Intended Consequences

When the administration announced it was making drastic changes to overtime rules, the media dutifully reported that the effects of the policy change were unclear; but the administration would never have changed the rules if it were not sure that they would lower wages. Or do you suppose that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would have enthusiastically endorsed the changes if they were going to cost their constituents money?

This story has a context. The United States is running a huge trade deficit with the rest of the world at the same time that it the government is busy increasing the size of the national debt. As almost everybody admits, these excesses will be paid for sooner or later. What has become increasingly clear to me is that the restoration of balance is not some distant eventually but is already underway in the form of a de facto lowering of the real income of the majority of working people brought about by mechanisms such as the increasing use of temporary help and other forms of outsourcing, restrictions on health benefits, and the change in overtime rules. A decline in American wealth relative to the rest of the world is probably inevitable. The administration’s policies, especially its labor policies, make sense as a way of making sure that the burden of this decline falls squarely on the plebs.

Austrian Millionaires, Part Deux (the Third Installment will not be Forthcoming)

For a long time, I have had serious doubts about the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis that the characteristics of particular natural languages such as English or Navaho determine or at least seriously bias or influence the way in which the speakers of these languages understand the world. The vagueness and ambiguity of the hypothesis is part of the problem. Just as an individual determined to achieve atheism is doomed to frustration in the face of interminably mutable theological definitions, you can never be sure whether the Whorf hypothesis you refute is the relevant version or even worth refuting. At best you can raise objections that make a meaningful point against some versions of the hypothesis. Two such considerations:

1. The grammar of particular languages obliges the speaker to provide certain information to the listener. In English, for example, the third person singular pronoun always indicates gender, a linguistic fact that became a real issue in the last 40 years or so as the clumsiness of writing “he or she” over and over again drove many of us to “they.” It is far from clear, however, that it makes much difference whether or not a category like gender or tense is coded in the grammar since the same meaning can just as well be conveyed by extra words. The verb in Homeric Greek has a dual number, but exactly the same meaning can be expressed by words like “pair” in languages such as English that don’t have a dual. It has been claimed that the Arabs have a foggy notion of causality because of the rudimentary systems of tenses in classical Arabic; but the Arabs in fact have a huge historical literature as do the Chinese whose verbs so far from having tenses doesn’t even have conjugations. Meanwhile, the Indians, whose culture is notoriously unhistorical, wrote Sanskrit, a language with a complex and nuanced system of tenses. Arguably, the main effect of putting distinctions into the grammar is to make them less salient and easier to ignore. Why does it make a difference if distinctions are built into the grammar or have to be expressed lexically?

2. The Whorfians suggest that the structure of particular languages makes it hard to say or understand certain things; but this limitation, it seems to me, is an artifact of the methodology of linguistics. A person who studies a language from the outside has no business deciding what a native speaker should say in a particular instance. If there is no recorded instance of a 2nd person plural pluperfect subjunctive middle of the verb “to burp” in the available corpus of late Medieval Utopian, the linguist simply can’t say for sure whether there ever was such an animal or do more than guess what it might have been by analogy to known forms. But native speakers confront this situation all the time. For all I know, no English speaker has ever said “Had you have burped yourself immediately, you wouldn’t have been discommoded by the gas attack;” but the lack of a precedent didn’t slow me down because I have citizen’s rights in my own language and can make things up as I go along. By the same token, if I need of more ways to speak about kinds of snow, I’ll just make them up. It isn’t just people turning their doctoral dissertations into books that possess the magic power of neologism.

The words and expressions in use in a particular natural language doubtlessly betoken something about the culture of the speakers of the language, but it seems more appropriate to say that the culture expresses itself in the language than that the language molds the culture. I was reminded of this issue by an article in last week’s online edition of SCIENCE that reported on an Amazonian tribe that only has three numbers, one, two, and many. These Indians, it turns out, do very poorly on simple arithmetical tasks that involve counting or matching up rows of small objects—story problems were apparently completely out of the question. The finding, which is apparently well attested, was trotted out as a confirmation of Whorf as if the lack of counting numbers accounted for the poor math skills. In fact, what the anthropologists seem to have discovered is an instance of the extremely depauperate culture of a small and isolated group. Everything about these folks is minimalist. The tribe, seem have lost or discarded elements of culture. They don’t talk about much or build very much. In this regard, they are perhaps like the native Tasmanians who forgot how to build boats after they attained their isolated homeland.

This tribe raises the question of just how small a tool kit is enough for a viable human culture, a question analogous to the issue of how small a genome can be. The Indians are certainly economical with numbers. I hadn’t though anybody could improve on the famous Austrian millionaires mentioned in George Gamow’s book One, Two, Three, Infinity. These worthies challenged each other to come up with the biggest number. One millionaire hems and haws, takes a deep breath, grits his teeth, and comes up with “Three!” The other looks stricken, jumps up from his chair, paces around the room, grimaces, and finally despairs, “You win, damn it!” (Incidentally, George Gamow was a great contriver of names, who coined, among other terms, the expressions Big Bang and the Genetic Code, and thus exemplified the super-Worfian creativity of language users. By the way, I don’t know why Gamow settled on the nationality of the idiots in his joke; but I am sure that if he had been an amoeba, he would have called his book One, Two, Four, Infinity.)

