First-Thing-in-the-Morning Thought

The New Atheists complain when theists insist that their naturalism is itself a kind of religion, but the problem with modern scientism is precisely that it is not a religion or rather, since religion isn’t quite the right word, not an aspirational ideology or value system. The scientists and their commercial and military employers have made a concerted effort to demystify science, to assure everybody that the scientists don’t form some sort of priesthood, that their motives aren’t alien but merely commercial (better living through chemistry) or at worst patriotic (better bombs through nuclear physics). The originality and power of science, however, like all the other great human institutions, can not he explained by its utility, though religious fundamentalists and reactionary politicians only tolerate it, to the extent they do tolerate it, because they need the technology it makes possible. I once asked the philosopher Paul Weiss what God was good for in his system of metaphysics. Weiss answered. “Well. Some things are good for something and some are good for nothing. God is good for nothing.” Science is (or was) like that.

It is a commonplace that the various philosophical schools of antiquity were not simply the bearers of differing opinions about the world but were the promoters of alternative forms of life, just as the Indian philosophical systems that were growing up in the same era, the atheistic ones just as much as the theistic or mystical, were all aimed at achieving liberation and transcendence. What is less often understood is that the very project of theoretical knowledge through mathematics and empirical inquiry was also just as much a practice as Pyrrho’s skepticism, Plato’s idealism, or Diogenes’ cynicism. What developed from the speculative activities of the Ionian physicists through the research activities of the peripatetics and the Alexandrian museum was not based on a universal human impulse though Aristotle famously claimed that all men naturally desire to know. The scientific enterprise is an artifact, a cultural creation, something we chose to value or perhaps don’t.

To the Bastille!

Aristocracy means rule by families. By that definition, America is becoming an aristocracy because we have allowed disproportionate power and wealth to concentrate in political and economic bloodlines—the much discussed increase in inequality of the last 40 years would be a very different phenomenon were it just about individuals. According to the New York Times this morning, 158 families have contributed more than half the money fueling the candidates for the 2016 presidential election—$176 million from 138 Republican and 20 Democratic families. What’s true of donors is also true of candidates. Of course there have always been prominent families in American politics, but the contemporary dynasties are different in a crucial way: you no longer have to excel to carry on a famous name. You just have to be born with one. Compare the Roosevelt or the Adams families with the Bushes. In lieu of one outstanding individual after another, you have from George Walker to Jeb a line of idiot princes worthy of the Bourbons. In politics as in education, the legacies have a leg up on the scholarship and affirmative action kids.

It is important to recognize that aristocracy in the West is not some historical leftover. It’s actually fairly recent—what we call the ancien regime in France wasn’t all that ancient and most of its elite were not nobles, if by nobles we mean members of very old lineages who derived their prestige from their military exploits. They were simply the caste of families that had made it, who had a heritable right to office and owned the lion’s share of the land. The English ruling class of the 18th Century also constituted a largely closed corporation—granted the power of local patronage, the smallness of the electorate, and the many rotten boroughs, the House of Commons wasn’t much more representative of the nation as a whole than the House of Lords.

In the run-up to the French Revolution, the Aristos were a lot like our pluto- and technocrats. They weren’t (yet) fossilized admirers of the past or sworn enemies of the Enlightenment. Like the neoliberals and neocons of our times, they thought they were the Enlightenment. I guess you could make a case that the Aristocrats of the reign of Louis XVI differed from ours in one respect. Perhaps they were a little less vulgar and still retained a sense of noblesse oblige so that it would have been possible to distinguish Edmund Burke and Donald Trump, at least in good light. Or maybe not. Power and privilege has always coarsened people more often than it ennobled them; and, on the other hand, even now you encounter the occasional decent billionaire.

It may well be that the aristocratic society emerging in modern America is the real end of history, i.e., the more or less stable state of affairs towards which everything naturally trends. Democracy, in either the sense of Jefferson or Carl Schmitt does seem obsolete. Political elites don’t need the many as much as they did before, either as proles or cannon fodder, and the idealism of the past seems merely quaint. Or it may be as it was before, when it was the hubris of the aristocrats that ushered in the Age of Revolution. It’s very hard for those who have not to want more, and that overreaching can finally mobilize those who have very little. The talking heads on CNN who call for reform of Social Security and Medicare are quite right in their own terms. It is perfectly true that such institutions are incompatible with the increase and perhaps even merely the continuation of the current high levels of inequality. They and their caste might find themselves pulling a repeat of the error of Croesus. You recall the story: the Lydian king asked the oracle of Delphi whether he should attack the Persians. The oracle supposedly told him “if you cross the river Halys, you will destroy a great empire.” Maybe what the God of mice is telling today’s political class these days is that if you attack Social Security, you will destroy a great entitlement.

