Thinking Out Loud
One of the right-wing themes that’s getting a lot of play—if not payola—is the idea that the Europeans are lagging behind us in economic growth because of their socialist or at least social democratic policies. I’m not competent nor particularly interested in determining if lower pension payments would have resulted in another point of GDP in Oslo—for all I know that could be the case—but I would like to raise a few niggling points whose generality will not endanger my amateur standing:
1. As Alan Greenspan remarked in a speech last year, economic growth results from increases in population and increases in efficiency. Since the population of the United States is still growing, other things being equal, one would expect its economy to grow more rapidly than a region without much population growth. The Europeans, especially the Germans, are also still dealing with the aftermath of the Cold War—absorbing East Germany was and is an enormous and expensive task.
2. GDP is merely a figure of merit. A serious assessment of relative wealth has to go beyond such aggregate measures, especially since we know of large and significant factors that make it unreliable. The inefficiency of American medicine, for example, increases its dollar value and contributes to a larger GDP, but it is hard to think that America is wealthier because its medicine is grossly overpriced. Hedonic accounting and other perfectly reasonable adjustments also distort comparative judgments—better computers are obviously worth more, but they aren’t worth more to very many people. I doubt if there is a value neutral way of measuring wealth. By my values, however, it is at least unclear that we do as well as the Europeans or that we’re even catching up.
3. Despite huge tax breaks for the rich, the economy of the United States has not grown very much over the last four years by any measure. We may have benefited in earlier periods of our history from relatively large disparities of wealth and income because huge pools of capital, however acquired, were useful in periods of weed-like growth. It doesn’t follow, however, that limitless private aggrandizement will benefit anybody but the rentiers now. To use a distinction I encountered most recently in Geerat Vermeij’s book, we’re apparently moving from an economic world in which effectiveness is critical to one in which the important thing is efficiency. In the U.S., the big, sloppy dinosaurs are in political charge, but the future, one guesses, belongs to the sleek, clever mammals. Our love of the gigantic seems an ever more pointless exercise—recreational elephantiasis.
4. As even the most confirmed Tory should understand, political stability is worth something. If, as I keep maintaining, the great fact of the age is a demographic transition that spells the end of explosive growth, it will be increasingly difficult to maintain or increase disparities of wealth and income by conventional political means. As they used to say in Pravda, it is not accidental that the old economy conservatives promote one-party government, irrational forms of religion, official oppression, aggressive nationalism, and cultural paranoia. There’s no guarantee that these shifts will suffice, however. It’s not that I think spears are being sharpened for Republican heads. Granted the traditions of the country, a violently rightist populism that would appall even the traditional conservatives is the more likely threat, not only to this country but to the world at large. A political economy that sacrifices a couple of percentage points of largely meaningless growth in the interest of national amity may be the rational choice in comparison to the divisive policies of the “At Least We Ain’t Niggers” party.
Saturday, January 08, 2005
Thursday, January 06, 2005
The Flowers that Bloom in Vermeij
Georges Sorel was more an amphibious than an ambiguous figure in intellectual history. When he died both the communists and the fascists sent a delegation to his funeral. He is largely remembered for his insistence on the importance of myth in contemporary life. Sorel claimed that only myth could make the revolution possible, but I’ve believed for some time that it was important to him for a more personal reason. Famous and indeed sometimes lampooned for having read libraries of books, he simply had to figure out ways of withstanding the floods of information he unleashed on himself. Since a true and comprehensive Theory of Everything was unavailable, his synthesis was bound to be synthetic. At least the man had the decency to file his ideas under the rubric of myth.
You could argue with considerable justice that Sorel was responsible for his own shortcomings, but what’s problematic about him was not his ambition, which was honorable enough, but the way his egoism and taste for violence colored the result. After all, anybody who tries to take a synoptic glance at the world faces a similar challenge even if they are highly respectable academics instead of wild-eyed revolutionary hermits. As someone once said (Thomas Kuhn? Steven Jay Gould? Stephen Wolfram?) “Sure learning about modern science is like having a swarm of bees in your head: but there they are.” And that brings me to a recent attempt to make sense of it all—well, of a lot of it—Geerat Vermeij’s Nature: an Economic History.
Vermeij is an evolutionary theorist who is probably best known outside of biology for his engaging memoir, Privileged Hands, which told the story of how a blind man became a world-class scientist. Like Steven Jay Gould, Vermeij began as an expert on molluscs—there’s apparently something about snails that inspires grand theory. He has written a great deal about ecology and biogeography and is associated with the application of the strategic concept of the escalation to the study of predator/prey interactions.
Vermeij’s most recent book argues, “economic principles applicable to humans are the same as those that govern all other forms of life.” As several reviewers have pointed out, Vermeij doesn’t quite pull this off, because what he points out are analogies rather than homologies, instances of suggestive similarities rather than underlying identities. The ability of organisms to store food, for example, is indeed reminiscent of the process of capital formation, but wealth, at least as it is defined in neoclassical economics, simply isn’t measurable in calories. In physics and chemistry, concepts have univocal definitions and mean exactly the same thing whether they are applied to understanding the motive power of steam or the collisions of billiard balls—establishing these identities was the great accomplishment of 19th Century science. No common measures yet unify ecology and economics, however. Economics remains emic, which is technical jargon for a science that accepts the validity of the cultural constructs it studies. Like language, money is a conventional system, which is why economics is more like linguistics than physics. It isn’t obvious that economic analysis can even be usefully applied to the analysis of precapitalist human material culture—a pitched battle has been going on among the anthropologists over this issue for a long time. Applying economics to non-human nature is still more problematic. Indeed, it may be that ideas drawn from population genetics, ethology, ecology, and game theory will do more to make sense out of the foundations of economics than the other way around.
Vermeij’s analogies are often illuminating. He points out, for example, that the adaptive radiations do not immediately follow mass extinction events such as the great Cretaceous die off because adaptive radiations not only require a relaxation of selection pressure in the wake of the disappearance of previously dominant forms but a sufficient mass of energetic resources (think capital) that is not available in the impoverished post-catastrophe environment. Eventually you get a zoo full of new birds and mammals, but for a long time its just ferns and possums. Vermeij also does a good job in making the more general point of the role of predation and parasitism in enriching, enlarging, and diversifying the biosphere over geological time, though the parallels he draws with the creative role of economic inequality in human history are liable to make the reader a little nervous. Vermeij himself doesn’t draw the obvious Social Darwinian conclusions in the last chapter of his book, but it’s hard to escape the impression that he is obsessed with themes of competition and domination.
As has been pointed out in various reviews, many of Vermeij’s substantive conclusions about evolution can be made in terms of the concept of niche construction and coevolution. To some extent, focusing on competition instead of cooperation is a rhetorical or aesthetic decision because the notions are correlative–one cooperates to compete effectively and competes for the sake of collectivities larger than oneself. Vermeij’s emphasis is thus a choice and presumably reflects something beyond the science. The choice involved, however, may not be a simple matter of the author’s psychological proclivities. As the philosopher of science Gerald Holton pointed out some years ago, the specific terms that come to be used to describe scientific discoveries are colored by cultural tendencies. Thus, modern physics is a bunch of differential equations too distant from ordinary human thinking even to be strange. Its public face, all the talk and terminology that emphasizes disconnection, indeterminacy, fission, and relativity, owes more to the Zeitgeist of early 20th Century modernism than anything about its conceptual content. By the same token, the current and sometimes hobbyhorsical fascination with competition evinced by Vermeij and thousands of others is probably also a symptom, specifically, a response to the great fact that the demographic transition is turning this phase of history into a giant game of musical chairs.
Georges Sorel was more an amphibious than an ambiguous figure in intellectual history. When he died both the communists and the fascists sent a delegation to his funeral. He is largely remembered for his insistence on the importance of myth in contemporary life. Sorel claimed that only myth could make the revolution possible, but I’ve believed for some time that it was important to him for a more personal reason. Famous and indeed sometimes lampooned for having read libraries of books, he simply had to figure out ways of withstanding the floods of information he unleashed on himself. Since a true and comprehensive Theory of Everything was unavailable, his synthesis was bound to be synthetic. At least the man had the decency to file his ideas under the rubric of myth.
