Political Correctness Rebuked

As part of my long patrol of the Universe, I recently spent a few days reading various posts at the right-wing site Pajamas Media. I responded to one piece by Michael Ledeen that complained that the Obama administration was engaging in censorship, although the evidence he educed was rather vague and actually dealt with “attempting to eliminate certain words and phrases from American policy documents and statements concerning Islam,” i.e. with a government controlling its own speech rather than the speech of the people. Ledeen did link to a segment from a Christian broadcast network that claimed that high school kids were being indoctrinated to think favorably about Muslims, though the sum total of the case was the testimony of a single Jewish lady, who, it must be admitted, was obviously very earnest. I responded:

Right wing Jews and fundamentalist Christians must have a highly developed sense of humor to complain about controlling discourse in the U.S. One can only imagine what would happen if high school textbooks objectively conveyed the bad as well as the good things about Christianity and Judaism, especially if accounts of the founding and subsequent behavior of Israel were even handed.

Note that I’m not applauding the kind of political trimming and calculation that routinely goes into the construction of the curricula in the U.S., though American history texts have always been political footballs and its absurd to suddenly get excited about it. There’s a substantial Muslim population is the United States and if it doesn’t have anything like the political pop of the ADL or the Christian groups, it’s hardly surprising if it works to promote its side. The only people who really give a damn about scholarly values such as objectivity are a handful of despised intellectuals. Everybody else just wants “Hurrah for us!”

One note: Ledeen takes Milbank’s quote out of context (of course). Milbank was complaining, with some justice, that the press was not given adequate opportunity to ask questions at a recent international meeting. The piece wasn’t about political correctness and the line about the Soviet Era referred to the intense security. Ironically, one of Milbank’s specific complaints is that Obama would not answer a question about Israel’s nuclear program. I doubt if Ledeen really wants people to start thinking about Israel’s non-membership in the nonproliferation treaty, but then his defense of political free speech doesn’t extend to anybody who might criticize his side. Ask Mearsheimer and Walt or Juan Cole about the Jewish lobby’s passion for open debate and plain speaking.

Here’s the fun part. Comments at Pajamas Media are moderated, but my comments in other threads have almost always posted after a minimal delay. Twenty-four hours later, though, the above paragraphs are still “under moderation.” Now I know that Ledeen reads the comments: he actually responded to me on a remark I had made on an earlier post of his. I don’t know whether he personally moderates the comments or not, and maybe it was just some intern’s night off. Still, it is amusing (though hardly surprising) to think that this defender of free speech is apparently willing to be so transparently hypocritical.

One note on Ledeen. He’s a prominent neocon whose career goes back to the Reagan era when he was one of the guys involved in the Iran Contra. More recently, he played a somewhat unclear role in the Plame affair. His vita features quite a few colorful passages, but what’s more interesting about him to me than the various intrigues is his notable defense or semi-defense of Italian fascism, a theme that began with his doctoral dissertation and has apparently continued since. I’ve long thought of neo-conservatism, at least in its Israeli-lobby component, as fascism for Jews; but that judgment was based on the similarities between the political philosophy and even more the rhetoric of the neocons and the outlook of the various movements of integral nationalism that swirled around in the first half of the 20th Century. Until I did a little research yesterday, I wasn’t aware of Ledeen’s writings on the subject. I’m reminded of the discovery of Uranus: one could predict the existence of documents like Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928-1936 by extrapolation from the speech of living right-wingers. One knew where to point the telescope. But I’m not bringing up Ledeen’s interest in Mussolini et. al. in order to discredit him. Fascist ideas are highly appealing to many people and are not going to go away just because we don’t know or don’t want to admit their historical connections. After World War II, no one wanted to be associated with fascism because fascism = Nazism, at least in the popular mind. As my Dad used to joke, Hitler was so bad he gave fascism a bad name, but German fascism was an outlier in a great many ways. There was a reason that Mussolini had admirers on the left as well as the right, and his movement wasn’t so different from others such the ideology of the Young Turks in his era or Netanyahu’s version of Zionism in ours. So I admire Ledeen’s willingness to associate himself with the fascist thinkers. The heck with political correctness. Let’s call a spade a spade.

Addendum: A day and half later, Ledeen let my comment appear and followed it with a brief paragraph complaining that I was stereotyping him. A guy like Ledeen who goes around accusing people of anti-Semitism at the drop of a hat has a lot of nerve complaining about that.

The Rest of the Annotated Flummeries

Philosophers spend their lives trying to develop a consistent view of the world. They fail. But anthropologists and cultural historians sometimes assume that primitive tribes somehow manage this feat.

From time to time, I get the idea of writing a general account of all the world’s great ideas as they are generally misunderstood. And then I remember that such an enterprise has been long in the works under the heading of intellectual history.

Realities are preferred because in the end they are cheaper than dreams and often require less talent to create.

The object of the game is not part of the rules since there's no penalty for ignoring it except losing, which is no real penalty if you aren’t trying to win.

Information sickness is like constipation since for the most part it only affects those who worry about suffering from it.

The self-sufficiency of the virtuous Stoic (or libertarian) is a consequence of a human world that makes meaningful individuality possible in the first place.

I don't believe in blaming the tyrants for tyranny—not because I want to let the tyrants off the hook, but because the usual demonization of the Stalins and Hitlers gives them too much credit as if a single person could create an entire world of malevolence by themselves.

Science advanced when discovery became the precondition for a new form of social climbing.

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

A dream in which I was involved in a debate as to whether Orthodox pigs are permitted to eat Jews.

The assumption is that the difficult philosophers are hiding a secret in their tortuous phrases. But I'm inclined to think the complexity of the surface is necessary precisely because the content is so simple.

We don't live under the gaze of an infinitely solicitous God, but we are embedded in a temporarily forgiving body.

Mystical philosophers have a problem analogous to avant-garde artists, but the content they have for sale— states of mind that are much the same everywhere and at all times— do not adequately differentiate their brand. Hence the need for another kind of transcendence, a rhetorical one pursued by the elaboration of paradoxes and hieroglyphics.

I could have been a successful married man in the old days when you weren't supposed to talk to your wife anyhow and marriage was just another kind of solitude.

Everything is here in this poem, having been left out on purpose.

When I found out that I had been cloned, I was beside myself.

The Encyclopedia turns up in nature even before man's arrival on the scene, for example in the sensory homunculus, which, after all, was a little possum or lizard before it was an inward man.

Intelligence is like a category five hurricane that can't keep its strength when it makes landfall over reality.

I’d rather believe I was a criminal than that my activities were the consequence of some brain dysfunction. Responsibility can also be a useful dodge, romancing the lesion instead of acknowledging it.

Like certain Romans who wanted to command armies so that they'd eventually be better historians.

Just as the planned death of certain cells is an integral part of the development of the adult animal, certain reasonable ideas have to die in order to yield a fully developed theory.

Just as it is very difficult to erase the hard disk without leaving a trace, cultural messages persist through history, though like old files, they often lose their names.

In every generation young intellectuals discover some often repeated idea in one of its recent appearances and proclaim it a great novelty. They are like someone who buys a new comb even though there are plenty of them under the sofa.

Preaching to the laity was a dubious innovation pioneered by urban heretics in the Middle Ages before it was taken up by their enemies. Just as the cops are our criminals, the preaching friars were the church’s heretics.

Reverting once again to weed
To put the chronic in fatigue

No sensible conservative encourages intense belief in anything since principles are most vulnerable when they are taken seriously.