The Invisible Man Puts in Another Appearance

Kevin McCarthy, presumptive heir to the Speakership of the House is said to have been caught in a truth a few days ago when he bragged about how the Benghazi hearings were succeeding in their goal of tearing down Hillary Clinton. The only thing surprising about what he said was that he said it. Everybody knew that the hearings weren’t about investigating the circumstances of what was, after all, a normal disaster, that is, the kind of misfortune that inevitably occurs in the midst of wars and insurrections. Democrats and Republicans alike understood the motives of the investigators. So did the press, though by the rules of the game they could never just report the facts. It’s rather like those Japanese puppet shows where the puppets are manipulated by operators dressed in black. The deception is not concealed, but the audience agrees to pretend it can’t see it and you aren’t even supposed to acknowledge the convention that makes the comedy possible.

A more significant example of the same thing is the campaign to discourage or prevent black people from voting, though in that case, it was Supreme Court justices as well as news presenters who took pains to preserve the pathetic lie that dismantling the Voting Rights act had something to do with the menace of voter fraud. We weren’t supposed to notice the puppeteer. Indeed, the puppeteer doesn’t even have to try to be inconspicuous. The other day, it was announced that Alabama is closing DMV offices in heavily black districts, a move that makes it harder for black people to get the picture IDs they need to vote. Several states are making the requirements for abortion clinics more and more stringent and claiming they are concerned about the safety of patients. It goes on.

If exhibitionists followed the Conservative model, they’d argue that their pricks were really hat racks.

A Long-Winded Tweet

While the Taliban was feeling its oats in Afghanistan this week, the Russians launched their first air attacks on rebels hostile to Assad. We could look on these developments as bad news and react with some fresh military spasm of our own, but the neighborly thing for the other flies to do is to welcome Putin to the flypaper.

If Don Draper Had Been Caligula, Would He Have Written I’d Like to Give the World a Choke?

The car companies, the fast food chains, the political parties pay for the ads; but an objective observer might easily conclude that they were really sponsored by the seven deadly sins. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to match up lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride with the relevant products and services—try it. It's fun. Meanwhile chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility run public service announcements in the dead of night.

 
I have no particular brief for the virtues. As a man of regular habits, most of them bad, I would cut a peculiar figure as a moralist; and having read the Fable of the Bees back in college, I’m well aware that the economy runs on vice. It’s surprising, however, how seldom anybody remarks on the relentless campaign of anti-morality we subject ourselves to every time we turn on the television or go on the Internet. The flood of enticements to bad behavior does have serious aggregate consequences, after all, especially for public health. Beyond that, what does it say about the human situation that so much effort and money have to be devoted not to satisfying desires but to creating them? Are we a bunch of geezers who have to be coaxed into swallowing a spoonful of soup because consumption has become too much of a chore? Is this situation an example of what the old writers used to call the dotage of the world? 

The Motivation of the Device or Jokes I’m not Mean Enough to Tell

Freud thought of wit as an excuse for the expression of sexual or aggressive thoughts and that’s surely often true. For me, however, the reverse also takes place. I come up with a clever cutting remark, but there’s nobody around to launch it against, at least anybody I want to wound that much.  The French talk about l'esprit de l'escalie, a perfect comeback that you come up with too late; but you can also think up the comeback before the insult and suffer the fate of a born counterpuncher matched with a Quaker. I’ve kept some lines in reserve for decades, but the occasion never arrives or I’m not angry enough to attack or both. It’s frustrating.

I’m cleaning out my files, so I’m leaving these bits out like discarded furniture. If you have the requisite malicious intent and the time is right, feel free to use any or all of the following.  

She used to have an hourglass figure, but you could see that time was running out.

If that’s his trophy wife, he must have come in third.

If you think that drinking 8 glasses of water a day will make you healthier, you’re just diluting yourself.

My parents fought constantly. It was a mixed marriage. Different genders.

