The Elitism of the 80th Percentile

It’s been a while since Socrates recommended understanding the state as the soul writ big, but a host of philosophers and psychologists have followed his suggestion right up to the present. It has recently been suggested, for example, that the political pattern of the executive who decides among the options presented to him by his counselors mirrors the way that decisions are actually made in the brains of individuals as the frontal lobe presents alternatives to some central coin-flipper. In another version of the theme, one more faithful to Plato, the various classes of political actors are related to levels of mental functioning in an updated, psychometric version of the divided line. In this rendition, the public at large just has to be manipulated since it can only be register images and emotional appeals— inexplicable dumb shows and noise. Expecting to get anywhere with even straightforward arguments makes about as much sense as erecting Braille billboards to reach the blind market. Full rationality only sets in somewhere North of 120 and only applies to a small fraction of our species. Since individuals of normal intelligence are simply incapable of operating at a fully adult level, they must be governed by rigid rules backed up by overt rewards and punishments and can never be expected to govern themselves by universal rational principles, even assuming, as many people don’t, that there are universal rational principles of right and wrong.

Stated thus baldly, IQ elitism makes a bad impression; but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t appeal to a great many individuals, including quite a few who go out of their way to come across as just plain folks when they’re playing to the cheap seats. Anyhow, to be fair, everybody recognizes that children have to be trained before they are educated and that prohibitions have to come before explanations if you don’t want your kids to run over somebody or to be run over themselves. It isn’t much a stretch to conclude that the mass of the population will never grow up and that politics has to take this fact into account. Indeed, in my experience, the familiar denunciation of liberal moral relativism has nothing to do with asserting the objectivity of ethics and everything to do with pedagogic realism, especially since so many conservatives are committed to an irrationalist theory of ethics anyhow. It is the liberals who are more likely to be rigorous moralists of a Kantian or semi-Kantian stripe.

I hardly have democratic instincts, and I certainly think that de facto intellectual incapacity of the majority of mankind has all kinds of implications for practical politics. Unfortunately, assuming that most people cannot make reasonable choices about their own lives quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy as the public is saturated with violent emotional appeals conveyed by the latest in high-tech propaganda techniques. No fair spending billions to make people worse so your pessimistic assessments will be proven right or to denounce their stupidity after so many years of attempting to stupefy ‘em. Fact is, we don’t know how enlightened the mass of humanity may become. I expect a philosopher of the Roman Empire would have scoffed at the notion that the mass of people could ever be literate.

Extractive Industries

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, miners believed that precious metals would grow back in exhausted mines if the digs were left fallow long enough. The Republican Party, perhaps because it harbors so many mining interests, seems to have a similar notion about the American middling classes. To judge from their taxation and debt policies, the Conservatives seem to think that they can indefinitely go on extracting a disproportionate share of resources from the ordinary folks without bringing about the permanent impoverishment of the class. Or maybe they figure that the middle-income stratum is as doomed as the Atlantic cod, and they may as well harvest as much of the wasting resource as possible. The bit about the fools rushing in does not apply either to fishermen or vultures.

For all their rhetoric about limited government, moneyed interests need a large and expensive government to protect them from enemies foreign and domestic, to keep the corporations from eating their own kind, and to subsidize the scientific research indispensable to economic growth. They also need the government to provide welfare services to the working poor because absent free clinics and public housing they’d eventually have to pay higher wages out of their own profits so that the proletarians can go on producing proles. The trick is to get all these benefits at a discount instead of bearing the costs of big government through an equitable tax system. Resources must be mined from somewhere, and the only available store of wealth is in the middle—not enough meat on the poor.

You’d think that the folks in the middle would eventually catch wise to all this; but the one tax that has gone up in every year of the Bush administration is the tax on stupidity; and the people in Kansas have yet to notice what a high bracket they’re in. They probably won’t notice for a while longer, either, because there are still family savings to go through to send the kids through college and home equity to borrow against. Above all, the Republican program is protected by the vanity of the small fry, who persist in believing that they are genuinely bourgeois when they are really just working people who have been flattered into thinking they are something grander.

The interesting question to me is what the right does as we pass the peaking point.

