It’s not War. It’s Extermination.

Various critics of the new War of the Worlds have interpreted it as an allegory of 9/11, citing in particular the way that the alien’s death ray turns human flesh into fine white ash. That observation may be fair enough, since Spielberg is an American and Americans understand everything that happens in terms of their own experience. If I were an Iraqi, however, I might venture a quite different take on the movie. The U.S. Army moves in hummers and tanks rather than in giant tripods and our air force doesn’t employ ray guns as far as we know, but we are the ones with the terrifying, invincible weaponry. Our drone aircraft and cruise missile can blow anybody to atoms, anywhere, at any time at the command of a distant operator. Our fuel-oil bombs can take out several city blocks at one time. I don’t know if it is more horrible to be vaporized by non-humans or burned to death by napalm. I do know, however, that the former monstrousness is in the realm of special effects while the later is a reality for whomever we chose to attack. So how do you suppose War of the Worlds will play in Tehran or Cairo?

The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom but What Makes You Think There’s an Off-Ramp?

Something rather like representative democracy may be the most rational goal of political action, but that doesn’t mean that democracy is the telos of history. Good things, after all, are anti-entropic almost by definition while a pile of ruins is a much more natural outcome. The sage does nothing, and everything is demolished. Anyhow, to desist from the metaphysical pronouncements and get empirical for once, a quick look around the world doesn’t necessarily support the notion that things tend towards democracy under current conditions. A series of ancien regimes has indeed been overthrown by the concerted action of populations, but the aftermath of the various velvet revolutions has been more equivocal because liberation is hard to sustain in face of the structural advantages that the oligarchs have over the democrats, especially when economic conditions change. Fukuyama, the author of a famous book on the end of history, himself believed that the triumph of liberalism resulted from the prosperity promised and then delivered by free institutions and market capitalism. If that prosperity falters, as we have good reason to believe it will, promoting the general good will be a less rational program for individuals than securing a greater share of a stagnant or declining economy for you and yours—recall the political monstrosities spawned by the last great global depression.

The commonplace assumption that the triumph of the liberal society is foreordained is very much like the faith of Old Reds in the inevitable triumph of Communism. It is an article of faith that is argued from more often than it is argued to. I myself incline to the ancient opinion that there is no stable form of government and that under the stress of events each type of polity is likely to succumb in turn to its own intrinsic contradictions—aristocracy, democracy, tyranny, paper, rock, scissors. And that’s assuming that some sort of overwhelming external force does not intervene in the frustrated dialectic like a Cretaceous meteorite. At best, political arrangements are temporary solutions to changing circumstances that depend crucially on the continuous efforts of men and women determined to make them work.

The most recent democratic era in American history was made possible by the nation’s extraordinarily favorable international political and economic position after World War II; by cheap oil; by a series of technological breakthroughs; and, not least, by a genuine consensus in favor of open, inclusive, and responsible government. Most of these contextual factors have changed over the last thirty years; and, in response, functional, as opposed to notional, loyalty to the public good is becoming merely quaint—in this society, individuals of real integrity have something Amish about ‘em. The U.S. appears to be moving in the direction of a one-party state that uses interlocking government and corporate power to protect and extend the prerogatives of a small group of hyperwealthy families against the interests of an inert and infantilized population. One can surely imagine the fall of the current kings of the shining city on the dunghill—indeed, one can predict their fall with some confidence—but the removal of one mad prince isn’t going to restore the Republic because democracy doesn’t go very well with a declining empire. Even if democracy is the end of human history in some sense, I doubt if there will be very much of it at the end of our history.

A Protestant Misunderstanding of the Nature of Science

It may seem an excess of caution to feel a need to argue for the real presence of flour in the host, but our motto has always been “Dare to be dull.” We purpose to get it right even though the truth is bound to be pretty banal: it is largely banal, after all, since so much of it resides in the box labeled “Of Course.” Repeating the facts too often violates Grice’s rules of pragmatics and Shannon’s information theory, both of which mandate that every utterance must surprise or else it cannot inform. Fortunately for the leaden literalist, however, the world is full of fictions that people actually believe; and so long as they do, it will remain relevant to dispute them. Thanks to all.

Where was I? O, yeah. I was fixing to comment on how popular discussions of science presume that the sciences are really just debating societies whose output is a body of propositions. If you bother to click on the link to Panda’s Thumb over to the right of these paragraphs, you’ll discover that both the partisans of Intelligent Design and the defenders of evolutionary theory sound like participants in a particularly ill tempered 18th Century salon. That’s pretty much inevitable, of course, but only because the political debate over evolution and creationism doesn’t take place in the sciences at all. It is a sham combat, a clown fight with pig bladders. Real scientists really do argue with one another in the course of practicing science, obviously; but the novelty and value of the science derives from the degree to which it is not merely a conversation among people but a process that gives a voice to the objects its studies.

