. But even if the people of Iraq could somehow be so browbeaten as to peacefully accept foreign domination, the rest of the region and the rest of the world would surely view the big bases as a perpetual provocation if not simply as a modern version of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Which is why McCain’s hundred-year plan is the dumb idea of a rather dumb man.

Practical Monadology
Perhaps because I’m doomed to be a philistine anyhow, I’ve embraced programmatic philistinism as a way of rethinking philosophical concepts. For example, I propose to consider human freedom, not as an edifying postulate that can only be defended by complicated transcendental maneuvers but as something that becomes merely obvious once you stop imagining that freedom is evidence of our celestial provenance. So far from evincing our kinship with the angels, human free will is an intensified version of the functional autonomy that goes along with being an animal.

I got to thinking about human freedom most recently while watching a cable show about a maximum-security prison. In one sequence, six or seven burly guards had to equip themselves in elaborate armor to safely subdue a not particularly large man. Even with all their gear, they had a terrific struggle on their hands. It simply happens to be the case that human beings are extremely hard to control by direct means, a fact which, like our descent from some sort of monkey, ought to be as clear to parents as to prison guards.

Except for the most extreme and uncharacteristic situations—high security prisons and locked insane asylum wards—people are ruled by rewards and punishments. Even when the rhetoric in play involves whips and hot pokers, people have to be persuaded by enticements and sanctions. No society could afford to manage the behavior of very many individuals with the physical methods used at Pelican Bay. Short of simply annihilating people, the worst tyrant in the world is obliged to address the purposes of his victims, though the purposes at issue may be mere survival or the avoidance of present pain. A forteriori, no one get useful work out of workers by main force.

You are out of luck if you’re looking for a magic kind of free will that is as uncaused as the decay of a neutron and yet intimately rooted in the personality of the willer. That kind of free will is a conceptual chimera, an Unding, useful only to inspire Sunday homilies or give the executioner a good conscience. Chasing such metaphysical dreams may distract us from noticing the zoological reality of garden-variety freedom or exploring its very significant implications. It matters very much that the individual components of human society interact primarily by final rather than efficient causation. We may not inhabit the kingdom of ends mandated by the ethical system of Immanuel Kant, but we aren’t pool balls on a pool table either and that’s simply a fact.

Symmetries

The question is occasionally asked whether there are any groups in Iraq that are really on our side. The left-over Baathists, local and imported Al Quaida, and radical Shiites obviously hate us, which leaves the non-Baathist secular Sunnis, who blame us for leaving them at the mercy of the Shia but are willing to put up with us for the time being, and the bulk of the Shia who also want us gone, though they differ among themselves as to timing. The exception is the Kurds, the sole and only faction in the country that is doing pretty well and not coincidentally the only Iraqis who aren’t under foreign occupation; but even their support has a hidden reservation: they know we’re very likely to betray them to the Turks, Syrians, and Iranians in the end. Meanwhile, other ethnic and religious minorities in the country—the Christians and Turks, for example—have already learned not to put their faith in princes (or presidents). One has to look long and hard for anybody who is really on our side, and even our erstwhile allies are allies from policy and for the time being.

Our universal unpopularity in Iraq is not the most salient strategic fact, however. In principle, bribery and favoritism could win the hearts and minds of some local faction. Thing is, it’s pretty hard to figure out just what Iraqi group we would want on our side. There just aren’t any candidates for the role that was played, if only in our historical imagination, by Filipinos or Vietnamese mountain tribesmen. Groucho famously would not join any club that would be willing to have him as a member. How could we respect—or trust—any Iraqi who was so abject as to follow our lead with the dog-like loyalty demanded by the current administration? Bush demands gratitude. Oil isn’t enough. In fantasies, it may be agreeable to imagine someone who not only let’s you have your way with them but actively desires their own submission; but in the real world all that’s available are individuals who are willing to play out that script temporarily if the price is right. In Iraq, apparently, there aren’t even many of those left; and the rest of the actual Iraqis are too religious, too secular, too nationalistic, or too simply too self- respecting for the purposes of the current administration.

It isn’t just that they don’t like us. We don’t like them.

The Bolton Treatment

John Bolton, Bush’s former U.N. Ambasssador, was on the Daily Show last night—apparently Jon Stewart will eventually get around to interviewing everybody. Bolton defended the firing of the federal prosectutors and several other administration moves by referring to what he called “democratic theory.” He used that phrase several times. It occurred to me that Bolton, who certainly thinks of himself as a deep thinker, was probably channeling Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s idea of democracy is that the leader, elected by the people once and for all, is superior to law since his authority comes directly from the masses.

