Judicial Notice
With a resounding title like the Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Bryan Ward-Perkins’ new book figures to be a magisterial brick. In fact it is more accurate to call it an extended pamphlet—it’s barely more than 200 pages. Written for a polemical purpose, it is a move in the on-going debate about the advent of the Dark Ages. Over the last twenty or thirty years, several influential historians have tried to re-imagine the era between 200 and 800 AD as “a quite decisive period of history that stands on its own” rather than a depressing coda to a glorious antiquity. Ward-Perkins is not entirely hostile to some of this work. He obviously respects Peter Brown, for example, though he points out that such books as the World of Late Antiquity and the Rise of Western Christendom focus on the spiritual and intellectual dimensions of the era rather than its economics and politics. But Ward-Perkins dissents when revisionist historians attempt to downplay the gravity and violence of the fall of the Empire in favor of an irenic vision in which the Romans and barbarians gradually accommodate to one another. In the West, at least, there was indeed a catastrophe in the 5th Century, a comprehensive crash comparable to the collapses of civilizations documented by Jared Diamond.
Mentalities are fine, but Ward-Perkins concerns himself with piles of broken pottery, the remains of old villages, and the bones of ancient cattle to address realities. The contrast in material conditions before and after the 5th Century is startling. One easily forgets how wealthy and comfortable the Empire had become, not only for a tiny elite but also for farmers and tradesmen who lived in well-build houses with tile roofs and emptied the wine and oil from mountains of amphora. Literally mountains. A view of Rome from 1625 shows Monte Testaccio, a 50-meter high hill made of some 53 million amphora imported from southern Spain.
Before the Barbarian invasions, the prosperity of the Western Empire depended on the long-distance exchange of cash crops and other goods. When first Gaul and Spain and then Africa fell to invaders, the dismembered parts could not sustain themselves either economically or demographically. The enormous manufacturing industries that used standardized methods to gin out good quality clothing, pottery, and weapons failed. As Ward-Perkins documents, domestic animals became smaller as farmers reverted to less efficient subsistence agriculture. Though the book doesn’t address the issue directly, one can only assume that people were similarly stunted. Things really, genuinely, no fooling, went to Hell.
I think Ward-Perkins makes his case effectively, but it’s telling that he needs so few pages to do so. The point of view he combats was never very strong in arguments and evidence. Its appeal was and is extrinsic. Ward-Perkins claims that it has become convenient to find nice things to say about the barbarians since most of the E.U. nations are heirs to the barbarian kingdoms; but I think there is something else at work besides multicultural sweetness and light, though the fetching picture of the barbarian couple he reproduces from a recent French book suggests he’s got a point. I note that, as it did in late antiquity, much of our intellectual life has turned inward—Derrida and Lacan are highly reminiscent of Plotinus and Proclus—so that the mental life of the Church fathers and Neoplatonics seems more interesting to many scholars than the noise and numbers of economics and demography. Writers who obsess about what people think and feel instead of what they do and make have become idealists in practice if not in theory. They just aren’t interested in what used to be quaintly called the external world.
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Monday, September 12, 2005
Of Some of the People, By Some of the People, For Some of the People
The administration is spending billions of dollars in response to Katrina. One is supposed to be grateful that they have finally decided to do something, but it is quite likely that they are going to waste an enormous amount of public money in the process. The same cost-plus, no-bid contracts that were awarded to Bush’s political allies in Iraq are very much a feature of the current relief effort. Of course from a purely partisan point of view, this sort of looting of the treasury is not a waste at all since it’s going into the right pockets; but for those of us who aren’t in on the swag, it’s just more looting. And the damage is not merely fiscal. Bush et. al. are past masters of using emergency situations as cover for passing laws that continue their settled policy of dismantling unions and weakening environmental protections.
The Republicans harm us, as much when they are driven to address genuine public needs as when they pursue more overtly selfish ends. Last year’s Medicare bill, for example, ostensibly enacted to provide drug benefits to seniors, has turned out to be a gruesomely expensive boondoggle that provides minimum help at maximum cost while containing a host of deal sweeteners for the political connected drug firms. No bill at all would have been much preferable to this measure, which not even the conservatives have bothered to defend except as a more or less necessary piece of political cynicism in an election year.
In lieu of encouraging the government to do anything at all over the next three years, responsible politicians need to follow a consistent program of obstructionism. Nothing good will come from this corrupt crew, whose defenders are more accurately described as accomplices than supporters. What we have here is a new version of the Grant administration, except that it was possible to believe that the President in that case was simply naïve. It was said that Grant never met a businessman he didn’t trust. But Bush is a businessman who, absent amnesia, should surely know better than to trust himself.
The administration is spending billions of dollars in response to Katrina. One is supposed to be grateful that they have finally decided to do something, but it is quite likely that they are going to waste an enormous amount of public money in the process. The same cost-plus, no-bid contracts that were awarded to Bush’s political allies in Iraq are very much a feature of the current relief effort. Of course from a purely partisan point of view, this sort of looting of the treasury is not a waste at all since it’s going into the right pockets; but for those of us who aren’t in on the swag, it’s just more looting. And the damage is not merely fiscal. Bush et. al. are past masters of using emergency situations as cover for passing laws that continue their settled policy of dismantling unions and weakening environmental protections.
The Republicans harm us, as much when they are driven to address genuine public needs as when they pursue more overtly selfish ends. Last year’s Medicare bill, for example, ostensibly enacted to provide drug benefits to seniors, has turned out to be a gruesomely expensive boondoggle that provides minimum help at maximum cost while containing a host of deal sweeteners for the political connected drug firms. No bill at all would have been much preferable to this measure, which not even the conservatives have bothered to defend except as a more or less necessary piece of political cynicism in an election year.
In lieu of encouraging the government to do anything at all over the next three years, responsible politicians need to follow a consistent program of obstructionism. Nothing good will come from this corrupt crew, whose defenders are more accurately described as accomplices than supporters. What we have here is a new version of the Grant administration, except that it was possible to believe that the President in that case was simply naïve. It was said that Grant never met a businessman he didn’t trust. But Bush is a businessman who, absent amnesia, should surely know better than to trust himself.
The Inextinguishable Laughter of the Blessed Gods
While everyone except salaried administration personnel and pundits on Fox has denounced the conduct of the Iraqi war, criticism of the war itself remains strangely muted beyond the radical left. A great many Democrats, including self-defined liberal Democrats, favored the invasion even though most of them thought the PR preparation was inadequate. For them no less than for Rumsfeld or Bush, international laws and treaties are just scraps of paper; and the doctrine of preemption is unproblematic. But the liberal hawks have more in common with the administration than the traditional sociopathy of the international relations professional. They share the right’s belief that America can do anything it likes because of its enormous military and economic preponderance. Beneath their purported political realism lies a thick deposit of nationalist fantasy. They seem to actually believe that we can get away with almost any level of incompetence.
The theologians missed something when they didn’t include complacency among the divine attributes. A God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal is necessarily also immune to anxiety. I mildly care about such things, because I’ve always liked the first person of the Trinity. Some fictions are more lovable than others—I’ve still got the hots for Elizabeth Bennett, for example—and part of the appeal of the figure of Father to me is the attraction of somebody, someplace who has everything under control. It would be similarly gratifying to imagine that one lived in a nation so powerful as to be unmenaced even by its own errors. I’ve got a head cold just now, so I can’t say with 100% certainty that our shit doesn’t stink. Nevertheless, I believe as an article of rational faith that it does. I don’t think that any country ever has or ever could achieve so transcendent a status.
While everyone except salaried administration personnel and pundits on Fox has denounced the conduct of the Iraqi war, criticism of the war itself remains strangely muted beyond the radical left. A great many Democrats, including self-defined liberal Democrats, favored the invasion even though most of them thought the PR preparation was inadequate. For them no less than for Rumsfeld or Bush, international laws and treaties are just scraps of paper; and the doctrine of preemption is unproblematic. But the liberal hawks have more in common with the administration than the traditional sociopathy of the international relations professional. They share the right’s belief that America can do anything it likes because of its enormous military and economic preponderance. Beneath their purported political realism lies a thick deposit of nationalist fantasy. They seem to actually believe that we can get away with almost any level of incompetence.
The theologians missed something when they didn’t include complacency among the divine attributes. A God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal is necessarily also immune to anxiety. I mildly care about such things, because I’ve always liked the first person of the Trinity. Some fictions are more lovable than others—I’ve still got the hots for Elizabeth Bennett, for example—and part of the appeal of the figure of Father to me is the attraction of somebody, someplace who has everything under control. It would be similarly gratifying to imagine that one lived in a nation so powerful as to be unmenaced even by its own errors. I’ve got a head cold just now, so I can’t say with 100% certainty that our shit doesn’t stink. Nevertheless, I believe as an article of rational faith that it does. I don’t think that any country ever has or ever could achieve so transcendent a status.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
The Moral Hazard Hazard
The voice in your head that orders you to do bad things is not necessarily a demon or a black dog. In many cases it turns out to be some theoretical conclusion you learned in school. Economists, for example, have internalized a notion of how markets are supposed to function that is far more attractive than mere empirical information. “Who you gonna believe? Conclusions that follow validly from convenient axioms or your lying eyes?” Back before the California energy crunch, proponents of deregulation made calculations from reasonable assumptions that putting up with occasional blackouts was worth it if it made the system more efficient overall. In the event, however, people just would not put up with unreliable service; and it turned out that the “reasonable assumptions” had only been reasonable on somebody’s blackboard. Politically, they were simply impossible. What’s going on with New Orleans is similar. The social Darwinists of the administration have been brought up short by the sudden revelation that the nation as a whole thinks of itself as a nation and doesn’t think that even poor blacks are disposable at 3/5ths a head. As a result, we’ve learned how fast even an incompetent government can act when confronted with a catastrophic public relation’s disaster.
Certain ideas mesmerize their thinkers. They are like drugs. For example, discussions of the state of America’s health system almost always get caught up on the issue of moral hazard, the terrifying prospect that adequate health care insurance would encourage people to go to the doctor too often. Such an eventuality is certainly possible since making anything cheaper is liable to increase demand, but the issue has got to be the reddest red herring of them all in a country where, on the evidence, the current incentives often discourage people from going to the doctor when they should and the largest single reason we pay more for health care is the expense of maintaining an enormous bureaucracy dedicated to keeping people from getting care. Whatever the notional cost of moral hazard, the real—and staggering—costs arise from the levees and dykes erected to hold it off. Meanwhile, the nations that have capitulated to universal care and succumbed to a terminal case of moral hazard have been penalized with better medicine at a much lower cost, a fact that, unfortunately, is no match for a fascinating idea.
