Small Story

Richard Dawkins’ latest provocation is the tweeted observation that one Cambridge college had won more Nobel prizes than all of Islam. In an on-line discussion of the general issues raised by this particular instance of flame throwing, I wrote:

Dawkins tends to treat Islam as if it had a unitary essence. That's profoundly misleading right now, not because it violates some canon of political correctness but because it makes it hard to see that what's going on even more a struggle inside the Muslim world than a fight between civilizations. Bigoted and uncompromising versions of Islam have been on the rise for a couple of centuries now and they represent a genuine threat, both to traditional and modernizing Muslims. You sometimes hear that the problem is that Islam never had a Reformation, but the real good fortune of the West was that we did have a Reformation that petered out. Imagine John Calvin with the bomb.

From the point of view of most educated people, all religions are nonsense, at least in their popular form. But, to paraphrase David Hume, religions are not malevolent when they go in for superstition instead of enthusiasm. The trouble with many strains of contemporary Islam is their sincerity.

A bit latter in the discussion, somebody linked to a thoughtful essay at a Pakistani website by Irfan Hussain, which stuck me as rather courageous because it admitted, albeit carefully, the connection between Islam and scientific backwardness. “The reason Muslims have been left so far behind is their refusal to embrace modern education, and to cling to rote learning and dogma. By confusing Western thought and influence with rationality, we think we are better Muslims by rejecting modernity.”

It was the dead of night, so I put in my own two cents without bothering to remember that Pakistan is not San Francisco. My thoughts actually got through moderation, but not without significant deletions—what was left out is in boldface. (Apologies for recycling the asparagus bit: I guess I assumed nobody reads Inanis and Vacua in Lahore.)

  

There’s an old joke that seems to capture the logic or illogic of the situation: a guy explains “I’m glad I don’t like asparagus because if I liked it, I’d eat it; and I can’t stand it.”

And here’s the application. Several Muslims have quoted the Koranic verse to me about how there is no compulsion in religion, and yet apostasy is forbidden and, indeed, punishable by death on some interpretation of religious law.  You must recognize that no outsider is ever going to credit Muslim claims to be a tolerant religion if you won’t even allow anybody to leave it in peace. If you can’t put up with the possibility that somebody might decide that your religion is largely or entirely false, you have given up the game in advance.

Of course I have also been assured that criticism of Islam is perfectly legitimate, yet several Islamic states make “blaspheming the prophet” a civil crime and interpret blasphemy to include suggesting, among other things, that Muhammad was not divinely inspired. Even non-Muslims are subject to persecution for suggesting out loud what every non-Muslim obviously believes, i.e. that Muhammad wasn’t a genuine prophet. Some tolerance. Islamic tolerance is rather like an election in the old Soviet Union. One is completely free except there is really only one permissible choice. Obviously many Muslims are not in favor of this sort of thing and say so, though the fact they seem more comfortable writing about it in English than in their own vernacular is telling.

The absence of practical freedom of debate surely has something to do with the relatively bad performance of the sciences in Islamic countries. You still encounter invocations of the past glories of Islamic science, yet even relatively secular Muslim states like Turkey suppress theories like evolution because they are thought to conflict with religion. Of course there are plenty of Christian fundamentalists who are hostile to Darwinism, but they aren’t in charge and haven’t been for a long time, which is one of the reason that modern biology developed in the West. I’m not sure that Richard Dawkins is tremendously useful in Northern California, but maybe the Middle East needs to develop some homegrown version. 

The editors of the Dawn can hardly be criticized for censoring my comments, and I’m certainly not going to do so. Indeed, publishing the unaltered copy would have been against the law in Pakistan. Specifically, it would have fallen afoul of section 295C of the Criminal Code, a law that is anything but a dead letter in those parts. Prosecutors do prosecute and that’s assuming that the defendants survive long enough to go on trial.