The suspicion that being utterly clear about something might actually be clever, at least if you used the tactic sparingly and didn’t go overboard.

An apple strudel could, after all, be considered the kind of metamorphic rock that results from the application of heat at low pressure to sedimentary deposits of phyllo dough. Granted we don’t usually think of bakers as geological agents like erosion or volcanic eruptions, but the geology textbooks do consider bacteria and diatoms in this way and, under the hood, a macrobe isn’t much different than a microbe.

As was once said of a crucial moment in a badly played chess match, “I don’t see how either side can save the game.”

Mass movements sometimes take place and there have been tremendously influential individuals, but I tend to favor the theory that the activities of small groups explain most of what happens.

Proverbs of Heck, Anti-Pensées, Fragments of Heraclitus of Aphasia

In an effort to train a dictation program for my computer, I’ve been reading out assorted sentences from the copybook I keep next to my bed. A lot of these lines come more or less directly from dreams. The exercise has taught me a lot, for example that I mumble dreadfully.

The monuments sloth builds to her own glory are not likely to challenge the heavens.

We Americans should make good classicists since we have no great literature of our own to obsess about.

You are perfectly entitled to be skeptical about the Enlightenment. But why do you have to embrace such ripe and stinking superstitions in order to express your disappointment with reason?

It shouldn't bother you to be accused of elitism. It ought to bother you not to be elite.

As with other serious conditions, apotheosis often has an insidious onset. Strokes of luck occur with suspicious frequency. Old women with startling blue eyes fall on their knees in spontaneous adoration, an occurrence that is always embarrassing and often quite inconvenient for everybody, especially on crowded buses.

Nanotechnology has been under way for hundreds of years under the title of chemistry.

It was late winter and the vampires were tapping the diabetics to make syrup.

Reading Marsden's life of Jonathan Edwards, I was struck by the practical similarity of the Christian quest for conversion and a Zen Buddhist quest for enlightenment. Both enterprises are deeply irrational. Both promote the power of religious teachers. Both have a distinct flavor of sadism—which is not to deny either their due as spiritual adventures highly meaningful to the participants. Religion would make a lot more sense if its goal were temporary spiritual thrills instead of permanent beatitude or definitive insight.

Despite its greater rationality, science is much more dispersed than common sense because it addresses the real diversity of the world while the popular mind is fixed on a tiny subset of topics. The people talk a lot, but they don't talk about much.

Like would-be novelists, philosophers think their ideas are shocking, but both the daring sex scenes and the revolutionary concepts generally put the readers to sleep.

"Being" is the Maginot line of the theologians, impregnable but easy to go around.

I've encountered so many grand theories of everything that I've become quite indifferent to them. Explaining anything is so much harder than explaining everything.

The quirkiness of dreams is like the diction of people writing in a foreign language. The combinations don't outrage logic or probability so much as usage.

Culture is a subgroup of nature, not its opposite or rival.

I have to remind myself that most people have never followed a complicated proof or the argument of the serious novel. Forget about what it is to be like a bat. Do philosophers know what it is to be a normal man?

In tightly argued scholarly books, every footnote is like a piton driven into the granite face of a sheer cliff.

Life really is too short to worry about extremely unlikely hypotheses just because they are sacred to the majority of human beings.

Thinking is much easier once you accept the unlikelihood of reaching definitive results just as soldiers fight better when they assume they won't survive the war.

The affairs of men are much simpler than the doings of atoms. We call them complex, but they are really just more interesting to us.

The Republicans fear we will become too much like Europe, but much of what they fear from Europe is what Europe learned from us.

As frequently happens, their love affair ended in marriage.

Self-education is highly problematic, but every original thinker has to turn autodidact for the same reason you can't become the valedictorian by copying the other guy’s answers.

Any detailed passage of history has to be normalized to fit in with the rest. It isn't enough to simplify what happened or merely summarize it as one reduces a body of data to the mean and variance. The events have to be systematically distorted so they will play for a single mind just as the notes are tempered so they can be sounded on a single piano. In my experience, however, historians do a lot more cheating than piano tuners.

The secret principle that explains cosmic inflation: every word deserves its commentary, but once that's admitted there is no place to stop even if in the beginning there was only a single word. Eventually you wind up with the world of glossed glosses and glossing glosses expanding to infinity. What would really be comforting is the assurance that there'll eventually be a reader at the end, a God of love, which is to say, a celestial pedant (for whose love surpasses the pedant’s who cherishes every detail long after the others have closed the book in scorn or mere boredom).

Basic problem: the absence of a large class of people who can afford to tell the rest of us to fuck off.

It says a great deal about our situation that one of the greatest corporations created in the last 10 years is dedicated to answering the old man's question, "where the hell are my keys?"

It was the historians who taught me the strategy of willful stupidity, and I am sincerely grateful to them for that.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest

I imagine a mad mathematician, suffering from the effects of some atypical stroke or perhaps just an extremely severe case of OCD, who could derive the most amazing results except that he kept going back to make sure that his earlier proofs worked. “Did I really prove the bit about the square on the hypotenuse? Maybe I should go over it just one more time…” If your understanding of modern biology depends upon the popular press, you may think that we’re stuck in the same fix. No matter how much evidence piles up for the gold-standard validity of natural selection and evolution in general, somebody is always on hand to insist that we need to re-examine the evidence. Of course, the public debate, like so much else in America, is queered by ideology and religion—the Creationist calling for a fresh look at old fossils is exactly as honest as a Republican insisting that we ought to start over again with health care reform. However, in biology, at least, the PR efforts of the cultural conservatives have an ironic effect. By endlessly focusing attention on the issues related to traditional Darwinism, they ensure that most people won’t notice that much of the most important new work in evolution doesn’t have much to do with the preoccupations of what is often called the New Synthesis—natural selection and speciation among multi-cellular animals and plants. I’m not just referring to the work done under the heading of Evo-Devo: that the development of individual organisms would shed light on the historical relationships between species and vice versa was already bruited in the 19th Century, though the advance of biochemistry means that the current version of ontology and phylogeny is less talk and more HOX. I’m also not talking about attempts to rethink evolution in the light of Odling-smee’s concept of niche selection, the various ways that the activities of organisms determine the selection pressures on their offspring—I think that idea is very important, but I recognize that we’re talking about a reversal in perspective here, vases and faces, rather than a new assertion about how things work. What has changed most drastically, it seems to me, is our understanding of what there is to explain.

The famous names of evolutionary biology in the last century were mostly zoologists, botanists, and paleontologists who shared a preoccupation with large and showy organisms, even if large and showy sometimes meant nematodes and fruit flies. For the most part, the makers of the synthesis demonstrated a disdain for the microorganisms that represent so much of the biomass and biochemical diversity of life on earth. While these bird watchers and entomologists weren’t paying all that much attention, the microbiologists decided to get evolutionary and in the process discovered that life on earth is rather different than we imagined. When I first began to read biology books, there were two and only two kingdoms of living things, animals and plants. Subsequently, it was noticed that the more salient division was between organisms with and without nuclei, the eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Circa 1960, you got points for knowing about that. A little later, things were broken down more finely with Robert Whittaker’s five-kingdom system (bacteria, protists, fungi, plants, and animals), but that didn’t last very long either. The analysis of ribosomal RNA led Woese and his allies to the discovery that some of the erstwhile bacteria were as genetically different from bacteria as they were from animals, plants, and fungi, indeed, that these organisms, which eventually came to be classified under the new taxon Archaea, were, if anything, more similar to us than to E. coli. These newly discovered creatures obviously had a history, and their existence also put the possible origins of already familiar organism in a new light that evidently demanded rather different kinds of explanations than what had been dreamed of in Ernst Mayr’s hundred years, including, for example, the dramatic episodes of symbiosis that apparently gave rise to the eukaryotes by endowing them with vital organelles such as mitochondria and chloroplasts and, more generally, the possibility that a much greater degree of genetic interchange occurs between organisms, thus not simply making it much harder to discover the true tree of life but raising the possibility that it wasn’t always a tree at all.

