You’ve Heard It (and not Heard It) a Million Times Before

While surfing the net, I came upon a site called The Universes of Max Tegmark with a long expose of Tegmark’s ideas about multiple universes, including a thought experiment he refers to as quantum suicide, which he apparently cooked up back in 1998, though Wikipedia claims that the same notion was discussed by Hans Moravec in 1987 and Bruno Marchal in 1988. Suppose you set up an experiment in which a gun fires or does not fire depending on whether it turns out that the spin of a given particle points up or down. The odds are 50/50 for this completely indeterminate quantum event. Now suppose that an experimental subject sits in front of the gun and will be killed if the gun fires and will go on living if it does not.  According to Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, both outcomes occur, but in non-communicating, parallel worlds. From the point of view of the experimental subject, however, only one outcome is observable so that in principle a scientist who is willing to put their life on the line could verify the many-world’s interpretation by repeating the experiment on herself until the null hypothesis were rejected with any desired level of confidence. The experiment raises the possibility that everyone is immortal from their own point of view, assuming, and it’s a big assumption, that there is always set of some quantum events that would allow the subject to avoid death. This notion apparently occurred to Everett himself. According to his friend Keith Lynch, “Everett firmly believed that his many-worlds theory guaranteed him immortality: His consciousness, he argued, is bound at each branching to follow whatever path does not lead to death.”

Here’s the strange thing. I wrote a short story back in 1985 that features a version of the quantum-suicide idea. I wasn’t trying to do physics without a license—the experiment was just an elaborate plot device—but I wonder where I got the idea from or if I just pulled it out of my ass. The story itself isn’t anything special. Only a few friends and relatives ever read it. I’m offering it here for its curiosity value.

All Men are Mortal

I always treasured my obscurity much as other people cherish their fame. I chose quite deliberately to be a mousey and obsequious nonentity—not out of timidity and certainly not because I think humility to be a virtue, but solely out of a cunning and shameless selfishness. I very early recognized that the world always takes more than it gives its famous names. That’s clear to any halfway intelligent observer in the case of celebrities who are doomed to carry, Atlas-like, the lust, envy, or devotion of the many; but I saw that it was no different for the local real estate man who must atone for his minor triumphs in the Purgatory of the Rotarian luncheon. The visible man inevitably becomes a symbol to his fellows, his identity a pawn in a pointless game whose rules are laid down by the others. I wanted to possess myself, and I made this project the rule of my life.

That’s why I became a professor of English Literature at a small college in Ohio. Of course as a teacher and researcher I did have a social role, but a role far less burdensome than the strenuous occupations of rebel or madman that a less subtle man might have rashly chosen in pursuit of himself. I would have preferred to be utterly invisible or transparent; but, obliged to take on some color, I opted for gray. I thought of myself as a geode, one of those wonderful hollow rocks which looks like a nondescript clod of dirt from outside, but whose dark interior hides a brilliant bloom of colorful crystals.

In this disguise I might have lived and died like a dog in perfect happiness. It was not to be.

I had fallen asleep in my armchair watching an indifferent baseball game on the television when I suddenly startled awake. I thought something had finally happened in the ballgame, but the score was still 0 to 0 in extra innings. “Muscle twitch,” I muttered to myself. I was still rubbing my eyes when I heard a loud but muffled crack coming from the other unit of my duplex. I might have ignored it if I lived in a big city, but Lindley is a very small town indeed, and I couldn’t imagine what could have caused such a noise. Certainly, I didn’t think that my neighbor would do anything rash. Bill Wolfson was a physics professor at my school, an unremarkable middle-aged man with whom I was friendly but hardly close.

I got up, walked around to his door, and called out to him. There was no answer, but the lights were on in the kitchen, so I was sure he must be at home. The door was, as usual, unlocked, and I hurried in, suddenly concerned that something had happened to Bill.

As you will have already gathered, I am a most stolid individual; but I confess that what I saw in the kitchen left me gasping for breath. Bill, or what remained of him, sat or sprawled on cheap dinette chair. His jaws were still clamped tightly on the barrel of an old 10-gauge shotgun. The top of his head was gone and the wall beyond was splattered with blood and brains. An atrocious odor of smoke and burning flesh filled the air. It took a moment for me to be sure that the shock of this grisly scene had not given me a coronary, but as my heartbeat gradually slowed again, I noticed a yet more macabre particular. Bill had set up a video camera on the kitchen counter, and I could still hear the gentle whine of the recorder. For some unaccountable reason, this perfectly normal man had blown his brains out and recorded it all on a Panasonic. I turned of the machine as one might close the eyes of a corpse. Then I called the police.

While I was waiting, I discovered one more thing. Bill had a microcomputer on the kitchenette table. It had been turned off, but I noticed that a long manuscript was hanging from the printer. I guessed it was a suicide note, as indeed it was. For Bill’s sake and, I admit, from my own curiosity, I tore it from the printer and hastily carried it back to my own apartment. I could think of no better place to hide it than my freezer where I nestled it among the petrified leftovers and frozen steaks.