Many Carry the Thursis but Few Are Pseudo-Dionysus

Ascribing agency to the ultimate ground of reality is no less an instance of zoomorphism than imagining God to have a gender. An eternal and ubiquitous entity cannot do anything or even move because whatever it is supposed to do has always already happened and there is no place for it to go. The connoisseurs of negative theology came to this conclusion long ago, though, unlike me, they seem to have thought that some residue of meaning persists after or perhaps during the evaporation of all the divine attributes. The point is not academic. Many educated people assume that the divine science fiction of popular religion somehow adumbrates a defensible doctrine of Being qua Being, albeit in a charmingly childish way. But it is far from clear that the plausible elements of the postulated perennial philosophy have anything very interesting to say. It’s surprisingly easy to get bored with Enlightenment once you get over its novelty value since the glamour of the thing is something left over from all the engaging mythology and nonsense that precedes the moment of terminal sobriety.

Not So Simple

Like other groups of highly educated individuals of superior intelligence, professional scientists tend to be more liberal than the American average—a fact documented in many places, for example, the Bell Curve. Whatever their political proclivities, however, scientist are not given to yelling and hooting. Indeed, as I can testify from many years of personal experience as a technical editor, it is very, very difficult to get a scientist to make an unguarded, unqualified statement, even when the facts warrant it. These folks have grown up in a system in which nobody has a right to an opinion, and every published utterance must be vetted in advance by well-informed critics who are often professional rivals. Meanwhile, the economic situation of scientist also encourages cautious speech. Those who best know what they are talking about work for businessmen and politicians who generally don’t know very much at all. Telling the truth in an asylum run by the patients requires continuous tact and, as the man said, abeunt studia in mores, i.e. you get used to it. All of which makes the current political activism of the science establishment all the more remarkable. The most recent issue of SCIENCE (13 August) is a case in point. The issue features a special section on the hydrogen economy that Bush has promoted as a pat answer to energy and environmental problems associated with global warming. The clear message of the issue is that the hydrogen initiative is politically useful but crucially flawed.

Hydrogen power may have a role in the fairly distant future, but it is hardly a panacea. Hydrogen has to be generated by processes that require energy and produce carbon dioxide. If we make hydrogen by burning coal, we’ll have to figure out how to somehow sequester the resulting CO2 to make net progress towards carbon emissions reduction. Carbon sequestration is a monumental technical problem. And producing hydrogen promises to be a very expensive proposition. Meanwhile, hydrogen presents many other technical challenges. To mention one simple but hard to solve problem: hydrogen is very light. Storing enough hydrogen to power a car for 300 miles of operation would require a fuel tank eight times larger than a normal gas tank even if the hydrogen were pressurized to 10,000 pounds per square inch. There are other options: liquefying the hydrogen or absorbing on in carbon nanotubes or hydrides but nobody knows if these techniques are practical or affordable.

Even if the hydrogen option pans out, it isn’t rational to pursue it in lieu of other measures against the looming problem of global warming. As Donald Kennedy wrote, “Our attention is deflected from the hard, even painful measures that would be needed to slow our business-as-usual carbon trajectory. Postponing action on emissions reduction is like refusing medication for a developing infection: It guarantees that greater costs will have to be paid for.”

Note: The articles in SCIENCE aren't available on line without a subscription.

The Earliest Stages of Withdrawal

It’s a commonplace by now that the most ignorant and thoughtless segment of the electorate decides American elections, thus guaranteeing the juvenile tone of our political campaigns. One simply has to talk baby talk to babies. It also seems to be an invariable rule that the most pressing issues of the day may not be the subject of public debate in an election year. How else explain the remarkable silence that met Bush’s proposal to remove the bulk of our troops in Germany, Japan, and Korea? In itself, the Iraq imbroglio may well prove to be of marginal importance; but overturning the fundamental basis of world politics is definitely going to make the cut in the nth edition of R.R.Palmer. Indeed, what may turn out to be the most important consequence of the invasion of Iraq could well be the impetus it gave for a thoughtless and spasmodic redefinition of the foundations of American foreign policy.

In principle, I’m not unhappy with the general idea of reducing our garrisons in Europe and Asia; but I recognize, as apparently the administration does not, that much more is at stake than a cheap fix for our imperial overstretch. There are so many consequences. For example, in the short term, pulling the troops out of Germany may be a way to punish a recalcitrant ally. That seems to have been the principle rationale when the idea was first floated six months ago. Over even the middle term, however, the absence of a substantial American presence is likely to lead to a more independent and assertive Europe, exactly what sets this administration crazy. The Germans may have liked the economic benefits of the permanent occupation, but golden fetters are still fetters. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Earth, a stand down in Korea and Japan may have analogous effects. I don’t happen to be very worried about the North Koreans in this regard—they would be obliterated if they attacked the South whether or not we have a couple of extra divisions there—but the de facto lessening of American military guarantees may well lead to Japanese rearmament, not because of North Korea but because of China. I guess the administration figures it has plenty of time to adjust to this development since it would take Sony a good three months to come up with nuclear weapons. But the military consequences of withdrawal may not be the most important issue.