Pleasure’s Poisoned Baits

Nature, we can agree, is an enormous bait and switch operation: the angler fish his lure, the rose her flower, not to mention all the blandishments evolved to lighten fools the way to busty Beth. These gaudy shows and cheap thrills were never meant to profit the fish, the bee, or the bachelor. From the point of view of nature, human purposes are just a means to an end, though, speaking properly, nature doesn’t actually have any goals of her own—to call a basin of attraction a goal is the merest facon de parler. The sexual aspects of the system are explained more fully in one of the earliest known TED lectures.

Here’s the amusing application: when the traditional Catholics insisted that reproduction was the only licit motive for intercourse and strictly forbade any sexual activity that did not have at least the potentiality to produce a child, they were acting as agents for nature. Spinoza’s expression, Deus sive nature, sounds rather atheistic to us as it did to many people in the 17th Century; but medieval thinkers often used nature as a synonym for God. It wasn’t unorthodox, and it wasn’t just theory. Practicing Catholics of the old school had enormous families, which certainly met the approval of a God dedicated to goosing inclusive fitness, at least if he (she?) were betting on r selection. Of course the Catholics also insisted on a celibate priesthood; but beyond how many nephews the average Pope had and the fact, famously noted by Rabelais, that even the shadow of the monastery chapel can knock up your daughter, the net effect of the system was maximum fecundity. The faith duplicates or mimics nature in another way as well. It seeks to control the behavior of the individuals by the promise of eventual gratification. The believer is supposed to look beyond the temporary if inevitably disappointing rewards of the flesh—the one sticky night of pleasure Baudelaire wrote about—to an eternal reward, which is another way of saying one that never actually occurs. The prospect of the permanent orgasm of beatitude in a vague elsewhere substitutes for even the fleeting gratifications of earthly life. In this respect, the religious version of the swindle is an improvement on the various contrivances natural selection came up with. It’s cheaper.

A Catholic will certainly object that there’s more to it than that, and they will be quite correct. I’m simply teasing out one strand in a tangled mass of ideas, practices, and feelings. The mystics always claimed to experience eternity in the here and now, and the moralists always valued virginity above marriage. There’s a permanent tension in the tradition between the urge to slut shame Mother Nature and the insistence that creation, whatever its imperfections in the fallen era, is nevertheless good. Gnostic and Manichean hatred of the flesh is heretical, and the stake awaited the votaries of any sect that drew the obvious conclusion that reproduction should be prevented. They were pulling down Cathar castles in Languedoc long before they were bombing abortion clinics in Oklahoma. And the Catholics I know still tell me that their church really is dedicated to making people feel guilty.

The history of Christian asceticism witnesses a related ambiguity. What is supposed to be a renunciation of pleasure and an acceptance of suffering in religious devotion constantly threatens to become just a different and, indeed, superior kind of pleasure.  Not for nothing are whips found both in Jesuit seminaries and the specialty room at high price brothels. There is a genealogical continuity between manuals of spiritual mortification and the oeuvre of the Divine Marquis. The masochist, as Giles Deleuze pointed out in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, exploits conventional morality’s permanent vulnerability to subversion. If sexual pleasure merits punishment, one can pay for one’s pleasure in advance by sexualizing punishment. I’ve suffered already. Now you owe me. 

For the record, I think the masochists are on to something, not that you need to go in for complicated rituals in order to enjoy yourself; but that living a fully human life requires a certain form of jiu jitsu, obliges us to use nature and its religious proxies against itself.  I think of the ego—myself—as a kind of parasite that exploits the raw material of the natural drives to create motives for itself and the other parasites it choses to love. That sounds odd, but it’s really just a fourth version of the categorical imperative. It understands the kingdom of ends referred to in the third version of the imperative to be a sphere of anti-nature or rather, since nature isn’t really a God whatever Spinoza suggested, an eddy in the thermodynamic system of the world, a temporary and local reversal of flow in the entropic rush. It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature and not possible to thwart the 2^nd Law but you can insist “Not here. Not now.” Let us let oblivion take care of itself. It’s good at that.

