Narcissus, Unimpressed

“Know before whom you stand” is inscribed on the top of the Torah case in many synagogues. I’ve written the same message on the top of my bathroom mirror, though hardly as an exercise in megalomania.

Most of us don’t get ourselves crucified, but the path of even a more or less satisfactory life is marked off by such stations of the cross as the moment when you realize that your plans have failed and you’ll have to make do with fantasies, and the moment when you discover that you have to imagine that you still have desires in order to go on dreaming, and the moment when you recognize that dreaming is as much of a chore as doing the dishes.

I’m anything but a good person, and yet I have a certain automatic generosity. I don’t much care who enjoys something as long as somebody does. It’s as if I believed that there was only one actor behind every part in the play, the self-same crazy hunger chanting “I am the eater, I am the eater, I am the eater!” through its innumerable ravenous mouths. (Or “Feed me!” if you prefer the Little Shop of Horrors to the Upanishads.)

The sad fact that a question isn’t necessarily profound just because it doesn’t have an answer.

The Fifth Rerun of Wagon Train

It is gradually dawning on quite a few people that last week’s terror plot probably wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. Indeed, since none of the villains of the piece had made any bombs or bought airline tickets and many of them didn’t even have passports, it’s not clear that they were ever ready to even rehearse, let alone pull off a massive attack. The charges against the group depend on the testimony, probably extracted under torture, of a man in Pakistani custody. Meanwhile, both Bush and Blair stood in urgent need of a renewal of public panic; and both have a long track record of exaggerating and misrepresenting facts for political gain. Now it is true that even the most relentless bluffer is sometimes dealt good cards. There may indeed have been some sort of plot. Chances are, however, that our boys are just blowing smoke again. Granted the extreme incompetence of these administrations, a real plot would have most likely have been revealed by planes plummeting to the ground. If these guys are able to thwart it, the threat can’t be too serious.

The Murphy Bed

People who love books are advised not to open bookstores on the same reasoning that suggests that the perfect spouse is somebody you don’t hate but don’t particularly like either. I once contemplated a career in the ministry on this basis, figuring that a passionless disbeliever would make a well-nigh ideal Episcopalian priest. Besides, I rather looked the part. As a trial run, I once conducted a service at Pomona College, which went OK, although the congregation was puzzled why I had them sing the hymn about “those in peril on the sea”—I had written the wrong number down in my notes. The clerical theme crops up later in my story as well, though these days, I’ve given up impersonating a Protestant preacher in favor of being mistaken for a local Hassidic rabbi. The rumor that I’m actually Pope Benedict blogging under an assumed name is unsupported by credible evidence, however.

The point is—there must be a point around here someplace—the point is I don’t have any dislike of churches or theologies. I don’t think there is a particle of truth in the articles of anybody’s faith, but that’s not much of an argument against religion. Human life needs a ritual dimension; or, to be more accurate, we prefer not to leave dead family members out in the trash, even if we don’t believe in the prospect of recycling. It’s only humane and decent to frame the facts of our existence with due ceremony. Literal belief in Gods and spirits is unnecessary and, in any case, largely irrelevant even to most believers because modern religiosity is like a Murphy bed. It folds away when not in use.

You often encounter biologists who vigorously oppose the thesis of intelligent design on the unimpeachable grounds that it isn’t science and yet maintain their own Sunday-morning version of divine design. Nature shows no trace of the workings of an extraneous intelligence—the VIN numbers having been filed off the mitochondria—but one can certainly claim that the entire system of the world was created with just the right characteristics to produce intelligent life. Conway Morris, in his otherwise very impressive book Life’s Devices, makes this argument; and is obviously proud of it, too, even though it is very little more than a restatement of the rather basic theorem of modal logic that everything actual was formerly possible. Even the fact, if it is a fact, that the constants of physics have to be almost exactly what they are in order to make life possible, doesn’t provide any evidence of “fine tuning.” Indeed, the expression “fine tuning” is itself an instance of question begging since the whole issue is whether there ever was any tuning or any tuner in the first place. Anyhow, if it is miraculous that our emergence was, like the Battle of Waterloo, a close run thing, adding a second miracle to explain the first won’t lessen the peculiarity of the situation. But if Morris’ argument is a non-starter from a philosophical point of view, it is also a completely harmless one since it has been carefully crafted to have no consequences whatsoever for the conduct of the sciences or for our understating of nature. A perfect Murphy bed.

