Back in that Forking Garden
I’m skeptical of meditations on history that appeal to the now familiar butterfly effect. As a matter of mathematics, arbitrarily small differences in the starting points of certain dynamic systems have huge consequences. If the world and therefore history is a chaotic system, however, that just means that any alteration of boundary conditions whatsoever suffices to change everything after a while. But this notion is perfectly empty, first, because one can never test or exploit the sensitivity of the system because no one can change anything at all, and, second, because all changes, meaningful or meaningless, are equivalently potent in this hypothesis. So far as I can see, chaos theory has nothing to tell us about what makes historical events decisive. It can never help us figure out what would have happened if Grant had been drinking at Appomattox.
Counterfactual historians like to underline the quirkiness of history by suggesting that plausible alternative decisions would have led to vastly different outcomes. I have no quarrel with this procedure as a way of thinking about what’s at stake in history, though in many cases I think it is employed mostly as a prophylactic or postphylactic against the apparently unbustable ghost of Marxism. But counterfactual history, as practiced, actually presumes a high degree of rationality in human affairs. It is anything but a celebration of the sovereignty of chance. Only in a highly organized world is it possible for an individual or a few individuals to make a decision that has recognizable, if not entirely predictable consequences. The paths fork—the government of Italy chooses to invade France or it doesn’t—but the options don’t splinter into thousands or billions of outcomes at every moment. If Croesus crosses the river Halys, he doesn’t know whose kingdom will be put at hazard, but somebody’s will. Atoms, molecules, rocks, and animals just don’t have that kind of leverage.
Counterfactual history only makes sense if human affairs mostly make sense. Niall Ferguson may not be a Hegelian, but his methodology strongly implies that the “Real is pretty rational: the pretty rational is real.” That’s not a small matter, and raises the preliminary question of how a region of reality got predictable enough to be uncertain in a game-like way.
Saturday, July 10, 2004
Friday, July 09, 2004
That Time of Year
Reading through Stephen Owen’s Anthology of Chinese Literature I was struck again by how few themes dominate poetry, especially lyric poetry, and how few genuinely novel sentiments ever appear. According to the ancient Classic of Documents, “The Poem articulates what is on the mind intently.” Apparently nothing makes the mind more intent than the bloodshot dawn of old age, though there really isn’t more to say about it than there is to do about it; and the master plot of all those poems can be provided all too easily as in my contribution to the genre:
The Poet’s Keen Awareness of his Approaching Decrepitude
Crap!
Of course it could be that Chinese were wrong about what poetry is about and that “what’s on the mind intently” is just another formal element like rhyme or meter. Or maybe it is an instance of a deeper artifice to deny a really depressing fact by concentrating on it in a patterned way.
The Japanese poet Michizane’s line about the failure of the light: “It was not the wind—the oil is gone.” Let us consider the extent to which this loveliness helps and the extent to which it does not.
Reading through Stephen Owen’s Anthology of Chinese Literature I was struck again by how few themes dominate poetry, especially lyric poetry, and how few genuinely novel sentiments ever appear. According to the ancient Classic of Documents, “The Poem articulates what is on the mind intently.” Apparently nothing makes the mind more intent than the bloodshot dawn of old age, though there really isn’t more to say about it than there is to do about it; and the master plot of all those poems can be provided all too easily as in my contribution to the genre:
The Poet’s Keen Awareness of his Approaching Decrepitude
Crap!
Of course it could be that Chinese were wrong about what poetry is about and that “what’s on the mind intently” is just another formal element like rhyme or meter. Or maybe it is an instance of a deeper artifice to deny a really depressing fact by concentrating on it in a patterned way.
The Japanese poet Michizane’s line about the failure of the light: “It was not the wind—the oil is gone.” Let us consider the extent to which this loveliness helps and the extent to which it does not.
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
The Difficulty of Figuring Out Who’s Really on the Top in Wrestling and Religion or Mort Saul Among the Prophets
In my village atheist phase, I’m concerned by the influence of religion on politics because bigotry and irrationalism are catching. Religion is a very mixed bag, however; and though all faiths are obviously false if construed as systems of propositions, religious values are certainly not all malevolent or anti-democratic. The very notion of the separation of church and state originated on the church side of the line, for example. Indeed, it could be argued that the worst thing about the current confluence of politics and religion is the bad effect that politics is having on religion.
If slavery is the Punic curse of American history, imperial patronage plays the same role in history of every church. Preachers sometimes claim that Christianity triumphed because of the many miracles wrought by the saints and apostles; but, from a real politik point of view, the only miracle that mattered was the miracle of the Milvian Bridge in which Constantine saw a cross in the sky, won a battle, and became emperor. In one respect, of course, that cross was a good sign for the faithful since Christianity needed the coercive power of the state to become a universal religion, but it was a bad sign also since the empire provided its services at a high price. To this day, for example, the monarchical mummery, obsessive secrecy, and authoritarianism of the Catholic church derive from the imperial model; and it is these political characteristics much more than the doctrines of the faith that make abuse and corruption inevitable.
George Bush isn’t exactly Constantine, but he and his cohorts are offering the modern churches a new version of the imperial bargain. In return for votes and money, churches will get tax breaks, federal funds, and support for some but not all their cultural concerns. Go along with aggressive wars and your leader will endlessly profess his faith. Soft-pedal your opposition to the death penalty and we’ll recriminalize abortion and pester the pornographers. Rome has been making these kind of deals for centuries and will probably go along—it’s only the first moral compromise that keep you awake at night, the ten thousandth is easy—but some of the more traditional Protestant groups, especially the Baptists, are having second thoughts about making their services into pep rallies for the President or acknowledging that the Reverend Moon really is the Messiah.
In my village atheist phase, I’m concerned by the influence of religion on politics because bigotry and irrationalism are catching. Religion is a very mixed bag, however; and though all faiths are obviously false if construed as systems of propositions, religious values are certainly not all malevolent or anti-democratic. The very notion of the separation of church and state originated on the church side of the line, for example. Indeed, it could be argued that the worst thing about the current confluence of politics and religion is the bad effect that politics is having on religion.
If slavery is the Punic curse of American history, imperial patronage plays the same role in history of every church. Preachers sometimes claim that Christianity triumphed because of the many miracles wrought by the saints and apostles; but, from a real politik point of view, the only miracle that mattered was the miracle of the Milvian Bridge in which Constantine saw a cross in the sky, won a battle, and became emperor. In one respect, of course, that cross was a good sign for the faithful since Christianity needed the coercive power of the state to become a universal religion, but it was a bad sign also since the empire provided its services at a high price. To this day, for example, the monarchical mummery, obsessive secrecy, and authoritarianism of the Catholic church derive from the imperial model; and it is these political characteristics much more than the doctrines of the faith that make abuse and corruption inevitable.
George Bush isn’t exactly Constantine, but he and his cohorts are offering the modern churches a new version of the imperial bargain. In return for votes and money, churches will get tax breaks, federal funds, and support for some but not all their cultural concerns. Go along with aggressive wars and your leader will endlessly profess his faith. Soft-pedal your opposition to the death penalty and we’ll recriminalize abortion and pester the pornographers. Rome has been making these kind of deals for centuries and will probably go along—it’s only the first moral compromise that keep you awake at night, the ten thousandth is easy—but some of the more traditional Protestant groups, especially the Baptists, are having second thoughts about making their services into pep rallies for the President or acknowledging that the Reverend Moon really is the Messiah.
Monday, July 05, 2004
Democratic Vistas
It’s rather like the joke in which a clerical error results in a world where the cooks are English and the cops are French. America circa 2004 has all the bad features of a democracy with few of its redeeming qualities. As the vice president would put it, right wing populism stokes class resentment and envy big time. Even though the Republicans are far wealthier as a group than the Democrats, it’s John Kerry’s class standing that’s somehow the issue in a campaign where the other guy comes from the bluest blood in America. More generally, the people are encouraged to believe that majorities should rule in the sciences (Creationism) but not in economics or even politics where the interests of the contributing classes trump, as if by rule, the concerns of lower and middle class people. Meanwhile our billionaires have become just plain folks, at least in the Dogville sense. While 19th Century economic elites felt an obligation to get cultured, modern money parades its coarseness and ignorance. Noblesse oblige really is problematic attitude, of course, but dispensing with it altogether is not necessarily better. And it’s not just that our nouveau riche have learned how to have nouveau riche children. The grandchildren of Connecticut bankers have learned how to munch on pork rinds in public, and their great grand children have learned how to like ‘em. Mr. Bush would feel perfectly at home in a house trailer. Indeed, if anybody ever belonged in a trailer…
What’s missing from our ersatz democracy is a first of all the sense of responsibility that should accompany popular sovereignty. Many of the people I speak with act as if they would be doing somebody a favor if they voted. Perhaps because they realize that they have little or no voice in public life, they don’t think of themselves as actors but victims. If, as is unfortunately very likely, America’s arrogant foreign policy eventually results in domestic disaster, it’s a good bet everyone will look around the next day and blame “them” for what happened. “Why didn’t you tell us?” they’ll ask, though they certainly never tried to find out.
