Noted in Passing

Several prominent Republican senators are trying to head off attempts by House conservatives to defund Obamacare by shutting down the entire government. I note without further comment that their basic argument against the House strategy is that it would end up weakening the party and perhaps lead to a loss of control of the House. So far as I know, no Republican of any kind has expressed concerned for the human cost of wrecking the American health care system.

A Couple of Thoughts about Zimmerman, Martin, and Obama

The hard right was predictably livid about Obama’s remarks on the Zimmerman case, but even quite conservative people found what he said unremarkable. No wonder about that. The President never deviated very far from commonsense. Obama remarked that his black listeners understood from experience the animus they face in dealing with the police or even just getting a taxi, but I found myself wondering why any of this should be news to whites either. After all, black people hear door locks clicking as they walk past parked cars, but we’re doing the clicking. White people remain afraid of black people. This is news? A black Zimmerman would have gotten away with assassinating a white Martin? Really?  

So long as we make sure to keep the discussion focused on subjective attitudes, no one can refute the proposition that prejudice has declined in this country. As we read in the Bible, “No one knows what is in man but the spirit of man which is in him.” I doubt if St. Paul was trying to craft a universal dodge for bad behavior by making this remark, but it certainly works efficiently when used for that purpose. If we look at what people do and ignore their assertions about the state of their souls, it seems pretty clear that we routinely overestimate to what extent racial attitudes have changed. That’s especially true in the South where decent people have learned to loudly deny their own racism. You have to wonder how long even this linguistic piety would survive if their side manages to win the culture war—look at how quickly several states rushed to enact new Jim Crow laws once the Supreme Court let them. After the Civil War, Dixie never went through a process comparable to denazification, and black citizens and the nation's honor continues to pay the price for that. In a species as lacking in genetic diversity as ours, the races themselves are largely cultural artifacts; but racism, the tendency to hate other groups on the basis of visible differences, is apparently quite natural and dealing with it takes a great deal more effort than we’ve been willing to expend, at least so far.

Of course, as many of the reactions to the Zimmerman affair demonstrate, the problem isn't just a Southern thing. Thus many people all across the country have pointed to high black crime rates to justify the racial profiling beneath Zimmerman’s behavior. I guess the reasoning is that if you don’t want to be at increased risk from cops and vigilantes, you should do something about the behavior of your kind as if Trayvon Martin participated in some sort of collective guilt in the same way some theologians speak of everyone participating in the sin of Adam. The essentialism of this kind of thinking isn’t the only thing problematic about it. If it isn't the legacy of hundreds of years of oppression and economic deprivation that accounts for the problem of black crime, the conclusion must be that the explanation is the intrinsic viciousness of negritude itself, the curse of Ham. What else? Appealing to some notion of metaphysical free will certainly doesn’t help. If men are all radically free and circumstances don’t matter, roughly the same proportion of every group should opt for the same choices by sheer chance like an honest coin or balls drawn from an urn. That’s nonsense of course, but I guess it’s too useful a form of nonsense to be dispensed with.   

In fact, no one who has bothered to learn American history is surprised at how difficult it is for a despised minority to make headway against the continuing and often institutionalized hatred of the majority. The crime rates in inner cities are utterly unmysterious, granted the lack of social and cultural capital of the inhabitants, the lousy schools, the inadequate policing, the bad health care, and all the rest. You can and many do blithely recommend that black people ought to be saints or heroes, though I don't notice a great deal of superhuman effort coming from the other side. Of course exceptional individuals do surmount the obstacles, but no group of human beings is made up of exceptions. Which is why racism will be over, if it ever is over, with the end of the marked disparity of fortune between the races and not before.  

 

The Crisis of the Twenty First Century

If you search the pages of John Froissart’s Chronicles of England, France, and Spain for any notice of the Black Death, you’ll be disappointed. Even though this contemporaneous account of the 14^th Century includes many pages telling the story of Edward III’s famous victory at the Battle of Crecy in 1346, you won’t find even a sentence about the plague that arrived in Europe less than two years later. The battle resulted in several thousand deaths. The plague claimed millions and reduced the population of Europe by almost a half. There’s nothing particularly surprising in Froissart’s indifference to a happening of much larger moment than the squabbles of kings. In concentrating on the collision of dynasties and the pageant of wars, Froissart was, to use his own words, interested in “la noble matière du temps passé” just as Herodotus had written his history so that “the great and wonderful deeds of the Greeks and the Barbarians would not be forgotten.” For Froissart, as for so many others, history is about the alpha dogs, a properly mammalian affair. The doings of bacteria don’t count. A fortiori, less showy natural events are at most background for what men do even if they have more to do with the outcome of wars and revolutions than the vanity of princes or the syllogisms of ideologues.

There have certainly been historians who paid attention to natural occurrences like epidemics—Thucydides’ describes in some detail the plague that struck Athens in the early years of the Peloponnesian war and obviously takes it seriously as a causal factor in the decline of his city—but historians have trouble integrating natural occurrences into their narratives, especially when, unlike outbreaks of the plague, non-human inputs into the story occur gradually. The insidiousness of climate change makes it especially difficult for historians to deal with. Even those who take a sociological approach to history—Charles Tilly, Jack Goldstone, Ernst Gellner, Michael Mann*—don’t have much to say about major climate events such as the Little Ice Age though the timing of fits of extended bad weather matches quite well with eras of social upheaval and demographic stasis or collapse. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie wrote a book on the methodological and scientific problems inherent in integrating the natural history of the climate with human history (Times of Feast, Times of Famine). That was back in ’67, though, and its rather surprising that so few serious historians have returned to the theme. Mike Davis related shorter-term climate fluctuations like El Niño to some of the great droughts and famines of the 19^th Century in his Late Victorian Holocausts, but Davis focuses in that book on the role of imperialism and free market capitalism in turning these natural events into human catastrophes.

