Make It So

I don’t doubt there are things that are what they are because of the way we think about them, which is to say, because of the will or whim of a sovereign community. Famously, it is consensus not connubium that makes a marriage; and imaginary medical facts can send you off to real jails and madhouses or, thanks to a show of hands at some hotel in Toronto, turn a disease into a life style choice or vice versa. There is nothing new about such astonishing feats of creation from nothing. We read in the Talmud that the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel disputed for two and a half years whether the creation of man had been a good thing. Eventually they took a vote. I guess that settled that. But even admitting that it is indeed possible to do things with words, one has to ask why anybody is especially impressed with these somewhat less than earth-shattering miracles, “Do you believe in infant baptism?” he asked earnestly. “Yes, I’ve seen it done.”

May I suggest that what has been novel and remarkable about the last couple of centuries is a partial escape from the tyranny of the illocutionary? In the near total absence of reliable knowledge, truth was bound to be an act of social will, a set of sacred, obligatory clichés. These days, having figured out how to let reality get a word in edgewise, we actually do understand a thing or two including our location relative to the Sun and the other stars, the nature of the chemical bond, and how living things work. Even granting that the objectivity of the various sciences is to some extent inversely proportional to their human relevance, you’d think we’d be impressed if not relieved to encounter at least a few examples of facts that remain the case whether or not you believe in them. But, of course, it is quite possible that the obsession of retail Postmodernism with the relativity of knowledge is actually an indirect recognition of the new state of affairs, just as the Fundamentalist’s newly found interest in radical skepticism is pretty obviously a response to the practical impossibility of doubting the reality of the evolution of life.

Going Ted Postol

The trouble is, the evil part is so much easier than the genius part. Every three-year old dreams of conquest and empire, but then they kick the wrong uncle in the shins. Unfortunately, the current crop of would-be masters of the universe disposes of a lot more firepower than a toddler and their comeuppance is likely to involve blood rather than tears. In either case, however, wishful thinking leads to a drastic overestimation of real capabilities.

In theory, disciplined but unscrupulous individuals can exploit the power of fantasy to move masses of people without falling for their own line. In practice, even technically sophisticated people don’t seem to be able to keep the two sets of books straight. Back in the 80s, for example, the rational reason to promote antiballistic missile defense was to outmaneuver the Soviets. In the context of that strategy, it made sense to tout the prospects of a successful system even in the face of a near-total scientific consensus that the whole idea was nonsense. The Reds are long gone and the prospects of a working system remain essentially zero, but the dream of perfect safety lives on, recruiting new threats—North Korea, terrorists, perhaps China—to justify what is really a childish and extremely aggressive dream of irresponsible power. By now, it is pretty clear that many in the current regime actually believe in ABMs despite the simultaneous recognition that tests results must be faked to keep the project going.

This sort of thing has happened a lot in the last hundred years. Alfred von Schlieffen could never make his famous plan work even in a map exercise, and the grand dreams of the even more feckless Austrian Franz Conrad von Huetzendorff were similarly dead before arrival. The logistical experts of Hitler’s Wehrmacht calculated that the panzers would run out of gas before they reached Moscow. That didn’t matter to the high command for whom, as usual, hope was indeed the plan. Similarly, the Japanese discounted the results of the war games they conducted in the run up to the Battle of Midway. The umpires ruled that the result of the simulation, the loss of four aircraft carriers, was simply impossible. Authoritarian regimes appear to be especially prone to this pathology. The absence of a free press and serious political opposition makes it easy to fool the populace and therefore yourself. As America becomes steadily more authoritarian, we can expect its leaders to believe their own propaganda more and more.

Unmodern Library

I know a biology professor who draws a chemical structure in front of his class and asks what it is. The students are always familiar with that one, and immediately tell him it’s DNA. “No!” he thunders—well, I imagine he thunders—“It’s chalk on blackboard!” thus producing a new cover of the Buddhist number about the finger and the moon, though as far as I know Ralph hasn’t cut off anybody’s finger yet. There is a philological version of this riff.