Back in the 16th Century, the Reformers made the error of thinking that Holy Writ sufficed to define right belief so long as it was read in good faith. The Genevan variety of intolerance followed from scriptura sola like a theorem; for if the doctrinal content of the Bible was clear, if followed that the Papists and the Socinians and Anabaptists and the Libertines just had to be lying. Even the most literal-minded of the Lutherans and Calvinists eventually had to finesse the theory of reading that underlay their theology, however, because at a minimum they themselves had to add a little something to the interpretation of the Old Testament to go on claiming that it made reference to Christ and the Trinity and they also had to tweak their own rendition of the New Testament to defend the utterly unscriptural practice of infant baptism. Meanwhile the Catholics made things much easier for themselves by maintaining that the basis of the faith was not the inert text itself but the scriptures as interpreted by a tradition continuously inspired by the spirit of God.

The sciences cleave to the Catholic view of the matter. The intelligibility, let alone the reliability, of scientific results does not derive from right reason or human authority but from the continuing real presence of the world in the process of research, which plays the same essential role for them that the holy ghost is said to play for the church. The novelty of the scientific method was to invite the things into the lab where they could offer their sometimes-coerced testimony to supplement and eventually supplant the testimonials of learned. Obviously this process crucially involved the development of new social and political institutions, but the whole point of the emerging research establishment was to get beyond merely human input and the interminable repetition of our favorite fantasies. Only a cartoon social constructionist could imagine that the content of the often unexpected findings of physics and biology originate from the fiat of any human mind since our minds just aren’t that creative—Millikan may have fudged his data, but he surely couldn’t have found the value of the charge on an electron in his head since -1.6 x 10-19 is not the sort of thing to be found in human heads.

Power to the People?

Mainline Democrats are only slightly more democratic than their Republican opponents since a strongly egalitarian politics threatens the prerogatives of professional people as well as billionaires. Certainly, none of the relevant elites is about ready to let the mass of the population have a decisive say in foreign policy. The democrats really do have a different take on the proper use of power, but liberal imperialists who wish to rule through consensus are still imperialists. Which largely explains why the Democrats have been so helpless in confronting the Iraq war. Many of them more or less openly endorse the notion that we have a right to unilaterally impose our system and its values on others by the application of deadly force. The Weapons of Mass Destruction scam didn’t just provide cover for the right. The moderates that went along with Bush may have thought that Saddam had some mustard gas, but they also knew perfectly well that the WMDs were utterly inconsequential, the merest red herring. They knew, but they were as willing as Powell and the rest to use this phony excuse to manipulate the public because they have no scruples whatsoever about lying to the people. Whatever you think of their motives, that is what ruling classes do.

My point is not to suggest that the world would automatically be better or safer if the wishes of the public were seriously consulted, though I think the European public at least has been far wiser than the American Neocons about the Middle East. There are a great many things that should not be settled by a vote, indeed a great many things about which people in general have no right to an opinion. The problem is that our nation endlessly proclaims its democratic principles but denies them in practice in areas—war and peace, wealth and poverty—where everybody really does have an existential stake and therefore a right to be heard and listened to. Since democracy on these matters would interfere with the wishes and interests of the rulers, we get democracy where it doesn’t belong by way of compensation. The courts will become collection agencies for the corporations, but we will tenderly protect the people’s right to impose their sexual morals on everybody. We’ll steal your pensions and your social security contributions to pay off our political supporters, but you’ll be able to decide scientific issues like evolution by a show of hands. You want to pronounce it New-cu-lar, you go right ahead. See, we’re populists.

Windfall Prophets

To hear people use the word you’d think that the notion of spirituality was as plain and unambiguous as $3.45. I don’t mind admitting that I’m less clear about either the referent or the intention of the term. In fact, I just don’t know what it means. On the other hand, I do know at least one thing it’s for. Like many other words that lack an overt definition, it certainly has a job description. For example, you trot out “spirituality” on those occasions when you want to intimate that you are a decently deep individual even though you are also a little too sophisticated for more mythological or dogmatic or organized forms of religion.

I don’t have much use for “spirituality” myself because I’m always trying to be as shallow as I can. That’s my job: to pursue the horizontal depth of the literal. I guess in a pinch I could identify as spirituality the Psalmist’s solitary insomnia or my own recurrent surprise and delight at the spectacle of the world, a gratitude that tempts me to invent somebody to thank. Mostly, though, I avoid using terms like spirituality whose meaning eludes me. It doesn’t seem quite decent to speak so loosely about what is rumored to be the most important dimension of life. I certainly have the exclusive rights to that particular scruple. Folks who are otherwise very cautious of speech immediately lose all restraint once the time comes to make vague religious assertions, and the modern precedents are all on their side.