Of course it is arguably true that no nation was ever very democratic in the sense of having a truly well-informed and vigilant electorate—I mostly believe in the iron law of oligarchy myself—but in any case, the anti-democratic tendencies of the last thirty years are not just a matter of process. Whether our politics are by the people or of the people, they surely aren’t for the people. The last three Republican administrations have been dedicated to lowering wages and cutting benefits for the majority of the population with predictable results.
It’s rather like the joke in which a clerical error results in a world where the cooks are English and the cops are French. America circa 2004 has all the bad features of a democracy with few of its redeeming qualities. As the vice president would put it, right wing populism stokes class resentment and envy big time. Even though the Republicans are far wealthier as a group than the Democrats, it’s John Kerry’s class standing that’s somehow the issue in a campaign where the other guy comes from the bluest blood in America. More generally, the people are encouraged to believe that majorities should rule in the sciences (Creationism) but not in economics or even politics where the interests of the contributing classes trump, as if by rule, the concerns of lower and middle class people. Meanwhile our billionaires have become just plain folks, at least in the Dogville sense. While 19th Century economic elites felt an obligation to get cultured, modern money parades its coarseness and ignorance. Noblesse oblige really is problematic attitude, of course, but dispensing with it altogether is not necessarily better. And it’s not just that our nouveau riche have learned how to have nouveau riche children. The grandchildren of Connecticut bankers have learned how to munch on pork rinds in public, and their great grand children have learned how to like ‘em. Mr. Bush would feel perfectly at home in a house trailer. Indeed, if anybody ever belonged in a trailer…
What’s missing from our ersatz democracy is a first of all the sense of responsibility that should accompany popular sovereignty. Many of the people I speak with act as if they would be doing somebody a favor if they voted. Perhaps because they realize that they have little or no voice in public life, they don’t think of themselves as actors but victims. If, as is unfortunately very likely, America’s arrogant foreign policy eventually results in domestic disaster, it’s a good bet everyone will look around the next day and blame “them” for what happened. “Why didn’t you tell us?” they’ll ask, though they certainly never tried to find out.
Of course it is arguably true that no nation was ever very democratic in the sense of having a truly well-informed and vigilant electorate—I mostly believe in the iron law of oligarchy myself—but in any case, the anti-democratic tendencies of the last thirty years are not just a matter of process. Whether our politics are by the people or of the people, they surely aren’t for the people. The last three Republican administrations have been dedicated to lowering wages and cutting benefits for the majority of the population with predictable results.
Friday, July 02, 2004
Genuine Blogging for a Change
Today’s disappointing job report puzzled me a bit because I had expected more of a bounce off the bottom of the last recession granted what can be expected from a normal business cycle and the cumulative effective of massive deficit financing and ultra-low interest rates. Like many observers, I thought the tax cuts, overwhelmingly aimed at people in the upper brackets, were an inefficient way to stimulate the economy; but I thought they would provide some Keynesian stimulus if only as a side effect. At the recent rate, it will take years for employment to catch up with the population. In fact, at this month’s rate, it will never catch up. However you measure it, the current recovery is exceedingly sluggish, a fact somewhat obscured by the nonstop cheerleading of the financial press.
Even observers like Paul Krugman who are decidedly hostile to the administration’s economic policy tend to suggest that the price we pay for running enormous deficits in the federal budget and the balance of trade is mostly long term. Indeed, they imply that one of the structural problems with the nation’s real constitution is that there is no political cost for promoting bad economic policies since the public is too stupid or too distracted to register consequences that occur incrementally over a long time period. Opportunistic political economics such as unsustainable tax cuts are rational in the same sense that knowingly operating a polluting factory is rational. The malefactors get the benefits and leave everybody else with the costs. It may be, however, that the piper will have to be paid in real time on this go round.
One other economic thought, a question really: Critics of the Bush tax cuts have generally complained that drastically lowering the higher tax brackets was an inefficient way to stimulate the economy because well off people don’t spend as high a proportion of their income as poorer people. But doesn’t it also matter what the tax cut dollars are spent on? Less affluent people spend extra money on food, shelter, clothing, health care, and education. More affluent people spend extra money on recreation, prestige items, second homes, and fancy rides. Even if high bracket tax payers spent the same proportion of their tax cuts as the less well off, their dollars would be stimulating different segments of the economy. Doesn’t the quality as well as the quantity of effective demand have an effect? For example, doesn’t a pro-wealth policy result in more capital going into the development of gated communities rather than affordable housing? Just asking.
Today’s disappointing job report puzzled me a bit because I had expected more of a bounce off the bottom of the last recession granted what can be expected from a normal business cycle and the cumulative effective of massive deficit financing and ultra-low interest rates. Like many observers, I thought the tax cuts, overwhelmingly aimed at people in the upper brackets, were an inefficient way to stimulate the economy; but I thought they would provide some Keynesian stimulus if only as a side effect. At the recent rate, it will take years for employment to catch up with the population. In fact, at this month’s rate, it will never catch up. However you measure it, the current recovery is exceedingly sluggish, a fact somewhat obscured by the nonstop cheerleading of the financial press.
Even observers like Paul Krugman who are decidedly hostile to the administration’s economic policy tend to suggest that the price we pay for running enormous deficits in the federal budget and the balance of trade is mostly long term. Indeed, they imply that one of the structural problems with the nation’s real constitution is that there is no political cost for promoting bad economic policies since the public is too stupid or too distracted to register consequences that occur incrementally over a long time period. Opportunistic political economics such as unsustainable tax cuts are rational in the same sense that knowingly operating a polluting factory is rational. The malefactors get the benefits and leave everybody else with the costs. It may be, however, that the piper will have to be paid in real time on this go round.
One other economic thought, a question really: Critics of the Bush tax cuts have generally complained that drastically lowering the higher tax brackets was an inefficient way to stimulate the economy because well off people don’t spend as high a proportion of their income as poorer people. But doesn’t it also matter what the tax cut dollars are spent on? Less affluent people spend extra money on food, shelter, clothing, health care, and education. More affluent people spend extra money on recreation, prestige items, second homes, and fancy rides. Even if high bracket tax payers spent the same proportion of their tax cuts as the less well off, their dollars would be stimulating different segments of the economy. Doesn’t the quality as well as the quantity of effective demand have an effect? For example, doesn’t a pro-wealth policy result in more capital going into the development of gated communities rather than affordable housing? Just asking.
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
It’s Not a Well?
Watching television informercials on the golf channel, you have to wonder why Ernie Els and Tiger Woods don’t get themselves one of those patented rescue clubs so they, too, can reliably hit 200 yard shots out of deep bunkers. Since it is likely that they can afford the three easy payments of $69.99, it must be pride. Or, perhaps what we have here is the commercial version of something that happens all the time in the realm of religion and the occult. Mystics and gurus of all sorts perpetually advertise amazing secrets that must be kept from the profane mob, but what they reveal in their more exoteric statements is typically far more extreme, lurid, and downright screwy than the vastly more guarded remarks they make to their actual students. Thus, for example, of the two attested works of the philosopher and shaman Empedocles, the Purifications, which is addressed to all the citizens of the city of Acragas, teaches an elaborate doctrine of reincarnation with many mythological trimmings while the book On Nature, which is addressed to a fellow philosopher, offers a reasoned and admittedly provisional physical account of the universe. In this instance, as in many others, the esoteric is less exotic than the exoteric.
Nothing is more plebian than the rhetoric of secret wisdom. Since the content of popular religion is a mix of banalities and science fiction, it is absolutely necessary to tart things up with mystifications about things hidden since the foundation of the world. Meanwhile, the conversations of people seriously interested in figuring things out are extraordinarily modest and matter of fact since the object of the game is not to impress the natives by claiming to possess God’s unlisted phone number and actual knowledge, as opposed to humbug, is damned hard to come by. There is a secret about real thinking, however. Most people will never understand how grounded you can feel once you’ve acknowledged to yourself that neither you nor anybody else can see through walls by sheer concentration.
Watching television informercials on the golf channel, you have to wonder why Ernie Els and Tiger Woods don’t get themselves one of those patented rescue clubs so they, too, can reliably hit 200 yard shots out of deep bunkers. Since it is likely that they can afford the three easy payments of $69.99, it must be pride. Or, perhaps what we have here is the commercial version of something that happens all the time in the realm of religion and the occult. Mystics and gurus of all sorts perpetually advertise amazing secrets that must be kept from the profane mob, but what they reveal in their more exoteric statements is typically far more extreme, lurid, and downright screwy than the vastly more guarded remarks they make to their actual students. Thus, for example, of the two attested works of the philosopher and shaman Empedocles, the Purifications, which is addressed to all the citizens of the city of Acragas, teaches an elaborate doctrine of reincarnation with many mythological trimmings while the book On Nature, which is addressed to a fellow philosopher, offers a reasoned and admittedly provisional physical account of the universe. In this instance, as in many others, the esoteric is less exotic than the exoteric.
Nothing is more plebian than the rhetoric of secret wisdom. Since the content of popular religion is a mix of banalities and science fiction, it is absolutely necessary to tart things up with mystifications about things hidden since the foundation of the world. Meanwhile, the conversations of people seriously interested in figuring things out are extraordinarily modest and matter of fact since the object of the game is not to impress the natives by claiming to possess God’s unlisted phone number and actual knowledge, as opposed to humbug, is damned hard to come by. There is a secret about real thinking, however. Most people will never understand how grounded you can feel once you’ve acknowledged to yourself that neither you nor anybody else can see through walls by sheer concentration.