When I returned the cops were banging on the front door. I let them in and showed them to the kitchen. The local police turned out to me far more efficient than I expected. They were also a little irritating to me with their exaggerated deference as if I were some hysterical old woman whose world had been irremediably shattered. In fact, though I actually liked Wolfson well enough, I was more intrigued than horrified by what had transpired, especially since a glance at this last words had given me an inkling that this was anything but the routine suicide of a secretly desperate man. Besides, though I have long affected a slight, scholarly stoop as part of personal disguise, I’m really in very good shape. For once it offended by vanity to be dismissed as an old crock. And dismissed I was, “You can come down to the station anytime tomorrow and make a statement, Professor Hayes—just a formality—no need to worry about it.”

As I imagine the young sergeant expected, I nodded gravely and withdrew to my own side of the duplex, but only because I couldn’t think of a credible reason to hang around the scene of this fascinating incident. As I left, I passed the medical examiner, Dr Stingley, coming in. We looked at each other for an instant—I had played bridge with the man once or twice—and I remember whether this neat little man was as shrewd and competent in his morgue as he was at the card table.

I was extremely anxious to read the dead man’s last message, but both from prudence and a sense of style I decided to wait. I was slightly concerned that I might somehow be discovered with the note if I read it while the police were still rummaging through Bill’s place, but even more than that, it occurred to me that the fragile old scholar character I was playing had to react to the horror he had witnessed with some suitable show of unease. That no one would see me wring my hands and pace through my apartment was immaterial: I was artist enough to know that follow-through is as crucial to pretence as it is to a golf swing. It vexed me inwardly, however, that I couldn’t find out who won the ball game.

It was only much later, when the voices and footsteps from next door had ceased, that I removed the printout from my freezer and with a tint of ice cream. I sat at my own kitchen table eating marble fudge out of the carton and reading the peculiar message Bill had left behind.

Wolfson’s Testament was almost forty pages long—apparently word processing makes even suicides voluble—and was by turns affecting, closely reasoned, and simply crazy. It began with a cri de coeur, “Dear Woody, dear, dear Woody. How I hate you,” and continued in the same Joan Crawford vein for some pages. The tale was a hackneyed one. Bill had fallen in love with Woody; Woody had reciprocated; now Woody had jilted Bill. Bill couldn’t take it, would make Woody sorry, etc. I was a little disappointed, though it was interesting that Bill had evidently had a homosexual affair—I assumed Woody was a he. I was also surprised that so wooden a figure as Bill Wolfson could work himself into such fits of emotion.

As I read along, it gradually dawned on me that Bill never actually used the word suicide. He always referred to blowing his brains out as ‘the experiment.’ At first I dismissed this locution as gallows humor, but it became clear that Bill wasn’t kidding. “I’ve become a mad scientist. In a few hours, I may be dead, but if I’m not, I’ll know the biggest secret of them all because I’m going to perform the grandest and craziest experiment of them all. I’m going to find out if it is possible to turn out the lights.” Somehow the mundane business of self-destruction had gotten conflated in Wolfson’s mind with a weird metaphysical experiment. I interpreted his remarks as a kind of prosy paraphrase of ‘to be or not to be,’ but evidently the undiscovered country he had in mind was not the next world but simply his kitchen.  For some reason, Bill seemed to think that he could blow his brains out without dying.

Bill’s ramblings also had a cosmic slant. Sometimes he wrote grandiloquently about his own existence as “the big, obscene mystery,” and likened his mind to a hot, naked light bulb shining alone in a huge, empty garage. “Without me, without the inexplicable witness, what is there in this world but silence, dust, and cobwebs? Why should the light go on burning? Why does it have to hurt?” Apparently Bill thought this his shotgun would supply an explanation or, failing that, at least the sovereign Novocain of oblivion.

Sometimes Bill fairly cackled with crazy glee over what he was doing, but mostly he sounded guilty, and not just because of the pain he planned to inflect on his lover. “I’m a mad scientist because I’m not going to solve this puzzle for anyone but myself. If Frankenstein had proposed to reanimate the dead at the Salk Institute instead of his lonely castle, I bet he would have gotten a grant. In science you can try anything, but you have to let everybody in on it. That’s my secret crime. I’m going to find out about that fucking light bulb, but only for me, Dr. William Wolfson. I’m fed up with being a good little boy.”

Wolfson went on like this for many pages, but just when I thought he would on repeating himself to the end, his tone abruptly changed. I found myself reading a proper treatise on the physics of death. “Ironically, it was you who first pointed out that my interpretation of quantum mechanics may have drastic consequence. Consider an inertial frame of reference such that…” I sighed.  In such a dark wood a humanist like me was immediately astray. I who have made a career out of glossing Joyce and Pound could barely stay afloat in a pitchy sea of standing waves, singularities, and nodes, of Hilbert spaces and Hamiltonians. Every time I though I had caught my bearings, the page would break out with equations—it might as well have been written in Chinese. I was all the more frustrated because from time to time I caught sight of a human meaning, but only when a little jagged piece of comprehensible madness broke the black and greasy surface of scientific reason.