All of this makes Geoffrey Parker’s treatment of climate change as an independent variable in early modern history extremely welcome. Global Crisis is a detailed and wide-ranging examination of the disasters that beset almost all the nations of the Northern Hemisphere between 1618 and 1700 and the famines, floods, and droughts that may account for their otherwise mysterious simultaneity. The English Civil War, the Thirty Years War in Germany, the Fronde in France, civil wars in Turkey, the collapse of Spanish power, the Russian Time of Troubles, the rapid decline of the Polish monarchy, the fall of the Ming dynasty, and the wars that led to the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate all took place within the same few decades. Why? Others have recognized that there was a general crisis, and people like Goldstone have looked for common causes for a worldwide epidemic of political instability. Parker makes the case that the great overarching fact of this unhappy century was the cooling of the climate by a couple of degrees Celsius. What makes this these thesis particularly significant is that the magnitude of the climate change we’re undergoing right now will almost surely be larger than 2°. Even ignoring the more dramatic effects, even mildly increased temperatures raise death rates and lower agricultural productivity.

Parker is a serious historian, well known for his work on the Dutch revolt, the vicissitudes of the Spanish empire, and the military revolution of the 17^th Century. After traversing the 800 pages of Global Crisis, few readers will accuses him of oversimplifying anything. His point is not that everything that happened in the 17^th Century is explicable in terms of the weather, but that colder weather interacted in specific ways with existing institutions and other forces to produce a spectrum of results, resulting, for example, in stronger central governments in some countries (France, England, Japan) and weakened or failed states in others (Spain, Poland, the Ottoman empire.)

Climatologists talk of anthropogenic CO₂ as a forcing, i.e., an independent variable that impacts the climate as a whole. Parker treats climate change in an analogous way as if the effects of colder weather ramified through demographic, agricultural, economic, political, and eventually ideological subsystems of history in much the same way that pushing down the break pedal increases the hydraulic pressure even in distant lines. What’s fascinating about his book is the investigation of how the shorter growing seasons, larger floods, and longer droughts of the Little Ice Age promoted mass starvation, widespread plagues, and endless wars, a Malthusian crisis that lowered the population of many countries by one third in Germany, Poland, Russia, China, and the Ottoman empire. People were actually stunted by the stress as attested by the average height of recruits in the French army, which fell to a little more than 5 feet. The philosopher Hobbes, a child of this era, famously spoke of the life of man as naturally solitary, poor, brutish, and short; but perhaps he was just generalizing from what he could see around him in the stricken Europe of his times.    

Disaster movies predispose us to think of general catastrophe in terms of big, showy disasters; but slow works, too, and it compounds the problems it creates by making it harder for those subject to the crisis to understand and deal with what’s going on. The people of the 17^th Century knew that things were much worse than usual; but they trotted out the traditional explanations, which generally involved human turpitude and divine anger. It never seemed to occur to them that it was illogical to blame something that does not change for something that does change. Our behavior is always deplorable, after all. Why did Jehovah pick 1618 to do something about it? To be fair, the historians often fall into the same fallacy, explaining specific regional events like the English Civil War, the fall of the Ming dynasty, or the Thirty Years War by pointing to factors like governmental incompetence as if the governments hadn’t been incompetent before. It’s not that the stupidity of princes or even the general shortcomings of human nature are irrelevant, however. What’s needed—and this is the great virtue of Parker’s book—is an explanation of why and how institutional weaknesses become fatal under novel pressure.

In most places, the ruling powers attempted to deal with the crisis of the 17^th Century, which they experienced not as climate change but as endless riots and revolts, by asserting stronger control. The last half of the century was the time in which princes attempted, with variable success, to unify the patchwork of territories that constituted pre-modern kingdoms and also to assert their power at a finer grain. The attempt failed in Poland, Spain, and most of Germany; but it succeeded in France, England, China, and Japan, thus ushering in the Age of Absolutism. Incidentally, a significant feature of the revolution in governance was a great increase in data collection by central governments—Colbert, who is portrayed as the selfless, civil servant in Man in the Iron Mask movies, was actually the relentless, rather sinister master of the Ancien Regime’s version of the NSA. He ransacked the archives of the local French parliaments in order to assemble the immense repository of information needed to assert central control over a fractious society under perpetual pressure, much of it from climate.

It wasn’t just kings who had to adjust. The famines, floods, and droughts of this period caused riots and insurrections that made it difficult for local elites to maintain local dominance with their own resources. The magnates of the older feudal system resented central authority, but they couldn’t continue to extract surpluses from the population in the old feudal way. Where the state didn’t simply break down, a new solution emerged, not one in which privilege was in any sense diminished, but one in which the aristocrats gave over political power to the state in exchange for service in the military and civil service. In lieu of lords of the castle, the great ones became courtiers at Versailles or Edo. This transition did not occur easily or peacefully, but under the right circumstances it could work, in part because declines in population made it easier for the powers that be to deal with fresh climatic disasters. There were simply fewer people left to feed, and the improved efficiency of government led to better responses to emergencies.  

