Waiting for Carnot

I used to smart off by saying “Of course I’m an atheist. I’m a high school graduate.” The God that everybody knows doesn’t exist isn’t the only God on prospect, however. Myths are always what somebody else believes. More evolved types of Christians, Jews, and Muslims don’t take their own religion literally. They simply assume that some sort of meaningful concept of God lies somewhere beneath the accretions of tradition and fable, even if just what it is they believe is something they haven’t got around to defining, something they are willing to leave to a theologian to be named later. They have bought the meaningfulness of their faith on credit, assuming there’s a formula for theism they would endorse if they encountered it. If you make a pest of yourself, though, you can usually get them to posit this much: God is a person, i.e., an entity that has purposes and cares about the world. That sounds vaguely edifying, especially to secular people who insist that appearances to the contrary they are actually very spiritual. For me, though, perhaps because I’m so unspiritual, the personhood of God is the religious idea that I have the most problem with.

If you talk about God as the first cause, the prime mover, the ground of Being, necessary Being, or Being qua Being. I may not agree with you; but I I understand what you’re saying. Perhaps god-talk may be meaningful, at least at an abstract metaphysical level. What I haven’t been able to process for a great many years is the personhood bit. That it makes sense to talk about an infinite, all-powerful entity that, like us, acts, cares, suffers, and lives.

My puzzlement has very little to do with the usual complaints of the atheists, but then both those hostile to religion and those who defend it aren’t usually proposing philosophical theses. Creationists don’t give a shit about biology, but atheists don’t really care much about First Philosophy. Belief in God for many people is basically a loyalty oath to society or a certain kind of society; and disbelief in God caries its own political freight. It’s eccentric of me, I recognize, but I do care about the philosophical side of these questions.

What offends my scruples is the way that the pedigree of the God concept is never provided. That’s not so obviously a problem if you buy into one of the Gods of the Philosophers because many of the characteristics or dimensions of such deities are drawn from logic or physics—that’s where Kant derived his idea of god, for example. Once you imagine a God that is alive and has purposes, however, you’re abstracting from living things, specifically animals; and that’s what strikes me as extraordinarily dicey. It’s not just that it seems rather unlikely that gaseous vertebrates exist. All the living things we have encountered have metabolisms, and anything we run across in the future will have a metabolism or we won’t count it as alive. So is God an autotroph or a heterotroph? The Chandogya Upanishads represents Atman as chanting “I am the eater! I am the eater!” So what’s it eating? Once again, that’s not a problem for the utterly replete spherical God of Parmenides who needs nothing at all, but that God or any other God eternal, infinite, and complete isn’t alive because to live is to persist on a thermodynamic gradient like a vortex in a tea pot. (I take Carnot’s word for that one, hence the title of the piece.)

A non-living God seems otiose or disappointing since such a being simply cannot act, care, or will. We might love it, but it wouldn’t make sense for it to love us. A finite God, some sort of friendly or not so friendly Cthulhu, at least makes sense; but if you are going in for that kind of science fiction God you might as well believe in Baal riding the storm clouds. At least that way you don’t have to finish high school.                

Lazy Reason

Sadists don’t smile a lot because serious pleasures are not laughing matters. It follows that economists are not necessarily unhappy people even though they practice the gloomy science and certainly sound pretty gloomy. There’s so much satisfaction to be had in identifying with the aggressor, not to mention the daily fun of humiliating students by demonstrating that everything they know is wrong. It’s no secret by now that a certain malice motivates the dialectic—Socrates himself was, after all, the first and greatest of trolls—but pedagogic cruelty is especially close to the surface in the Econ 101 version of the Method. Not even Socrates got to demonstrate so literally that the good intentions of the earnest youths were mere stupidities. Economics is a thoroughly evil profession. Unfortunately, that’s not exactly a fatal objection to the discipline or a refutation of its fundamental insights. Still, the economists might miss something important in their humorless infatuation with the dark side of the Force.
 
Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, an influential defense of free markets, argued back in '46 against government interference in the economy by claiming (in John Quiggin’s paraphrase): "Assuming that market prices are equal to opportunity costs, government interventions that change the market allocation must have opportunity costs that exceed their benefits." I don’t know if this lesson really is the basic principle of economics or if it really is, as advertised, ineluctable in some sense—Quiggins is currently writing a book that proposes that economics requires at least one more lesson—but if the Hazlitt’s lesson isn’t precisely the fundamental theorem of economics, it does point towards the fundamental shtick of economics, the endlessly fascinating idea that good intentions are always self defeating while individual greed leads to broad sunlight uplands or if not exactly broad sunlight uplands, the broadest and sunniest uplands we’re going to get. The historical version of this bit of this theodicy is always trotted out whenever some Pope or other busybody criticizes capitalism. “So what do you think is lifting the world’s poor from their poverty? Encyclicals?”
 
Elaborate deductions from dubious premises in papers decorated with the backwards 6’s may impress the masses…of business majors, but it is the historical evidence rather than the mathiness that raises the more serious questions for me. Even after you scrub the chamber-of-commerce makeup off the Whiggish version of economic history, the narrative has considerable plausibility. It really is hard to see how a virtuous and communitarian system of production and distribution (let alone scientific socialism) could have ever produced the respite from Malthusian misery enjoyed by at least a substantial portion of mankind over the last couple of centuries. After all, the nearest example of a Jeffersonian paradise of yeomen farmers on hand is Haiti.
 