Providence

With the last bit of profit wrung from the passion of Terry Schaivo, the media looked anxiously around for its next obsession, trusting that just as Diana succeeded O.J. and Jackson followed Monica, some fundamentally trivial but sensational happening would provide the occasion for a fresh round of moral theater featuring artificially sweetened sentiment, recreational grief, and/or fabricated anger. It didn’t have to wait even a day. I guess it is appropriate that the Catholic Church got around to supplying the entertainment this time since the papacy pioneered the creation and exploitation of emotional hysteria. St. Bernardino, the Rush Limbaugh of the 16th century, could have stepped into a job at Fox without a moment of further training. Of course the death of a very old and very sick man is not remarkable or tragic; but properly spun it can supply yet another way to deflect public attention from important issues, including, in the case, the very important and very problematic things John Paul II did when he wasn’t dying.

Lines Masquerading as Volumes

Young historians attack the archives armed with hypotheses, which, though it is probably the best way to get your degree, has a signal disadvantage. It isn’t just that the people in the past weren’t doing their damnedest to give birth to the present. Their preoccupations don’t normally have much overlap with ours. An historian expecting to find Philip II obsessing about the rights of the unborn is like the gnat that asked Alice what insects she rejoiced in back home. Or, to reverse the temporality, imagine a time-traveling imperial chancellor asking W about his stand on the Investiture Controversy. Whole eras doubtless have more bandwidth than individual human beings, but the agenda is necessarily extremely narrow since in the absence of radical selectiveness, disagreement would be as impossible as consensus in the vast, deserted forest of the possible. It follows that to actually encounter the past, it is first of all necessary to become familiar with its hobbyhorses and that requires a certain amount of aimless rambling in the sources, not a very popular activity in our rapid age.

Run Over by an Ambulance: Convenient (Traditional Chinese Saying)

Reverse plagiarism—claiming that somebody else wrote your words—used to be more common than direct plagiarism because authority was a much more valuable commodity than words, which, after all, can be improvised on the spot. Nowadays we fetishize originality, but reverse plagiarism still has its uses. The Soviet-era literary critic Michel Bahhtine, silenced by Stalin, published many of his most important critical works under the name of various party apparatchiks, and right-wing publicists regularly quote the pseudo-Abraham Lincoln to bolster their ideological prejudices with stolen prestige. For my part, I find that reverse plagiarism allows me to float more ideas than I have a license to conceive since it isn’t quite decent to contain multitudes. Besides, there are certain notions that not only deserve to circulate, but deserve to circulate as anonymous proverbial wisdom without the impediment of any author whatsoever. For example:

Every time somebody complains that liberals only love mankind and not men, I find myself reaching around for a folksy counter that might point out in a concise and earthy fashion that a statistical approach to human affairs reflects a basic ethical principle, the equal claim that every person has on our moral respect. By the time you’ve typed in that many words, you may as well deliver a lecture to the normal distribution and the Second Critique while you’re at it. So I’m very tempted to appeal to that old proverb, “One man’s blood has as much salt in it as another.”

Second instance: A number of books and articles have been written about the appeal of Republican politics to people whose interests are seriously harmed by Republican policies—on a per capita basis, the red states benefit vastly more from Federal money than the blue and good old boys are much more likely to go bankrupt than professional people in Connecticut. Just as few of the poor sods who got gunned down marching up Seminary Ridge owned slaves or benefited at all from the semi-feudal society of the South, working people support the initiatives of the Conservatives who routinely exploit them. Which is why I want to quote the saying, “Mistreated dogs are the most loyal” as if there were such a saying.

Uncle Fuckers of the Black Hills

I recently watched the first six or seven episodes of HBO’s Deadwood series. The characters in this revisionist Western swear interminably, and after a couple of nights of listening to them, I found myself casually telling a secretary on the phone, “Yeah, that’s the right report. I read the whole fucking thing.”

By the way, if you can avoid the consequences of spending so much time in bad company, you should certainly give Deadwood a try, precisely for its language. In between the “limber-pricked cocksuckers” and other Homeric epithets, the dialogue features a texture and density that exploits the whole range of registers from the merest expletives to self-conscious preciosity—a virtuoso instance of what Bahktine meant by the dialogic. Corking good story, too, though the principle villain is perhaps a bit too much like the Butcher in Gangs of New York.

Formal Constraints

The theory of history you espouse has a lot to do with how many sentences you’re willing to devote to its description. A one- paragraph history of the world has just enough room to promote idealism, but the one-liners are liable to sound rather Marxist:

History is the story of how various elites struggled with one another over who was going to get to abuse the mass of the population.