It may not be reasonable to draw a parallel between the emergence of Absolutism in the 17^th Century and the growth of technocratic totalitarianism in our times, at least in point of what’s causing nations all around the world to screw the lid on as tightly as they can, imprison large portions of their citizenry, and put cameras on the street lamps. As I have suggested before, the increase in inequality and the loss of political freedom that goes with seems to be largely a consequence of the absence of any credible threat to power-holding groups in the wake of the collapse of the Left. Where people at large can be more effectively exploited, they will be, simply because they can be. Domination of the many by the few is the default case, at least since the Neolithic; and it is times and places where liberty is more general that call for special explanation.  

Unfortunately, the worst consequences of the current round of climate change lie ahead of us; and the concerted action required to deal with the consequences of climate change really will justify additional centralization and executive rule, especially if, as appears likely, the squabbling oligarchs and culture warriors will prevent responsible representative government from functioning effectively. There simply won’t be any alternative. It very much matters, however, who will be in charge and what they believe in. People are forever saying that the devil is in the details, but I’m inclined to embrace the slightly different cliché: God is in the particulars. The 17^th Century shows that a range of responses are possible even under dire conditions. Thus while France opted for personal rule and the suspension of representation under Louis XIV and Japan opted for stasis and isolation under a rigid oligarchy, England kicked out its would-be Sun King, James II, in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and devised a workable constitutional monarchy that combined a stronger and more rational bureaucracy with a functioning parliament. Unfortunately, the political history of the era also provides plenty of precedents for mere collapse as a response to challenge. The key variable seems to have been whether the aristocrats could be conquered or bought off or if they preferred the destruction of their nations to losing some of their power as was the case, for example, in Poland where one of the great powers of Europe was paralyzed by the nobility’s reckless use of the veto to prevent effective responses to internal and external challenges.

As I freely admit, historical analogies are bunk. Our situation differs from the Global Crisis of the 17^th Century in an enormous number of ways. Our technology is vastly beyond anything available or even imaginable in the past, for example. On the other hand, since a Malthusian crash has yet to occur, the governments of the 21^st Century will have to deal with climate change at a time when populations are at an all time maximum and we’ve already availed ourselves of some of the technical options to avoid calamity this long—there is no guarantee that a second green revolution is practically possible. Even if you consult history merely as a stimulus to thought, however, it seems to me that what happened before in the earlier climate crisis does point to some of the dimensions of the problems we’re going to face.

Oddly, the climate denialists have more clarity about what’s going on than many others. When they aren’t just shilling for oil and coal companies, their opposition to the possibility of global warming is rooted in a fear of the increasing reach of central governments or international agencies. It isn’t so much that they think that global warming is unlikely as that they find the political consequences of dealing with it intolerable. The science is simply not the issue. Indeed, you sometimes encounter denialists who accept the possibility that something may have to be done after all, at which point they begin to dream about drastic, science fiction-style technical solutions. Filling the upper atmosphere with rocket-borne sulfur dioxide to block the sun or dumping tons of iron into the ocean to increase uptake of CO₂ by bacteria strikes them as preferable to the horrors of more stringent fuel efficiency standards, subsidized photovoltaic power, or reminding people to turn off the lights.

Climate denialism is no more about atmospheric physics than creationism is about biology. What it is about is not mysterious. Especially in the U.S., denialism is largely about protecting the freedom of elites to control people locally and extract rents from them without paying too much of a cut to a central authority. The rules and regulations of central governments often protect and enlarge the rights of individuals; but they inevitably interfere with the prerogatives of bosses, clerics, and fathers. The liberties they swear to protect are their own, and in their usage “liberty” retains its ancient legal meaning, which was privilege as when you read in old books about the liberties of particular English cities or colleges at Oxford or Cambridge. In those days a liberty was a license to legally do things that other institutions or individuals could not. Dealing with climate change really does impinge on such liberties. Crucially, it limits the right of CO₂-producing industries to avoid paying damages for the harm they do to every one. Meanwhile, it also irritates larger groups like car owners, who also think of their privileges as human rights; and this automotive Herrenvolk is far more numerous than the tiny group of oil and coal execs who are the only ones who substantially benefit from delaying action on climate.    

Unfortunately, while climate skepticism is about politics and therefore operates largely in the realm of the unreal, climate change is mere fact and will take place regardless of anybody’s ideological posturing. As it takes place, governments will have to deal with it and its consequences, though like the regimes of the 17^th Century they may not recognize or admit the underlying cause of increasing social and economic disorder. This may be possible for a long time. Just as one cannot prove that any given heat wave, drought, or hurricane is a result of global warming, it will continue to be possible to deny that revolutions, civil wars, and economic stagnation are indirect effects of the same forcing. This second-order denialism may already be in play. How many accounts of the Syrian debacle point out that the drying out of the countryside is one of the reasons that Homs and Damascus are full of displaced, miserable peasants?  

As previously averred, I’m dubious about drawing any conclusions from historical parallels, though like Levi-Strauss, another skeptic about history, I also recognize that even if history takes the place of myth in our thinking, it is not really possible to dispense with it, if only as an inevitable rhetoric. Speaking of Levi-Strauss: back in 1962, in the last chapter of the Savage Mind, the anthropologist wrote a famous put-down of Jean Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reasoning for its privileging of history, especially a piece of history sacred to leftists of his era. “... the problem raised by the critique de la raison dialectique is reducible to the question: under what conditions is the myth of the French Revolution possible?” Levi-Strauss goes on to argue that the history that matters continually changes. “We are still ‘in focus’ so far as the French Revolution is concerned, but so we should have been in relation to the Fronde** had we lived earlier.” He goes on to claim and even demonstrate using the example of the Fronde that “thought is powerless to extract a scheme of interpretation from events long past.” An old pedant like me can’t resist noting the irony that books like Parker’s Global Crisis are showing that the Fronde may be coming back in focus after all. 