Putting the Waste Back in Wasteland

American journalism is highly offensive to people with an engineering mentality because it represents an enormous waste of resources. When I see a CNN anchor sitting in front of a room full of expensive electronic equipment manned by highly trained technical folks, I can’t but wonder if Turner et. al. would have ever made such a massive investment if they had known how little of the information gathering capacity they created would ever be used. What we see on the screen depends far more on fear of offending the government or the sponsors and the imperative of sticking to the storyline of the week than on any input from the real world. In the absence of an institution willing to inform its audience, building up the machinery of newsgathering is as pointless as fighting a famine by manufacturing more spoons. The newsmen already know what they need to know. What they lack is the nerve to tell it to us.

Deciding what to show and what not to show is an absolutely basic function of any kind of journalism, but the problem with our system is not that it is selective but that the bases of its selection are uniformly perverse. A certain kind of faux liberal pundit likes to claim that many stories are too complicated or too old hat for the fickle and mindless listeners, but much of the information coursing through the wires behind Aaron Brown is both interesting and timely. If he doesn’t report promptly on stories like the Downing Street memo it’s not because of their irrelevance but precisely because they are all too relevant. Real news would be highly exciting, perhaps even inciting; but it would also get the networks in trouble with the government and its corporate allies.

You often hear that television news reflects the taste and intellectual capacities of the public. Aside from the obvious fact that the tabloid obsessions of the day don’t preexist the nonstop coverage of the nonevents, the displacement of serious news by gossip wasn’t motivated by ordinary commercial considerations. The kind of folks who are eager to listen to blond harpies picking at Michael Jackson’s scabs are a very much less desirable demographic than the well-educated, mostly prosperous people who want to know what’s actually going on in the world. Unfortunately, to reach that audience would require a huge gamble that would put at risk a great many careers and a lot of capital. Which is why it’s probably not going to happen. And since we’re not going to have a free press again for a long time, most of the electronics on the set of the news shows will be as useless as the machine that went ping in the old Monty Python skit.

The Tyranny of the Agenda

Politicians and pundits tend to think that everything that occurs is relevant to the issue that happens to preoccupy them that day, just as scientists can fall into the analogous error of thinking that their observations automatically bear on the topic of the grant proposals. In a recent study of capuchin monkeys at Yale, for example, an economist set up a token economy for the animals. When the females began to hook for tokens, it was assumed, quite arbitrarily, that this primate prostitution reflected badly on the monkeys when it may have had more to do with the moral atmosphere of New Haven.

Making an analogous error, David Brooks recently delivered that the economic problems of Europe demonstrate the bankruptcy of the Left, even though, as I recall, very few rightists ever admitted that the former economic power of the West Germans was evidence of the superiority of Social Democracy or that the abysmal performance of American medicine has anything to do with our peculiar political economy. Political polemic aside, the performance of the European economy surely reflects a host of demographic factors; the aging of its population; the costs of absorbing the countries of the former Warsaw Pact into the system; and, crucially, the price of oil. The putatively socialistic institutions of Western Europe didn’t prevent many years of general prosperity in the region—remember the Wirtschaftwunder?—; and, in any case, since the socialistic parties in Europe have pursued a far more market-oriented policy over the last decade, one could just as easily maintain that it has been their abandonment of the true leftist faith that got them into trouble. My point is not that one or another of these explanations is right, but simply that determining which issues matter in such discussions is already a crucial and difficult question. Just because you happen to obsess about the proper balance between the public and the private doesn’t mean that everything happens because of the level of social spending in Norway.

Generals famously prepare for the last war; and, more generally, people go on worrying about the same old issues when the times change. I suspect that both the left and the right are part of a failing ancien regime that has fallen into this trap, though the stereotypical thinking of the right is vastly more harmful just now because the right is in charge. When Brooks denounces Europe in the name of a more dynamic if piratical economic policy, he is promoting remedies for the wrong disease. In an era of cheap fuel and demographic expansion, one could indeed make a case for a more laissez faire approach because too much welfare spending probably did reduce the overall growth rate of the European economies at a time when the great challenge and opportunity was still growth. Under contemporary conditions, on the other hand, it is at least problematic to suggest that building strip malls in Tuscany constitutes progress since it is not obvious that it constitutes progress in Nebraska. By the same token, promoters of a yet another New Deal fall into anachronism by supporting income redistribution as a way to shore up demand in an era when the most pressing need is to figure out how to suppress demand without crushing the economy or impoverishing a large part of the population.

Awaiting the Sensation

Whether what’s coming is a short, sharp shock, on the other hand, remains in dispute. In the last six months or so a great many people have finally noticed the problem with liquid fuels. There was even a made-for-TV faux documentary on one of the off-brand stations last night that dealt with the consequences of an interruption of oil supplies, though even this pot boiler, which was otherwise sufficiently alarmist, was careful not to let on the fundamental problem isn’t recalcitrant Arabs, balky technology, or hurricanes but the sheer disproportion between a finite supply and a continuously growing demand. Absent Ben Laden or Iraq, we’d still be up against it, albeit the political and military angles will doubtlessly have a lot of do with how and when the crisis plays out. And of course it does make some difference that the current administration is doing nothing substantive to deal with the problem.