Monday, June 28, 2004
The Will of Zeus Was Being Accomplished
The official handoff of sovereignty to the provisional Iraqi government wasn’t a very grand affair and not simply because it took place in deep secrecy two days before its scheduled date. The sovereignty in question, at least so far, is utterly notional. The initial affect of today’s proceedings is simply to transfer effective power from the American administrator to the American ambassador. Before leaving, Bremer underscored the hollowness of the gesture by committing Iraq to a series of laws that include legal immunity for foreign contractors and a fairly low (15%) ceiling on the highest income tax bracket. Since the new government will be dependent on the American military, their freedom of action will be sharply limited in any case. I, for one, find it hard not to feel sympathy for the members of the new government, at least some of whom appear to be sincere Iraqi patriots. Since ’75, the personal prospects of members of American puppet regimes have not been proven very good from an actuarial point of view.
As in antiquity, the temporarily victorious powers establish their form of government in occupied states. Sparta set up oligarchies. Athens set up democracies. In much later history but in the same vein, the Soviet Union set up People’s Republics in its Eastern European empire. Now we’re establishing what we are calling a democracy in Iraq. Democracy, however, is a very elastic term. For the most part, its semantic value in our political discourse is the equivalent of a grunted “Good.” It certainly doesn’t mean popular sovereignty or anything like it. Our foreign policy maintains a steady hostility to that—an electoral victory by the wrong guy amounts to sending the Marines an invitation with an RSVP. But “Democracy” can’t be used to refer to a general preference for the rule of law over arbitrary executive power either since this administration famously asserts the supremacy of presidential authority over both the courts and congress. In this respect, Bush, though personally innocent of any knowledge of political philosophy, is just following the lead of the Neocons in his administration. In turn, the Neocons are following the influential German rightist, Carl Schmitt, who asserted back at the end of the Weimar Republic that political legitimacy is logically and materially superior to legality. The current administration idea of democracy also seems to derive from Schmitt, for whom it referred to a regime legitimized by the Will of the People as defined by a charismatic leader ruling by plebiscite. That pretty much captures what the administration stands for in Iraq and, for that matter, at home: an authoritarian regime that overrules juridical and legislative authority in the name of the Nation. Writes Schmitt, “Every democracy rests on the presupposition of the indivisibly similar, entire, unified people.” While this Republican version of democracy indeed uses populist, demagogic methods to promote itself, in practice it defends the interests of wealthy people against the liberals or socialists who threaten the sacred rights of property, conceived of, as conservatives always do, as natural.
As everybody admits, it will not be easy to establish democracy in Iraq; but that’s especially true if the democracy in question is the kind contemplated by our government. Conservative ideologies are hard to disseminate because they are particularistic. If you don’t mind the mumbo jumbo, it makes some kind of sense to pledge allegiance to the mystical body of your own country. You can hardly expect the Iraqis to be similarly worshipful about the American Way. Besides, although we hear more about religious objections to our policy, a lot of opposition in Iraq, perhaps most of it, is completely secular and derives in large part from the accurate perception that the non-negotiable privatization policies foisted on the country at gun point amount to the theft of the national wealth of Iraq and its distribution to a politically connected elite. Some of the insurgents are determined to prevent their nation from being ripped off. Unfortunately, the bulk of them are probably just determined to get cut in on the swag.
The official handoff of sovereignty to the provisional Iraqi government wasn’t a very grand affair and not simply because it took place in deep secrecy two days before its scheduled date. The sovereignty in question, at least so far, is utterly notional. The initial affect of today’s proceedings is simply to transfer effective power from the American administrator to the American ambassador. Before leaving, Bremer underscored the hollowness of the gesture by committing Iraq to a series of laws that include legal immunity for foreign contractors and a fairly low (15%) ceiling on the highest income tax bracket. Since the new government will be dependent on the American military, their freedom of action will be sharply limited in any case. I, for one, find it hard not to feel sympathy for the members of the new government, at least some of whom appear to be sincere Iraqi patriots. Since ’75, the personal prospects of members of American puppet regimes have not been proven very good from an actuarial point of view.
As in antiquity, the temporarily victorious powers establish their form of government in occupied states. Sparta set up oligarchies. Athens set up democracies. In much later history but in the same vein, the Soviet Union set up People’s Republics in its Eastern European empire. Now we’re establishing what we are calling a democracy in Iraq. Democracy, however, is a very elastic term. For the most part, its semantic value in our political discourse is the equivalent of a grunted “Good.” It certainly doesn’t mean popular sovereignty or anything like it. Our foreign policy maintains a steady hostility to that—an electoral victory by the wrong guy amounts to sending the Marines an invitation with an RSVP. But “Democracy” can’t be used to refer to a general preference for the rule of law over arbitrary executive power either since this administration famously asserts the supremacy of presidential authority over both the courts and congress. In this respect, Bush, though personally innocent of any knowledge of political philosophy, is just following the lead of the Neocons in his administration. In turn, the Neocons are following the influential German rightist, Carl Schmitt, who asserted back at the end of the Weimar Republic that political legitimacy is logically and materially superior to legality. The current administration idea of democracy also seems to derive from Schmitt, for whom it referred to a regime legitimized by the Will of the People as defined by a charismatic leader ruling by plebiscite. That pretty much captures what the administration stands for in Iraq and, for that matter, at home: an authoritarian regime that overrules juridical and legislative authority in the name of the Nation. Writes Schmitt, “Every democracy rests on the presupposition of the indivisibly similar, entire, unified people.” While this Republican version of democracy indeed uses populist, demagogic methods to promote itself, in practice it defends the interests of wealthy people against the liberals or socialists who threaten the sacred rights of property, conceived of, as conservatives always do, as natural.
As everybody admits, it will not be easy to establish democracy in Iraq; but that’s especially true if the democracy in question is the kind contemplated by our government. Conservative ideologies are hard to disseminate because they are particularistic. If you don’t mind the mumbo jumbo, it makes some kind of sense to pledge allegiance to the mystical body of your own country. You can hardly expect the Iraqis to be similarly worshipful about the American Way. Besides, although we hear more about religious objections to our policy, a lot of opposition in Iraq, perhaps most of it, is completely secular and derives in large part from the accurate perception that the non-negotiable privatization policies foisted on the country at gun point amount to the theft of the national wealth of Iraq and its distribution to a politically connected elite. Some of the insurgents are determined to prevent their nation from being ripped off. Unfortunately, the bulk of them are probably just determined to get cut in on the swag.
Saturday, June 26, 2004
Where’s Waldo?
The Gods have smiled on me by staging a series of really stupid miracles as if they were determined to teach me an important lesson about synchronicity. Back in the 60’s, for example, I had a night of truly obsessive dreams, all of which involved the unlikely theme of tuna spaghetti sauce. Like golf dreams in which you never actually get to tee off, like sex dreams in which you actually never get to get off, the tuna spaghetti sauce dream was intensely frustrating. Though I courteously informed everybody I didn’t know the recipe for the dish, indeed, had never actually heard of such a thing, people of all kinds kept insisting that I cook it for them. One and after another and then in choruses, women, men, children, talking animals, cartoon characters on television shows, midgets with Munchkin voices, even rows and rows of newborn babies in the hospital all chanted: “Tuna spaghetti sauce! Tuna spaghetti sauce!” And I tried to make what they wanted but either I couldn’t get the stove to light or there wasn’t any pasta or there wasn’t any tuna, always something. I think I must have spent half a sweaty Connecticut summer night tossing and turning as I moaned to myself “Tuna spaghetti sauce! Tuna spaghetti sauce!” I woke up several times during the night, but it didn’t help. No sooner had I got back in bed and fallen asleep than a new variation of the Tuna spaghetti sauce dream would begin. As you’d imagine, when morning finally came, I was relieved to hear the clock radio come on. Relieved that is, until I heard the unmistakable nasal tones of Myra Waldo, New York radio personality and food expert, announcing “Today’s recipe: tuna spaghetti sauce!”
Now I suppose that someone with a more spiritual turn of mind than my own would find some meaning in this episode as I might have myself had the subject matter been less trivial. I’ve never had a similar experience involving the death of a loved one or some other event emotionally significant enough to turn a quirky coincidence into a portent. I do continue to experience equally screwy conjunctures, however. The other day when I was trying to think of an especially odd incident in the Bible to exemplify all the things in scripture that nobody remembers, I considered the story in First Samuel of how God inflicted the Philistines with a plague of hemorrhoids for capturing the Ark of the Covenant. In order to appease Yahweh, the Philistines not only returned the Ark but also sent with it an offering of five golden hemorrhoids and five golden mice. I didn’t use this bit, settling instead on the tale of Ehud and Eglon King of Moab as my example, but I certainly had in mind a day later when I more or less accidentally caught a few minutes from a television interview of Ashley Judd. She was talking to Conan O’Brien about her role in the new movie about Cole Porter. They were talking about somebody’s jewelry and I was suddenly struck with a premonition that she had actually encountered a copy of one of the golden hemorrhoids. Of course that’s exactly what happened. I guess there really is a God.
