“Reh, Reh, Reh” or Notes on Proto-Soupysalian

I have the habit of responding to something I hear on TV or the Internet by muttering “Reh, reh, reh” when what I hear is obviously copy, i.e., professionally scripted discourse that nobody stands behind and nobody believes, discourse written in purposive anonymity and designed* to be delivered in a voice at once suave and bland. No doubt I recognize this sort of thing so readily because I’ve written so much of it myself in my various vocational incarnations. ** Partly it’s just filler—there is so much air time and you have to say something—but it’s also a kind of ventriloquism, an attempt to impersonate commonsense in somebody’s interest. Ventriloquism originally meant speaking from the stomach (venter). In the case of the “Reh, reh, reh,” most of it obviously emanates from the belly of the beast, which partly accounts for my dyspepsia about it.  But it isn’t the fact that so much of what you hear everywhere is interested that gives commodified speech its unmistakable character.  Both those that read the script and the hired hands that compose it in the first place obviously resent the indignity of acting as purchased people. The flatness of so much of what you hear, its trademark insipidity, is a workplace protest on a par with spitting in the soup, except that the irritated waiter is mad at the customer while the performer on TV is asking for the audience for forgiveness and signaling a decent insincerity—I’m just making a living. Even Flo wants you to know that the dummy hasn’t lost all her self-respect. Well, maybe not Flo. Considering the probable size of her residuals, she may very well have learned to love Big Brother.

Of course, everybody understands all this very well—you hardly have to read complicated treatises on Late Capitalism*** to grasp the nature of a system in which everybody participates every day. I had intended to supply an explanation of the origins of “Reh, reh, reh.” It appears that the expression evolved from “O reh, o reh,” the one and only utterance of White Fang, a canine character who appeared regularly on the old Soupy Sales show. I say White Fang appeared but actually only his enormous paw appeared. You never actually saw the whole dog.  I’m told that White Fang’s voice was once a recording of the howl of the Hound of the Baskervilles, but the record got broken just before a show and “O reh, o reh” was the adlibbed substitute. Somehow “O reh, O reh,” gradually got transmogrified in my idiolect into “Reh, reh, reh,” which will probably scandalize the purists—there are still lots of people in my age group who instantly recognize the “O reh, o reh.” In my defense, let me point out that in practice the two expressions are related by chiasmus. Each time White Fang would say “O reh, o reh,” Soupy would interpret it differently. It could mean anything. Each time I hear copy, I interpret it as “Reh, reh, reh” because it means the same thing or the same non-thing or nothing.  

* If this paragraph were copy, I would have written “crafted” instead of “designed.”

** The Buddhists have a genre called Jakata tales, which consist of accounts of the previous lives of Gautama. How about Jakata tales about somebody who resolutely refuses enlightenment?

*** The “Late Capitalism” bit is probably an instance of copywriting on my part so I ought to “Reh, reh, reh” myself here. As I’ve written many times before, I don’t know if there is anything late about contemporary capitalism. It certainly isn’t “late” as in my late Uncle Jake. Only a prophet knows if the system is on its last legs or will go on till the sun cools off, and I agree with the rabbis that prophecy is for fools and children. There’s also the far from minor problem of whether it really makes sense to speak of capitalism as a system with so definitive an essence as to be something susceptible of old age and death. Which is not to deny that our economic system is changing, of course. For example, I find myself muttering “Reh, reh, reh” more and more, not only to the TV or the I pad, but under may breadth as I listen to twenty somethings pitch themselves to one another in the garden behind the coffee bar.