One should point out at the outset, however, that the important issue in all this is not whether the free market was worth it. The free market capitalism found in Chapter One is not the capitalism of history. That economic system only functions in the Cloud Cuckoo land of theorists where the spherical cows graze contentedly on the artificial turf. The capitalism of history, the system that actually transformed the world, certainly involved markets, but the adjective free seldom applied to them. Markets were not the secret ingredients in the recipe of the modern world—everybody trades. Sven Berkert’s concept of war capitalism is closer to the mark since it took a great many guns to produce the take off and the great divergence. Even before the Age of Exploration, capitalism was, in Braudel’s useful formulation, something layered on top of the technologies of production and the structures of exchange. The whole point of being a capitalist is to beat the market, to game it, to pay your workers as little as possible and preferably nothing at all, to shoot fish in a barrel because competition and fair dealing is not likely to get you rich. The modern world was created through force and fraud; and the question is whether that force and fraud was necessary and, even more, whether a system that continues to function through force and fraud should be defended and reproduced. I take it that’s a very real question.
 
My ambitions in addressing this question are limited. Unlike Niall Ferguson, who is considered an economist by historians and a historian by economists and therefore enjoys immunity from criticism by either side. I’m neither an historian nor an economist and can’t get away with anything. It simply occurs to me that the neoliberal celebration of capitalism suffers from an obvious shortcoming. While I quite agree that things have worked out better than you would have expected, the history of the last two centuries is hardly a story of the triumphant advance of unbridled capitalism. The one-time experiment was not a trial of pure capitalism because capitalism was opposed, edited, and modified at every step by political forces. Indeed, a counterforce has emerged precisely at those passes where putatively free market but actually oligarchic political economics has resulted in intolerable results. If the English working class didn’t fall into terminal wretchedness, it certainly wasn’t because of some happy intrinsic feature of Manchester political economics. The workers got organized. It was Ulysses Simpson Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman and not economic rationality that ended slavery In the U.S.—slavery was a huge moneymaker right up to the Civil War. For that matter, the eight-hour workday, overtime, tolerable working conditions, and Saturday didn’t happen because of anonymous market mechanisms. Unions and political action imposed these reforms on the owners against the advice of most of the economists and pundits of the time.

Anno domini 2015 it very much matters that the great expansion of the world’s economy unfolded in an era where capitalism was always contested because we are apparently entering an era when the forces opposed to capitalism are extraordinarily weak. Across the West, democracy has been largely discredited; and what’s called liberalism in a country like ours is more a call for a more decent form of oligarchy than a serious contestation of the power of money. We’re apparently preparing to perform a new and unprecedented experiment in which we do find out what happens when the soi disant free market gets to do its stuff without effective opposition. What the Republicans denounced as socialism saved capitalism from itself before. It will be interesting to see if capitalism survives its own triumph. Wellington once said that the only thing more terrible than a battle won was a battle lost, but maybe Wellington wasn’t quite right about that.

Speaking of battles lost. It would be an instance of the fallacy of the lazy reason to give up the struggle just because the inexorable laws of economics or the iron law of oligarchy or some other scientificated version of fate predetermines the outcome and you figure that it won’t be too bad even if you do nothing. It may well be true that the historical processes that produced the modern world didn’t result in the disaster the prophets foretold (at least yet), but the efforts of those that didn’t come out on top were part of the process. Just as the old theologians used to insist that reality only persisted because of an ongoing act of divine creation—continuous fulgurations— it seems to me that what humanity there is in the human world survives because human will recreates it in every generation. I don’t always go along with the theologians entirely, however. For me, a war is just if losing it is better than not fighting.

Memories are Made of This

Recent polls indicate that George Bush’s standing with the public is becoming more favorable. That’s depressing, but not very surprising. Unless there’s something wrong with your own memory, you ought to have learned by now that the public’s memory is extremely short. In fact, for most people, most of the time, memory is a social phenomenon even though it manifests itself through individual nervous systems. Small wonder, then, that a great many people can’t recall the several disasters of Bush’s reign since the communal recollection engine isn’t doing its work and, of course, our justice system has decisively flunked its vital mnemonic role. 

That memory is predominately a sociological fact has got to be the most unpopular idea I’ve ever tried to float in a lifetime of floating unpopular ideas, at a minimum right up there with the  claim that thought is not something contained in brains, that the self is in the world and not in the skull. I admit that reading Maurice Halbwachs’ La memoire collective is more a chore than a pleasure. He not only writes as a sociologist. He writes like a sociologist. What really makes his ideas hateful, however, isn’t just a matter of prose style. We really don’t want to admit that the human world is not built out of individual minds the way that a wall is made out of bricks. Perhaps that’s why, though the social nature of memory is a basic part of Nietzsche’s outlook and Nietzsche could certainly write, nobody gets that part. As Nietzsche himself wrote someplace, in such cases there is an auditory hallucination. It seems like something was said and heard, but no transaction took place.  

Well, as the case of Bush’s rehabilitation shows, Halbwachs and Nietzsche were optimists. Nietzsche took it that memory stopped with the grandparents. The Heidelberg Egyptologist Jan Assmann, following Halbwachs, estimates that social memory stretches back 70 years or so. Before that is the imminently ignorable history written in books and entombed in museums, the dead zone between lived experience and the sacred origin stories. You’d think that longer lifespans would lengthen social memory—lots of people know their great grandparents these days—but the reverse appears to be the case. I once read about an anthropologist who visited an isolated tribe of aborigines twice. On his second visit, which only took place a few years after the first, he asked whether anybody remembered him. “Yes, there’s an old story about that…” When I talk to San Francisco State students about Vietnam, it might as well have occurred in the dreamtime. They’ve heard about it. They saw the movie, but It is not a part of their experience in the same way that World War II was a part of my experience though I was born almost exactly halfway between VE and VJ day.