The well understood arithmetic of coincidence guarantees that this sort of thing will not be especially rare, especially for someone like me who, as I am fond of saying, lives as a kind of intellectual oyster or barnacle that filters an immense stream of information through my brain every day. If I got it into my head to be superstitious, I could be very superstitious indeed. Besides, no doubt as a further consequence of an off-brand nervous system that’s been out of warrantee a very long time, I’ve had a host of uncanny experiences that a more enterprising type could have made into a career as a retail mystic. I used to sleep walk and on one memorable occasion woke up with muddy feet and dressed only in the jacket of a tuxedo. I’ve had repeated and memorable hypnagogic visions and even a couple of ecstasies and long ago learned how to throw myself into a passable imitation of a shamanic trance, though I’ve never been moved to send back a post card from the Land of the Dead. The net effect of all these interior adventures, like the prophetic dream of tuna spaghetti sauce, has been to make me highly skeptical of the value of mysticism itself. Extreme psychological states and uncanny coincidences are like exclamation marks. No matter how much they impress you, they owe whatever meaning they have to the words that precede them.
The Gods have smiled on me by staging a series of really stupid miracles as if they were determined to teach me an important lesson about synchronicity. Back in the 60’s, for example, I had a night of truly obsessive dreams, all of which involved the unlikely theme of tuna spaghetti sauce. Like golf dreams in which you never actually get to tee off, like sex dreams in which you actually never get to get off, the tuna spaghetti sauce dream was intensely frustrating. Though I courteously informed everybody I didn’t know the recipe for the dish, indeed, had never actually heard of such a thing, people of all kinds kept insisting that I cook it for them. One and after another and then in choruses, women, men, children, talking animals, cartoon characters on television shows, midgets with Munchkin voices, even rows and rows of newborn babies in the hospital all chanted: “Tuna spaghetti sauce! Tuna spaghetti sauce!” And I tried to make what they wanted but either I couldn’t get the stove to light or there wasn’t any pasta or there wasn’t any tuna, always something. I think I must have spent half a sweaty Connecticut summer night tossing and turning as I moaned to myself “Tuna spaghetti sauce! Tuna spaghetti sauce!” I woke up several times during the night, but it didn’t help. No sooner had I got back in bed and fallen asleep than a new variation of the Tuna spaghetti sauce dream would begin. As you’d imagine, when morning finally came, I was relieved to hear the clock radio come on. Relieved that is, until I heard the unmistakable nasal tones of Myra Waldo, New York radio personality and food expert, announcing “Today’s recipe: tuna spaghetti sauce!”
Now I suppose that someone with a more spiritual turn of mind than my own would find some meaning in this episode as I might have myself had the subject matter been less trivial. I’ve never had a similar experience involving the death of a loved one or some other event emotionally significant enough to turn a quirky coincidence into a portent. I do continue to experience equally screwy conjunctures, however. The other day when I was trying to think of an especially odd incident in the Bible to exemplify all the things in scripture that nobody remembers, I considered the story in First Samuel of how God inflicted the Philistines with a plague of hemorrhoids for capturing the Ark of the Covenant. In order to appease Yahweh, the Philistines not only returned the Ark but also sent with it an offering of five golden hemorrhoids and five golden mice. I didn’t use this bit, settling instead on the tale of Ehud and Eglon King of Moab as my example, but I certainly had in mind a day later when I more or less accidentally caught a few minutes from a television interview of Ashley Judd. She was talking to Conan O’Brien about her role in the new movie about Cole Porter. They were talking about somebody’s jewelry and I was suddenly struck with a premonition that she had actually encountered a copy of one of the golden hemorrhoids. Of course that’s exactly what happened. I guess there really is a God.
The well understood arithmetic of coincidence guarantees that this sort of thing will not be especially rare, especially for someone like me who, as I am fond of saying, lives as a kind of intellectual oyster or barnacle that filters an immense stream of information through my brain every day. If I got it into my head to be superstitious, I could be very superstitious indeed. Besides, no doubt as a further consequence of an off-brand nervous system that’s been out of warrantee a very long time, I’ve had a host of uncanny experiences that a more enterprising type could have made into a career as a retail mystic. I used to sleep walk and on one memorable occasion woke up with muddy feet and dressed only in the jacket of a tuxedo. I’ve had repeated and memorable hypnagogic visions and even a couple of ecstasies and long ago learned how to throw myself into a passable imitation of a shamanic trance, though I’ve never been moved to send back a post card from the Land of the Dead. The net effect of all these interior adventures, like the prophetic dream of tuna spaghetti sauce, has been to make me highly skeptical of the value of mysticism itself. Extreme psychological states and uncanny coincidences are like exclamation marks. No matter how much they impress you, they owe whatever meaning they have to the words that precede them.
Principalities and Powers
I admit that Bush exercises a certain fascination, rather like something alarming and mysterious you find sticking to the bottom of your shoe; and, certainly, the American system gives him staggering official power and very real actual power. Political combinations aside, he still commands the loyalty of the dull normals, an enormous voting block. All that said—and these are not insignificant considerations—Bush just isn’t the problem. Evicting him from office may be an indispensable step towards restoring a decent state of affairs, but it is not a sufficient step and it makes a very great difference how he is removed and by whom. That’s why I have very mixed feelings about recent evidence that the CIA is working to unseat Bush.
One can hardly blame the professional spooks for despising an administration that has used them so badly and in so many ways. But it goes beyond making Tenet the in-house fall guy for every disaster or even the cynical and, indeed, criminal outing of Valerie Plane, now in the late cover-up stage. The CIA, in common with many other career defense and intelligence people like Richard Clarke, see the Bush doctrine as potentially fatal to their own much subtler approach to dominating the world. Almost everybody’s an imperialist at this point. The issue is whether the empire should be managed with a certain amount of tact and an awareness of the very real limits of American power or whether we can afford to rub the world’s nose in our endlessly advertised righteousness.
There are plenty of signs that CIA people are busy undermining the administration. Retired intelligence people have been furiously criticizing our unilateral foreign policy, and an active CIA man, writing as Anonymous, will shortly publish a ferocious attack on Bush that predicts that Bin Laden will make a point of undertaking a showy terrorist attack in the United States before the election in order to get his favorite candidate a second term—nothing could have furthered the cause of Islamic radicalism so much as the invasion of Iraq. The appearance of Imperial Hubris is especially significant since active intelligent agents have to get company permission before publishing. It would have been very easy for the CIA to have delayed the book beyond the election if they wished. They didn’t.
We do not know what other actions CIA people are undertaking. They are, after all, accustomed to operating clandestinely. In the first three years of the administration, very little embarrassing paper surfaced about the Bush administration. I suspect the increasing appearance of secret documents and memos over the last six months or so owes something to the activities of disgruntled insiders. Bush is not quite the Lone Ranger in his own administration, but he is having some serious What-You-Mean-We-White-Man moments. Of course the CIA is not the only power group with an ax to grind. I’m sure that plenty of generals would like to get even with Rumsfeld for his highhandedness and micromanagement. The administration should keep an eye on those folks—high-ranking officers are far more intelligent and vastly better trained than the average political hack—and the heads of the various commands are used to exercising independent power.
Military and intelligence groups have long exercised extra-constitutional power in the United States. Democratic presidents, in particular, haven’t been able to rely on the loyalty of the cops, spies, and generals for a very long time; and if some renegade admiral torpedoes a Republican at some point, I guess turn about is fair play. The net effect of the process, however, is to continue the erosion of responsible government in the country. Most of the time, I believe liberal empire is the best available short-term outcome, but it worries me that a Kerry administration is going to have to kiss a lot of rings to achieve even that.
I admit that Bush exercises a certain fascination, rather like something alarming and mysterious you find sticking to the bottom of your shoe; and, certainly, the American system gives him staggering official power and very real actual power. Political combinations aside, he still commands the loyalty of the dull normals, an enormous voting block. All that said—and these are not insignificant considerations—Bush just isn’t the problem. Evicting him from office may be an indispensable step towards restoring a decent state of affairs, but it is not a sufficient step and it makes a very great difference how he is removed and by whom. That’s why I have very mixed feelings about recent evidence that the CIA is working to unseat Bush.
One can hardly blame the professional spooks for despising an administration that has used them so badly and in so many ways. But it goes beyond making Tenet the in-house fall guy for every disaster or even the cynical and, indeed, criminal outing of Valerie Plane, now in the late cover-up stage. The CIA, in common with many other career defense and intelligence people like Richard Clarke, see the Bush doctrine as potentially fatal to their own much subtler approach to dominating the world. Almost everybody’s an imperialist at this point. The issue is whether the empire should be managed with a certain amount of tact and an awareness of the very real limits of American power or whether we can afford to rub the world’s nose in our endlessly advertised righteousness.
There are plenty of signs that CIA people are busy undermining the administration. Retired intelligence people have been furiously criticizing our unilateral foreign policy, and an active CIA man, writing as Anonymous, will shortly publish a ferocious attack on Bush that predicts that Bin Laden will make a point of undertaking a showy terrorist attack in the United States before the election in order to get his favorite candidate a second term—nothing could have furthered the cause of Islamic radicalism so much as the invasion of Iraq. The appearance of Imperial Hubris is especially significant since active intelligent agents have to get company permission before publishing. It would have been very easy for the CIA to have delayed the book beyond the election if they wished. They didn’t.