I wouldn’t have put things in this fashion when I was young, but even when I was a child I wondered at the point of it all if we’re all just destined to pumping out offspring and raising the GNP. Are we all, to borrow a bit from an old Mad Magazine article, vending machine vending vending machines or is there some time when we take a profit? Levi-Strauss ended his memoir Tristes Tropiques with a similar thought with a reference to the futility of mankind’s hive like labors. The anthropologist has been damned as a European Buddhist for such asides, but I figure that a meaningful exchange of glances with a cat is as good as we’re going to get.  

Merry Old

I know very little about UK politics over and beyond what I've learned watching Question Time, but it seems to me that what's going on with Corbyn is a predicable consequence of what is going on in the U.S. and around the world. Across the democracies of the West, generic conservatism has triumphed to the extent that even putatively left parties, Labor in Britain, the Socialists in France and elsewhere have positioned themselves as conservatives with a human face. Bill Clinton ran that way as well. Most recently this consensus has ensured the triumph of austerity across Europe, a triumph that continues even though austerity has been a flop in economic terms. What's happening seems to be a gradual replacement of democratic governance with a system in which an entrenched political class passes on power from one generation to the next by cooption. There are elections, of course, but the system is jiggered to assure that only safe candidates are allowed to run—Hong Kong rules aren't just for the Chinese. Which also accounts for the extremely low turn outs in elections. Since none of the options give a damn about what the majority of the population cares about, the majority of the population doesn't give a damn either. It's a Utopian arrangement if you've already got yours, even if there's a certain amount of rump bumping in any game of musical chairs. The problem is, there's such a thing as victory disease. If you create a politics that leaves no room for the non connected, you guarantee that the non connected are not going to be particularly polite about reasserting themselves. Right thinking people loudly bewail Chavez, but they never seem to get it that the Venezuelan oil plutocracy made him inevitable. i don't know if Corbyn in power would be anything like Chavez, but the Camerons and Blairs created him. 

These thoughts were inspired by reading R.R. Palmer's old classic, the Age of Democratic Revolution, which covers Western history from 1760 to 1800. Palmer points out that the French Revolution wasn't begun by furious peasants or Enlightenment lefties but by aristocrats complaining that their taxes were too high. Sound like anybody you know?

There’s Always Room at the Top

My sense of geometry urges
That everything rising diverges.
Heteroskadasticity
Explains the plasticity
Intellectual history observes.

Cthulhu is living quietly in Encino

A friend of mine once hyperbolized Thomas Kuhn by expressing a wish that grammar would one day undergo a paradigm shift. He didn’t mean that he looked forward to a new version of amo, amas, amat or to English or French or Swahili going from one set of grammatical categories to another—that happens on the time. He dreamed of entirely new tenses, persons, moods, and parts of speech that would transform our thinking thought, indeed what we could think. Ergo, the quest for the fourth person singular.

Well, I’m a little skeptical about that. For all I know some language in Papua New Guinea already has a fourth person singular and, anyhow, the absence of a way of making a distinction in a given language doesn’t keep us from making the distinction. The linguists talk about grammaticalization. For example, in some languages the gender of the speaker is indicated by an ending on the main verb or by some other obligatory marker, but that doesn’t mean you have any trouble referring to whether a boy or a girl is doing the talking in languages like English that don’t have such a feature. Similarly, the problem with achieving the desired weirdness isn’t that English doesn’t have a way to grammaticalize it. 

I’m not saying that treating grammar as a kind of metaphysics can’t be useful as a way of generating certain insights in a fashion not completely dissimilar from the way that a Zen master uses his staff on an acolytes noggin. For example, it occurred to me the other day than when we speak, there’s a certain amount of you involved because unanimity is always a never quite completed negotiation. And I guess that shouldn’t be surprising since when I speak, there’s a certain amount of us in it—it’s not just in the history of Tragedy that the actor emerged from the chorus. Heidegger was right that even the most authentic individual is a modified anonymous collective being—das Man—and never ceases to be such a being, no matter how neurotic she gets about it. So there isn’t a fourth person singular, but there is a first and halfth person plural as well as a first person singular plus. Mathematicians have been talking about fractional dimensions for quite a while now. Maybe the grammarians can learn to live with fractional persons. And maybe we can use such strained terminology to think about the unspeakable oddness that constitutes the human condition, much as we manage to use the bizarre formalisms of quantum mechanics to think about the unspeakable oddness of the physics that governs absolutely everything.