Memory is social; and forgetting, which is an integral part of memory, is also social. Jon Stewart delivered a memorable rant last night on the Middle East under the rubric Learning Curves are for Pussies. He focused on what we refuse to learn, but he could have as easily spoken about we refuse to remember, namely the long roll of disastrous American interventions in the region. If you understand memory in a psychological way, you may figure that the recollection of events decays exponentially so that old wars have a half life like U235. That perspective may not be entirely wrong, but it is profoundly misleading because in real situations our purely personal memories are repeatedly refreshed like the image on a computer screen. Of course, if the organs that ordinarily do our thinking for us, e.g., our families, our spouses, our friends, the internet, television, and the rest, neglect to restore the fading impression or decide to ignore it for some ideological or commercial reason, we have to fall back on our own resources. In other words, unless we belong to the small group that make it our business to actively remember, we forget. So what was so bad about Bush?

Thoughts Inspired by Andrew Scull’s Madness in Civilization

Scull’s book disappointed me or, to be more accurate, the first half of the book disappointed me. The author tried to write a comprehensive history of insanity and ended up producing the world’s longest blue book essay for a Western Civ final. I don’t know if anybody is really up to the task of writing a cross-cultural history of madness, but Scull is not that guy. Heck, his effort reminded me my high school report on ancient attitudes to insanity, which I reread the other day while cleaning out some old papers. On the other hand, when Scull finally gets around to the last two centuries, he’s much better, passionate and on-point about the intellectual and moral scandal of the era of the mass incarceration of the insane, the hubris of the psychiatrists, the indifference of the politicians, and the incoherence of the law. Exposing the absurdity of the DSM is not especially difficult, I guess; but it sure is necessary.

I’m not quite up to writing a proper review of Scull’s book, but reading it occasioned a few random reflections:

• For most of history, the care of the insane has been an exercise in law enforcement, which is why there are no firm dividing lines between treatment, punishment, and torture. Celsus recommended whipping lunatics to restore them to sanity. St Loyola recommended whipping yourself to atone for the crime of being a human being. For the first part of our history, we Americans put difficult people in madhouses. Later we put the same kind of people in prisons. Neither approach works very well.
• “Insanity” does not name a natural group. Particular ailments that can indeed be separated out because of their clear causation have been identified from time to time and ceased to be though of as forms of madness. Indeed, the Greeks already distinguished delirium associated with fever from other kinds of aberrant behavior. Later epilepsy, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and the psychiatric manifestations of tertiary syphilis were hived off.  It seems likely that manic depression and schizophrenia may eventually follow, though that remains to be seen; but most of the conditions identified in the various editions of the DSM are far slippery than something like agitated catatonia. It’s almost as if a problem has to be an ongoing category mistake in order to count as a proper entry in the Chinese encyclopedia that is the official nosology.
• Simply getting a bunch of doctors to agree to call a set of behaviors a disease is not the same as making a discovery. I was in the audience in Toronto when the shrinks decided by a show of hands that homosexuality isn’t a psychiatric disorder. I almost laughed out loud, not because I think homosexuality is a kind of madness—I don’t and didn’t—but because of the stupidity of the whole procedure, which, to put it mildly, didn’t have much to do with satisfying Koch’s postulates.
• People are far more fouled up than we want to believe. Normality is as mythical as God almighty.
• A tremendous amount of psychiatry is merely a new version of phrenology. Though officially and even truculently materialist, the focus on neurology is actually rather Cartesian. It replaces one form of dualism with another. The world isn’t divided between things and souls, but between the brain and the rest of the world. Hence the obviously false notion that selves are located in certain parts of the brain and are identical with particular cerebral structures.
• I am not my body. After all, my body knows how to synthesize proteins from amino acids. I certainly don’t. The self is a parasite rather like those fungi you read about that control the behavior of ants.  The analogy is actually rather close. In Plato, the rational self is pictured as the driver of a team of unruly horses that resist his efforts to guide the chariot upwards. In ants, the fungus gets the infected insect to climb the highest twig, the better to spread the spores that will burst from its swollen head.
• For all its failings, psychoanalysis at least recognized that what’s at stake, at least for the most part, are meanings rather than brain chemicals. Scull is very good on this point. The fatal flaw of analysis is that you can’t get your insurance company to pay for it. The fact, if it is a fact, that it doesn’t do you any good is not the problem.
• The Freudian view of things is not dissimilar to Buddhism. The difference is that the Freudians more or less clear-headedly vote for samsara. They recognize that the ego is an illusion; but they opt for the illusion. To quote an old line of my own: of course we’re fucked up. Angst in the Tao of the West—the alternative, as Nietzsche accurately pointed out, is European Buddhism.

An Attack of Gas

I note that Oklahoma has legalized the use of nitrogen gas as an execution method, though stifling people in this fashion has never been tested and it would raise certain ethical issues to run a phase one trial. In any case, you’d think that opting for helium would have demonstrated a more developed sense of humor on the part of the legislature.  Really, I don’t know why we have so much trouble with this issue. We worry about how much a handful of condemned murderers will suffer, but we routinely torture living inmates.

