Last Man Standing Turn Out the Lights

I don’t know if it counts as an instance of the wisdom of crowds, but some trends in popular culture do seem to amount to a general conclusion about our situation, almost as if the fads and crazes amount to an act of perception on the part of the hive mind. What set off this thought is a quick trip through the television listing wherein one finds, for the umpteenth year in a row, a host of televised contests, reality shows, and movies that all have the same general format. Whether they involve survival on an island or cooking or modeling or set design or makeup or dancing or singing or getting married, the format of nearly every show is the same as the plot of the Hunger Games. One by one, the contestants are winnowed down until only one individual or team remains. The contest is far less about winning than about avoiding loss. The lingering camera shots are on the losers. The winner is merely a formal necessity of the grammar of the contest and only appears for a few minutes at the end of the hour or even the season. Sometimes the credits are already rolling over the happy faces as they take their brief bow at the end. Obviously, the winners aren’t as interesting as the losers. The moment of triumph is the anticlimax: the disappointment and degradation of the losers is the substance.

Framing contests in this way is not a given, and television contest shows of older vintage do not.  The contestants on Jeopardy or Iron Chief or even Wheel of Fortune try to win. There are losers on these shows; but the focus is not on them; and they are treated very differently. Of course, cross-culturally, not even an emphasis on victory is a given. David Pace, a historian of anthropology, tells me that in many societies contests are played until the score is tied and wonders why this seems odd to us. Even if it does seem odd to us as heirs to the old Greek imperative that one must strive to out do the others, it remains true that our attitudes about victory are a matter of culture. In any case, the recent framing of competition that we see on the tube, goes a long way beyond a general obsession with competition. I think it reflects a specific and quite recent economic and, one might even say, spiritual situation.

Although the top prizes in the economic game are absurdly great, very few of us are even entered in that lottery. For most of us, the prize pool has shrunk over the last 40 years or, and this is what matters as far as the mood of country is concerned, it is perceived to be shrinking, hence, the compulsion to stage and restage simulacra of what is apparently a nation-wide game of musical chairs. Americans know that they have to make alliances with one another in order to survive; but they also believe, perhaps falsely, in the necessity of eventual treachery in a world without enough for everybody. Complicated debates about health policy aside, much of the opposition to universal health care is based on the simple thought that anything the other guys get will be at my cost. Ergo, get your hands off my Medicare!

There’s a deeper mechanisms at work as well. Winning or at least not losing is a value that survives the bankruptcy of other values. To put things crudely, the contest is a way of changing the subject in the absence of a sense of what your life is for. As a people, we could declare peace, after all, and build a society in which the goal was not a level playing field for an endless protracted conflict but the general health and welfare of the inhabitants of North America. Apparently this outcome is too terrible to contemplate. People not only chose to watch Chopped! They chose to live it.

Where is Fancy Bred?

You don’t have to be some sort of postmodernist to recognize that we frequently mistake linguistic conventions for objective facts about the universe. For example, we normally speak of facing the future; but it would be more sensible to claim, as some peoples do, that we are backing into the future. After all, everything we can know or perceive, as opposed to make guesses about, is in the past; and our constant stumbling would be more understandable if we adopted the metaphor of walking backwards to tomorrow. Whichever way we imagine our orientation in time, however, the choice is linguistic, not a matter of adopting a different physics. Nevertheless, such choices can have existential consequences.

Consider how we speak about sexual desire. When I say I desire a woman, the normal interpretation, at least among my kind of people, is that the desire, though inspired by her, is something that belongs to me, something I’m responsible for. There is nothing inevitable about this way of putting it. Old poems sometimes personify desire and treat it as one of the properties of the desired person, a fact about them. “Desire glowed in her lovely face.” On this view, one can no more choose not to perceive and feel this desire than one can choose not to see that an apple is red; and if the lover makes a fool of himself over the beloved or even acts in some seriously wrong way, the fault is not his, any more than it’s the nail’s fault to be attracted to a magnet.  In speaking in this fashion, the troubadour is merely working a variation on the eternal complaint of the misogynists. After all, priests and philosophers have been blaming women for being desirable for several thousand years now as if women had a singular responsibility for the bridle their attractiveness puts on masculine freedom. This rationale, which I suspect underlies the resentment of women by traditionalist Jews, Christians, and Muslims, continues to be widely in evidence in the modern world and, if it sometimes seems ridiculous, causes a tremendous amount of hurt. Of course it is possible to construe this attack on women as an instance of projection; but the matter can’t be settled scientifically because the location of desire is not a natural fact but an ethical choice, albeit one that the culture we are born into usually makes for us. Taking responsibility for your own behavior isn’t a recognition of a truth, it’s a matter of doing the right thing, which is something different. 

Separating Out

Before the great realignment of the 60s and 70s, the two worst segments of American society, the Southerners and the plutocrats, were in opposite parties. Now the racism and ignorance of the former has joined with the egotism and relentless greed of the latter to produce today’s GOP.  This bad outcome has been clear for some time, but perhaps it is less obvious that something similar has taken place in the area of religion. In the past, both the Protestant and Catholic denominations were a mixed bag of progressive and retrogressive tendencies, but the current religious scene features two dueling ecumenical groups. The religious split that matters in contemporary America is no longer between denominations but between right wing and liberal religiosity. We were far better off when the Southern Baptists were still denouncing the Jews and the Papists. Now that the authoritarian and obscurantist strains of all faiths have drained into the lowest swamp of the American spiritual landscape, rational believers and unbelievers alike have to confront a monster holy army.

Road Limericks

On a long drive to Los Angeles I got bored enough to compose some limericks in my head. I suppose this exercise in free association reveals something about me; but since it was random things I saw out the windshield that inspired these stinkers, maybe I was actually psychoanalyzing I-5.  Hegel claimed that the sciences and other human institutions constituted what he called Objective Reason. This is my contribution to Objective Nonsense.  

Said an auto mechanic in Texas

As he sexually assaulted a Lexus,

“I don’t mean to hurt her

Catalytic converter;

But, damn! That’s the gadget that checks us.

I confess I’m nonplussed for the nonce.

I’ve forgotten the meaning of sconce.

I believe that “soigné’”

Means “billboard” in L.A.

And guess that a “prelate’s” a ponce.

“My dreams have evolved, “ he said jovially,

“In lieu of evening with Bovary,

I’d bugger Gumby

In the back of a Humvee

While whistling Donna e mobile.

The governing rules are cuckoo

From Peoria down to Peru.

It makes scarcely a ripple

When a man bares a nipple,

But the feminine tit is taboo.

There’s a winsome young lady in Dallas

Who’s the cure for a flexible phallus.

I don’t mean to nag you,

But you won’t need Viagra

If ever you chance to see Alice.

I disdain ordinary disease.

It’s recherché ailments for me:

Coccidioides,

Polyploidy,

Or a prurient interest in bees.

“You gals should be grateful,” said Fritz,

Repeating one of his favorite bits,

“As I’ve told you all oft,

Your bras would fall off

If God hadn’t given you tits. “

Though it’s proving a difficult sell,

Reagan’s trying to privatize Hell.

Each bankrupt corporation

Once found in our nation

Is lobbying Satan as well.

No one’s happy about senility

With its various over-the-Hillites,

Yet I find that Alzheimer’s

Much worse for us rhymers

Who are stumped at the end of the verse.

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.