The approaching problem hasn’t been a secret for some time. Aside from assorted environmentalists and folks who simply hate the car-dependent suburban lifestyle and can be dismissed for parti pris, sober scientific types such as Philip Morrison have been sounding the alarm for many years, though it must be admitted that publishing editorials in SCIENCE is not exactly calculated to reach a large audience. Even when the message has been audible outside the technical ghetto, it has been misunderstood as a claim that we were facing a generalized energy shortage instead of something a lot more specific and hard to deal with. But the point is not that there aren’t many available substitutes for oil but that the sources of energy that remain abundant are not the right forms of energy to sustain an economy like ours. Despite its abundance and high caloric value, coal can’t be put in your gas tank, for example, anymore than you can eat it. Converting coal into what we need is not, contrary to the G.E. ad, merely a matter of filling the coal mines with sweaty Victoria Secret models. It is not going to be easy to figure out how to use coal or nuclear or the renewables to fuel transport and, perhaps more crucially, to produce the huge inputs of fertilizer that have so far kept agricultural production ahead of world population growth.

Perhaps we misunderstand the problem because the public discussion of energy issues tends to be dominated by economists who tend to think that energy is as fungible as money and engineers who tend to think that every problem is solvable by sufficient ingenuity. I’ve think I’ve tended to be overoptimistic about the effectiveness of the technical solutions myself, in part because I deal with the technological side of the issue in my day job and know of many possible ways of ameliorating the situation if only the political will existed to implement real steps to deal with the problem. Even making the dubious assumption that the nations and their citizens can be persuaded to act rationally in all this, I may still be too optimistic.

It’s easy to dismiss the scary prophesies of writers like Jim Kunstler as green hysteria, but rather more difficult to defeat the particulars of their arguments, especially the very important point that the transition to a non-petroleum economy will be exceedingly expensive, perhaps impossibly so, without a fairly drastic decline in the standard of living. It takes a lot of gas to fill up the trucks that deliver the cement that goes into a new nuclear plant, for example; and that gas is likely to be even more expensive by the time we finally get around to building even one new nuclear plant. Even the building of new coal power plants and the mining infrastructure needed to supply them with fuel requires a great deal of petroleum. Biofuels have the same weakness. Indeed, since agricultural production in its modern form requires a huge and continuous input of petroleum products, synfuels may be dimes purchased at a quarter a piece even after you amortize the costs of ramping up their production.

Any change involves waste, but the transition of this country to a totally different energy regime is likely to result in an enormous write-off of assets. A large proportion of the wealth of a country like the United States is tied up in suburban real estate. Increasing the price of gas automatically deflates the real value of much of this store of wealth by making it more and more expensive if not impractical to live many miles from work. Having made the decision to build huge suburbs, we can’t just move all those buildings into more compact and energy efficient cities. We’re stuck with the consequences of earlier choices.

Students of economic geography often point out the dilemma faced by the Russian Federation. Huge cities were built in Siberia during the Soviet period at the whim of tyrants and commissars even though it never made much sense to locate large population centers so far from markets in such a miserable climate. Now that the cities are there, however, it is next to impossible to dismantle them, even though they have filled up with unemployed people and represent a drain on the entire country. We’re going to have to deal with the Capitalist version of the same problem. L.A., Phoenix, and Las Vegas are every bit as artificial as Magnitogorsk or Irkutsk.

Why Second Base is Scoring Position

You may have encountered a news story about the effect of the hormone oxytocin on the human propensity to trust other people. Sprayed in the nose, it apparently makes the subject more willing to risk giving money to a stranger. That’s really not so surprising. It has been known for quite a while that the hormone elicits maternal behavior so that it wouldn’t be surprising if it played a role in other kinds of bonding. But I expect that other conclusions remain to be drawn. For example:

Oxytocin, which does many other things as well, plays a key role in lactation. When the nipples of a nursing mammal are stimulated, oxytocin is rapidly released from the hypothalamus and stimulates the initial step of milk secretion. Which is supposedly why the washing and manipulation of the utter is an important preliminary to milking a cow. But the oxytocin not only promotes milk but also the milk of human kindness; and presumably, it is not only released when a baby does the sucking. Sexual caresses of the breasts probably also lead to oxytocin release and thereby increase willingness of a woman to take the plunge, always a risky choice.

In the Frogs of Aristophanes, Euripides quotes one of his own lines, “Persuasion, save in speech, no temple hath.” But Persuasion, who the Greeks imagined to be a goddess who helped out the bridegroom on the wedding night, might have another temple or two after all.