The solution to the execution problem should be obvious to anybody who has taken Econ 101. There are surely many wealthy people who would pay a good price for the right to kill somebody with impunity, thus providing much needed revenue to the state while making the choice of lethal instrumentality a question for whoever was willing to pay the most. Privatizing state-sanctioned murder has the added benefit of undercutting a familiar argument against capital punishment. Opponents are forever carping that execution is much more expensive then life imprisonment. My suggestion would make the death house a profit center. A win-win situation.

Frustrated

Paradoxes were popular in my youth. It was the age of Gödel, Escher, Bach, a time when college kids wondered out loud whether the critique of an ideology could ever be anything but another ideology, when we all admired the Heroic Struggle of the Little People to Finish the Mural and wondered what we would have seen in the barbershop mirror if our heads weren’t in the way. Well, rapid transit gloria mundi. In the midst of the Cambrian explosion of consumer electronics, Cratylus is even more apropos than Heraclitus. It’s all you can do to step into the same river once. Under the circumstances, who has the time to be mesmerized by the mise en abyme of consciousness? Small wonder the world snake seems intent on biting somebody else’s tail these days. In the words of the irritated vulture, “patience my ass, I’m going to kill something!” Neurosis has given way to perversity, which, oddly enough, involves fewer kinks, at least from a topological point of view.  

Presumably we prefer things to be straightforward. Sadly, you can’t always get what you want, at least in world politics. Evidently Escher isn’t quite obsolete yet. Middle Eastern geopolitics is an ever-ascending (or descending) staircase. Iran is our enemy in Lebanon and Syria where it supports Hisbollah, which supports Assad, but our friend in Iraq where it fights ISIS, which fights Assad. Meanwhile, we scold the Pakistanis for oppressing the Shia, but send weapons to help the Saudis bomb and perhaps invade Yemen even though the Saudis oppress the Shia that live in the eastern part of their country. The Republicans don’t know whether to denounce Obama as a secret Muslim or a secret Shi’ite, which is perhaps more damning since for the most part, the Christians, at least the right wing ones, definitely lean Sunni. Even Senator McCain, an obligate carnivore in foreign policy, may be forgiven some confusion when it comes to deciding whom to attack, at least whom to attack first.

What we have here is what solid-state physicists describe as a frustrated system, “one where the interactions compete with each other and cannot be simultaneously satisfied.” If it were merely a matter of coming up with an economically rational policy or an ideologically coherent policy or a geopolitically shrewd policy, a solution set wouldn’t be so hard to compute. The equation we insist on solving, however, has only imaginary solutions.

Riyadh is the hometown of radical Islam, and Saudi royalty orchestrated the oil shocks that derailed the American economy back in the 70s. That bunch runs one of the world’s most repressive regimes. You’d think this absurd and malignant monarchy would be enemy number one, especially after prominent Saudis financed 9/11 and a bunch of young Saudis carried it out. Yes, but there’s all that oil. Meanwhile, Iran continues to be the focus of perpetual hatred for reasons that are never spelled out in public. At the behest of first the British and then the Israelis, we’ve bankrolled coups, propped up a tyrant, encouraged a foreign invader to kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians, shot down an airliner, attempted to impoverish the country with non-stop sanctions, and engaged in cyberwar against it—I guess it’s something that we left it to the Israelis to do the murdering of Iranian scientists. I suppose our continuing hostility to the Iranians makes a certain human sense. Like Southern racists, we’ve acted so badly that we can’t change our attitudes now without admitting how insupportable our actions have been for decades. So we keep pretending that Iran is a major threat even though from a Real Politik perspective, Iran doesn't make much more sense as an enemy, so much so that we're finding it next to impossible not to treat them as allies.

Of course, it is far easier for an Israeli to make a case for war with Iran in view of their support for anti-Israeli groups in Lebanon and Gaza and the prospect that an Iran with even a rudimentary nuclear weapon would break Israel’s monopoly on atomic weapons in the region and limit its ability to bomb and invade its neighbors, something it has done, after all, on a great many occasions. But it’s not enough to prevent the Iranians from getting a bomb. The pot must boil indefinitely to provide cover for the gradual annexation of the West Bank and deflect attention from the obvious bankruptcy of the Zionist ideal in the eyes of the world at large. Real peace is a serious threat for a nation that looks more and more like South Africa before Mandela.

Why the U.S. puts up with endlessly being played by Netanyahu and company takes more explaining, though obviously the political leverage of the Israelis with both the Democrats and the Republicans has a lot to do with it. But maybe it’s just become a habit. For obvious reasons, many Americans and Europeans had a great deal of sympathy for the Jews in the wake of the horrors of World War II, certainly more sympathy than they had for the Palestinian, who were too different from us to count. Things are somewhat different now, but I remember that it was well into the 60’s before a spokesman for the swarthy others was even allowed to make his case on PBS—Palestinians in those days were as apologetic and cowed in their rare public appearances as members of the Mattachine Society before the Stonewall riots. Israel had its uses during the Cold War—one forgets how tense things got between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in ‘67 and ‘73. It’s also true that Israeli society is admired here for many defensible and some indefensible reasons—Israel is a democracy, albeit a herrenvolk democracy, with a vibrant intellectual life, and it is also the kind of ethno-theocracy that many Republicans wish America could be. Still, absent domestic political imperatives, no American administration would keep giving Israel billions in aid every year without putting an end to the settlements.