Incidentally, I was reminded of the Morris book recently when I encountered a somewhat similar line of reasoning in R.J.P. Williams and J.J.R. Frausto de Silva’s “the Chemistry of Evolution,” which, while carefully avoiding theological overtones, attempts to understand the evolution of living things as the more or less inevitable unfolding of the potentialities of elements under the conditions that obtained in early Earth history. Williams and de Silva speak about the emergence of general ways of processing energy and matter such as anaerobic prokaryotes or unicellular eukaryotes or animals with nervous systems and brains rather than of particular taxa while Morris argues, much less plausibly, for the inevitability of something recognizably human, down to bipedal locomotion. Even so, I expect that Williams and de Silva have overstated their case, but I’m inclined to think that the table of Mendeleev does explain rather more than the tablets of Moses. The Chemistry of Evolution book also has the virtue of underling the role of inorganic chemistry in the development and functioning of living things, something rather lost in many popular accounts of living things, reflecting as such accounts do the prejudices of the organic chemists and the journalists’ obsession with DNA.

Democratic Deficits

I mostly hear the term “democratic deficit” used in relation to the situation in the European Union where the bureaucrats in Brussels are largely independent of any control by elected bodies; but the EU case, whose consequences have mostly been benign, is hardly anomalous. Worldwide, the will of the people only matters when it happens to coincide with the desires of some ruling group. Thus, most citizens of the United Kingdom didn’t support British participation in the Iraq invasion and want the troops brought home. Opinion in the United States has trended strongly in the same direction. That doesn’t seem to matter. Indeed, bringing up the disconnect between the wishes of the public and the government may be counterproductive since it is demonstrates to the operators of the system how little they have to fear from below. Every defeat of the people reinforces the arrogance of the elites. Having lost their inhibitions, the politicians and technocrats cheerfully fix elections, corrupt judicial systems, intimidate the press, and—if necessary—overturn the occasional inconvenient electoral result by simply murdering their opponents, Israeli style. I’m reminded of the Don Larson cartoon where the trained bears suddenly discover how easy it is to tear off their muzzles.

I’m not a proponent of universal populism. My political philosophy is banal indeed, a barely updated version of Aristotle’s theory of mixed government; and I believe that the will of the people is only one element in a happily constituted state. Private property and the economic inequality that goes with it require that society be maintained in a condition of perpetual tension; and science and many other cultural institutions are also anti-popular institutions that have to be maintained against the ignorance and superstition normal to our species. Nevertheless, when the level of exploitation of the many by the few becomes greater than the level at which it promotes a higher general level of welfare, it becomes morally problematic; and when it rises without moderation, it becomes practically unsustainable. Of course, it may be that advances in military technology and propaganda techniques will allow elites to maintain or increase their control; but I think it is more likely that the end of the era of economic and demographic expansion will eventually destroy the dynamic equilibrium as the haves fall out among themselves and the have-nots figure out how to get even. This set of contradictions has already resulted in at least one casualty: the word Democracy, which, like Lenin’s body, has been reeking of formaldehyde for some time now.

Sexually Based Offenses are Considered Particularly Marketable

Television is often a victimless crime. When some cable channel talking head makes a few bucks by hosting a special on an alien autopsy or the Shroud of Turin, the willful misrepresentation of the facts is no more objectionable than the net stockings on a hooker. It’s just something the johns like; and the second-rate celebrities that host these shows probably figure that the work, inglorious as it is, still beats opening strip malls. The calculated promotion of public ignorance is far harder to excuse when real human beings are hurt in the process. I’m not just thinking of the way the corporate shills on CNBS encourages stock market speculation or Fox stokes the natural cowardice of the American people in order to justify war and torture. The entertainment shows also spread false and misleading ideas and do so far more effectively than any blond harpy on CNN.

It is the premise of countless television shows that sex offenders are impossible to rehabilitate and should be locked up forever. For Law and Order Special Victims Unit and the others, once a molester, always a molester is a genre convention like the well-known fact that you can’t see vampires in the mirror. Now it is very hard to come by reliable statistics on recidivism, but the biggest meta-statistical study I’ve encountered suggests that the recidivism rate for sex crimes is approximately 13.4%, notably lower than the 40+% recidivism rate for other crimes. Apparently the guy you really, really don’t want moving in next door isn’t Ernie the perv, but a garden-variety mugger.