To my increasing confusion, Bill went on and on about an animal called Schrödinger’s Cat, and the Anthropoid Principle, and somebody named, improbably enough, Hugh Everett the Third. I was nearly ready to put the paper away and simply go to bed when I arrived at the crux. I had repeatedly read and re-read on particularly dense paragraph without really registering its point when I realized that I had jotted down a note that summarized the whole amazing performance: “Gist of the theory: everybody is literally immortal from their own point of view.” That night between the writing down and the reading over, I felt a distinct sensation of falling.

As any rate, I woke up. While Bill’s reasons were completely opaque to me, his conclusion was quite straightforward. According to him, the stream of time constantly branches into an infinite delta of parallel worlds. Everything physically possible—and apparently that just about anything imaginable—can and in fact does happen in one of the emerging worlds. It follows that whatever peril I undergo, there will always be some escape hatch, some quirk of destiny, which will allow my consciousness to move ahead into one or more futures. We’re all like James Bond or Luke Skywalker. We always dodge the razor-sharp brim of Odd Jobs bowler; we always elude the light saber of the invincible Vader. We can’t even die of old age, for if need be the atoms of our sclerotic arteries will jig instead of jag and get us out of the ICU. The Hell with Aristotle. No man is mortal.

All of this is, of course, sheer theory and lunatic theory at that as Bill seems to have realized. He was too much of a scientist to accept his conclusion a priori. Hence the experiment. “When I shoot myself, I won’t prove a damn thing to anybody but me. In most universes I’ll simply be a problem for the coroner and for you, faithless Woody. From my perspective, though, only successful outcomes can occur; they are the only cases in which I’ll be around to draw a conclusion. I calculate that if shoot myself a couple of times and live, I will verify my own immortality at the .001 confidence level.”

Had you asked me then what I thought of Wolfsan’s theory I would have dismissed it as symptomology.  Certainly I was not overwhelmed by all of Bill’s technicalities. O, the pages full of unintelligible mathematics, with their elegant integral signs, Greek letters, and symbols that looked like backward 6’s, were impressive, especially the conclusions marked with a little square for QED. The citations of Bohr, Einstein, and Tipler meant nothing to me. I had no way of knowing whether Bill’s physics was legitimate and in any case doubted if scientific reasoning could touch cogently on a matter of such existential concern. Besides, Bill himself insisted that his experiment violated all the rules of his profession, for it could only yield a personal sort of knowledge. If he fired the shotgun and lived, he might learn something, but in the vast majority of universes the result would simply be a half-headless corpse and a bemused neighbor.

For all my skepticism, I admit I did hope that Bill wasn’t just nuts. What gripped me was the reawakening of an ancient human hope. Who has not secretly consoled himself with the fantasy of his own immortality? Young men are said to disbelieve their own mortality—it is this crazy confidence that sends them whistling off to war. But in the middle of the night when an inexplicable pain wakens an old man’s anxiety, what half-formed thought allows sleep, if not the old dream that it can’t happen to me? I recall that at the end of his life the novelist William Saroyan wrote that he always thought he was exempt from death because was such a good writer, By Wolfson’s theory, one need not fend off one’s doom with superior adjectives, and it isn’t just the heroes who can look forward to the Elysian Fields.

Shaking off such ruminations, I continued to read the note. After all the physics, Bill went on for several paragraphs discussing the ethical import of his ideas. It was as if Wolfson were working out the moral consequences of physical immortality. He seemed to think that right ad wrong were as cut and dried as mathematics and that the new postulate of everlasting life, like the denial of the parallel postulate in geometry, would generate a sort of non-Euclidean morality. He concentrated, not surprisingly, on the new ethics of suicide. “If I am right, murder isn’t so bad as we had thought. In some ways in is impossible. Suicide takes the place of honor, for it harms the living at no cost to the erstwhile victim. In 99.999999% of all universes I will leave you alone to mediate on what you’ve done to me. Trillions of Woods will have to live with that I’ve done while in the comparably few worlds in which I go only living, I will glory in the thought of my revenge and the possession of my great secret.”

Bill’s note wound up with a dark hymn to loneliness. “People have thought that death was the great evil, but the great evil is really loneliness. We will all live on forever in our separate universes, but our immortality will cost us the loss of everyone we ever love. Losing someone is bad enough for beings that can die, but they can at least console themselves with the thought that they too will pass away. In the new world I give you, my faithless lover, there is only eternal loneliness. That was your last gift to me, Woody. Now I’m returning it.” It was this last passage that I had read while it was still hanging on Bill’s printer.