Dealing with this epic game of pick up sticks requires a light touch and a tolerance for complexity, but above all a recognition that local victories may result in overall defeat. What I hear from many politicians is a simply a call for acting out. “Do something, damn it!” In all probability the Republicans will run on a policy of going to war against Iran. The thinking appears to be that if we jump off the roof, we’ll be perfectly OK until we pass the fifth floor on the way down, at which point we can reassess the situation.

The Funeral Baked Meats

Since it’s Easter morning, it’s perhaps an appropriate time to resurrect the dead, in this case an old poem that was (sort of) published almost a quarter of a century ago. Adam Gopnik wrote a much better essay on the same topic a few years ago—coming across Gopnik's work this morning is what make me think of my old poem.

Catechism

We are saved by grace alone. It follows

The chalice of eternal mercy’s
An earthen cup and not a golden grail.
To be saved by a miracle is not a miracle.
He was not the man with the honey beard and the tender eyes
But an excitable young intellectual
Whose love, like ours, was overgrown with rage
Like the last rose in an abandoned garden
Among the thorns, entangled branch and root.
Certainly he was not very nice,
Moody and hysterical and then suddenly cold;
And if his words were sometimes a new thing in the world,
Mostly he repeated the wisdom and insanity of the prophets.
He wasn’t a good teacher either.
His followers followed him for their own reasons
As if they had caught the power in his voice
But not the sense. As for the rest
They hardly listened at all or heard
What they wanted to hear and already believed.
For the exhausted women he was an Adonis.
For the men,
Against all the evidence, a vengeful sword.
Perhaps he cured the sick or perhaps
The wretched took some comfort from his hand
Because compassion in his day as ours
Is by itself a portent. Beyond that sign
Which either suffices or does not
He gave no other, as you all well know;
For you are fools. He died and he stayed dead.

Morning Glory

From time to time everybody dreams epic-making insights that melt away at first light. If we remember them at all, they turn out to be either absurd or obvious. What’s worrisome is that the last three moments of Zen continue to make sense to me. Perhaps senility is making me impressed with things everybody knows.

Dream insight #1

The living things in the universe form a guild, not a taxon. Unless the theory of panspermia turns out to be true, whatever complex beings we might encounter would not be kin of ours no matter how similar they may appear to be. Which is quite different than the situation here on earth where the bed bugs are literally our cousins; and even liverworts, black mold, and bacteria are all in the family, albeit more than a few times removed. It may be reasonable to define a class of complicated entities that play the same thermodynamic role on other planetary bodies as organisms do here; but this category would not be like a family or a genus or even a phyla or kingdom. You can speculate, as Conway Morris does in his book Life’s Solutions, that living things would necessarily converge on a common plan—Morris even supposes that intelligent beings will all turn out to be bipeds—but this is the merest guessing. Since all the living things we have experience of belong to a single natural group, Conway is making an inference from a database with a single entry. In any case, even if the spacemen looked an awful lot like us, they would be at best a little more than kind, but less than kin. Under the hood, in the cellular depths, living things elsewhere are surely based on different frozen accidents. The genetic code isn’t just a QWERTY; but it’s one of the most efficient possible codes, not the most efficient possible code. Other features of living things, notably the chemistry of membranes and the specific suite of organelles found in eukaryotes are also inheritances from symmetry breaks. Does anybody seriously believe that mitochondria or chloroplasts are inevitable features of complex living things?  

Dream insight #2

The first line of the Gospel According to John is absurd on its face. “In the beginning was the Word” implies that a language can exist without either any one to listen or a world to speak about. Wittgenstein famously argued that a private language is impossible, but God’s language would be more than merely private. Even solipsists who question whether other people have minds don’t doubt that there are things outside themselves.  The fourth evangelist implied something even more drastic and implausible than solipsism. Of course creation myths are usually, if not necessarily illogical—the myth about the origin of aquatic plants has otters in it and the myth about the origin of otters has aquatic plants in it—but the Abrahamic religions sharpen the contradictions. “Let there be light!” says God in his primal solitude, but it is never explained who he’s talking to or who or what is available to allow there to be light. Imagining that he’s talking to the heavenly hosts doesn’t help since they are also created beings. “Let there be angels!” simply pushes the problem back a step without resolving it.

Dream insight #3

Since the prospect of reward motivates people, inequality can promote economic growth and technological innovation. In that respect, inequality, is a good thing, at least potentially. Thing is, our economy is now so top loaded that there isn't enough inequality to go around. There's an inequality shortage. So many of the goodies go to the very top that there aren't enough left to adequately reward effort and ingenuity among the middle class and the working poor. A winner-take-all political economy creates the slackers it supposedly despises. "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work."

No Spoilers

Epic poems aren’t suspenseful. Even his horses knew what was in store for Achilles. The dominant affect is foreboding, not surprise. In the Mahabharata, the leader of the Kauravas and his hapless father are endlessly warned of the inevitable consequences of making unjust war on the Pandavas. The virtuous cousins are undeniably in the right, are led by five redoubtable warriors including the invincible Arjuna, and have the support of Krishna, who is acknowledged by all to be the incarnation of the supreme God of the universe. You’d think that it would be pretty clear that the odds are not favorable and that the outcome, even for the victors, will be the grandest of disasters. The Greeks spoke of “an Iliad of woes;” but the Mahabharata, which is twenty times longer than the Iliad, also has twenty times the misery. As the poet describes them, the weapons of the combatants sound like nuclear weapons; and the stricken field at the end of the war is like the aftermath of Hiroshima, right down to the black rain. Only one heir survives from either set of cousins; and the whole caste of the kshatryas is devastated, just as the Gods had purposed when they fated the war. The age of Kali begins. All of it was foreseeable and indeed foreseen and yet nothing could divert the dark will of Duryodhana or motivate his father to insist that he change course.