The point of presenting this little story is not to beat up on Muslims; but to point out that at the current pass, it is thoughtful, rational Muslims like Hussain who are most menaced by the intolerance and fanaticism of their fellow religionists. I’m not going to be dragged out of my house and beaten to death for criticizing Islam. Of course, if I were planning on going into politics, I’d be obliged to discover I was a Christian or theist of some sort; but that degree of social coercion is hardly comparable to the legal sanctions and existential threats faced by intellectuals in Muslim countries. In any case, it’s perfectly natural to develop your own thoughts in terms of the tradition in which you are born. The problem isn’t that peaceable and rational people in the Middle East want to think of themselves as Muslims, but that a powerful strain in Islam makes it difficult and dangerous to reform the religion into something less dangerous and irrational. The terrible simplicity of Islam has always been a great part of its appeal and social virulence, but movements like Wahhabism have exacerbated this tendency and, especially in places like Pakistan, turned Muslim against Muslim even more than Muslim against everybody else.  

A Cloud No Bigger than a Man’s Hand

I’ve got this little worry. It occurred to me the other day that the government research that made the Internet and the various Apple products possible was actually conducted in the 60s and 70s. Much of the work that underlies green technology and biotech also dates back to that era. The lag time is not peculiar; scaling up and commercializing new ideas takes a lot of doing; and the transition from dream to product has probably been slowed down by the increasing reluctance of American business to invest in anything tangible. What bothers me is the suspicion that there isn’t a great deal left in the pipeline after 40 years of neoliberal hostility to government initiatives and tax changes that discourage corporate research—Bell Labs are a distant memory.

The off again on again support for photovoltaics and other renewables offered by the current administration is not encouraging. The real scandal of Solyndra was not that it got into difficulties, hardly a surprising vicissitude for a pioneering company, but that Obama allowed the company to collapse simply because the venture capitalists got cold feet and he wanted to avoid political unpleasantness. The Chinese government wouldn’t have allowed an outfit with similar problems to collapse. In fact, when the main Chinese PV firm did go bankrupt, its management lost out, but the enterprise was saved.

PV and windmills and the like are already an enormous industry worldwide and have the potential to get far more important. China and Germany and even (you’ll pardon me) fucking Denmark realize this rather obvious fact and their pols act accordingly. Renewable power, however, is probably not a realistic candidate to serve as the basis for a new industrial revolution that could support another hundred years of prosperity. Nanotechnology, on the other hand, might just be as revolutionary (and destabilizing) as cars and electronics previously were. If we’re missing the boat on so obvious an opportunity as new power sources whose commercialization is already under way, how likely are we to have the patience, foresight, and nerve needed to fund and stick by nanotechnology or, for that matter, any really promising new technology? There isn’t going to be a juicy IPO for amalgamated Nano in the next ten years. There are no quick snacks to whet the appetites of hedge fund operators with high-speed intestines. Realizing the promise of nanotechnology will almost certainly take decades and involve putting up with serious risks without the sure prospect of immediate profits. Earlier technological revolutions required copious government support, but in the past American business people were still interested in building great things. How likely that the greedy little posers in charge of our great firms will be willing—or able—to mobilize the requisite investment money and stick to a long-term plan? And how likely that the trimmers and fanatics that control our political system will rally the country to look after its own interests? It is fatally easy for businessmen to pile up profits by exploiting aging research and sitting on patents, especially since the effective tax rate is so low that they get to keep the lion’s share of the extracted rents. It is equally easy for politicians to opt for inadequate levels of government investment in the name of compromise. So I worry that the great torpid serpent that is America in 2013 has forgotten that you do eventually have to swallow a new pig.

 

Shooting Fish in a Barrel

Businessmen and their PR professionals endlessly promote a love of risk as a basic value entrepreneurial value. At least in my experience, however, lack of imagination, tolerance for boredom, and deeply ingrained cautiousness are much more salient features of the commercial mentality. Far from courting danger and adventure, the executives I’ve met always much prefer the fix to be in. No doubt there really are outliers who live up to the Schumpeter romance of the swashbuckling innovator in fact as well as manufactured image. At least I assume such beings walk the earth. For some reason they didn’t show up at the meetings I attended. The guys who did show up much preferred arbitrage to leaps in the dark. There’s a reason for all those movie sequels and new flavors of Snapple, for the persistence of SUVs, for yet another strip mall in Tacoma, for all the innovations that aren’t very innovative. “Who hath vision? He who died o’ Wednesday.”