An Homage to Chesterton

Anybody who participates in an Internet discussion soon discovers that the range of audible opinions is extremely narrow. It’s not that original notions don’t appear. They do, but for the most part they rapidly disappear because they are not acknowledged. The Law of Least Hassles takes care of that. To put things in a Piagetian way, adults find it far easier to assimilate input to their existing kit of mental structures than to accommodate significant novelties by actually learning something new. But one shouldn’t assume that the apparent deafness of the public is absolute. From time to time, minds do get changed after all. Effect lags behind cause, however, because processing new ideas requires neurological changes and even more because most of us are too vain to lose an argument on the spot—it would be like taking a dump in public.

Like the catatonic and the comatose, normal individuals register more than they let on. Which is why, for example, radicals who become reactionaries and reactionaries who become radicals don’t have to learn any new rhetorical moves; and, more generally, why the Zeitgeist is able to lurch so rapidly from one set of unwarranted assumptions to another—it’s very easy to overlook the long period of preparation. The pattern is especially obvious in the case of intellectuals who support traditional versions of religion. Granted the prideful perversity natural in a strong mind, defending an indefensibly silly set of ideas is a great pleasure; but even great pleasures eventually stale. At that point it suffices to simply give up the game. One hardly has to be convinced of anything since the mere truth of the secular position had been registered long before.

The Unspeakable Gods of the Abyss

Creationists and Intelligent Design folks routinely resort to God-of-the-Gaps arguments in order to find room for a creator in the workings of nature, and biologists routinely remind them how many of the gaps have been filled in over the years. Gaps remain, however, including gaps that are perhaps not likely to be filled in any time soon, most obviously in such intrinsically difficult issues as the origin of living things. Even things that happened more recently than 4 billion years ago are also hard to figure out. For example, it has become more and more clear over the last few years that we don’t have a very good handle on what gives with the microbial majority of living things. Only a small percentage of single-celled organisms can be cultured by current methods, but we’ve know from DNA-sequencing experiments on natural samples that there must be many, many unknown forms, including lots of members of the mysterious domain of the Archaea, which, it transpires, are not a handful of weird relics lurking in thermal vents as they first appeared by in 1977, but ecologically important members of many ordinary environments. Our branch of the tree of life also turns out to be bushier than we thought—many unknown eukaryotes are also hidden somewhere if we could only figure out how to grow and identify them. Meanwhile, we have a more general problem than simply accounting for all these cryptic organisms. We have a basic problem in figuring out how to make sense of the phylogeny of all these bugs since they regularly swap genes, thus seriously tangling up the usual diagrams.

Traditional evolutionary theory was devised to make sense of multi-cellular eukaryotes. Indeed, as botanists like Verne Grant have complained, the historical bias of the theory has effectively been yet more parochial, privileging animals over plants, even though flowers and trees don’t evolve or speciate in exactly the same fashion as birds and beasts. In current phylogenies plants, animals, and even fungi occupy the same branch of the tree while most of the fundamental diversity of life lies elsewhere. To the extent that evolutionary theory is based on the usual suspects, it suffers from a serious sampling problem.

All in all, if you want to assert the possibility that big surprises may await us in the understanding of living things, you won’t have any trouble finding plenty of gaps that remain to be filled in. What the Creationists and other theists don’t seem to recognize, however, is that the existence of gaps is not an argument for their view of things. What emerges from dark is much more likely to be even less congruent with theological preconceptions than what is already known because the journey of the sciences is an expedition away from the comfortable territory of the human into an undefined Antarctica. If traditional evolutionary thinking is objectionably zoomorphic, theological reasoning is even more wedded to a view of things dependent on HOX genes. ID, for example, involves the notion of an agent that makes living things, a rather unimaginative piece of theorizing. So far as we know, the only entities in the universe that can be said to act at all are members of certain terrestrial phyla so the God, gods, or aliens who supposedly made life turn out to be a run-of-the-mill bilatrians, real or virtual organisms imagined in our image. Unfortuanately, the trend of discoveries in biology suggest that it’s a good bet that what dwells in the gaps will not turn out to be something so familiar as a deity or a Vulcan. Think of something from a Lovecraft story.