I was just finishing up reading Carole Staymurti’s modern retelling of the Mahabharata when I heard the Israeli election results. It struck me how the shortsightedness of the leader of the Israelis rhymed with the unwisdom of the leader of the Kauravas or at least fit into the meter of the epic, which sounds a little like Hiawatha— Duryodhana, Netanyahu. Of course I don’t know whether the current Israeli policy really will lead to the plains of Megiddo as Duryodhana’s stubbornness led to Kuruksetre. What I don’t get is just how peace or even the long-term existence of Israel is possible in the absence of any legal standing for the Palestinians in an increasingly hostile world. I certainly don’t see how we help matters if the U.S. insists on playing the part of the literally blind king who facilitated his son’s moral blindness until it was too late. Netanyahu is supposedly walking back the statements he made just before the election, but surely nobody believes him. After all, what was novel in his earlier remarks was simply that they were uttered in public. Paying lip service to a two-state solution, really to any solution, while proceeding with the de facto annexation of the West Bank has been part of the Israeli arcana of state for decades. No other assumption fits with Israel’s behavior. Maybe somebody in Tel Aviv has a strategy that goes beyond the next election, but they are certainly keeping that plan secret. In lieu of wisdom, defiance and amor fati. Heroic intransigence. 

As far as our part in this grim epic is concerned, I don’t know if Obama has ever heard of Dhritarashtra but it matters if, after a couple of weeks of ritualized disapproval, he goes back to the by now habitual role of enabler played by American presidents for their own short-term political ends. 

The Prophet Procrastinates

By the time you hear about the latest thing, it’s usually too late. That’s true of fashion trends and intellectual developments, all of which have a finite velocity of propagation. The news travels at various speeds and arrives at different places at different times, and you’re probably not in the right place. On the other hand, if you happen to travel faster than a fad, you’re doomed to déjà vu since relativistic time travel, though exotic or impractical in physics, is merely banal in culture. I experienced this kind of jet lag when I moved from California to Connecticut in 1967 and lived through the Summer of Love twice, once in the Summer in San Francisco and once in the Fall in New Haven. A year later I experienced a third repetition in Jonesboro, Arkansas where the locals thought they were the cat’s pajamas because they’d just discovered tie-dye. No reason to feel superior about this sort of thing, though. Nietzsche made fun of people who were inordinately proud of themselves for being fifteen minutes ahead of the Zeitgeist. To modify a once trendy expression, we are always already hicks.

Brokers make automatic profits by exploiting infinitesimal time delays in the reporting of stock prices. The authors of popular nonfiction books practice a similar but much more leisurely form of arbitrage as they retail as novelties merchandize that has been available for a long time at a much cheaper price on the wholesale market. If you read a serious journal like SCIENCE you experience a more or less perpetual reverb as what you read about in January shows up as hot news on CNN in August.

Predicting what has already taken place isn’t magic, but it’s a living. The various warnings we’re been hearing lately about the menace of renegade computer programs are a case in point. Of course the idea of a takeover by artificial intelligences has been around for a long time. Before Skynet, there was the Forbin project and who knows how many Twilight Zone episodes. Harlan Elison’s story, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, is an especially memorable variation on the theme. More recently, the menace of machine intelligence has become a concern of credible people like Bill Joy, Stephen Hawkins, and Nick Bostrom. I don’t discount these worries, but it seems to me that they are already out of date. The inhuman system that has gone rogue is not a giant server farm in Utah but the capitalist economy, and that happened quite a while ago.

The good thing about markets is that they automatically take care of distribution and supply problems that would defeat the computational capabilities of a central planning agency. In that respect they are like optimization techniques. In fact, Leonid Kantorovich, one of the inventors of linear programming, was looking for a way to rationalize the Russian economy without resorting to profits and supply and demand pricing—the British writer Francis Spufford wrote a fascinating novel about the episode, Red Plenty. Even with the help of modern computers, however, the maximization problem blows up, which is why even most of the Left in Europe and North America now buys into von Hayek’s insight into that the economy functions as a dispersed form of intelligence, “the result of human action but not of human design.” Folks who want to bring back Gosplan are notably thin on the ground these days. What has concerned me for decades, however, is the other side of the Hayekian notion; for if the economy manages to aggregate the decisions of millions of human beings and thereby find a maximum, it is far from clear just what it maximizes. Why it would maximize my welfare or the welfare of everybody or even the welfare of a chosen class is unclear. Apparently one can only trust the invisible maker, the materialist Holy Ghost, and have faith that a process beyond the control of individuals or even communities will be for the best. And, as with the old fashion kind of faith, it’s easier to believe in the goodness of God if you’re one of the elect than if you’re one of the preterite.

It would be a form of animism to attribute a purpose to the economy just as it is a form of superstition to think that evolution has a purpose. Nevertheless, both commerce and nature act as if they were up to something, though presumably that something is something better defined thermodynamically than theologically. Living things are bags of enzymes, organic catalysts that accelerate the rate of chemical change without altering its direction. We dissipate energy for a living; indeed, from an inhuman perspective, living just is the dissipation of energy and my body is a contrivance devised by natural selection to efficiently turn perfectly good food into shit. I’m no Hayek scholar, but I gather that he saw the economy as a subsystem or elaboration of evolution. If there’s something to that, perhaps what the market system does is just the continuation of the entropic vocation of life, only in business suits this time. 