It was almost 5 when I looked up from this peculiar document. I would have to go down to the police station in a few hours, and the prospect made me feel exceedingly weary. Worse was to befall me, for as I undressed it struck me that my attempt to protect Wolfson might be in vain. I might even be in trouble myself. In the excitement of discovering the body and the not, it hadn’t occurred to me that the note might be preserved electronically in the machine. I tried to remember if the power were still on whether that made a difference. Would Dr. Stingley be able to determine if the note had ever been printed out? For once I wished I knew something about the damned computers. With such thoughts gnawing away at me, I struggled to fall asleep and finally succeeded.

I woke up with the happy thought that I was in fact immortal. I jumped out of bed and shouted at no one in particular. Then I chuckled because no one was there to hear me in the silent house.

“Ah well,” I thought, “Life goes on!” I remembered I had errands to run. I picked up my laundry, I went grocery shopping; and to the amusement of several kids, I played a video game in the mall. Everything could have happened the same way a day before my discovery, but somehow my little chores had become intensely pleasurable. Everything was a privilege—a drink of water, the sound of my shoes slapping on the sidewalk in front of Watson’s diner, the blowzy friendliness of the checkout clerk at the supermarket. Everything was magical because of all the inhabitants of the earth, I alone owned these ordinary moments free and clear. I could go to the store a million times. I could let my mind wander for a century if I liked, for my thoughts were as eternal as God’s and I would never again be under any obligation to come to a conclusion.

I amused myself with the theological consequences of my new state. Surely an every lasting being is eo ipso God even if he is also a harmless middle-aged man in polyester pants. Of course, I knew I was neither omnipotent nor omniscient, but it seem to me that I ha a far more important attribute of divinity: complacency. I didn’t need thunderbolts or a cloak of fire. I didn’t need a chorus line of angels behind me. I would be a hidden God whose transcendence never manifested itself in anything more violent than an infinitely knowing smile whose secret I alone possessed.

I looked up at the sun and though that after that great light goes out for good, my stubborn little habits would to on, the true laws of nature. Under a new heaven, I would someday absently pick my teeth and recite poetry to myself.

That sun kept getting brighter and brighter until I realized that it was the sun coming in my bedroom window and that I had been dreaming. It took me a few minutes to sort out what was dream and what was history. A quick trip to the freezer assured me that Bill Wolfson had indeed died in the name of science and love and that I still had a problem with the coroner. By then I certainly didn’t feel immortal. My eyes were red, and my whole body ached.

It was about eleven when I finally went in to see the police. A visibly bored secretary took my statement, and I began to hope that the whole affair would blow over. I had risen to leave when the young woman stopped me.  “Excuse me, Professor Hayes. The medical examiner would like to have a word with you before you go.”

Stingley’s office was at the end of one of those linoleum halls what could as easily be part of a hospital, a junior college, or a courthouse. His secretary showed me into a tiny office shoe air bore, or so I imagined, a faint aroma of formaldehyde. Stingley came in almost immediately. He wore his usual neat suit with its aggressively unfashionable how tie, but his seemed uncharacteristically frayed as if he had been up most of the night. His eyes were red and staring.

“I’m glad you came in, Dr. Hayes,” he began formally. “There are a couple of details about Bill Wolfson’s death that need cleaning up.

“I wouldn’t think there would be much for a medical examiner to do in a case like this.”

“You wouldn’t think so. Certainly the immediate cause of death is no medical mystery.”

“Was Bill drinking?” I ventured.

“I don’t me to be impolite, but I think I’ll ask the questions. Tell me what happened.”

“I just gave my statement.”

“Be good enough to repeat it.” Stingley’s request sounded like an order.

In my best academic-obtuse fashion, I told him what happened—everything but the detail about the printout.

“Look, Dr. Hayes, I know this whole affair makes you nervous, but please spare me the professor bit. You can’t be more than 50 and, according to the college, you publish three or four articles a year even though you have tenure. You aren’t the diffuse old gent you pretend to be. Your secret is safe with me, but I want information.”

“Very well,” I said and pulled up my chair. I was impressed by this young fellows acumen.

“Who’s Woody?”

“I don’t know anybody of that name.”

“You’ve encountered the name recently, though, haven’t you?”

I was framing an answer when Stingley help up his hand, “I know all about the printout. When you tore it off, you left a piece of one page hanging on the printer. It had the last page number on it.”

I opened my mouth but didn’t manage to say anything.

“Please don’t deny it. When I first realized that you had taken the printout, I thought you might be involved somehow; but after I read the note, I guessed you took it to satisfy your own curiosity. Anyhow, you certainly aren’t Woody.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Woody is a woman. I found some letters Wolfson wrote to her on his machine. Unfortunately, they must have been hand delivered.  There were no addresses.”

I tried to protest my innocence.