* Michael Mann the sociologist, not Michael Mann the climatologist.

** The Fronde was a series of revolts from 1648 to 1653 against the regency government of Cardinal Mazarin, who was ruling France in the name of the juvenile Louis XIV. The regional parliaments and many nobles objected to the taxes the regency imposed without the permission of the Estates General and had other grievances. Few of us remember this affair now—in many history books it’s represented as a rather ridiculous insurrection conducted by incompetent rebels. Louis XIV never forgot it.

You Heard It Here First

The NSA will shortly announce the first steps it has taken to prevent a recurrence of leaks like those recently made my Edward Snowden. I don’t have the whole press release—my call with the informant was cut off by technical difficulties. Presumably the rest will be published next week.
 

“As part of our ongoing efforts to maximize transparency, the NSA wants to reassure the American public that their concerns over the security of our systems are being listened to. We’re implementing thoroughgoing institutional changes to meet the challenges raised by recent episodes of whistleblowing. For example, new personnel will now be screened using special psychological tests that can detect even low levels of personal integrity, public spirit, or idealism. We want to make sure that all NSA employees are reliable and trustworthy individuals who, in accord with American way, are motivated solely by careerism. In the future, you can sleep soundly, knowing that your safety and liberty are in reliable hands.”

Blame Game Squared

Our political system suffers from a deficit of recrimination and retribution. It’s not just that the right kind of people can get away with felonies like the torture of captives but that there is no penalty for those who excuse such offenses by bleating about the blame game and how we should avoid it. There is the infraction and the meta-infraction, the denial of justice and then the denial of the need for justice. This sort of thing doesn’t work.

The lack of accountability routinely celebrated by our pundits is especially problematic in relationship to the conduct of foreign policy because the behavior of presidents—I almost wrote princes because I was thinking about Machiavelli—really can’t be dictated in advance by deliberative bodies. Matters of national security really do sometimes require extraordinary decisions that have to be taken in the moment and carried out in secret. Some of these actions are violent and terrible. What separates the tyrannical abuse of power from legitimate executive action is not prior law, which will always be incapable of anticipating specific circumstances, but the willingness of leaders to own their actions after the fact.  To be a democratic or simply a decent leader means to be responsible not only for the consequences of a decision, which are often largely a matter of luck, but for its wisdom and moral rightness as determined after the fact by the sovereign community of which one is a member. A democratic or simply decent polity is one that insists that there be no power exempt from subsequent accounting.  Obviously we do not inhabit such a polity.

To be less grand and philosophical about it, we’ve had plenty of evidence of the consequence of not playing the blame game. When Holder refused to prosecute the torturers, for example, he effectively legalized torture. The absence of effective responsibility also has the ironic effect of delegitimizing executive power. Bush and Chaney took us to war in Iraq in a stupid and arguably criminal way, but future presidents may have to take us to war when that is the right thing to do. If there is no such thing as wrong action by the prince, there is no such thing as right action either.  

 

The Trap

The proponents of economic ideologies are seldom embarrassed when their ideas are put into practice and fail. Instead of reconsidering their ideas, they insist that the theory is correct but has yet to be put in practice with sufficient purity. For most of the history of the old Soviet Union, for example, the party reacted to the shortcomings of a demand economy by making the demands for efficiency and production more strident and backing them up with threats and violence. Fortunately, the story of the Conservative ascendancy has been less dramatic. For forty plus years now we’ve been following a neo-liberal program of decreased taxes (especially on the wealthy), privatization, free trade, government hostility to organized labor, and the weakening of the social safety net. None of these measures has restored us to the robust growth we enjoyed before 1970. Median wages have performed very poorly, and finance has become an unhealthily large proportion of our economy. Deregulation may not have caused the disaster of 2008, but it surely exacerbated it. The response to these disappointments has been to suggest that all will be well if we only reduce the government’s role in the economy still further, stop worrying about economic inequality, and finish off the unions.

There’s a political version of this sort of thing. Conservatives have been afraid of democracy for hundreds of years and spend a great of effort figuring out how to neutralize it. From John Adams to Fareed Zakaria, the same story is retailed. The mob will overturn the proper order of things if the great unwashed get power for unscrupulous demagogues will rouse them against their betters, thus resulting in legalized looting, economic collapse, and the wrong kind of dictators, i.e. Chavez rather than Pinochet. Thing is, though, over and beyond the recent evidence that oligarchs and their technical advisers aren’t very good at economics themselves, the Burkean vision of politics is self defeating in another way. If you design your political system as a series of bulwarks against the interests of the many to the point that ordinary politics is unavailing for them, you guarantee the emergence of unordinary politics. When Venezuela was securely in the control of the plutocrats, much of the population regarded elections with indifference since things had been arranged so that no outcome would alter the balance between haves and have nots. That’s how we got hurricane Hugo.

You’ve got a lot of nerve to complain about the menace of mob, when you’ve been working for so many years to create the mob. And if elections are set up to be heads I win, tails you lose, it will be small wonder if people stop believing in elections and begin to consider other means of making their point.

What’s Heard

St. Francis preached to the animals, but it is not recorded whether they understood much of what he was talking about. The other day I walked past a group of teenagers who were talking about Keynesian economics. They were agreeing with one another that he had a point with his “in the long run we’re all dead” business. “After all,” one explained, “If you keep passing your debts from one bank to another until after you’re gone, you’ll never have to pay anything! That’s pretty smart.”