Encountering some nice modern translation of an old book or, more likely, a few well-chosen paragraphs from a translation, it is very easy to think you are encountering the word of Dante or Sophocles instead of a thoroughly synthetic surrogate for the postulated original. I recently encountered a photo of a crumbling Babylonian tablet of an episode from the Gilgamesh epic along with a transliteration of its contents (Introduction to Gilgamesh, A Reader, edited by John Meier). What we read as “Why, Enkidu, do you curse the love priestess, the woman?” was vocalized, leaving out the diacritical marks and brackets for conjectures, as “am-me-ni en-ki-du ha-rim-ti sam-hat ta-na-an-za-ar.” Except the tablet is in pretty bad shape, in several pieces in fact, and the scribe’s handwriting, though rather better than mine, is not perfect. And the text is in Akkadian, a Semitic language, but the epic was originally in Sumerian so a literate Mesopotamian would actually have read the characters for Enkidu as something like Heabani. (Apparently, it’s just a convention to call the hero by his Sumerian name Gilgamesh [Bilgamesh?] since the Akkadian is something like Izdubar and everyone knew him as Nancy.) There are other difficulties also. For example, George Smith, who originally translated the passage back in the 1870s, didn’t realize that Samhat means sacred prostitute. He thought it was a proper name for a lady called “Delightful.” It goes on.

I don’t mean to belabor the point, both because it is preposterous for me to talk about the finer points of Assyriology at all granted my well-known imbecility with languages but also because you don’t have to go back to the Dawn of History to find examples of the illusion of transparency. Anyhow, my point is not so much a matter of instances as generalities. Everything we read from other languages, indeed most of what we read in our own language, is highly mediated. Like baby sea gulls we never feed on an actual herring, though in the human case, mommy chews our food for us our whole life long. Intellectually speaking, we subsist on pasteurized, homogenized, and bowdlerized texts, a processed cheese product but one without nutrition information on the label. That’s why I like very literal translations and even more bilingual editions of books. You don’t learn how to make conversation in Assyrian, but at least you preserve some sense of the distance between yourself and the past and the sheer difficulty of understanding.

Hiring the Handicapped

Integrity in a politician is like the tail of the peacock, an extravagance that advertises that its possessor is so vigorous he can afford a superfluous expense. That’s why I usually support the better man even when, as a practical matter, what is most needed is the better politician.

Sunday School

I’ve frequently cited the Book of Daniel for polemical purposes as an example of prophesy after the fact (ex eventu). Obviously put together around 165 BC during the despotic reign of Antilochus IV Epiphanes, the book represents the legendary Daniel as “foretelling” history that had long sense taken place—until very recently Daniel was seven times more fraudulent than any other document ever forged in the land of Mesopotamia. The fortunetelling doesn’t occupy the entire text, however; and I still fondly remember its tales of the handwriting on the wall and the fiery furnace from a picture book I had as a child. Both for old time sake and to see if I had been representing the historical status of the book accurately all these years, I reread Daniel this weekend with the help of the translation and commentary of Hartman and Di Lella. I still like the folkloric parts, and the apocalyptic predictions are still a transparent fiction; but I did learn a few things.

1. The pious commentators treat “the book’s supposed historical setting and dates as merely literary conventions and nothing more,” but they educe no evidence that Daniel’s authors are winking at the reader. It is true, however, that the rabbis, who in this as in other matters demonstrate considerable integrity, eventually put the Book of Daniel in the third part of Scripture, Kehuvim or writings, instead of in the second part, Nevi’im or prophets. The writings contain a number of works such as Job, the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes that are of considerable literary merit but theologically problematic. The Christians were less cautious. St. Jerome followed the Hellenistic Greek translation of the Jewish Bible in placing Daniel among the prophets.

2. The clumsiness of a fraud is no evidence of the innocence of the perpetrators, but it does testify to the remarkable credulity of the faithful. One speaks of a will to believe, but that’s surely a misnomer if the word “will” implies a process of deliberation leading to a decision instead of automatism, group think, and wishful thinking. One believes in the good news much as one believes that it’s you can eat awesome blossoms on a regular basis without bad consequences. One hardly needs to sift the archaeological evidence or to become an expert on Oriental languages to notice that the accounts in the Book of Daniel are incoherent and self-contradictory—on internal evidence alone, the pagan philosopher Porphyry correctly dated the composition of the book back in the 3rd Century.

3. The prophesies in Daniel are indeed ex eventu, but they are also erroneous despite the advantage of predicting the past. The authors of the work simply didn’t understand the history of the Near East—not surprising when you recall that they were talking about things that had happened four hundred years before their own time. How many people today would get the wars and rulers of 16th Century right? Thus the famous allegory of the statue with feet of clay confuses Medes and Persians and generally makes a hash of chronology and king’s names.

Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex by Judith Levine

Harmful to Minors is an expose of the craziness of American attitudes towards sex and children, including our hysteria about pedophilia and child pornography, our dotty notion that there’s something pathological or criminal about nine year olds playing doctor, and the official promotion of abstinence as a panacea. From a statistical point of view, children aren’t at much risk of sexual attack from strangers—family members are another matter—and notion that sex offenders are a homogenous population of incorrigible monsters is not so much a psychological generalization as a rule of genre fiction like the convention that you can’t see vampires in a mirror. Levine usefully reminds us that these received truths hurt a lot of actual people. Minor offenders are branded for life and subjected to vigilante justice, and children get stigmatized by pointless psychiatric interventions backed by the force of law. Meanwhile, the obsession with real or imagined sexual misbehavior opens up vast prospects of blackmail and political extortion to public and private sex police and other entrepreneurs.

In most respects, Harmful to Minors is an unremarkable effort. Levine, a journalist, is neither a remarkably good or remarkably inept writer, and her book features the mix of anecdote and generalization usual in general nonfiction. In any case, making a case for the obvious isn’t all that difficult. What makes the book notable is that it was published at all, even by a minor university press. Indeed, I expect that the University of Minnesota Press wishes it had stuck to learned treatises on phenomenology since the publication of Harmful to Minors was greeted with gouts of venom from the usual spitting cobras. Levine is not a pamphleteer for NAMBLA or a promoter of sexual liberation ala Reich; but she was nevertheless denounced, and not just on AM radio, as a debaucher of children and an agent of the Prince of Darkness. The dogmas of American sexual politics are far too fragile to be defended without fanaticism.

An Unfortunate Consideration

A good many people seem to think that only God can establish moral rules and that without supernatural fiat and sanction we wouldn’t be able to figure out what we should do or bring ourselves to do the right thing if we somehow managed to guess what that might be. This belief is problematic in a practical way. If a theological irrationalist gets up in the morning, looks in the mirror, and decides he can no longer hypnotize himself into believing he believes, a potential psychopath is born. Unfortunately, one has to be very optimistic indeed to think this is only a theoretical possibility.

Has Anybody Pointed Out

Conservatives continue to insist that the observed warming of the Earth has a natural rather than a human cause. To judge from the tendency of articles I’ve read in various journals, the consensus against this proposition is pretty strong and getting stronger—the most recent issue of SCIENCE included a paper reporting evidence that the troposphere, the lowest level of the atmosphere, is swelling, a phenomenon consistent with anthropogenic warming—but the issue of why the Earth is warming may be less important than the more imperious fact that it is warming. Mankind may have to take collective action to deal with the consequences of global warming whatever its cause. And even if, contrary to the current evidence, greenhouse gases aren’t responsible for the warming the Earth, reducing emissions of such gases would remain an obvious way to counter a rise in average temperatures.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Without any particular strain or great expense, I drove more than 5,000 miles in the last month; but I was able to move so effortlessly only because I stayed to well-beaten paths like a marble rolling in a groove. At right angles to the Interstates, I could barely have traveled at all. The freedom of the open road is freedom in much the same way and to the same degree that Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride is an adventure—keep your hands inside the car at all times.

Technical Note: Accounts of the “inner” history of mankind sometimes leave the impression that what has changed in the last couple of centuries is an affair of worldviews or mentalities. What made parts of the Earth into Our World is not something primarily psychological but a real physical process. Dasein really is a clearing in the woods, often enough a clear cut; and our experience is a communal fantasy structured by a physical network of narrow but well-greased pathways paved with concrete and lined with Quality Inns and Burger Kings.

Report from the Heartland

On my recent inspection tour of the continental United States, I mostly inspected the mile or so on either side of various Interstates. I sampled the airwaves more adequately, however, even though with the car in drive and my mind in neutral, what was actually being said in the broadcasts didn’t stick with me. I listened as dogs listen, not to the words but to the tone of the voice. Clear Channel D.J.’s sound a trademark note on every station even when it isn’t literally the same person celebrating the vibrant personality of Amarillo, the Athens of Potter county, on Wednesday and the pioneer spirit of the old Northwest in Terre Haute two days later. On Clear Channel stations, however, it often is the same person.I could also usually tell I had tuned into right-winger talk show by the perpetual snarl. Similarly, NPR announcers almost always sound like psychiatric nurses trying to calm excitable patients. There are exceptions. The musical segues on NPR seem to feature Mongolian throat singing with remarkable frequency, and conservative commentators spend a certain part of every hour flattering their listeners as if the entire middle of the country was suffering from a perpetual crisis of low self esteem.