Granted that it is childishly easy and highly profitable to get people hysterical about sexual offenses, don’t television producers, writers, and actors have some responsibility for riling up the lynch mob? The real justification for permanently stigmatizing sexual offenders is not that their crimes are especially harmful—a lot of these guys are hapless flashers and voyeurs, after all, and some of them are sixteen year old boys caught groping their fifteen year old girlfriends—but that the public can be made to believe that the rare cases of homicidal child-abusers are somehow typical and that people who like child pornography are very likely to feel up the next kid they meet. To speak like an anthropologist, sex crimes are sacred. One has to believe that they are qualitatively different than other crimes since they are a real but much smaller problem quantitatively.

An Iliad of Woes

In the third book of the Iliad, the Greeks and Trojans get the brilliant idea of settling their ten-year long war by a single combat between Paris, the abductor of Helen, and Menelaus, the outraged cuckold. For thousands of years now, students have been asking why this solution didn’t occur to anybody before so many warriors had already become a feast for the vultures. I have a similar question as I read about the Iraqi government’s proposal to end the civil war by trading an agreement for the withdrawal of all foreign troops for a general cessation of hostilities. After all, in the immediate aftermath of our invasion, the United States could have promised to leave at a time certain and thus preempted the main motive of the insurrection.

One knows the answer to the Homeric riddle. Troy was doomed. A reasonable composition of the quarrel would have thwarted the will of the Gods, and even a postponed duel between the aggrieved parties could not be allowed to resolve things until every drop of fated blood had been shed. Aphrodite duly intervenes to save Paris before Menelaus can finish him off. Things are much the same in Mesopotamia. In the Iraqi instance, our own Zeus can be counted on to guarantee the continued misery of all concerned, though it may be a challenge to figure out how to twist the arms of our erstwhile local allies and ensure that all five acts of the tragedy be performed before the curtain.

Gummed to Death by Gabby Hayes

One of the most persistent and mysterious myths about political blogging is the notion that the average blogger is young, poor, and badly educated. In fact, to judge by recent surveys, most bloggers and most readers of blogs are down-right long in the tooth—in a study of those whippersnapper Kos people, the most overrepresented age bracket was the over 65 set. Bloggers also tend to be both better educated than the average American, which is hardly surprising since people who are comfortable with writing are likely to more highly literate than the norm. They are also relatively well-off.

I’m skeptical of the political potential of the Blogosphere, at least as a medium for mass mobilization. Communicating in whole sentences is just too demanding for most people, especially since even people with the requisite English skills are often too busy or too distracted to relish an activity as high-energy as writing or even reading blog posts. For the common reader, the seriousness, novelty, and complexity of the arguments one finds on many sites are far more apotropaic than the often bewailed tendency of some bloggers to operate at a level of obscenity reminiscent of Deadwood. Because they are highly articulate, however, the bloggers may exert an indirect effect on future politics by working on the minds of members of political elites. And because they and their readers have considerable disposable income, they do have the wherewithal to get politicians to listen to them.

A character in one of my old science fiction stories notices that the headline on Time magazine cover reads “The Baby Boomers Turn 80 This Year!” Well, we aren’t 80 yet, but maybe the true secret meaning of the Blogging vogue is the advent of a generational geezer attack, something rather like what takes place in a zombie movie except that the web’s shambling monsters make a lot more editorial comments than the traditional brain-eaters.

A Looming Threat

As many people have pointed out, it is more than a little ironic that so many established journalists are currently publishing attacks on the blogosphere on the theory that it is under the control of puppet masters like Marcos, the founder of the Daily Kos. After all, the pundit counter-offensive appears to be far more coordinated than the normal activities of the anarchistic net. Indeed, when the Op-ed writers aren’t calling the bloggers on their groupthink, they are complaining about net-based opinion precisely because it is uncontrollable. Nothing on the net corresponds to the editorial section of the New York Times. There is no permanent high ground. Anybody is liable to say anything, including, for example, pointing out that the defining feature of American elite journalism is its startling lack of talent.