You could argue with considerable justice that Sorel was responsible for his own shortcomings, but what’s problematic about him was not his ambition, which was honorable enough, but the way his egoism and taste for violence colored the result. After all, anybody who tries to take a synoptic glance at the world faces a similar challenge even if they are highly respectable academics instead of wild-eyed revolutionary hermits. As someone once said (Thomas Kuhn? Steven Jay Gould? Stephen Wolfram?) “Sure learning about modern science is like having a swarm of bees in your head: but there they are.” And that brings me to a recent attempt to make sense of it all—well, of a lot of it—Geerat Vermeij’s Nature: an Economic History.
Vermeij is an evolutionary theorist who is probably best known outside of biology for his engaging memoir, Privileged Hands, which told the story of how a blind man became a world-class scientist. Like Steven Jay Gould, Vermeij began as an expert on molluscs—there’s apparently something about snails that inspires grand theory. He has written a great deal about ecology and biogeography and is associated with the application of the strategic concept of the escalation to the study of predator/prey interactions.
Vermeij’s most recent book argues, “economic principles applicable to humans are the same as those that govern all other forms of life.” As several reviewers have pointed out, Vermeij doesn’t quite pull this off, because what he points out are analogies rather than homologies, instances of suggestive similarities rather than underlying identities. The ability of organisms to store food, for example, is indeed reminiscent of the process of capital formation, but wealth, at least as it is defined in neoclassical economics, simply isn’t measurable in calories. In physics and chemistry, concepts have univocal definitions and mean exactly the same thing whether they are applied to understanding the motive power of steam or the collisions of billiard balls—establishing these identities was the great accomplishment of 19th Century science. No common measures yet unify ecology and economics, however. Economics remains emic, which is technical jargon for a science that accepts the validity of the cultural constructs it studies. Like language, money is a conventional system, which is why economics is more like linguistics than physics. It isn’t obvious that economic analysis can even be usefully applied to the analysis of precapitalist human material culture—a pitched battle has been going on among the anthropologists over this issue for a long time. Applying economics to non-human nature is still more problematic. Indeed, it may be that ideas drawn from population genetics, ethology, ecology, and game theory will do more to make sense out of the foundations of economics than the other way around.
Vermeij’s analogies are often illuminating. He points out, for example, that the adaptive radiations do not immediately follow mass extinction events such as the great Cretaceous die off because adaptive radiations not only require a relaxation of selection pressure in the wake of the disappearance of previously dominant forms but a sufficient mass of energetic resources (think capital) that is not available in the impoverished post-catastrophe environment. Eventually you get a zoo full of new birds and mammals, but for a long time its just ferns and possums. Vermeij also does a good job in making the more general point of the role of predation and parasitism in enriching, enlarging, and diversifying the biosphere over geological time, though the parallels he draws with the creative role of economic inequality in human history are liable to make the reader a little nervous. Vermeij himself doesn’t draw the obvious Social Darwinian conclusions in the last chapter of his book, but it’s hard to escape the impression that he is obsessed with themes of competition and domination.
As has been pointed out in various reviews, many of Vermeij’s substantive conclusions about evolution can be made in terms of the concept of niche construction and coevolution. To some extent, focusing on competition instead of cooperation is a rhetorical or aesthetic decision because the notions are correlative–one cooperates to compete effectively and competes for the sake of collectivities larger than oneself. Vermeij’s emphasis is thus a choice and presumably reflects something beyond the science. The choice involved, however, may not be a simple matter of the author’s psychological proclivities. As the philosopher of science Gerald Holton pointed out some years ago, the specific terms that come to be used to describe scientific discoveries are colored by cultural tendencies. Thus, modern physics is a bunch of differential equations too distant from ordinary human thinking even to be strange. Its public face, all the talk and terminology that emphasizes disconnection, indeterminacy, fission, and relativity, owes more to the Zeitgeist of early 20th Century modernism than anything about its conceptual content. By the same token, the current and sometimes hobbyhorsical fascination with competition evinced by Vermeij and thousands of others is probably also a symptom, specifically, a response to the great fact that the demographic transition is turning this phase of history into a giant game of musical chairs.
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
The Cartoon Channel
In my quest to understand absolutely everything, I’m afraid I’ve made the freshman error of over researching the topic. After all, even if you could get it right, a complete explanation would be as useless as a map as large as the territory. The whole point is to leave things out; and by whole point, I really mean the whole point since the general action of time is subtractive right from the collapse of quantum indeterminacy into classical observables to the reduction of our national discourse to a series of commentaries on the Peterson trial. The trick is to leave a beautiful corpse when you murder the possibilities. To that end, the poet Rimbaud insisted that it is necessary to be drunk. For some of us, glue’s more like it. So here’s what’s happening in world history.
We’re at the end of the exponential increase in the human population. The birth rate has stabilized or begun to fall in most countries, and the inflection of the curve is the great fact of the age. With one of the great motors of economic growth turned off, political elites are faced with a new situation. As long as the rising tide was lifting all boats, they could afford to be generous without losing ground to the plebs. Indeed, practical egalitarianism paid. That easy liberalism is increasingly obsolete, and new options have to be explored. I see four responses taking shape:
1. The modern liberals bet that technological progress will be able to maintain economic growth and underwrite a society that remains relatively rational and democratic provided its members are willing to live in the responsible, sober, and rather boring fashion that goes along with the information economy.
2. The thoughtful conservatives accept the likelihood that the economy will stagnate and plan to maintain or improve their privileged position by getting more of the pie. They recognize that this can only be accomplished by force or fraud. To take care of your family, you do what you have to do.
3. The thoughtless conservatives live in denial, proposing to maintain an expanding standard of living by deficit financing and the accelerating exploitation of finite resources like oil. Some of them rationalize their unsustainable policies by taking apocalyptic fantasies literally or by dreaming of magic technological fixes—nanotechnology as the Great Pig, Star Wars as the bulletproof shirt.
4. The utopian radicals propose to deal with the end of material progress by embracing a virtuous egalitarian poverty. One may be allowed a certain skepticism about the prospects of ahimsa in a tide pool.
Mix and match.
In my quest to understand absolutely everything, I’m afraid I’ve made the freshman error of over researching the topic. After all, even if you could get it right, a complete explanation would be as useless as a map as large as the territory. The whole point is to leave things out; and by whole point, I really mean the whole point since the general action of time is subtractive right from the collapse of quantum indeterminacy into classical observables to the reduction of our national discourse to a series of commentaries on the Peterson trial. The trick is to leave a beautiful corpse when you murder the possibilities. To that end, the poet Rimbaud insisted that it is necessary to be drunk. For some of us, glue’s more like it. So here’s what’s happening in world history.
We’re at the end of the exponential increase in the human population. The birth rate has stabilized or begun to fall in most countries, and the inflection of the curve is the great fact of the age. With one of the great motors of economic growth turned off, political elites are faced with a new situation. As long as the rising tide was lifting all boats, they could afford to be generous without losing ground to the plebs. Indeed, practical egalitarianism paid. That easy liberalism is increasingly obsolete, and new options have to be explored. I see four responses taking shape:
1. The modern liberals bet that technological progress will be able to maintain economic growth and underwrite a society that remains relatively rational and democratic provided its members are willing to live in the responsible, sober, and rather boring fashion that goes along with the information economy.
2. The thoughtful conservatives accept the likelihood that the economy will stagnate and plan to maintain or improve their privileged position by getting more of the pie. They recognize that this can only be accomplished by force or fraud. To take care of your family, you do what you have to do.
3. The thoughtless conservatives live in denial, proposing to maintain an expanding standard of living by deficit financing and the accelerating exploitation of finite resources like oil. Some of them rationalize their unsustainable policies by taking apocalyptic fantasies literally or by dreaming of magic technological fixes—nanotechnology as the Great Pig, Star Wars as the bulletproof shirt.
4. The utopian radicals propose to deal with the end of material progress by embracing a virtuous egalitarian poverty. One may be allowed a certain skepticism about the prospects of ahimsa in a tide pool.
Mix and match.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Authorized Leaks
I love to badmouth journalists, but it’s quite unfair to blame them for the absence of general public outrage at reports of the use of torture by American forces. The story was reported. The people simply didn’t care, believing, apparently, that terrorism justifies extreme measures. Which is why, incidentally, the administration was not completely unhappy the stories got out. Publicity makes everyone complicit. We knew and we did nothing. Indeed, we reelected the ultimate sponsor of the atrocities and made it possible for him to make the principal apologist for state-sponsored terror his attorney general while the generals who encouraged their troops to apply electrodes to Islamic testicles got a free pass and only the noncoms were left holding the bag. If there is ever a proper accounting of the deeds of the Bush administration, you can be sure that the defendants will point out that the public raised no objections at the time though they certainly knew what was going on.