Syria Again

The only people who will be surprised (or scandalized) by the muddiness of American foreign policy in the Syrian crisis are those who are unfamiliar with diplomatic history. Which is to say that the only people who will be upset are the vast majority, at least the vast majority of pundits. When people complain that nobody learns anything from history, they usually have in mind some substantive lesson unlearned; but it seems to me that what people don’t learn from history is something rather more general. They don’t get the texture of how things happen. In particular they don’t absorb two basic facts:

1.     People have to live every hour, day, week, month, year, decade, and century of human life. It isn’t that the longue duree is necessarily more important than histoire événementielle, but that the periods between the famous events are sequences of events that aren’t experienced as inconsequential by the participants even if they quickly disappear from public consciousness. The fact we generally aren’t interested in the parenchyma of history doesn’t mean you can get from Monday to Wednesday without going through Tuesday.  The politicians, generals, and diplomats of the past could never be sure which of their words and actions would matter and got gray hair and hypertension over crises that even PhD candidates have long since forgotten. Of course every happening hyped on the Huffington report is not the Defenestration of Prague or the Assassination of the Archduke, but nobody can be sure about that at the time and, anyhow, they still have to get up in the morning.

2.     Relations between nations are mostly made up of trial balloons, misunderstandings, kicking the can down the road, playing to the newspapers, chest thumping, flattery, brag, bluff, and willful obfuscation. Muddle is the métier of the diplomatic corps, always has been, always will be. Or if somebody can point me to an important historical passage where one side or the other had a definite plan and carried it out decisively without lots of backing and filling, I’d be obliged if they’d tell me about it.* A couple of squirrels taking turns chasing each other around a tree trunk is a pretty good first order model of international relations, not surprisingly, after all, because international relations are just mammalian behavior carried out on a very large tree.  

If you look at what happened over the last couple of weeks as a typical diplomatic sequence, the administration’s performance looks pretty good.  I wrote earlier that I didn’t think Obama wanted a war and it appears I was right.  In this affair and also in Libya he acted rather like any number of 19^th Century statesmen who were pushed towards intervening in some Balkan hellhole by the newspapers and the hawks in the irresponsible domestic opposition.  Success under these circumstances is damage limitation by minimizing the scale of military action or, even better, resolving the issue through great power negotiations.  

That said, I don’t think for a minute that John Kerry was playing 11-dimensional chess when he suggested that Assad could avoid being attacked by agreeing to give up his chemical weapons. He simply lucked out, lucked out, that is, assuming that the current stand-down of tensions doesn’t turn into some other kind of debacle. It’s just that I figure a skillful diplomat is rather like Maxwell’s demon, an agent who exploits random fluctuations to achieve his goal, which, in this case, is to avoid useless and destructive military action while limiting the freedom of action of Syria’s government. One can only hope that the administration can blunder into a similar happy outcome in its relations with Iran. Enough mistakes and Obama may yet earn that Nobel Prize.

* The only candidate that comes to mind is the Bush Administration’s single-minded determination to invade Iraq. Chaney and company knew what they wanted and got it. Maybe the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in August 1914 also counts since it was designed to make war inevitable and worked perfectly.

Contradiction #3

Business culture remains extremely conventional, and even quite high-level managers are very careful to validate their bona fides by repeated displays of conformism. Even the eccentricities of billionaires come from an approved list of quirks. In a time when commodification quickly erodes profits, however, businesses absolutely depend upon creative employees. Businessmen are like prudes who find they can’t resist picking up hookers.

Apologia Pro Vita Sua

Back in college a philosophy professor quoted me a famous bit from Lessing:  “If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand, and say: Father, I will take this one—the pure Truth is for You alone.” I think I was supposed to be edified, but instead I wondered out loud if you can really claim to seek the truth if you won’t take it when you can get it. Dr. Erickson was momentarily taken aback by this humorless rejoinder, but I’m sure he got over it. On the other hand, if he came up with a cogent response, I don’t remember it.

Here’s the thing: I understand why the guy who owns the track doesn’t want the greyhound to catch the rabbit, but it seems to me that it’s a pretty sorry hound that doesn’t try. In his parable, Lessing sounds like he’s being meritoriously humble, but he’s really looking at things from the point of view of the master of the dog races. A self-respecting philosopher who knows his place in this world may be perfectly well aware that his chances of success are not brilliant, but he always strives to finish the game even if that eventuality might turn out to be rather depressing.* What looks like and perhaps is hubris is actually one of the duties of his station in life.   