Minerva’s Kingdom

It has been repeatedly pointed out that the E.U. is not Holy, Roman, or an Empire. After the other day, it may be supposed that it is hardly even a union. I take a more hopeful view, though perhaps only because of a near total ignorance of European politics. Speaking parochially, I’d like to see Europe stick together, but not too well. In the ideal case, the E.U. would form a conglomeration of states far too strong to mess with but rather too loosely organized to throw its weight around aggressively.

House Rules

Finding things out has never been easier, at least for people who are already well educated and want to know. Unfortunately, the availability of reliable information does not guarantee that the public will be well informed. Very few take the trouble to educate themselves; and it remains exceedingly difficult and very expensive to convey simple facts to the mass of the population; and that’s true even in the minority of cases where corporations, political parties, and religions aren’t actively promoting ignorance and spreading lies.

I think we routinely overestimate human curiosity. People are fond of trivial novelty, of course, but the real surprises in this world require effort to comprehend. My nephew quotes a line from a song that goes (more or less): “Each household appliance’s another new science;” but an unknown idea is more hateful to most of us than a new fangled telephone is to your grandpa. Heraclitus said, “If one does not expect the unexpected one will not find it out.” If follows, apparently, that one will not find it out. Which partly explains why most of our political debates are fought over obsolete issues that have only an indirect or symbolic relationship to the real problems of the time. At great personal cost, the participants finally learned how to argue about abortion or state’s rights or stem-cell research. It’s just too much to ask that they learn a new game just because the old one is largely irrelevant; and any political agent who tries to alter the stale agenda has to fight not only his opponents but human inertia, which, contrary to Cicero, is the real power against which the Gods themselves struggle in vain.

We pretend that the ideological struggles of the day revolve around technical economic issues or the specifics of constitutional law as if whether prices are set by a governments or cartels is the most important problem with world trade and gridlock in Washington is a consequence of a quarrel over the proper construal of the doctrine of Federalism. Privatization arguments are particularly irrelevant, or so it seems to me, since the enormous corporations that stand to inherit traditional governmental functions are more like states than firms anyhow—the real issue is whether you prefer dirigisme or feudalism since, at least for the time being, a true third way is a very notional option. The great contests of our time are not about the how as much as the for whom, the cui in cui bono. Of course the shills for the various interests have every reason to perfume their advocacy with an incense of academic disinterest; and the people, for their part, would prefer to think that there is a nonpolitical solution to political problems; but over and beyond, or perhaps beneath, these particular motives is the tendency of minds once at rest to remain at rest.

A Base Line

A classic way to torpedo a historian’s reputation is to check the accuracy of the victim’s footnotes. When the procedure yields evidence of carelessness, the critic can argue a lack of professional standards. This technique would not pass muster in the sciences. Until and unless it could be established that the rate of error in the target’s work were greater than the average for his cohorts, the detected mistakes might as well be taken as evidence of the general sloppiness of historians rather than the particular incompetence of a single historian. As a matter of fact, since the reported background error rate in citations is on the order of 35 to 40%, you have to be a sorry researcher indeed to come in under the existing deplorable standard. Under the circumstances, one has to agree with Doctor House that full-body scans of patients are useless in making a diagnosis because they mostly just reveal that human bodies have lots of little suspicious lumps and shadows.

As my old boss Kay Chamberlain used to say, don’t tell me a number unless you’ve got another number to compare it to. And if that simple methodological maxim suffices for the book business, it ought to hold for historians, too, and perhaps other folks. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. When politicians are attacked for their sexual quirks, for example, nobody ever stops to ask to what extent the quirks are quirks and the accused are damned not for violating norms but simply for getting caught. All these years after Kinsey, we’re still acting shocked that people routinely commit adultery, cross-dress, or engage in homosexual behavior. Of course in mass societies, the factor that determines whether you suffer for your offenses is not the offense, which, indeed, you may not even have committed, but the ability of your enemies to make a dog and pony show out of your supposed taste for dogs and ponies. On the evidence, Conservatives are at least as prone to what is commonly mislabeled as sexual irregularity as the supposedly lascivious liberals whose morals they relentlessly denounce even as they don their seamed nylons and size 11 fuck-me shoes.

I have this recurrent dream in which I’m falsely accused of some crime or other. I’m on the stand and the prosecutor is raking me over the coals for assorted personal foibles irrelevant to my purported crime. I finally respond, “If I known you were charging me with original sin, I would have plead guilty.”

What is Enmerdement?

Ralph Sorensen, a biologist friend of mine currently on sabbatical writes:
“Being in Germany, I reflect on the question of how so bright, charming, and sly a group of people could have, in the person of their parents and grandparents, been seduced by Nazism. This leads me to reflect on Bush and the current American zeitgeist I am presently avoiding. I am awaiting publication of "The Eternal Liberal," given the vacuity of a term as abused by people who appear oblivious of a) the enlightenment b) the etymology of the term, and c) the fallacy of reducing all political thought to a single axis. Yes, being a "liberal" is not constitutive, but, rather, facultative (existential, not essential), but the definition of "Jew" had the same flexibility, did it not?”