People, especially guys on barstools, think that economy is organized for the benefit of the already wealthy and powerful; but from a wider point of view, that view may have things almost exactly backwards. Extreme inequality furthers the tendency of the system to endlessly increase material throughput. The system has its own very good reasons to produce tycoons. Billionaires are like the old couple from Iowa who really does win the jackpot at Reno. The Casino can’t bilk everybody; there have to be some winners to explain why the rest of us go playing a losing game. But the hyperwealthy do more than serve as the mechanical rabbit at the dog track. They can also be counted on to use their enormous financial resources to effectively defend the system from the human rationality that threatens to interfere with its intrinsic tendencies. It’s pretty hard to feel sorry for top one percent of the top one percent, though it must be truly horrible to wake up every morning and realize you’re Donald Trump and can’t do anything about it. Still, the richest of the rich are more dupes than masters. Secondary causes.

Natural selection ceaselessly tends to increase the inclusive fitness of organisms, but that doesn’t mean I have to take the inclusive fitness as the basis for my personal sense of values. In fact I don’t. My morality is quite self-consciously anti-natural, though I’m perfectly well aware that my private purposes exploit the order produced by the natural-selection machine and cannot defy it without obvious costs. Similarly, I recognize the reality and power of the economic calculating machine, but I don’t share its implied teleology. A humane political economics doesn’t identify with the aggressor. The old Jews used to have a legend that God slew the female leviathan, but saved her meat for the eventual messianic feast. I don’t think that’s feasible, but maybe we can parasitize the Great Beast.

Speaking of anachronism. These thoughts are pretty much a reflection on what Karl Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation back in 1944 so it’s either allusion or plagiarism depending on how you look at it. Or maybe it’s a structural transformation of an old joke about Arkansas’ slowest train. The train stops unexpectedly and the passenger asks the conductor what happened. “There’s a cow on the tracks.” The train starts up, but stops after a little while. “Now what?” “We caught up with the cow again.”

The Romance of Statistical Mechanics

Driving around town a couple of weeks ago, I composed a little poem or rather, since I didn’t set out to compose anything, it simply occurred to me:

Molecule by molecule

The gale that felled the tree

Was not the mighty fist of Jove

But merely tendency.

Later on I gave the verse a title: Things and Events are the Public Relations of Atoms. And then I pretty much forgot about it until I had a dream the other day in which a duplicate me responded:

I really have to call a foul

On your ersatz Emily,

If ever Jove had had a fist

It was also tendency.

Charlie Hedbo

As mystics experience and philosophers deduce, God is a name for the superlative degree of nothingness, the abominable singularity that constantly threatens reason from within. Religion is the accretion disc that forms around the intolerable mystery, the scab that covers the wound that cannot heal. The sane believers renormalize the equations of theology to avoid absurd solutions and resort to idolatry and superstition to protect themselves from the murderous implications of the faith. Since only a suicidal fanaticism is fully consistent with monotheism, it’s literally true: you can’t look on Yahweh face-to-face and live.

Even atheism is not necessarily a perfect defense against this lethal nonsense. It depends on how you gloss the slogan “Nothing is sacred.” Which is why there is such an obvious affinity between the jihadis and the Red Brigade terrorists of the Nietzschean left. Or to make the same point in the other direction, you might say that the real Shahada of the Salafis is “There is no God, and Muhammad is his prophet.” Allah is the emptiness in the middle. There really isn’t anything in the Holy of Holies. That’s the obscene secret.

Perhaps the votaries of the Assassins were being redundant when they said “There is no God. Everything is permitted” since what they based their sect upon was the recognition that God was a way of referring to our terrible freedom. That everything is permitted is God. 

 

A Year and a Half Later

I certainly attempted not to care.

I studied indifference as if it were algebra.
It didn’t help. It was like drowning a beachball,
Picking a fight with the nature of things.
I still don’t think love is a good thing—
Though softly it arrives, it departs as grief—
But harder than steel, harder than diamonds
Is the heart’s will, something so inhuman
In our humanity, we don’t think it belongs to us.

The Small Oppress the Great when the Great aren't that Great 

What worries me is not the prospect that a majority of white Americans will buy into theocratic racism or Randian libertarianism but the remarkable leverage that extremists can have even when they are in the minority so long as political elites lack courage and prudence. The crazies are always with us, and people are always susceptible to demagogic appeals. What gives them strength is the decadence of our political class, the unfortunate fact that our elites just aren't that elite.

Here's an uncomfortable parallel: I've been reading Eri Hotta’s book on Japanese politics in the run up to the Pearl Harbor. The majority of Japanese leaders were perfectly well aware that Japan would lose a war with America—even those who subscribed to mystical versions of Japanese exceptionalism were able to count—but they were cowed into an obviously stupid policy by their fear of a rather small number of fanatical army officers. Of course, the fanatics in Japan resorted to assassination to get their way, something that hasn't happened here yet; but the firebrands also imposed a kind of rhetorical terrorism that made it impossible for leaders to admit in public that Japan wasn't always in the right and wouldn't automatically prevail against any enemy because of the Yamato spirit. The prime minister, cabinet members, and high-level army and navy officers were too cowardly to face up to a rabid minority and ended up signing off on a suicidal war few of them believed in. The Germans and Italians made war at the command of strong, evil men. The Japanese made war because of the vacillation of weak, morally mediocre men. 