Revolt of the Masses

The Republican candidates now sound like the spokesmen for the hysterical crowds in any number of old Twilight Zone episodes, the guys who insist we should string the malefactor up right away or burn down the stranger’s house or perhaps tattoo a barcode on the alien’s forearm. They endorse paranoia, fear of people who don’t look like us, blind patriotism, unprovoked aggression against other countries, obscurantism, anti-intellectualism, vigilantism, and even the use of torture. They may not all do it in a clown suit, but they’re all doing it. Moderate Republicans are officially extinct.

It was easy in the day to make fun of Rod Sterling’s liberal pieties, what we used to call the nicely, nicely; but his moral lessons don’t sound so schoolmarmish now that music redolent of the lynch mob resounds so loudly through the land, often enough from the podium in the House and Senate. I understand that the murder rate has recently lurched upwards after a long decline, but the escalation of political rhetoric strikes me as a better indicator of a premeditated reversion to barbarism because it is particularly significant when elites go bad. Political stupidity is, like any other liberation from inhibition, a pleasure. On the evidence, many people are finding it very hard to resist temptation; and the usual suspects are on hand to push the good stuff and use all the latest technologies of persuasion to market the product. The demagogues can now be followed on Twitter, multiplied holographically on CNN, piped into every beer bar in Christendom on Fox. What we have here is a case of progression in the service of the Id. 

I rant not because I think the bad guys are necessarily going to win this time, but because one of these days they very well may. All it would take is some bad timing on the part of the business cycle or a meaningless sex scandal or some other glitch. And if they do win, there’s no guarantee that the traditional Conservatives who just want to safeguard their wealth and screw the unions will be able to contain the folks they have so efficiently riled up.  Besides, by now some of them believe their own nonsense—consistent hypocrisy requires a level of self discipline few can maintain for long. What worries me is that America is not going to remain the white bread nation the right thinks it remembers. In the face of this inevitable change, I find it hard to believe that our reactionary populists won’t eventually act out violently, perhaps in concert with European groups also caught up in a similar state of cultural despair. I guess we’ll simply have to manage the outbreaks as best we can and wait for time to change the subject, though a policy of domestic containment is likely to be as nerve racking as the Cold War original.  

You Think You Have Troubles?

Liberals have been complaining for decades that people of middling means vote against their own economic self interest when they vote for conservative Republicans, but the Trump phenomenon shows that the Republicans have their own worries about this group. They’d like to believe that the formerly Democratic white voters who jumped ship in protest to anti-war activists, DFHs, and the desegregation of schools by busing bought into Republican political economics even if their original motives were cultural. It turns out, however, that the base is perfectly comfortable with New Deal-style political proposals such as single payer health insurance so long as some one they trust makes the suggestion. During last week’s debate, Trump even had nice things to say about the British Health Service and got applause instead of jeers. Obama or Hilary Clinton could hardly have gotten away with that. 

Tea Party politics is identity politics, which means that a person with the right perceived identity can make points by appealing to the material interests of the base. In fact, in a competition between two candidates with equivalent white-bread credentials, the one who promises the most goodies is likely to win, free markets be damned. Jonah Goldberg wrote a book a few years ago called Liberal Fascism in which he made an effort to claim that the Nazis were a left-wing operation, an assertion that would have landed him in a Berlin madhouse had he made it in Germany before Hitler took over. What is true, however, is that right-wingers can and do appropriate liberal or socialist ideas and programs because a politics of personalities and machismo can appropriate anything. After all, in Tea Party speak, words do not mean, they signal. They don’t stand for anything specific, which is why these folks aren’t embarrassed by speech that strikes others as incoherence—Obama is simultaneously a Marxist, an atheist, a Muslim, a wimp, and a tyrant—because it’s not technically self-contradictory to call somebody both a mother fucker and a fag. Logic doesn’t count if you are using language in a non-propositional way, swearing allegiance or just swearing. If “constitutional” means what our guy says it means, who knows what can count as a free market policy, especially if I benefit from it?

What keeps at least some economic conservatives awake at night is the possibility that somebody may emerge who cares more his own aggrandizement than the protection of privilege, a Republican Huey Long. I’m guessing that Trump is at most the John the Baptist to such figure—I just don’t think he has the required stamina—but we may someday see Ted Cruz accepting the challenge. He has seemed determined from the beginning to become the Aaron Burr of the 21st Century and dispensing with neoliberal pieties would hardly be surprising in a politician from Texas where the line between left and right populism has always been hair thin.