What saddens me is the way in which the erstwhile liberals, eternal or temporary, duplicate so many of the responses of the German Jews to their own demonization, including insincere conversions to the religion of their oppressors, gratuitous professions of loyalty to the Reich, and endless self criticism. Nobody spends more time and ingenuity figuring out ways to bad mouth the Enlightenment and its values than liberal public intellectuals. The right-wing press harps on liberal arrogance and elitism, but it is the liberals themselves who compulsively elaborate the theme and provide the demagogues with complicated historical analyses explaining what’s wrong with progress and rationality. After all, the red-state folks don’t know much about the historical period or movement traditionally called the Enlightenment. At most they’ve heard the term someplace and don’t like the sound of it because it gives them the same bad feeling they get from the expression “Civil Liberties.”

The Deacon’s Masterpiece

As the Roman Empire in the West declined, the grandees of the time continued to build huge baths and basilicas as monuments to their greatness, though the dearth of resources and the decline of taste resulted in a showy but shabby grandeur reminiscent of Las Vegas. Better maintenance of existing structures would have been much more cost effective; but, then as now, janitors didn’t get much respect; and the cities gradually decayed. A somewhat similar pattern is emerging in our times. Our political economists and politicians promote policies that are obsessed with endless growth even though the problem we have to manage is precisely the end of growth. We celebrate the ethos—and ethics—of the entrepreneur even though the situation calls for a different kind of agent altogether. You often encounter young business types who like to make speeches about the need to welcome risk—a motivational theme that makes old CEOs smile since they know that the whole point is to make sure you’re shooting fish in a barrel—but taking risks when there isn’t anything worthwhile to win is just stupid. While opportunities for sensible risk taking will surely continue to occur in the future, the larger challenge will be to preserve as much of what we have as possible and that will require an outlook completely opposite to the current vogue for free-market boosterism in business and Neocon ruthlessness in politics.

Unfortunately, what ought to be the Golden Age of Maintenance Engineering will probably turn out to be something quite different. Though that would be unfortunate, it does offer the philosophical observer a special opportunity to study how things fail and, more specifically, why so many people are surprised when they do. On that second question, for example, I note that the threats to our continuing prosperity are not unknown or even unacknowledged, even by supporters of the status quo, who, however, typically address and dismiss them one by one as manageable as, indeed, they are if taken one by one. We could spend the necessary resources to fix up the roads, bridges, and harbors. We could stop increasing the Federal deficit. We could address the imbalance of trade. We could take steps to manage the consequences of global warming. We could find substitutes for liquid fuels as petroleum production declines. The problem, obviously, is that we have to do all these things at once and we’re currently not doing any of them.

One frequently encounters middle-aged ruins who point out that many alcoholics live long lives, that many smokers don’t get cancer, and that plenty of fat people are perfectly healthy. Our politicians have adopted this cheerful system of evasion on our behalf by incorporating a whole raft of optimistic estimates into their projections. Claiming, not without reason, that each element of the national system can withstand normal stresses, they ignore the evidence of how things fail. Like the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay of Oliver Wendell Holmes, each component of the whole may be equally strong—or, as is more accurate in our case, equally infected with a general flavor of mild decay—but the shocks that it will encounter on road are not similarly homogenous. We don’t know what’s going to tip over the cart—-perhaps some calamity of war, financial panic, religious strife, epidemic disease, or terrorism—but the scale of the bad consequences are likely to be very great since the overall strength of the fabric has been compromised by years of neglect.

Going Down

I don’t know whether Newsweek’s story about interrogators at Gitmo flushing the Koran down the toilet was true or false, though my guess is that the story was essentially correct and that its government source has simply recanted under pressure. A great many former prisoners have reported similar outrages. Why we should credit members of this administration over these victims is unclear to me. If the Secretary of State can insist that we didn’t ask for the Iraqi War (“This war came to us”), if senators like McCain can deny the plain message of the recently revealed British memo (“I do not believe that the Bush administration decided that they would set up a scenario that gave us the rationale for going into Iraq.”), if the military justice system can put the blame for Abu Greib on a handful of noncoms, it’s pretty clear that both the administration and its legions of enablers are deeply into the Big Lie.

As befits this new age of faith, all of this has a theological explanation. What you have to understand is that there are really two Purgatories, the one Dante wrote about where venal sins are purged in preparation for eternal bliss and the other purgatory where falling souls, still hampered by residual decency, undergo basic training for full-blown Hell. America is currently on the down escalator, but we’ve got a ways to go. Which is why Conservatives still bother with excuses. We aren’t torturing anybody. We aren’t torturing anybody without extreme need. We aren’t torturing anybody too much. Good people aren’t evil just because they do evil things. We can quit anytime. Torture is manly and admirable.