We do not know what other actions CIA people are undertaking. They are, after all, accustomed to operating clandestinely. In the first three years of the administration, very little embarrassing paper surfaced about the Bush administration. I suspect the increasing appearance of secret documents and memos over the last six months or so owes something to the activities of disgruntled insiders. Bush is not quite the Lone Ranger in his own administration, but he is having some serious What-You-Mean-We-White-Man moments. Of course the CIA is not the only power group with an ax to grind. I’m sure that plenty of generals would like to get even with Rumsfeld for his highhandedness and micromanagement. The administration should keep an eye on those folks—high-ranking officers are far more intelligent and vastly better trained than the average political hack—and the heads of the various commands are used to exercising independent power.
Military and intelligence groups have long exercised extra-constitutional power in the United States. Democratic presidents, in particular, haven’t been able to rely on the loyalty of the cops, spies, and generals for a very long time; and if some renegade admiral torpedoes a Republican at some point, I guess turn about is fair play. The net effect of the process, however, is to continue the erosion of responsible government in the country. Most of the time, I believe liberal empire is the best available short-term outcome, but it worries me that a Kerry administration is going to have to kiss a lot of rings to achieve even that.
Monday, June 21, 2004
What Caesar Rendered Unto
Recent surveys show that a majority of Americans claim to believe in the literal truth of such Bible stories as the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, and the parting of the Red Sea. Although American piety doesn’t seem to extend much beyond the Golden Oldies—who remembers what happened when Ehud stabbed Eglon?—the poll does show an increase in belief. In the most recent studies I’ve seen, however, church attendance and other indexes of religious behavior continue to decline. For most Americans, religion is adherence to a form of words rather than the practice of a form of life, which is a bit of a comfort to us infidels. The government recently argued before the Supreme Court that the “Under God” clause in the Pledge of Allegiance was constitutionally permissible because nobody took it seriously anyway. To judge by what people do, as opposed to what they say, affirming the existence of the Almighty to a pollster is similarly lacking in existential force. However.
A real, as opposed to notional, religious revival is not impossible granted the pathological state of our public discourse and the extremism and irrationality of our political leaders. One should remember that all the great historical religions achieved political and cultural domination through political coercion. Universal religions are systems of compulsion. Before the Conversion of Constantine, Christians were a considerable minority but no more than that. Islam was always an affair of the sword, and even Buddhism only spread widely with the help of the Mauryan emperors. The Church Fathers were well aware that it was Roman imperial power that made their success possible. From their point of view the Empire was a work of providence, part of what they called the preparation for the gospel.
It’s hard to imagine a real theocracy in America, of course; but the right obviously does not believe in the separation of church and state—according to one of the planks in the platform of the Texas Republican Party, the United States should define itself overtly as a Christian country. Professions of traditional belief are already a de facto requirement for high political office in these parts. Free thinkers like Jefferson couldn’t pass the test and the Spinozistic Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have much of a chance either. Much rightwing support for religion is completely cynical—neoconservatives from Leo Strauss on down regard popular faith as a useful fraud—but people like Bush appear to be completely sincere. We don’t know what may happen now that an authentic bigot has the bomb.
Recent surveys show that a majority of Americans claim to believe in the literal truth of such Bible stories as the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, and the parting of the Red Sea. Although American piety doesn’t seem to extend much beyond the Golden Oldies—who remembers what happened when Ehud stabbed Eglon?—the poll does show an increase in belief. In the most recent studies I’ve seen, however, church attendance and other indexes of religious behavior continue to decline. For most Americans, religion is adherence to a form of words rather than the practice of a form of life, which is a bit of a comfort to us infidels. The government recently argued before the Supreme Court that the “Under God” clause in the Pledge of Allegiance was constitutionally permissible because nobody took it seriously anyway. To judge by what people do, as opposed to what they say, affirming the existence of the Almighty to a pollster is similarly lacking in existential force. However.
A real, as opposed to notional, religious revival is not impossible granted the pathological state of our public discourse and the extremism and irrationality of our political leaders. One should remember that all the great historical religions achieved political and cultural domination through political coercion. Universal religions are systems of compulsion. Before the Conversion of Constantine, Christians were a considerable minority but no more than that. Islam was always an affair of the sword, and even Buddhism only spread widely with the help of the Mauryan emperors. The Church Fathers were well aware that it was Roman imperial power that made their success possible. From their point of view the Empire was a work of providence, part of what they called the preparation for the gospel.
It’s hard to imagine a real theocracy in America, of course; but the right obviously does not believe in the separation of church and state—according to one of the planks in the platform of the Texas Republican Party, the United States should define itself overtly as a Christian country. Professions of traditional belief are already a de facto requirement for high political office in these parts. Free thinkers like Jefferson couldn’t pass the test and the Spinozistic Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have much of a chance either. Much rightwing support for religion is completely cynical—neoconservatives from Leo Strauss on down regard popular faith as a useful fraud—but people like Bush appear to be completely sincere. We don’t know what may happen now that an authentic bigot has the bomb.
Saturday, June 19, 2004
The Descending Limb of the Parabola
Feminism, democracy, and rationality have had a remarkable run over the last 200 years, but it remains to be seen if any of these rockets has achieved escape velocity from the gravitational pull of human nature. The historical and anthropological record suggests that males normally dominate women, the thugs normally intimidate peaceable people, and the population at large finds crazy religious ideas irresistible. Under the circumstances, I’m thankful and a little surprised that my neighbors haven’t gotten around to murdering me in my bed. Of course it may be that the special conditions of a complicated, high technology civilization really do automatically promote the persistence of enlightenment, at least in the long run. Or maybe they don’t. Or maybe, though the suggestion is rather strenuous, the liberal option remains open if and only if people keep it open by an exercise of their collective will.
Feminism, democracy, and rationality have had a remarkable run over the last 200 years, but it remains to be seen if any of these rockets has achieved escape velocity from the gravitational pull of human nature. The historical and anthropological record suggests that males normally dominate women, the thugs normally intimidate peaceable people, and the population at large finds crazy religious ideas irresistible. Under the circumstances, I’m thankful and a little surprised that my neighbors haven’t gotten around to murdering me in my bed. Of course it may be that the special conditions of a complicated, high technology civilization really do automatically promote the persistence of enlightenment, at least in the long run. Or maybe they don’t. Or maybe, though the suggestion is rather strenuous, the liberal option remains open if and only if people keep it open by an exercise of their collective will.
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
From Minerva to Mars
Conservatives traditionally claimed they just were defending themselves against the advance of various terrible radicals but above all against anybody who proposed to redistribute wealth. That stance required them to represent property rights as sacred and natural, a dubious proposition from either a philosophical or a historical point of view, but one that at least didn’t justify the acquisition of additional wealth by force and fraud in the present day. Modern conservatives are more ambitious. They are as eager to redistribute wealth as any socialist regime. In the Code Napoleon, the first heading under the rubric of Ways to Acquire Wealth was marriage. In the current code of American politics, it’s buying influence. The Republican Party, far better at this sort of thing than the Democrats, has become a powerful engine of wealth creation, but only for its supporters. A new and vigorous round of primitive accumulation is underway here and around the world.
Previously, people used to assume that corruption is only a major problem in the Third World countries or southern states in which a significant proportion of pubic wealth is siphoned into private pockets. Corruption in most of the United States, despite some impressive specific cases, seemed at most to have a moral significance, that is, it was deplorable but also not very important from a macroeconomic perspective. Small time opportunists, like camp followers, might latch onto a successful politician to make their thousands or millions; but the net effect of all the chiseling was negligible, a kind of friction. In the last 30 years, this assumption has been proven wrong. The active and partisan intervention of government has made it possible for the already wealthy to increase their share of wealth at the cost of the overall prosperity and health of the population. And the rich have grown accustomed to this fast-food feast. Which is also why so much money continues to pour into Bush’s coffers even though it is as apparent to Big Money as to everybody else that the President is utterly incompetent and exceedingly dangerous. He’s still the best profit play around; and if things go to Hell in the U.S., they can always move. They already have an office in Bermuda.
Conservatives traditionally claimed they just were defending themselves against the advance of various terrible radicals but above all against anybody who proposed to redistribute wealth. That stance required them to represent property rights as sacred and natural, a dubious proposition from either a philosophical or a historical point of view, but one that at least didn’t justify the acquisition of additional wealth by force and fraud in the present day. Modern conservatives are more ambitious. They are as eager to redistribute wealth as any socialist regime. In the Code Napoleon, the first heading under the rubric of Ways to Acquire Wealth was marriage. In the current code of American politics, it’s buying influence. The Republican Party, far better at this sort of thing than the Democrats, has become a powerful engine of wealth creation, but only for its supporters. A new and vigorous round of primitive accumulation is underway here and around the world.
Previously, people used to assume that corruption is only a major problem in the Third World countries or southern states in which a significant proportion of pubic wealth is siphoned into private pockets. Corruption in most of the United States, despite some impressive specific cases, seemed at most to have a moral significance, that is, it was deplorable but also not very important from a macroeconomic perspective. Small time opportunists, like camp followers, might latch onto a successful politician to make their thousands or millions; but the net effect of all the chiseling was negligible, a kind of friction. In the last 30 years, this assumption has been proven wrong. The active and partisan intervention of government has made it possible for the already wealthy to increase their share of wealth at the cost of the overall prosperity and health of the population. And the rich have grown accustomed to this fast-food feast. Which is also why so much money continues to pour into Bush’s coffers even though it is as apparent to Big Money as to everybody else that the President is utterly incompetent and exceedingly dangerous. He’s still the best profit play around; and if things go to Hell in the U.S., they can always move. They already have an office in Bermuda.