Why Aren’t You a Racist?

American civilization lives an immense contradiction. The charter of our society is egalitarian—all men are created equal—but its reality is deeply unequal and growing more so. We try to resolve this contradiction by distinguishing equality of opportunity from equality of outcomes, but that doesn’t really work. Why do the same groups of people consistently have poor outcomes if human beings are fundamentally alike and the game is fair?  If you accept this logic and yet you are determined to maintain or even increase inequality, the only real out is to vilify the losers. What makes this such a dreadful trap is that it is never enough to ascribe perverse behavior to those at the bottom. They have to be made actually deviant by social and political action. The erstwhile friends blamed patient Job; but if the poor really were as patient as the patriarch and sat on their dung heaps scrapping their sores with a potsherd, it would be an intolerable reproach to the happy others. The nation needs the drug abuse, the violence, the ignorance, which is why it doesn’t leave it chance. Rather than trouble the sleep of the righteous, the teachers, cops, judges, prosecutors, and many others work long hours to ensure the required outcome. 

Whether you’re on the left or the right or the top or the bottom, this solution is not much of a solution. 

The left can’t really acknowledge the fundamental unfairness of the system without coming across as ranting Jeremiahs or dangerous radicals. Besides, and this is really the hard part, to publicly recognize realities would alienate and anger racial minorities, who don’t want anybody to advertise the de facto inferiority of poor people even if that inferiority is manufactured by the system—mentioning in passing that poor black neighborhoods really are dangerous and black people on the average are far less numerate and literate than other groups is what got me banned on Salon, even though the aside occurred in the contest of a comprehensive denunciation of structural racism. 

The right has its own problems with demonizing minorities. Many poor people who are white and vote Republican don’t appreciate the implicit negrification implied by the strategy; but it goes beyond that. There are few conservatives, especially in the base, who want to think of themselves as racists since racists are bad people and they aren’t bad people. Hence the tortured attempts to explain why those people don’t just lift themselves by their bootstraps and all become proprietors of 162 pizza restaurants. I guess the influence of evil liberals and the corrosive effects of government handouts are supposed to supply the explanation, but that hardly accounts for why black folks are uniquely susceptible to the purported sophistries of the intellectuals and other agents of the antichrist or, for that matter, what the motives of the evil liberals and minions of the dark lord are supposed to be. Well, evil is a theological concept. It doesn’t explain anything. It is a marker of the place where explanations fail. Meanwhile, the economic conservatives have another problem. Dog whistling the base certainly gets people into office who help you avoid paying higher taxes or salaries, but riling up the peasants carries well-known risks. What if somebody gets in power and takes the propaganda literally? You never know when the siren song of resentment politics will turn into the last trump. Restraint and moderation in political manipulation has a practical as well as an ethical rationale. Playing with fire, you can get burnt. And what if the poor somehow got organized?

Over and beyond its political dangers, the maintenance of unnecessarily high levels of poverty is not a cheering prospect even for the rich. Many of our billionaires simply won the lottery and woke up in the right cradle, but at least some of them actually built something and even those who didn’t may have normal moral instincts. Those who have an engineering mentality don’t like the human and financial waste it requires to build and expand economic inequality—poverty is extremely expensive. Meanwhile, those who buy into Enlightenment values or the social message of any of the major religions are repelled by the unfairness of it all. 

The ideology is especially hard on the poor because it makes them blame themselves for their own condition precisely because they largely buy into the meritocratic and egalitarian ideology of the country. Nobody is more American than African Americans—they’re the ones who act as if Jefferson didn't have his fingers crossed even if they know better. Contrary to what you hear on Fox or AM radio, black people don’t hear messages of self-pity from their leaders. Instead, they are bombarded with non-stop admonitions, sermons, and pep talks, which, like other forms of self-help, generally promise rather more than they can deliver. Of course if you tell people that things would be splendid if only they were exceptional, some of them really will become exceptional. That’s part of the reason why despised minorities produce extraordinary people—without the prodigious creativity of black musicians, we’d all still be whistling Green Grow the Rushes, after all. It’s also true that nothing will improve without the heroic agency of the victims. Nevertheless, the net effect of the rhetoric seems to be self-hatred more than anything else. Maybe that’s better than anger or despair. I don’t know.