By Bolton’s lights, bureaucratic resistance to elected officials goes against the will of the people and is therefore illegitimate. It doesn’t seem to bother him if the Administration uses its legal arm to persecute its political enemies and protect its corrupt supporters. That’s consistent. One characteristic of Schmitt’s reactionary populism is its tendency to collapse together party and state. Political authority is unitary and vested in the party and its leader. Since He is the State, other sources of power are mere obstacles to the proper functioning of democracy. In Bolton’s view, as Stewart pointed out, it’s hard to see what would count as a proper check on the maximum leader. In this respect, though Bolton’s version of semi-fascism is rather more highfalutin, he’s very close to another Bush courtier, Albert Gonzales, who has famously asserted the priority of the Commander-in-Chief over Congress and the courts.

There’s something to be said for plain speaking. When Leopold Bloom requested a blow job by telling a whore “there are better things to wrap your lips around than a cylinder of rank weed.” The doxy replied, “You don’t have to make a stump speech out of it.” We need to make the same kind of reply when radical authoritarians like Bolton try to retail the Führerprinzip as “democratic theory.”

300 Ironies

I specialize in arguments that don’t convince anybody. I used to encounter students who were impressed by the theories of Erich von Däniken, especially his notion that aliens from outer space taught the Egyptians about pyramids and helped build them too, which was necessary since handling big stones were hard for people who hadn’t even invented ropes yet. Since it didn’t help to show students Old Kingdom bas reliefs that depicted Egyptians using ropes, I tried another unsuccessful tact. I pointed out how strange it was that a space faring species of fantastic technical sophistication favored an architectural form that amounted pretty much to a big heap of stones. If something like Chartres Cathedral or one of those rock-cut temples from medieval India turned up in Luxor, we’d be entitled to marvel. But pyramids? Of course that consideration was pretty much a flop. Indeed, to judge by the success of the Star Gate franchise, adolescents continue to imagine that intergalactic super beings, dressed in jackal outfits no less, not only favor the design but fly around the Universe in enormous pyramid ships.

When 300, the semi-cartoon version of the Battle of Thermopylae, arrived, I had another idea that was sure to be dead on arrival. It struck me as an incredible irony that the movie cast the struggle between the Greeks and the Persians as a fight between light and darkness, good and evil. The trouble with this narrative, aside from its mind-numbing banality, is that the Greeks themselves didn’t think of the war in this way. Herodotus, who literally wrote the book on this patch of history, represented the struggle as the latest episode in a long quarrel between Europe and Asia. It was no more a showdown between the cowboys in white hats and the cowboys in black hats than the Trojan War had been a matter of good guys versus bad guys. Indeed, in his quasi-epic framing of the history, Herodotus specifically refers to the Trojan War as an earlier bout in the same ongoing contest. A century after Herodotus there were Greek writers who reinterpreted the Persian Wars as a contest of civilization versus barbarism, but the propagandistic efforts of orators like Isocrates, which were part of a public relations campaign that justified in advance Alexander’s conquest of the East, still did not represent the issues in terms of moral dualism for the very good reason that this way of thinking is about as non-Hellenic as you can get. It is, in fact, Persian. So 300, which recounts the brave stand of the Spartans against Xerxes bestial horde, a military feat that led to the invader’s eventual defeat, actually underlines how the Persians won in the long run

Cooling Down the Heated Up

Just as Creationists and ID types reject evolution because of what they believe are its religious implications, global warming deniers reject the new consensus because of what they think are the political implications of doing something about climate change. They think that green ideas are stalking horses for one-world government and socialism. Which is why arguing about the science with them doesn't help very much. From their point of view, what's at stake isn't a scientific question at all. You might as well assume that Philip Johnson was motivated by a sincere desire to understand nature.

Since the real objection to global warming is not that it is unreal but that dealing with it will increase the power of government, it might be worthwhile to point out what kind of steps are being recommended to deal with greenhouse gases. Do they amount to "massive government intervention?"

The role of government in dealing with climate change appears to be threefold:

1. Paying for research about the issue.

2. Promoting behavioral changes through public education.

3. Altering existing regulations.

Some of these measures certainly cost public money, though not necessarily huge amounts of it. As far as I can see, however, they don't require governments to do anything qualitative different than they are doing now. The U.S. already requires electric utilities to limit the emission of certain substances. The various health-related agencies work to reduce smoking and promote exercise among the population. The Feds subsidize an enormous amount of research. So what are the conservatives so afraid of? Public service ads telling you to turn off the damned lights?

The irony is that unchecked climate change will certainly require a great increase in government investment. If you think CO2 sequestration is expensive, wait until you see the bill the Army Corps of Engineers runs up trying to save Florida.

A Peephole

It is a common observation that Americans are proudly, even arrogantly monolingual, insisting that others learn English, even in their home countries, while finding the persistence of other languages in America offensive or politically threatening. Our cultural solipsism goes beyond that, however. To judge by what sells, even educated people tend to limit their reading to works written for them in a uniform, patronizing idiom as devoid of challenge and surprise as Adventure Land is devoid of adventure. They are also apparently reluctant to read anything that was written more than a hundred years ago, which explains the commercial rationale of P. J. O’Rourke recently published premasticated summary of the Wealth of Nations—I guess late 18th Century prose is now as linguistically challenging as Chaucer. I’ve got absolutely nothing against children’s books. It’s the ubiquity of children’s books written for adults that bothers me, if only because it is in listening to a real diversity of voices we find our own. As it is, most of us feed from a cultural buffet, which looks sumptuous enough from a distance but, like the menu at Taco Bell, actually consists of a lot of variations on greasy ground beef and processed cheese.