There are various meaningful ways to look at what philosophy is. For example, academic philosophy is a discipline with a professional tradition and has gradually accumulated technical expertise in a cumulative way. One can be a philosopher in this sense and remain a regular Joe who punches the clock and goes home at 6.  What I mean by philosophy is quite different. It’s the crazy project of understanding the world in and for yourself as if the universe could come to consciousness in an individual. The natural sciences, as becomes more and more obvious in the age of hundred-author papers, mass databases, and accelerators 17-miles around, are communal enterprises. The knower in the sciences has long been an us and may soon enough become an it as inquiry gets outsourced to the inorganic. Meanwhile, in philosophy, the knower is definitely an I. The motto of the operation is Wo wir waren will ich werden.

The idea of philosophy is quite absurd granted the disproportion between the littleness of the mind and the vastness of things and even more in view of the intrinsically social nature of thought. On the other hand, even in acceding to the fallibility of my own judgment, I’ve got to do the acceding. Even the Scholastics, who crowned Theology as the Queen of the sciences and therefore claimed to give the final word to the Magisterium of the church, couldn’t quite do so, not only because the submission of my mind to the consensus of a select group of elderly Italian pederasts is my decision, but because eventually I have to decide what the dogmas mean. The same dilemma faces those who think that science, that modern Magisterium, is going to make it unnecessary or jejune to philosophize; but aside from the fact that the sciences only deal with certain select aspects of reality, they don’t interpret their own results. I still have to figure out what to think about the status of physical laws or even of mathematical theorems. Of course scientists often do ask questions about such things. They don’t do so as scientists, however.

The inevitability of philosophy is hardly a triumphant assertion. The normal scorn cast on philosophers is all well deserved. Thing is, though, in laughing at philosophers, you make fun of humanity itself. There really is something deeply funny about our condition, and people who think of themselves as philosophers aren’t in a fundamentally different fix than anybody else. They’re just willing to wear the clown suit in public.  

* In practice, of course, philosophical careers do end; and there is something melancholy about that too, especially when a person mistakes tenure, professional recognition, or even becoming a bust in the Hall of Fame as what it had been all about. In writing about this, at least, Lessing was perceptive. He wrote to Moses Mendelssohn  “It is infinitely difficult to know when and where one should stop, and for all but one in thousands the goal of their thinking is the point at which they have become tired of thinking.”

A Dying Man Can Eat Anything: an Old Man Can Say Anything

I’m not particularly radical, but I know I come across that way at times. I sound radical because I more or less write what I think, at least relative to the going average for straightforwardness. The substance of my ideas is not far to the left or philosophically drastic or, for that matter, original; but having arrived at a time and place in my life where there are few consequences to speaking up, I sound strident to others whose words and even thoughts are under more effective external or internal censorship than mine. That’s not bragging. It would be if I paid much of a cost for typing away in the dead of night to a tiny audience of old friends, puzzled interlopers, and perhaps NSA bureaucrats. But I’m not risking much. I’m not in the situation of so many of the business people and academics I know who have to be extremely careful about what they put on the Internet because an unwise spasm of sincerity really can complicate their lives and even menace their careers. After all, in this age of universal surveillance absolutely everything is taken down and may be used against you. 

Speaking truth to power may be heroic. Speaking truth to the void is mostly just comical. Indeed, in the limit, it is essentially virtual; for just as a bird is only able to fly because of the resistance of the air that apparently hinders its flight, speech means to the extent that it does work against the burden of custom and expectation. When the Emperor admitted that the war situation had developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, it mattered, though his majesty wasn’t entirely forthright about the situation. By the same token, if a TV news anchor or an ex-president takes a big risk and speaks with five percent more candor than usual, the incremental sincerity counts vastly more than any number of my rants, even assuming that in some cases I’m actually right about something. When I was in the publishing business, I used to tell potential authors that they had a choice of changing the thinking of a great many people in a small way or, if they pulled it off, changing the thinking of a very few people in a big way. Unfortunately, there’s a limit to this trade off because zero times anything is zero. If you’re going to bet on a number instead of a color, you should at least pick one of the integers and not one of the reals.