I love to badmouth journalists, but it’s quite unfair to blame them for the absence of general public outrage at reports of the use of torture by American forces. The story was reported. The people simply didn’t care, believing, apparently, that terrorism justifies extreme measures. Which is why, incidentally, the administration was not completely unhappy the stories got out. Publicity makes everyone complicit. We knew and we did nothing. Indeed, we reelected the ultimate sponsor of the atrocities and made it possible for him to make the principal apologist for state-sponsored terror his attorney general while the generals who encouraged their troops to apply electrodes to Islamic testicles got a free pass and only the noncoms were left holding the bag. If there is ever a proper accounting of the deeds of the Bush administration, you can be sure that the defendants will point out that the public raised no objections at the time though they certainly knew what was going on.
Sunday, December 19, 2004
All In
Poker players know that it’s often easier to bluff when your hand is unambiguously bad than when it has some real strength. The possibility of actually drawing the flush distracts from the crucial work of bluster and deception. Which explains in large measure why the innumerable arguments against Bush’s social security reforms are strangely irrelevant despite their obvious cogency. It simply doesn’t matter that partial privatization is indefensible. It proponents have no intention of playing defense. Just as rightists really don’t care that Star Wars is technologically infeasible or that there really is no scientific merit to intelligent design, they are quite indifferent to the fiscal and moral objections to the proposed changes to Social Security. Of course it’s a bad idea. How could it be a triumph for an aggressive minority if it were a good one? What’s the glory in winning a hand with a full house?
Poker players know that it’s often easier to bluff when your hand is unambiguously bad than when it has some real strength. The possibility of actually drawing the flush distracts from the crucial work of bluster and deception. Which explains in large measure why the innumerable arguments against Bush’s social security reforms are strangely irrelevant despite their obvious cogency. It simply doesn’t matter that partial privatization is indefensible. It proponents have no intention of playing defense. Just as rightists really don’t care that Star Wars is technologically infeasible or that there really is no scientific merit to intelligent design, they are quite indifferent to the fiscal and moral objections to the proposed changes to Social Security. Of course it’s a bad idea. How could it be a triumph for an aggressive minority if it were a good one? What’s the glory in winning a hand with a full house?
Thesis, Antithesis, Prosthesis
Years ago I had to prove that I could read French in my degree program. I expected that I’d have to take an intensive French course to get past the requirement, but just for fun I took the achievement exam to see what I was up against. Though I’d never studied French, I didn’t go in quite unprepared. In the week before the test, I spent a couple of evenings looking over one of those laminated crib sheets for French grammar. Nevertheless, I certainly couldn’t read, speak, or understand the language in any meaningful sense. As a consequence, I was a bit surprised when I not only passed the test but scored well above the cutoff line. I remember thinking to myself that it was too bad I hadn’t taken the Chinese, Arabic, and Sanskrit tests on the same occasion so I could be fluent in those languages too.
Lots of folks denounce multiple choice tests. Frank McCourt, the genial author of Angela’s Ashes and himself a former school teacher, once referred to them as “the most hideous invention America has ever come up with.” I used to be dead set against them myself and inflicted essay exams on my students in a former life, but I’ve come to think that my dislike of them was mere ingratitude in view of the business about the French requirement and the many other occasions in which standardized tests have rewarded my superficial cleverness. Besides, multiple choice tests really are quintessentially American and patriotic to boot, having been invented for the benefit of our army by Arthur S. Otis in 1917. After 9/11 one is advised not to knock our heritage, at least publicly. Anyhow, multiple choice tests also have a metaphysical significance that marks them as something more important than just another piece of cultural detritus. They implement a powerful historical tendency, the grand process of simplification that allows us to live with the complexity our own activities create. In this way, multiple choice tests help fend off the never quite looming menace of epistemia gravis, aka information sickness or, to use a quaint old term, Harrison’s Fatheadedness.
Just as human beings are not adapted to live in nature without clothes, we are hardly prepared to learn about history, science, and literature without a host of mediating instrumentalities that protect our egos from the awful truth about how hard it is to figure things out. And that’s true even for people who happen to have the motivation and aptitude for learning. If the goal is to create an entire nation of people with some intellectual self respect and, moreover, to do it on the cheap—always the American way!—the intelligible world will have to be turned into a cartoon. Pretending there are at most four or five alternative responses to each mental challenge is a good start especially when you remember what it was like to grade blue books.
Years ago I had to prove that I could read French in my degree program. I expected that I’d have to take an intensive French course to get past the requirement, but just for fun I took the achievement exam to see what I was up against. Though I’d never studied French, I didn’t go in quite unprepared. In the week before the test, I spent a couple of evenings looking over one of those laminated crib sheets for French grammar. Nevertheless, I certainly couldn’t read, speak, or understand the language in any meaningful sense. As a consequence, I was a bit surprised when I not only passed the test but scored well above the cutoff line. I remember thinking to myself that it was too bad I hadn’t taken the Chinese, Arabic, and Sanskrit tests on the same occasion so I could be fluent in those languages too.
Lots of folks denounce multiple choice tests. Frank McCourt, the genial author of Angela’s Ashes and himself a former school teacher, once referred to them as “the most hideous invention America has ever come up with.” I used to be dead set against them myself and inflicted essay exams on my students in a former life, but I’ve come to think that my dislike of them was mere ingratitude in view of the business about the French requirement and the many other occasions in which standardized tests have rewarded my superficial cleverness. Besides, multiple choice tests really are quintessentially American and patriotic to boot, having been invented for the benefit of our army by Arthur S. Otis in 1917. After 9/11 one is advised not to knock our heritage, at least publicly. Anyhow, multiple choice tests also have a metaphysical significance that marks them as something more important than just another piece of cultural detritus. They implement a powerful historical tendency, the grand process of simplification that allows us to live with the complexity our own activities create. In this way, multiple choice tests help fend off the never quite looming menace of epistemia gravis, aka information sickness or, to use a quaint old term, Harrison’s Fatheadedness.
Just as human beings are not adapted to live in nature without clothes, we are hardly prepared to learn about history, science, and literature without a host of mediating instrumentalities that protect our egos from the awful truth about how hard it is to figure things out. And that’s true even for people who happen to have the motivation and aptitude for learning. If the goal is to create an entire nation of people with some intellectual self respect and, moreover, to do it on the cheap—always the American way!—the intelligible world will have to be turned into a cartoon. Pretending there are at most four or five alternative responses to each mental challenge is a good start especially when you remember what it was like to grade blue books.
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Anymore than Drag is Flattering to Women
What bothers me most about the right-wing fundamentalists is their political power, but then I’m an infidel. A believer might be even more unhappy with the Fallwells and the Dobsons and the Robertsons because they have created the impression you have to be a bigoted know-nothing to be a Christian. That’s not so healthy for the future of the real, which is to say, invisible church because even those who have signed on for the moment to reactionary religiosity may eventually weary of its somewhat artificial extremism while the merely ill-informed won’t be aware of the humane and highly-defensible outlook of people like Garry Wills or Jimmy Carter.
To the extent that professing Christianity involves adherence to elaborate metaphysical notions about things people are in no position to know, it makes a peculiar impression on an old philosopher like me, but not even I am down on practical agape. It would be a real loss if the braying Elmer Gantrys succeed in drowning out the quieter voices of the decent evangelicals, the thoughtful liberal Protestants, and the lay Catholics. And that’s true even though a seriously Christian politics would be far to the left of my own.
What bothers me most about the right-wing fundamentalists is their political power, but then I’m an infidel. A believer might be even more unhappy with the Fallwells and the Dobsons and the Robertsons because they have created the impression you have to be a bigoted know-nothing to be a Christian. That’s not so healthy for the future of the real, which is to say, invisible church because even those who have signed on for the moment to reactionary religiosity may eventually weary of its somewhat artificial extremism while the merely ill-informed won’t be aware of the humane and highly-defensible outlook of people like Garry Wills or Jimmy Carter.
To the extent that professing Christianity involves adherence to elaborate metaphysical notions about things people are in no position to know, it makes a peculiar impression on an old philosopher like me, but not even I am down on practical agape. It would be a real loss if the braying Elmer Gantrys succeed in drowning out the quieter voices of the decent evangelicals, the thoughtful liberal Protestants, and the lay Catholics. And that’s true even though a seriously Christian politics would be far to the left of my own.