Travelers to this country often remark on the monotony of its commercial landscapes, the identical strip of brand name stores and restaurants plunked down in an astonishing variety of physical settings; but, to judge by the radio, anyway, America’s feelings are as franchised as the burger joints.

Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, edited by Ibn Warraq

[Note] I tell myself that the best thing is to be satisfied with your fate and get on with it. For example, if you’re a Superhero, it doesn’t do to bitch that you are an off-brand superhero. True, I’m not as strong as the Hulk, as mysterious as the Shadow, or even as stretchy as Plasticman, but I do read a lot. Think of me as what would have happened if the guy in the Twilight Zone episode hadn’t broken his glasses. In that spirit, the first of innumerable very brief notices of mostly unnoticed books:

Ibn Warraq is probably the most prominent anti-Muslim writer who comes from the Muslim world. Leaving Islam and his earlier book, Why I Am Not a Muslim, are effective if unoriginal polemic. You don’t have to be a great shot when you’re shooting an elephant at close range but you do have to keep your nerve—Ibn Warraq, whose real identity is understandably kept secret, is under a death sentence for apostasy as are all male apostates under Muslim law as interpreted by all four schools of Islamic jurisprudence. In any case, as the narratives in Leaving Islam make clear, criticisms of religion that have been commonplace in the West since the Enlightenment are still news in Pakistan and Egypt. Indeed, one of the benefits of reading these first-person accounts is to recover the force of the old arguments. Other themes are perhaps more surprising: many male and female apostates cite the deep hostility of traditional Islam to women and many non-Arabs see Islam as an Arabic imperial ideology. I was also interested to read that many ex-Muslims are as unimpressed with the literary quality of the Koran as I am.

While works like Leaving Islam may have a more immediate impact, I expect that Ibn Warraq’s more academic books will turn out to more important in the long haul. In his What the Koran Really Says, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, and The Origins of the Koran, all anthologies of serious scholarship, Ibn Warraq examines the remarkably thin evidence that lies behind the official story of how Islam and the Koran came to be. Sympathetic Western accounts of Islam have left many people with the impression that, unlike Moses or Jesus, Muhammad’s career unfolded in the light of history. In fact, contemporary Byzantine accounts of the Arab invasion of Syria and Egypt don’t even mention Muhammad, and the familiar just-so story of his activities is based on biographies and histories written down two centuries after the death of the Prophet. It is also quite impossible to squeeze a coherent narrative out of the Koran itself, surely the worst edited as well as the worst written of the major scriptures. In any case, while Jewish and Christian writings have been subjected to four hundred years of serious philological research, the corresponding process has barely been initiated for the Koran. Ibn Warraq’s own conjectures about the origins of Islam may not prove to be accurate or even on the right track—he is perfectly well aware of how tentative all such reconstructions must be given the state of the evidence—but the effort itself is a vital precedent and a huge improvement on the thinly disguised apologetics (Watt!) that often pass for serious scholarship on Islam.

Putting Lessons

Golf is supposed to be a cruel game, but it is also capriciously merciful. No matter how badly you play, some of your shots will go in the hole because the idiot optimism of your club selection and the mere stupidity of your course management will sometimes combine in one golden moment with a feeble swing and geriatric nerves to produce a brilliant result. This occurs surprisingly often. If you both misread and miss hit all your putts, for example, half of them will go wildly off line but half will move in the general direction of the target because the errors counteract one another. An analogue of this mechanism operates in the occasional cases in which journalists get something right. The universal corruption of our Press is sometimes moderated by an incompetence that is equally chronic but much more erratic in its effects. Thus, as Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler website (www.dailyhowler.com) points out, the pundits routinely get the facts wrong when they report on the current WMD scandal. They rightly attack a deeply dishonest regime but with misunderstood particulars. Unfortunately, the golf analogy quickly breaks down, because even the worst golfer really is trying to get the ball in the hole, whereas telling the truth about the public world is not the object of the sport of journalism.

A Memorable Fancy or Phylum and Forget ‘Em

I used to have a recurrent dream that recast the Oedipus legend in modern dress, rather in the style of the Brazilian movie about Orpheus. The only scene I remember with some clarity involved the encounter with the Sphinx, who in this version is a very cool but somewhat sinister jazz pianist, a demonic Ray Charles. The sphinx/hipster registers my approach somehow and, flashing the exaggerated grin of a blind man, lays the riddle on me, “Say, babe, at what temperature does meat keep best?” I answer instantly, “98.6°!” and win, though only for the time being.