The voice in your head that orders you to do bad things is not necessarily a demon or a black dog. In many cases it turns out to be some theoretical conclusion you learned in school. Economists, for example, have internalized a notion of how markets are supposed to function that is far more attractive than mere empirical information. “Who you gonna believe? Conclusions that follow validly from convenient axioms or your lying eyes?” Back before the California energy crunch, proponents of deregulation made calculations from reasonable assumptions that putting up with occasional blackouts was worth it if it made the system more efficient overall. In the event, however, people just would not put up with unreliable service; and it turned out that the “reasonable assumptions” had only been reasonable on somebody’s blackboard. Politically, they were simply impossible. What’s going on with New Orleans is similar. The social Darwinists of the administration have been brought up short by the sudden revelation that the nation as a whole thinks of itself as a nation and doesn’t think that even poor blacks are disposable at 3/5ths a head. As a result, we’ve learned how fast even an incompetent government can act when confronted with a catastrophic public relation’s disaster.
Certain ideas mesmerize their thinkers. They are like drugs. For example, discussions of the state of America’s health system almost always get caught up on the issue of moral hazard, the terrifying prospect that adequate health care insurance would encourage people to go to the doctor too often. Such an eventuality is certainly possible since making anything cheaper is liable to increase demand, but the issue has got to be the reddest red herring of them all in a country where, on the evidence, the current incentives often discourage people from going to the doctor when they should and the largest single reason we pay more for health care is the expense of maintaining an enormous bureaucracy dedicated to keeping people from getting care. Whatever the notional cost of moral hazard, the real—and staggering—costs arise from the levees and dykes erected to hold it off. Meanwhile, the nations that have capitulated to universal care and succumbed to a terminal case of moral hazard have been penalized with better medicine at a much lower cost, a fact that, unfortunately, is no match for a fascinating idea.
Monday, September 05, 2005
The Law of Intended Consequences
It gives the play a lousy plot, but much of what happens is simply what somebody wanted. They may not like it when they get it, but that’s a separate issue. For example, I don’t doubt that many Republicans were momentarily unhappy to read that poverty had increased in every year of the Bush administration as it routinely does in Republican administrations; but that result, though unedifying, began life as an intention. One can imagine a universe in which destroying unions, eliminating public services, and promoting lower wages ironically results in general prosperity, but that’s an alternative reality. In our world, if the ruling party sets out to benefit its people at the expense of those people, it’s very likely to succeed.
Liberals and moderates like to argue about policies, but often what matters is not how the law reads but who administers it. One is reminded of the old and thankfully obsolete joke about the German daddy who complained that when he followed the directions on assembling his son’s bicycle, it always turned out to be a machine gun.
Sometimes it is a fallacy not to argue ad hominem.
It gives the play a lousy plot, but much of what happens is simply what somebody wanted. They may not like it when they get it, but that’s a separate issue. For example, I don’t doubt that many Republicans were momentarily unhappy to read that poverty had increased in every year of the Bush administration as it routinely does in Republican administrations; but that result, though unedifying, began life as an intention. One can imagine a universe in which destroying unions, eliminating public services, and promoting lower wages ironically results in general prosperity, but that’s an alternative reality. In our world, if the ruling party sets out to benefit its people at the expense of those people, it’s very likely to succeed.
Liberals and moderates like to argue about policies, but often what matters is not how the law reads but who administers it. One is reminded of the old and thankfully obsolete joke about the German daddy who complained that when he followed the directions on assembling his son’s bicycle, it always turned out to be a machine gun.
Sometimes it is a fallacy not to argue ad hominem.
A Hopeful Note
Maybe things really will get better in Iraq. The Bush administration is notorious for rewarding failure and ineptitude, but this policy is finally running up against its natural limit. In several cases there is simply no honor or office left to give to the incompetents so that people like Condi Rice may no longer motivated to invite fresh catastrophic terrorist attacks through their negligence or to promote another disastrous and illegal war by lying to the public. Unfortunately, the law of effect takes time to alter behavior; and sheer momentum may produce further calamities just as Katrina remained a destructive storm for a long time after it made landfall. Nevertheless, though the administration is still made up of people immune to the bad consequences of their own behavior, malfeasance is no longer a guarantee of further riches and higher offices so perhaps some of them will at last learn.
Maybe things really will get better in Iraq. The Bush administration is notorious for rewarding failure and ineptitude, but this policy is finally running up against its natural limit. In several cases there is simply no honor or office left to give to the incompetents so that people like Condi Rice may no longer motivated to invite fresh catastrophic terrorist attacks through their negligence or to promote another disastrous and illegal war by lying to the public. Unfortunately, the law of effect takes time to alter behavior; and sheer momentum may produce further calamities just as Katrina remained a destructive storm for a long time after it made landfall. Nevertheless, though the administration is still made up of people immune to the bad consequences of their own behavior, malfeasance is no longer a guarantee of further riches and higher offices so perhaps some of them will at last learn.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Crimes of Pedagogy
To a remarkable but largely unremarked extent, what the public knows about nature and science is simply the pedagogy of textbooks. The common notion that animals fall into distinct groups marked by unambiguous structural characteristics, for example, reflects the examples teachers use to explain taxonomies. Many taxa contain members that have secondarily lost features that were once definitive of their group—the notion that there is a central plan that plays unchanging substance to the superficial accidents of wing color or tooth shape or behavior is deeply misleading since even basic body plans can change drastically over time. We only know the animals belong together because we can trace their common ancestry through transitional forms. And even when common features persist, there is a temptation to assume that they are functionally fundamental simply because they have persisted, even though some diagnostic features—the details of wing venation in insects, for example—are probably as accidental as the ridges on a finger print. They just happened to be the elements that, for some reason or for no reason at all, didn’t change in a given phylogeny.
By fostering an exaggerated belief in the naturalness of kinds, the just-so textbook version creates a largely artificial mystery, the impression that macroevolution differs qualitatively from microevolution. This may be one of those instances in which there is no answer to a question because there really isn’t a question to answer. Granted that genetic changes are always discrete, Natura semper fecit saltus, but the leaps in question only appear to be impossibly great if you imagine a spectacular vault from the picture of the living starfish on page 121 and the picture of the living hummingbird on page 124 instead of the tiny hop involved in the original divergence between one obscure species of deuterostome invertebrate and another in the slimy bottom of some Vendian estuary.
I was reminded of this issue by a report on the BBC on a strange looking invertebrate from the Cambrian that is said to embarrass the taxonomists. Vetustodermis planus is evidently hard to place in one of the recognized phyla, but it is hardly weirder than many a common living organism. The recherché bugs pictured in Grimaldi and Engel’s splendid new book Evolution of the Insects are every bit as bizarre as any relic of the Burgess Shale; but since they don’t fall on a crack between one group and another, nobody thinks they challenge evolutionary theory.
To a remarkable but largely unremarked extent, what the public knows about nature and science is simply the pedagogy of textbooks. The common notion that animals fall into distinct groups marked by unambiguous structural characteristics, for example, reflects the examples teachers use to explain taxonomies. Many taxa contain members that have secondarily lost features that were once definitive of their group—the notion that there is a central plan that plays unchanging substance to the superficial accidents of wing color or tooth shape or behavior is deeply misleading since even basic body plans can change drastically over time. We only know the animals belong together because we can trace their common ancestry through transitional forms. And even when common features persist, there is a temptation to assume that they are functionally fundamental simply because they have persisted, even though some diagnostic features—the details of wing venation in insects, for example—are probably as accidental as the ridges on a finger print. They just happened to be the elements that, for some reason or for no reason at all, didn’t change in a given phylogeny.
By fostering an exaggerated belief in the naturalness of kinds, the just-so textbook version creates a largely artificial mystery, the impression that macroevolution differs qualitatively from microevolution. This may be one of those instances in which there is no answer to a question because there really isn’t a question to answer. Granted that genetic changes are always discrete, Natura semper fecit saltus, but the leaps in question only appear to be impossibly great if you imagine a spectacular vault from the picture of the living starfish on page 121 and the picture of the living hummingbird on page 124 instead of the tiny hop involved in the original divergence between one obscure species of deuterostome invertebrate and another in the slimy bottom of some Vendian estuary.
I was reminded of this issue by a report on the BBC on a strange looking invertebrate from the Cambrian that is said to embarrass the taxonomists. Vetustodermis planus is evidently hard to place in one of the recognized phyla, but it is hardly weirder than many a common living organism. The recherché bugs pictured in Grimaldi and Engel’s splendid new book Evolution of the Insects are every bit as bizarre as any relic of the Burgess Shale; but since they don’t fall on a crack between one group and another, nobody thinks they challenge evolutionary theory.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
“It has yet to be proved that acerbity or gloom is detrimental in an historian.”
I’ve been very gradually reading Syme’s immense book on the Roman historian Tacitus, mostly for the pleasure of spending as much time as possible with Sir Ronald’s austere wit. Unfortunately, the contemporary relevance of the subject matter intermittently interferes with the untroubled appreciation of the great classicist’s sheer virtuosity. The unfolding of present events brings ancient dilemmas in and out of focus. Roman writers of the empire like Tacitus and Seneca were greatly admired and closely read at the end of the Renaissance, no doubt because they spoke to the ethical predicaments of ambitious men in an age of burgeoning national empires—the literati of the Chinese Age of Warring States would probably have appreciated them as well. They certainly speak to an important group of modern individuals. And they speak to me as well.
Tacitus took up history writing after a not insignificant public career that began in the tyrannical regime of Domitian and extended into the time of Trajan, the second of the so-called five good emperors. Although a member of the Senate who sometimes evinced a certain nostalgia for the Republic, Tacitus did not write to restore a past that was gone for good and, for that matter, gone for good reason—he had no illusions about the fatal shortcomings of the old system of anarchic competition between selfish aristocrats. His great theme was not retrospective at all. It addressed the question of how virtuous men could live decently and usefully in the imperial present. The end of political liberty limited the prospects of ambitious men, but it didn’t absolve them of responsibilities to their country or to mankind. Even in its palmist days, the Roman Empire was only maintained by the strenuous efforts of a host of generals and officials. If the German barbarians didn’t sack Rome in the first century, if the Parthian horsemen didn’t overrun the East, it wasn’t because they weren’t trying. The Empire needed leaders who could some how function in an autocratic regime even though the emperor feared able men and often rewarded incompetence. (nec minus periculum ex magna fama quam ex mala’ — no less danger from a good reputation than a bad one — as Tacitus wrote, defending his father-in-law Agricola from the Tiber chapter of the Swift Boat Veterans) But what can integrity mean in a milieu in which dissimulation and flattery really are the prerequisites for career advancement?
Maybe it would be a good time to come out with an inexpensive paperback edition of Tacitus for the benefit of all the serious people in this country who are attempting the difficult act of behaving well in a vicious system.