The Lay of the Land

Michael Jackson could have avoided all the unpleasantness by becoming a Republican politician. Whether scandals and trials occur in this country has far more to do with who controls the media and the Justice department than anything about the actual behavior of the people involved. Thus Clinton underwent grueling attacks because of old business dealings that proved to be utterly ethical, and Kerry was savaged for his heroic Vietnam record while drug use, desertion, insider trading, lying, torture, and war mongering somehow never counted against Bush because his side controls the machinery of demonization. Politics in these parts is like a game of football played on a hillside where one team permanently defends the heights, though in this case, the desirable terrain is scarcely the moral high ground.

What makes the tilt of playing field especially invidious is the way in which it affects everybody’s judgment and not just the casual observers. Liberals and moderates would very much like to believe that the game is fair even when devotion to fairness impairs objectivity. The strategy of lowered expectations works on all of us so that when something like the Iraqi election occurs, we applaud it for having happened at all even though it is a highly ambiguous development that may have more to do with the initiation of a civil war than the advent of democracy. In a world where everything that can possibly be credited to the maximum leader is hosannahed by a professional choir while everything that is problematic about his administration is excused by legions of well-paid shills, we need to make a general correction for the queered frame of reference of the public arena. Bush’s mistakes and crimes will look even worse, his accomplishments far smaller once the anesthesia wears off.

The Short Circuit

The Assyriologist Bottero liked to imagine the glee with which the Sumerians greeted the invention of prostitution, which at the time must have seemed like the I-pod and sliced bread all in one. As any economist will tell you, money is an excellent way to manage access to scarce goods. Better still, with pros there is no commitment, children, or emotion; and, anyhow, hookers are often more polite than waitresses. But as Heidi Fleisch pointed out, the greatest thing about buying it is not so much that the whores arrive on schedule, but that they can be counted on to leave afterwards. Unfortunately, it would turn out that prostitution is not all that simple in practice for a host of ethical, psychological, and bacteriological reasons. Nevertheless, like many other market-based solutions to a fundamental problem, it surely must have seemed like a wonderful idea at the time, almost as wonderful as the scheme, recently repopularized by wealthy right wingers, to simply buy the human mind so that it can be counted on to promote the interests of its corporate sponsors.

You can pay somebody to act as if they desire you, and you can pay somebody to tell you that you’re right. Both cases have the same limitation. The love you rent is not real, and the truth you buy is not truth. If you’re rich and powerful enough to be able to ignore reality, that may not matter much. But you have to be careful on one point. One of the things that the journalists, public relations men, and purchased intellectuals were paid to discover was that you are indeed so grand that you don’t need to have any truck with realities because like the Word of God, your actions create a world ex nihilo. The truth of that conclusion, however, is only as reliable as a whore’s love.

Of course politicians and other grandees have been buying the services of flacks for a very long time. Things are getting more serious now, however, because the bought voices include an increasing number of academics, scientists, and supposedly objective journalists whose whole raison d’etre is their independence. The right may imagine that the universities are crammed with crazy lefties, but the profs who matter most are not Native American studies guys vaporing about little Eichmanns or comp lit mavens deconstructing deconstruction but the armies of engineers, scientists, and economists who hire themselves out to corporations and ideologically motivated think tanks at a time when the old ideals of intellectual objectivity and public service are increasingly corroded. Serious journalism is in even worse shape as punditry follows the money as surfers used to follow the sun. Armstrong Williams has a lot of company. His behavior is the rule, not the exception, though more august—and whiter—media hookers are more discrete about the connection between their opinions and the prospects for television airtime and lucrative speaking engagements.

Like wiring, the safe functioning of a civilization depends on the integrity of the insulation. The current set up has been designed to short circuit and can be expected to cause quite a few fires. Appearances aside, it was never that good an idea.

The Motivation of the Work

I’m regularly accused of idealism for suggesting that people are motivated to do their jobs not only by the prospect of rewards or the sanction of punishments but because of the intrinsic pleasure of performing well. Sometimes my critics will allow that this automotivation takes place in certain highfalutin occupations in the arts or sciences but not for the girl who pours your coffee at the coffee shop or the pure schmuck who sweeps up the office—evidently these folks inhabit a world in which wage slavery is slavery indeed and life is perpetual degradation. They may be right. I do date back to an epoch in which people didn’t conceive of working as a straight-up trade of self-respect for money. If things have changed, however, I doubt if they’ve changed all that much. I certainly wouldn’t willingly hire a janitor who didn’t want to sweep clean, even when I wasn’t watching; and I wouldn’t want to be the janitor either. That said, I’m well aware that under the current dispensation lots of people feel like whores in a system of universal prostitution. I simply regard this state of affairs as pathological.