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Low Cal Snacks
Dogville:
The movie in a capsule: a Greek Tragedy that ends with the murder of the chorus.
A Poem Found in a Scholarly Article about the Renaissance Philosopher Pico della Mirandola:
"Can the right-thinking scourge of the stargazers have been
A wooly-brained wizard himself?"
Written On a Stray Piece of Paper I Found Under the Bed:
Long acquaintance hath at last made the world unfamiliar to me.
Useful Quotation for all Occasions:
“The sun will have no spectators if it is not in eclipse.” – Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus
The Fate of Holy Writ:
As Moses could have told Marx, an author who is not allowed to be wrong will end up not being read, no matter how often he’s quoted.
An Explanation:
The innumerable vampires and demons of Sunnyvale
The invincible Kung-Fu of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan
Because there are no Gods or spirits at all
Because the force of a single man is merely contemptible.
Cheer Up:
In view of the dullness we daily observe
Even you are a God if they grade on the curve.
The Lure:
Grand theories are like big tits, a bait and switch operation. Seeking pleasure, we procreate. Seeking enlightenment, we conduct empirical research.
Title in Search of an Essay:
Much Wretched Queen Adieu About Nothing
Dogville:
The movie in a capsule: a Greek Tragedy that ends with the murder of the chorus.
A Poem Found in a Scholarly Article about the Renaissance Philosopher Pico della Mirandola:
"Can the right-thinking scourge of the stargazers have been
A wooly-brained wizard himself?"
Written On a Stray Piece of Paper I Found Under the Bed:
Long acquaintance hath at last made the world unfamiliar to me.
Useful Quotation for all Occasions:
“The sun will have no spectators if it is not in eclipse.” – Olaus Magnus, Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus
The Fate of Holy Writ:
As Moses could have told Marx, an author who is not allowed to be wrong will end up not being read, no matter how often he’s quoted.
An Explanation:
The innumerable vampires and demons of Sunnyvale
The invincible Kung-Fu of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan
Because there are no Gods or spirits at all
Because the force of a single man is merely contemptible.
Cheer Up:
In view of the dullness we daily observe
Even you are a God if they grade on the curve.
The Lure:
Grand theories are like big tits, a bait and switch operation. Seeking pleasure, we procreate. Seeking enlightenment, we conduct empirical research.
Title in Search of an Essay:
Much Wretched Queen Adieu About Nothing
Monday, June 14, 2004
We Were Just Ordering Followers
The administration is blaming 19-year old soldiers for implicating the administration in war crimes. “None of this would have happened if the soldiers had demonstrated more moral strength and disobeyed our clearly illegal orders.” In a separate statement, a Whitehouse spokesman reassured the American public, “We’re doing everything we can to ensure that you won’t hear another word about the abuse of prisoners.”
The administration is blaming 19-year old soldiers for implicating the administration in war crimes. “None of this would have happened if the soldiers had demonstrated more moral strength and disobeyed our clearly illegal orders.” In a separate statement, a Whitehouse spokesman reassured the American public, “We’re doing everything we can to ensure that you won’t hear another word about the abuse of prisoners.”
Edification with Real Edifices
Part of the charm of early medieval literature is the contrast between its sophistication, sometimes amounting to preciosity, and the barbarity of its environment. While assorted Magyars, Vikings, and Moors prowled around the walls of the monastery, the monks wrote charming love letters in Latin verse to their (Platonic) girl friends in the adjoining nunnery or elaborated complicated allegorical interpretations of the Song of Songs. In a time of universal violence, poverty, and disorder, when the thugs had just begun their ambiguous transformation into knights, you might think that a coarse and masculine style would rule. In the vernacular and outside the cloister, it did. In Latin and inside, however, the classic models emulated by the intellectuals were the self-consciously literary works of Virgil and Ovid. I find it piquant that an Alexandrian poetics flourished in the midst of chaos and ruin, rather as if the Institute of Advanced Studies were located in downtown Trenton instead of Princeton, Andrew Sullivan may be an evolved Catholic, but stylistically he's no Liudprand of Cremona.
I was brought back to that world by reading the Craft of Thought, the most recent work of the medievalist Mary Carruthers. We’re supposedly living in an era in which scholarship has been debased by fashion, but authors like Carruthers refute that libel, which, truth told, is mostly supported by the very dubious practice of quoting assistant professors at random. Now it is perfectly true that very few people are in a position to enjoy the artistry as well as the erudition of somebody like Carruthers—nobody believes me that philological books can be absurdly exciting. Unfortunately, her theme, the practice of meditative thought in the Christian West before 1200 or so, sounds hopelessly recherché unless you understand how it fits in with the art of memory in the premodern world. If you aren’t into the topic, you’d be advised to read the works of Frances Yates instead of Carruthers, though I think Carruthers understand many issues better than Yates.
Both the moderns and the medievals understand thought as an activity, but whereas we credit the imagination as the active agent responsible for the invention of ideas, people formerly thought of invention as belonging to memory, a dynamic organization and reorganization of the contents of the mind or, more generally, received culture. The Medievals had recourse to traditional rhetorical techniques to order their thoughts, an art of memory that was far more than a set of parlor tricks to memorize speeches. The Art of Memory involved the association of particular ideas with places in a familiar context, most often an architectural setting such as a public building like a courthouse or church but sometimes an imagined theater or even the Zodiac. By mentally traversing the various places in one these sites, one could recall the topics of a speech or order the elements of a literary composition, or, in a religious context, meditate on the elements of faith—think of the Stations of the Cross. The vital point, which Carruthers does seem to have understood better than Yates, is the benefit in this internal ritual arises from the process than its results. It is getting organized, not being organized that energizes and illuminates the mind, which is also why, if you don’t mind an aside by an old textbook editor, modern pedagogy with its boxes, chapter summaries, and forty-two levels of emphasis is so self defeating.
In her Craft of Thought, as in her earlier Book of Memory, Carruthers deals with the very general anthropological question of how individuals and cultures can make sense out of the world, granted that the structuration provided by the categories of natural languages doesn’t provide a sufficient grid to underlie either sociability or the acquisition of empirical and theoretical knowledge. In this respect, her work is similar to the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss, which focuses on the cognitive role of myth and other cultural artifacts—my use of the word “grid” in the previous sentence is actually a microplagiarism from the Frenchman’s seminal book the Savage Mind. The monks wove their web of thought and practice out of the Psalms, church architecture, classical rhetoric, and a few other elements they found good to think just as Levi-Strauss’ Amazonian natives articulated their world by relating everything to the natural kinds of animals and plants and European modernism made overall sense of things by reference to a history rectified through “falsified outlines” (another microplagiarism).
Part of the charm of early medieval literature is the contrast between its sophistication, sometimes amounting to preciosity, and the barbarity of its environment. While assorted Magyars, Vikings, and Moors prowled around the walls of the monastery, the monks wrote charming love letters in Latin verse to their (Platonic) girl friends in the adjoining nunnery or elaborated complicated allegorical interpretations of the Song of Songs. In a time of universal violence, poverty, and disorder, when the thugs had just begun their ambiguous transformation into knights, you might think that a coarse and masculine style would rule. In the vernacular and outside the cloister, it did. In Latin and inside, however, the classic models emulated by the intellectuals were the self-consciously literary works of Virgil and Ovid. I find it piquant that an Alexandrian poetics flourished in the midst of chaos and ruin, rather as if the Institute of Advanced Studies were located in downtown Trenton instead of Princeton, Andrew Sullivan may be an evolved Catholic, but stylistically he's no Liudprand of Cremona.
I was brought back to that world by reading the Craft of Thought, the most recent work of the medievalist Mary Carruthers. We’re supposedly living in an era in which scholarship has been debased by fashion, but authors like Carruthers refute that libel, which, truth told, is mostly supported by the very dubious practice of quoting assistant professors at random. Now it is perfectly true that very few people are in a position to enjoy the artistry as well as the erudition of somebody like Carruthers—nobody believes me that philological books can be absurdly exciting. Unfortunately, her theme, the practice of meditative thought in the Christian West before 1200 or so, sounds hopelessly recherché unless you understand how it fits in with the art of memory in the premodern world. If you aren’t into the topic, you’d be advised to read the works of Frances Yates instead of Carruthers, though I think Carruthers understand many issues better than Yates.
Both the moderns and the medievals understand thought as an activity, but whereas we credit the imagination as the active agent responsible for the invention of ideas, people formerly thought of invention as belonging to memory, a dynamic organization and reorganization of the contents of the mind or, more generally, received culture. The Medievals had recourse to traditional rhetorical techniques to order their thoughts, an art of memory that was far more than a set of parlor tricks to memorize speeches. The Art of Memory involved the association of particular ideas with places in a familiar context, most often an architectural setting such as a public building like a courthouse or church but sometimes an imagined theater or even the Zodiac. By mentally traversing the various places in one these sites, one could recall the topics of a speech or order the elements of a literary composition, or, in a religious context, meditate on the elements of faith—think of the Stations of the Cross. The vital point, which Carruthers does seem to have understood better than Yates, is the benefit in this internal ritual arises from the process than its results. It is getting organized, not being organized that energizes and illuminates the mind, which is also why, if you don’t mind an aside by an old textbook editor, modern pedagogy with its boxes, chapter summaries, and forty-two levels of emphasis is so self defeating.