Lazy Reason

Defenders of civil rights, like defenders of the environment, are at a rhetorical disadvantage. So long as they succeed in preserving the guarantees of the Bill of Rights, it will be possible to assert or imply that there never had been a serious threat to anybody’s liberty, just as the fact that nothing very dire happened at the turn of the millennium is routinely used as evidence that the preparations that prevented Y2K problems had been unnecessary in the first place. In the eras of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Red Scare, and McCarthyism, however, threats to our rights were only thwarted after a protracted struggle led by determined politicians, lawyers, and journalists who had to withstand abuse, official oppression, and sometimes violence. There was nothing preordained about who was going to win these struggles, either, as witness the fact that some of the battles went the other way as in the episode in which the South instituted the Jim Crow laws.

Whatever physics rules the history of mankind, it is rather more complicated than simple harmonic motion. Unlike a pendulum whose steady beat results from the operation of an automatic restoring force, the cycles of repression and freedom are mediated through the intelligent—or unintelligent—action of individuals. That’s a very scary fact. Blasting down Interstate 5, it’s comforting to think that the semi ahead of you stays in the lane through the operation of some sort of gyrostatic stabilizer instead of the occult operation of a human brain; but we know perfectly well that those thousands of pounds of metal would quickly veer off the road or crash into your Mustang absent the continual intervention of the driver. Of course, from a purely statistical point of view, the human nervous system is usually up to the task of steering a car. Indeed, its complexity probably makes it more rather than less reliable than a simple feedback system. Nevertheless, we prefer not to dwell on the way in which the functioning of the world depends upon the care of human beings and not some imaginary thermostat. Besides, to revert to the political sphere, the notion that excess automatically corrects itself provides an effective apology for complacency. Worse than that, it licenses those who attack civil liberties and democracy because those who indulge their sweet tooth for authoritarianism secretly believe that they’ll be restrained before they go to far.

Words at Work

Georges Bataille, the French philosopher, novelist, and pornographer, used to talk about the "job" of a word, not what it means or what it refers to but what it is used for. Like many other theological words, spirituality doesn't have very much to offer on a conceptual level--nobody is very interested in specifying what it denotes--but many people obviously find it useful.

Sometimes people appeal to spirituality as a way of complaining about the narrowness of the scientific outlook. Even the most souless secularist can certainly sympathize with that. To listen to the rhetoric of pan-scientism, you'd have to conclude that its supporters are unaware that science is a vanishingly tiny fraction of human experience. The question was asked "have you ever had an experience that you could not scientifically explain?" as if it weren't obvious that almost every experience is not reducible to some sort of scientific explanation--"spiritual" experience, which always seems to be exemplified by sighing at a beautiful vista, is nothing extraordinary in this regard. Most of what we do—hoping, enjoying, hurting, arguing, sympathizing, cursing, laughing, trying, playing—isn't captured by the sciences and can't be, not because of some defect of science but because science is about knowing about things in a particular way while living is comprised of all the ways we do and suffer. One can imagine an explanation of a joke that accurately and adequately described it in terms of atoms and void, but the explanation wouldn't be funny. Category mistake. The best screwdriver in the world is a lousy adverb.

Another job of "spirituality" is less complicated. One insists on possessing spirituality as a no-fuss, shorthand way of asserting "I am not a philistine." If most of these folks really weren't philistines, however, you'd think their spirituality would amount to more than a verbal gesture about oneness with the all. Except for the odd mystic, however, who spends appreciable time communing the cosmos anyhow? Well, experiencing the unity of all things has this much going for it: it requires no complicated or expensive equipment or time-consuming training, you can do it anywhere, and nobody can prove you're faking it.

One small cavil: it's cheating to think that the absence of spirits is an objection to spirituality since the whole point of claiming that you're a spiritual person, as opposed, for example, to a Methodist, is that vaguing things out gets around the necessity of making unlikely empirical claims about the reality of ghosts or angels. That's part of the job of "spirituality."

Supply Your Own Context

Where there isn’t really anything very important to discuss, the quest for truth tends to become a cleverness contest.

The knife is worn away to nothing in an attempt to keep it sharp.

We don’t live under the kindly gaze of an infinite God, but we are embedded in a body that will forgive us for the time being.

Epistemia gravis is like constipation. For the most part, it only afflicts those who bother to worry about it.