Like most people who actually blog, I doubt if blogging is going to bring the millennium or even turn out to be politically important except at the margins. Indeed, the greatest the new modality’s most significant impact may be to accelerate the tempo of serious debate in academic and scientific disciplines. Participation in the electronic conversation is rather too strenuous to attract mass participation, which partly explains why so many bloggers are in their 50s and 60s. There just aren’t that many younger people who are willing or able to write paragraphs in the dead of night. But I doubt if the Swift Boating of the bloggers is motivated as much by the realistic political threat they represent to conservative and liberal orthodoxy as by the pundits’ anger at the recognition of their own increasing marginalization. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and the rest are steadily losing readers and credibility. The blogosphere—as opposed to the Internet as a whole—may have little to do with the downfall of the traditional media and the declining status of the talking heads; but it is a convenient scapegoat. As usual, the defense of privilege is more fervent than the defense of principle.

I’m Not Interested in Figuring Out Whether I’m Leaning Left or Right—I Have a Hard Enough Time Remaining Vertical

The notion that netroot Democrats are a radical protest group may be politically useful spin, but it is analytically inaccurate. The center of gravity of the dissident bloggers is located in the middle, not the periphery—Kos, Atrios, Brad DeLong, Marshall and many others are liberals, not leftists. The occasional old guard types that do surface in the comment sections from time to time stand out as a bit quaint, blue-dog Marxists among the irritated pragmatists. Remarkably few commentators are dreaming about nationalizing the toilet paper factories. The funny thing is that many of the bloggers think of themselves as more leftist than they actually are, perhaps unconsciously buying into the right-wing way of conceptualizing things. For the right, after all, Eisenhower was a pinko.

You also read that the Democrats on the web have no positive program. This too is spin. Precisely because the developing consensus of the netroots is anything but radical, its values and policy preferences are bound to be less dramatic than the revolutionists on the right. If you don’t want to repeal the Bill of Rights and you aren’t proposing an invasion of yet another foreign country or attempting to establish a national church, you’re bound to have more trouble making headlines than your photogenic opponents with their amusing pathologies. Even universal health care, a traditional Democratic goal sometimes featured as radical, obviously is anything but groundbreaking. It’s catch-up—Indoor plumbing! What will they think of next! Taking the energy crisis and global warming seriously isn’t daring innovation either. It’s what we obviously ought to do.

Unfortunately, a manifesto composed almost entirely of sensible proposals aimed at managing real problems is not going to make very inspiring reading. Maybe I’ll take a whack at composing one. I’m told I’m good at dull.

On the Advantages of Maintaining a Sense of Humor about Human Sexuality, a Not Exactly Pindaric Ode inspired by an Internet Debate on the Impropriety of Certain Amorous Proclivities

All our games are coarse and rude,
Unless, of course, you’re in the mood.
Besides, when you come down to it,
Both girls and boys are full of shit
As was delivered by the Saint
Commenting on the human taint
Betwixt the boudoir and the loo
And number one and number two
Where we beget and were begot
And go to get and to be got.

Academics and Politics

Profs often complain that they are ineffective politically because people resent their intellectual level. No doubt that occurs, but I think the main reason that academics have trouble reaching large audiences is not that they are smarter than their potential listeners, but that their way of speaking conforms to specialized rules of scholarly discourse. A lot of the complexity of professorial language consists of rhetorical Masonic Handshakes that verify the guild membership and status of the speaker to his colleagues; and both habit and humility guarantee that a learned person will make unreasonable assumptions about what the listener already knows about a subject. Meanwhile, academics spend their whole careers trying to come up with something new to say or at least some new way to say something old. This requirement alone guarantees that no simple truth will be uttered, even if it is news to the actual recipient, without a elaborate garnish of ifs, ands, and buts. There is always the suspicion that the plain facts plainly enunciated will not suffice either to maintain one’s own dignity or respect the capacity of the other person, even when the plain facts are already damned hard to explain and nobody knows anything without having learned about it.

The Most Apt Analogy

Commentators consistently impute more rationality to the Bush foreign policy than the record warrants. They write as if the goal of our occupation of Iraq was to set up a stable regime and then leave, even though the administration is on the record that it plans to remain in the area and the military is constructing elaborate installations with room for 50,000 or 60,000 troops. It is hard to believe that even the fantasists that run our government imagine that the U.S. has the political will or the economic and military resources to turn Mesopotamia into a permanent entrenched camp in the midst of a hostile region. Stupidity, however, is a great enabler of optimism.