Archimboldian Philosophy

If only because it saves effort, we routinely overestimate the consistency of our world. In the formula of Mary Douglas, dirt is matter out of place, but if we don’t care to notice the disarray, the dirt doesn’t really matter. That there are chambermaids with the souls of duchesses and duchesses with the souls of chambermaids may occasion an observation or two in Proust, but it hardly threatens the class system. That our stream of consciousness is “a shitty run of category mistakes and non sequiturs” is equally inconsequential. Which is a good thing, because our Zeitgeist, like the clothes of the lady in the limerick, is surely in patches with everybody out of kilter in time, genre, register, and discipline. While there are certainly plenty of 21st Century polemicists with the outlook (and talents) of off-brand 18th Century philosophes, the serious discussion of real issues is sometimes reminiscent of that ancient precursor of the Internet, the Talmud, except that the sages aren’t talking with one another in the same language. Reading Brian Joseph and Richard Janda’s long and extremely eccentric introductory chapter to the Handbook of Historical Linguistics the other day, I couldn’t decide if I was more reminded of the Baroque splendor of the Nuova Scienza of Giambattista Vico or the oppressively relentless whimsy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The motley is not merely stylistic. Trying to come to terms with language change, Joseph and Janda manage to meander through the particulars of a half a dozen intricate debates in other fields including thermodynamics, history, paleontology, developmental biology, theology, and philosophy as if wrestling with the Great Vowel Shift or the etymology of “Bunk” requires a comprehensive theory of Time itself in the historical linguist. The first sentence of an Old Chronicle of the City of Barcelona reads “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” Similar quirk. The odd thing about this performance, however, is its reasonableness under the circumstances. These guys are presumptuous, but they have as good a right to be presumptuous as anybody else. Hubris is sometimes a duty.

Joseph and Janda face the problem, ubiquitous in our age, of dealing with the general in the absence of the universal. Instead of relating linguistic change and (for example) evolutionary change by abstracting out a purified philosophical sense of change, the authors use professional-level concepts of each alternatively to traverse the broken ground of various theoretical and practical issues. Sometimes punctuated equilibrium is good to think with, sometimes the ergodic hypothesis, sometimes the properly linguistic notion of grammaticalization. The absence of a master level of discourse rules out the drafting of a map, but not the writing out of an itinerary, always provided we can put up with the inelegance of literary forms required to match such a jumpy methodology. It’s not that anybody who wants to deal seriously with great issues has much choice, after all. Veritable knowledge cannot be any more compact and homogeneous than the reality it addresses. Coming up against the real strangeness and multiplicity of the world, it has at last become necessary for thought to conform to its object at the cost of forgoing the dream of an integral knowing subjects or even of integral totalizing disciplines. In the Bible, God inflicted the confusion of tongues on the people for trying to build a tower to heaven. In this version, we’re actively promoting that same confusion precisely in order to build the tower.

By the way, the advent of what I’m call Archimboldian thought, hardly spells the end of traditional philosophy. Much of what professional philosophers do is appropriately specialized and technical and can be cannibalized to good purpose by the scavenging bricoleur. Meanwhile more traditional “Great Ideas” philosophy also endures and prospers as a specialized form of public relations that satisfies the public’s metaphysical needs. The whole is just another one of the parts, but that’s hardly fatal to the commercial prospects of the next dozen versions of retail holism.

—the Librarian

Stories Just So or So So

The air went out of the tire back in the early 70s when a generation of young people suddenly realized that their educations weren’t going to automatically result in a higher status or even necessarily pay the bills. The economy, rapidly cooling down from a once in a millennium growth spurt, simply didn’t have room for so many college-educated people. Besides, there was always something contradictory about the American project of democratizing privilege. The disappointment of so many individuals played itself out in a great many forms of self-destructive behavior over and beyond the obvious trio of drugs, disco, and deconstruction. Much of the continuing political prosperity of the Right derives from a search for psychic compensation for shipwrecked hopes.

Whether you call it a talking point, a meme, or just a commonplace, modern conservatives frequently claim that their liberal opponents are mediocre characters who like the idea of social safety nets because they aren’t up to the bracing struggle of life. Implicit in this bit are the assumptions that the only things worth fighting for are money and perhaps power and, on a deeper level, that fighting is the inevitable form of meaningful activity. Apparently, they find it astonishing that anybody might aspire to something different and perhaps better than wealth or that many people don’t want to obsess about stocks and bonds because they have better things to do. In fact, what we have here is a simply projection. Having renounced ambitions they themselves think are more worthwhile, they detect a failure of ambition in those who have made other choices.

I doubt if even the most of the promoters of the religion of the market really think that there is something particularly wonderful about getting rich. Their avidity is often just the public face of a fear of loosing out and becoming déclassé, a motive that has turned more than one child of well-educated hippies into a CFO. Perhaps that’s why our new billionaires are such notable flops as patrons of the high culture. Unlike other ruling classes, they haven’t figured out how to make an art out of being rich or even enjoy themselves very much. Lefties attack them for their greed, but perhaps even that isn’t quite authentic.