Much as modern literature is sometimes successful in making the reader aware of the strangeness of experience, recent discoveries have revealed how little we understand of the living things around us, how down right weird the biosphere actually is. Cthulu isn’t lurking in an adjoining dimension: half a mile underground, in boiling hot springs, in chemical spills, at the bottom of the sea, and—it’s a good bet—in your large intestines, microbes are exploiting every energetic chemical bond on the planet in ways more exotic than any brain-eating alien. Genetic probes inform us that thousands and thousands of such beings exist, though we don’t know how to culture many of them yet or identify them under a microscope—one coccus looks much like another—but their modes of life, metabolisms, and chemistries mark them off as more radically diverse than the all the animals, plants, and fungi put together. And that’s what a complete theory of evolution would have to explain.

The people at Panda Thumb and other venues who fight the good but thankless fight against the Creationists and Intelligent Design devotees have to repeatedly point out to their theologically inspired opponents that the theory of evolution is not the same thing as a theory of the origin of life. Nobody is claiming that Darwin had an explanation for biogenesis—at most he had a few odd thoughts on the topic. It is also the case that no knowledgeable person would suggest that any consensus has formed since Darwin as to how life began on this planet. Granted that the primary evidence is probably 4 billion years old, that problem may not be insoluble but it is definitely a cold case. Distinguishing theories of the origin of life from theories of the origin of species thus makes excellent sense. Thing is, I wonder if it goes far enough. Granted what we’re learning about the deeper diversity of existing life, especially the wide range of ways that energy flows in living things, shouldn’t we expect that an adequate and truly general theory of evolution is likely to require us to intercalate several stages between biogenesis and the era when life began to evolve according to the familiar rules and patterns of the modern synthesis?

For the record, these thoughts were inspired by Jan Sapp’s recent book The New Foundations of Evolution, which provides a detailed history of the advent of the new understandings of phylogeny inspired by microbiological research. Reading his book was rather like listening to a golden oldies CDs since so many of the important discoveries have taken place during my lifetime and, as something of a scientific fellow traveler or male groupie, I remember what I was doing when caught wind of them even if I didn’t really understand their importance.

Citizens United

The recent Supreme Court decision that gives corporations the right to make unlimited campaign contributions has been defended by some people, including, notably, Glenn Greenwald, who take an absolutist view of the First Amendment. On their view, the issue is not whether corporations are persons since the amendment merely states that Congress shall make no laws abridging the freedom of speech and does not refer to who does the speaking. I find this argument utterly unconvincing and not just because it seems to imply that Congress can’t limit the rights of tarot decks, Ouija boards, and Urim and Thummim to protected speech. Governments make corporations and grant them privileges and immunities that natural human persons do not possess. It is settled law, as I understand, that the speech of military officers, teachers, and doctors in clinics receiving federal funds can be limited so long as they are acting in their official capacity, so the rights of corporations, which are creatures of the state in an even more fundamental way, should not be sacrosanct either, especially since corporations aggregate money in ways that living human individuals cannot. Precisely because they surpass the citizens in actual power, it is wise and right to limit their legal status to prevent them from being more than persons under the law.

It has been suggested that the practical effect of Citizens United has been overestimated and that corporations will either not choose to or not be able to control elections by throwing around huge sums of money or, more plausibly, that the newly discovered rights of the corporate superpersons will turn out to be superfluous since they already own the political process. More optimistically, it might be also be pointed out that a vigilant public could find ways to get around the ruling: it is hard, after all, to write checks while hanging from a lamppost. The actual effects of legal rulings are always hard to predict, and ironic outcomes are quite likely. Unfortunately, ironic is not a reliable synonym for good.

I note in passing that I do agree with the majority of the Court in one respect. Neither one of us take the words or the meaning of the Constitution as sacred and inviolate. The majority bases its opinions on what it thinks is best for the Republican party at a given time while I read the fundamental documents by the light of what I find enduringly moral and defensible in them. I would probably try to respect precedent more than the Roger’s court because I perceive a huge practical value in the predictability of the law, but I recognize that you can’t dispense with special pleading just because you think you’re sincere. On some fundamental level, it isn’t the methodology but the ethics of these jurists that I find vicious.

Princes of Peace

Ecumenicalism, at least in Europe and the Americas, is largely a reaction to the threat of unbelief. Atheists are the only people that the Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Calvinists, Lutherans, Pentacostals, Muslims, and Jews hate more than each other; and this hatred draws them together. I think of Gregg Easterbrook as the anti-Aristotle of our age, the master of those who don’t know, but even Easterbrook seems to understand the essentially defensive character of the current vogue for a shared faith in merely having some sort of faith.

Momentary controversies over Islam aside, in America's contemporary spiritual landscape, the dividing line is not between Christians and non-Christians, nor drawn along any religious perimeter. It is between believers and nonbelievers. Persons of faith of almost any stripe have begun to embrace each other as allies against the encroachment of pure secularism, philosophical positivism, and legal hostility toward belief in the public square.

Now despising atheists is nothing new—John Locke thought atheism should be illegal and the public affirmation of disbelief in God has long been a capital crime in Muslim nations—but apparently the atheist menace had not seemed sufficiently urgent to compose religious divides that are centuries or millennia old and make priests, bonzes, and imams conveniently ignore the plain contradictions among their respective doctrines. The Enlightenment wasn’t quite enough, apparently, or even Marxism; but the New Atheism has at last done the trick and brought a truce to the religious wars. So let us give thanks to Dawkins and Hitchens and P.Z. Myers and the other princes of peace who have brought this blessing on mankind. I have often been critical of the New Atheists if only because I couldn’t detect anything new in what they had to say, but neither I nor anybody else should claim that they are not a force. Of course it may be that the effectiveness of their message is more a reflection of the startling fragility of religion than the intrinsic merit of their own point of view, which is often little more than unreflective positivism that seems to think the only thing besides science is some sort of theology. Thing is, though, pricks don’t have to be especially sharp to puncture a balloon.

Reality, What a Concept!

America appears to be paralyzed by discord; but a closer look at the evidence, for example, an hour or two reading comment threads on Internet discussion sites, will set you straight. There is plenty of conflict, obviously, but few actual differences of opinion, that is, if disagreement means I assert P and you assert non-P, there is almost none to be found. We don’t agree enough to meaningfully disagree. What one encounters instead of dialogue are fistfights and simultaneous monologues. Now by my lights, that’s exactly what we should expect granted the true volume of possible ideas—in that immensity actually encountering another is quite improbable, though the illusion of contact is not. If you think that all-that-is is a big room with stuff in it, you won’t agree, assuming, that is, I’ve correctly guessed what’s going on over there in the adjoining monads.