I’ve been very gradually reading Syme’s immense book on the Roman historian Tacitus, mostly for the pleasure of spending as much time as possible with Sir Ronald’s austere wit. Unfortunately, the contemporary relevance of the subject matter intermittently interferes with the untroubled appreciation of the great classicist’s sheer virtuosity. The unfolding of present events brings ancient dilemmas in and out of focus. Roman writers of the empire like Tacitus and Seneca were greatly admired and closely read at the end of the Renaissance, no doubt because they spoke to the ethical predicaments of ambitious men in an age of burgeoning national empires—the literati of the Chinese Age of Warring States would probably have appreciated them as well. They certainly speak to an important group of modern individuals. And they speak to me as well.
Tacitus took up history writing after a not insignificant public career that began in the tyrannical regime of Domitian and extended into the time of Trajan, the second of the so-called five good emperors. Although a member of the Senate who sometimes evinced a certain nostalgia for the Republic, Tacitus did not write to restore a past that was gone for good and, for that matter, gone for good reason—he had no illusions about the fatal shortcomings of the old system of anarchic competition between selfish aristocrats. His great theme was not retrospective at all. It addressed the question of how virtuous men could live decently and usefully in the imperial present. The end of political liberty limited the prospects of ambitious men, but it didn’t absolve them of responsibilities to their country or to mankind. Even in its palmist days, the Roman Empire was only maintained by the strenuous efforts of a host of generals and officials. If the German barbarians didn’t sack Rome in the first century, if the Parthian horsemen didn’t overrun the East, it wasn’t because they weren’t trying. The Empire needed leaders who could some how function in an autocratic regime even though the emperor feared able men and often rewarded incompetence. (nec minus periculum ex magna fama quam ex mala’ — no less danger from a good reputation than a bad one — as Tacitus wrote, defending his father-in-law Agricola from the Tiber chapter of the Swift Boat Veterans) But what can integrity mean in a milieu in which dissimulation and flattery really are the prerequisites for career advancement?
Maybe it would be a good time to come out with an inexpensive paperback edition of Tacitus for the benefit of all the serious people in this country who are attempting the difficult act of behaving well in a vicious system.
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
The Standard Oil Song
The whole is, at most, the sum of its parts; but figuring out the anthill by tracking individual ants is very hard work. For example, the Iraq War was undertaken through the efforts of a host of individuals with multiple and changing motives so it has become an on-line industry to figure out how we brought ourselves to strip off our clothes and jump in this particular cactus patch in the first place: Oedipal one-upmanship, routine miscalculation, hubris, the search for a political distraction, the urge to play tin soldiers with real soldiers, indirect support for Likud, Wilsonian idealism, American exceptionalism, profiteering by well-connected contractors, the Monroe Doctrine as applied by people with an uncertain grasp of geography. Or maybe what we’re experiencing is the strategic version of the disassociative effect of computer games. For ex officio statesmen personally unfamiliar with the blood and shit of real war, blowing people to bits from high altitude is like playing Doom. The electronic mediation makes it all rather flat and unreal. Or it could be argued, in the alternative, that action in this instance resulted from a case of Presidential nerves. Making an irrevocable decision wasn’t evidence of resolution: it was a substitute for resolution. Cortez burned his boats in order to commit his men to a desperate mission. Bush burned our boats to commit himself. And then there’s the oil.
It is customary at this point to remind everybody of every reason that oil wasn’t really at the root of the thing even though it is obvious, and usually admitted, that we certainly wouldn’t be so deeply involved in the Middle East if it weren’t for the petroleum. It is argued that actually occupying Iraq doesn’t increase the world’s oil resources at all or even secure them for the United States at a lower price. Since oil is fungible stuff whose cost is determined by the global market, what matters is overall production, not who sells which oil to whom. If a regime decided not to sell to us, the overall effect would be nil so long as they sold to somebody. Of course a fanatical government could decide not to sell its oil to anybody, but no nation could afford such a course for long. During the sanction years, even Saddam, who certainly hated us, sold as much oil as we’d let him. What else was he going to do with it? So who physically controls the oil fields is not crucial. Only people naïve about economics think otherwise. However.
The problem is that there is an important group of influential people who are naïve about economics and many of them play key roles in developing our foreign policy. Practitioners of realpolitik are often addicted to a crude mercantilism, in the current instance to a mercantilism that assumes that what matters is who possesses the crude. Looking at foreign policy as a huge map exercise, one can imagine them thinking to themselves that putting a marker in Mosul was part of a solution, though we surely know by now that they had no clue what the men and women represented by the marker were going to do once they got there or how that was supposed to keep the price of oil under $50 a barrel. Bear in mind that these are the same guys who occasionally float the idea that we may eventually have to seize the Saudi oil fields by military force, evict the Arabs, and run the plants ourselves.
It may be true that oil was not a rational motive for invading Iraq, but that doesn’t mean that oil wasn’t a large part of why we went there.
The whole is, at most, the sum of its parts; but figuring out the anthill by tracking individual ants is very hard work. For example, the Iraq War was undertaken through the efforts of a host of individuals with multiple and changing motives so it has become an on-line industry to figure out how we brought ourselves to strip off our clothes and jump in this particular cactus patch in the first place: Oedipal one-upmanship, routine miscalculation, hubris, the search for a political distraction, the urge to play tin soldiers with real soldiers, indirect support for Likud, Wilsonian idealism, American exceptionalism, profiteering by well-connected contractors, the Monroe Doctrine as applied by people with an uncertain grasp of geography. Or maybe what we’re experiencing is the strategic version of the disassociative effect of computer games. For ex officio statesmen personally unfamiliar with the blood and shit of real war, blowing people to bits from high altitude is like playing Doom. The electronic mediation makes it all rather flat and unreal. Or it could be argued, in the alternative, that action in this instance resulted from a case of Presidential nerves. Making an irrevocable decision wasn’t evidence of resolution: it was a substitute for resolution. Cortez burned his boats in order to commit his men to a desperate mission. Bush burned our boats to commit himself. And then there’s the oil.
It is customary at this point to remind everybody of every reason that oil wasn’t really at the root of the thing even though it is obvious, and usually admitted, that we certainly wouldn’t be so deeply involved in the Middle East if it weren’t for the petroleum. It is argued that actually occupying Iraq doesn’t increase the world’s oil resources at all or even secure them for the United States at a lower price. Since oil is fungible stuff whose cost is determined by the global market, what matters is overall production, not who sells which oil to whom. If a regime decided not to sell to us, the overall effect would be nil so long as they sold to somebody. Of course a fanatical government could decide not to sell its oil to anybody, but no nation could afford such a course for long. During the sanction years, even Saddam, who certainly hated us, sold as much oil as we’d let him. What else was he going to do with it? So who physically controls the oil fields is not crucial. Only people naïve about economics think otherwise. However.
The problem is that there is an important group of influential people who are naïve about economics and many of them play key roles in developing our foreign policy. Practitioners of realpolitik are often addicted to a crude mercantilism, in the current instance to a mercantilism that assumes that what matters is who possesses the crude. Looking at foreign policy as a huge map exercise, one can imagine them thinking to themselves that putting a marker in Mosul was part of a solution, though we surely know by now that they had no clue what the men and women represented by the marker were going to do once they got there or how that was supposed to keep the price of oil under $50 a barrel. Bear in mind that these are the same guys who occasionally float the idea that we may eventually have to seize the Saudi oil fields by military force, evict the Arabs, and run the plants ourselves.
It may be true that oil was not a rational motive for invading Iraq, but that doesn’t mean that oil wasn’t a large part of why we went there.
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
A Perfectly Normal Ill Wind
I’m informed that there is an old Arab saying to the effect that the Persians know how to do everything. I don’t know about that, but I suspect they know enough to bemuse the world long enough to develop a nuclear arsenal. The Iranians are in the situation of the Athenians, who wanted to wall their city in order to be able to defy the Spartans. The Spartans convened a conference to prevent just this sort of destablizing and irresponsible masonry proliferation, but the Athenians, led by Themistocles, who, to judge by his track record, was even more clever than the Persians, kept on talking and talking and talking, ragging the puck, working the clock, resorting to a four corner offense, bribing the odd ephor, lying through their teeth, and sending the official wall inspectors on a series of wild goose chases through the whorehouses of the Piraeus while all the while every man, woman, and child back home was furiously piling brick on brick. Naturally, when the wall was tall enough to defend, Themistocles diplomatically advised the Spartans to bugger off just as it is a good bet that seventeen U.N. committee meetings from now, the Iranians are going to invite us to bite their cranks.
Most Americans seem to regard Iran as a non-fiction version of one of those comical countries you find in novels. The Iranians, presumably don’t think of themselves as living in San Narciso, however. Not without historical warrant, they have a sense of themselves as one of the great nations of the earth. If the Americans, British, Russians, Chinese, French, Indians, and even the benighted Pakistanis have the bomb, how can so proud a people as the Persians be content to forgo the prestige that comes with nuclear power, especially since their national identity has been repeatedly and painfully disrespected down through the centuries? Even if the Iranians lacked a practical reason for wanting the definitive deterrent in the face of what they see as a paranoid Israel and an aggressive, erratic America, their self-definition would demand the bomb. Which is why it is probably impossible to deny it to them even in the medium term. What we have here is not the whim of some maximum leader like Kim Il Sung or even part of the program of some party or sect. It isn’t just the mullahs who want the weapons. I suspect it isn’t even especially the mullahs. And Iran is a big country with considerable resources, not a basket case like North Korea. They’re going to get the bombs.
Meanwhile, I know I’m supposed to be very worried about the Persian bomb, but I’m mostly worried of the consequences of efforts to forestall it. In a different time line, one in which we had pursued a calm and principled foreign policy, America might be in a position to argue against the bomb with more justice. As it is, our options are to go on practicing our own policy of delay or to unleash the Israelis or resort to a bombing campaign of our own. Between the disastrous consequences of a violent response and learning to live with a nuclear Iran, I’d opt for the latter. I think the dangers of such an eventuality are vastly overstated. Meanwhile, nobody with a paying job seems to be willing to notice its upside. At least an Iranian bomb would prevent prevention.
Unlike the first few nuclear club members, India, Pakistan, and even China have not built a huge number of bombs or delivery systems. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. still have thousands of warheads and the British and French hundreds, presumably because they once upon a time seriously considered using them. Having a notably smaller arsenal has a different logic. India, Pakistan, and China have enough megatonnage to hugely raise the ante for any country that contemplated attacking them, but acquiring the continent-destroying power of even the Force de Frappe would be pointless. A nuclear India isn’t going to get in an arms race with the United States or even Europe, and a nuclear Iranian isn’t going to either. It couldn’t afford the investment and would have no prospect of success against any of the big powers. From an Iranian perspective, however, the inability to compete is irrelevant because the point of having the bomb is to preserve their sovereignty against aggressive countries like the U.S. whose public intellectuals frequently speak blandly about attacking Iran as if it were Guatemala or Haiti.