The majority of Republicans don't believe in democracy, but they aren't nuts. They are weak, however, and afraid of being labeled RINOs or worse by the true believers. Which is why they end up supporting ridiculously jingoistic and counterproductive foreign policies—assuming that bomb, bomb, bomb counts is a plan—as well as domestic policies that weaken the country economically and divide it socially. The Democrats have analogous fears, which is why, among other things, right wing terrorists and militia men are not suppressed and war crimes perpetrated by own brand of renegade Colonels go unpunished while whistleblowers rot in jail. 

 
Weakness is dangerous. Many people subscribe to the so-called great man theory of history; but as I read the record, the little men theory of history applies more often, especially when it comes to explaining the grand disasters. For example, for the last hundred years people have been trying to decide who are the villains responsible for the massive calamity that was World War I; but that's a question without an answer because the true cause was not a villain but the fact that the nations were governed by moral and intellectual midgets. I'm afraid that a similar explanation holds for our current political crisis. You can’t have a democracy or even a decent oligarchy without responsible leadership.

Ataraxia Nervosa

When cosmic insight
Has filled you with light,
When you’ve beaten the odds
And placated the Gods,
When you’re rested and sated
And recently mated,
When the belch and the fart
Have seen fit to depart,
When the pissing is past
And the shit has been shat,
And the who that was you is a guy with no why,
Nirvana’s a coma
For psyche and soma,
And you don’t even bother to die.

Two Problems in One

In the decadence of the Soviet system the saying was "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work." Something like that may be happening in our country, though it's hard to quantify. I think the phenomenon is manifesting itself in the lousy morale of government workers and the corresponding mediocre performance by employees in the VA, IRS, and government labs. I've got to believe that the combination of years of wage freezes and non-stop public abuse of government workers—bureaucrats, teachers, scientists—is taking a toll. And why would you expect the people who clean houses and flip burgers to go on trying one iota more than they absolutely must if they have nothing whatsoever to look forward to and everybody keeps telling them that the only reason they haven't risen into prosperity is their own human worthlessness? 

Positive reinforcement works, but it isn't just millionaires who need it. Part of the problem with great inequality is that paying so much to the very top of the distribution leaves little left to reward the efforts of those below.

There are two problems we've got to deal with:

1. The distribution of incomes between bottom and top is too great

2. There is insufficient social mobility.

These are distinct problems, and confusing 'em messes up the debate. It's a good thing if burger flippers can go back to school and rise in the world, but not everybody is going to rise and those burgers still need to be flipped. Not every body is going to be a Horatio Alger hero. After all, the boss has only so many daughters. Considerations of fairness or decency aside, what’s the upside of leaving so many people in a state of wretchedness?

Time was people spoke about the dignity of work, not the dignity of work as a steppingstone to becoming a manager and owning 168 pizza restaurants, but the dignity of doing the job itself. In any case, if you expect people to do their jobs well year after year, you better figure out some way of rewarding them for their efforts instead of treating them with non-stop disrespect. The meritocratic ideology implies that the losers are dreck. Those of us who are doing OK may not notice the implication, but I'm pretty sure that much of the population is very well aware of it—no Protestant ethic without a large and populous hell.

The Garden of F****** Paths

The situation in the Middle East is so complex that it is impossible even to come up with a single adequate metaphor: Borromean rings? Russian dolls? the Chinese finger trap? Jenga? Pick up sticks? Evidently, an epic poem on these events will have to written in fractalic hexameter. But I will be told it’s all really very simple when you factor in: 

The energy crisis, fundamentalisms and other versions of reactionary modernism, the injured pride of Islamic nations, the unresolved stress of modernization, sexual politics, globalization, various ghosts of the 19th Century’s Great Game, the desire of the Persians to finally get even with the Arabs, the cyclic struggle of the nomads and the city dwellers (ibn Khaldun!), the mutual hatred of Sunnis and Shias, America’s quest for the mirage of ultimate safety, the forceful imposition of liberal democracy overseas sponsored by people who hate liberal democracy at home, climate change with accompanying drought and environmental degradation, the final collapse of the Sykes Picot agreement as part of the ongoing demise of the Westfalian system of international relations, the clash of civilizations, demographic trends (too many adolescent males), Facebook and Twitter, the covert alliance of the Saudis and the Israelis, the inability of states to control their intelligence apparatuses, irredentist nationalisms (Turks, Israelis, Kurds, and Syrians), the revived Cold War between Russia and U.S., the aspirations awakened during the Arab Spring, the persistence of archaic forms of government (sheiks and kings), the activities of irresponsible plutocrats, political paralysis in America, European disunity and economic stagnation, state breakdown in Pakistan, entrepreneurial terrorism, and whatever else I’m too lazy to write down.

People search for the basic cause of every great historical catastrophe, but the true explanation of such explosions is precisely the absence of a single basic cause. The French Revolution, the outbreak of World War I, the current impasse in the Middle East are crises made out of crises, knots of imbricated contradictions too intricate to unravel except with a sword. Unfortunately, there are always many would-be Alexanders around who are likely to lose patience at the same time. Hence the otherwise inexplicable suicidal stupidities that characterize such conjunctions, mostly committed by leaders trying to be statesmen when the situation calls out for politicians.