Second Nature

Years ago I visited a strip joint with a bunch of salesmen from my publishing company. A particularly attractive stripper propositioned one of my co-workers, who, as he explained later, refused her offer despite the reasonable price, not because he was especially scrupulous about such things—he’d just gotten a lap dance from the aforementioned girl—but because he figured that once he paid for it and had a good time, he’d soon become a regular customer of hookers. “Bad precedent.” The response to Mr. Bush’s speech reminded me of this little fragment of life wisdom because even the president’s critics obviously don’t think there was anything peculiar about imposing our will on a foreign nation, our innocence about the propriety of that sort of thing having been lost a long time ago now. While lots of commentators complain that bombing Iran or attacking Syria or murdering Sadr may be inadvisable from a cost-benefit point of view, very few, especially among the numerous tribe of the liberal hawks, evince any inhibition about the casual use of violence against non-Americans in their own countries. Of course, the novelty of this sociopathy is only relative—America has been treating the nations in its sphere of influence with contempt for well over a hundred years now—but it is new to extend the blessings of the Monroe Doctrine to any nation not strong enough to fend us off.

I’m no pacifist. If a country harbors people who have attacked the United States as Afghanistan did or if it invades a neighbor in a way that harms our interests, as Saddam did in the early 90s, I’ve got no problem with the use of military force. I also don’t endorse respect for the sovereignty of other countries on the basis of some a priori moral principle—as I once wrote, the Categorical Imperative is not a suicide pact. It is experience, not moral intuition, that teaches us why it is a dreadful idea to promote international lawlessness and how the loss of inhibitions by one great power often leads to general irresponsibility and misery. The trouble is, we’ve already traveled so far down the road, created so many dreadful precedents, that it is hard to see how we are going to recover a sense of decency in our foreign policy by simply acquiring new leaders. Our hubris has become habitual.

The Construction of a Novel Racism

Bush is still promising victory in the Middle East, but just who it is we propose to defeat remains in doubt. To speak of Iraq alone, the enemy is sometimes the left-over Baathists, sometimes the Iranians, sometimes the radical Shia, sometimes the tribal Sunnis; and it’s a good bet that the Kurds will eventually also find themselves in the field of fire of the American blunderbuss. Small wonder, then, if the part of the public that still supports the President will be tempted to simplify things by simply hating every available raghead, including, apparently, the millions of Muslims who are neither Arab nor Persian, various Middle-Eastern groups that are completely secular, and even American converts to Islam. What’s occurring is the construction of a race, which I define as a taxon that arises from political contingencies but is retroactively understood to be a natural group unified by an unchanging essence. Traveling down the Mobius strip, the essence is then retroactively invoked to explain the political contingencies that called it into existence in the first place. No negitude without slavery. No world-wide Jihadi menace without Israel and petroleum.

In political history, age-old, intractable conflicts are often the last things to be invented. When normal institutions break down, new bases must be found for political identities, and an obvious place to look for such expedients is ancient history. We may be permitted to doubt that the Serbs were obsessing about the Field of Crows in 1950 or that Ossetian nationalism was smoldering beneath the bureaucratic crust during the Soviet era. Any stone is a weapon in a riot, including, depending on the circumstances, moldy old Eastern Orthodoxy or the long forgotten dream of the Caliphate. Which doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that a rapidly improvised Clash of Civilizations isn’t a real conflict or that it can be as easily dispelled as it was summoned into its eternal existence.

The Dikes are Perfectly Adequate so Long as it Doesn’t Rain

Contemporary discussions of the value or irrelevance of economic equality have an 18th Century flavor. Apparently serious people speak about the issue as if it could be reasonably addressed without a dynamic historical context. Hence those who discount equality point out that poor people enjoy high levels of consumption while those who try to find a modern version of egalitarianism highlight the human costs of even relative (positional) poverty. I’m still waiting for somebody to point out that this academic debate, conducted in impeccably abstract faux-Enlightenment style, is premised on the highly dubious proposition than general wealth and, indeed, economic progress is a given. Unfortunately, real human beings are not embedded in a reliably benign eternity of peace and prosperity like cherries in a jello salad. What feels like equilibrium is more likely the motionlessness of the apogee. In bad times, the true cost of poverty will be quite apparent without complicated theoretical explications by PhD economists. What the wealthy have and the others lack is a margin of safety during emergencies. When things go wrong, it won’t be a case of having to do without plasma screen televisions or having your feelings hurt because your neighbor’s swimming pool is bigger than yours, but genuine deprivation and the stark reality of becoming déclassé. Oddly, both the rich and the poor understand this perfectly, even that part of the poor that thinks of itself as middle class. Somebody should tell the profs, though.

Ifology

I had thought about writing a review of a Unmaking the West, yet another book on counterfactual history; but I find it hard to take the practice seriously enough to make the exercise worthwhile. Historians sometimes use the literary conceit of alternative histories to illustrate worthwhile ideas about what actually happened; but when they imagine that their scenarios have probative as opposed to rhetorical or illustrative value, they lose me.