More by accident than design, the continued presence of American forces in Europe and Northwest Asia has worked out very well. The Americans weren’t threatening, not only because of our general benignity but because it was perceived that we were never strong enough to actually occupy or dominate Western Europe or Japan or to actively threaten the Soviets or China. That made us tolerable to our enemies who knew we wouldn’t get aggressive and welcome to our allies who benefited hugely from a geopolitical system frozen in place for forty years. Which is a large part of the reason why the industrial world has been willing to subsidize our economy. They were getting value for the money. Things are fixing to look different. We ought to be thinking about that. We ought to be thinking about a lot of things. We aren’t.

A Promising Fact

When little Portugal found a route to the Indies and therefore a source of enormous wealth, it’s leaders realized they had a problem. Their monopoly, though recognized by Spain and the Pope, was not backed up with demographic and financial strength at home. They were like a frail grandmother trying to cash a winning lottery ticket in a very bad neighborhood. As narrated in the first volume of Donald Lach’s Asia in the Making of Europe, they did a remarkable job in preserving their advantage; but the penetration of their markets by the Dutch, French, and English was inevitable because their cannonballs and pamphlets could only do so much against the more numerous cannonballs and longer pamphlets of their rivals.

The Portuguese case casts some light on the struggle over intellectual property rights, one of the great themes of contemporary economic history. The Vasco da Gamases (Vascos da Gamas?) of our time are American and European tech outfits, especially pharmaceutical firms, that are trying to extend their temporary monopoly on crucial inventions to maintain competitive advantage in the face of the disparity of size and potential power between the Western nations and Asia. The cannonball part of this program revolves around using the temporary military and political preponderance of the United States to enforce an unrealistically strong system of intellectual property rights on a mostly unwilling world. The Portuguese precedent suggests the limitations of this sort of arm-twisting. Threats and bribes produce a lot more lip service and evasion than compliance. Pamphleteering doesn’t necessarily work any better.

As with any justification of property rights, the defenders of intellectual property run up against a serious problem when they attempt to justify perpetual ownership. John Locke explained the claim of a person over his land by supposing that the proprietor mixed his labor with the land he worked, but this sweat equity rationale fails to explain why the children and grandchildren of the pioneer should maintain their rights without a further investment of effort. In the case of technological research, it makes a lot of sense that the agencies that spend the time and effort to discover and market new drugs or devices be rewarded for a time because that prospect encourages others to undertake fresh research. Why it is either right or beneficial for a firm to keep its monopoly into a second or third generation is far more problematic. Indeed, at some point, the ability to continue squeezing profits out of old discoveries results in a disincentive to innovate—why should the greyhounds keep on running if they can actually catch the rabbit?

Of course very few are promoting the notion that intellectual property rights should be perpetual. Keeping a monopoly as long as it is likely to remain profitable suffices, though the recently proposed extension of the term for copyrights, a boon for the grandchildren of novelists, shows how long that can be. In this issue, the struggle over the mores or lesses does matter, however, especially in the case of efficacious drugs where the dogged defense of intellectual property rights serves the larger purpose of keeping medical costs artificially high.

The Portuguese eventually lost; and the imperial power gradually turned into an inexpensive vacation destination; but that declension hardly harmed the world as a whole. Similarly, a rational revision of the rights of intellectual property would probably hurt the bottom line of Big Pharma, but it might well benefit most people if ways could be found to reward innovators who do an especially good job of giving away their productions once the cost of discovery has been amortized. Anyhow, rights and wrongs aside, it’s hard to see how intellectual property rights can be successfully maintained, let alone expanded, in the face of the underlying realities of power. And the 3-dimensional Xerox machine hasn’t even been invented yet.

Confessions of a Test Particle

When people worry about the increasing concentration of ownership in the major media, they are usually afraid that the monopolist will have too much power. To judge from the coverage of the Second Iraq War, however, the more immediate danger is just the reverse. The larger and more profitable these outfits become, the more they have to lose and the more cowardly they behave as when Disney caved about Fahrenheit 911 or the Washington Post decided it just had to play cheerleader to the Bush administration. The giant media combinations depend on government favors for their continued prosperity and aren’t about to speak truth to power even in the cases when they don’t completely agree with the emerging semi-fascist corporatist consensus. These outfits are big as in big targets.

A somewhat similar logic explains the consistent venality of individual media stars. It’s one thing to risk your job when you only make a hundred thousand a year and quite another to forgo millions and millions just for the sake of principle, especially since whistleblowing has become a meaningless gesture—in the absence of a free press, the whistleblowers will be personally destroyed as Scott Ritter knows and Joe Wilson is learning. Anyhow, at least for the present, the public despises people who rock the boat at the risk of oodles of money—it’s un-American.