Speaking descriptively and not homiletically, I don’t think the human world would work even as well as it does if the only motivating forces were extrinsic rewards and punishments. The pay system that structures and energizes the activities of the workers in a firm couldn’t function if the various participants didn’t organize their efforts around more global goals than the next paycheck. Reward systems simply don’t supply enough information to organize or coordinate the complex activities of even small companies or motivate the particular intelligent actions that make up modern work. It says something about the screwiness of the times that this point has to be made.

The human willingness to work is hardly unproblematic. The owners of enterprises routinely exploit the motivation of the work to get more effort from their employees than they are willing to pay for and not just in a handful of glamorous businesses. Discount retailing in this country is parasitic on the absurdly good work habits of abused employees, for example, which is why the Wal-Mart happy face is properly drawn with fangs. It would be a sad world indeed, however, if the rewards and challenges of the job itself were not a third thing between the demands of the masters and the acquiescence of the slaves.

Keeping the Canaries in the Air

The marked increase in income and wealth disparities in the United States over the last couple of decades makes it appear that we gave grown far more than we actually have. If the enormous paper assets of high-income people were magically redistributed to ordinary people, the value of the dollar would plummet because the economy lacks the productive capacity to back up monies of account with real goods and services. Does anybody think that the U.S. has the medical facilities, equipment, and trained personnel to provide adequate health care to its entire population or enough teachers and schools to educate them all adequately?

I don’t mean to overstate the case. The U.S. is surely a very wealthy country that could probably afford to do better by all of its inhabitants without drastic dislocations. I do think it is likely, however, that those of us who promote more egalitarian tax and income policies should recognize that there is no boundless store of wealth to divvy up. The profits of the corporations are only sky high because they don’t get spent. The very, very wealthy mostly get immunity to risk and social and political power rather than increased consumption out of their privilege. If their share of wealth were diminished, it would hardly increase the prosperity of middling people dollar for dollar. Over a longer period of time, an increase in the spending power of ordinary people would probably tend to increase the real productive capacity of the nation; but in the short run, it might well result in inflation and lower stock prices.

The Hills are Dead with Mounds of Fossils

If the Democrats want some advice about how to defeat Bush’s Social Security phaseout, they would be well advised to spend some time over at Panda’s Thumb, a website dedicated to defending biology against the well-funded assaults of Creationists and Intelligent Design proponents. The rhetorical problem is the same in either case. How do you contrive effective arguments in an open and shut case? It turns out to be remarkably disorientating to find yourself searching for yet more reasons why 5 plus 7 does indeed equal 12. Indeed, the very act of coming up with novel things to say in a debate that should have been over long ago creates the impression that there is something left to debate and impressions are all that matters in these cases.

With negligibly small exceptions, people don’t register the logic of arguments and simply follow the lead of whoever flatters them most effectively and doesn’t challenge what they heard as small children. Under the circumstances, nothing is less useful than a cogent argument. Thus the most effective weapon deployed by biologists is the old bit about how evolution is the way that God uses natural selection as his means of creation—an utterly irrelevant sentiment that doesn’t in fact bear thinking through since what occurs in evolution is nothing like a process fit to any purpose, divine or otherwise. That it takes 4.5 billion years to synthesize the likes of me is not much of a recommendation for a chemical engineer. The yield is miniscule, the quality control deplorable. None of which matters since the point of the rhetoric about secondary causes is not to make a point but to pacify the listeners or, in many cases, to pacify the scientists who wish to go on believing themselves. A pacifier doesn’t have to yield milk. The Democrats, cursed with the right side of the Social Security debate, will probably need to contrive similarly invalid appeals in order to prevail.

Is There Such a Thing as Nature?