I’m informed that there is an old Arab saying to the effect that the Persians know how to do everything. I don’t know about that, but I suspect they know enough to bemuse the world long enough to develop a nuclear arsenal. The Iranians are in the situation of the Athenians, who wanted to wall their city in order to be able to defy the Spartans. The Spartans convened a conference to prevent just this sort of destablizing and irresponsible masonry proliferation, but the Athenians, led by Themistocles, who, to judge by his track record, was even more clever than the Persians, kept on talking and talking and talking, ragging the puck, working the clock, resorting to a four corner offense, bribing the odd ephor, lying through their teeth, and sending the official wall inspectors on a series of wild goose chases through the whorehouses of the Piraeus while all the while every man, woman, and child back home was furiously piling brick on brick. Naturally, when the wall was tall enough to defend, Themistocles diplomatically advised the Spartans to bugger off just as it is a good bet that seventeen U.N. committee meetings from now, the Iranians are going to invite us to bite their cranks.
Most Americans seem to regard Iran as a non-fiction version of one of those comical countries you find in novels. The Iranians, presumably don’t think of themselves as living in San Narciso, however. Not without historical warrant, they have a sense of themselves as one of the great nations of the earth. If the Americans, British, Russians, Chinese, French, Indians, and even the benighted Pakistanis have the bomb, how can so proud a people as the Persians be content to forgo the prestige that comes with nuclear power, especially since their national identity has been repeatedly and painfully disrespected down through the centuries? Even if the Iranians lacked a practical reason for wanting the definitive deterrent in the face of what they see as a paranoid Israel and an aggressive, erratic America, their self-definition would demand the bomb. Which is why it is probably impossible to deny it to them even in the medium term. What we have here is not the whim of some maximum leader like Kim Il Sung or even part of the program of some party or sect. It isn’t just the mullahs who want the weapons. I suspect it isn’t even especially the mullahs. And Iran is a big country with considerable resources, not a basket case like North Korea. They’re going to get the bombs.
Meanwhile, I know I’m supposed to be very worried about the Persian bomb, but I’m mostly worried of the consequences of efforts to forestall it. In a different time line, one in which we had pursued a calm and principled foreign policy, America might be in a position to argue against the bomb with more justice. As it is, our options are to go on practicing our own policy of delay or to unleash the Israelis or resort to a bombing campaign of our own. Between the disastrous consequences of a violent response and learning to live with a nuclear Iran, I’d opt for the latter. I think the dangers of such an eventuality are vastly overstated. Meanwhile, nobody with a paying job seems to be willing to notice its upside. At least an Iranian bomb would prevent prevention.
Unlike the first few nuclear club members, India, Pakistan, and even China have not built a huge number of bombs or delivery systems. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. still have thousands of warheads and the British and French hundreds, presumably because they once upon a time seriously considered using them. Having a notably smaller arsenal has a different logic. India, Pakistan, and China have enough megatonnage to hugely raise the ante for any country that contemplated attacking them, but acquiring the continent-destroying power of even the Force de Frappe would be pointless. A nuclear India isn’t going to get in an arms race with the United States or even Europe, and a nuclear Iranian isn’t going to either. It couldn’t afford the investment and would have no prospect of success against any of the big powers. From an Iranian perspective, however, the inability to compete is irrelevant because the point of having the bomb is to preserve their sovereignty against aggressive countries like the U.S. whose public intellectuals frequently speak blandly about attacking Iran as if it were Guatemala or Haiti.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
We Must, We Must, Develop Robust
The President recently made some offhand remarks supportive of introducing intelligent design into high school curricula. Although some educators and scientists were upset, I doubt if his comments were calculated for political advantage. He didn’t make much of an issue of the matter, and his own science advisors are on the record that ID is not a credible scientific theory. In a very general way, I suppose, evincing skepticism about evolution is a way of demonstrating solidarity with your base, but surely nobody has any reason to doubt Bush’s bona fides as a member of the culture of ignorance. Creationism is a default position. You don’t have to take a course or read a book to be wrong about these things. It’s as natural as breathing. Living things may have developed without effort and forethought, but it requires effort and thought to arrive at understand how they could have developed without such inputs. The truth is located on an upper floor, and there is no elevator in the building.
Some of the heavy lifting involved in actually figuring things out is on display in Andreas Wagner’s new book Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems. Wagner’s aim is to examine how living things manage to persist, reproduce, and evolve despite the noisiness of their environment. Or to use Wagner’s own words, “Why is an organism not a molecular house of cards?” Stuart Kauffman wrote an influential book some years ago called the Origins of Order. Wagner’s book is about the durability of order, an equally challenging problem. Mutations are inevitable in genetic systems and even a top of the line Xerox machine eventually fails to reproduce a visible image as it copies copies of copies. Even during the life of a given organism, random thermal motions constantly perturb the intricate network of chemical processes that make up metabolism. So how do you have a picnic during a tornado? And why doesn’t the sheer complexity of a single cell, let alone a multi-cellular organism, make life simply impossible? According to Murphy’s Law what can go wrong will go wrong. There are vastly more things to go wrong in a cat than in a can opener, but the cats are still here. Indeed, contrary to what one might think, reliability actually seems to increase with complexity.
Wagner addresses two main questions. He examines the mechanisms that make living systems robust on the genetic, metabolic, and developmental levels; but he also looks at possible explanations of how these systems became robust. Quite a lot is known about the first problem. For example, computer simulations show that the genetic code is optimized for robustness in the sense that random mutations tend to code for chemically similar amino acids more often in the existing code than in all or almost all of the zillions of alternative possibilities. Which means, in turn, that a large proportion of the proteins derived from mutated genes will have the same general chemical properties as the originals and retain or enhance their functionality despite the changes. The chemical pathways of the cell also show a high degree of resiliency that allows metabolism to continue even when one or more enzymes fails, and developmental pathways can be drastically reorganized without obviously changing the morphology of the adult organisms—I was particularly impressed with Wagner’s account of how the embryology of insects in the hymenopteran suborder Apocrita differ depending on their lifestyles, with yolky, Drosophila-style eggs for the free living and ecotoparasitic forms and tiny, yolk-poor eggs for endoparasites. Evidently ontogeny doesn’t always recapitulate phylogeny as revolutionary alterations of developmental processes can occur without altering the end product very much.
How life came to be so tough in the face of noise and mutation is a separate and less clear-cut question. Wagner supplies some suggestions. There is some evidence that living things can and have evolved in the direction of greater robustness, but it isn’t always obvious that straightforward natural selection can account for the trend. For one thing, robustness can be too much of a good thing at some levels. For example, proteins are more stable if they reliably fold into the same shape despite thermal noise, but enzymes often have to be able to change their conformations in order to catalyze chemical changes. There are trade-offs. It is also unclear whether genetic systems can become more robust under individual natural selection, because the inclusive fitness of individuals is not increased by mutations that make future generations less sensitive to mutations. In that case, however, it may well be that the same mutations that increase the robustness of metabolic processes to thermal noise have the more-or-less automatic side effect of increasing the resistance of the genome to unfavorable mutations. Thus the same heat shock protein that protects proteins from folding improperly at high temperatures buffers the effect of mutations as well—knock out the now-celebrated Hsp90 and you and your fruit flies will manifest a host of abnormalities.
Wagner ends his book with a brief look at man-made systems. The telephone grid is like a living body by virtue of its enormous scale and intricacy but also because it is remarkably reliable (~99.999%). As Wagner points out, the great majority of service interruptions occur not because of the failure of individual parts—such failures occur at a rate comparable to the genetic mutation rate in living things, mostly without obvious consequences—but simply because the phone companies decided it wasn’t worth the money to build a big enough system to withstand the occasional overload. In other words, the fragility of the system is planned. Its robustness is not. It is a side effect of the way the system evolved. During the long, piecemeal process of its development, defects and failures continually occurred and were responded to with various ad hoc expediencies. As a result, the grid, like the genetic, metabolic, and developmental systems of living things, looks like a crazy guilt or, if you’re old enough to catch the reference, like a Rube Goldberg contraption. Nevertheless, it works in the sublunary world better than any rationally designed system whose elegant structure is likely to be hopelessly brittle.
By the way, although Wagener doesn’t say a word on the topic and should not be blamed for my homily, his take on robustness suggests a veritable Argument from Non-Design to an infidel like me. To put things simply: We know that living things were not designed. After all, they work. Which brings us back to George Bush’s recent comments.
The President recently made some offhand remarks supportive of introducing intelligent design into high school curricula. Although some educators and scientists were upset, I doubt if his comments were calculated for political advantage. He didn’t make much of an issue of the matter, and his own science advisors are on the record that ID is not a credible scientific theory. In a very general way, I suppose, evincing skepticism about evolution is a way of demonstrating solidarity with your base, but surely nobody has any reason to doubt Bush’s bona fides as a member of the culture of ignorance. Creationism is a default position. You don’t have to take a course or read a book to be wrong about these things. It’s as natural as breathing. Living things may have developed without effort and forethought, but it requires effort and thought to arrive at understand how they could have developed without such inputs. The truth is located on an upper floor, and there is no elevator in the building.
Some of the heavy lifting involved in actually figuring things out is on display in Andreas Wagner’s new book Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems. Wagner’s aim is to examine how living things manage to persist, reproduce, and evolve despite the noisiness of their environment. Or to use Wagner’s own words, “Why is an organism not a molecular house of cards?” Stuart Kauffman wrote an influential book some years ago called the Origins of Order. Wagner’s book is about the durability of order, an equally challenging problem. Mutations are inevitable in genetic systems and even a top of the line Xerox machine eventually fails to reproduce a visible image as it copies copies of copies. Even during the life of a given organism, random thermal motions constantly perturb the intricate network of chemical processes that make up metabolism. So how do you have a picnic during a tornado? And why doesn’t the sheer complexity of a single cell, let alone a multi-cellular organism, make life simply impossible? According to Murphy’s Law what can go wrong will go wrong. There are vastly more things to go wrong in a cat than in a can opener, but the cats are still here. Indeed, contrary to what one might think, reliability actually seems to increase with complexity.
Wagner addresses two main questions. He examines the mechanisms that make living systems robust on the genetic, metabolic, and developmental levels; but he also looks at possible explanations of how these systems became robust. Quite a lot is known about the first problem. For example, computer simulations show that the genetic code is optimized for robustness in the sense that random mutations tend to code for chemically similar amino acids more often in the existing code than in all or almost all of the zillions of alternative possibilities. Which means, in turn, that a large proportion of the proteins derived from mutated genes will have the same general chemical properties as the originals and retain or enhance their functionality despite the changes. The chemical pathways of the cell also show a high degree of resiliency that allows metabolism to continue even when one or more enzymes fails, and developmental pathways can be drastically reorganized without obviously changing the morphology of the adult organisms—I was particularly impressed with Wagner’s account of how the embryology of insects in the hymenopteran suborder Apocrita differ depending on their lifestyles, with yolky, Drosophila-style eggs for the free living and ecotoparasitic forms and tiny, yolk-poor eggs for endoparasites. Evidently ontogeny doesn’t always recapitulate phylogeny as revolutionary alterations of developmental processes can occur without altering the end product very much.