Under the circumstances, I have to wonder why there hasn’t been a resurgence of overtly racist thinking. It’s not that I know any way to make scientific or philosophical sense out of racism—I’m not going to rehearse the usual and perfectly sound criticisms of the concept here—and I figure that one man’s blood has as much salt in it as another’s. It’s not that racism has any prospect of turning out to be an adequate or even coherent theory of human differences. I’m simply pointing out its obvious utility as a way of easing our social dilemmas. If we gave up the notion of the biological equality of all sorts and conditions of people, we wouldn’t have to try to square the circle. The enormous gaps in wealth and income between groups would be justified by nature. Sudras don’t have the rights of Brahmins because the Gods made them inferior and assigned them their place. No reason for either the Brahmins are the Sudras to worry about it. It’s nobody’s fault. Problem solved. And if you can deny global warming, the scientific difficulties shouldn't daunt you.

I pick up some indications that something like a return of the repressed is indeed underway. Jeff Bush didn’t mention the Bell Curve when he endorsed another one of Charles Murray’s books the other day; but Andrew Sullivan, who promoted the Bell Curve back in the day when he edited the New Republic still endorses its conclusions as obviously true. I’m sure he has lots of company. It just isn’t the case that racists have to be malevolent skinheads. Murray’s dreams are far more peaceful, almost bucolic, rather like some of the idealizing pictures that Southerners used to imagine of darkies living their lives in innocence and simplicity in the cabins out back, except if you read Murray closely, you’ll see that not all the darkies are necessarily dark. A renovated racism doesn’t have to hang everything on color or assume that all the natural slaves are black. Among the techno-libertarians you run across the notion that mankind is undergoing what amounts to a speciation event in which the dullards mate with dullards and the smart with smart, thus producing sibling species or natural castes. The advantage of this non-racist racism is that it doesn’t have to tie itself in knots over exceptional black people. They are simply nerds of lower albedo, a different variety of us. What’s needed is some way of getting around this equality business, not necessarily the old way.

In lieu of a refurbished scientific racism, I’d personally prefer another approach. Most of the poor people in this country work. Suppose they got paid better. Minorities but also poor whites tend to be less well educated than well off whites and Asians, in large part because a crucial part of anybody’s education takes place at home before school age and many minority people simply have less cultural capital to pass on to their offspring. So what if we spent the money and time to educate the adults in poor communities so they’d have that capital? Many poor neighborhoods have inadequate access to the Internet. How would it be if we made access universal just as we promoted rural electrification back in the New Deal? Poor people often lack access to basic banking services like check cashing and savings accounts. Why can’t the Post Office supply these services and make a profit in the process? Cities depend on fines and fees that disproportionately burden poor people because they lack the necessary tax base. What if we figured out how to provide the cities with reliable alternate sources of revenue? Many urban neighborhoods are unsafe because arbitrary and oppressive policing is not the same thing as good policing. So what if we hired enough cops and trained them well enough so that they were able to be on the side of the inhabitants? By treating drug use as a criminal issue instead of a health issue, we fill prisons with miserable people, wreck families, promote violence, and create powerful criminal organizations. What if we stopped? 

Of course suggestions like these have the same drawback, which is presumably fatal. They all imply that we move in the direction of a more equal society and mean that the haves will have to be have lesses, though granted the economic inefficiencies of a drastically unequal society, the game is probably not zero sum. My suggestions wouldn’t eliminate poverty, either—even social democracies like Sweden continue to have poor people—but perhaps we could greatly reduce the number of the poor. After all, there used to be fewer poor people in the U.S. They also wouldn’t eliminate racism. Races may be largely arbitrary groupings built on imagined essences, but racism, i.e., the human tendency to identify and demonize groups on the basis of superficial differences, does seem to be natural to our kind. Thing is, though, I’m less concerned about who Uncle Ernie can’t stand and more concerned whether the political system of my country treats people fairly. I’m weary beyond measure with the way that every debate about race and poverty ends up being a question of verbal propriety as if things would be magically better if nobody ever used or even mentioned the N-word. Does anybody care about what people do?