A simple syllogism shows that my observation is not mere cynicism: if the business of America is business and the business of business is turning a profit, America is about making a profit and not about taking a flyer. You can’t build an entire system around the proposition that the bottom line is what matters and then bitch when consideration of the bottom line crowds out other possible motives, including actually building something that matters. As Kant might have written, had he lasted long enough to repent of his earlier foolishness, “There is no possibility of thinking of anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be regarded as good without qualification, except unearned income.” You’d have to be one of those idiots who know the value of everything and the price of nothing to cavil at that. Unfortunately, in the normal run of things rent seeking doesn’t leave much room for dreaming.

I’m not attacking individual business people here: they are doing what they were told to do and the sustained effort required to do what they were told is nothing contemptible, especially since the vast majority of them are just making a living for their families. The relentless pursuit of profit is, as Max Weber pointed out long ago, a form of worldly asceticism; and it takes considerable discipline, not only to work, but to remember that the work isn’t the point. You’re creating the software for the IPO, not for its technical sweetness or for what it can actually do. The mission statement is for the troops, not the general. They’re supposed to love their work—beats paying ‘em, after all—but it’s better if you manage in a field you don’t like very much, just as it used to be said the best arranged marriages were based on mild antipathy. Keeps your priorities straight.

Like many systems, business works by virtue of the exceptions to its fundamental rules. Somebody has to make it new in commerce as in art or the profit margins will eventually peter out. To a remarkable extent, however, the ones who do make it new do are not businessmen at all but academics, scientists, and artists, many of ‘em working for the government directly or indirectly. There are economic/institutional reasons why government research and investment has been so crucial to the emergence of the growth industries of the last hundred years*—I leave the explanation of those reasons to economists such as Marianna Mazzucato—but the deep conservatism of business culture, particularly its value system, is the proximate reason that the free market is as sterile as a demand economy if left to its own devices.

*Not all industries, just automobiles, aviation, nuclear power, electronics, computers, the Internet, pharmaceuticals, biotech, agriculture, and renewable power.

Measures of Central Tendency

I’m always trying to boil down my perception of things into as simple a form as possible. A dull game, I guess, but a necessary one for anybody who reads too much. Herewith my version of the four great facts of our situation:

1. A large proportion of humanity is anguished by the advent of secular civilization, the decline of religious values, and the corresponding overturn of traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Ergo the many versions of reactionary modernism afoot in the world, the Talibans, Tea Parties, fundamentalists of all faiths. In the U.S. and perhaps Europe, the political significance of this protest is mostly that the aging old guard remains capable of blocking efforts to deal with other problems. In other places, especially North Africa and the Middle East where the demography is different, enormous populations of young men are susceptible to cultural reaction; and they aren’t wheezing around on bad knees.

2. The absence of a credible left since the fall of the U.S.S.R. resulted in an dangerously unbalanced situation. Disparities of wealth and income are bound to increase when those who have have no reason to fear those who don't have. Ergo lower wages for the many, the profitable destruction of the environment, and the purchase of governments.

3. Outside of the developing world, the expansion of the economy drastically slowed thirty or forty years ago, in part because it had been driven by a one-time transition from an agricultural to industrial basis, in part because in this period there just haven't been any technological innovations with the same economic importance as the advent of electric power or cars or even refrigerators. In lieu of the growth of tangible productive capacity, global finance has swelled uselessly like the enlarged heart of a sick old man. Meanwhile, the neoliberal dogma of the free market is hobbling what has been the real engine of technological growth over the last century, government-led innovation. This time around, King Ludd is the monarch of business interests rather than workers.