How life came to be so tough in the face of noise and mutation is a separate and less clear-cut question. Wagner supplies some suggestions. There is some evidence that living things can and have evolved in the direction of greater robustness, but it isn’t always obvious that straightforward natural selection can account for the trend. For one thing, robustness can be too much of a good thing at some levels. For example, proteins are more stable if they reliably fold into the same shape despite thermal noise, but enzymes often have to be able to change their conformations in order to catalyze chemical changes. There are trade-offs. It is also unclear whether genetic systems can become more robust under individual natural selection, because the inclusive fitness of individuals is not increased by mutations that make future generations less sensitive to mutations. In that case, however, it may well be that the same mutations that increase the robustness of metabolic processes to thermal noise have the more-or-less automatic side effect of increasing the resistance of the genome to unfavorable mutations. Thus the same heat shock protein that protects proteins from folding improperly at high temperatures buffers the effect of mutations as well—knock out the now-celebrated Hsp90 and you and your fruit flies will manifest a host of abnormalities.
Wagner ends his book with a brief look at man-made systems. The telephone grid is like a living body by virtue of its enormous scale and intricacy but also because it is remarkably reliable (~99.999%). As Wagner points out, the great majority of service interruptions occur not because of the failure of individual parts—such failures occur at a rate comparable to the genetic mutation rate in living things, mostly without obvious consequences—but simply because the phone companies decided it wasn’t worth the money to build a big enough system to withstand the occasional overload. In other words, the fragility of the system is planned. Its robustness is not. It is a side effect of the way the system evolved. During the long, piecemeal process of its development, defects and failures continually occurred and were responded to with various ad hoc expediencies. As a result, the grid, like the genetic, metabolic, and developmental systems of living things, looks like a crazy guilt or, if you’re old enough to catch the reference, like a Rube Goldberg contraption. Nevertheless, it works in the sublunary world better than any rationally designed system whose elegant structure is likely to be hopelessly brittle.
By the way, although Wagener doesn’t say a word on the topic and should not be blamed for my homily, his take on robustness suggests a veritable Argument from Non-Design to an infidel like me. To put things simply: We know that living things were not designed. After all, they work. Which brings us back to George Bush’s recent comments.
Monday, August 01, 2005
Admission of Failure is not an Option
If nothing counts as losing, victory is inevitable. On a less flexible scoring system, Iraq sure looks like a failure. What we’ve bought at the cost of 300 billion and thousands of lives is a wrecked nation stuck in a civil war. Under the circumstances, the most favorable outcome would be a country divided between a pro-Iranian Islamic republic in the South and a Kurdish ethnic state in the North. Even in that case, a more or less permanent insurgency would probably smolder in the middle subsidized on the cheap by irritated Sunnis in adjoining areas.
The right wing, seconded by many a pundit from America’s mindless middle, cheerfully responds to the endless train wreck with rhetorical maneuvers patterned on theological apologetics. It isn’t that they examine the facts on the ground and conclude that things are going well. They begin with the conclusion and track back, just as defenders of Christianity or Islam seldom argue for the truth of the faith from the evidence but beg the question from the get go. Since assessing the situation might yield unacceptible results, both the theologians and the political commentators content themselves with the not very challenging task of explaining how a predestined conclusion can be represented as consistent with the acknowledged facts of the case. Such explanations are always possible: “True, no living things more elaborate than Lepidoptera survive in the poisoned wastes of post-war Mesopotamia, but the outcome is as good as anyone could have reasonably expected, and we can thank the President that Manhattan remains markedly less radioactive than Bagdad.” Consistency is a very cheap commodity and worth its price.
To judge by the polls, the American public is not buying the optimism of the right these days; but it is not clear that what the people think matters much as long as the levers of power are in the hands of true believers. Which means that we are at the mercy of a group of people who have decided that it is unmanly and unpatriotic to learn from their own mistakes. Since political stupidities have real costs, however, this principle can only be implemented by cupping your hands around your ears and repeating “la-la-la, I can’t hear you!” Unfortunately, denial is like running up the balances on your credit cards. Only God almighty can afford to be complacent forever.
If nothing counts as losing, victory is inevitable. On a less flexible scoring system, Iraq sure looks like a failure. What we’ve bought at the cost of 300 billion and thousands of lives is a wrecked nation stuck in a civil war. Under the circumstances, the most favorable outcome would be a country divided between a pro-Iranian Islamic republic in the South and a Kurdish ethnic state in the North. Even in that case, a more or less permanent insurgency would probably smolder in the middle subsidized on the cheap by irritated Sunnis in adjoining areas.
The right wing, seconded by many a pundit from America’s mindless middle, cheerfully responds to the endless train wreck with rhetorical maneuvers patterned on theological apologetics. It isn’t that they examine the facts on the ground and conclude that things are going well. They begin with the conclusion and track back, just as defenders of Christianity or Islam seldom argue for the truth of the faith from the evidence but beg the question from the get go. Since assessing the situation might yield unacceptible results, both the theologians and the political commentators content themselves with the not very challenging task of explaining how a predestined conclusion can be represented as consistent with the acknowledged facts of the case. Such explanations are always possible: “True, no living things more elaborate than Lepidoptera survive in the poisoned wastes of post-war Mesopotamia, but the outcome is as good as anyone could have reasonably expected, and we can thank the President that Manhattan remains markedly less radioactive than Bagdad.” Consistency is a very cheap commodity and worth its price.
To judge by the polls, the American public is not buying the optimism of the right these days; but it is not clear that what the people think matters much as long as the levers of power are in the hands of true believers. Which means that we are at the mercy of a group of people who have decided that it is unmanly and unpatriotic to learn from their own mistakes. Since political stupidities have real costs, however, this principle can only be implemented by cupping your hands around your ears and repeating “la-la-la, I can’t hear you!” Unfortunately, denial is like running up the balances on your credit cards. Only God almighty can afford to be complacent forever.
Friday, July 22, 2005
Doubtlessly
Even I have to allow that some eternal verities have a kernel of truth. For example, the cliché that scientific results are always provisional is correct as a matter of principle since on any reasonable account of what the “empirical” in empirical science means, it doesn’t mean deduced deductively from unquestionable axioms. Formally speaking, we could perfectly well discover next Tuesday that DNA never codes for protein or learn to our surprise that due to a clerical error we were wrong all along about the atomic number of oxygen. At least in a contemporary context, however, the rhetorical force of such avowals of methodological modesty depends on a covert awareness that DNA damned well codes for protein and the atomic number of oxygen really is 8. An enormous number of scientific issues are up in the air, of course; but the guilty secret of the researchers is that they actually can and have achieved results that are materially correct. Nobody’s going to come along and overturn the periodic table. It just isn’t going to happen. I don’t think we’ve come to terms with this embarrassing fact and its many implications.
Even I have to allow that some eternal verities have a kernel of truth. For example, the cliché that scientific results are always provisional is correct as a matter of principle since on any reasonable account of what the “empirical” in empirical science means, it doesn’t mean deduced deductively from unquestionable axioms. Formally speaking, we could perfectly well discover next Tuesday that DNA never codes for protein or learn to our surprise that due to a clerical error we were wrong all along about the atomic number of oxygen. At least in a contemporary context, however, the rhetorical force of such avowals of methodological modesty depends on a covert awareness that DNA damned well codes for protein and the atomic number of oxygen really is 8. An enormous number of scientific issues are up in the air, of course; but the guilty secret of the researchers is that they actually can and have achieved results that are materially correct. Nobody’s going to come along and overturn the periodic table. It just isn’t going to happen. I don’t think we’ve come to terms with this embarrassing fact and its many implications.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
The Fluoride of the Progressives
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been making the rounds of talk shows talking up the idea that autism is caused by thimerosal, a mercury compound formerly used in this country as a preservative in childhood vaccines. While some right-wingers are also upset about thimerosal, most of the concern about it comes from the left, which is peculiar in a way since suspicion about vaccination is traditionally a conservative preoccupation that reflects a programmatic unwillingness to bear even tiny personal risks for the general good. To be sure, Kennedy and Arianna Huffington and various folks at Salon and Rolling Stone claim to support vaccination and relate their attacks on thimerosal to an anti-corporate theme. Their narrative is all about how Big Pharma conspired with bunch of bought-off scientists to cover up the connection between mercury and autism. Of course if thimerosal really is a cause of autism, the motives of its critics don’t matter very much. What is the state of the evidence?
No official scientific agency in the United States and Europe has reported any link between thimerosal and autism or any other neurological problem, but a consensus developed that it should not be used in vaccines because of a general concern about mercury exposure. For this reason, thimerosal has not been used in vaccines in this country since 1999 while research into the possible effects of thimerosal has continued without turning up any very definitive results. As with many recent epidemological issues—the health effects of electro-magnetic fields, for example—the technical difficulties of defining the real risks are formidable, in part because the association between the agent and the effect is so weak. Nobody is claiming that flu shots are to autism what cigarettes are to lung cancer. Mercury is not good for the nervous system, but the toxicity of mercury depends upon its chemical form. Thimerosal delivers ethyl mercury to the body whereas environmental exposure to mercury largely takes the form of methyl mercury. The pharmacology of ethyl mercury remains to be elucidated. While methyl mercury tends to linger in the body, ethyl mercury is rapidly excreted in the feces. On the other hand, some babies may not be as capable of excreting ethyl mercury as others; and ethyl mercury from a vaccine injection comes as a single big dose while methyl mercury from food and water is ingested a little at a time. A bolus of mercury may produce a more severe effect than an incremental exposure.
The case against thimerosal also assumes that the incidence of autism has increased markedly in step with the frequency of childhood immunizations. This assumption is not obviously valid. You sometimes read that autism was unknown before the introduction of vaccines with thimerosal, but what happened in the forties was the introduction of the term autism, not the sudden appearance of withdrawn, affectless children. Many cases of what we would now call autism are described in the older medical literature, just as millions of people died from heart attacks over the years even though myocardial infarction was only defined in the 20th Century. Because the clinical definition of autism is so vague, it is perfectly possible that its increasing incidence reflects to some degree the tendency of doctors to make trendy diagnoses in borderline cases, an instance of that syndrome inflation or societal hypochondria familiar from the ADD saga. In this regard, I find it telling that follow up studies of children diagnosed as autistic in recent decades find that many of them go on to college and careers while the autistic kids of yesteryear are still banging their heads against a wall.