Turning Out the Base

In the olden days, the conservatives would scoff at democracy because the People in their wisdom would elect a wrestling star if they had their druthers. More recent conservatives have taken this idea to heart and are trying to act as much like wrestling stars as possible, strutting and preening and posing. Donald Trump even looks a bit like Gorgeous George. The Republicans are the party of privilege but the privilege they stand for is wealth, the most demotic of distinctions; and the remarkable crassness of the contestants in the Mussolini-of-the-Month competition currently underway is a way of identifying with the just plain folks. The time-tested stunts of late night used car commercials work, and the politicians know it.

Incidentally, I’m not complaining that the Republicans are hypocritical. They aren’t flying under false colors. They really are common. Plutocracy is the populist variety of elitism, and in their fashion its adherents really are small d democrats. The problem is that they reinforce precisely those aspects of democracy that are most problematic and not only problematic from the point of view of paleo-conservatives who have to hold their noses before they pull the lever on the voting machine.

What’s good about democracy is the project of engaging the energy and intelligence of the whole population. What’s bad about it is that the easiest way to mobilize the masses is to appeal to fear and prejudice. If the People are sovereign, they are also responsible and need to have their feet put to the fire from time to time; but it’s fatally easy for Demos to evade its obligations by blaming enemies even if it has to create them first as in the present pass where the immigrants, who had nothing to do with it, are made into the scapegoat for the economic troubles of the last decade. And then there is the susceptibility of the People to flattery—that’s what the endless drone about American exceptionalism comes down to, after all. Unfortunately, if we’re as special as all that, the ordinary norms of decent behavior don't apply to us as a nation and we can break treaties or invade countries with a clear conscience knowing that our intentions are pure. If America recognized itself as a proxy for the rest of mankind because almost every kind of human being is in fact a member of our national community that would be one thing. Republican herrenvolk democracy denies itself that out, however, since it defines the real America much more narrowly. For the right-wingers I grew up around, you weren’t an American if you lived in New York or San Francisco or had the wrong color skin or the wrong religious opinions. These days you can be read out of the nation if you don’t own a car or like the wrong kind of lettuce.

Democracy works, when it works, when elites don’t simply use it for their own purposes. I remain a small d democrat if only because it seems to me that the country ought to belong to its inhabitants; but I have no illusions about how dangerous democracy is in the hands of the little people. Of course by little people I refer to the current collection of American political leaders, especially that conspiracy of the mediocre that constitutes the Republican Party. 

Nothing Better to Say

Famous bit of Teutonic humor: Life is so painful that it is best to have a short life, but even better never to have been born. Unfortunately, scarcely one in a million is that lucky. I recall the joke every time I encounter Pascal’s Wager. As you’ll recall, the Wager runs like this: Even if you rate the probability that God exists as small, the payoff for belief is so enormously great—eternal beatitude—that you should opt for religion because of its infinite expected value. Infinity times any finite number is infinity. Lots of people have criticized the wager on the grounds that so calculating a faith could hardly be expected to please God; but the more obvious problem, at least to me, is that there are at least a countably infinite number of equivalent wager arguments of the following form

Even if you rate the probability that n gods exist is small, the payoff for belief in n gods is so enormous that you should opt for the religion of the n true gods because of its infinite expected value. 

It gets worse if you figure that you have to allow for the possibility of an irrational number of Gods* because then you can’t even count the number of arguments. Of course the proposer of the Wager may argue that the other propositions are less likely than the monotheistic option; but, even if you agree, it doesn’t help. You’re just opting for a golden oldie. Infinity times any number is infinity. All the arguments are mathematically equivalent, and that demonstrates how infinities turn moral theories into indefinable nonsense. That’s why we should renormalize talk about how we should act and be by canceling infinities and infinite beings out of our calculations. When religion gets out of hand, i.e., when you take it seriously, it destroys moral reason.

The same strictures apply to talk about the value of existence itself since the alternative to existence is nothing. You can’t measure how much life is worth by comparing it to the state of non being because in so doing you invoke a ratio whose denominator is zero and division by zero doesn’t have a definable meaning. You can’t say your life is worth 3,452,871 units of zip, or rather you can and people do; but the results are pretty much the same as the famous bit of Teutonic humor. As the Buddha pointed out long ago, there are questions that do not lead to enlightenment.  

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* Theologians, with the possible exception of certain admirably eccentric devotees of the Kabbalah, seem to have a limited imagination when it comes to mathematics. Maybe there are π distinct persons in the godhead. After all, π turns up everywhere else; and being is supposed to be round.