Consider the interminable struggle over abortion. One could construe the issue as revolving around whether or not one wishes there to be fewer abortions, but that is pretty clearly not the case since even those who, like me, don’t consider abortions an evil don’t consider them a good either while those who wave around the pictures of bloody fetuses seldom argue that outlawing abortion will actually reduce the number of abortions. They may assume that criminalization will have that result, but they mostly simply ignore the question of its real world consequences. What matters, apparently, is maintaining an attitude of official abhorrence towards the act. When pro-choice people argue that a policy of legalized abortion and free family planning services would probably make abortions less common, they are missing the point. Pro-lifers make the corresponding error in assuming that their opponents share their overwhelming concern about meanings. What is an argument about attitudes for one side is an argument about facts for the other. Sorting out the debate doesn’t call for moral philosophy but a better understanding of data types.

Something similar takes place in arguments about drug legalization. Drug warriors are not very interested in evidence that the criminalization of drugs may not decrease drug use, and they are especially not interested in weighing the bad consequences of drug use against the bad consequences of the legal efforts to suppress it. After all, it would be pretty hard to argue that the unfavorable health and economic consequences of smoking pot or even using heroin are remotely comparable to the obvious expense, suffering, and death that result from their legal suppression. One would have to be a moral monster to throw people in vile jails, destroy families, promote organize crime, subvert civil rights, and raise taxes in the name of what is obviously a futile effort to avoid the rather notional evils of marijuana use. But anti-drug people aren’t moral monsters; they simply put a tremendously high value on attitudes. Those of us who throw statistics at the crusaders are suffering from our own illusion.

Continuous Fulgurations

The Karabogazköl is a huge supersalty lagoon that protrudes like a hernia from the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. Water from the Caspian rushes through a narrow straight and spreads out into the desert where it evaporates under the Turkmenistan sun, thus maintaining the difference in level between the lagoon and the sea. Only the steady input of new water allows it to persist. Some years ago, in fact, when the straight was dammed up to protect the Caspian during a drought, the lagoon dried up completely. I was fascinated by this geographic quirk when I read about it in a Scientific American article that made it seem as if the entrance to the Karabogazköl was practically a waterfall—I gather it is really more like a rapids, at least these days, but the photo in the article created a more spectacular impression. Somehow the place became a visible symbol for me of the theological idea, perhaps more characteristic of Islam than in of Christianity or Judaism, that the cosmos itself is utterly dependent on a Godhead that not only created it but maintains it in existence from moment to moment. In this view, all that is is much like this wretched gulf, except that the universe depends on a steady influx of being rather than of water to maintain its evanescent reality under the black sun of nothingness. I don’t accept this metaphysical picture these days, if I ever did, but I’ve retained it as a useful way to stage a thought. In particular, I find it has a number of applications to politics.

One would very much like to think that human institutions, once created, possess the power to persist by themselves and are only destroyed by some external force or perhaps by the ripening of an internal contradiction. One dreams of a political machinery that runs by itself, keeping its balance like a gyroscope, maintaining its internal environment like a thermostat. Entranced by this illusion, propounders of constitutions are often merely projectors of perpetual motion machines of the third kind. The more sober of the old thinkers knew better. There is no destination, telos, or simple basin of attraction, no stable utopia at the end of history or even, for that matter, a permanent state of collapse short of the end of days. Monarchies become aristocracies; aristocracies coarsen into oligarchies; oligarchies are overthrown by democracies; democracies degenerate into mobocracies, idiocracies, tyrannies, or maybe fresh monarchies. The founders of states can at most set a precedent for a form of government because willful intelligent action is required in every generation to constantly recreate what can never persist by its own inertia any more than a living thing can subsist without a continuous metabolism. Persistence, in history as well as organisms, is not stasis but the degree zero of reproduction.

It doesn’t matter if you are the most conservative of conservatives. Since history’s default case is change, staying in place requires ceaseless activity. Indeed, because the same formal institutions have a different meaning in different circumstances, the human world must be remade all the more thoroughly if there are going to be any enduring values. The history of the last thirty years in America shows how easily the meaning of a nation can be lost through political paralysis. Everyone wishes that the horse-trading and hard feelings would go away, that some sort of expert commission will absolve us of responsibility, that we don’t have to take any chances. There are two great problems with this wish to renounce politics: First, as Hannah Arendt frequently insisted—and granted the drastic foreshortening of our current sense of history these days, she practically counts as a contemporary of Aristotle—there is simply no nonpolitical way to do politics; and second, even after you give up on making the omelet, the eggs are going to go on getting broken.

In Defense of Pat Robertson

Pat Robertson, the televangelist, is getting a lot of grief for claiming that the sufferings of the Haitians was a consequence of a deal they struck with the devil to win their independence in Napoleon’s time. A little research revealed that Robertson was referring to an old, not very credible legend about a revolutionary general who supposedly sacrificed a pig to a Voodoo spirit. Now I’m humorless enough to complain about the dubiousness of this tale—in the throes of early Alzheimer’s Pat has come to think that every implausible story he wants to believe is true, even the ones that aren’t two thousand years old—but I have to disagree with those who attack Robertson’s remark because they don’t think it’s fair that a whole nation should suffer because of something one or even many of their ancestors supposedly did long ago. One can complain, as I have, about the man’s astonishing credulity; but his theology is impeccable from a formal perspective. The plot pattern of communal guilt and its consequences is utterly central to his religion: to reject the structure of the tale is to reject Christianity itself.

People usually speak about religious faith as if it is a matter of believing in some amazing fact such as the resurrection of Christ, but the more essential element is belief in the admissibility of the theory that lies behind the fact. You not only have to believe that Jesus died to save your soul; you have to believe that it makes sense that the suffering and death of an innocent man can somehow change the spiritual state of another. It’s not just that the idea of vicarious atonement is harder to swallow than the idea of a particular instance of vicarious atonement and logically prior to it. It’s also more important. The world is full of people who don’t believe in the resurrection but remain enthralled by the Christian story because they go on hanging on its armature as witness the continuing allure and power of Christ substitutes in politics and literature. But here’s the thing. Vicarious atonement is simply the obverse of communal guilt, which is why the old theology regarded Adam as a type of Christ. “In Adam’s fall we sinned all,” just as Christ died for our sins. Reject the negative instance of moral action at a distance involved in the doctrine of original sin and you put in question the positive instance of salvation by the self-sacrifice of a divine figure. No wonder so many barrels of ink were spilt trying to make sense of the transmission of guilt from Adam to the whole human race. Better to raise this problematic issue some distance away from Jesus, especially since two thousand years of desperate ingenuity have already been squandered trying to explain these things.

Now it seems to me that it is a moral error to blame or punish the children for the sins of their parents; but I’m aware that Christians, at least those who cleave to the traditional faith, are pretty much stuck with accepting that God works in this fashion because the whole pathos of the cross is wrapped up in this belief and makes no sense without it. That’s why I’m inclined to forgive Robertson a little, not only in view of his obvious senility but because it’s hard not to be corrupted by an essentially immoral religion. Listening to him, though, I find myself thanking heaven that most Christians are better than their God, the God of Port au Prince.

O What an Angled Web We Weave

On Good Morning America, Rudy Giuliani claimed there were no terror attacks under Bush. This sort of comment is not new: Dana Perino had earlier asserted that the Bush administration inherited 9/11. Which points to an important general truth: liars don’t need a good memory so long as they can count on listeners who can’t remember anything very well and interviewers who will never call them on their premeditated falsehoods. Giuliani knew that the chronology of events in the distant past, i.e. eight years ago, was already becoming murky in the public mind and rightly calculated that George Stephanopolos, master of the convenient scruple, would find it in his own interest to let this studied lie pass on air and only correct the record later in the relative privacy of a blog.