To be fair, it is all too easy for somebody without responsibility or vulnerability to say what they think without a lot of preliminary calculations of profit and loss. If you live in a barrel in the dump, you can afford to tell Alexander the Great to get out of your light. Appearances to the contrary, however, I’m not playing the cynic here and making a moral criticism of the managers of big media or of the talking heads. The ethical dimension of the problem is secondary. Even in a rational world decent behavior requires courage and integrity, but the point is we don’t have a rational world. At this point, honestly reporting the news would land you in Butler’s Lives of the Saints; and that wouldn’t help anybody since sainthood is itself a media scam.

Boundary Conditions

Of the two engines of economic growth, the demographic dynamic is notably flagging these days, especially in Europe and Japan. Meanwhile, nobody really knows what opportunities or disappointments will emerge from technology, the other motor. Promoters of nanotechnology, the most recent Caucasian cargo cult, await the arrival of artificial paradise with more impatience than anxiety while others are worried precisely because the hype may pan out. I’m told that science fiction writers speculate about a point in history they call the Vingian Singularity in honor of Vernor Vinge, a writer who proposed that we were rapidly approaching the moment when “technological change speeds up to such a degree that society becomes incomprehensible even to the people living in it.” But maybe the Vingian Singularity, like the Second Coming, is destined to an interminable postponement; and whether we desire or fear its advent, we’ll eventually have to deal with the failure of prophecy.

It is commonly pointed out that Marx never fully realized how productive industry could become. It doesn’t matter very much if labor is exploited if the exploited masses are living high on the hog. But we may be falling into the reverse error of assuming that the projected triumphant advance of science will make the social and political structure of society irrelevant. If technology isn’t quite so miraculous as advertised and fails to generate economic growth, it becomes very important indeed who gets the biggest share of the pie. To judge by the renewed fervor of their defense of privilege, the conservatives seem to have recognized this possibility ahead of the rest of us.

More Excuses

Marx famously said that the obsession of the Germans with religion testified to their political and economic backwardness. But maybe it would be simpler to point out that people who are interested in ideas but have no connection to power naturally gravitate to subjects that sound important. The vanity of these earnest small timers calculated that the loftiness of the topic would compensate for their own insignificance. Hey, works for me. But there are perhaps better excuses for thinking about religion now if not in 1848. I don’t refer only or especially to the power of religious pressure groups in the U.S. or the salience of religious language in expressing cultural dissatisfaction. To use, not without premeditation, a Levi-Straussian expression, religion is good to think.

One can learn a lot about mankind from a consideration of the history of science or mathematics, but those cognitive enterprises are contaminated with authentic, non-human content. The errors of science may teach us about ourselves, but its truths teach us about triangles, moths, or neutrinos. For the philosophical anthropologist, theology is a much better object of study because its development has not been deformed by non-human input. In the absence of real gods, spirits, and devils, theology’s elaborate doctrines have been prepared in a vacuum like the especially pure chemicals they crystallize on the space shuttle.

I’m aware that this take on religions sounds rather like a well-known thesis of Feuerbach. In part it is, which is rather inconvenient granted Feuerbach’s dubious reputation. On the other hand, Auguste Comte was also right about several very important issues; and he’s even duller than Feuerbach. If they’re right, they’re right. But I draw more modest conclusions from all this than Feuerbach did. In studying the sociology of religion I don’t expect to discover a grand, though alienated human essence because I don’t see much evidence that there is such a thing. I expect that the realities that underlie the fictive rationality of religion comprise a pretty irregular collection headlined by the immutable laws of marketing.

Continuous Fulgurations

In their deep distrust of one another, the Americans look for some mechanism that can preserve social equilibrium and public decency in the face of the vanity, greed, and lust for power of individuals and organizations. But society has no automatic thermostat and will never devise one. The nation—any nation—holds together because enough people share and implement an understanding of what is permissible and what has to be done. Absent that will, constitutional checks and balances, independent commissions, bureaucratic procedures, automatic penalties, referenda, and similar gear automatically fail. Indeed, the selective implementation of rigid and impractical laws is an excellent way for unscrupulous political groups to persecute their enemies and extort campaign contributions from potential targets. No nation has stronger laws against corruption than Italy.

Both the Iraq prison abuse investigations and this week’s settlement of the Halliburton accounting fraud case underline the principle that justice isn’t an automatic device. In the former instance, it has already become clear that the military tribunals are being used to protect general officers by limiting accountability to low-level personnel. In the Halliburton case, a large fine was imposed because the company secretly changed the way it reported profits in order to pump up stock prices. Despite the fact that the largest single beneficiary of this scheme was the CEO, whose already enormous pay package was inflated by performance bonuses he did not honestly earn, the FCC did not hold Mr. Cheney liable, however. In effect, Halliburton stockholders got screwed twice, once by the future vice president and then again when the fine got paid out of corporation assets, thus lowering the value of the company. Apparently government agencies are simply not going to prosecute their bosses except in those cases where public pressure makes it expedient to sacrifice somebody, but public pressure would have to be organized by the media, another group full of men and women of convenient principle.