Because as a rule it is hard and expensive to figure things out, none of the questions about thimerosal are going to be answered quickly and anybody who issues conclusive statements about the matter is overstating his or her case. That said, I confess that I lost interest in the issue a couple of years ago because of a simple consideration. Thimerosal was removed from vaccines in Denmark in 1992 but the reported incidence of autism continued to rise sharply thereafter (Science, Vol 301, Issue 5639, 1454-1455, 12 September 2003). That finding doesn’t guarantee that the mercury in vaccines has no relationship whatsoever with autism, of course; but it certainly deflates the notion that thimerosal is the fundamental problem. The research also reminds us that a giant and crucial experiment is already underway in this country. If thimerosal really was the cause of a U.S. autism epidemic, the epidemic should be coming to an end shortly since vaccines no longer contain thimerosal. Since this vast if accidental test will much larger and more conclusive than any feasible planned study, I think it makes sense to reserve scarce research dollars to deal with other issues.
Note: for a rundown of information on thimerosal that includes links to sources on both sides of the issue, see this Wikipedia page.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been making the rounds of talk shows talking up the idea that autism is caused by thimerosal, a mercury compound formerly used in this country as a preservative in childhood vaccines. While some right-wingers are also upset about thimerosal, most of the concern about it comes from the left, which is peculiar in a way since suspicion about vaccination is traditionally a conservative preoccupation that reflects a programmatic unwillingness to bear even tiny personal risks for the general good. To be sure, Kennedy and Arianna Huffington and various folks at Salon and Rolling Stone claim to support vaccination and relate their attacks on thimerosal to an anti-corporate theme. Their narrative is all about how Big Pharma conspired with bunch of bought-off scientists to cover up the connection between mercury and autism. Of course if thimerosal really is a cause of autism, the motives of its critics don’t matter very much. What is the state of the evidence?
No official scientific agency in the United States and Europe has reported any link between thimerosal and autism or any other neurological problem, but a consensus developed that it should not be used in vaccines because of a general concern about mercury exposure. For this reason, thimerosal has not been used in vaccines in this country since 1999 while research into the possible effects of thimerosal has continued without turning up any very definitive results. As with many recent epidemological issues—the health effects of electro-magnetic fields, for example—the technical difficulties of defining the real risks are formidable, in part because the association between the agent and the effect is so weak. Nobody is claiming that flu shots are to autism what cigarettes are to lung cancer. Mercury is not good for the nervous system, but the toxicity of mercury depends upon its chemical form. Thimerosal delivers ethyl mercury to the body whereas environmental exposure to mercury largely takes the form of methyl mercury. The pharmacology of ethyl mercury remains to be elucidated. While methyl mercury tends to linger in the body, ethyl mercury is rapidly excreted in the feces. On the other hand, some babies may not be as capable of excreting ethyl mercury as others; and ethyl mercury from a vaccine injection comes as a single big dose while methyl mercury from food and water is ingested a little at a time. A bolus of mercury may produce a more severe effect than an incremental exposure.
The case against thimerosal also assumes that the incidence of autism has increased markedly in step with the frequency of childhood immunizations. This assumption is not obviously valid. You sometimes read that autism was unknown before the introduction of vaccines with thimerosal, but what happened in the forties was the introduction of the term autism, not the sudden appearance of withdrawn, affectless children. Many cases of what we would now call autism are described in the older medical literature, just as millions of people died from heart attacks over the years even though myocardial infarction was only defined in the 20th Century. Because the clinical definition of autism is so vague, it is perfectly possible that its increasing incidence reflects to some degree the tendency of doctors to make trendy diagnoses in borderline cases, an instance of that syndrome inflation or societal hypochondria familiar from the ADD saga. In this regard, I find it telling that follow up studies of children diagnosed as autistic in recent decades find that many of them go on to college and careers while the autistic kids of yesteryear are still banging their heads against a wall.
Because as a rule it is hard and expensive to figure things out, none of the questions about thimerosal are going to be answered quickly and anybody who issues conclusive statements about the matter is overstating his or her case. That said, I confess that I lost interest in the issue a couple of years ago because of a simple consideration. Thimerosal was removed from vaccines in Denmark in 1992 but the reported incidence of autism continued to rise sharply thereafter (Science, Vol 301, Issue 5639, 1454-1455, 12 September 2003). That finding doesn’t guarantee that the mercury in vaccines has no relationship whatsoever with autism, of course; but it certainly deflates the notion that thimerosal is the fundamental problem. The research also reminds us that a giant and crucial experiment is already underway in this country. If thimerosal really was the cause of a U.S. autism epidemic, the epidemic should be coming to an end shortly since vaccines no longer contain thimerosal. Since this vast if accidental test will much larger and more conclusive than any feasible planned study, I think it makes sense to reserve scarce research dollars to deal with other issues.
Note: for a rundown of information on thimerosal that includes links to sources on both sides of the issue, see this Wikipedia page.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Le Meme Chose
In Goethe’s play, Faust sells the Holy Roman Emperor on the idea of issuing paper money backed up by buried treasure since the emperor is entitled to such hordes by imperial law and the gold will turn up eventually. Naturally, the float sinks; but the brilliant absurd notion is no crazier than what various philosophers and scientists have promoted in earnest. Hume, as an impatient young man, advertised his initial epistemology as the application of Newtonian methods to the physics of ideas as if sense impressions formed little solar systems governed by simple laws of attraction. A.J. Ayer’s also proposed to cut all the Gordian knots at one stroke by assassinating traditional ethics and epistemology with a superficially plausible theory of meaning. This sort of thing can also be institutionalized. Some Sumerian grad student once got the bright idea of keeping track of what happened in Mesopotamian politics when comets appeared or the moon was eclipsed, but his program continues to this day as astrology. Learning theory in psychology can’t claim such a long run, but it is also based on an obvious methodological insight. All we’ve got to do is find the law that relates stimulus and response! Well, that’s the sort of thing that works when it works and, in any case, is always easy to explain, which counts for a lot.
Although every successful theory gets mechanically applied to every available problem, in most cases all that gets transferred is a set of buzzwords. That’s certainly true in relationship to the current fad for applying ideas drawn from evolutionary biology to discussions of the transmission and fate of ideas and institutions in human society—the meme meme. Since both living things and cultures change through time, it’s hardly surprising that the processes involved in their evolution are analogous. The trouble is, they are aren’t apparently homologous, i.e. the terms of the theory of natural selection—genes, genotypes, phenotypes, fitness—don’t match up one-to-one with the corresponding cultural terms, assuming there are corresponding terms. While genes prosper because the organisms to which they belong survive and reproduce better than organisms with other genes, the success of melodies, jokes, poems, slogans, gestures, gods, faiths, philosophies, and other cultural detritus seems to mostly depend merely on their tendency to be copied. Meanwhile, while it is possible to define what gets replicated in natural evolution—crudely speaking, stretches of nucleic acids—almost anything can and has been identified as a meme, though only a few candidates for memehood have anything like the specificity of an allele. It may be possible to model the fate of a catchy melody or an exactly repeated ritual by recourse to the mathematics of population genetics, but, as Scott Atran points out in his book In Gods We Trust, even something so apparently cut and dried as the Ten Commandments is impossible to specify. We’re not talking about a series of sounds in Hebrew or a series of letters in the KJV, after all, but the meaning of a form of words. In lieu of anything like the chemical formula that defines a gene or a protein, such entities are, as I like to say, boneless. Just think for a moment of the admirable flexibility of the Thou Shalt Not Kill provision.
Knowledge is limited by the intelligibility of its objects. Natural evolution is understandable because living things have genetic and developmental systems that drastically constrain how they change over time. They are good to think. The cultural systems that are best understood—languages, folk taxonomies, musical systems—are also apparently constrained by nature, which is to say human neural biology. Where such preexisting regularities are lacking, the will to know will simply create superstitions. I think that’s what’s happening with memology, which seems remarkably like the Intelligent Design movement in its endless production of programmatic statements and its utter lack of a research program.
In Goethe’s play, Faust sells the Holy Roman Emperor on the idea of issuing paper money backed up by buried treasure since the emperor is entitled to such hordes by imperial law and the gold will turn up eventually. Naturally, the float sinks; but the brilliant absurd notion is no crazier than what various philosophers and scientists have promoted in earnest. Hume, as an impatient young man, advertised his initial epistemology as the application of Newtonian methods to the physics of ideas as if sense impressions formed little solar systems governed by simple laws of attraction. A.J. Ayer’s also proposed to cut all the Gordian knots at one stroke by assassinating traditional ethics and epistemology with a superficially plausible theory of meaning. This sort of thing can also be institutionalized. Some Sumerian grad student once got the bright idea of keeping track of what happened in Mesopotamian politics when comets appeared or the moon was eclipsed, but his program continues to this day as astrology. Learning theory in psychology can’t claim such a long run, but it is also based on an obvious methodological insight. All we’ve got to do is find the law that relates stimulus and response! Well, that’s the sort of thing that works when it works and, in any case, is always easy to explain, which counts for a lot.
Although every successful theory gets mechanically applied to every available problem, in most cases all that gets transferred is a set of buzzwords. That’s certainly true in relationship to the current fad for applying ideas drawn from evolutionary biology to discussions of the transmission and fate of ideas and institutions in human society—the meme meme. Since both living things and cultures change through time, it’s hardly surprising that the processes involved in their evolution are analogous. The trouble is, they are aren’t apparently homologous, i.e. the terms of the theory of natural selection—genes, genotypes, phenotypes, fitness—don’t match up one-to-one with the corresponding cultural terms, assuming there are corresponding terms. While genes prosper because the organisms to which they belong survive and reproduce better than organisms with other genes, the success of melodies, jokes, poems, slogans, gestures, gods, faiths, philosophies, and other cultural detritus seems to mostly depend merely on their tendency to be copied. Meanwhile, while it is possible to define what gets replicated in natural evolution—crudely speaking, stretches of nucleic acids—almost anything can and has been identified as a meme, though only a few candidates for memehood have anything like the specificity of an allele. It may be possible to model the fate of a catchy melody or an exactly repeated ritual by recourse to the mathematics of population genetics, but, as Scott Atran points out in his book In Gods We Trust, even something so apparently cut and dried as the Ten Commandments is impossible to specify. We’re not talking about a series of sounds in Hebrew or a series of letters in the KJV, after all, but the meaning of a form of words. In lieu of anything like the chemical formula that defines a gene or a protein, such entities are, as I like to say, boneless. Just think for a moment of the admirable flexibility of the Thou Shalt Not Kill provision.