Contradiction #2

American managers and venture capitalists are trained to get in fast, make a killing, and get out with the goodies; but running a successful enterprise requires employees who want to provide superior goods and services. Which means there is a permanent disconnect between the mission statement and the ethos of those in charge.

The Crux

For all I know, the administration is misleading us all about the nerve gas attack in Syria; for though my impression is that Obama is even less eager to intervene there than Clinton was in the former Yugoslavia, my government has been lying to me about such things all my life. In any case, rightly or wrongly, when I first heard about the incident, I assumed that the real issue this time wasn’t whether or not the attack had occurred as described, but whether a missile strike on Syria was an intelligent or moral response. Since I had and have strong doubts about the utility and legality of military retaliation, the truth of what happened at the outset seems less critical to me. I also noticed that the best-informed critics of military action I heard on NPR and elsewhere didn’t focus on the reliability of the intelligence it was premised on but on its potential strategic drawbacks. Since the weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco of the Bush years is such a living memory, I figured that the critics would play up doubts about what happened if they thought that such doubts would hold up. For these and some other reasons, if I had to guess, which is all it would be, of course, I’d come down on the side of thinking that the Assad regime will turn out to have been, as advertised, responsible for what happened. I chose to direct my skepticism elsewhere.

What I’m waiting for is a cogent explanation of what a limited attack on Syria could accomplish. Absent that, the validity of intelligence about the event isn’t particularly relevant. It is, in fact, something of a red herring that confuses the debate by assuming that we’re preparing to reprise old mistakes when, most likely, we’re pioneering new ones. It isn’t just generals who are forever preparing for the last war. And what if Obama and company call everybody’s bluff, overruling the defense/intelligence community for once, and revealing what we actually know and how we know it? Would that settle things politically and discredit the critics even if it did not address the rightness or wisdom of the proposed response?

I recognize that these considerations may already be moot since Congressional opinion seems to running against the President.  Unfortunately, a no-vote will not settle my anxieties because not acting has its own risks and the prospect of serious non-military action is tenuous because so much of the coalition opposing Obama now is even more opposed to meaningful international cooperation than to military adventure. One could argue that it doesn’t matter how grim things become in Syria, but I wonder if it will be politically possible to ignore six months or six years of televised horror. What’s going on is indeed a civil war, but then so was the Spanish Civil War. The Syrian war is a struggle that, willy-nilly, is a proxy for most of the overt and latent conflicts of our world. I’m not sure we should be indifferent to it, and I’m damned sure we won’t be able to be indifferent to it.    

Contradiction #1

At a time when automation can replace workers in any repetitive job, we’re trying to make American education as mechanical as possible by defining performance as filling in the right circle on a multiple choice test.

The Old Folks at Home

Reading about the prosecution of rape victims in Saudi Arabia or honor killings in Pakistan, it’s worth remembering that conservative Muslims don’t have a patent on such proceedings. Back in 1205, a French girl who fell into a river and drowned while attempting to escape the henchmen of a lecherous local nobleman was denied Christian burial. It took the intervention of Pope Innocent III to insist that the girl was blameless because her death was an accident. The intention and not the event itself are what mattered, even if the circumstances of the event were notorious. There’s nothing novel about the Pope’s reasoning. St. Augustine taught much the same lesson in the City of God where he insisted that rape victims must not be stigmatized.* What is remarkable, as Alexander Murray noted in his account of the story, is that it took a Pope to enforce a point that had been made long before and not just by any Pope but perhaps the most powerful Pope of the entire Middle Ages. The church hierarchy often acted against what local congregations thought as piety because the mass of people operated with a morality of literal prohibitions and taboos. Jesus may have said, “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man, but what comes out of the mouth.” The laity always wants to see that in writing, and even then...