At this point in American history, it’s easy to believe that it would take more than 50,000 gallons of lighter fluid in an abandoned gold mine to provide a detector sensitive enough to register a particle of integrity in our public life. In fact, I believe that things would be very much worse were it not for the largely invisible effect of thousands of individuals doing the right thing in a conspiracy so secret that the conspirators themselves are hardly conscious of it. In the Legends of the Jews we read that God allows the world to persist because of the existence of ten good men. I’m more optimistic than the rabbis—or more matter of fact. I think that, as a plain matter of the physics of the situation, civil society and government function as well as they do, not because of mechanical laws and simple feedback loops, but because of the shared, tacit understanding of what needs to be done. It isn’t that ten wholly good men must exist somewhere, but that there is enough fractional rationality in enough of us fallible men to hold the world together. When that mediocre but foundational virtue weakens at the margins because of an incremental increase in the cowardice of individuals, the rule of law doesn’t work and nations decline. Conversely, if more of us, especially more of those of us who have power and privilege, find a little more courage to do what we know we should, things will get better.

Confessions

I have often been unjust to the television journalists by denouncing them as incompetent as well as venal. Venal they are, as is probably inevitable in any entertainment business where thousands compete for a tiny number of very lucrative jobs; but in calling them incompetent, I’m being a little unfair because they actually fulfill their duties very well. I am being disingenuous, after all, to act as if their job description actually called for them to determine the most important facts about public events and accurately and effectively disseminate this information. In fact, as I once wrote to Aaron Brown in an offhand email—to judge by his reply, he wasn’t in complete agreement— journalism is a cheesy entertainment and propaganda medium. Watching the tube, it’s very easy to get huffy and exclaim, “That’s not news, it’s an infomertial;” but the point is that news is an infomertial. Atavisms from the 50’s and 20 minutes of PBS a week aside, journalism just is the business of telling people those parts of what they want to hear that the owners of the networks want to tell them. The heroic version of what journalism is supposed to be is largely illusory: an ideal the journalists can trot out to defend the dignity of their low trade, a standard that provides carping critics like me with a convenient, if blunt, weapon.

While I’m in a confessional frame of mine, I should also apologize for writing as if I thought it was advisable or even possible to squelch commercial journalism. Over and beyond the obvious likelihood that censorship of the media would just provide a new venue for even worse abuses, I have a principled objection to kicking against the pricks. It makes sense to find ways to ameliorate problems that can never be cured without remedies worse than the disease, but it is dishonest to pretend either that there is a cure or that the situation is hopeless. Though journalism, like herpes, is incurable, it is also mostly a nuisance that can be treated topically by scorn and derision. Or, if you like grander, Joseph Cambellian language, you might say journalism is part of the eternal balance of things. Three rats ceaselessly gnaw on the roots of the cosmic tree, Yggdrasal; but for some profound reason you can’t simply exterminate the rats. All you can do is encourage the three Norns to counteract the rats by their ministrations.

The anchors and pundits rise every morning and recommit themselves to their sacred occupation of making their countrymen a little stupider and more ignorant and their nation a little cheaper and nastier. It is the way of things and has been for a very long time—even Fox would have a hard time living up to the standards of scurrility of Reformation broadsides. It remains possible, indeed, necessary, however, to do the Norn thing, especially since the rats seem to have multiplied considerably over the last couple of decades.

Politics, including cultural politics, is like cooking. If you get too much salt in the pot, you can only save the dish by adding something else. By the same token, it isn’t practical to fish the superfluous pundits out of the soup or even cut back very much on the coverage of the Lacy Peterson murder. It is possible to add something to the recipe, though; and that seems to be happening. If they insist on shitting in the swimming pool, we’re going to have to make the pool bigger.

The professional journalists covering the convention at Boston have complained about the invasion of the Bloggers, but they themselves called political blogging into existence by their own failings.

Putting Two and Two Together
I used to imagine the Platonic Realm of the Forms as an enormous and rather dull museum in which, like the standard meter in Paris, the exemplars of every conceivable thing are in display under bell jars. But maybe the actual Noosphere is a more going place, a rave where cruising concepts troll for pickups and ecstasy. One recent meeting of strangers in the dark:

It has been recently reported that the human lifespan took a big jump some 32,000 years ago, the same time period as the great florescence of Paleolithic art. Increased longevity may have been a key feature in human evolution since older individuals are carriers of cultural memory and it is culture that makes it worthwhile to spend all that metabolic energy on a big brain. But there’s another connection, and that’s where the second idea comes in. We know from the research of Robert Zajonc and others that birth order correlates with intelligence. First born and only children tend to be smarter than the others, presumably because they spend more time around adults. But that explanation implies that anything that increases the amount of time children spend around older people is likely to increase their intelligence. Increasing longevity is likely to do just that. In turn, greater intelligence in the phenotypes means more cultural innovation, more longevity, and more selection pressure for the genotypes that correlate with intelligence. In retrospect, you can see how the thing got out of hand.