Knowledge is limited by the intelligibility of its objects. Natural evolution is understandable because living things have genetic and developmental systems that drastically constrain how they change over time. They are good to think. The cultural systems that are best understood—languages, folk taxonomies, musical systems—are also apparently constrained by nature, which is to say human neural biology. Where such preexisting regularities are lacking, the will to know will simply create superstitions. I think that’s what’s happening with memology, which seems remarkably like the Intelligent Design movement in its endless production of programmatic statements and its utter lack of a research program.
Monday, July 11, 2005
Even If This Isn’t the City of God
I once tried to make the point to a bunch of libertarians that the worst political excesses of the 20th Century were committed by ideologues whose hostility to the state ran as deeply as theirs. Since from the libertarian point of view the state simply has to be the root of all evil, they couldn’t hear what I was proposing, though it was hardly sophisticated idea. I merely noted that the revolutionaries of the last hundred years treated the traditional state with contempt, sometimes merely ignoring it and building parallel institutions that exercised the real power, sometimes allowing it to function but only as a tool of their own interests. The fascists, Nazis, Bolsheviks, Maoists, Young Turks, Peronists, Iranian Mullahs, and Baathists had no use for parliaments or bureaucracies with real independence. They were parties acting in lieu of governments and rejected any real distinction between the administration and the state, often going so far as to argue that bureaucratic, juridical, scientific, and other professional norms of objectivity that justify the independence of the state apparatus are illusions or frauds. Which is why it was a critical moment in the Second Russian Revolution when Gorbachev decided to govern as President rather than Party Leader.
That the state and its institutions have in fact oppressed individuals and groups is not in dispute, of course; but the charter of the state is not to play favorites but to create artificial spaces in which individuals and groups differing in wealth and power can compete or cooperate without violence: parliaments, courts, markets. In these leveled arenas in which the din and stench of mammalian contention has been quieted and deodorized to some extent, men, who are certainly not created equal, are made equal for certain purposes. The cogency and benefits of this program are obvious. Even those who scoff at civilization generally don’t dispute the theory of the thing, but many people apparently think that human beings are quite incapable of the disinterested actions that make the City possible.
Lots of doctors have given up telling their patients not to drink too much because, as everybody knows, they will often go on drinking. It has been shown, however, that the advice of physicians has a real and medically relevant effect on alcohol consumption. In common with most remedies, advice is not a panacea; but it isn’t a placebo either and even placebos work. The human capacity for principled behavior is another such imperfect medicine. Teachers sometimes punish students for disagreeing with their private prejudices; but most of them know that promoting a point of view is not their role and they can and often do put their own ideas aside. Like infant baptism and other routine wonders, I’ve seen it done. I’ve even done it myself. The case is similar in other public professions. Judges perfectly well know what it is to act judiciously, though they may choose to cheat or fall into self-deception at times. Judging fairly is a skill that human beings can acquire, just as they can learn to play the piano or make soup. The notion that disinterested action is impossible is not merely a sophisticated way of defending immoral behavior. It is factually incorrect.
I once tried to make the point to a bunch of libertarians that the worst political excesses of the 20th Century were committed by ideologues whose hostility to the state ran as deeply as theirs. Since from the libertarian point of view the state simply has to be the root of all evil, they couldn’t hear what I was proposing, though it was hardly sophisticated idea. I merely noted that the revolutionaries of the last hundred years treated the traditional state with contempt, sometimes merely ignoring it and building parallel institutions that exercised the real power, sometimes allowing it to function but only as a tool of their own interests. The fascists, Nazis, Bolsheviks, Maoists, Young Turks, Peronists, Iranian Mullahs, and Baathists had no use for parliaments or bureaucracies with real independence. They were parties acting in lieu of governments and rejected any real distinction between the administration and the state, often going so far as to argue that bureaucratic, juridical, scientific, and other professional norms of objectivity that justify the independence of the state apparatus are illusions or frauds. Which is why it was a critical moment in the Second Russian Revolution when Gorbachev decided to govern as President rather than Party Leader.
That the state and its institutions have in fact oppressed individuals and groups is not in dispute, of course; but the charter of the state is not to play favorites but to create artificial spaces in which individuals and groups differing in wealth and power can compete or cooperate without violence: parliaments, courts, markets. In these leveled arenas in which the din and stench of mammalian contention has been quieted and deodorized to some extent, men, who are certainly not created equal, are made equal for certain purposes. The cogency and benefits of this program are obvious. Even those who scoff at civilization generally don’t dispute the theory of the thing, but many people apparently think that human beings are quite incapable of the disinterested actions that make the City possible.
Lots of doctors have given up telling their patients not to drink too much because, as everybody knows, they will often go on drinking. It has been shown, however, that the advice of physicians has a real and medically relevant effect on alcohol consumption. In common with most remedies, advice is not a panacea; but it isn’t a placebo either and even placebos work. The human capacity for principled behavior is another such imperfect medicine. Teachers sometimes punish students for disagreeing with their private prejudices; but most of them know that promoting a point of view is not their role and they can and often do put their own ideas aside. Like infant baptism and other routine wonders, I’ve seen it done. I’ve even done it myself. The case is similar in other public professions. Judges perfectly well know what it is to act judiciously, though they may choose to cheat or fall into self-deception at times. Judging fairly is a skill that human beings can acquire, just as they can learn to play the piano or make soup. The notion that disinterested action is impossible is not merely a sophisticated way of defending immoral behavior. It is factually incorrect.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
It’s not War. It’s Extermination.
Various critics of the new War of the Worlds have interpreted it as an allegory of 9/11, citing in particular the way that the alien’s death ray turns human flesh into fine white ash. That observation may be fair enough, since Spielberg is an American and Americans understand everything that happens in terms of their own experience. If I were an Iraqi, however, I might venture a quite different take on the movie. The U.S. Army moves in hummers and tanks rather than in giant tripods and our air force doesn’t employ ray guns as far as we know, but we are the ones with the terrifying, invincible weaponry. Our drone aircraft and cruise missile can blow anybody to atoms, anywhere, at any time at the command of a distant operator. Our fuel-oil bombs can take out several city blocks at one time. I don’t know if it is more horrible to be vaporized by non-humans or burned to death by napalm. I do know, however, that the former monstrousness is in the realm of special effects while the later is a reality for whomever we chose to attack. So how do you suppose War of the Worlds will play in Tehran or Cairo?
Various critics of the new War of the Worlds have interpreted it as an allegory of 9/11, citing in particular the way that the alien’s death ray turns human flesh into fine white ash. That observation may be fair enough, since Spielberg is an American and Americans understand everything that happens in terms of their own experience. If I were an Iraqi, however, I might venture a quite different take on the movie. The U.S. Army moves in hummers and tanks rather than in giant tripods and our air force doesn’t employ ray guns as far as we know, but we are the ones with the terrifying, invincible weaponry. Our drone aircraft and cruise missile can blow anybody to atoms, anywhere, at any time at the command of a distant operator. Our fuel-oil bombs can take out several city blocks at one time. I don’t know if it is more horrible to be vaporized by non-humans or burned to death by napalm. I do know, however, that the former monstrousness is in the realm of special effects while the later is a reality for whomever we chose to attack. So how do you suppose War of the Worlds will play in Tehran or Cairo?
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom but What Makes You Think There’s an Off-Ramp?
Something rather like representative democracy may be the most rational goal of political action, but that doesn’t mean that democracy is the telos of history. Good things, after all, are anti-entropic almost by definition while a pile of ruins is a much more natural outcome. The sage does nothing, and everything is demolished. Anyhow, to desist from the metaphysical pronouncements and get empirical for once, a quick look around the world doesn’t necessarily support the notion that things tend towards democracy under current conditions. A series of ancien regimes has indeed been overthrown by the concerted action of populations, but the aftermath of the various velvet revolutions has been more equivocal because liberation is hard to sustain in face of the structural advantages that the oligarchs have over the democrats, especially when economic conditions change. Fukuyama, the author of a famous book on the end of history, himself believed that the triumph of liberalism resulted from the prosperity promised and then delivered by free institutions and market capitalism. If that prosperity falters, as we have good reason to believe it will, promoting the general good will be a less rational program for individuals than securing a greater share of a stagnant or declining economy for you and yours—recall the political monstrosities spawned by the last great global depression.
The commonplace assumption that the triumph of the liberal society is foreordained is very much like the faith of Old Reds in the inevitable triumph of Communism. It is an article of faith that is argued from more often than it is argued to. I myself incline to the ancient opinion that there is no stable form of government and that under the stress of events each type of polity is likely to succumb in turn to its own intrinsic contradictions—aristocracy, democracy, tyranny, paper, rock, scissors. And that’s assuming that some sort of overwhelming external force does not intervene in the frustrated dialectic like a Cretaceous meteorite. At best, political arrangements are temporary solutions to changing circumstances that depend crucially on the continuous efforts of men and women determined to make them work.
The most recent democratic era in American history was made possible by the nation’s extraordinarily favorable international political and economic position after World War II; by cheap oil; by a series of technological breakthroughs; and, not least, by a genuine consensus in favor of open, inclusive, and responsible government. Most of these contextual factors have changed over the last thirty years; and, in response, functional, as opposed to notional, loyalty to the public good is becoming merely quaint—in this society, individuals of real integrity have something Amish about ‘em. The U.S. appears to be moving in the direction of a one-party state that uses interlocking government and corporate power to protect and extend the prerogatives of a small group of hyperwealthy families against the interests of an inert and infantilized population. One can surely imagine the fall of the current kings of the shining city on the dunghill—indeed, one can predict their fall with some confidence—but the removal of one mad prince isn’t going to restore the Republic because democracy doesn’t go very well with a declining empire. Even if democracy is the end of human history in some sense, I doubt if there will be very much of it at the end of our history.
Something rather like representative democracy may be the most rational goal of political action, but that doesn’t mean that democracy is the telos of history. Good things, after all, are anti-entropic almost by definition while a pile of ruins is a much more natural outcome. The sage does nothing, and everything is demolished. Anyhow, to desist from the metaphysical pronouncements and get empirical for once, a quick look around the world doesn’t necessarily support the notion that things tend towards democracy under current conditions. A series of ancien regimes has indeed been overthrown by the concerted action of populations, but the aftermath of the various velvet revolutions has been more equivocal because liberation is hard to sustain in face of the structural advantages that the oligarchs have over the democrats, especially when economic conditions change. Fukuyama, the author of a famous book on the end of history, himself believed that the triumph of liberalism resulted from the prosperity promised and then delivered by free institutions and market capitalism. If that prosperity falters, as we have good reason to believe it will, promoting the general good will be a less rational program for individuals than securing a greater share of a stagnant or declining economy for you and yours—recall the political monstrosities spawned by the last great global depression.