Counterfactual methods are usually deployed in an attempt to underline the role of contingency in history and to discredit thereby the grand theories that claim that history has an overall logic and destiny—over the last 150 years, for example, counterfactual arguments have been a reliable bludgeon in the interminable scholarly war on Marxism. Unfortunately, counterfactual history itself depends upon the presumption of a certain level of predictability in history; for once some plausible variation is postulated—William of Orange gets shot at the Battle of the Boyne or the wind blows the wrong way in 1588—the consequences of the surprise get worked out on the assumption that nothing else surprising takes place and that the predictable consequences of events play out as scheduled. A history made out of non-stop surprises is just as useless to counterfactual history as a history that runs on rails.

In fact, if history really were an incredibly detailed geology of the surface of the earth, a natural science that treated men as mobile rock formations, I expect that we would conclude that the predictions of historical events would be no more trustworthy than weather reports, especially when the forecasts ventured to tell us what happens after next week. Which is why, by the way, the practitioners of counterfactual history routinely sneak the notion of fate back into their tales—a careful sociological analysis of the economic consequences of a lasting French superiority in Europe will not fail to include the bit about a young Corsican who becomes a successful general in Louis XVI’s triumphant armies as if Napoleon would even be born in an alternative future. They really don’t come to terms with the contingencies of the world at all as anybody who really took seriously the physics or even the biology of the issue would have to do.

If individual human beings and their particular talents and foibles are critical to the outcome of history, as many a counterfactual historian has insisted, it doesn’t much matter what historical event you imagine altering in your imaginary parallel world. The non-linearity built into human reproduction guarantees that a total different cast of characters will soon begin to appear in the sequel even if we imagine that nothing much else takes place. Natural selection has decreed that the genetic cards will be very thoroughly shuffled before and, indeed, during each deal. It may take a cannonball to take off William’s head, but it takes the distant reverberation of a gnat’s fart to result in an Albertine instead of an Albert or to turn a hero into a weakling or nothing at all. Absent some mystic law of destiny, mere mechanics pretty much guarantees that any macroscopic or even microscopic perturbation will suffice to alter the outcome of every future conception in utterly unpredictable ways and, if the premise that individuals matter is correct, result in a drastically different history. Counterfactual history proves too much.

The Necessity of Atheism

The public debate about evolution, like every battle in a culture war, is and always will be conducted by guys in clown suits bopping each other with pig bladders. That's just the way things are. Serious science and serious philosophy are and will remain the business of a tiny and largely invisible minority. The culture wars are not politically unimportant, however, and it behooves us to don our own clown suits from time to time. Sometimes the appropriate clown suit is a village atheist outfit.

Philosophically speaking, atheism is a very uninteresting position since it amounts to making a big fuss about something obvious, i.e. that traditional religious ideas are fatuous. As Diderot pointed out long ago, "It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all." Atheism, at least the sort of atheism one encounters on public access television, also promotes a version of history which is factually dubious since it endlessly recycles the same banal anthology of religious excesses (Crusades, witch hunts, inquisitions) to somehow prove that organized religion is the root of all evil, a proposition that probably gives the churches too much credit. All that admitted, however, loud and obnoxious atheism is still necessary in a country like the United States, if only to assert the right of people to dissent from the totalitarian conformism to which we are so susceptible.

The argument against public assertions of anti-religious ideas is that such language is politically unwise and will only elicit more intolerance from the religious right. In fact, however, the anguish of the believers is good evidence of the effectiveness of such polemics. It makes a huge difference that skeptical ideas are in circulation. They wouldn't be so loudly denounced if they didn't resonate—there may be more Cotton Mather than Mark Twain in the American character, but there is some Mark Twain. In any case, ideas have to be publicized in order to persist since the vast majority of mankind will never find an idea in their heads that somebody didn't go to the trouble of putting there first.

Who the Heck is Jamil Hussein?

The obsessions of others are sometimes so alien to our own way of thinking that we aren’t even aware of the issues that have set their hair ablaze. Many evangelicals were less concerned about the activities of the U.S.S.R. than the formation of the E.U., for example, because they believed that the unity of Europe was one of the signs of the end of days foretold in the Book of Revelations. A more recent example is the attempt of the right-wing blogosphere to get everybody upset about the case of somebody named Jamil Hussein, who the AP apparently claimed as a source for a story about the burning alive of some Iraqis. The bloggers in question deny the existence of the aforementioned Hussein and insist that the AP story is a fraud. Fraud it may have been—who knows?—but the remarkable thing about the question is that anybody thinks it’s very interesting. Obviously most people’s personal understanding of conditions in Baghdad has nothing to do with an incident very few of them ever heard about. Of course, if the Hussein story were fraudulent and also symptomatic of coverage of Iraq, somebody could claim that it had some importance as a telling example. Unfortunately, however, what has really been typical about media behavior during this affair has been a tendency to act as the propaganda arm of the military: for example, the reporters who brought us the faux-iconic image of the toppling of Saddam’s statue were perfectly aware that the event was a staged photo-op but kept quiet about it since they apparently thought of themselves as part of the war effort. To this day, the newscasters treat official pronouncements as if there were somehow credible: I guess they don’t know the phrase from the Napoleonic Wars: to lie like a bulletin.