4. The fourth horse, rapidly galloping up from the pack to challenge the leaders, is climate change. Global warming is already putting pressure on social and economic systems, though it will be even harder to convince the public of its indirect effects than of its mere reality. The denialists wouldn’t stop denying what’s going on if Lake Erie were at a rolling boil. They certainly aren’t going to accept that a climate-related Malthusian crisis, especially in the overpopulated global South, is the underlying cause of extreme political turmoil.

Us

Generic conservatism certainly isn't always racist, though you can make a pretty good case that it's always about preserving the ability of one group to oppress another. That admitted, I still don't see how you can get around the huge role slavery and its sequels played and plays for the American right. I guess you could get antiquarian here and recall how the New England Federalists talked about state rights back in the War of 1812, but states rights has mostly been coded language for racial domination ever since. Even today, you hear states rights invoked to defend fresh attempts to reinstate Jim Crow laws of various kinds in order to cut down on the black vote. Maybe people who are defending the right of states to legalize pot will start talking about states rights too; but it just doesn't seem like the same argument and, anyhow, the heads would never get around to firing on Fort Sumter.

I do think that critics of the extreme right wing often get one thing very wrong. Our reactionaries really are populists and actually believe in their own version of democracy—Calhoun also always insisted he was a supporter of democracy. Thing is, the democracy in question is what the poly sci types call Herrenvolk democracy, the inalienable right of the right kind of people to rule, i.e. white or white-acting Judeo-Christians. That's how you can simultaneously dress up in Revolutionary war outfits and yet go ballistic when inner city people attempt to organize politically or even simply vote—recall the enthusiastic support for what was a pure Bill of Attainder against ACORN.

The basis of deciding who is a real American is not always racist. Indeed, Justice Thomas can thank his lucky stars that the right has its own affirmative action program. Often the criterion of belonging to the folk is economic or cultural. Adults who use public transportation are definitely suspect—real Americans have driver’s licenses and this entitles them to vote. I was recently made fun of by a guy named Tex because I flunked another requirement. I had written to him that Denis Prager’s Internet University counts as a university in the same sense that my apartment counts as a dukedom. He woofed at me for being an adult who lives in an apartment, which seemed mean since I hadn’t make fun of him for living in a trailer. You can also be read out of the nation for liking the wrong kind of lettuce. On the other hand, if you don’t like arugula, live in your own house, drive a car, and are white or own 162 pizza restaurants, you belong to the People and own the land and everything in it.  

In the Year 2525

The signs held up at the ball game always read John 3:16, but the cheerleaders of violent revolution prefer Revelation 22:20*. It doesn’t matter if it’s our nuts or theirs. Both Christian and Muslim devotees of apocalypse await the second coming of Christ, though the Islamic version doesn’t feature a resurrected God—their Jesus as more like the slumbering King Arthur. An antichrist features in both renditions, though; and both kinds of apocalypticism feature the same characteristic incoherence and bizarre imagery. Even by the low standards with which we judge the rationality of theological ideas, they don’t make much sense. There’s a reason that movies like the Omen and Constantine have plotting problems.  

The Boston bombers were apparently influenced by apocalyptic ideas involving a vengeful army of believers advancing from Central Asia under the black banners of Khorasan. There's a huge irony in that. Islam, like other religions, has always had end-of-time fantasies; but there is no Book of Revelation in the Koran. The current prevalence of talk of Antichrist and Armageddon in the Middle East seems to have been partly inspired by the remarkable increase in interest in such things in the West since World War II. Our crazies call out to theirs. There are now Islamic best sellers that are counterparts to Left Behind and the Late Great Planet Earth. There’s surely also an element of convergent evolution involved here—Muslim and Christian fundamentalism share in the world-wide protest that Jeffrey Herf calls reactionary modernism—but the idea is definitely contagious.

Of course, just as not all Christian Zionists dream of war, not all Muslims awaiting the second coming of Christ are calling for violence. Still, the apocalyptic strain in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam appeals to the dark side of human nature and can inspire destructive acting out.