Monday, December 13, 2004
Gone Phishing
As I purge my inbox of three dozen pieces of spam every morning I’m reminded of a nature film I saw on cable a couple of years ago that showed a giraffe dying from an overwhelming infestation of fleas. The electronic equivalent of the giraffe may not be quite dead, but the technology of email has lost much of its value over the last several years because of the non-stop parasitical assault, not only because of the direct damage inflicted by all the spam but because of the side effects of the filters that have been put in place to hold back the tide.
The problem has become personal for me. My business requires me to send large documents to my clients on a daily basis. Years ago, FedEx was a huge expense for me; and every exchange of paper took a couple of days. Email increased my personal productivity enormously, but its value has steadily decreased because corporate defenses against spam intercept my attachments. In many cases, I have to follow up the submission of work product with phone calls so that busy managers can wade through a trash pile to rescue documents. I can’t blame the firms for reinforcing their defenses—I get from 100 to 150 pieces of spam a day, some of my clients get as much as a 1000—but the incremental cost of dodging the spam blocker adds up. Meanwhile, I have to be careful not to lose their messages in my own spam blocker.
Some of the costs of spam are obvious, and one can only guess how many of the same elderly population already ripped off by junk mail solicitations have already fallen victim to sales pitches for phony pharmaceuticals or have sent their credit card number to criminals claiming to be their internet service providers. There are hidden opportunity costs as well. Email could be a useful channel for legitimate advertising, for example, if it weren’t overwhelmed with trash, obscenity, and fraud. That’s a real loss, and not just for the corporations. Everybody’s so accustomed to complaining about advertising that it’s easy to forget its indispensable role as a source of information in an extraordinarily complicated world—imagine how much it would cost to provide public education about new technologies.
While serious law enforcement efforts might be able ameliorate the spam crisis—you have to wonder why more identity thieves and purveyors of bogus drugs aren’t prosecuted—the fundamental problem with email is structural. It doesn’t cost enough. As many people have noticed, spam would not be profitable if it cost even a few pennies to send a message. Even junk-mail advertisers have to worry about picking the right mailing list because a response rate of a percent or two is necessary to pay the freight. Meanwhile, since it’s free, the same spammers who send me an ad for breast implants at 10:12 follow it up with a pitch for penile enhancement at 10:13 and not because they know how eager I am to please everybody. At a nickel a pop, an ad would have to have something to do with its recipient. At a nickel a pop, also, sending targeted Internet ads for my own services might become economical.
I know nothing of the technicalities, but I gather that the only feasible way of creating a system with appropriate fees would be to create an entirely new and separate system. That may be a utopian suggestion, rather like the dream of getting rid of QWERTY. Over and beyond practical obstacles to reforming the system, any call for even a small amount of central control runs afoul of the libertarian ideology of many computer mavens. They maintain an almost theological faith that systems will organize themselves perfectly if only we let them alone. One small nickel for the man is one giant step on the road to serfdom for mankind. There’s another problem, too. If email generated a public revenue, we’d have to decide what to do with the proceeds—the point of the tax, after all, would not be to fix potholes on the information superhighway. That doesn’t bother me. If the swag from a spam tax went to build a swimming pool for Mayor Quimby, I figure we’d still be better off. But that’s me. I expect the universe to be perverse in spots. The others will go ballistic about the unnecessary taxation.
Things do not look good for the giraffe.
As I purge my inbox of three dozen pieces of spam every morning I’m reminded of a nature film I saw on cable a couple of years ago that showed a giraffe dying from an overwhelming infestation of fleas. The electronic equivalent of the giraffe may not be quite dead, but the technology of email has lost much of its value over the last several years because of the non-stop parasitical assault, not only because of the direct damage inflicted by all the spam but because of the side effects of the filters that have been put in place to hold back the tide.
The problem has become personal for me. My business requires me to send large documents to my clients on a daily basis. Years ago, FedEx was a huge expense for me; and every exchange of paper took a couple of days. Email increased my personal productivity enormously, but its value has steadily decreased because corporate defenses against spam intercept my attachments. In many cases, I have to follow up the submission of work product with phone calls so that busy managers can wade through a trash pile to rescue documents. I can’t blame the firms for reinforcing their defenses—I get from 100 to 150 pieces of spam a day, some of my clients get as much as a 1000—but the incremental cost of dodging the spam blocker adds up. Meanwhile, I have to be careful not to lose their messages in my own spam blocker.
Some of the costs of spam are obvious, and one can only guess how many of the same elderly population already ripped off by junk mail solicitations have already fallen victim to sales pitches for phony pharmaceuticals or have sent their credit card number to criminals claiming to be their internet service providers. There are hidden opportunity costs as well. Email could be a useful channel for legitimate advertising, for example, if it weren’t overwhelmed with trash, obscenity, and fraud. That’s a real loss, and not just for the corporations. Everybody’s so accustomed to complaining about advertising that it’s easy to forget its indispensable role as a source of information in an extraordinarily complicated world—imagine how much it would cost to provide public education about new technologies.
While serious law enforcement efforts might be able ameliorate the spam crisis—you have to wonder why more identity thieves and purveyors of bogus drugs aren’t prosecuted—the fundamental problem with email is structural. It doesn’t cost enough. As many people have noticed, spam would not be profitable if it cost even a few pennies to send a message. Even junk-mail advertisers have to worry about picking the right mailing list because a response rate of a percent or two is necessary to pay the freight. Meanwhile, since it’s free, the same spammers who send me an ad for breast implants at 10:12 follow it up with a pitch for penile enhancement at 10:13 and not because they know how eager I am to please everybody. At a nickel a pop, an ad would have to have something to do with its recipient. At a nickel a pop, also, sending targeted Internet ads for my own services might become economical.
I know nothing of the technicalities, but I gather that the only feasible way of creating a system with appropriate fees would be to create an entirely new and separate system. That may be a utopian suggestion, rather like the dream of getting rid of QWERTY. Over and beyond practical obstacles to reforming the system, any call for even a small amount of central control runs afoul of the libertarian ideology of many computer mavens. They maintain an almost theological faith that systems will organize themselves perfectly if only we let them alone. One small nickel for the man is one giant step on the road to serfdom for mankind. There’s another problem, too. If email generated a public revenue, we’d have to decide what to do with the proceeds—the point of the tax, after all, would not be to fix potholes on the information superhighway. That doesn’t bother me. If the swag from a spam tax went to build a swimming pool for Mayor Quimby, I figure we’d still be better off. But that’s me. I expect the universe to be perverse in spots. The others will go ballistic about the unnecessary taxation.
Things do not look good for the giraffe.
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
Chicken Little or Just a Little Chicken?
Neither actually. The title is in honor of today’s publication in Nature of the genome of the domestic chicken. Meanwhile, I’m not particularly alarmed by recent political developments, though I certainly expect the outcome to be unfavorable for the United States. I’ve reached the time in my life when I find that external events have little lasting effect on my equipoise, either because I have an ever decreasing stake in the game or, more likely, because I’ve finally finished bulletproofing my vanity. My selfesteem unthreatened, I’ve risen above it all like a soap bubble, trivial and very temporary but round and perfect. Besides, though unfortunately my money's not in Euros, I mostly share the complacent European take on the Grand Fiasco. I calculate that the American empire is more likely to blow itself out in a noisy squall than to take the planet down with it in a terminal hurricane. So far, at least, we’ve been very careful to avoid a confrontation with anybody really dangerous so our Middle Eastern adventures have something of the staged and cheesy quality of a professional wrestling match, albeit the phony contest leaves all too many real corpses lying around. In this respect, Mr. Bush’s obvious lack of personal courage is a very positive factor. It’s hard to imagine these blowhards picking a fight with the Russians or Chinese.
America is not the world, and our misfortune is not necessarily a tragedy for humankind. Indeed, as Emmanuel Todd points out, loss of primacy may not even be a disaster for the Americans. The U.S. is a very rich and powerful country and will probably remain relatively rich and political significant even after it finishes impoverishing and humiliating itself—200 years after Napoleon, Paris remains a wonderful place to live and Washington may turn out to be a similarly agreeable monument to vanished pretension. Anyhow, as a rule, though everybody claims to be surprised when it finally happens, the decline of states and societies always takes longer than expected. It’s not quite time to start selling sombreros and colorful plaster piggybanks to Canadian tourists.