“Please don’t waste my time professor. In the first place you were the only one who had a chance to get the printout. The machine was still warm when I arrive. It had just been turned off. It follows that it had been used just before Wolfson shot himself.”

“Couldn’t someone have removed it between the time I hard the shot and came in.”

“It would have been on the video recording. Besides you’ve obviously been awake most of the night. From what I’ve heard you didn’t know Wolfson all that well. I can’t see you sitting around all night mourning him. I figure you pored over the paper as if it were one of your old books. Frankly, I’m not very interested in hanging you out to dry for stealing printout. It would be a small-potatoes crime in any case. Besides, for someone like you it must be punishment enough to know just how stupidly you’ve acted in all this.”

I did feel stupid, but I resented Stengley’s tone. “I’m sorry I violated the letter of the law, doctor, but I don’t see why you have to be abusive about it.  After all, I was just trying to protect a friend.”

“O come now. You took the note because you were fascinated by the whole thing. Evidently you like secrets.”

“I don’t deny my own curiosity in this affair. After all, my profession, like yours, is about finding things out. In any case, I didn’t want the truth about Bill Wolfson.”

“Just you, ey?” Stengley regarded me narrowly. “Maybe you should know the whole story. You were willing to steal evidence out of your scientific love of secretes. Let’s see how well you like this one.”

At this, the coroner unlocked a drawer in his desk and took out a videotape. He led me unprotesting into an inner room and put the cassette in a player. I should have been reluctant to see the tape; in fact, I was full of guilty eagerness.

The tape was surprisingly long. Wolfson had turned on the camera early to capture all of his preparations. He went about his business in complete calm, making sure that the angles were right so that the tape machine would catch everything, even positioning a clock on the shelf beyond the chair. Finally set himself down, very carefully loaded the shot gun and showed it to the lens, leaned back, inserted the muzzle in his mouth, and pulled both triggers in what you’d have to call a matter-of -fact way. There was a loud report and a huge volume of smoke pored from Wolfson’s mouth. Behind his head, the wall was peppered with shot. Bill sat up bolt upright and coughed furiously. Presently the cough turned into an uncontrollable laugh as Bill looked full on at the camera. His eyes were glowing and smoke continued to issue from his powder-stained smile.

For a moment he seemed to lose himself in thought. Then he reached for the cartridge box on the table. Very deliberately, he reloaded the gun, sat back down, put the muzzle in his mouth, and again pulled the triggers. His death was so instantaneous that it wasn’t even frightening: one moment a lanky, forty-year old scientist was settling himself in a chair and the next all that remained was a motionless, partly decapitated corpse.

After a few minutes I rushed in. You could see my eyes get very big, but what actually embarrassed me the most how quickly the expression drained from my face once the sheer impact of the scene had faded. Obviously, because I hadn’t noticed the video machine, I hadn’t bothered to register any emotion at all except perhaps a lingering note of surprise. Because I though myself unseen, I had the blank look of a man blind from birth. Eventually I noticed the camera was on and turned it off.

I stared at the screen for a long time after it had gone black.  When I finally looked around, I saw Stingley sitting rigidly in his char with an exasperated look on his smooth face. “I expect I don’t need to tell you to keep quiet about all this. Was it enough of a secret for you?”

I think I nodded, but it was a very long time ago and I may not remember everything perfectly.

Rewards and Punishments

The problem with capitalism is that it is too rewarding. The prospect of unlimited income is undoubtedly motivating—drug lords have excellent work habits—but that’s precisely the problem. We know that people will lie, cheat, and steal for relatively small payoffs. What do you suppose they’ll do if they can make $345 million a year doing it? Swindle their customers? Destroy the environment? Sell tainted food? Sell people into slavery? Buy politicians? Subvert the courts? Start wars? Betray their country? As we all know, the lords of universe do all that and a great deal more as a matter of routine. Even the most fervent disciples of the gospel of wealth are perfectly aware that the doings of the great would be the sheerest criminality in small timers. They simply assert that these activities automatically result in good consequences, a conclusion they apparently base on something they read somewhere.

What we have here is a dosage problem. If one pill makes you feel better, it doesn’t follow that it’s a good idea to empty the bottle. The opportunity to get ahead can certainly make people work harder and sometimes smarter, which is very often a good thing. Increasing the potential rewards without limit, however, simply means that other motives and considerations will be overwhelmed. Offer me enough and I’ll not only ignore my obligations to my fellow man, I’ll feel that I ought to ignore them.