In her Craft of Thought, as in her earlier Book of Memory, Carruthers deals with the very general anthropological question of how individuals and cultures can make sense out of the world, granted that the structuration provided by the categories of natural languages doesn’t provide a sufficient grid to underlie either sociability or the acquisition of empirical and theoretical knowledge. In this respect, her work is similar to the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss, which focuses on the cognitive role of myth and other cultural artifacts—my use of the word “grid” in the previous sentence is actually a microplagiarism from the Frenchman’s seminal book the Savage Mind. The monks wove their web of thought and practice out of the Psalms, church architecture, classical rhetoric, and a few other elements they found good to think just as Levi-Strauss’ Amazonian natives articulated their world by relating everything to the natural kinds of animals and plants and European modernism made overall sense of things by reference to a history rectified through “falsified outlines” (another microplagiarism).
Saturday, June 12, 2004
Time to Repair Your Bicycle?
Since there isn’t room for Reagan on Mt. Rushmore, the Republicans are petitioning the Reverend Moon to promote the late president to the third person of the Trinity—not so radical a tribute, when you think about it, since nobody is sure what the Holy Ghost is anyhow. Meanwhile, back in the sublunary sphere I continue to be troubled by the possibility that I was right about something. It’s sure looking likely that Saudi Arabia is going to go Iranian on us over the next several months.
The Iranian revolution began a parenthesis in American political history what with the hostage crisis and Carter’s subsequent defeat, the rise of the Neocons, the Iran Contra affair, our sponsorship of Saddam Hussein, the Iran-Iraq War, Kuwait, and the various Desert Storms, and 9/11. It would be satisfying, though only from a formal point of view, if this era of skullduggery ended with the ) of a second Islamic revolution. Unfortunately, the foreseeable bad consequences of the collapse of the House of Saud trumps the advantages of any possible Schadenfreude, especially in view of the possibility that Fundamentalist insurrections are also possible in other Muslim countries such as Pakistan. Well, I solace myself with the thought that I’m reading too much into the bombings and assassinations in Saudi Arabia, though granted the incompetence of our Press one may perhaps be forgiven for reading corpses like tea leaves—who the heck knows what’s going on? The trouble is, even on general considerations, you’d have to figure that our activities in Iraq and our attitude towards the Palestinian problem would set off an explosion if an explosion were possible at all.
Since there isn’t room for Reagan on Mt. Rushmore, the Republicans are petitioning the Reverend Moon to promote the late president to the third person of the Trinity—not so radical a tribute, when you think about it, since nobody is sure what the Holy Ghost is anyhow. Meanwhile, back in the sublunary sphere I continue to be troubled by the possibility that I was right about something. It’s sure looking likely that Saudi Arabia is going to go Iranian on us over the next several months.
The Iranian revolution began a parenthesis in American political history what with the hostage crisis and Carter’s subsequent defeat, the rise of the Neocons, the Iran Contra affair, our sponsorship of Saddam Hussein, the Iran-Iraq War, Kuwait, and the various Desert Storms, and 9/11. It would be satisfying, though only from a formal point of view, if this era of skullduggery ended with the ) of a second Islamic revolution. Unfortunately, the foreseeable bad consequences of the collapse of the House of Saud trumps the advantages of any possible Schadenfreude, especially in view of the possibility that Fundamentalist insurrections are also possible in other Muslim countries such as Pakistan. Well, I solace myself with the thought that I’m reading too much into the bombings and assassinations in Saudi Arabia, though granted the incompetence of our Press one may perhaps be forgiven for reading corpses like tea leaves—who the heck knows what’s going on? The trouble is, even on general considerations, you’d have to figure that our activities in Iraq and our attitude towards the Palestinian problem would set off an explosion if an explosion were possible at all.
Second Story Man
I’ve never been a big Stanley Fish fan, but I share some of his suspicions about abstract principles. My problem with immutable truths, however, is not that they are too abstract but that they often aren’t abstract enough. Partisans nail their flags to privatization or state’s rights or multiculturalism or some other slogan masquerading as a transcendent principle when these policy themes are at best means to end. To suggest that these ideas are good or bad depending on time or circumstance is not to embrace some sort of moral relativism, any more than the infinity of possible viewpoints in perspective drawing implies the nonexistence of an objectively real landscape. Just the reverse. Tactics are properly judged in terms of the strategies they realize, and policies by the higher purposes they serve.
I don’t favor the public ownership of utilities or the private ownership of utilities. I favor ensuring safe, reliable power at reasonable cost and with minimum damage to the environment. I don’t think it is decisively important whether health care is largely private or largely public, but I do care that it is available, efficacious, and universal. Sometimes a national news service promotes free debate and accurate news, sometimes it is merely the ministry of propaganda just as a privately owned press at times serves as a marketplace for ideas while at others, as in contemporary America, it is just a whorehouse.
People would like to believe that simple answers are available to problems just as they prefer to follow a preadolescent morality based on concrete prohibitions because, contrary to appearances, situational ethics are too rigorous. In politics, as in private life, the only reliable moral compass is gyroscopic, a complicated machine that allows an individual to maintain a sense of direction despite the turbulent motions of his or her surroundings.
The would-be student was disappointed with the Sufi master because he blew on his fingers because they were cold and blew on his soup because it was hot.
I’ve never been a big Stanley Fish fan, but I share some of his suspicions about abstract principles. My problem with immutable truths, however, is not that they are too abstract but that they often aren’t abstract enough. Partisans nail their flags to privatization or state’s rights or multiculturalism or some other slogan masquerading as a transcendent principle when these policy themes are at best means to end. To suggest that these ideas are good or bad depending on time or circumstance is not to embrace some sort of moral relativism, any more than the infinity of possible viewpoints in perspective drawing implies the nonexistence of an objectively real landscape. Just the reverse. Tactics are properly judged in terms of the strategies they realize, and policies by the higher purposes they serve.
I don’t favor the public ownership of utilities or the private ownership of utilities. I favor ensuring safe, reliable power at reasonable cost and with minimum damage to the environment. I don’t think it is decisively important whether health care is largely private or largely public, but I do care that it is available, efficacious, and universal. Sometimes a national news service promotes free debate and accurate news, sometimes it is merely the ministry of propaganda just as a privately owned press at times serves as a marketplace for ideas while at others, as in contemporary America, it is just a whorehouse.
People would like to believe that simple answers are available to problems just as they prefer to follow a preadolescent morality based on concrete prohibitions because, contrary to appearances, situational ethics are too rigorous. In politics, as in private life, the only reliable moral compass is gyroscopic, a complicated machine that allows an individual to maintain a sense of direction despite the turbulent motions of his or her surroundings.
The would-be student was disappointed with the Sufi master because he blew on his fingers because they were cold and blew on his soup because it was hot.
Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Saints' Lives
We all know that TIME magazine will never have a cover that reads: Latest Scientific Discoveries Imply the Nonexistence of God. The reverse proposition, on the other hand, has been repeatedly floated by that publication and many others. Hence the widely trumpeted theological significance of every local flood in Anatolia, every splinter on Ararat, every Palestinian graffiti that includes a Biblical name. The middlebrow press may be too proud to emulate the checkout tabloid that once led with a picture of a bear skull with a hole in its forehead and the caption “Goliath Found!” but the principle is the same. Since journalism is the business of telling people what they want to hear, so long as it’s something the owners want to tell them, it doesn’t matter how feeble the connection may be between each reported discovery and some popular religious or ideological thesis. The people want to believe and the advertisers want them to believe so that facts and logic don’t matter.
Mass-market journalism has a natural affinity for the great retail religions; for like them it depends on crude, endlessly repeated story lines. Because its core activity is the creation of prejudices, journalism is far better suited to promoting credulity than to providing a forum for critical thinking. Religious genres suit it. Thus, though the deification of Ronald Reagan doubtlessly serves the interests of the conservatives who dominate the media, Gipper hagiography would come naturally to these folks in any case. “Let your speech be Yea, Yea and Nay, Nay” is more fundamental to press practice than the business about Who, What, Where, When, and Why. Granted its formal requirements, the press is never going to get science right, even if, for some reason, the powers that be became markedly unreligious. In that case, as in fact used to happen regularly in Pravda, atheistical conclusions will be promoted by sound bytes every bit as irrelevant as the line about Goliath. “Our Cosmonauts have encountered no angels.”
We all know that TIME magazine will never have a cover that reads: Latest Scientific Discoveries Imply the Nonexistence of God. The reverse proposition, on the other hand, has been repeatedly floated by that publication and many others. Hence the widely trumpeted theological significance of every local flood in Anatolia, every splinter on Ararat, every Palestinian graffiti that includes a Biblical name. The middlebrow press may be too proud to emulate the checkout tabloid that once led with a picture of a bear skull with a hole in its forehead and the caption “Goliath Found!” but the principle is the same. Since journalism is the business of telling people what they want to hear, so long as it’s something the owners want to tell them, it doesn’t matter how feeble the connection may be between each reported discovery and some popular religious or ideological thesis. The people want to believe and the advertisers want them to believe so that facts and logic don’t matter.