I go through phases of being similarly sanguine about the consequences of our neglect of the environment. Despite the interminable attempts of right-wing op-ed writers, most people knowledgeable about global warming don’t expect the Northern hemisphere to turn into a double boiler. Indeed, unless there really is some catastrophic tipping point, a real but modest possibility, global warming won’t ruin the Earth because its inexorably increasing effects will make international countermeasures inevitable. The people who project future energy prices for the utilities already routinely factor in the cost of CO2 recapture into their estimates of the economics of coal-burning power plants because in the long and even medium run, the opinions of this or that politician won’t matter. Willy-nilly we’ll have to restrain greenhouse gas emissions because, by definition, realities don’t give a damn about what anybody thinks. Just as the U.S. will eventually have to cut back on deficit financing even if Bush becomes dictator for life, even the Cato Institute will end up supporting global emission caps. Because the administration dragged its feet—and knuckles! —about global warming, the price of dealing with the problem will much higher than necessary but the resulting poverty, sickness, and death won’t necessarily make a good special effects movie. Let’s look on the bright side.
I also moderate my pessimism with a sometime belief in the Caucasian Cargo Cult of science. Like any other projection, guesses about the economic, political, and environmental future are based on assumptions about boundary conditions. For example, Marx’s prediction of the collapse of capitalism, indeed, his whole view of the human prospect, was vitiated by a drastic underestimation of the productive power of technology. I’m well aware that my own thoughts about what may or may not happen in the next several years similarly depend upon an estimate of the advance of technology. Maybe nanotechnology or some other Great Pig will arrive at the last moment and usher in a Rabelaisian millennium of sausages and mustard or, at the very least, ensure that even the humblest family will be able to enjoy the apocalypse on a high definition plasma screen in their cozy abandoned coal mine.
Neither actually. The title is in honor of today’s publication in Nature of the genome of the domestic chicken. Meanwhile, I’m not particularly alarmed by recent political developments, though I certainly expect the outcome to be unfavorable for the United States. I’ve reached the time in my life when I find that external events have little lasting effect on my equipoise, either because I have an ever decreasing stake in the game or, more likely, because I’ve finally finished bulletproofing my vanity. My selfesteem unthreatened, I’ve risen above it all like a soap bubble, trivial and very temporary but round and perfect. Besides, though unfortunately my money's not in Euros, I mostly share the complacent European take on the Grand Fiasco. I calculate that the American empire is more likely to blow itself out in a noisy squall than to take the planet down with it in a terminal hurricane. So far, at least, we’ve been very careful to avoid a confrontation with anybody really dangerous so our Middle Eastern adventures have something of the staged and cheesy quality of a professional wrestling match, albeit the phony contest leaves all too many real corpses lying around. In this respect, Mr. Bush’s obvious lack of personal courage is a very positive factor. It’s hard to imagine these blowhards picking a fight with the Russians or Chinese.
America is not the world, and our misfortune is not necessarily a tragedy for humankind. Indeed, as Emmanuel Todd points out, loss of primacy may not even be a disaster for the Americans. The U.S. is a very rich and powerful country and will probably remain relatively rich and political significant even after it finishes impoverishing and humiliating itself—200 years after Napoleon, Paris remains a wonderful place to live and Washington may turn out to be a similarly agreeable monument to vanished pretension. Anyhow, as a rule, though everybody claims to be surprised when it finally happens, the decline of states and societies always takes longer than expected. It’s not quite time to start selling sombreros and colorful plaster piggybanks to Canadian tourists.
I go through phases of being similarly sanguine about the consequences of our neglect of the environment. Despite the interminable attempts of right-wing op-ed writers, most people knowledgeable about global warming don’t expect the Northern hemisphere to turn into a double boiler. Indeed, unless there really is some catastrophic tipping point, a real but modest possibility, global warming won’t ruin the Earth because its inexorably increasing effects will make international countermeasures inevitable. The people who project future energy prices for the utilities already routinely factor in the cost of CO2 recapture into their estimates of the economics of coal-burning power plants because in the long and even medium run, the opinions of this or that politician won’t matter. Willy-nilly we’ll have to restrain greenhouse gas emissions because, by definition, realities don’t give a damn about what anybody thinks. Just as the U.S. will eventually have to cut back on deficit financing even if Bush becomes dictator for life, even the Cato Institute will end up supporting global emission caps. Because the administration dragged its feet—and knuckles! —about global warming, the price of dealing with the problem will much higher than necessary but the resulting poverty, sickness, and death won’t necessarily make a good special effects movie. Let’s look on the bright side.
I also moderate my pessimism with a sometime belief in the Caucasian Cargo Cult of science. Like any other projection, guesses about the economic, political, and environmental future are based on assumptions about boundary conditions. For example, Marx’s prediction of the collapse of capitalism, indeed, his whole view of the human prospect, was vitiated by a drastic underestimation of the productive power of technology. I’m well aware that my own thoughts about what may or may not happen in the next several years similarly depend upon an estimate of the advance of technology. Maybe nanotechnology or some other Great Pig will arrive at the last moment and usher in a Rabelaisian millennium of sausages and mustard or, at the very least, ensure that even the humblest family will be able to enjoy the apocalypse on a high definition plasma screen in their cozy abandoned coal mine.
Live and Learn
Experience is a great substitute for brains—Hamburger Helper for the cognitively penurious. By now, I’ve accumulated enough of it to get through a few senior moments. Unfortunately, I’ve also had a lot more practice at being wrong than younger folks so maybe I’ve gotten better at that, too. For example, the current administration demonstrates a host of tendencies that were formerly thought to presage disaster; but the Conservatives and their de facto supporters in the media assure me that they’ve changed all that. Don’t get paranoid just because your lover is a bisexual Haitian hooker with a drug problem. The government is in good hands. The rules have changes under the new dispensation and it is no longer unwise for governments to:
Conduct public affairs in profound secrecy
Bribe and intimidate the press
Institutionalize groupthink by surrounding the leader with Yes-men
Destroy the careers and reputations of anyone who dissents
Denounce domestic opposition as unpatriotic
Replace professional civil servants and government scientists with political appointees
Vilify opponents by well-orchestrated campaigns of innuendo and slander
Suppress or distort unfavorable economic statistics
Disseminate inaccurate scientific and medical information
Freely break existing international agreements
Conduct aggressive wars without international sanction
Undertake military actions with insufficient forces
Permit or encourage the use of torture
Systematically weaken civil rights
Run up huge deficits
I could have sworn that a country ruled in this fashion was heading for disaster, but what do I know? Perhaps some one in the non-fascist right can explain to me again why I shouldn’t fret.
Experience is a great substitute for brains—Hamburger Helper for the cognitively penurious. By now, I’ve accumulated enough of it to get through a few senior moments. Unfortunately, I’ve also had a lot more practice at being wrong than younger folks so maybe I’ve gotten better at that, too. For example, the current administration demonstrates a host of tendencies that were formerly thought to presage disaster; but the Conservatives and their de facto supporters in the media assure me that they’ve changed all that. Don’t get paranoid just because your lover is a bisexual Haitian hooker with a drug problem. The government is in good hands. The rules have changes under the new dispensation and it is no longer unwise for governments to:
Conduct public affairs in profound secrecy
Bribe and intimidate the press
Institutionalize groupthink by surrounding the leader with Yes-men
Destroy the careers and reputations of anyone who dissents
Denounce domestic opposition as unpatriotic
Replace professional civil servants and government scientists with political appointees
Vilify opponents by well-orchestrated campaigns of innuendo and slander
Suppress or distort unfavorable economic statistics
Disseminate inaccurate scientific and medical information
Freely break existing international agreements
Conduct aggressive wars without international sanction
Undertake military actions with insufficient forces
Permit or encourage the use of torture
Systematically weaken civil rights
Run up huge deficits
I could have sworn that a country ruled in this fashion was heading for disaster, but what do I know? Perhaps some one in the non-fascist right can explain to me again why I shouldn’t fret.
Sunday, December 05, 2004
Now That We Need Him
Marxist ideas are laughed at these days, especially by Libertarians, Neocons, and other deep thinkers; but Marxism raised questions that don’t go away just because the most dogmatic version of the philosophy was associated with a failed empire. Like other enterprises of thought sponsored by religions or political movements, Marxism provided a context in which insightful inquiry of a focused kind could take place, not despite but because of its ideological setting. One can learn from Marxist sociologists and historians just as atheistic scholars can profit from the philosophers and theologians of Christendom without sharing even one article of their credo.