The Theoretical Problem and the Real Problem

You still encounter people who doubt that atheists can be moral even though one would think that a debate that began back in the late 17^th Century with a famous entry in Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary would be pretty much played out by now. I actually had a thought about it the other day, which, though not really new, is at least one I haven’t heard recently. It occurred to me that the real reason it’s hard for traditionalists to imagine non-theological justifications for morality is not that they or anybody else has much trouble figuring out what’s problematic about lying or homicide and most of the rest. It is only very specific elements of their moral stance that are difficult to justify without divine help. It isn’t that there can’t be rational arguments for moral principles; it’s just that there can’t be rational arguments for irrational principles. As one can verify by perusing any reasonable sample of three hundred years of anti-atheistic polemic, what the traditionalists overwhelmingly care about is defending hierarchy, the privileges of kings and priests in the old days or the wealthy and powerful in ours. It really is hard to come up with something that will convince non-elites that they should be obedient servants willing to suffer and die for their betters. That’s what God and the angels do for a living. The much discussed abyss between the ought and the is has very little to do with it. The problem isn’t meta-ethical, but ethical. There just aren’t any good arguments for immoral conclusions.

You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do

A significant fraction of American economic capacity is going unused. We not only aren't getting the goods and services this capacity could produce, but more importantly we're losing future capacity because of flagging real investment in plant, personnel, and technology. The private sector is sitting on piles of money right now and could invest, but won't because it doesn't make any sense to produce goods and services nobody is buying or can buy—all the surveys of business people list absence of customers as the prime reason for decisions not to hire. Under the circumstances, I don't see the alternative to public investment.

The notion that resources put to work by governments are somehow not productive is obviously false. Indeed, the most obviously needed capital investments are just the kinds of things that governments have traditionally undertaken or subsidized: transportation infrastructure, research, education, environmental remediation. They are also the investments that the roaring new Asian economies are undertaking as they outstrip us. Does somebody actually believe that the Erie and Panama Canals, the land grant universities, the railroads, the interstate highway system, or the Internet weren't productive investments? Really?

The Conservatives, who favor policies that promote income and wealth disparity, should think twice before blocking projects that put the country back to work. America has consistently tolerated levels of inequality that led to popular revolt elsewhere in the world because economic expansion gave the have nots hope that they would eventually become haves. Absent renewed growth, it will soon become apparent to anybody who hasn't already figured it out already that America is not only stratified but that its class divisions are becoming set in stone. The philosopher Hegel once remarked that the French Revolution would never have taken place were the forests of Germany still empty. By the same logic, we never had a revolution comparable to the French Revolution in this country because in the 19th Century we had a still open frontier and in the 20th we had several episodes of dramatic industrial growth. If the Republicans don't want to end up with their heads on pikes, they might want to reconsider their opposition to the public investments essential to a fresh burst of economic expansion. Ironically, restoring a realistic sense of hope to people of middling means is essential to maintaining America's tolerance for inequality.

To be Fair

The right wing outlook on life doesn’t often get the respect it deserves. For example, the Conservative answer to the current economic situation is not so crazy as it sounds. If the ability of working people to resist lower wages were decisively broken, supply and demand would indeed raise the employment rate—for a couple of hundred a month, who wouldn’t hire more servants? We simply have to stop thinking of great disparities of wealth and income as an exceptional condition. Of course reestablishing the proper social order of things will require some political changes to prevent any effective popular protest, ergo the current campaign of reinstituting Jim Crow laws to prevent the wrong kind of people from voting and the continuing effort to make it effectively illegal or at least extremely dangerous for working people to organize. There is surely no moral objection to this program: if you’ve been told that capitalism turns private greed into public good, its natural to draw the conclusion that one should therefore be as greedy as possible, not just in the grand fashion of business moguls, some of whom, after all, really do build useful things but in the somewhat less glamorous fashion of grasping old farts. This does not mean that conservatives cannot be charitable, of course. Charity is one of the cardinal privileges of wealth and ostentatious demonstrations of compassion by professional golfers and oil billionaires are praiseworthy so long as they don’t threaten to actually relieve human suffering or create confusion as to who is in charge. What did Jesus say? “The poor should always be with us.” Close enough. And it would be utterly unjust to object to modern conservatism as elitist. Humility, no doubt, is a virtue; and vulgarity is the right-wing version of humility, a philistine populism that brags about its ignorance and love of violence. What we have here is a large number of people who have decided that civilization was a mistake all along. Who’s to say they’re wrong?

To Whom It May Concern

The lede in the New York Times article on the New York election reads: “The Republican defeat in a special election is a reminder that voters like the idea of budget cuts, but often recoil when the cuts threaten programs that touch their lives.” This sentence, though not exactly false, reflects a deeply erroneous story line, the notion that the Republican attempt to destroy Medicare has something to do with controlling the deficit. The deficit is just the most recent of a long series of excuses to do what they have always wanted to do. How anybody could live through the last thirty years and believe that the Conservatives care about the national debt is mysterious to me. They do say they care about the state of our finances, of course; but you have to give them the benefit of the doubt to an extraordinary degree to credit their protestations of fiscal virtue in view of the budget-busting policies they have put in place at every opportunity under Reagan and the two Bushes. The current uptick in the deficit, after all, is almost entirely a function of the Bush’s tax cuts and military adventures. The long-term budget problem is indeed largely a matter of medical inflation; but the Republicans fought a ferocious and dishonorable campaign to prevent the passage of the health care reform, which was the first serious step in decades to curb the increase in costs.