Something for the Koan Brothers to Make a Movie About

The critique of nationalism associated with Eric Hobsbawm can be pushed too far. Kilts and tartans and other patriotic clichés are commonly cooked up by the marketing department; but nationalities do possess distinct and identifiable folkways and mentalities. After all this time, it really does mean something to be a Frenchman. The important point, however, is that what Volkish philosophers and entrepreneurs of Fundamentalism pick up as the basis for their constructions are seldom still living traditions. It is only by chance that the beliefs and practices of real people will be appropriate to a program designed to address specifically contemporary concerns. The universal demand for particularism so characteristic of the 20th Century and very much with us in the endlessly attacks on liberalism are obviously rooted in the international culture of universities, not the parochial world of peasants. Indeed, if the genuine institutions and values of a people conflict with what the conservatives want, so much the worst for tradition. The requirements of ideology come first, as when the Enlightenment ideals of the American Revolution, still very much alive in many hearts, are denounced in the name of patriotism.

If you meet Thomas Jefferson on the road, kill him.

The Silence of the Oracles

When Stephen Hawking proposed that black holes give off radiation some years ago, the idea wasn’t very surprising to me. No physicist, obviously, I did have a liberal artsy appreciation of quantum mechanical tunneling, the principle behind Hawking radiation. Hawking’s new claim about black holes is much more opaque. He now says that he can solve an old paradox—a paradox he himself created, as it happens—by showing that black holes do not violate a basic rule of quantum physics by destroying all information about the particles that fall into them. But while information may indeed escape from black holes, damned little of it escaped from the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation. Apparently the argument’s got something to do with what actually occurs at the event horizon of a black hole—reports on scientific websites are very vague.

What amuses me about all this has nothing to do with the physics of it, about which I’m certainly not competent to comment, but about the popular presumption that Hawking’s change of heart on the issue is somehow decisive, presumably because he will once play poker with Newton, Einstein, and Data. Unfortunately, very bright and accomplished scientists make claims all the time that turn out to be false or, worse, foolish. Hawking, after all, is 61, an age at which famous scientists, their previous triumphs having grown stale, get enthusiastic about Vitamin C or Grand Unification or the Implicate Order or the successor to the Duotronic Brain. But maybe Hawking did solve the problem. I understand he managed to cheat on his wife despite being confined in a wheelchair with ALS. In comparison to that, psyching out black holes is trifling.

Rebels without a Cause

I don’t know what a 21st Century American theocracy would look like and I certainly hope neither I nor my heirs will ever find out, but I doubt if most conservatives would really like the reality of a no-fooling-around American Crusader state. The German conservatives from whom our rightists derive many of their ideas didn’t necessarily want the gangster regime that emerged from the last great defeat of liberalism, either, though their support was essential to the triumph of the Nazis. People like Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, and Hans Freyer were far clearer on what they hated about soulless modernity and parliamentary government than on what kind of new dispensation could underlie a new and unified Germany. People whose political program amounts to waiting for a miracle aren’t likely to be very choosy. Which is probably also accounts for the surprising enthusiasm so many conservatives evince for authoritarian forms of traditional religion. It isn’t that any of these decrepit belief systems have become even slightly more plausible over the last decades—if anything, just the reverse. What has changed is the level of cultural anxiety. The right doesn’t know what it wants. It just knows that it wants it very badly. If you’re impatient enough for the Second Coming, you can even manage to be rapturous about the Reverend Moon.

For a long period after the end of the Second World War, conservatives in America and Europe accepted that welfare state capitalism and the extension of human rights to minorities were irresistible and that a meaningful conservatism should dedicate itself to preserving what remained valid in tradition while countering the utopian and potentially despotic tendencies of the dogmatic Left. That’s not enough any more.

Unfortunately, the real enemy of these folks is not the political ideology of liberalism, but social, economic, and cultural trends that are far more stubborn than a few Democrats. Religious enthusiasm can perhaps cow the feminists, but it doesn’t change the fact that the economy depends on everybody working. One can resist gay marriage and call for family values, but the demographic fact that most people aren’t going to have more than a kid or two isn’t going to change. Kansas may not teach evolution to high school kids, but using religious politics to squelch the autonomy of the sciences gets self-defeating very quickly. Does anybody really think that the spiritual situation of the age is going to be fundamentally altered by outlawing condoms and stem-cell research?

Jus Fetiales

By ancient Roman law, the state was forbidden to engage in aggressive war. A college of 20 priests, the fetiales, had to establish in each case that some king or other had offended the senate and people before war could properly begin by casting a bloody spear into the territory of the enemy or, when that wasn’t convenient, from the Temple of Bellona to the ager hostilis. Amazingly, this scrupulosity did not prevent Rome from expanding from a hilltop refuge for horse thieves to the greatest empire the History Channel has ever known and thus demonstrated once and for all that counterpunchers can be champs. The Etruscans, Samnites, Carthaginians, Greeks, Macedonians, Illyrians, Spaniards, Gauls, Thracians, Egyptians, Numidians, Arabs, Persians, and Britons probably had a different take on things, but all Roman wars were officially defensive.