* For those who flunked Sunday school: “He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

A Flaw in the System

Since the public at large regards both parties with intense cynicism—"They're all crooks!"—it’s always possible for a genuinely radical party to prevail in a two-party system where the winner of a given presidential election is likely to be determined by factors like short-term economic trends, irrelevant sex scandals, or the personal charisma of candidates. Most people simply don't think an election makes that much difference. Besides, there is the widespread and not unreasonable belief that the alternation of parties is necessary to put a leash on corruption even if that means occasionally voting for the more dubious side.

If the crazy right can maintain control of the Republican Party long enough, they'll eventually take over the presidency as they have already taken over the Party itself, the House, and the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, once a piece of political turf is conquered, the Conservative version of the Brezhnev doctrine takes effect and extreme gerrymandering, Jim Crow laws, and reactionary court decisions make it much harder to move politics back towards the center. So far, at least, opposing forces haven’t demonstrated the degree of political ruthlessness needed to combat this ratchet and pawl strategy. Of course, the nuts may not prevail. External events may change the nature of the game or the financial interests that traditionally control the Republican Party may be able to curb their dogs. It’s also true, as everybody points out, that time is not on the side of a movement whose base is old white men. So long as the right maintains a viable mass of supporters, however, the possibility remains that our political system will give an opening to something really malevolent. The mischief already afoot in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina shows what harm can be done from a single capricious election.     

Who?

There’s an old bit about how the essence of Puritanism was the fear that somebody, somewhere was having a good time. Is there a hedonistic obverse to this idea? If pleasure is the highest good, does it matter who is feeling their oats? Of course most of us would insist that it matters a very great deal how the goodies are distributed. Thus even utilitarians have some truck with deontology when they insist on the greatest happiness for the greatest number. They insist on an element of fairness even though concepts like fairness seems to go along with an entirely different moral philosophy. If pleasure really were a quantity like mass, one could imagine a consistent hedonist who only considered the sum total of pleasure resulting from some arrangement and didn’t care if it only accrued to a few or even just one. I imagine a divine monster arguing that a supreme pleasure is justified even if it would only be enjoyed by a single individual and that individual would not be him. Indeed, I think that actual psychopaths reason in this way, even when they wouldn’t be the ones who do the enjoying—it’s the Sadist’s version of veil of ignorance. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure the Marquis would accuse Bentham of inconsistency in insisting that the happiness be spread around. Why should that matter? Mill is often accused of messing things up by insisting on adding to Bentham’s purely quantitative view of pleasure a dimension of quality: he didn’t want to have to admit that a happy pig might find in its swill a superior felicity to an Oxford don could experience from reading a Horatian ode. It’s worse than that, though, and not just because the pigs are bound to outnumber the dons. One needs a separate principle of justice or has to face some pretty alarming implications.

Part of the logical appeal of putting a supreme valuation on pleasure is that it allows us to believe that there are genuine ultimates in the universe. Something that is pleasurable is not thought to be good because it is leads to something else, but because of what it is in the present. Like pain which doesn’t stop hurting even if it isn’t the foreplay of death or some other future evil, a moment of ecstasy gratifies even if might not be worth its consequences. It just is; and requires, or so we would sometimes like to believe, no exegesis unlike things such as love or virtue that have to mean in order to be and therefore disappear into the very act of being understood. On this view, pleasure is an end in itself, an infra-cosmic eschaton, which, unlike some postulated act of creation from nothing or interminably postponed day of justice, has the virtue of actually occurring, though Blake’s “eternity in the palm of your hand” may not be very grand when you consider the reality of the thing. That’s not the real problem, however. If pleasure and pain aren’t good and bad because of what they lead to, if they really are absolute, it also really doesn’t matter who experiences them since they are more fundamental than the persons or animals in whom they occur.

Mostly I take this line of thought as a reductio ad absurdum of the notion that anything subjective—pleasures, pains, sense data—is even a temporary ultimate. I decided long ago that experience is what I used to call vanishing. The nearest thing to what we dream of as presence is a certain hesitation in the perpetual departure of things and that’s as true of pleasure or pain as of anything else. Nevertheless, I recognize the appeal of the error.  

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.”