Whatever its failings, Marxism has at least one huge virtue. It relentlessly asks the question “who?” of history and politics. Thus where social scientists, no less than television pundits, blithely assume that policy debates are about the best means to achieve common goals, the Marxists recognize this methodological bipartisanship for the rhetorical scam it undoubtedly is and try to figure out which interests speak through which proposals. It may be an oversimplification or even paranoia to assume that all human affairs are a struggle between the exploiters and the exploited, but the opposite presumption is far less realistic. The current debate about social security reform, for example, is certainly not about how best to structure a system to assure a decent retirement for everybody. That’s why the official arguments on both sides seem so feeble. The wonkish debate is a ceremonial clown fight that serves to misdirect attention from the real issues. In fact, for middling people, attempting to preserve the social security system in something like its current state is a defensive struggle to maintain one of the few remaining mechanisms of income redistribution. For the well off, privatizing the system is an offensive operation to make the over all tax system less progressive and thereby increase the disparity of wealth between the haves and have-nots. One group doesn’t want to get poorer. The second group wants to get richer at the expense of the first.
Marxist ideas are laughed at these days, especially by Libertarians, Neocons, and other deep thinkers; but Marxism raised questions that don’t go away just because the most dogmatic version of the philosophy was associated with a failed empire. Like other enterprises of thought sponsored by religions or political movements, Marxism provided a context in which insightful inquiry of a focused kind could take place, not despite but because of its ideological setting. One can learn from Marxist sociologists and historians just as atheistic scholars can profit from the philosophers and theologians of Christendom without sharing even one article of their credo.
Whatever its failings, Marxism has at least one huge virtue. It relentlessly asks the question “who?” of history and politics. Thus where social scientists, no less than television pundits, blithely assume that policy debates are about the best means to achieve common goals, the Marxists recognize this methodological bipartisanship for the rhetorical scam it undoubtedly is and try to figure out which interests speak through which proposals. It may be an oversimplification or even paranoia to assume that all human affairs are a struggle between the exploiters and the exploited, but the opposite presumption is far less realistic. The current debate about social security reform, for example, is certainly not about how best to structure a system to assure a decent retirement for everybody. That’s why the official arguments on both sides seem so feeble. The wonkish debate is a ceremonial clown fight that serves to misdirect attention from the real issues. In fact, for middling people, attempting to preserve the social security system in something like its current state is a defensive struggle to maintain one of the few remaining mechanisms of income redistribution. For the well off, privatizing the system is an offensive operation to make the over all tax system less progressive and thereby increase the disparity of wealth between the haves and have-nots. One group doesn’t want to get poorer. The second group wants to get richer at the expense of the first.
Saturday, December 04, 2004
Leaden Weapons and Lead Balloons
Historical analogies are such a poor guide to political action in the present that the most useful thing professional historians can do to promote sensible policies is to point out the limitations of history itself. That’s hard to do, however, because to deny that history repeats itself is to recognize the scary fact that what’s going on is literally unprecedented. Just as original writers have no way of understanding themselves except by misidentifying with some illustrious predecessor, historical actors and the rest of us in the terrified chorus imagine that we are repeating what is really happening for the first time. But every peace conference is not a Munich. Iraq is not Vietnam. Bush is not William McKinley. The Republicans certainly don’t merit comparison with the fascists—at any event not until the trains start running on time in these parts. Debunking such analogies by bloodless analysis is rhetorically ineffective, though philosophically interesting. The other available strategy is to multiply instances in order to make them all weaker, an approach that also has the heuristic benefit of suggesting alternate ways of understanding what’s going on.
Finally no science or other form of knowledge can be more intelligible than its object. Induction works brilliantly on the energy levels of atomic hydrogen because every electron really is exactly like every other. Natural history and totemism work to the extent that there really are natural kinds whose identities and borders are created and maintained by specific mechanisms. Where no objective order obtains, empiricism merely produces learned superstitions like astrology or the stimulus response learning theories of the first half of the 20th Century. The social sciences are full of such chimeras. Grown academics actually publish cross-cultural studies claiming to show whether or not capital punishment reduces the murder rate as if Sweden and Texas were lab rats of the same strain. Cross-temporal comparisons of events are even more problematic since there really are similarities between societies functioning at more or less the same level of technology while the haecceity named by World War II has very little more in common with the War of the Roses than with the War between the Roses. Even to the extent that one can identify comparable objects of study in history—states, classes, leaders, ideologies, conflicts—the number of instances is far too small a sample of possible cases to permit a test of more than the crudest generalizations.
Historical analogies are such a poor guide to political action in the present that the most useful thing professional historians can do to promote sensible policies is to point out the limitations of history itself. That’s hard to do, however, because to deny that history repeats itself is to recognize the scary fact that what’s going on is literally unprecedented. Just as original writers have no way of understanding themselves except by misidentifying with some illustrious predecessor, historical actors and the rest of us in the terrified chorus imagine that we are repeating what is really happening for the first time. But every peace conference is not a Munich. Iraq is not Vietnam. Bush is not William McKinley. The Republicans certainly don’t merit comparison with the fascists—at any event not until the trains start running on time in these parts. Debunking such analogies by bloodless analysis is rhetorically ineffective, though philosophically interesting. The other available strategy is to multiply instances in order to make them all weaker, an approach that also has the heuristic benefit of suggesting alternate ways of understanding what’s going on.
Finally no science or other form of knowledge can be more intelligible than its object. Induction works brilliantly on the energy levels of atomic hydrogen because every electron really is exactly like every other. Natural history and totemism work to the extent that there really are natural kinds whose identities and borders are created and maintained by specific mechanisms. Where no objective order obtains, empiricism merely produces learned superstitions like astrology or the stimulus response learning theories of the first half of the 20th Century. The social sciences are full of such chimeras. Grown academics actually publish cross-cultural studies claiming to show whether or not capital punishment reduces the murder rate as if Sweden and Texas were lab rats of the same strain. Cross-temporal comparisons of events are even more problematic since there really are similarities between societies functioning at more or less the same level of technology while the haecceity named by World War II has very little more in common with the War of the Roses than with the War between the Roses. Even to the extent that one can identify comparable objects of study in history—states, classes, leaders, ideologies, conflicts—the number of instances is far too small a sample of possible cases to permit a test of more than the crudest generalizations.
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Rolling Your R’s
I’ve never raised a child and I was a dreadful teacher so I’m a lousy judge of what teenagers can and cannot understand. Heck, I obviously have trouble figuring out what adults can understand. Even so, when I see a movie like Kinsey, which raises a host of serious questions in a lively way and presents history in a slightly more accurate fashion than, say, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, I find myself wondering if the way we censor movies for adolescents aren’t fundamentally wrongheaded. We make some effort to prevent kids from being exposed to brutal or pornographic images, but we don’t worry that they are missing something if they don’t experience art that challenges their assumptions and obliges them to think. For example, though I have no desire to return to the retail philosophy business, I’d love to teach just one section of 101 on the topic of creativity and morality, but based on the documentary Crumb instead of the usual Ion. I expect that the alarming cartoonist would make a better example of the menace of poetry than the harmless rhapsodist of the dialogue. I don’t know if 18 year olds are up to getting beyond a case of the giggles—in fact I expect that the problem would more likely be seriously offended young women—but I’m dead certain that the Plato would come across as a snoozer.
I’ve never raised a child and I was a dreadful teacher so I’m a lousy judge of what teenagers can and cannot understand. Heck, I obviously have trouble figuring out what adults can understand. Even so, when I see a movie like Kinsey, which raises a host of serious questions in a lively way and presents history in a slightly more accurate fashion than, say, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, I find myself wondering if the way we censor movies for adolescents aren’t fundamentally wrongheaded. We make some effort to prevent kids from being exposed to brutal or pornographic images, but we don’t worry that they are missing something if they don’t experience art that challenges their assumptions and obliges them to think. For example, though I have no desire to return to the retail philosophy business, I’d love to teach just one section of 101 on the topic of creativity and morality, but based on the documentary Crumb instead of the usual Ion. I expect that the alarming cartoonist would make a better example of the menace of poetry than the harmless rhapsodist of the dialogue. I don’t know if 18 year olds are up to getting beyond a case of the giggles—in fact I expect that the problem would more likely be seriously offended young women—but I’m dead certain that the Plato would come across as a snoozer.