Can Religious People be Moral?

We’ve come distance since the time of Pierre Bayle, the early Enlightenment philosopher and journalist who got in trouble by suggesting that atheists can, after all, be decent people; but the concept of a moral atheist is still paradoxical to many—I heard the historian John Lukacs on CSPAN a couple of years ago expressing his astonishment that some of the atheists he had met over his lifetime turned out to be people of good character. Nevertheless, for many of us, the more salient question these days is becoming whether belief and morality are antithetical. It’s not just that bad behavior and religious fervor may be statistically associated. It isn’t encouraging for the apologist that Mississippi is the most religious state in the Union, but correlation isn’t the same as causation. The deeper suspicion is that religiosity, at least in its AM radio form, is intrinsically anti-ethical. There are several reasons to think so, none of which require you to think that dear old Aunt Maude is a moral monster:

1.Many religious people claim that actions are good because a transcendent power says they are good. Of course one can claim that shooting a doctor or flying a plane into a skyscraper is not actually praiseworthy behavior but only by asserting that the television preacher or Imam who sponsored this behavior was not really reporting God’s wishes. Thing is, though, it all becomes a game of theological he said, she said since, ex hypothesi, there is no way to judge the authenticity of revelation by reference to a rational standard of right and wrong. For all you know, Osama has been right all along.

2.Religious ways of thinking about morality promote the notion that ethics is some profoundly mysterious subject and that there aren’t sound and rather obvious reasons for most of the norms of civilized behavior. While there certainly are times when it is hard to decide on the right thing to do, focusing on dubious instances creates a false impression. For the most part, it’s quite obvious what the right thing to do is, which is why it is legitimate to hold people responsible for their actions. Pretending that ethics is rocket science just provides a second handy excuse for bad behavior that hasn’t already been blamed on original sin.

3.Religious people commonly suggest that we ought to try to be good; but this way of thinking, though an inevitable stage of moral education, confuses doing right with pleasing somebody. It’s a moral fault in a grownup that has more than theoretical consequences since it routinely leads people to abdicate responsibility to the nearest authority figure.

4.Religious thinking corrupts practical reasoning by introducing infinities into moral calculations. Pascal’s wager is a good example. It doesn’t matter how low one estimates the probability of the truth of religion so long as the postulated reward for accepting it is infinite: .0000000001 times infinity is still infinity. The bet will always be worthwhile. In fact, this kind of reasoning was the conceptual recipe for fanaticism long before Pascal, though in practice 72 virgins is apparently close enough to infinity for practical purposes. (I note, parenthetically, that the insistence of religious people on the infinity of rewards and punishments is more evidence of the profound vanity that underlies faith.)

5.Traditional religiosity leads to political immorality because it abdicates to God and the next world our responsibility to create a space for ourselves in this world in which good behavior is rewarded and bad behavior punished.

And Another Thing

I wrote the following couple of paragraphs in a comment thread about the prospects for a split in the Democratic Party:

"I don't think the issue is capitalism versus anti-capitalism so much as democracy versus oligarchy. While the New Democrats and the Old Republicans disagree as to whether experts or billionaires should be in charge, they agree that the history of the last couple of hundred years has taught us that government by consent of the governed is a childish idea on a par with the fantasies such as legal equality. A certain faction of the Democratic Party base disagrees about all this and actually believes that, for example, if the majority of the country is in favor of having a public option or not invading Afghanistan, their wishes should mean something. For that matter, these feckless idealists believe that government agents should not be allowed to get away with torturing people. Imagine that!

Snark aside, I just don't encounter very many people who are interested in nationalizing the toilet paper factories. What I do hear are voices that oppose the current organization of American business, not because the corporations are private but because they are politically powerful and deeply irresponsible, even to their erstwhile owners. Like feudal barons, the corporations have taken over part of the sovereignty of the state—they even maintain their own courts. The perceived problem is at root more political than straightforwardly economic. Is this our country or theirs?"

I would ask for unanimous consent to revise and extend my remarks, except that the Talmud of ifs, ands, and buts I would ideally like to append to this tiny Torah would run to at least as many volumes as the Short History of Human Vanity. Nevertheless, a few additional thoughts:

1. A serious critique of how American society is organized would have to look as hard at the NGOs as at the for-profit corporations. The mentality and often enough the salaries of top bureaucrats are comparable to those of private CEOs. Anyhow, the term “corporatism” is too unspecific to capture the essence of the current conjuncture.

2. Property rights are not natural facts but historical constructions, and the proof of their artificiality is that they have obviously changed dramatically over the two and third centuries of our national existence. In particular, one form of property, the modern corporation, was a 19th Century invention like the cotton gin. The point of insisting on the social construction of property is not, as Conservatives always assume, to badmouth property rights in general. Indeed what bothers me about corporations is the way in which they weaken one of the great advantages of private property by disassociating ownership and responsibility. Nobody washes a rented car, and no stockholder or executive gives a damn what happens to General Motors after he sells out or retires. Limited liability may be a good thing insofar as it promotes the flow of capital to productive uses and yet a bad thing insofar as it serves as an all purpose mechanism for dumping externalities on the public. The point is not to restore some sort of Jeffersonian utopia of yeomen farmers holding forty acres in fee simple, but to work towards new legal forms that restore some accountability in a knowledge economy.

3. The usual complaint about Democracy is that the people are too ignorant to make meaningful decisions, but the irony is this notion is trotted out most often in connection with issues like war and peace or social equity where the public often turns out to be wiser than the self-appointed wise men. Where the public really is wretchedly informed, for example, on issues like global warming or the true state of the American health care system, it’s vox populi, vox dei. I have a different perspective. I don’t think there is anything sacred about democracy—as ought to be obvious, I don’t think there is anything sacred at all—and I certainly don’t believe that the majority is always right or should have unlimited sway; but my reading of history has led me to conclusion that societies are both more stable and more dynamic when they are responsive to the wishes and interests of their members and do the many things that are necessary to ensure that the People are something different and better than a mob. Where the leading classes don’t recognize—and fear—the authority of the population, they won’t be zealous in looking after their interests either. They may make populist appeals for strategic or tactical reasons and they will certainly continue to repeat the usual pieties, but they will inevitably end up favoring the interests of themselves and their class.

Another Modest Suggestion

According to the Supreme Court, money is speech, which is hard to argue against since we all know that money talks. On the other hand, unlimited political contributions erode one of the most fundamental preconditions of a lawful society, the establishment of an artificial realm of legal equality in which reasons can be heard above the din of power. Men are not made equal, after all. We make them equal by agreeing to treat them as equal for certain specific purposes. Of course in the real world, even if we refrain from settling law suits by holding a public auction, wealth already lays a heavy thumb on the scales of justice. Which is why we don’t need to find other ways to safeguard the prerogatives of privilege. Dollars are already more effectual than votes, and even formal equality, far from being a looming threat, is a departing dream. Which leads to my suggestion: in order to form a more perfect Union, let us level the playing field a little by imposing a progressive tax on political contributions. Token contributions, the $20s and $50, would pay little or nothing, while the $1,000s would get nicked significantly. Let us allow anybody to contribute any amount of money to any candidate or cause, but let a portion of that contribution go to the public treasury. Monsanto and Pfizer and rest can go on purchasing senators just as they do right now, but they would at least have to pay some reasonable levy, say 50%, every time they did so. Think of it as a sales tax. After all, their intent is to buy the country or at least rent it. It’s only fair that the rest of us get a cut of the profits they intend to make from the transaction.