Meat can keep for quite a while, several billion years in my case, though temperature isn’t necessarily the most critical parameter, some of my ancestors having been pretty cold fish long before they were really cool cats. The fundamental thing is the unbroken maintenance of a definable chemical tension between what is inside and what is outside. Thus life persists only so long as cells contain a lot more adenosine triphosphate than adenosine diphosphate—8 to 10 times more, I’m told. Since ATP spontaneously breaks down into ADP, only the perpetual uphill synthesis of ATP keeps everybody going. The treadmill must never be allowed to stop. It’s like the children’s pastime of seeing how long you can bounce a ball on a paddle. “A zillion and one. A zillion and two. A zillion and three. Oops!” Life also depends on a continuity of genetic information, of course; but the thermodynamic imperative is even more despotic since it rules every moment of every life.

Physicists describe the motion of things as world lines in space-time. The careers of living things form world tubes, cylinders enclosing small regions rich in energetic molecules. If we could view the Earth and its history from a fifth dimension, we would see trillions and trillions of these mostly microscopic tubes emerging from what was, presumably, a single primal mass. Many of the tubes ramify; but the overwhelming majority dead end almost immediately; and, in all probability, all the tubes end eventually. If you look very closely, you can just make out exceedingly thin tubes branching out from the rare thicker sections. A tiny fraction of these very tiny tubes connect with other tiny tubes and themselves grow into thick tubes. Despite these rare instances of joining, the overall shape of life is, as Darwin recognized, a rather bushy shrub. Topologically, the whole assembly appears to be a single volume in space-time but, because of sex, is actually multiply connected when you look at it closely.

Non-Prophet Organizations

It is a commonplace of Biblical studies that prophets are not fortunetellers and should not be graded by how often their predictions are fulfilled—their calling, presumably, having been something rather different and more important than a gig as a night club card reader or political pundit. I’m merely a gypsy nabi (on the analogy with a gypsy taxi driver), but these days even an unlicensed prophet knows better than to foretell elections or forecast wars. The prudential reason for my reticence is the embarrassment of guessing wrong. Afflicted as I am with a reasonably good memory and random fits of integrity, I’m liable to admit I’m wrong and suffer the consequences to my self-esteem. But the likelihood of error is not the main thing. After all, I might also be right once and a while. I oppose the enterprise of fortunetelling because, finally, I believe in the reality of time and the freedom of the will. History is a surpassingly exciting adventure because not even God knows how it will turn out. So if, for example, I excoriate George Bush, it isn’t because I know whether his face will end up on a stamp or his head on a pole. Good actions turn out badly. Bad actions turn out well. Meanwhile the guy who insists on drawing to an inside strait is still an idiot.

All of this was supposed to be a brief preface to a couple of remarks about Nonprofit Organizations—I guess as a person with a philosophical education, I couldn’t resist the temptation to begin at the beginning and work backwards. The introduction was also meant to display a note of piquant irony, for having rejected the notion of making predictions, I was going to make one, namely that there will be a whole series of scandals involving NPOs in the next few years.

As prophesies go, that one isn’t very thrilling, I suppose. It is also largely ex eventu, that is, there have already been quite a few scandals involving NPOs. Just as the fabricator of the Book of Daniel could accurately predict the downfall of the Babylonians and Persians because these events had already occurred when he wrote the book, I can confidently assert the increasing prevalence of serious dishonesty in the non profits because high officials of Goodwill, the Red Cross, and various church groups have recently been caught with their hands in the till. More than that, however, my prediction is based on the increasing reliance our society places on charitable foundations to the wake of the retreat of the welfare state. NPOs offer a magic or at least very convenient solution to the problems of the world or at least to the problems of the compassionate conservatives. For reasons never exactly explained, the managers of NPOs are supposed to be morally better than government officials and the inefficiency of their bureaucracies somehow a nonissue to the same people who otherwise can’t type the word “bureaucracy” without putting the word “bloated” in front of it. While everybody complains that the CEOs of unsuccessful companies shouldn’t be rewarded with enormous salaries and bonuses, at least CEOs can be judged by the profits of their firms. What constitutes good performance in a top NPOs manager is much more difficult to define. The potential for abuse is enormous.