Snow and other administration spokesmen have recently taken to likening the current impasse in Iraq to the Battle of the Bulge as if the activities of the insurgents were the last, desperate counterattack of a strategically defeated enemy. The problem with the analogy is that we are not contending against a single organized power like Hitler’s Germany. With remarkably few exceptions, everybody in the neighborhood hates us, including most of our current allies in the ersatz People’s Republic of Iraq. It’s possible that we can defeat any particular group, but so long as we insist on continuing our occupation, there will always be new groups, armed and financed by public and private sources in the surrounding nations. We simply don’t have the armed forces required to pacify the entire Middle East, and we don’t have the economic resources necessary to bribe the Iraqis into willing submission.

The accurate analogy here is not the Battle of the Bulge. It’s an ingrown toenail.

Every Cow is Driven to Pasture by a Blow

The usual thing to say is that the foreign policy of a national leader becomes less effective as he loses political power at home. In Bush’s case, the reverse may be true. Lacking the strength to mount a military attack on Iran, the Administration is falling back on diplomacy and actually getting somewhere, in part because a manufactured crisis rapidly becomes less threatening when you stop manufacturing it. If the president’s poll numbers continue to decline, his State Department may be compelled to take additional intelligent steps.

This morning’s killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi provides an opportunity for another retreat to rationality. It’s not just that eliminating the principal bogie man allows Bush to declare victory while preparing a strategic withdrawal from Iraq. It gives both the Republicans and the liberal hawks a chance to wean themselves from their dependence on bogie men. So long as the conflict in Mesopotamia is defined as a struggle of radical good against radical evil, cutting deals is impossible even though any semblance of a resolution of the problem in the region will require the cutting of a huge number of deals. Bush could—and may well—replace Zarqawi with another papier-mache monster as Zarqawi once stepped into the shoes of Saddam and Bloefeld succeeded to Dr. No but that won’t help because the supply of candidate terrorists is not the rate-limiting factor in this reaction. Short of literally grinding the contending factions to dust, we’ll eventually have to recognize that our opponents aren’t mindless henchmen directed by Hitler-clones but political, ethnic, and religious groups that regard their own interests as legitimate. So how about singing just one more chorus of “Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead” and then setting up some meetings with the Sunnis?

The Default, Dear Brutus, Is Not in Our Stars

Unless you’re listening to your relatives, you have a right to expect something new in every declarative sentence, some hint of surprise, since a perfectly predictable utterance conveys no information. This pragmatic rule is presumably more rigorously enforced in written language since print costs more, at least in bother, than idle conversation. Unfortunately, this net effect of this imperative can create a misleading impression of what people actually believe at any given time in history since what is written is written against a set of assumptions that seldom get stated except by mathematicians and sociologists. Statistically considered, the Zeitgeist described by the intellectual historians is not the default position of the educated people of an Age but some sort of measure of the typical forms of dissent to the mysterious dark matter of the real consensus. This problem isn’t just academic. I may not care very much about what they really thought during the Scottish Enlightenment, but I’d very much like to know what I myself am thinking right now. To figure that out, I’d have to dare to be dull; and, appearances to the contrary, I’m not sure that I’m that audacious.

Private Property is like Ketchup

The classic route to staggering wealth begins with the assumption of a huge mountain of debt. I like to use the same technique in writing essays, beginning with some peculiar sentence that makes no sense at all on its face and saddles me with an obligation to explain my way out of a fix I've willingly put myself into. The best example I know of this sort of thing and the inspiration of my title is the first sentence of one of Levi-Strauss’ books: “Totemism is like hysteria.”

If you haven’t already guessed, private property is like ketchup because both are homely items, which, though far too familiar to be taken much note of, would be sensational inventions were they to appear for the first time in the year 2006. One can easily imagine the rapturous reception the zesty new condiment would earn on the cooking shows. Similarly, the discovery of a way to ensure that cars get washed and shops get opened on time would amaze and delight the public. It’s too late to experience either frisson now, except, perhaps, to the extent that the disappearance of a thing rhymes sadly with the memory of its debut. Of course ketchup isn’t actually going away. Private property, on the other hand, is under serious attack as corporate capitalism, at last poised to fulfill the dream of Henri Saint-Simon, pursues the Wal-Mart route to socialism.