Of course if what was at stake were merely one way of organizing a decent provision for the well being of the aging population, the issue would not be so critical. There’s nothing sacred about Medicare as a particular scheme. Unfortunately, the Conservatives would be just as hostile to any arrangement that could actually work since what upsets them is the idea that people can best deal with an existential problem by universal, intergenerational cooperation instead of purely private initiative.

At root, Conservatives hate Medicare because they hate the notion of universal human rights and the inclusive view of humanity that goes along with it. Like people who are besotted with love, they lie without hesitation or shame to satisfy their ideological passion. It’s not that they don’t have a sense of right and wrong: if the dishonesty had not long sense disappeared in the oblivion of habit, they would simply argue that behavior that would be reprehensible if done to members of the in-group is perfectly justifiable when used against members of the out-group, in this case, the majority of inhabitants of the country. As I have had occasion to point out before, in a political system with some democratic features, deceit is absolutely imperative for defenders of privilege and that’s true even when privilege is not recognized as privileged. Indeed, the moral contradiction is all the stronger in the American instance where the oligarchical party actually thinks of itself as populist. Surely lying to a newspaper is not a sin if it is done in defense of liberty! There are bound to be casualties in any war, and even I have to admit that the least of it is the massacre of arithmetic perpetrated every night on CSPAN by Republican congressmen.

Not About Wikileaks

HBGary Federal, a private security firm, has been advising Bank of America how to respond to the threat of more data dumps from Wikileaks. Since the relevant memos from HBGary have themselves been leaked, we know that the recommended response is preemptive attack on Wikileak supporters including the Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald. One of HBGary’s bullet points reassures the bankers: “These are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them will chose professional preservation over cause, such is the mentality of most business professionals.”

At the moment, I have nothing to add to the debate about Wikileaks; but I note the oddity that an important, if not central fact of American political life can appear in a private Power Point presentation as a truism and yet seldom be mentioned or commented upon in a public venue, presumably because this particular truism is, in fact, true. For many professions, prostituting one’s self is an integral part of the trade and counts as the prudence expected of an adult. Thus, American journalists, at least the sensible ones, only rock the boat as a bargaining maneuver. They have to represent themselves as a potential threat to the powers that be in order to satisfy their armour propre and command a higher price for their later good behavior. There is a place for honest reportage—Glenn Greenwald isn’t going to shut up—but the commercial niche for principled commentary is very narrow and generally doesn’t pay enough in an era in which professional people expect to be extremely affluent.

Five and a Half Whys

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has delivered its verdict on the causes of the 2008 collapse. Because the majority determined that the disaster had been preventable, the Republican members of the commission were not enthusiastic about this conclusion, perhaps pretending to doubt the validity of the forensics because of whose fingerprints were on the murder weapon. I have a different criticism. Although several factors were identified, the inquiry was not sufficiently recursive. It didn’t repeat its questions enough times. If the regulators failed, why did they fail? If financial laws were inadequate, why were they inadequate? If too much money went into highly leveraged derivatives, why were these paper investments so much more attractive than investments in plant and personnel?

Six-year old girls know the game of asking why over and over again. You’d think that sixty year old economists could at least ask why at least five times, as famously recommended by the engineers of Toyota. The difficulty, I suspect, is not that answers are not forthcoming to the repeated questions but just the reverse. There’s a slippery slope here. If you don’t stop fast enough, you might tumble down to an inconvenient place. You might have to admit that the problem cannot be explained by corrupt individuals or institutions, but reflects more fundamental and intractable problems. Moral explanations are always superficial. It’s not just that there are reasons why the malefactors do wrong. There are also reasons why honest actors do the right thing and reasons why, under some circumstances, it doesn’t matter a great deal what anybody does.

It is perfectly true that Alan Greenspan deserves to be horsewhipped, but it would be more useful to know why it is unthinkable that he and the rest of his kind will ever be horsewhipped. And it would be still more valuable to figure out how to promote anti-Alan Greenspans to positions of authority. Similarly, it’s all very well to bewail the dominion of financial interests over regulators, legislators, and judges; but it would be better to find a counterforce to concentrated wealth. Laws by themselves will never help. Like an alien aphid, Goldman Sachs has no natural enemy in these parts—we need to find somebody or something that eats bankers.

Incidentally, I do try to follow my own advice occasionally. For example, while I do think that one of the deeper reasons for the financial and economic calamity of the last couple of years is the great and growing disparity of wealth in the our country—a conclusion, by the way, which is apparently shared even by many business leaders—I don’t think that’s an adequate explanation for what’s going on either. One has to ask why wealth and power have become increasingly concentrated at the very top, not only in the U.S. but in other nations as well. I’m not satisfied with the answers I’ve encountered to that question so far.