Oddly, the only general criticism of NPOs I have heard lately comes from the Right. The American Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society recently held an all-day conference entitled NGOs: The Growing Power of an Un-elected Few. Why these two organizations should be unhappy about un-elected power is not clear, but you don’t succeed in the world of foundations by being consistent or intellectually honest. Characteristically, the conference turned into a day long attack on precisely those NPOs — Amnesty International, CARE, Oxfam, and Friends of the Earth—whose activities interfere with the prerogatives of the corporations and America’s imperial foreign policy. The political irresponsibility of the NPOs was just a convenient stick to beat up hated greens and internationalists. That it was an available line of attack, however, is telling. The AEI critique applies far more to the deeply corrupt religious organizations and propaganda mills on their own side than Amnesty International or Doctors without Borders, but it is a valid in principle.

Separating Out

Ian Hacking remarks in one of the essays in his Historical Ontology that the “renaissance medical, alchemical, and astrological doctrines of resemblance and simultude are well nigh incomprehensible. One does not find our modern notions of evidence deployed in these arcane pursuits.” That’s not exactly wrong, but only if the “our” in “our modern notions” is defined narrowly enough. In fact a great many people, even people who don’t live in Taos, still practice these “arcane pursuits” as evidenced by the large Metaphysics sections in bookstores. Indeed, if folks addicted to resemblence and simultude don’t constitute an actual majority of the population, it’s only because so many of the rest haven’t got as far as Paracelsus. The Medieval lies far ahead of most of mankind, especially in America where, even for elites, the gains of the Enlightenment were mostly given back in the succeeding Enmerdement, so that a nation founded by cosmopolitan philosophers is now ruled by superstitious dullards.

What we (but which we?) count as general cultural advance is more often just a separating out of a tiny self-conscious minority who only think they typify the others. Just as the world of living things started out as a bunch of bacteria and mostly remains a bunch of bacteria after three and a half billion years of evolution, intellectual progress hasn’t moved the average very much either. Well-educated people are often upbraided for their sense of superiority, but in my experience they tend to offend more often by giving their fellow man too much credit than too little. They are certainly ignorant about ignorance, mistakenly taking their idea of the human mean from the highly untypical sample of people with whom they themselves interact. Indeed, with this background, encountering a truly typical human being can be quite a shock. Nothing is quite so painful as listening to an honorable, good-natured biologist getting destroyed in a pubic debate over Darwinism because his cynical opponent has a much more realistic understanding of the mentality of a lay audience whose common sense is decidedly prescientific and utterly lacking in “our modern notions of evidence.”

Ends and Means

When I hear people criticize politicians for letting the ends justify the means, I find myself wondering what else is supposed to justify the means. In my experience, the graver errors and crimes of leaders stem from an infatuation with the means themselves for which the purported end of the action simply provides an excuse or occasion. The use of torture to extract information, for example, is commonly defended by an appeal to necessity, as in the current war on terror during which we have promoted the use of torture by our allies when we haven’t practiced it ourselves under various euphemisms. Historical experience suggests, however, that torture is not a very useful technique for gathering information precisely because it is all too effective at eliciting the desired answer. Thus if what you need to do is convince yourselves of the rightness of some crazy theory, for example that old women are powerful agents of the devil or that a wrecked Middle Eastern country is a deadly immediate threat, torture works. More generally, torture makes sense, at least to its devotees, as a way of asserting power through the moral annihilation of a hated enemy. Forcing the bad guy to disclose where he planted the bomb, a very rare occurrence, is treated as the paradigm case for apologetic purposes; but, for the most part, the powerful electrocute a captive’s balls for the same reason a dog licks his—because he can.

Terrible things must sometimes be done by decent people, though even in the most defensible instances, the good can only do what they must my waking their own dark impulses. Thus in the inevitable example—though the case of Roosevelt is probably more illuminating—Churchill waged pitiless war on Hitler because it was the necessary thing to do, but he was able to act ruthlessly, as he himself understood perfectly, because he loved war and destruction for itself. Hitler was a godsend to Churchill, just as the tragedy of the Civil War was a gift to Lincoln, something Lincoln also acknowledged. But in these cases the ends really did justify the means. The great objection to America’s behavior in the world over the last couple of years is not that we have used violent and coercive means, but that we have used them despite the absence of a great national emergency and with a vehemence all out of proportion to any real threat. Bin Laden and Saddam are just excuses for the arrogant and highly pleasurable exercise of sheer power. And the proof of this will be that when these hyped and misidentified villains are gone, there will be others.