It’s actually quite easy to assemble examples of the church working in the interest of what even a village atheist considers enlightenment. One thinks the Spanish inquisition manifested the dark essence of Catholicism; but the papacy actually worked to moderate the excesses of what began as a local initiative against the conversos, former Jews and Muslims, who were suspected of disloyalty. For the church, a Catholic was a baptized individual who subscribed to the tenets of the faith. For the Spaniards, membership in the church was a matter of blood, not belief, which is why the characters in Don Quixote so often speak approvingly of “Old Catholics,” i.e. people of undoubted limpieza de sangre. The various inquisitors sent from Rome to mitigate the worst excesses of the Inquisition were hard, bigoted men; but they did attempt to reassert the Pauline universality of Christianity (“neither Greek nor Jew”) against the implicit racism of the Spanish church. They also attempted and largely succeeded in replace popular antisemitic riots and pograms with rational legal proceedings. Progress of a sort.

Nietzsche was no friend of Christianity, but he recognized that the church actually served to tame the inchoate religious impulses of the laity. In his view, the church was the expression of a slave revolt, but it was also disciplined the ressentiment of the mob and developed a moral outlook that was much more rational than the regime of custom (Sittlichkeit der Sitte) it endlessly struggled to replace or at least control. Christianity really did work to civilize the inner and outer barbarians; and though Nietzsche was obviously ambivalent about the virtues of civilization, he gave the priests credit for curbing the passions of their own supporters. As in many other ways, his appraisal of the historical role of religion was very different than that of the New Atheists, and he certainly didn’t agree with the commonly expressed sentiment—it’s one of the ten known undergraduate ideas—that personal religion is good but organized religion is bad.  His view—and mine—on that question is nearly the reverse.

 

Much of what I dislike about Catholicism is a function of the extent to which the people didn’t lose the struggle against a priestly elite. The rather pagan spiritual materialism of Catholicism reflects a long series of compromises that the hierarchy made with popular religiosity. The obvious example is the dogma of the literal presence of Christ in the host, a doctrine whose obvious absurdity even the finest minds of Europe could only finesse by prodigies of sophistical interpretation—one hopes the scholastics got paid by the hour. The church’s embryolatry, which amounts, after all, to the assertion of the real presence of the soul in the pharyngula, shows that folk psychology still at work, for the implicit metaphysics of the prolife folks is nothing as sophisticated as philosophical dualism. The soul is imagined as a filmy double of the body and not conceptualized as a radically different substance as it was, for example, by St. Augustine or Descartes. The unborn haunt the sentimental anti-abortionists whose Casper-the-Friendly-Ghost solution to the mind/body problem keeps them in the folkloric vicinity of revenants and zombies.

For all of its shortcomings, the history of the church does teach an important lesson. It takes unrelenting effort to maintain, if only by fits and starts, an adult morality of intentions in the midst of a population that thinks of right and wrong as a matter of crude rules and ritual purity. Only a disciplined, hierarchical organization can retain some sense of sobriety and realism in a world where spirits and demons routinely appear to one and all, especially since the church itself shares some the credulity of the laity.

There is a kind of thermodynamics at work in civilization. Keeping the ice cube from melting in the midst of the hot water requires insulation, and creating the ice cube in the first place requires work. A fully adult morality is unnatural. In fact, any rational approach to things requires a personal or institutional alienation from the community.

We can see this necessity in the sciences where without the creation and maintenance of distance from the opinions of the mass of humanity science would be quite impossible, not only because some of the results of inquiry outrage custom but because it is socially inappropriate to think too hard about anything. We think of the sciences as founded finally on observation, which is not exactly a mistaken impression, but a misleading one since it is just as important to disqualify the wrong kind of observers as to listen to the right kind. The democratic tendencies of science are often contrasted with the authoritarianism of the church, but the control of discourse imposed on the scientists is, if anything, more despotic than the old priestly censorship. The Index of Prohibited Books of the Holy Office has nothing on the prior restraint enforced by peer review.

Purely private skepticism also depends upon what Nietzsche called the pathos of distance. When people you love blandly report on the miracles and apparitions they’ve witnessed, there’s nothing for it but to smile and excuse yourself from the dinner table.

* “Nothing that another person does with the body, or upon the body, is any fault of the person who suffers it, so long as he cannot escape it without sin.”