Saturday, November 27, 2004
The Kinsey Report
As environmentalists are aware, solvable problems have limited political utility. Because of the very strenuous efforts of many people in the United States and around the world, the ozone hole seems to have been successfully addressed; but just because sheep aren’t catching fire in Argentina, the public at large is indifferent to the issue and largely ignorant of how much work it took to prevent a global disaster. Smaller but significant examples, such as the expensive and protracted clean up efforts that restored Pittsburgh to livable condition also earn no votes for future efforts to manage pollution in other places. Indeed, the relative healthiness of many North American localities is an argument against spending money on environmental problems. “Hey, Lake Erie doesn’t look that bad to me.”
Like Egyptian peasants of the Old Kingdom, the Americans live in an eternal present. In the absence of an effective recollection, the fact that everything is changing at a furious pace doesn’t make any difference. It has been written—by me, actually—that longevity is the only time machine that works; but it’s not enough to possess the device. You’ve got to pull the gadget off the shelf and use it, or you’ve drawn those 946 million breaths in vain. If you don’t bother to remember how things came to be, including the good things, you’re bound to make bad decisions about what needs to be done in the future. So much is taken for granted. You start thinking that safety of the drinking water is as inevitable as the yearly flooding of the Nile. You think it is natural for middle class kids not to die of typhoid or whooping cough or cholera.
The new biographical move Kinsey got me thinking down this line. It is so easy to focus on the problematic consequences of the sexual revolution that one forgets its overwhelming benefits. The recognition that masturbation is essentially universal, for example, alleviated a huge, if unquantifiable burden of guilt from generations of teenagers and probably prevented quite a few suicides—hysteria about masturbation was a real curse on young people. Indeed, in many places it still is. I don’t think it’s such a small thing either that the advance of sexual enlightenment increased the net pleasure of life for most of us, though it says something about the incompletion of the revolution that to this day you’re not supposed to think that’s important. It’s also pretty clear that the socially mandated sexual ignorance of women played a role in maintaining general gender inequality and that promoting rights in the bedroom promoted rights elsewhere. One can dwell on ubiquity of pornography or the threat of STDs or the prevalence illegitimate births or get upset about legal abortions, but who really wants to return to the old regime—aside, that is, from the rightists that control our government?
On my way back from seeing Kinsey, I had to wait at an intersection while a fire truck drove by. It was driven by a female fire fighter, which, of course, is utterly unremarkable. Which, of course, is utterly remarkable. Which, of course, is never remarked. Same moral.
As environmentalists are aware, solvable problems have limited political utility. Because of the very strenuous efforts of many people in the United States and around the world, the ozone hole seems to have been successfully addressed; but just because sheep aren’t catching fire in Argentina, the public at large is indifferent to the issue and largely ignorant of how much work it took to prevent a global disaster. Smaller but significant examples, such as the expensive and protracted clean up efforts that restored Pittsburgh to livable condition also earn no votes for future efforts to manage pollution in other places. Indeed, the relative healthiness of many North American localities is an argument against spending money on environmental problems. “Hey, Lake Erie doesn’t look that bad to me.”
Like Egyptian peasants of the Old Kingdom, the Americans live in an eternal present. In the absence of an effective recollection, the fact that everything is changing at a furious pace doesn’t make any difference. It has been written—by me, actually—that longevity is the only time machine that works; but it’s not enough to possess the device. You’ve got to pull the gadget off the shelf and use it, or you’ve drawn those 946 million breaths in vain. If you don’t bother to remember how things came to be, including the good things, you’re bound to make bad decisions about what needs to be done in the future. So much is taken for granted. You start thinking that safety of the drinking water is as inevitable as the yearly flooding of the Nile. You think it is natural for middle class kids not to die of typhoid or whooping cough or cholera.
The new biographical move Kinsey got me thinking down this line. It is so easy to focus on the problematic consequences of the sexual revolution that one forgets its overwhelming benefits. The recognition that masturbation is essentially universal, for example, alleviated a huge, if unquantifiable burden of guilt from generations of teenagers and probably prevented quite a few suicides—hysteria about masturbation was a real curse on young people. Indeed, in many places it still is. I don’t think it’s such a small thing either that the advance of sexual enlightenment increased the net pleasure of life for most of us, though it says something about the incompletion of the revolution that to this day you’re not supposed to think that’s important. It’s also pretty clear that the socially mandated sexual ignorance of women played a role in maintaining general gender inequality and that promoting rights in the bedroom promoted rights elsewhere. One can dwell on ubiquity of pornography or the threat of STDs or the prevalence illegitimate births or get upset about legal abortions, but who really wants to return to the old regime—aside, that is, from the rightists that control our government?
On my way back from seeing Kinsey, I had to wait at an intersection while a fire truck drove by. It was driven by a female fire fighter, which, of course, is utterly unremarkable. Which, of course, is utterly remarkable. Which, of course, is never remarked. Same moral.
Friday, November 26, 2004
On the Beaches
You often hear that the two-party system is not part of the American Constitution, but this commonplace is only true if you are referring to the document of that name rather than the underlying structure of our polity. As recent history demonstrates, our vaunted system of checks and balances simply doesn’t work without warring factions. Executive is not moderated by the legislature or the judiciary when all three branches are controlled by the same interests, especially in the effective absence of a free press. Under the circumstances, now really is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party— not because the Democrats are an impressive bunch but because there is no alternative to maintaining an alternative. Or do you really want to rely on the self-restraint of ideologues who believe that the secret of political success is immoderation and that all internal as well as external dissent must be stifled?
Many people find it difficult to resist calls for bipartisanship even though in the mouth of Bush or Chaney, “bipartisanship” has a lot in common with earlier slogans such as “peaceful coexistence” or “It’s all right. You’re going to be deloused.” Like all revolutionaries, our rightists absolutely depend upon the forbearance of their enemies, who are expected to be tolerant even of those who are intolerant as a matter of principle. The heck with that. Let us deny them bread and salt.
Partisanship certainly has a cost, but having allowed things to deteriorate to the current pass, we have to accept the obligation to bear this cost. For example, in states like California and in much of the Northeast, the Republican Party still plays its normal role as one of the quarreling partners that make free government possible. From a local point of view, it is a good thing that Republicans are sometimes elected governor or senator in true blue states. Unfortunately, until the general crisis passes, any such advantage must be outweighed by national considerations; and all Republicans are the enemy, most especially the reasonable ones.
You often hear that the two-party system is not part of the American Constitution, but this commonplace is only true if you are referring to the document of that name rather than the underlying structure of our polity. As recent history demonstrates, our vaunted system of checks and balances simply doesn’t work without warring factions. Executive is not moderated by the legislature or the judiciary when all three branches are controlled by the same interests, especially in the effective absence of a free press. Under the circumstances, now really is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party— not because the Democrats are an impressive bunch but because there is no alternative to maintaining an alternative. Or do you really want to rely on the self-restraint of ideologues who believe that the secret of political success is immoderation and that all internal as well as external dissent must be stifled?
Many people find it difficult to resist calls for bipartisanship even though in the mouth of Bush or Chaney, “bipartisanship” has a lot in common with earlier slogans such as “peaceful coexistence” or “It’s all right. You’re going to be deloused.” Like all revolutionaries, our rightists absolutely depend upon the forbearance of their enemies, who are expected to be tolerant even of those who are intolerant as a matter of principle. The heck with that. Let us deny them bread and salt.
Partisanship certainly has a cost, but having allowed things to deteriorate to the current pass, we have to accept the obligation to bear this cost. For example, in states like California and in much of the Northeast, the Republican Party still plays its normal role as one of the quarreling partners that make free government possible. From a local point of view, it is a good thing that Republicans are sometimes elected governor or senator in true blue states. Unfortunately, until the general crisis passes, any such advantage must be outweighed by national considerations; and all Republicans are the enemy, most especially the reasonable ones.
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
And Now for Something Completely Different
To get my mind off the recent troubles, I’ve been reading David Hackett Fisher’s Washington’s Crossing, a superb account of the crucial year in the American Revolution when it appeared that the military might of the highly professional British army would crush the colonists. The British decided that a maximum effort would shock and awe the traitors. The military leaders of the invasion were not barbarians. Indeed, general Howe was sure that his men would be welcomed with open arms once it became apparent that the Crown was appropriately conciliatory. True, the British were somewhat isolated diplomatically; but they could count on the stalwart support of Frederich Wilhelm II, Landgraf of Hesse-Cassel, who supplied them with thousands of soldiers at reasonable rates and made up for the hostile neutrality of the French and the rest of the Europeans.