The Kiss of Death

The idea of making Medicare available to everybody over 55 was wildly popular, even more so than the public option. That, and not the vanity of one Connecticut Lukudnik, probably sealed its fate. Both American parties are terrified of democracy. It’s not much of a secret that our system of government amounts to a series of bulwarks against the will of the people. What the health care fiasco is demonstrating is that frustrating the wishes of the majority is no longer enough. The system is also determined to hurt their interests. “For the people” is apparently just as bad as the widely despised “Of the people and by the people.”

The Price of Vanity

The debate about Afghanistan is usually framed as a matter of dueling moralisms. The hawks, supposedly, are the ones who insist that the Taliban must be defeated because of their support for terrorism and their oppression of women and Afghanis in general. The doves are represented as unhappy with our military intervention because of a generalized rejection of war as an instrument of policy. I have my doubts if this version of the argument has much to do with the real opinions and motives of the participants since both sides use ethical appeals to pretty up positions taken for Real Politik reasons and like to paint their adversaries as, respectively, brutal cynics or feckless idealists. Well, I don’t know what really gives with the military experts, IR mavens, and talking heads: my own thinking about our Afghanistan policy isn’t about morals or motives. I simply don’t think we can win the war.

In many respects, Afghanistan is not very much like Vietnam—there is vastly more international support for our efforts in Afghanistan than there ever was for our Southeast Asian adventure, for example, and Vietnam never harbored terrorists who attacked us at home—but in one way, the two situations are similar. As Nixon understood just as well as LBJ or McGovern, there was never a prospect of prevailing in Indochina. Thing is, there is no prospect of prevailing in Afghanistan either. It’s not just that the American public would not stand for the level of expenditure required for victory. Victory wouldn’t be worth it even if it we were willing—or able—to pay the price. The real question for Obama is whether deferring defeat for a few years is worth some lesser but still enormous cost.

Of course there are always people who will claim that America can do anything if it weren’t for the defeatists among us. From their point of view, I’m not very patriotic to suggest that my country has limitations just like any other.

Down with Religious Freedom?

It has always made a huge difference in American politics whether the liberty that matters will be the rights of individuals to stand against collectivities or the rights of collectivities such as churches, local governments, landlords, corporations, and families to oppress individuals without the interference of the central government. I was reminded of this distinction while reading Jonathan Israel’s account of Baruch Spinoza’s opinions on religious freedom and how his views contrasted with those of John Locke. Both wrote in favor of toleration, but Spinoza, though he favored an absolute right of individuals to believe in any faith and practice it privately, thought that the state should restrain the public activities of dissenting religions because they were likely to be combinations against the public peace and engines of oppression—not an unreasonable suspicion in his century as, for that matter, it is not in ours. Locke’s version of toleration was almost exactly the reverse. He maintained that the state should tolerate, within limits, dissenting churches but not dissenting individuals. His notion of tolerance is sometimes criticized because it did not extend to atheists or Catholics, but it was even more narrow than that.

Maybe Spinoza was on to something. When the politically actively churches of our day complain about government action, they are usually unhappy because the state is preventing them from telling individuals what to do. It’s as if the Mormons and Baptists and Catholics were asserting a First Amendment right to persecute others. Legalizing same sex marriage or abortion doesn’t obligate anybody to do anything. These reforms simply deny religious groups the authority to impose their own morality on nonbelievers. In essence, their plaint that somebody else’s rights diminish theirs duplicates the arguments of Southerners, who claimed that the government has no right to tell them that they can’t own human beings.

The neocons and others still promote the ancient thesis that organized, obligatory religiosity is necessary to maintain social cohesion; but the 700 Clubs, Muslim brotherhoods, and Unification churches have exactly the reverse tendency. They promote division and hatred as, with some few exceptions, politically active religions always have.

I’m not suggesting that the government should attempt to suppress particular sects or churches, but I think it is time we stopped giving them special rights such as the tax exemption for their non-charitable activities. One can only give freedom of conscience to artificial persons like churches by compromising the freedom of real persons.

The Enemy

Intellectually ambitious right-wingers like to appeal to the ideas of the German Carl Schmitt, who famously asserted that one cannot have a politics without an enemy. I don’t go along with that, but I also don’t agree with a certain tribe of sweetness and light commentators that objects to acknowledging the existence of real enemies even when the antagonists in question have already defined you as their enemy. When the Conservatives shriek their “Juden heraus!” message to liberals and even moderates, I don’t feel obligated to make excuses for their eliminationist rhetoric. They are dangerous enemies not only of me, but of my country. I have no desire to emigrate to Madagascar.

It’s not that I propose an inverse of AM radio hatred, mind you. People here in San Francisco may not want to live in Mississippi or Texas, but we’ve never proposed to eject these benighted states from the Union even if their adherence to democracy and even their loyalty to the United States was and remains highly dubious. Despite the non-stop provocation that comes from the red states and which is only unremarkable because we don’t remark about it, we refuse to be like the Limbaughs and Becks, who dream out loud of driving the vermin out of their sanctuaries on the coasts or like their more consistent followers such as Jim David Adkisson who have already acted on their exortation to “Go Kill Liberals.” Nevertheless, as far as I’m concerned, if my enemies want enemies, they’ve got ‘em.

Believe It or Not

An old Believe It or Not comic I read as a child breathlessly announced that common table salt was actually made out of two violent poisons, chlorine and sodium. I don’t remember if this attempt to make chemistry lurid explained what happens if you throw sodium in water—that information may have been restricted to an R-rated version I wasn’t allowed to read. The bit did make an impression on me, though; and it has since become part of my own private transcendental apparatus, one of the synthetic a priori propositions in the Swiss army knife of my mind. I find it especially useful in thinking about politics.

I know too much history to romanticize revolutions or long for radical change, but the endlessly harped upon themes of bipartisanship and civility have no appeal for me either and not just because they are bleated out with such transparency insincerity by apologists for the status quo whose idea of social peace is the permanent triumph of one side. I prefer to recognize that there really are conflicting interests in the world, beginning with, but certainly not limited to the haves and the have nots. A rational political chemistry seeks to compound something more savory than endlessly strife or endless oppression from these ingredients, but it doesn’t pretend that conflict is just a misunderstanding. Indeed, thinking there is no conflict is the misunderstanding.

The Crux

As many commentators have remarked, the health care systems of the rest of the industrialized world have little in common except for the fact they each and every one of them is better than ours. The debate about health care isn’t, or shouldn’t be, yet another argument between the virtues of socialism or capitalism, public or private. Things are really simpler than that. The issue is whether one particular industry, the health insurers, will be allowed to go on siphoning off 5% of American GNP. The insurers understand what’s at stake perfectly. What matters isn’t public options or cooperatives or single payer insurance schemes. If we’re ever going to have a decent system, the insurance companies simply have to go or at least change their business model beyond recognition so that instead of making money by denying care, they make money by supplying it. Small wonder then if no American politician or journalist goes unbribed in the next couple of months. People fight harder for their privileges than for their rights, and few privileges are so succulent as the license to steal currently enjoyed by the insurance industry.