 

The Extent to which it is Possible to Tell Death to Fuck Off

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
   So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Noisy Channel Coding Theorem (Don Johnson’s version of Claude Shannon’s Theorem)

           

Let E denote the efficiency of an error-correcting code: the ratio of the number of data bits

to the total number of bits used to represent them. If the efficiency is less than the capacity of the digital channel, an error-correcting code exists that has the property that as the length of the code increases, the probability of an error occurring in the decoded block approaches zero.

          

    

for Val

The Good News

On the evidence, political anger and cultural pessimism are pleasurable. Presumably that’s why rage and gloom appeal to us even when the situation isn’t objectively unpromising at all. The hand wringing about the national debt is a case in point. The large deficits of the last four years were largely a consequence of the Great Recession and are diminishing now even though the economic recovery has been extremely slow. We aren’t going broke, and interest rates remain remarkably low. This simply isn’t Greece or Zimbabwe and isn’t going to become Greece or Zimbabwe. The debt is not a present catastrophe, and the political groups that are making the most noise about it are using it to promote quite different goals than fiscal propriety. None of this slows the manufacture of panic, however, even on the part of people who ought to know better. If they recognize that the Republicans are acting cynically, they insist that there is a real long-term problem on the far side of the largely invented immediate crisis. They figure that if better economic times will improve the deficit situation, the implacable rise of the cost of entitlements, essentially medical entitlements, will nevertheless eventually overwhelm us.  To which I answer. No, they won’t; or, at least, no, they shouldn’t.

In cartoons, the hapless coyote just stands there motionless as the Acme safe hurtles towards him from the cliff above. In real life, you figure, he’d just move to the side a little way as the shadow of the safe got bigger and bigger. Thus it is perfectly true that if you simply extrapolate the increase in the cost of medical care, it appears we’ll be squashed in a couple of decades. Thing is though, although I seem to be the only guy who has noticed this, there is simply no reason why the costs should increase. I can understand a Frenchman or an Englishman or a Japanese succumbing to despair about medical inflation, but we should not. And the reason we should not is because we aren’t Frenchmen, Englishmen, or Japanese, who already have a reasonably efficient health care system. The good news is that we’ve got a dreadfully inefficient medical system that costs almost twice as much per capita as the systems in other countries. We spend $8,000 per person to get results comparable to countries that at worse spend $4,000 per person. Even in our own hemisphere, Canada spends 11.3% of its GPD on health care. We spend 17.9%.  If we reform our health care system to roughly match the performance of everybody else’s system, our medical cost disaster goes away. And if medical costs don’t blow up, neither will the budget.  Let me rephrase this dreadful good news in its own paragraph:

We know we can reduce the amount of wealth we spend on health care drastically because almost every other country shows that we can.  And if we don’t have a health care cost problem, we don’t have a long-term budget problem.

I call this good news dreadful, not only because it will be disappointing to those who get off on despair, but because it doesn’t actually ensure that we won’t have a disaster. It simply means that we won’t have a disaster unless we act with truly epic stupidity. If the safe lands on us, it will be our fault. Unfortunately, it’s perfectly possible that we will not rationalize our health care system. In lieu of doing something sensible like moving to a single payer insurance scheme or some equivalent approach, we may even dismantle the minor efficiency improvements that go along with the ACA. In that case, even if we avoid a fiscal disaster by privatizing everything in sight, we still will have an economic disaster as more and more of everybody’s income is pissed away on health care that costs twice as much as it should and American economic competitiveness is decisively crippled. 

What we should really do is not merely match the efficiency of the health care systems of other nations, but develop a system that is more efficient than theirs and sell it to them at a profit.  Unfortunately, such a program of economic nationalism would violate the free market principles of conservative politicians and injure the material interests of their supporters.  

Breaching the Pomerium

The Pomerium was the sacred boundary of ancient Rome. Some of the inscribed stones that marked if off are still in place around the city. Inside the Pomerium, weapons were not allowed; and, except on the very day of their triumphs, even generals could only cross it in civilian dress. I was reminded of this bit of lore when the children were murdered in Connecticut and the NRA called for arming the kindergarten teachers. 

I guess we have different ideas of what ought to be sacred.

Perhaps its peculiar to allude to a Roman institution when insisting that our country or at least some part of our country should be a zone of peace. The Romans were remarkably brutal people, for whom conquest and domination were the essence of foreign policy and staged homicides the national pastime. Still, the ancients understood something important about civilization, perhaps because they were so familiar with its absence. Justice and peace are not natural at all; they are artifacts of human effort.

Where the will to maintain the Pomerium falters, the result is a reversion to the regime of strong men facing each other down: Goths and Vandals, Dodge City, Crips and Bloods. (One of capital ironies of the day is that the gang-related murder epidemic in contemporary Chicago reflects the honor-based ethic that black emigrants absorbed from the white culture of the old South.) The essence of modern reaction is a resentment of central power and a hankering for the manly world of face-to-face local authority where private revenge takes the place of law and order and any more comprehensive justice is God’s business. If the American right triumphs, in fact, a future historian will be able to reuse Gibbon’s summary of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.”

They Don’t Owe Us, We Owe Them

Whatever their actual motives, when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil made their celebrated deal to save Social Security, what they actually set in motion was a slow motion raid on the nation’s pension system. The increase in the payroll tax did not pay for current benefits; instead, it kept the Federal budget afloat during an era of lower and lower tax rates on the higher brackets. The net effect was a transfer of wealth and income from bottom to top. The deal didn’t even safeguard the long term health of the system because those who have always despised it have never counted the Federal bonds the system have accumulated during the long period of surplus as a legitimate investment.  Now that we face the prospect that some of the accrued savings may actually have to be paid back at some point, we’re hearing anguished screams. Hence the calls for raising the retirement age and lowering benefits by fudging the inflation adjustment.