Look and See

In a public debate, those with the facts are at a serious disadvantage because their listeners have to learn something in order to understand arguments supported by evidence. Inertia favors appeals based on platitudes and commonplaces since these notions are already well known and people tend to think that ideas are true simply because they are familiar. In debates about religion, for example, it is taken as a given that belief in the supernatural promotes morality and prevents social breakdown while even a cursory examination of the historical record suggests that things are far more complex. Sometimes religious institutions have maintained order in the aftermath of military defeat and general demoralization as when the bishops of Western Europe, often members of the senatorial class, stepped in to manage as best they could the ruined provinces of a fallen empire. In these instances, as perhaps in the case of some of the successor states of the USSR, religion was important by default. On the other hand, where societies are doing well, as in contemporary Scandinavia, or manage to organize themselves around nationalism or secular ideologies, religion is often largely irrelevant. And there are also cases such as Mongolia and Tibet where a mania for religion appears to have led to national decadence. Historical sociology does not yield simple conclusions, which is not to say that it doesn’t yield any conclusions at all. The point is, you have to look and see.

By the way, the atheists are as fond of coarse answers as any believer. Every time I encounter some villager waving the bloody shirt of the Crusades or the Inquisition, I find myself wondering if any of these worthies has bothered to assess the historical record. As a cause of mortality, getting burnt at the stake is pretty insignificant compared to brain tumors or probably even lightening, not to mention really serious killers like spousal jealousy. Similarly, though there have certainly been times of terrible religious wars, there have also been long eras during which people found other reasons to kill one another. It is trivially true that every kind of villainy correlates with religiosity; but that just reflects the fact that a proclivity to superstition and fanaticism, if not part of the essence of humanity, is at least a universal accident like original sin. Indeed, on balance, it may have been a good thing that organized churches have managed and channeled our potentially dangerous spiritual impulses over the centuries. Thus even the Spanish Inquisition, terrifying as it undoubtedly was, did serve to curb the homicidal prejudices of the Spanish people, for whom being a Christian had become a matter of blood, not belief, If you think Torquemada was bad, wait until you face a Castilian mob.

On the Hoof

There’s a joke in the Pooh Perplex about the professor who published “All Previous Thought, a rather large freshman casebook.” The notion that even an elephant folio could contain that much content is pretty funny, but I have several volumes on my shelves that purport to be only marginally less capacious—the closest in view is Wing-Tsit Chan’s Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy, clocking in a comparatively modest 856 pages. Sourcebooks are an improvement on the potted summaries one encounters in surveys since even translations convey something of the voice of the real thinkers instead of reducing them to a set of opinions rephrased in the conceptually impoverished pidgin language of all-to-much intellectual history. That doesn’t evade the problem of selection, however. It isn’t just a choice must be made between particular thinkers—that subtraction is often part of the value added by the editor. What is problematic is the almost inevitable systematic bias in favor of representatives of traditions whose activities come down to defending definable points of view as opposed, for example, to those for whom a philosophy is more a methodical practice than a body of results. But if the tendency of anthologies to focus on doxa misrepresents the history of philosophy, something similar has a far worse effect when it comes to compilations that survey the world’s religions.

Perhaps because in modern times having a religion is often more like having a hobby than anything else, it’s not surprising that one thinks that adherence to Christianity or Buddhism is definable as belief in a series of propositions. One can easily decide to believe this rather than that. Adapting a total manner of living and feeling is quite a different matter, especially considering the very onerous obligations that go along with the traditional practice of religions. Are you really going to give 10% of your income to the church? Are you really going to sit on a mat two hours a day? Are you really only going to have sex with your wife when you intend to reproduce? And that’s not the worst of it. The theologies of the various religions, having typically been elaborated by extremely intelligent and sophisticated men engaged in a long-range debate with other extremely intelligent and sophisticated men, are intellectually respectable while the ritual, devotional, ethical, and magical elements of the same faiths are often rather embarrassing. Small wonder if a comprehensible belief system presented in a scriptural anthology seems more congenially than the Howl’s Moving Castle of a real religion.