At some point in the future, if there is very much of a future, the mentality of our times is going to be a puzzle. One can understand how the figure of the saint, the sage, the artist, the statesmen, the builder, the warrior, the inventor or the industrialist can capture the imagination of an age. What can you say about a civilization whose hero is the crony capitalist?

That’s More than We Know

This has got to be a rotten time to be an honorable soldier, spy, or bureaucrat. With the fix permanently in place, the guilty have every prospect of getting away with civil and military crimes so long as they are of sufficiently high rank. The innocent, however, can no longer be exonerated because the courts and commissions that might serve that purpose have no credibility. Once the government has solemnly announced that obvious malefactors such as Sanchez, Gonzalez, and Rumsfeld have no culpability for the mistreatment of prisoners, the presumption becomes that everyone is complicit, though the fairer conclusion is simply that we can no longer draw any conclusions about the behavior of individuals.

Risk and Integrity

Moral theories make history more or less unintelligible if they explain the fate of nations as the consequence of whether individuals act well or badly as if their choices were ultimate causes in themselves and not susceptible of further explanation. Though we’re the only actors in this play and what occurs is our doing, the consequences of our actions and therefore the meaning of what we do are at the mercy of a social context that escapes our control. It’s not that we aren’t free. We can do whatever we like inside the narrow set of options created by our cultural and social setting. Escaping that agenda is a vastly more difficult performance.

I love to rail against the mass-market journalists, but my petit bourgeois indignation is largely beside the point because their lack of integrity and competence is a consequence rather than a cause of the viciousness of the institutions they staff. It is perfectly possible for individuals to opt out of the propaganda machine. Indeed, many people do opt out; but whether or not absenting yourself from the scene of the crime is good for the soul, it is utterly inconsequential because thousands of replacements wait to carry on the thankless but hardly unrewarding task of corrupting public discourse. Dissident journalists are in the same boat as corporate whistleblowers. They can chose to tell the truth, but their actions are more likely to result in professional self-destruction than to effect change. The moral act thus becomes a gesture, theater without an audience. Indeed, the ruling professional mentality positively discourages such actions as juvenile acting out. If moral behavior has bad consequences for the moral agent, it cannot be moral. The categorical imperative is not a suicide pact.

America’s general lack of integrity is a consequence of other changes in our social and political system and does not imply that people have suffered an inexplicable loss of virtue. As Pravda used to put things, none of this is an accident. In 1950, many Americans had stable jobs in a growing economy. The government and the unions protected the rights of working people, and the college-educated could always teach. Since then, while most of us have not become impoverished, almost everybody’s livelihood and health are at much greater perceived risk and a bachelor’s degree guarantees nothing. At the same time, the level of income required to maintain a middle-class status has steadily increased and wealth and celebrity have replaced a plethora of other values as the bases for self-definition. To be sure, there are still scholars, poets, and even saints (of a sort); but the notion of respectable poverty is a museum piece. Certain criminals aside, one simply cannot be famous and poor—even Maya Angelou is a millionaire. Under these circumstances, people do what they have to do to win because coming in second has become disastrous while to live in a merely decent fashion is barely decent. The increase in social risk guarantees that the nation will be full of trimmers and ass kissers.

Darkness at Noon

One is encouraged to love the sinner but hate the sin. That’s pretty much how I feel about Catholics and Catholicism. The laity is infinitely better than the secretive and tyrannical institution that routinely abuses them financially, intellectually, and sexually. Outside the hierarchy, one often encounters a tolerant and modest spirituality that understands the church as a community of loving people rather than a rigid, exclusionist organization in which a self-perpetuating priesthood lords it over a passive flock. Inside, in the service of the paramount goal, the sheer survival of the divine machine, even thoughtful and cultivated men become toadeaters and tyrants, cutting endless dishonorable deals with secular thugs and crushing internal dissent.

During the Cold War it was a commonplace to claim that Communism was a religion. The reverse analogy also holds. Just as the commissars always decided that the humane and universal goals of Marxism had to be sacrificed to maintain socialism in one country, the popes will always decide that the needs of suffering people are not as important as the survival of the church itself. Unlike the Reds and their own predecessors, the current batch of men in red hats can’t simply murder heretics but they can still humiliate them after secret ecclesiastical trials—the new Pope’s former job was to supervise these invisible, bureaucratic pageants. And over the centuries catholic intellectuals have found themselves again and again in the position of leftist writers, trying to defend the indefensible and remain loyal to an ideal that has no real presence in the visible church. When I read Cardinal Newman or Lord Acton or Hans Kung submitting to Roman discipline, I’m reminded of the way the French Communist party routinely vilified its non-proletarian supporters as second-class radicals and potential traitors to the cause and how all those academics and novelists willingly participated in their own abasement.