Rectification Part III: Jumping the Shark

All this rectification business came to a head for me in the wake of the ACORN fiasco as politicians of all stripes fell over one another to denounce the organization because a couple of its most junior employees in a couple of its offices said some dumb things. Serial killers caught red handed are granted the courtesy title “alleged” even on Fox News, but no judge or jury was necessary in the face of a few minutes of handheld video of a guy in a pimp suit. One understands that for the Republicans, the real crime of ACORN was not a crime at all, but the organization’s success in registering the wrong kind of voters—most of the Conservatives I know would love to limit the franchise to the right kind of people. The interesting thing has been how eagerly the Democrats have gone along with the Republicans in the ritual denunciation of ACORN and even supported a clearly unconstitutional Bill of Attainder against the organization in Congress. The teabaggers may believe that the Democrats are a bunch of reds; but to judge from their overt behavior, the Democrats are as eager to distance themselves from any underclass effort to organize as any member of the Chamber of Commerce.

I don’t know a great deal about ACORN, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if some of its chapters engage in dealings I’d disapprove of. The outfit is very loosely organized, after all, and its membership doesn’t have the social connections and cultural finish that allow other pressure groups to flaunt the law without upsetting anybody who matters. Thing is, I do know that far more credible allegations of far more heinous behavior have been lodged against Hallilburton and Blackwater without giving the pundits a case of the vapors. ACORN hasn’t stolen billions or killed and raped hundreds, but they obviously just aren’t our kind of people. The law was never meant to be applied equally in these cases just as a deal’s a deal when it comes to the compensation of higher management in a bailed-out bank, but not when the ones who lose what they were promised don’t have any political or social clout. A contract with a union, in particular, has pretty much the same force as a 19th Century treaty with a tribe of Indians.

The Republicans and the Democrats have genuine differences, but they are both what an old lefty would call bourgeois parties. When Obama is done being a Communist/Socialist/Fascist/Nazi/Muslim or whatever, he is as dedicated to capitalism as anybody else. There just isn’t any major group in this country eager to nationalize the toilet paper factories. There aren’t even a great many of what one could reasonably call social democrats about; and that brand of socialism, let us remember, isn’t very revolutionary even in places like Sweden where, right wing propaganda aside, the bulk of the economy remains in the hands of private firms and people do their sweating in saunas, not concentration camps. In not recognizing the notable absence of would-be commissars in this country, the neocons and their less erudite allies are simply stuck in a time warp, still trying to understand our politics as if the same groupings were at war now that were fighting it out in the 1930s. They aren’t. The Democrats still draw some strength from what’s left of organized labor, but the dynamism of the party comes from the knowledge industries and the professional classes, groups and businesses that want government to help them make money and grow the country by promoting better education, regularizing our national finances, fixing the health care mess, and subsidizing research and development. Their program isn’t radical: in terms of American history, it’s rather similar to the ideology of the early 19th Century Whigs who were similarly committed to national improvement and skeptical of imperial adventures. There’s a lot more John Quincy Adams than Karl Marx about Barack Obama. Indeed, it is not completely inaccurate to claim that as the Republicans have gradually turned into Dixiecrats, if not full-blown 1840-style Jacksonian democrats, the Democrats have gradually become the Party of Lincoln. As for leftist radicals in the U.S., hay no moros in la costa.

Rectification Redux

If we’re really going to use more accurate names for the political tendencies of our time, perhaps we should consider going back a little further in history for inspiration. I’m not talking about reverting to the Plebs and the Patricians or even the Optimates and the Populares. Our politics, a struggle between elites, has no room for anything like a people’s party. I’m thinking more about the Tories and Whigs of 18th Century Britain. Especially in foreign policy, their George the Third had much in common with our George the Least. As Brendon Simms exhaustively documents in his recent book Three Victories and a Defeat, the English, mostly under Whig leadership, had been very careful to cultivate alliances in their long struggle with the French right up to the triumphant climax of the Seven Year’s War—what we call the French and Indian War. The Tories, on the other hand, didn’t have any use for diplomacy or the continent. Their sovereign, the first king from the House of Hannover who didn’t have a German accent, simply posited that England was the greatest nation on earth and didn’t need or much appreciate anybody’s help in ruling the world or keeping her colonies. Which is why when the Revolution came, England, faced by a continent full of determined enemies and hostile neutrals, was utterly alone, overmatched, and finally defeated. If you read the political pamphlets of the time, the clueless Tories even sound like American neocons and share a similarly impractical program of world domination. Pointing out that England was, after all, a rather small country was regarded as unpatriotic, just as our tub-thumpers regard any acknowledgement of the limits of our power as craven defeatism.

The Rectification of Names

Democrats often avoid the term liberal in favor of the supposedly more marketable label progressive. The desire to rebrand is understandable granted the effects of thirty or forty years of the vilification of liberalism, and it may even be advisable from a pragmatic point of view, but observers with some knowledge of American history will take issue with it. Actual progressivism, the attitudes and policies of figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, differed in very important ways from contemporary liberalism. One can argue with some justification, in fact, that its real heirs are the big government nationalists who call the shots in the Republican Party. It’s not just that TR was an unabashed imperialist. The Progressives were almost as cavalier about civil rights as Bush or Chaney. The tender concern for free speech and dissent that we associate with the left of our day was then notably absent. The Progressives also resemble modern Conservatives in their willingness to use government power to enforce their own cultural values: The war on drugs began in 1914 with the passage of the Harrison Act. And let us not forget Prohibition.

Of course many features of the Progressive program were and remain anathema to rightists and are favored by the left along with most of the population of the country: the trust busting, the progressive income tax and the estate tax, and vigorous government action to protect the environment. The liberalism of the 20th Century nevertheless represented a repudiation of much of what Progressivism stood for. What is ironic is that the secession of the liberals from Progressivism took them in a libertarian, Jeffersonian direction. It’s the liberals who actively oppose the expansion of executive power and stand up for the other 90% of the Bill of Rights. The statist elements of the Progressive agenda have been taken up by others. Which is why I prefer to be called a liberal.

Taking the Side of the Things

We think the scientists do science
And nature just sits there and poses.
In fact, without a firm alliance
Of man and thing there’d be no gnosis.
The line between the S and O
Is dotted and moves to and fro.
It’s like what happens on a date
If you get lucky and you mate.
We get inside of nature’s pants
Because the lady wants to dance.
Or to make the selfsame point
Without alluding to your joint:
Science happens
As much in things as in the mind
Else the naked eyeball of our pride
Would be definitively blind.

A Snarkfree Suggestion

Taking my cue from Bob Somerby, I suggest that you copy the following information and send it on to at least five people, preferably people who don’t agree with you about health care.

Total spending on health care, per person, 2007:

United States: $7290
United Kingdom: $2992

Life expectancy, 2007:

United States 78.0
United Kingdom: 78.8

An Unfortunate Passage

While waiting for Snow Leopard to finish installing itself on my computer, I idly paged through my old paperback copy of Hannah Arendt’s Origin of Totalitarianism. I had highlighted a passage, which I apparently had somehow guessed would become highly relevant 45 years later:

“A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that the audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

One is supposed to sympathize with the just plain folk who shout down their representatives at townhall meetings and dream out loud about murdering the goddam liberals before they get a chance to pull the plug on grandma or herd the white Christians into concentration camps. Human actions and ideas have their explanations, after all. There’s a reason for all the paranoia and cultural despair; and, anyhow, it’s political error to scorn so large a portion of the electorate. As of 11:30 P.M. September 1, however, I don’t feel sympathy for the shock troops of the Great American Idiocracy. It’s not that I expect that the mob will prevail exactly. This is not Germany in the 30s: the reactionary program of establishing a white trash republic on these shores once and for all is demographically implausible. Unfortunately, there may be enough of ‘em out there to make the country ungovernable and bring about a paralysis that guarantees a miserable future for everybody. That’s what keeps me awake at night.