For several months things worked out as planned. Washington and the Americans, thoroughly overmatched on sea and land, were driven from Manhattan and then New Jersey. The English were in a false position, however. The 31, 625 troops that had landed on August 27, 1776 made up an enormous expeditionary force by 17th Century standards, but they were far too few to seize and occupy all the colonies. Worse, though military casualties were not high at first, mere attrition began to wear down the force; and Howe’s army could not be significantly augmented with fresh troops because George’s government was unwilling to raise taxes at home or institute a general draft. Inevitably, the overstretched occupying army resorted to more and more brutal means to subdue the rebellion; but the collateral damage of their efforts inspired more defiance—Fisher points out that the famous Christmas attack on Trenton was preceded and suggested by the success of earlier spontaneous attacks by irregular forces. Howe had hoped that he could count on the help of the local Loyalists to make up for the inadequacy of his strength. It turned out, however, that he could not even protect them from the insurgents. By the end of March 1777, the British were pretty much holed up in the safety of New York City, planning in the next year to seize the initiative by occupying Philadelphia, the sanctuary of the rebels. Back in London, the government-controlled papers explained how that would turn the tide…
To get my mind off the recent troubles, I’ve been reading David Hackett Fisher’s Washington’s Crossing, a superb account of the crucial year in the American Revolution when it appeared that the military might of the highly professional British army would crush the colonists. The British decided that a maximum effort would shock and awe the traitors. The military leaders of the invasion were not barbarians. Indeed, general Howe was sure that his men would be welcomed with open arms once it became apparent that the Crown was appropriately conciliatory. True, the British were somewhat isolated diplomatically; but they could count on the stalwart support of Frederich Wilhelm II, Landgraf of Hesse-Cassel, who supplied them with thousands of soldiers at reasonable rates and made up for the hostile neutrality of the French and the rest of the Europeans.
For several months things worked out as planned. Washington and the Americans, thoroughly overmatched on sea and land, were driven from Manhattan and then New Jersey. The English were in a false position, however. The 31, 625 troops that had landed on August 27, 1776 made up an enormous expeditionary force by 17th Century standards, but they were far too few to seize and occupy all the colonies. Worse, though military casualties were not high at first, mere attrition began to wear down the force; and Howe’s army could not be significantly augmented with fresh troops because George’s government was unwilling to raise taxes at home or institute a general draft. Inevitably, the overstretched occupying army resorted to more and more brutal means to subdue the rebellion; but the collateral damage of their efforts inspired more defiance—Fisher points out that the famous Christmas attack on Trenton was preceded and suggested by the success of earlier spontaneous attacks by irregular forces. Howe had hoped that he could count on the help of the local Loyalists to make up for the inadequacy of his strength. It turned out, however, that he could not even protect them from the insurgents. By the end of March 1777, the British were pretty much holed up in the safety of New York City, planning in the next year to seize the initiative by occupying Philadelphia, the sanctuary of the rebels. Back in London, the government-controlled papers explained how that would turn the tide…
Saturday, November 20, 2004
Another Attempt to be Fair
Sports writers discount the achievement of the latest golfer to set a new record for winnings in a single season because the relentless increase in purses means that the same level of performance will yield far more dollars in 2004 than it would have in 1994. By a similar logic, each new American president automatically becomes the most dangerous man who ever lived because technology keeps increasing his power to destroy. This sort of reasoning is as unfair to W as it is to VJ, however, because, on the one hand, the Fijian really is a heck of a golfer, and, on the other, Bush’s moral and intellectual failings multiply his net potential to do harm. Clinton or Bush’s father already had the wherewithal to blister the surface of the Earth seven times over; but if they were hearing voices in their head, at least they kept quiet about them.
Sports writers discount the achievement of the latest golfer to set a new record for winnings in a single season because the relentless increase in purses means that the same level of performance will yield far more dollars in 2004 than it would have in 1994. By a similar logic, each new American president automatically becomes the most dangerous man who ever lived because technology keeps increasing his power to destroy. This sort of reasoning is as unfair to W as it is to VJ, however, because, on the one hand, the Fijian really is a heck of a golfer, and, on the other, Bush’s moral and intellectual failings multiply his net potential to do harm. Clinton or Bush’s father already had the wherewithal to blister the surface of the Earth seven times over; but if they were hearing voices in their head, at least they kept quiet about them.
Friday, November 19, 2004
The True Armature of the Absolute
The affairs of men are much simpler than the doings of atoms. We call them complex, but what they really are is interesting. Which is why it is possible to write history across centuries or even millennia despite radical changes in how people cook, eat, farm, trade, fight, travel, write, compute, build, revel, sicken, dance, and sing that should reduce any general narrative to incoherence—epistemic breaks are the least of the problem. But whether in Babylon or Bayonne, in the Iliad or on the Sopranos, each renewal of the mammalian game of King of the Hill remains as stereotyped and inevitable as the zillionth hand of pinochle with Uncle Arthur and Aunt Jo.
The affairs of men are much simpler than the doings of atoms. We call them complex, but what they really are is interesting. Which is why it is possible to write history across centuries or even millennia despite radical changes in how people cook, eat, farm, trade, fight, travel, write, compute, build, revel, sicken, dance, and sing that should reduce any general narrative to incoherence—epistemic breaks are the least of the problem. But whether in Babylon or Bayonne, in the Iliad or on the Sopranos, each renewal of the mammalian game of King of the Hill remains as stereotyped and inevitable as the zillionth hand of pinochle with Uncle Arthur and Aunt Jo.
Displacement
Just because an issue doesn’t irritate my moral sensibilities doesn’t mean it isn’t a real question. I have a rather leathery heart, after all. But I just can’t escape the feeling that all the hand wringing and Presidential commissions about stem cells and genetic engineering are mostly an empty ritual, moral busy work that allows politicians and religious entrepreneurs to demonstrate their earnestness without confronting the irresistible changes in human life that really bother them. A clone, for example, is nothing more nor less than an artificial identical twin, so that even if there were some reason to create a lot of people in this fashion—unlikely, since human beings can already be mass produced by unskilled labor—the resulting pairs would be no more alarming than any other Terri and Toni or Mike and Nick. Meanwhile, there really is something icky about the radical franchising of our existence and the emergence of the electronic hive mind. Nobody knows what to do about Walmart, so we get excited about steroidal outfielders or designer babies instead. Something similar takes place in the hysteria about decency on television. While Janet Jackson’s boob is apparently a national security issue, the plot lines of shows like CSI are grotesquely and entertainingly perverse. I came to during one episode last year, suddenly startled by a story that revolved around semen detected in a discarded wad of chewing gum. Indeed, in their endless attempts to achieve more and more extreme effects, such shows reflect the characteristic stylistic frustration of the Marquis de Sade whose tableaux are also finally thwarted by steric hindrance and the limitations of human sexual stamina. Apparently, we have to get excited about Howard Stern’s use of the word “fuck” because we certainly don’t want to take judicial notice of the hypersexuality of the rest of the media.
Just because an issue doesn’t irritate my moral sensibilities doesn’t mean it isn’t a real question. I have a rather leathery heart, after all. But I just can’t escape the feeling that all the hand wringing and Presidential commissions about stem cells and genetic engineering are mostly an empty ritual, moral busy work that allows politicians and religious entrepreneurs to demonstrate their earnestness without confronting the irresistible changes in human life that really bother them. A clone, for example, is nothing more nor less than an artificial identical twin, so that even if there were some reason to create a lot of people in this fashion—unlikely, since human beings can already be mass produced by unskilled labor—the resulting pairs would be no more alarming than any other Terri and Toni or Mike and Nick. Meanwhile, there really is something icky about the radical franchising of our existence and the emergence of the electronic hive mind. Nobody knows what to do about Walmart, so we get excited about steroidal outfielders or designer babies instead. Something similar takes place in the hysteria about decency on television. While Janet Jackson’s boob is apparently a national security issue, the plot lines of shows like CSI are grotesquely and entertainingly perverse. I came to during one episode last year, suddenly startled by a story that revolved around semen detected in a discarded wad of chewing gum. Indeed, in their endless attempts to achieve more and more extreme effects, such shows reflect the characteristic stylistic frustration of the Marquis de Sade whose tableaux are also finally thwarted by steric hindrance and the limitations of human sexual stamina. Apparently, we have to get excited about Howard Stern’s use of the word “fuck” because we certainly don’t want to take judicial notice of the hypersexuality of the rest of the media.