What’s going on is not so different from what often happens in the private sector when CEOs and CFOs figure out ways of getting their hands on pension funds and using them to finance enormous executive pay packages just before their companies go bankrupt. Or what is happening in many state and local government systems where pension benefits that were negotiated in lieu of pay hikes never get paid out, presumably because a deal's a deal doesn’t count when the deal’s with a labor union. The sanctity of contracts only applies between parties of comparable power: otherwise, a contract is just another treaty with the Indians.

The peculiar thing about the current proposals to weaken Social Security is that they don’t make economic sense, at least if, perhaps quaintly, you think that the point of economic policy is not merely to increase inequality.  Lowering the incomes of retirees is bad for the economy in a period of inadequate demand; and raising the retirement age has the effect of increasing the pool of unemployed people at just the wrong time, with the predictable effect of lowering wages—when Social Security was first proposed, one of the arguments in its favor was that it would take many people out of the labor pool. Far from representing an unsustainable fiscal indulgence, the current system is already stingy beyond reason. Wonky debates about the best way to make it even stingier simply reinforce the false premises upon which our politics are currently constructed.

Default and Defeat

You can and, indeed, must compromise with people who disagree with you about the best way to accomplish shared goals. The problem with accommodation comes when core principles are at issue. The current depressing debate about changing the way that inflation is accounted for in Social Security is a case in point. The argument here isn't about ways and means. Technocratic debates about econometrics are beside the point, though they wouldn’t be in a less polarized political situation. The plain fact is that Republicans want to destroy Social Security, and switching to chained CPI is simply an incremental step in that direction. A legitimate compromise would be between measures that make Social Security more generous and others that tend in the opposite direction. As it is, the only options on the table are more or less drastic ways to weaken the system and make it less popular. Under these circumstances, compromise is inevitably defeat.

Policy wonks often make the mistake of evaluating particular measures as if they existed in isolation and weren't part of a larger struggle. In the long run, what matters are values. So far the Republicans have been successful in framing the Social Security and Medicare debate as if these programs were embarrassing legacies from a bygone era instead of concrete embodiments of a national will to ensure a decent life for everybody who plays by the rules. The sad fact is that a great many establishment Democrats actually share the Republican view of things or have decided, as perhaps Obama has, that the majority of the Americans can't really have rights because they don't really have power.  Since the government hasn’t been of the people or by the people for quite a while now, it’s a little unrealistic to expect it to be for the people.

A Stretch?

According to Suetonius, the emperor Caligula wished that the Roman people had only one neck. I’m less demanding than “Little Boots.” Reading the latest news about how the Feds were fining UBS $1.5 billion for rate fixing, I found myself wishing that the corporations who crashed the economy had at least one neck. The regulators probably give each other high fives over the giant fines they impose, but the actual perpetrators escape responsibility when the fictional person of the corporation and the stock holders get flogged.  

The Occupy Wall Street folks bitch about corporatism, but it seems to me that this diagnosis is wrong. It isn’t the legal person of the corporation that commits the crimes; but the group of individuals who control corporations, usually the CEOs and their henchmen. The limited liability that the official owners of corporations enjoy is not the fundamental problem—the greatest malefactors don’t necessarily have much of a stake in the companies they rip off in the course of ripping us off.  Plutocracy and its abuses are not about fictional persons but about real persons with real necks.  The limited liability that keeps these necks safe is not a legal loophole, but the political and cultural power of wealth concentrated in a few absurdly rich families.

Compromised

The American system of checks and balances works best when inaction is not a bad thing, in other words, when the basic situation is not changing too quickly. All the committees, all the branches of government, the filibusters, the courts, and the rest prevent us from going off half cocked. When real emergencies arise, however, the bias towards stasis built into the Constitution hurts us. In fact, our system is so ill suited to dealing with new conditions that it even fails to deal with slowly developing trends. Inequality has been increasing for decades now, for example; but our tax laws and spending practices have, if anything, exacerbated what is now a highly toxic situation; and it’s hard to imagine the Republican party permitting measures that would seriously curb, let alone reverse, the relentless growth of privilege. The current Constitution gives even a relatively small minority the power of veto.

There is another problem with the design of our government. One would like to believe that the struggle between interests and points of view would lead to a compromise that is better than the original proposals of either side. At this point, however, it requires so drastic an effort to do anything whatsoever that compromises are likely to be worse than anything either side would have done had it the sole power to chose. When the economy needs stimulus, for example, what we get is likely to be heavily loaded with tax cuts because the Conservatives are determined to prevent government spending unless it is for weapons or subsidies to their wealth supporters. Unfortunately, we not only need stimulus, we badly need investments in infrastructure and schools and other things and we also need to preserve adequate sources of revenues for the legitimate functions of government. The cumulative effect of forty years of compromise, of dealing with everything by tax cuts has left us with fewer options and a dilapidated, downright shoddy nation. Similarly, we obviously have needed to renovate our health care system for a long time now, not only because health care costs will break the budget in the long run but because the huge inefficiency of our current system is making us less and less competitive with every other industrialized country. The intransigence of the Republicans makes a straightforward solution to this problem impossible. Ergo we find ourselves with the mare’s nest of Obamacare, a make-do that is not only unnecessarily complex and incomplete but has been loaded with absurd provisions that the other side insisted upon in the name of a compromise, though none of them voted for the final bill. Their whole point was always to sabotage the effort.