Since art is long and time is short, I’m reluctant to come up with new arguments to prove that evolution is a reality, Iraq is a mess, and anvils don’t float. I recognize, however, that a great many people actually think that anecdotes are better evidence than statistics. In that spirit, let me venture a rhetorical bomb of my own. Consider this: three years after the end of World War II, American service men were chatting up frauleins and quaffing beer in taverns all over Germany. In Japan, they were going on sightseeing trips to Mount Fuji. Even during the Vietnam War, marines could go out on the town in Saigon. Does anybody believe that an off-duty American soldier could wander around Ramadi without getting shot, beheaded, or kidnapped? Or is that just what the AP wants you to think?

Federalists for Jefferson

You can always tell when a minority political position is gaining ground. The scratchy voices crying out in the wilderness are supplemented and then drowned out by far more unctuous tones as the movement begins to attract supporters who smell new opportunities. Back in the 90s, those of us who publicly attacked the emerging right-wing machine may have suffered from loneliness but the company we did enjoy was very agreeable, at least by our lights. Since we had no political prospects and weren’t operators, we had little incentive to dissemble and mostly didn’t. Perhaps because nobody was offering to buy ‘em, we weren’t much tempted to sell our souls. Anyhow, since the facts were very much on our side, integrity offered a modest but more or less automatic rhetorical advantage at a time when the other rhetorical edges belonged to our enemies. Who knows if the scrupulousness of people such as Joe Conason or Duncan Black or Kos was an expression of character or the product of a situation? Maybe we shouldn’t complain about the journalistic sins of the op/ed writers until we’ve walked a mile in their wingtips. It was easy to be honest when there wasn’t a better option. Things are different now and the newly converted and perhaps some of the old hands, too, will have many new opportunities to lie, cheat, and steal in print.

I certainly don’t expect public debate to be conducted on a very high level under any circumstances and the object of the game in any case is not to preserve a prissy purity but to promote better policies. Scrupulousness is not an art form or an end in itself. Nevertheless, as I emerge from a silence enforced by the twin evils of seasonal affective disorder and full-time employment, I find myself distinctly uncomfortable with some of the new company I’m keeping, including, especially, people like Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post borrows so many of the propaganda techniques of the right-wing press. Her blog assembles many news items from the AP and various newspapers but presents them under headlines that drastically spin their contents, often in astonishingly misleading directions. Huffington herself engages in the kind of personal attacks based on pop psychology that the mainstream press used to sink Al Gore—as you’ll recall, that’s how they got all that blood on their hands—but her favorite target seems to be Hillary Clinton, who she portrays as a scheming harridan as if ambition were a sin in womankind. The point isn’t that Clinton shouldn’t be criticized or even that misogynists should shut up, but that Arianna uses her tactics with such obvious cynicism. She’s not an Neanderthal like Chris Matthews whose hatred of female politicians is an authentic expression of inherited prejudice and personal stupidity. She’s just an opportunist, for whom activating poisonous stereotypes is unobjectionable as long as it happens to be useful at the moment, just as not too long ago, she had no compunction about portraying the rather conservative Diana Feinstein as a raving radical leftist in order to promote the senatorial campaign of her then husband, who was running under false colors as a right-wing Republican. Arianna surely understands the bit about strange bedfellows in politics, and I do too; but I find it difficult to feel comfortable with this particular ally even though, for the time being, her very real talents are mostly being used in favor of causes dear to me.

Disquieting

Today’s videotape from Al Qaeda may be something more than business as usual, not because the spokesman is Adam Gadahn, AKA Azzam the American, but because the message contains a formal invitation to convert or submit: “We invite all Americans and believers to Islam, whatever their role and status in Bush and Blair’s world order. Decide today, because today could be your last day.”

I happen to be reading Wahhabi Islam by Natana J. Delong-Bas and found a footnote that informs me that not only Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, eponymous founder of the school of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia, but a consensus of Islamic scholars insist that the enemy must be summoned to Islam before the initiation of war. In this context, the Gadahn statement strikes me as just the kind of formal nicety that zealots somehow think will have the same meaning for non-believers as it does for them. Since it is now September and two obvious days for an attack are approaching, Labor Day and 9/11, I’m waiting with some trepidation for what happens next.

By the way, just in case the world doesn’t come to an end, let me say a word about Wahhabism because so many people have been influenced by works like Stephen Schwartz’ Two Faces of Islam that trace contemporary militant Islam back to Abd al-Wahhab, a late 18th Century religious leader, even though, as Delong-Bas notes, Wahhab’s uncompromising and rather austere version of Islam does not emphasize holy war on the infidels for the unsurprising reason that the Arabia of his day wasn’t threatened by non-Muslim outsiders. Wahhabism in its later incarnations may have become identified with more fire-breathing versions of the faith—the ferocious Islam of medieval Ibn Taymiyya and the modern Siyyid Qutb, both of whom were responding to external threats—but the original movement was rather like one of the Protestant Great Awakenings, a movement of internal reform, not a call for aggressive war. That doesn’t mean that Wahhabism, even in its early form, wasn’t rather alarming. It was. It just wasn’t more alarming than the contemporary competition and, more to the point, Wahhab’s opinions don’t have very much to do with what people do in his name in 2006. As I never tire of repeating, religions don’t have any bones. They can become anything.