A Question of Who

The critical thing is not one’s moral principles: rules, after all, can be interpreted in endless ways; and it requires an excess of metaphysical optimism to believe that there is only one right course of action and that we’re always able to see it. What matters is the point of view taken up by the moral actor. Theological ethics make sense if we think of ourselves as servants or slaves, i.e. individuals whose task is to understand the orders of their masters and faithfully observe them. Kantian ethics, but also many versions of utilitarianism, are the ethics of free individuals who assume that it is their responsibility to make decisions. That’s why such secular ethical systems so offend the religious: the follower of the categorical imperative is guilty of the sin of pride since he takes up the station of the lawgiver that ought to belong to god alone. The religious also imagine that an ethic of autonomy is an invitation to arbitrary and perhaps murderous freedom, the creed of Columbine. Those who have thoroughly thought through the implications of human liberty will disagree: the recognition of one’s freedom is the coldest of cold baths. The dangerous people are those who attain the authority without accepting what goes with it: as the Greeks knew and every age learns again, a tyrant is a slave with too much power.

No Commercial Possibilities

Pederasty Deflated is a book that will never be written, though its general outline is easy enough to rough out. Such a text would point out that the obsession with sexual crimes against children is rather recent and that the salience of the issue is more than debatable given the fairly obvious fact that children are harmed far more by poverty and the lack of good health care than the ministrations of horny priests and peculiar uncles. Like the witch craze of the Renaissance and Reformation era, the SVU hysteria of our times is a clear instance of displacement, the refocusing of anxieties on a convenient target. It’s almost as if the need to get upset about other people’s sexual behavior has a constant mass and the pederast now bears a much larger proportion of this burden now that it has become socially unacceptable to hate homosexuals and cohabiting unmarried couples. The persecution of sexual deviance is also politically useful, as we see in the predictable way in which any person who threatens ruling interests will be predictably accused of sexual irregularities, often involving children. Just as the war on drugs has long served to erode everyone’s civil rights, the interminable campaign against child pornography is a crucial element in the state’s campaign to tame the Internet. There are, of course, people who prey on children, just as there really are people who want to blow up buildings for political and religious causes; but the response to both pederasty and terrorism is so ludicrously disproportionate as to call for an explanation in terms of the psychological, economic, and political utility of these inflated threats. Unfortunately, while various people have addressed the hyping of terrorism, it is a far more daunting prospect to confront the other great inflated monster.

The Editorial

Somebody once told me that my essays sound like editorials by which I think he meant that they were measured, sound, and reassuringly dull. I suppose I’d rather have a reputation for daring, but you can’t escape your nature. Character is destiny, as Heraclitus pronounced long ago; or, to put it another way, even though an excruciatingly gradual vengeance would be the most terrible, no superhero is ever going to be named the Sloth. My thoughts are doomed, apparently, to drag their arthritic coils laboriously behind the gravity of my purposes. Might as well advertise this effect as dignity. Anyhow, there may be times when it is appropriate to take your time.

When Gabrielle Gifford was shot in Tucson last week, a great many people, myself included, instantly wondered if somebody had finally been inspired to action by Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, and the rest, though I at least and I expect most of the others were also perfectly aware that we simply didn’t know. When it turned out the perpetrator’s motives were thoroughly psychotic, the assumption that right-wing paranoia was at fault was criticized even though it was surely, if silently shared at the time by most Republicans who must have felt they had dodged a bullet—nobody, right or left or center, is going to be surprised if Teabaggery eventually results in violence, after all. Thing is, what’s at stake in all this is not the impropriety of jumping to conclusions and engaging in a scholastic debate about the effect of the rhetorical environment on the behavior of paranoid schizophrenics is similarly irrelevant to what lies beneath the public debate. It is simply this: the scandal that it takes a multiple murder to get anybody to notice how screamingly pathological our politics has become. The crazy narratives retailed on Fox may indeed have nothing to do with one guy in Arizona, but they are extraordinarily crazy nevertheless. What does it take for the political nation (if there is such a thing) to respond to the fact that a large part of the population has convinced itself that the government is run by a Marxist/socialist/fascist/Nazi/atheist/narco/muslim/terrorist Antichrist?

Come to think of it, that last bit didn’t sound that much like the New York Times.

Relativistic Ptolemaic Astronomy

If the earth is at rest at the center of the universe, the maximum diameter of the sphere of fixed stars can be calculated from Einstein’s theory of relativity. The maximum circumference of the sphere is one light day since a larger sphere would have to travel faster than the speed of light to carry the stars around the earth in 24 hours. It follows that the diameter of the universe is at most about .318 light days or a bit more than five billion miles. Since Neptune is, at its closest, 2.67 billion miles from earth and its orbit is therefore over 5 billion miles across, we can conclude that Ptolemaic astronomy has serious problems. Stay tuned.

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.