Another example: Out here in California, a desperate struggle is under way to prevent the building of a high-speed rail line between the Bay area and L.A. It’s not that you can’t come up with arguments against the line, though I personally think that such a project is worth it on the merits. I don’t doubt that there are many other transportation projects that are more important to undertake. In an era of rising gas prices, for example, the sorry state of transportation inside cities is truly deplorable. The critics of high-speed rail aren’t about to trade it in for better buses for politically irrelevant people, however. Like Polish noblemen, they just want to say no. If we’re going to do anything, it has to be something spectacular like bullet trains. Nothing incremental can move the seized-up machinery of state government.  As with the country as a whole, the options seem to be permanent constipation or explosive diarrhea.  

Philosophical Anthropology 101

A man who everybody thought was a widower gathered his many children together when the youngest reached the age of 18. “I felt that I had to let you all know a secret I’ve been keeping since your mother died. Your mother and I were never married.” The sons and daughters were aghast and began to upbraid their Dad, “How could you have done this?” After a while, though, the youngest boy stood up and said, “I don’t know what the rest of you bastards are going to do. I’m going to the movies.”

 

Humanae Vitae

I ran across an anecdote in the Saturnalia of Macrobius that was weirdly apropos of contemporary controversies—I knew there had to be some reason I was reading this ancient monument to terminal pedantry. Anyhow, the story runs like this. The daughter of Marcus Popilius had a pretty bad reputation. When somebody tried to make a point by asking her why the females of other animals only sought a mate when they wanted to get pregnant, she replied “that’s because they are animals.”

And here’s the application:

The old debate about the function of the female orgasm flared up recently. The scientific interest in the question revolves around its implications for evolutionary theory, specifically, the issue of whether every character of an organism should be seen as an adaptation or, at a minimum, whether biologists should always presume that every character is adaptive until proven wrong. Although the dispute is much older, its recent salience dates back to an influential paper “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm” by Steven Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, which argued that many features of living organisms are the side effects of other characters that are adaptive and only become adaptive themselves, if they ever do, after the fact. Actual spandrels, the spaces between two arches or an arch and its rectangular frame, came to be used as decorated surfaces in churches and other buildings; but the buildings weren’t designed to create such surfaces. Analogously, some features of organisms aren’t selected for, but are simply consequences of features that are selected; and, if they end up serving some purpose after the fact, they are, to use the jargon, exaptations rather than adaptations. In many cases, however, they are about as useful as tits on a boar pig. 

The strictly scientific question is whether the female orgasm is a spandrel—“a fantastic bonus”—or is there some reason that natural selection might account for its (sporadic) occurrence in human women? The debate is extremely interesting and involves some central issues of the philosophy of science. It has certainly provided an opportunity for creative hypothesis creation on the part of the panadoptationists who invoke sperm suck-up and other equally ingenious or far fetched functions for the orgasm. My interest here is not scientific, however. I wonder what are the non-scientific, perhaps even unconscious reasons, that account for why people either readily accept or noisily reject the fantastic-bonus account of female organism.

I may be speculating at a sperm-suck up level to suggest this, but it seems to me that a lot of people don’t like the spandrel version because for them the legitimacy of enjoying sex needs the blessing of natural selection, which serves in this instance as a substitute for a moral legislator. Long before Spinoza, people sometimes referred to God as Nature; and Nature (with a capital N) is still imagined in a theological way even though natural selection (with a small n) is not a teleological principle but an explanation of why a teleological principle is unnecessary. On the other side, some people probably like the spandrel version because they don’t deify nature and are perfectly happy if the female orgasm is a $20 bill they found on the sidewalk. From this point of view, it is profoundly human to make something meaningful out of what doesn’t mean anything at all in itself.  The human thing is a city that floats in the clouds.

Another application:  When Sandra Fluke testified in favor of covering birth control in health insurance, she brought down a really remarkable storm of slander and libel on her head. Although the level of civility may have differed between the spokesmen of the Catholic church and Rush Limbaugh, the rationale of Fluke’s critics was identical: contraception is always dubious because the function of sex, at least for women, is reproduction. The economic argument against Fluke was not central, though the Conservatives did falsely claim that Fluke wanted the government to pay for contraception. For them, to enjoy sex while frustrating its natural purpose is perverse even if you’re paying for your own birth control pills. To allow such things to be part of your health insurance is a public endorsement of fundamental immorality.

In fact, Nature has no purposes and lays down no laws. To understand the world rightly, it is even more necessary to be an atheist about Nature than about God. We cooked up all our customs and rules, so that a sex-negative morality is quite as artificial as a sex-positive one. The difference is simply that an ethic that eschews pleasure, equality, and sociability is rather unintelligent.

The Existentialists sometimes made this point in a misleading way. It is perfectly true that our inheritance from that careless mother, evolution, strongly constrains our choices, just as the physical properties of marble and paint constrain the artist. As the bricoleurs of our own desires, we tinker with the bits and pieces we find in ourselves. Since these biological raw materials developed under the influence of natural selection, they often have a continuing tendency to improve our general fitness. Nevertheless, “Thou shalt maximize the number of thy viable offspring!” is no less arbitrary a commandment as “Thou shall have no other Gods but me!”  In any case, the exemplary product of radical human freedom is not the individual and stupid act of a Raskalnikov, but the intelligent and cooperative creation of a civilization.  Sartrean cheap thrill aside, we aren’t condemned to freedom. We won the lottery on that one.