Most Dreaded Nation Status

In a recent exchange with Christopher Hitchens, Eric Alterman referred to surveys showing that Europeans think Mr. Bush is more dangerous than Osama Ben Laden. Alterman criticized the administration policies that had led to this perception but was quick to assure everybody that he didn’t share the opinion himself. I presume he was observing the current taboo that mandates piety about American leaders, but I suppose it’s just possible he was sincere. In that case, one has to ask how anybody could doubt that George Bush is not more dangerous than Ben Laden?

My point is not polemical. I’m not looking for new ways to deplore Mr. Bush. I have plenty of those already. What’s at stake is the need for some clarity about obvious realities. Whatever the personal characteristics of Ben Laden or Castro or even the poufy-haired supreme leader of the North Koreans, their actual power to harm is sharply limited by the poverty and military weakness of the organizations they lead. Mr. Bush, by contrast, could incinerate five continents in half an hour. Since the dangerousness of a regime is the product of its capacity to inflict harm and the malevolence or stupidity of its policies and our country is a thousand times more capable than its enemies, our leaders would have to me a thousand times wiser or more moral just to break even. QED.

It is an undisputed maxim of sound strategy that we should prepare to deal with what the enemy can do, not what we think he wants to do. I apply this principle to my own country and its current master. Intentions are not facts of the same order as capabilities; they are often inscrutable and can always be dissembled. Besides, to say that America would never play the bully is to ignore a great deal of historical experience, especially the parts relating to the business end of the Monroe Doctrine. To date, America’s reputation, especially in America, owes a lot to the general ignorance of history and the fact that we’ve mostly played the villain to marginal and despised people and inflicte horrors on nations that had previously acted horribly themselves. I am particularly skeptical of the seldom-articulated but frequently reasoned from premise that America has an especially virtuous national character that guarantees it will not act as badly as all the other empires of history. National character is not unchanging. The Italians used to be Romans; and two hundred years ago it was the French who the military beasts, the Germans who were the people of the poets and thinkers. Unless you believe in divine providence, why should you think that the Americans, whose culture and germplasm is an amalgam of every people on the planet, are somehow above falling into the normal sins of the Nations? The only thing beyond dispute is this: if we go on a rampage, it will be some rampage.

One Hundred Views of Clement Street

The Elizabethans loved finery and display, but their world, like that of practically all human beings for most of history, was very poor in images. Aside from public religious art and a few paintings in the homes of the rich or at court, the only representative art a Londoner regularly encountered were a few black and white figures in books and the crude woodcuts used to decorate humble walls. Artists were scarce, the choice of media limited, and means of reproduction rudimentary. Even the subject matter of pictures was constrained by tradition to a small number of types. The contrast with our experience is stark. We are absolutely awash in images: drawings, paintings, cartoons, prints, movies, videos, photographs, micrographs, charts, clip art, computer displays, even iconic road signs and identification badges. A large proportion of the surfaces of things now bear the likeness of something. The cumulative effect can be overwhelming or at least wearying, but under the circumstances, you’d think we at least know what the world looks like.

It was once a commonplace of Freudian dream analysis that the multiplication of phalluses or phallic symbols such as digits or swords actually figured castration, the lack of even one phallus. Art historians refer to something similar under the rubric of horror vacui. The same logic obtains in the original Matrix movie in which the spectral unreality of the projected world is made clear by the gratuitous multiplication of images–remember the scene where the hero asks for weapons and gets a universe of Uzis that noisily materialize in infinite parallel racks? The effect was subsequently plagiarized in a TV ad for an Internet company that sells cars; and, for that matter, was anticipated in Eastern art where infinite arrays of identical selfless Buddhas are regularly depicted appearing in a golden sky. If we have expanded on these motifs and now fill our entire lives with representations, part of the reason is surely the simple fact that we have the technical means to do so; but the ubiquity of picturing, a sort of objective neurosis of the age, also obsessively stages the inescapable fact that the world remains essentially invisible.