Every time Star Trek needed a new plot device Spock or one of his successors would discover yet another piece of physics just in the nick of time. You’d think that things would have been pretty well figured out in 200 years and certainly in 300, but the sequels continue to feature novel “I’ve-never-seen anything-like-it!” L rays and M rays and N rays ad infinitum and it’s a good bet they’ll keep on finding ‘em even when the intergalactic Borders is featuring the latest thriller, WC is for Water Closet. That’s OK for television science fiction, which has no more need of plausibility than my recent strenuous but rewarding dream involving Lindsey Davenport and Charlotte Church, In policy discussions, however, it is more problematic to begin with the premise that nature has limitless depths that will make possible a technological fix to any problem. Some economists and others such as Michael Creighton seem to think that the laws of fiction apply to the real world and that some thing will turn up to save the day after we’ve exhausted the oil and fresh water and good soil. Willing to recognize that any material resource is limited, they fail to consider that human ignorance is also a finite good and that we are using it up at a furious pace. Of course, I don’t know for sure that nanobots won’t turn the Arctic Ocean into lemonade. The point is, I don’t know they will either and neither do they.

Science and technology look very different when you view them prospectively instead of retrospectively. It’s easy to make a very long list of amazing discoveries and inventions, many of which were so surprising that it took a long time to figure out something they were good for. But that’s looking backwards. The tract record of predicted technical triumphs is less impressive, even if you discount the business about the gyrocopters. AI was the wave of the future in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and remains the wave of the future today. In disdain of innumerable announcements to the contrary, some in the New York Times, cancer remains largely incurable except in mice who, by a tragic irony, seldom have adequate health insurance. It’s even remotely possible that hydrogen cars just aren’t going to work. In twenty years of working on technology transfer, I’ve seen far brilliant ideas crash than triumph, which is not, of course, an indictment of brilliant ideas but a consequence of the fact that the sciences really are empirical, i.e. they are a form of wagering. Scientific triumphalists are like moronic statisticians who estimate the odds at the tables by interviewing people who are cashing in their chips. No wonder they’re so optimistic. But in science as the rest of life, it’s much easier to find something you like than to get exactly what you want.

Meanwhile, we are aware of various physical limits that seem to affirmatively rule out some of the fondest dreams of teenagers and libertarians. Perhaps some of these limits are not absolute or can be worked around, but limits like the speed of light sure look serious; and the onus on maintaining that they are defeasible surely ought to fall on those who blithely assume we can escape our ravaged planet and whip off to Alpha Centuri and will, too, as soon as the demand line crosses the supply line at the right price.

Truth told, I resist technological optimism for a personal reason. I find the notion that nature cannot stand before the human will somewhat sickening. My Father, who had a engineering outlook, used to pronounce “Whatever the mind of man can imagine, he can accomplish;” but even as a child this sort of 1930s, Raymond Massey-style Prometheanism repelled me. If nature offers the mind no limit, if it cannot stand before our wishes, it sublimes like dry ice, invisible in its perfect transparency. All that’s left is the likes of us, the little or not so little god of the world. I hadn’t even heard of Martin Heidegger in those days, but I guess even then I recognized that Being-in didn’t quite work without the-World because the content of our humanity is bound up with the things and their opacity. And I kinda like the things.

Of course reality is not really going to go away—the Periodic table and the Balmer series are not fads. Unfortunately a partial and temporary triumph of human will over the traditional limits of human life also presents a great danger, not only because the city in the clouds is going to come tumbling down one of these days but because even before that denouncement, the erstwhile happy citizens of that gated community are doomed to a terminal case of anomie and loneliness. As they used to say in Pravda, it is not accidental that some these folks are dreaming about the end of the world, some as Götterdämmerung, some as the Rapture.

Let Us Now Braise Famous Men

Jared Diamond’s new book Collapse is one of the few books that have some prospect of actually affecting public opinion and political debate in the United States because its author has a gift for calm and even-handed discussion of issues that are mostly just yelled about and because, unlike most academics, he manages not to reach. As one says of competent second basemen, he plays within himself. Since the fundamental facts of our environmental situation are not that complex, there’s no reason to get theoretical on anybody’s ass. In this respect, Diamond is like Clinton, another persuasive man who recognized the inutility of complex arguments in public venues. There are lots of important questions that are beyond simple explication, but you might as well stick with the simple stuff because that’s all that can be heard anyway.