Granted the durable success of Roman hypocrisy, Bush may be right in invoking in his doctrine of Preventative War an American version of the Jus Fetiales. If, on the other hand, we really don’t have the resources or the will to enforce universal empire, we might be better off with attitudes that suit a powerful but not all-powerful nation in its dealings with other nations. It used to be possible for a country to assert its interests in an international dispute without claiming that its foreign policy echoed the obvious principles of Natural Law if not the will of Almighty God. Before the first Gulf war, for example, Bush the First could and should have informed Hussein that the United States had a vital interest in the independence of Kuwait, an interest that didn’t have to be defended theologically but would be defended with guns and bombs. We didn’t need to represent ourselves as Pure and Good in every way in order to act decently. Indeed, absent the interminable rhetoric about how wonderful we are, other countries and their people would probably find it easier to accommodate our wishes. Even being recognized as a non-equal is an improvement on not being recognized at all except as a law-breaker.

They finally got Bush to stop talking about crusades, but his policy is remains “Love me, love my Sun God,” an interminable exercise in self-righteousness and national egotism. Unfortunately, Bush the Second didn’t invent American highhandedness; and the notion that we are always and obviously the offended party has been intoned on many previous occasions by the journalists who make up the local Fetial College. Too bad. I think we’d be less dangerous if we didn’t always have to be right.

Spammed by Maxwell’s Demon

What we think of as the norm is, after all, just what we’re used to. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, if some oddball thing we happen on turns out on closer examination to be exemplary. Since our existence is only possible because we are located in the bull’s eye of a nested set of improbabilities, inductions on everyday experience are risky. The Firesign Theater may be overstating matters to claim that everything you know is wrong, but everything is certainly likely to be anomalous. Many of the regularities we mistake for laws of nature are just ground rules and only apply in this one ballpark and then only for the duration of a game that may be called at any time for bad weather. I’ll mention some highfalutin instances in a moment, but the phenomenon is already captured by the puzzled look of a soon-to-be run over pedestrian who doesn’t understand how a taxi could be bearing down on him since the light is red. And then there’s the case of the extremely virginal girl I knew in high school who, when informed that her best friend was pregnant, cheerfully informed everybody that there must be some sort of error since her friend wasn’t married. Unlike Janet, Leibniz wasn’t, so far as I know, a Christian Scientist; but his belief that all curves have simple formulas has some of her endearing naïvite. It could not last, not for Janet, probably, and certainly not for the mathematicians, who having laboriously defined a few pathological functions in the 19th Century had to admit by the 20th that almost all functions are pathological and that the exceptions are the rule.

What I’m talking about only seems to be a rare pattern. Some more examples: in ordinary life, we assume that knowing more about what’s going on in some competitive situation will improve our chance of prevailing. That expectation may or not be valid in these parts and for the nonce, but it certainly can’t be generalized. Years ago, the game theory folks devised games in which having more accurate information puts a player at a disadvantage. Subsequently, they realized that these monsters were not curiosities at all. Having more information turns out to be disadvantageous in most possible games. Again, Kurt Godel proved the existence of propositions whose truth could not be decided by deductions from the axioms of the system in question. Naturally, it turns out that essentially all possible true propositions are in this set.

Many apparently general procedures only work under very particular circumstances. One example is the simplex method of solving linear programming problems, the single most commonly used operation’s research technique. The simplex method is the means by which an enormous number of governmental, business, and military decisions are made because it can often quickly find the best available solution to real-world problems. But the method, which works splendidly in practice, shouldn’t be that efficient. Tested on randomly generated inputs, it takes a long time to find the answer. The utility of the method depends on something about our world and how we deal with it. Which really shouldn’t be too surprising. We know that the performance of other optimizing techniques also depends on the circumstances. It has been clear for a long time that natural selection only works in a small subset of possible environments; and, more generally, the efficiency of any learning algorithm depends on what there is to be learned. We can’t know in advance what method to use. It’s not just that it’s better to be lucky than good. You’ve got to be lucky to be good.

Meanwhile. All of these thoughts were occasioned as I set about the task of deleting a day’s worth of emails for advanced degrees, penile enlargements, photos of hot middle aged women, real estate deals, and work-at-home schemes from my computer. I suddenly realized that the spammers aspired to be Maxwell’s demons, agents that make a profit without doing any work. As you’ll recall, a Maxwell demon is a character in a thought experiment. The demon, acting as a gatekeeper between two gas-filled chambers, lets fast molecules go from left to right while only letting slow molecules go from right to left until one chamber is much hotter than the other. In this fashion, in apparent disregard of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, a temperature difference is created that can be used to drive a piston. The demon gets something for nothing, exactly what the Viagra salesmen are trying to get.

Now a Maxwell’s Demon is not really possible if only because it costs something to find out about the velocity and location of the particles and compute when to open or close the gate. But one of the reasons it costs to do the computation is rather subtle. Holding the intermediate results of your calculations in your head isn’t so expensive, but you not only have to remember things. You have to forget them, and that requires extra energy. When I encountered this argument years ago in an article in Scientific American, I never expected that it would turn out to have a real world application, but it does. It explains how the computer spammers succeed. They can impersonate Maxwell’s Demons by finessing the energetic costs of forgetfulness. They aren’t stuck with the vast amounts of garbage information they generate in the course of their operations, but only because they can get us to take out the trash for them.