Epidemiological Surveillance

One argument in favor of telling the truth is that lying is ultimately self-defeating. It’s worth making claims about matters of fact because somebody is liable to believe what you say. Lying, especially habitual lying, devalues speech. As Robert J. Fogelin used to point out, however, people do lie, quite frequently as a matter of fact, but we nevertheless go on talking. The situation recalls a reply to an objection formerly advanced about a different vice. When told if he didn’t stop, he’d go blind, Woody Allen promised to quit after he got nearsighted.

Human society would hardly be possible if it could be easily subverted by individual acts of bad behavior. Indeed, since a certain amount of skullduggery is built into the machinery, displays of virtue can be entirely more threatening to the status quo than any rampaging murderer. No serial killer ever raised as big a ruckus as Martin Luther King. Of course most ethical behavior is not so alarming. Most of it is largely invisible, and what does surface is either treated as a vestige of a long-dead past like Walter Cronkite’s journalism or else is chalked up to the intervention of an angel of the Lord or the bite of a radioactive spider—religion and/or science fiction. Objectivity and fairness, in particular, are widely regarded to be impractical, either as a matter of principle or because, as one television anchor explained the other day, the threat of losing millions of dollars in income for doing your duty amounts to force majeure. You just can’t expect anybody but a Don Quixote to try to unsell their souls as long as there are several years left in the term of the contract. But are there circumstances under which ethical behavior can infect a diseased social system? Is morality ever catching?

At various times in history, justice, fairness, and disinterest appeared as marvelous new inventions. Societies paralyzed by the tetanus of internecine strife the ancients called stasis found a way out through the intervention of prophets and lawgivers, though it says something about habitual human behavior that disinterested benevolence was commonly associated with supernatural intervention or madness. One of the reasons that modern states emerged from the interminable savagery of early medieval knighthood was that a lawful monarch, be he ever so hypocritical, was preferable to the thugs in the castles so long as something like justice arrived with his regime. Indeed, even the thugs recognized the advantage of such a system, which is part of the reason that the kings eventually prevailed over the dukes.

Well, we don’t live in the Dark Ages, though barbarism and religion are obviously on the march and there is something feudal about the great corporations whose masters claim a right not merely to influence, but sovereignty in the nation. Is it possible that public spirit could spread like a new strain of flu among such swine? I’m not saying it’s likely—if anybody is immune to the virus of integrity, it’s surely Senator Grassley—but I wanted to point out that it has happened before.

The Decision

Obama is quite right to point out that the finances of the United States and the economic health of the nation absolutely demand that we get a handle on health care costs and do so in short order. To this material imperative, one should add the moral obligation we all have of finally addressing the human needs of our fellow citizens in an adequate way. But there is a yet more pressing reason why the system must be reformed this year, a political reason. What’s at stake is the future of the nation as a going concern. It’s not just that defeat of health care in the face of a clear public mandate for change would be a clear proof that the nation is not even minimally democratic. Such an outcome would also and disastrously represent a victory for overt corruption and blatant thuggery. Can we really afford so dramatic a demonstration that our legislature is under the thumb of silver-haired whores and semi-literate ideologues? And what kind of a society can we expect to evolve into if we allow the disruption of our political debate by mobs of crazy, potentially violent, and heavily armed people who have been whipped into nativist fury by nonstop black propaganda? If incredibly cynical P.R. men really can convince people that the majority party in the United States is out to snuff your grandma, we’re simply toast.

Another Argument about a Pig

The American right is currently making yet another effort to show that FDR’s policies did nothing to ameliorate or end the Depression. Their argument, which has the virtue (for a conservative) of a lack of originality, is that it was only World War II that decisively ended the economic slump. I leave it to the economic historians to reprint the relevant graphs and charts that show that things did get markedly better in the wake of the first years of the New Deal, but I want to highlight the essential contradiction of the Republican argument. The first part of their argument is a claim that deficit spending, i.e. Keynesianism, doesn’t work, but the second part of their argument is that it does. War, after all, goes one better than Keynes’ recommendation that the government pay people to dig holes and then fill them up again. It simply blows holes in things all over the place. At the very least, the rightists ought to address the question of how the war ended the Depression if it wasn’t by ending the demand deficit.

In fact, the Republicans are perfectly aware that government deficit spending benefits the economy during times of recession. They just prefer military spending, if not outright war, as the vehicle of stimulus. There is also another peculiarity about their version of Keynes. They haven’t gone along with the second half of the Keynesian prescription: running a surplus when times are good. In my lifetime, only the Democrats have followed that suggestion.

Explanations

Crucial social ideals are not maintained by the magic of personal virtue. Something like tout comprendre c'est tout pardoner applies to good as well as evil acts. I have frequently asserted that American journalism is not atrocious because of the venality of its personnel, but because of the viciousness of a system that promotes and rewards bad behavior. Moralizing about the failings of this or that pretty face on cable amounts to blaming the electrons for the short circuit. Thing is, the same logic applies in reverse. If Cronkite and the other luminaries of the early decades of T.V. news were especially admirable, we should not forget that their careers were made possible because the big company executives temporarily tolerated an integrity from their employees they did not possess themselves—David Sarnoff, after all, was every bit as deplorable a human being as Rupert Murdock. Television news was a loss leader. If the execs of the 50s and 60s had insisted on making a profit from it, it would probably have been as bad as the current cheesy mix of entertainment, advertising, and propaganda.

Both virtue and vice are explicable, which does not mean, however, that we aren’t entitled to praise the former and despise the later.

An Anniversary Card that Demonstrates Why I Never Got Hired at Hallmark

I get the same melancholic feeling looking at Armstrong's footprint as I do thinking about paleolithic grave sites where a handful of shells and beads have been left on the remains of a child. Both vestiges are protests against mortality. The fantasy of manned space flight is a counterfactual assertion of a cosmic destiny for our species just as funeral customs reflect the equally vain hope of personal survival. Unless we find some pretty fundamental loopholes in the limitations that physics puts on technology, we are never going to go to the stars. I assume we could put men on Mars at immense expense, but then I guess the Egyptians could have built a pyramid even larger than the pyramid of Cheops. Meanwhile, for the record, teflon was invented in the 1930s.

The Great Beast: the Real Problem with the Demos

The classic nightmare of the conservatives is that the people will rise up and take their money. Which is the main reason they have the “this is a republic, not a democracy” bit on speed dial. On the evidence, however, an aroused People are more likely to prove reactionary than radical; and for every instance of redistribution at gunpoint one can find several cases of mobs demanding a restoration of the old order. The melody of the rough music is often enough the Horst Wessel song. It takes an extraordinary amount of time, effort, and money to teach the majority of individuals anything, so that activating existing prejudices will always be easier than mobilizing informed self interest. Republicans understand this basic fact much better than Democrats and practice on the simplicity of their constituents with much greater efficiency.

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.