Principled Incoherence

The Republican defense of what's going on with changes in voter laws in North Carolina, Texas, and several other states follows a familiar pattern. 

This isn't Jim Crow. Jim Crow (properly understood) is justified, and, anyhow, this is a much milder version of Jim Crow than the original. I didn't steal the pig. It was my pig; and, anyhow, it wasn't very big.

As Freud noted long ago, the law of non contradiction has no force in the realms of the Id; and about that, at least, he was right. 

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Narrowcasting

I met an ichthyologist a few months ago. Talking to him inspired me to write a couple of limericks that were aimed specifically at biologists, though the second one is less esoteric.

It seems that the family of Hennig

As a taxon is not worth a pfennig.

His frau frequently strayed

Which made his whole clade

Polyphyletic from the beginning.

A biologist who was named Verne

Showed what even a postdoc won’t learn 

When he inserted some genes

By traditional means

In the genome of Jean the intern.

Verdict on a Verdict

What made Manning's acts so intolerable to the government is that he acted out of a sense of responsibility and embarrassed powerful people. They might have offered him some mercy had his motives been greed or blood lust and his offense merely a war crime—Manning has already served more time than Lt. Calley. Notably, we tortured Manning. There was never a chance that we'd torture our own torturers. The simple fact is that it was imperatively necessary to demonstrate to one and all that the bit about not following illegal orders is just public relations.

It wouldn't be quite accurate to say that the response to this case shows that the American people has lost it's sense of right and wrong. Very few human beings, even the worst, do what they do without following some code. In all of this, we are all following our conscience. I expect that the judge in this show trial also felt like she was actually acting like a judge instead of the stooge she was. The irony, however, is that the going system of morality, which puts prudent self interest above all other considerations, makes malcontents like Manning and Snowden inevitable since no well adjusted individual would do something so stupid as act in the name of abstract principles like human rights or the public good. Since our government is acting badly and will continue to act badly with the help of the American people, there will be more Mannings and Snowdens for the foreseeable future and they will probably be marginal people.

Many people have pointed out that no military or civilian government could be indifferent to what Manning or Snowden did. This is absolutely true. No one, to my knowledge, has claimed that the whistleblowers didn’t break the law. What is also true, however, is that absent this kind of crime, the state would be acting with even more impunity. The best joke of 2013 was the suggestion that if Snowden was unhappy with what the NSA was doing, he should have complained to his superiors or perhaps written a vague op/ed.

Scientism: Threat or Menace?

The word “scientism:” has become a battlefield, with the pot most recently stirred by an essay by Steven Pinker in the New Republic and responses made by cosmologist Sean Carroll and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci.  My two cents:

Reading John Haffenden's monster biography of William Empson, I learned that "scientism" was a term of debate back at Cambridge in the 1920s at a time when very serious folks were trying to figure out what could and could not be meaningfully talked about. Both ordinary language philosophy and the New Criticism (among other things) came out of this conversation. In that context, "scientism" referred to a narrow version of licit universe of discourse. It was a philosophical position, not a term of abuse, though the people who supported it most often called themselves positivists.

I've tried to swear off using the word "scientism" myself, but when I've succumbed to temptation and used it in ill-tempered modern arguments, I've meant by it something like vulgar positivism just as one used to talk about vulgar Marxism. This scientism is a largely unreflective pop version of a philosophy that is or at least once was defensible. Like the earlier philosophical version, it asserts or implies a metaphysics in which reality is a large room with objects in it and an epistemology in which rational discourse consists in making factual assertions on the basis of observations when it isn’t bookkeeping. Where the original philosophy made these claims with its eyes open and on the basis of arguments, contemporary scientism does so as if they were commonsense and out of a lack of imagination. My own view is that what the scientists study is an infinitesimal fraction of the volume of the world and the ways they talk about it are a vanishingly small proportion of meaningful ways of speaking. Which doesn't imply that chemistry isn't the best way to do chemistry, it simply reflects my perception of the scope of things.

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.