We also drastically underestimate the possibilities. When people talk about human freedom, they sometimes seem to imply that individual choice is only about the selection of means because we have no control over the ends. We want what we want. With Christmas coming up, however, you’d think that at least the philosophers who are parents would notice how much time they spend teaching their children how to identify their own desires. You have to learn how to want and not just what you want for lunch. Self-fashioning is as much or more about selecting and elaborating goals as picking out the route to your objective; and this is especially true in terms of our sexual selves. 

Perhaps the deepest objection that traditional religionists have to non-procreative sex is that it exemplifies a dimension of freedom that people, especially female people, are not supposed to have.* What makes free female sexuality particularly threatening is that women can use it to modulate their relationship with men. The polemicists rant about hookup culture, but the scarier outcome is the emergence of a much more egalitarian and stable form of marriage that is prevalent among well-educated folks, at least in the blue states.    

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*Thomas Laqueur made a similar point about self love in his book Solitary Sex: a Cultural History of Masturbation—according to Laqueur, what upset the moralists was not so much the prospect of biological decadence and hairy palms as the interior liberty opened up by sexual fantasy. There just isn’t any way to censor the programming that appears on the thinking man’s television.

Give an Example of Defeat

I expect that an objective observer of the last 40 years would come to the following conclusion: Conservative parties have won most of the battles in the U.S. and Europe on economic matters as is witnessed by their successes in lowering the tax rates of the wealthy, deregulating markets, and curbing unions. Though challenged by recent events, neoliberalism remains the dominate framework for policy on both sides of the Atlantic, which is why the Americans are arguing about the debt when their obvious problem is unemployment. The mass of conservatives don't feel like they're winning, however. What queers their triumph is that the victories on economic issues have been accompanied by a long string of defeats on social and cultural issues. The right lost on civil rights, lost on feminism, lost on abortion, lost on gay rights, and lost on many other issues. Moreover, while only a small fraction of the right actually benefited from the movement's economic triumphs, many more of them have experienced the cultural changes of the recent past as personal defeats.  

The outside observer might also suggest that conservative disappointment has another, deeper root: Conservative economic policies have unfavorable consequences for the bulk of the population, including the part of the population that is itself conservative. When measures that increase economic inequality and depress wages have their predictable effects, true believers conclude that the problem is that the economic policies put in place by Republican administrations aren't conservative enough or aren't conservative at all—hence the perception that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the liberals are tremendously powerful, control the media, call the shots, etc. If only a real Conservative took power, not a crypto-leftist like Bush or a wimp like Romney! If only we had a true free market system!

What we have here, the observer might conclude, is an instance of recurring pattern among extreme groups left or right. The failure of a policy to make things better doesn't make the revolutionaries give up their theories. Instead, they try to apply them with greater stringency. Endlessly cutting taxes and government spending may not be as drastic as beheading more aristocrats or killing more kulaks or invading yet another country, but the same psychological mechanism is at work in all these escalations and the program is always self defeating. Eventually you invade Russia...

Another Attempt to be Fair

Obviously a great many powerful people have an interest in preventing a rise in the tax rate for the very wealthy, but interest doesn't explain all the opposition. It’s important to recognize that much of the passion on the right reflects principled belief. Opposition to tax reform, indeed opposition to the very idea of a graduated income tax, follows inevitably from an absolutist view of property rights. By the lights of that way of thinking, taking 38% of income over $250,000 a year instead of 36% is just as bad as stealing somebody's horse. What makes the right wing even more strident about all this is the meta belief that the validity of their way of thinking is self evident so that anybody who disagrees is either feeble minded or evil—a whiff of John Calvin hangs in the air around many a conservative, especially the Southern ones.

The idea that property is a social construction, that what's mine is mine because the rest of you agree to recognize that it's mine, is worse than newfangled rubbish or recycled Marxism. For many conservatives, it's utterly alien, the ideology of Cthulhu. I think you can complain that the outlook of the right is both ahistorical and unrealistic—capitalism just doesn't work without some mechanism of redistribution—but it's neither fair nor useful to chalk up all the opposition to self-interest.  

By the way, if I’m right about all this, it follows that the Republicans we can do business with are most likely to be those for whom opposition to changing the tax code is simply an exercise of greed. You can reason with the insincere.

The Futility of Voting?

Before the elections, various people, mostly disgruntled left-liberals, wrote Internet pieces suggesting that voting was pointless since a single vote meant nothing and, anyhow, Obama wasn’t all that different than Romney.  Now I appreciate the arithmetic. As a proportion of the population, I should have a right to 0.000000003333% of a say in national affairs; but even if you make a correction for the enormous number of people who read this blog—almost 5,000 over ten years—I don’t have a claim for much more than 0.0000083333% of the available political juice.  But I disagree with the counsels of despair, because there are people whose vote did matter and mattered a very great deal.

The fundamental reason that Republican-leaning pundits got the election wrong, bias and sheer innumeracy aside, was their considerable underestimation of the political participation rate of blacks, Hispanics, and young voters.  I’ve been involved in many political campaigns over the years and know how difficult it is to get a college student to even remember that it’s election day, let alone to vote; but, the fact is, this year, college students did vote and so did members of supposedly apolitical America’s minorities.  I expect they are going to notice the consequences as even the crustiest Republicans recognize electoral facts and your relatives don’t get deported and you get a break on your student loans and your grandmother doesn’t have to eat dog food. The rules are changing. It’s a different country if the whole population votes.  As the Chinese say, the journey of a thousand Li begins with a single step. Yep, and the rectification of national politics begins with a single yank of a lever.