I’m guessing that folks who find their way to this site have already heard quite a bit about Diamond and his book even if they haven’t read it yet. Besides, if you’ll put up with me, you probably have a taste for something slightly more challenging or maybe just something slightly more perverse and pretentious (in a good way) than Diamond. If Collapse is for the freshmen, the most recent work of Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides, is for us juniors and seniors—the grads won’t find it sufficiently recherché. It’s also about issues of great contemporary relevance, but its argument requires a few paragraphs to summarize and a modicum of historical knowledge to appreciate fully, all of which limit its commercial possibilities. By speaking at length and perhaps at gunpoint, you could convey the gist of what Sahlins has to say to almost anyone; but that wouldn’t help much. People can appreciate a joke whose point has to be explained; but it won’t make them laugh.

Sahlins is an anthropologist who is generally identified—and dismissed—as the last of the purebred cultural relativists in the lineage of Franz Boas. This characterization is not entirely wrong. In Apologies to Thucydides, as in his other books, Sahlins does defend the thesis that the actions of nations and individuals are only explicable in terms of their cultural setting. He doesn’t leave it at that, however, since culture, indispensable in the explanation of history, is itself a product of history and history, in turn, is embedded in nature. The dialectical-minded Sahlins isn’t an immaterialist, but he is determined to take mediations into account. He is critical, for example, of explanations of international politics that treat “that restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death” as the beginning or ending of an explanation because he sees the war of all against all beloved of the hardboiled realists as a historical contingency rather than a given of human nature that has always obtained and can never really be transcended. Like every other game, the Great Game has rules and a history. It is a cultural artifact. To think otherwise is as silly as to imagine that the rook has a natural proclivity, no doubt coded in its nucleic acids, to travel in straight lines up or across the board.

It was hardly an accident that Thucydides evolved his tough and cynical view of the human condition in this context of the Peloponnesian war. Machiavelli’s habitat was the Italy of the Borgia for similar reasons, and the Big Fish Eat Little Fish doctrine of the Arthashastra whose author actually calls his basic principle fish logic (Matsya nyaya) grew up in the tide pool of Mauryan India. Ruthless regimes of international politics come into existence under specific historical circumstances. The Athenians may have been sincere in arguing to the Melians, “Of the Gods we believe, and of the men we know, that by a necessary law of nature, they rule whatever they can,” but their resort to extortion and terror in order to maintain an unstable thalassocracy was actually a historical novelty. As Cleon explained to them, “Your empire is a despotism and your subjects disaffected conspirators.” In the wake of a series of historical contingencies, Athens had become a state that had to lord it over its neighbors in order to remain prosperous and independent. Although the cultural prestige of the city and its role as the defender of the Greeks against the Persians put an attractive face on its hegemony, soft power was never going to be enough to maintain its hegemony.

Sahlins compares Athens in the Peloponnesian War to the Kingdom of Bau in the Fiji Islands during its long war with Rewa, the Sparta of the tale. Drawing a parallel between the School of Greece and the dominant power of the Cannibal Isles is a bit of a jeu d’esprit—Sahlins is well aware of the limitations of this kind of analogy—but the real key of the allegory is neither Hellenic nor Polynesian. According to Sahlins, both Athens and Bau exercised a novel form of imperium, which he calls Arche, hegemony without sovereignty. Unlike the European colonial empires, these powers did not directly rule their dependencies by conquest or administration. They lacked anything like the economic resources or sheer manpower to do that. Instead, they “relied on awe and fear—which is to say, on a reputation for power, confirmed by strategic displays of it. Rather than mild, the Athenians and Bauans could be all the more brutal, so they would be known for it.”

I don’t know how accurately Sahlins analyzes thing Fijian—a good part of the book is historical ethnography. His take on the Athenians, on the other hand, strikes me as plausible and even partly congruent with some of the views of experts like Donald Kagan whose writings on the Peloponnesian War are often cited by the neocons apropos of contemporary foreign policy dilemmas. The right, with its trademark taste for paranoia, draws very different conclusions from these analyses than a leftist like Sahlins, however. Conservatives believe that the current historical situation reflects the natural condition of our kind so that we may as well be happy warriors in the war of all against all even if a quick calculation shows that we are seriously outnumbered. The alternative is to recognize that we can call off Ragnarok and help the world system evolve in a peaceable direction.