Malpractice, Good for Everybody

Vilifying John Edwards as a trial lawyer hasn’t worked very well for the Republicans, who seem to have misjudged to what degree the public shares their visceral hatred for personal injury attorneys—in their innocence, many Republicans simply do not realize how much their version of common sense simply reflects their class interests. It isn’t that very many thoughtful people think that expensive lawsuits and occasional lottery-scale payouts are a rational way to curb the greed and arrogance of corporations. It’s just that in our dysfunctional system, random legal remedies are getting to be the only check on the power of money. If regulators won’t regulate, if legislators won’t legislate, if journalists won’t denounce, what else? In a nation of people on the take, the worst excesses can only be moderated by other people on the take. Why the enormous amounts of money some lawyers make from injury cases upsets the Republicans beats me. Aren’t they the party in favor of enormous rewards for dubious services? In red-state, red meat America, the Land of Betting on the Come, high rolling is as honorable as holy rolling. Junk politics, junk bonds, junk religion aren’t that much different, or less profitable, than junk lawsuits. If it pays, it’s patriotic. So why the hostility to shysters by folks who love CEOs?

By the way, if you really wanted to cut down on frivolous injury lawsuits, the obvious first step to take would be ensure that everybody had a guaranteed access to decent health care since a huge proportion of suits begin not out of the prospect of a big payday but out of fear of being ruined by medical expenses—at the outset, all the scalded lady wanted was enough money to pay her hospital bill. An efficient, universal health care system is out of the question, however, since it would lower the profits of the medical industry and put untold thousands of insurance company bureaucrats out of work. Anyhow, and this is the obvious consideration that never seems to be considered, the malpractice suits have their good side for the health industry. Because of the endlessly hyped threat of lawsuits, the doctors and hospitals are obliged to practice defensive medicine and order a host of expensive tests and procedures, most of which are not performed pro bono. I’m not aware if anybody has done the arithmetic, but do we know that the increased cost of insurance is as great as the increased profits from all those extra X-rays and blood workups? Many doctors find it personally distasteful to waste their patient’s money. My point is that the system provides them both an incentive to overspend and a handy and elastic excuse. Meanwhile, the purported malpractice crisis is also useful to right-wing politicians, who can blame escalating medical costs on lawsuits and thus deflect attention from the grotesque structural inefficiency of the system.

Silver Linings

When I read that the balance of trade improved slightly last month, I wasn’t surprised since the considerable recent decline in the value of the dollar has made imports more expensive while lowering the real price of export goods. That’s good or at least necessary, but only in the sense in which it is necessary to go to the dentist after years of sucking on hard candy. Like working off a bout of inflation or increasing the savings rate, redressing a gross imbalance of trade inevitably involves pain. Just who does most of the suffering is another question. Which is probably why right-wingers view the trade balance with equanimity. They are aware that the balance of trade will eventually be redressed, but that’s OK because under the current political economy of the United States, the cost of paying down the deficit can be shifted to the proles. No need to lower your profit rate to reflect the lower prices you get for your goods internationally when the difference can be more than made up by lowering the standard of living of your workers who will be buying more expensive consumer goods on lower wages. A utopian solution, always assuming, of course, you don’t end up with your head on a spear.

The prosperity of the United States is artificial to a considerable degree. Unless we really do figure out how to make empire pay on a grand scale, our standard of living must eventually come more into line with the rest of the world. Such an outcome is not necessarily tragic, both because the continual improvement of technology means that a relative decline doesn’t have to imply an absolute decline and because wealth simply isn’t the only measure of the well being of a nation. If the burden of a decline were equitably borne, paying down the trade imbalance wouldn’t have to unpleasant political consequences. Indeed, shared sacrifices can promote genuine unity in a country, something with which we’re completely unfamiliar after long decades of commercialized patriotism. It might also be a relief to have some goal in this life beyond the endless accumulation of things. I don’t expect things to work out in this happy fashion, however. As the American economy continues to come under competitive pressure, the natural reaction of the well off will be to compensate for declining national income by increasing their share of what’s left.

Enter the Dragon (Here and on Line 32)

Am I alone in thinking that the great problem of the left is not political but ideological? While Ehrenreich or Nader or Chomsky can score rhetorical points against the powers that be and turn out the usual crew of protesters, what are they offering as a coherent alternative to business as usual? What the heck is democratic socialism—or whatever—in the 21st Century? Acting as if a mass outbreak of virtue and compassion will solve our problems just doesn’t cut it.

I'm not writing this to carp. I keep looking around for a confident voice on the left that has something to offer but theoretical nuance or petit bourgeois moralizing. I'm not sure I'd buy into a fresh radical point of view, but I'd sure like to hear one. Capitalism itself seems to work much better when it is challenged and checked by a credible counterforce with serious ideas. Which probably requires the emergence of a group or class of people with a vital interest in changing things and some idea of what they want.

Incidentally, I don't have a clue what the title of this bit means either.