Mass-market journalism has a natural affinity for the great retail religions; for like them it depends on crude, endlessly repeated story lines. Because its core activity is the creation of prejudices, journalism is far better suited to promoting credulity than to providing a forum for critical thinking. Religious genres suit it. Thus, though the deification of Ronald Reagan doubtlessly serves the interests of the conservatives who dominate the media, Gipper hagiography would come naturally to these folks in any case. “Let your speech be Yea, Yea and Nay, Nay” is more fundamental to press practice than the business about Who, What, Where, When, and Why. Granted its formal requirements, the press is never going to get science right, even if, for some reason, the powers that be became markedly unreligious. In that case, as in fact used to happen regularly in Pravda, atheistical conclusions will be promoted by sound bytes every bit as irrelevant as the line about Goliath. “Our Cosmonauts have encountered no angels.”
Monday, June 07, 2004
From Christ to Jesus
A recent Frontline television series was titled From Jesus to Christ. I think they got it backwards. Christ, zillionth edition of the dying/resurrected God, comes before the much more original invention of Jesus, the mere mortal. Granted that the humble carpenter, endlessly glorified in later Christian art and theology, often reverted to his previous status as a normal Hellenistic savior god, the literal humanity of Jesus is absolutely central to the faith, as reflected, or example, in the Creeds. Thus attempts to recover the historical Jesus are anything but heretical or daring. They simply repeat the literary strategy of the evangelists by providing another novelization of the myth. Indeed, even those who deny the resurrection or the divinity of Jesus are simply extrapolating a tendency that was present from the beginning.
A recent Frontline television series was titled From Jesus to Christ. I think they got it backwards. Christ, zillionth edition of the dying/resurrected God, comes before the much more original invention of Jesus, the mere mortal. Granted that the humble carpenter, endlessly glorified in later Christian art and theology, often reverted to his previous status as a normal Hellenistic savior god, the literal humanity of Jesus is absolutely central to the faith, as reflected, or example, in the Creeds. Thus attempts to recover the historical Jesus are anything but heretical or daring. They simply repeat the literary strategy of the evangelists by providing another novelization of the myth. Indeed, even those who deny the resurrection or the divinity of Jesus are simply extrapolating a tendency that was present from the beginning.
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Real News
While we obsess about minor wars and Janet Jackson’s left nipple, serious history rolls on in its subterranean channels. In the last couple of weeks, for example, three exceedingly important scientific papers appeared that bear on the origins and nature of animal life. A run down and some discussion:
Bejerano et. al. announced in the 28 May issue of SCIENCE the discovery of 481 DNA segments that are 100% conserved in the human, rat, and mouse genomes and are also extraordinarily similar to corresponding stretches in the DNA of chickens and fugu fish. Analogies between DNA segments are not surprising, but absolute identity is amazing because of the well-known near impossibility of perfectly faithful transmission—even the best Xerox machine will eventually produce a garbled image if you keep copying the copies of the copies. The authors of the paper point out that their findings imply that the duplicated stretches are extremely important to the survival of the organisms and therefore subject to powerful stabilizing selection or that some sort of exceptionally effective and so far unknown editing mechanism is at work on just those base sequences. Interestingly, many of the conserved segments do not code for messenger RNA—only 111 overlap the mRNA of a known protein-coding gene. Presumably they are important because of their role in the regulation of gene expression and RNA processing rather than specifying a protein.
The same issue of SCIENCE includes a paper by Finnerty et. al. that also deals with conserved genes, in this case the Hox genes that pattern the front-to-back axis of development in all bilateral animals, including us. The authors demonstrate that Hox genes underlie the development of the sea anemone, Nematostella vectensis, a bilateral organism in a phylum (Cnidaria) whose members mostly have radial symmetry. Remarkably, the top-to-bottom axis of Nematostella is established by the action of the same gene (decapentaplegic) that patterns the top-to-bottom axis in Bilateria. The authors conclude that their data “suggest that bilateral symmetry arose before the evolutionary split of Cnidaria and Bilateria.” Now that was a very long time ago indeed—Cnidarians and bilaterians appear together in Precambrian fossils from 560 to 570 billion years ago. Meanwhile.
A June 3 paper published in SCIENCE on line (Chen, et.al) reports the earliest known bilaterian fossils. The authors date these tiny forms (<150 microns) to 580-600 million years before present, just after the end of a period of intense glaciation, hence the name of the organism, Vernanimalcula guizhouena, spring animalcule. The date matches up pretty well from guesses on the age of the earliest bilateral animals derived from phylogenetic analyses, but other scientists are sure to second guess this research. The authors also claim the animals “had paired coeloms extending the length of the gut; paired external pits that could be sense organs; bilateral, anterior-posterior organization; a ventrally directed anterior mouth with thick walled pharynx; and a triploblastic structure,” That’s a lot of structure to identify from minute and ancient specimens. It remains to be seen if these conclusions hold up. However
Taken together, these three papers emphasize how little wobble there has been in the history of animals. It appears that over the last 600 million years or so evolution has been playing with a very small toolkit indeed. Of course it may be possible that there is just one way to put together a mobile, multicellular organism and that the leaping green mice of Mars will turn out also to have Hox genes and hyperconserved DNA; but it certainly looks as if what occurred was the selection of one possible system among many. Of course that version suits my own rather hobbyhorsical view of how the universe operates—on every scale and in every venue relentlessly thinning out an original plentitude of possibilities in favor of a vanishingly small set of survivors. That’s just my take. The results are remarkably suggestive even for those who don’t like to make generalizations in the style of Herbert Spencer.
In other news, Ronald Reagan died. Mr. Reagan is mostly significant as an example of how a handsome nonentity can be turned into a beloved and irreproachable icon by modern public relations techniques.
While we obsess about minor wars and Janet Jackson’s left nipple, serious history rolls on in its subterranean channels. In the last couple of weeks, for example, three exceedingly important scientific papers appeared that bear on the origins and nature of animal life. A run down and some discussion:
Bejerano et. al. announced in the 28 May issue of SCIENCE the discovery of 481 DNA segments that are 100% conserved in the human, rat, and mouse genomes and are also extraordinarily similar to corresponding stretches in the DNA of chickens and fugu fish. Analogies between DNA segments are not surprising, but absolute identity is amazing because of the well-known near impossibility of perfectly faithful transmission—even the best Xerox machine will eventually produce a garbled image if you keep copying the copies of the copies. The authors of the paper point out that their findings imply that the duplicated stretches are extremely important to the survival of the organisms and therefore subject to powerful stabilizing selection or that some sort of exceptionally effective and so far unknown editing mechanism is at work on just those base sequences. Interestingly, many of the conserved segments do not code for messenger RNA—only 111 overlap the mRNA of a known protein-coding gene. Presumably they are important because of their role in the regulation of gene expression and RNA processing rather than specifying a protein.
The same issue of SCIENCE includes a paper by Finnerty et. al. that also deals with conserved genes, in this case the Hox genes that pattern the front-to-back axis of development in all bilateral animals, including us. The authors demonstrate that Hox genes underlie the development of the sea anemone, Nematostella vectensis, a bilateral organism in a phylum (Cnidaria) whose members mostly have radial symmetry. Remarkably, the top-to-bottom axis of Nematostella is established by the action of the same gene (decapentaplegic) that patterns the top-to-bottom axis in Bilateria. The authors conclude that their data “suggest that bilateral symmetry arose before the evolutionary split of Cnidaria and Bilateria.” Now that was a very long time ago indeed—Cnidarians and bilaterians appear together in Precambrian fossils from 560 to 570 billion years ago. Meanwhile.
A June 3 paper published in SCIENCE on line (Chen, et.al) reports the earliest known bilaterian fossils. The authors date these tiny forms (<150 microns) to 580-600 million years before present, just after the end of a period of intense glaciation, hence the name of the organism, Vernanimalcula guizhouena, spring animalcule. The date matches up pretty well from guesses on the age of the earliest bilateral animals derived from phylogenetic analyses, but other scientists are sure to second guess this research. The authors also claim the animals “had paired coeloms extending the length of the gut; paired external pits that could be sense organs; bilateral, anterior-posterior organization; a ventrally directed anterior mouth with thick walled pharynx; and a triploblastic structure,” That’s a lot of structure to identify from minute and ancient specimens. It remains to be seen if these conclusions hold up. However
Taken together, these three papers emphasize how little wobble there has been in the history of animals. It appears that over the last 600 million years or so evolution has been playing with a very small toolkit indeed. Of course it may be possible that there is just one way to put together a mobile, multicellular organism and that the leaping green mice of Mars will turn out also to have Hox genes and hyperconserved DNA; but it certainly looks as if what occurred was the selection of one possible system among many. Of course that version suits my own rather hobbyhorsical view of how the universe operates—on every scale and in every venue relentlessly thinning out an original plentitude of possibilities in favor of a vanishingly small set of survivors. That’s just my take. The results are remarkably suggestive even for those who don’t like to make generalizations in the style of Herbert Spencer.
In other news, Ronald Reagan died. Mr. Reagan is mostly significant as an example of how a handsome nonentity can be turned into a beloved and irreproachable icon by modern public relations techniques.