Fool’s Paradise

In my last comment, I alluded to the best known of Basho’s haikus in a rare attempt to connect with actual readers, who are more likely to have heard about the crow and the frog than other examples. Part of the point of reading a book like Ueda’s Basho and His Interpreters, however, is to wander away from the usual guided tour and get a slightly better idea what Basho’s oeuvre is like in itself. The poems that strike a Western reader as Zen-like exemplify a by now thoroughly domesticated variety of the exotic, at least for a West coast kid like me who grew up in the heyday of the Beats; but many of Basho’s poems are rather like 19th Century vers de societe or classical epigrams and most of them depend for their full effect on literary echoes inaudible to outsiders or historical and geographic references. Ueda’s book has another virtue. Because he quotes several Japanese interpretations of each poem, his book reveals that their obscurity is not simply a function of cultural distance. The locals aren’t sure what they mean either. One might expect that different readers would have differing takes on the metaphysical implications of such brief and allusive verses, but the literal meaning is not settled either. We shouldn’t make the school kid assumption that the grown ups have the answers in the answer book, even to something as tractable as the plain sense of seventeen syllables.

Old men often become indecent, showing less and less respect for cherished vanities like the fantasy that people have attained, if not the truth, then at least a stable consensus of error. As a matter of fact very little is ever really settled, but I suppose it’s a bit malicious of me to enjoy rubbing it in. Since I’m not that old yet, I guess it must be precocity.

Of Mere Being

Reading a recent translation with commentary of the poems of Basho, I found myself reminded of Lucretius, another philosophical poet living in an age of political consolidation. Dactylic hexameter may be an elaborate instrument compared to the minimalism of haiku, but the flatness conveyed by these contrasting means is similar. For both the Roman and the Japanese, the most refined and difficult of tropes is literal speech. What is astonishing about the Nature of Things is the possibility that atoms and void are not a myth but a fact. What is amazing about the frog and its plop is the possibility that the frog stands for nothing more than a frog, the plop for nothing more than a plop. Of course it is highly likely that Basho’s poem doesn’t record a singular event in a specific swamp anymore than Lucretius could automatically arrive at an accurate version of how things actually are by purely literary means—after all atomism isn’t the true physics. The everyday absolute is a stylistic effect like all the others. The ethic behind these contrivances is perhaps more substantive.

Historians of philosophy sometimes imply that the Epicurus claimed that merely existing is a pleasure in order to avoid a reputation for promoting immorality—the expensive and lurid enjoyments that hedonism might be expected to recommend are counterproductive and unnecessary if it suffices to breath and think. I’ve finally decided that the judgment of Epicurus reflected a veritable perception instead of or perhaps in addition to a dialectical finesse. I’m not scholar enough to judge whether a similar insight is expressed in the Mahayana notion of the Buddha’s body of bliss, which seems to imply that pleasure is the ground note of every sensation, even agony. It’s certainly a bit eccentric of me to arrive at the Fire Sermon with marshmallows and popcorn, but if this is indeed the other world, as I have so often suggested, the drip of the saline solution in the I.V. beside the death bed is as good a transcendental instance as any other and the shivering crow on the bald branch is, if anything, objectionably gemütlich.

An Unpleasant Consideration

The President’s efforts to privatize Social Security appear to be faltering, but I take little pleasure in this development. Second term presidents thwarted in their domestic ambitions inevitably switch their attention to foreign affairs where they have much more freedom of action. If Bush bombs in Congress, he’s all the more likely to bomb in Tehran.

Mo

Just as a arrow shot into the air approaches its zenith long after has exhausted most of its impetus and the shortest day of the year is the beginning of Winter, political movements are often merely coasting in their hour of triumph. Hubris has its own physics. The Conservative tide in the United States, for example, has finally awakened countervailing forces even among the hapless Democrats. The Republicans may continue to prevail for some time just as it keeps on getting colder after December 21 even though the sun is rising in the skies every day; but the underlying trends are actually quite unfavorable for them and not simply because any ruling party is vulnerable to failures. Republican policies only make sense on the assumption of continuing American predominance, but this premise becomes less and less plausible with every new report on the trade deficits. Meanwhile, as every survey shows, the administration is far to the right of the public on most issues, though people remain ignorant of Bush’s stated objectives and policies because of the absence of a free press in the United States. The likelihood that the second derivatives are unfavorable to the right is not necessarily a happy fact, however, because movements can become violent when they sense that time is no longer on their side.