The commonplace assumption that the triumph of the liberal society is foreordained is very much like the faith of Old Reds in the inevitable triumph of Communism. It is an article of faith that is argued from more often than it is argued to. I myself incline to the ancient opinion that there is no stable form of government and that under the stress of events each type of polity is likely to succumb in turn to its own intrinsic contradictions—aristocracy, democracy, tyranny, paper, rock, scissors. And that’s assuming that some sort of overwhelming external force does not intervene in the frustrated dialectic like a Cretaceous meteorite. At best, political arrangements are temporary solutions to changing circumstances that depend crucially on the continuous efforts of men and women determined to make them work.
The most recent democratic era in American history was made possible by the nation’s extraordinarily favorable international political and economic position after World War II; by cheap oil; by a series of technological breakthroughs; and, not least, by a genuine consensus in favor of open, inclusive, and responsible government. Most of these contextual factors have changed over the last thirty years; and, in response, functional, as opposed to notional, loyalty to the public good is becoming merely quaint—in this society, individuals of real integrity have something Amish about ‘em. The U.S. appears to be moving in the direction of a one-party state that uses interlocking government and corporate power to protect and extend the prerogatives of a small group of hyperwealthy families against the interests of an inert and infantilized population. One can surely imagine the fall of the current kings of the shining city on the dunghill—indeed, one can predict their fall with some confidence—but the removal of one mad prince isn’t going to restore the Republic because democracy doesn’t go very well with a declining empire. Even if democracy is the end of human history in some sense, I doubt if there will be very much of it at the end of our history.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
A Protestant Misunderstanding of the Nature of Science
It may seem an excess of caution to feel a need to argue for the real presence of flour in the host, but our motto has always been “Dare to be dull.” We purpose to get it right even though the truth is bound to be pretty banal: it is largely banal, after all, since so much of it resides in the box labeled “Of Course.” Repeating the facts too often violates Grice’s rules of pragmatics and Shannon’s information theory, both of which mandate that every utterance must surprise or else it cannot inform. Fortunately for the leaden literalist, however, the world is full of fictions that people actually believe; and so long as they do, it will remain relevant to dispute them. Thanks to all.
Where was I? O, yeah. I was fixing to comment on how popular discussions of science presume that the sciences are really just debating societies whose output is a body of propositions. If you bother to click on the link to Panda’s Thumb over to the right of these paragraphs, you’ll discover that both the partisans of Intelligent Design and the defenders of evolutionary theory sound like participants in a particularly ill tempered 18th Century salon. That’s pretty much inevitable, of course, but only because the political debate over evolution and creationism doesn’t take place in the sciences at all. It is a sham combat, a clown fight with pig bladders. Real scientists really do argue with one another in the course of practicing science, obviously; but the novelty and value of the science derives from the degree to which it is not merely a conversation among people but a process that gives a voice to the objects its studies.
Back in the 16th Century, the Reformers made the error of thinking that Holy Writ sufficed to define right belief so long as it was read in good faith. The Genevan variety of intolerance followed from scriptura sola like a theorem; for if the doctrinal content of the Bible was clear, if followed that the Papists and the Socinians and Anabaptists and the Libertines just had to be lying. Even the most literal-minded of the Lutherans and Calvinists eventually had to finesse the theory of reading that underlay their theology, however, because at a minimum they themselves had to add a little something to the interpretation of the Old Testament to go on claiming that it made reference to Christ and the Trinity and they also had to tweak their own rendition of the New Testament to defend the utterly unscriptural practice of infant baptism. Meanwhile the Catholics made things much easier for themselves by maintaining that the basis of the faith was not the inert text itself but the scriptures as interpreted by a tradition continuously inspired by the spirit of God.
The sciences cleave to the Catholic view of the matter. The intelligibility, let alone the reliability, of scientific results does not derive from right reason or human authority but from the continuing real presence of the world in the process of research, which plays the same essential role for them that the holy ghost is said to play for the church. The novelty of the scientific method was to invite the things into the lab where they could offer their sometimes-coerced testimony to supplement and eventually supplant the testimonials of learned. Obviously this process crucially involved the development of new social and political institutions, but the whole point of the emerging research establishment was to get beyond merely human input and the interminable repetition of our favorite fantasies. Only a cartoon social constructionist could imagine that the content of the often unexpected findings of physics and biology originate from the fiat of any human mind since our minds just aren’t that creative—Millikan may have fudged his data, but he surely couldn’t have found the value of the charge on an electron in his head since -1.6 x 10-19 is not the sort of thing to be found in human heads.
It may seem an excess of caution to feel a need to argue for the real presence of flour in the host, but our motto has always been “Dare to be dull.” We purpose to get it right even though the truth is bound to be pretty banal: it is largely banal, after all, since so much of it resides in the box labeled “Of Course.” Repeating the facts too often violates Grice’s rules of pragmatics and Shannon’s information theory, both of which mandate that every utterance must surprise or else it cannot inform. Fortunately for the leaden literalist, however, the world is full of fictions that people actually believe; and so long as they do, it will remain relevant to dispute them. Thanks to all.
Where was I? O, yeah. I was fixing to comment on how popular discussions of science presume that the sciences are really just debating societies whose output is a body of propositions. If you bother to click on the link to Panda’s Thumb over to the right of these paragraphs, you’ll discover that both the partisans of Intelligent Design and the defenders of evolutionary theory sound like participants in a particularly ill tempered 18th Century salon. That’s pretty much inevitable, of course, but only because the political debate over evolution and creationism doesn’t take place in the sciences at all. It is a sham combat, a clown fight with pig bladders. Real scientists really do argue with one another in the course of practicing science, obviously; but the novelty and value of the science derives from the degree to which it is not merely a conversation among people but a process that gives a voice to the objects its studies.
Back in the 16th Century, the Reformers made the error of thinking that Holy Writ sufficed to define right belief so long as it was read in good faith. The Genevan variety of intolerance followed from scriptura sola like a theorem; for if the doctrinal content of the Bible was clear, if followed that the Papists and the Socinians and Anabaptists and the Libertines just had to be lying. Even the most literal-minded of the Lutherans and Calvinists eventually had to finesse the theory of reading that underlay their theology, however, because at a minimum they themselves had to add a little something to the interpretation of the Old Testament to go on claiming that it made reference to Christ and the Trinity and they also had to tweak their own rendition of the New Testament to defend the utterly unscriptural practice of infant baptism. Meanwhile the Catholics made things much easier for themselves by maintaining that the basis of the faith was not the inert text itself but the scriptures as interpreted by a tradition continuously inspired by the spirit of God.
The sciences cleave to the Catholic view of the matter. The intelligibility, let alone the reliability, of scientific results does not derive from right reason or human authority but from the continuing real presence of the world in the process of research, which plays the same essential role for them that the holy ghost is said to play for the church. The novelty of the scientific method was to invite the things into the lab where they could offer their sometimes-coerced testimony to supplement and eventually supplant the testimonials of learned. Obviously this process crucially involved the development of new social and political institutions, but the whole point of the emerging research establishment was to get beyond merely human input and the interminable repetition of our favorite fantasies. Only a cartoon social constructionist could imagine that the content of the often unexpected findings of physics and biology originate from the fiat of any human mind since our minds just aren’t that creative—Millikan may have fudged his data, but he surely couldn’t have found the value of the charge on an electron in his head since -1.6 x 10-19 is not the sort of thing to be found in human heads.
Saturday, June 11, 2005
Power to the People?
Mainline Democrats are only slightly more democratic than their Republican opponents since a strongly egalitarian politics threatens the prerogatives of professional people as well as billionaires. Certainly, none of the relevant elites is about ready to let the mass of the population have a decisive say in foreign policy. The democrats really do have a different take on the proper use of power, but liberal imperialists who wish to rule through consensus are still imperialists. Which largely explains why the Democrats have been so helpless in confronting the Iraq war. Many of them more or less openly endorse the notion that we have a right to unilaterally impose our system and its values on others by the application of deadly force. The Weapons of Mass Destruction scam didn’t just provide cover for the right. The moderates that went along with Bush may have thought that Saddam had some mustard gas, but they also knew perfectly well that the WMDs were utterly inconsequential, the merest red herring. They knew, but they were as willing as Powell and the rest to use this phony excuse to manipulate the public because they have no scruples whatsoever about lying to the people. Whatever you think of their motives, that is what ruling classes do.
My point is not to suggest that the world would automatically be better or safer if the wishes of the public were seriously consulted, though I think the European public at least has been far wiser than the American Neocons about the Middle East. There are a great many things that should not be settled by a vote, indeed a great many things about which people in general have no right to an opinion. The problem is that our nation endlessly proclaims its democratic principles but denies them in practice in areas—war and peace, wealth and poverty—where everybody really does have an existential stake and therefore a right to be heard and listened to. Since democracy on these matters would interfere with the wishes and interests of the rulers, we get democracy where it doesn’t belong by way of compensation. The courts will become collection agencies for the corporations, but we will tenderly protect the people’s right to impose their sexual morals on everybody. We’ll steal your pensions and your social security contributions to pay off our political supporters, but you’ll be able to decide scientific issues like evolution by a show of hands. You want to pronounce it New-cu-lar, you go right ahead. See, we’re populists.
Mainline Democrats are only slightly more democratic than their Republican opponents since a strongly egalitarian politics threatens the prerogatives of professional people as well as billionaires. Certainly, none of the relevant elites is about ready to let the mass of the population have a decisive say in foreign policy. The democrats really do have a different take on the proper use of power, but liberal imperialists who wish to rule through consensus are still imperialists. Which largely explains why the Democrats have been so helpless in confronting the Iraq war. Many of them more or less openly endorse the notion that we have a right to unilaterally impose our system and its values on others by the application of deadly force. The Weapons of Mass Destruction scam didn’t just provide cover for the right. The moderates that went along with Bush may have thought that Saddam had some mustard gas, but they also knew perfectly well that the WMDs were utterly inconsequential, the merest red herring. They knew, but they were as willing as Powell and the rest to use this phony excuse to manipulate the public because they have no scruples whatsoever about lying to the people. Whatever you think of their motives, that is what ruling classes do.
My point is not to suggest that the world would automatically be better or safer if the wishes of the public were seriously consulted, though I think the European public at least has been far wiser than the American Neocons about the Middle East. There are a great many things that should not be settled by a vote, indeed a great many things about which people in general have no right to an opinion. The problem is that our nation endlessly proclaims its democratic principles but denies them in practice in areas—war and peace, wealth and poverty—where everybody really does have an existential stake and therefore a right to be heard and listened to. Since democracy on these matters would interfere with the wishes and interests of the rulers, we get democracy where it doesn’t belong by way of compensation. The courts will become collection agencies for the corporations, but we will tenderly protect the people’s right to impose their sexual morals on everybody. We’ll steal your pensions and your social security contributions to pay off our political supporters, but you’ll be able to decide scientific issues like evolution by a show of hands. You want to pronounce it New-cu-lar, you go right ahead. See, we’re populists.