Were there absolutely no light in the Platonic Cave, we would not even be aware of the darkness. What disturbs complacency is not the impossibility of knowing but the implications of what we know and can’t doubt in good faith. Authentic but indirect knowledge allows us to gauge our massive, constitutive ignorance. I’ve lived in these parts for almost a quarter of a century, for example, but I have only recently admitted that I don’t know what Clement Street looks like. I have acquired this insight through a thought experiment. Let there be hundred representations of Clement Street, but let them be truly representative for once, which is to say, let them be random perspectives that reflect the objective reality of Clement Street rather than the customary iconography. A photographer would probably pick a vantage point from which the interesting features of the scene could be observed, but that choice imposes a human principle of selection and drastically reduces the possible images. For our purposes, the view from underneath a dead pigeon or looking straight down from a light post must have equal rights. Indeed, since the nearly universal practice of holding the camera level is also hugely arbitrary, we also have to expect images shot at every angle. Pictures should be made at every focus, at every magnification, at every shutter speed, and with film sensitive to every possible set of frequencies. Like a bee, we should see the street in the ultraviolet. Like a sniper, we should see it in the infrared. It should appear as an X-ray, a spectrogram; and, atom-by-atom, as an image formed by scanning tunneling microscopy—and that’s just to consider mechanical forms of representation. The complete set of views of Clement Street would also include paintings and models produced not only in every known style of art from cave painting to Peter Max but in every possible style of art and executed with every degree of virtuosity at every scale from the microminiature to the monumental, including full-scale duplications of the street made out of everything from bricks and wood to play dough or cottage cheese. Baring miraculous chance, none of the hundred representations selected at random from this thinkable but unimaginable ensemble would look like anything at all we could recognize or interpret but they would be views of Clement Street for all that and representive of what the world looks like in general.

Never Asked by Charlie Rose

I was interested to learn from a recent public service ad that marijuana is a major cause of unwanted pregnancy. For some reason, I was under the impression that beer and tequila shooters often had something to do with that. I don’t discount the deleterious side effects of cannabis, however. For example, pot causes politicians to lie on television and incites police officers and judges to ruin the lives of total strangers—a powerful drug, indeed, especially considering that it isn’t a powerful drug at all.

I was going to write that American society is hung up about pot and drugs in general, not because of their public health significance, which is small potatoes relative to the medical significance of tobacco, cheeseburgers, and even computer games, but because drug use symbolizes the hugely menacing because hugely attractive appeal of consciousness itself, the master addiction. That may be so, but I can’t claim to know why we inflict such terrible grief on each other over what should be trivialities. The anti-drug mania, after all, is not the only witch-hunt under way in this country. Why have we turned the sexual abuse of children into a crime so horrible, so sacred that people have to apologize in advance for speaking about it without hysteria? Even stating the obvious statistical fact that children are far more harmed by poverty than by child abuse can land you in trouble. The level headed Ian Hacking has shown that “child abuse,” far from naming an eternal evil, assumed in current absolute form around 1960. So why are we suddenly so obsessed with what was, not so long ago, more often an occasion for gossip and sniggering than inquisition and judicial condemnation?

My usual procedure is the reverse of Jeopardy. I regularly phrase my questions in the form of an answer. But in this case I’ll break with my own tradition and ask the plain question: “What accounts for our crazy public behavior about drugs and juvenile sex?” Of course it is possible that there is no natural class composed of irrational public obsessions and that the persecution of potheads, short eyes, and wicked old women has no common measure. It is also possible that the explanation or explanations will be rather disappointing since in human affairs there is no proportion between cause and effect.

Is Democracy Finished?

Charlie Rangel, the New York democrat, raised a minor ruckus a few months ago by suggesting that we ought to reinstate the draft. His comments may have been effective as rhetorical brickbats, but even he probably knew that the era of mass armies is over with. Even were the reinstatement of universal service politically possible, it would be militarily absurd. Low-tech soldiers have no earthly purpose except to serve as victims to high tech soldiers, like the hapless Iraqi orcs in the recent Mesopotamian Dungeon Siege episode. But properly trained and equipped soldiers are extraordinarily expensive. The rate-limiting variable in military power is, for the time being anyhow, money, not manpower. This fact cannot be changed by a political decision, but it has enormous political consequences.

It has been plausibly argued that developments in military technology are the single most powerful cause of structural political change. Thus the military revolution of the 16th Century made political absolutism more or less inevitable because only powerful, centralized states could field and finance effective armies and fleets while the mass armies of the 19th and 20th Centuries required rulers to redefine themselves as national leaders and to pay attention to the welfare of their citizens in order to mobilize entire populations. I don’t know to what extent I subscribe to this account of history; but, like everybody else who lived through the Vietnam era, I remember the end of the draft in the United States as the day the world changed, when the air went out of the tires to use a metaphor all the more apropos because it is as flat and stale as the event it describes.