If, for some reason, you really want to know something about the religions of the world, you have to find a way to go beyond accounts that focus on the intellectual rationalizations of the several traditions and take a series of soundings of their daily substance. Donald S. Lopez, Jr.’s Princeton Readings in Religions series is a good place to start since these volumes focus on practice. Reading them conveys a very different picture of the reality of the world religions than the usual accounts, which, in contrast, often seem to be apologetics by proxy, appreciations of alien cultural institutions that accept the accuracy of the self-definitions of the religions they describe. The contemporary scholars who introduce the selections in the Lopez anthologies demonstrate something largely missing from popular discussions of religion: a combination of sympathetic understanding and critical distance.

When the Man on the Horse Won’t Get Off His Ass

Like many others, I’ve taken comfort over the years from the reluctance of American military men to intervene in politics—two hundred and thirty years without a coup. George Washington’s decision not to seize power by force is perhaps an even more defining moment in our history than the Declaration of Independence, which, after all, would read as pretty feckless exercise in enthusiasm had the revolution resulted in a dictatorship. The willing subordination of military to civilian authority is not without its ambiguities, however. It certainly doesn’t mean that the generals and the admirals, inhabitants of an authoritarian world of obedience and deference, respect democratic politics. Indeed, many of them find the give and take of free institutions distasteful and avoid partisan involvement as much out of fastidiousness as principle. Which has a good side and a bad side. The prospect of some future Colin Powell riding a tank onto the Whitehouse lawn is remote, but it’s easy to imagine the Joint Chiefs of Staff looking the other way in the event of a violent seizure of power. “We don’t want to be involved.” The precedents are not favorable. It wasn’t the Italian army that marched on Rome back in 1922, but the fascist seizure of power was made possible by passivity of the generals. The aristocratic German General Staff certainly looked down on the hysterical corporal; but they were too proud to get political and, anyhow, the new party promised to respect their prerogatives and increase their budget allotments. Historically, right-wing craziness is ineffectual without the willingness of military men to sit on their hands. Of course Bush hardly measures up to Mussolini or Hitler and he lacks (for now) the requisite army of street thugs; but the acquiescence of high-ranking officers to torture and illegal wiretapping shows how little effective resistance to extra-constitutional behavior we can expect from a supposedly apolitical military. That’s especially serious because the American military has enormous prestige right now, not only because of its technical competence but because it is perceived, probably inaccurately, as less corrupt than such despised institutions as Congress and the Press. If Bush turns out to have been the John the Baptist to some really malevolent messiah, can we expect the Generals to defend the republic?

Kadavergehorsamkeit

As the Bush administration becomes odious even to its erstwhile ideological supporters, many conservatives are defecting. In a parliamentary system, the result would be a vote of no confidence and a new government. Our constitution prevents that sensible outcome. An American President is like a king, albeit a king with a legally established term of rule. Baring impeachment—an exceedingly unlikely event even if the Democrats regain the House—Bush will occupy the Whitehouse for more than two more years. Of course he might have better luck or try better policies in that period. He might follow the precedent set by Reagan, whose last years in office were rescued by a set of moderate Republicans. Bush, however, is not Reagan. The “new” people he is bringing on board are, if anything, even more ideological than their predecessors. Meanwhile, since the people who are leaving are more principled or at least more cautious than the ones who stay, the administration will probably become more erratic and incompetent. The tarry remains of the distillation will be characterized above all by blind loyalty. Not a comfortable prospect, especially since the better people are not just being driven out of political jobs. The CIA, the armed forces, the civil service, and the science advisory bodies are also affected.

The Swinging Door Policy

Even the most consistent demagoguery becomes self-defeating in the face of a divided people. When illegal immigration wasn’t a particularly salient issue and the prospect of picking up a significant proportion of Hispanic votes outweighed the danger of irritating the nativists, Bush cheerfully sang the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish—in those days, as his publicists were eager to inform us, he was fluent in the language. With his base in revolt, both Bush’s bilingualism and his enthusiasm for La Bandera aren’t what they used to be. The President can’t solve the underlying political problem with this simple PR adjustment, but PR is all he has. A serious crackdown on illegal immigration would harm the interests of his moneyed backers. Indeed, it would put them in legal jeopardy. Meanwhile, the mass part of his support is afraid of all those brown faces. Anyhow, as true Americans, they’d rather face a thousand deaths than actually learn a second language; and you can’t simply point out to these folks that imprisoning or even deporting twelve million hard-working people isn’t going to happen. So it’s a guest worker program to appease the Chamber of Commerce on the plane of the real and three cheers for a culturally white America on the plane of the imaginary.