Narcissus, Unimpressed

“Know before whom you stand” is inscribed on the top of the Torah case in many synagogues. I’ve written the same message on the top of my bathroom mirror, though hardly as an exercise in megalomania.

Most of us don’t get ourselves crucified, but the path of even a more or less satisfactory life is marked off by such stations of the cross as the moment when you realize that your plans have failed and you’ll have to make do with fantasies, and the moment when you discover that you have to imagine that you still have desires in order to go on dreaming, and the moment when you recognize that dreaming is as much of a chore as doing the dishes.

I’m anything but a good person, and yet I have a certain automatic generosity. I don’t much care who enjoys something as long as somebody does. It’s as if I believed that there was only one actor behind every part in the play, the self-same crazy hunger chanting “I am the eater, I am the eater, I am the eater!” through its innumerable ravenous mouths. (Or “Feed me!” if you prefer the Little Shop of Horrors to the Upanishads.)

The sad fact that a question isn’t necessarily profound just because it doesn’t have an answer.

The Fifth Rerun of Wagon Train

It is gradually dawning on quite a few people that last week’s terror plot probably wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. Indeed, since none of the villains of the piece had made any bombs or bought airline tickets and many of them didn’t even have passports, it’s not clear that they were ever ready to even rehearse, let alone pull off a massive attack. The charges against the group depend on the testimony, probably extracted under torture, of a man in Pakistani custody. Meanwhile, both Bush and Blair stood in urgent need of a renewal of public panic; and both have a long track record of exaggerating and misrepresenting facts for political gain. Now it is true that even the most relentless bluffer is sometimes dealt good cards. There may indeed have been some sort of plot. Chances are, however, that our boys are just blowing smoke again. Granted the extreme incompetence of these administrations, a real plot would have most likely have been revealed by planes plummeting to the ground. If these guys are able to thwart it, the threat can’t be too serious.

The Murphy Bed

People who love books are advised not to open bookstores on the same reasoning that suggests that the perfect spouse is somebody you don’t hate but don’t particularly like either. I once contemplated a career in the ministry on this basis, figuring that a passionless disbeliever would make a well-nigh ideal Episcopalian priest. Besides, I rather looked the part. As a trial run, I once conducted a service at Pomona College, which went OK, although the congregation was puzzled why I had them sing the hymn about “those in peril on the sea”—I had written the wrong number down in my notes. The clerical theme crops up later in my story as well, though these days, I’ve given up impersonating a Protestant preacher in favor of being mistaken for a local Hassidic rabbi. The rumor that I’m actually Pope Benedict blogging under an assumed name is unsupported by credible evidence, however.

The point is—there must be a point around here someplace—the point is I don’t have any dislike of churches or theologies. I don’t think there is a particle of truth in the articles of anybody’s faith, but that’s not much of an argument against religion. Human life needs a ritual dimension; or, to be more accurate, we prefer not to leave dead family members out in the trash, even if we don’t believe in the prospect of recycling. It’s only humane and decent to frame the facts of our existence with due ceremony. Literal belief in Gods and spirits is unnecessary and, in any case, largely irrelevant even to most believers because modern religiosity is like a Murphy bed. It folds away when not in use.

You often encounter biologists who vigorously oppose the thesis of intelligent design on the unimpeachable grounds that it isn’t science and yet maintain their own Sunday-morning version of divine design. Nature shows no trace of the workings of an extraneous intelligence—the VIN numbers having been filed off the mitochondria—but one can certainly claim that the entire system of the world was created with just the right characteristics to produce intelligent life. Conway Morris, in his otherwise very impressive book Life’s Devices, makes this argument; and is obviously proud of it, too, even though it is very little more than a restatement of the rather basic theorem of modal logic that everything actual was formerly possible. Even the fact, if it is a fact, that the constants of physics have to be almost exactly what they are in order to make life possible, doesn’t provide any evidence of “fine tuning.” Indeed, the expression “fine tuning” is itself an instance of question begging since the whole issue is whether there ever was any tuning or any tuner in the first place. Anyhow, if it is miraculous that our emergence was, like the Battle of Waterloo, a close run thing, adding a second miracle to explain the first won’t lessen the peculiarity of the situation. But if Morris’ argument is a non-starter from a philosophical point of view, it is also a completely harmless one since it has been carefully crafted to have no consequences whatsoever for the conduct of the sciences or for our understating of nature. A perfect Murphy bed.

Incidentally, I was reminded of the Morris book recently when I encountered a somewhat similar line of reasoning in R.J.P. Williams and J.J.R. Frausto de Silva’s “the Chemistry of Evolution,” which, while carefully avoiding theological overtones, attempts to understand the evolution of living things as the more or less inevitable unfolding of the potentialities of elements under the conditions that obtained in early Earth history. Williams and de Silva speak about the emergence of general ways of processing energy and matter such as anaerobic prokaryotes or unicellular eukaryotes or animals with nervous systems and brains rather than of particular taxa while Morris argues, much less plausibly, for the inevitability of something recognizably human, down to bipedal locomotion. Even so, I expect that Williams and de Silva have overstated their case, but I’m inclined to think that the table of Mendeleev does explain rather more than the tablets of Moses. The Chemistry of Evolution book also has the virtue of underling the role of inorganic chemistry in the development and functioning of living things, something rather lost in many popular accounts of living things, reflecting as such accounts do the prejudices of the organic chemists and the journalists’ obsession with DNA.

Democratic Deficits

I mostly hear the term “democratic deficit” used in relation to the situation in the European Union where the bureaucrats in Brussels are largely independent of any control by elected bodies; but the EU case, whose consequences have mostly been benign, is hardly anomalous. Worldwide, the will of the people only matters when it happens to coincide with the desires of some ruling group. Thus, most citizens of the United Kingdom didn’t support British participation in the Iraq invasion and want the troops brought home. Opinion in the United States has trended strongly in the same direction. That doesn’t seem to matter. Indeed, bringing up the disconnect between the wishes of the public and the government may be counterproductive since it is demonstrates to the operators of the system how little they have to fear from below. Every defeat of the people reinforces the arrogance of the elites. Having lost their inhibitions, the politicians and technocrats cheerfully fix elections, corrupt judicial systems, intimidate the press, and—if necessary—overturn the occasional inconvenient electoral result by simply murdering their opponents, Israeli style. I’m reminded of the Don Larson cartoon where the trained bears suddenly discover how easy it is to tear off their muzzles.

I’m not a proponent of universal populism. My political philosophy is banal indeed, a barely updated version of Aristotle’s theory of mixed government; and I believe that the will of the people is only one element in a happily constituted state. Private property and the economic inequality that goes with it require that society be maintained in a condition of perpetual tension; and science and many other cultural institutions are also anti-popular institutions that have to be maintained against the ignorance and superstition normal to our species. Nevertheless, when the level of exploitation of the many by the few becomes greater than the level at which it promotes a higher general level of welfare, it becomes morally problematic; and when it rises without moderation, it becomes practically unsustainable. Of course, it may be that advances in military technology and propaganda techniques will allow elites to maintain or increase their control; but I think it is more likely that the end of the era of economic and demographic expansion will eventually destroy the dynamic equilibrium as the haves fall out among themselves and the have-nots figure out how to get even. This set of contradictions has already resulted in at least one casualty: the word Democracy, which, like Lenin’s body, has been reeking of formaldehyde for some time now.

Sexually Based Offenses are Considered Particularly Marketable

Television is often a victimless crime. When some cable channel talking head makes a few bucks by hosting a special on an alien autopsy or the Shroud of Turin, the willful misrepresentation of the facts is no more objectionable than the net stockings on a hooker. It’s just something the johns like; and the second-rate celebrities that host these shows probably figure that the work, inglorious as it is, still beats opening strip malls. The calculated promotion of public ignorance is far harder to excuse when real human beings are hurt in the process. I’m not just thinking of the way the corporate shills on CNBS encourages stock market speculation or Fox stokes the natural cowardice of the American people in order to justify war and torture. The entertainment shows also spread false and misleading ideas and do so far more effectively than any blond harpy on CNN.

It is the premise of countless television shows that sex offenders are impossible to rehabilitate and should be locked up forever. For Law and Order Special Victims Unit and the others, once a molester, always a molester is a genre convention like the well-known fact that you can’t see vampires in the mirror. Now it is very hard to come by reliable statistics on recidivism, but the biggest meta-statistical study I’ve encountered suggests that the recidivism rate for sex crimes is approximately 13.4%, notably lower than the 40+% recidivism rate for other crimes. Apparently the guy you really, really don’t want moving in next door isn’t Ernie the perv, but a garden-variety mugger.

Granted that it is childishly easy and highly profitable to get people hysterical about sexual offenses, don’t television producers, writers, and actors have some responsibility for riling up the lynch mob? The real justification for permanently stigmatizing sexual offenders is not that their crimes are especially harmful—a lot of these guys are hapless flashers and voyeurs, after all, and some of them are sixteen year old boys caught groping their fifteen year old girlfriends—but that the public can be made to believe that the rare cases of homicidal child-abusers are somehow typical and that people who like child pornography are very likely to feel up the next kid they meet. To speak like an anthropologist, sex crimes are sacred. One has to believe that they are qualitatively different than other crimes since they are a real but much smaller problem quantitatively.