A Perfectly Normal Ill Wind
I’m informed that there is an old Arab saying to the effect that the Persians know how to do everything. I don’t know about that, but I suspect they know enough to bemuse the world long enough to develop a nuclear arsenal. The Iranians are in the situation of the Athenians, who wanted to wall their city in order to be able to defy the Spartans. The Spartans convened a conference to prevent just this sort of destablizing and irresponsible masonry proliferation, but the Athenians, led by Themistocles, who, to judge by his track record, was even more clever than the Persians, kept on talking and talking and talking, ragging the puck, working the clock, resorting to a four corner offense, bribing the odd ephor, lying through their teeth, and sending the official wall inspectors on a series of wild goose chases through the whorehouses of the Piraeus while all the while every man, woman, and child back home was furiously piling brick on brick. Naturally, when the wall was tall enough to defend, Themistocles diplomatically advised the Spartans to bugger off just as it is a good bet that seventeen U.N. committee meetings from now, the Iranians are going to invite us to bite their cranks.
Most Americans seem to regard Iran as a non-fiction version of one of those comical countries you find in novels. The Iranians, presumably don’t think of themselves as living in San Narciso, however. Not without historical warrant, they have a sense of themselves as one of the great nations of the earth. If the Americans, British, Russians, Chinese, French, Indians, and even the benighted Pakistanis have the bomb, how can so proud a people as the Persians be content to forgo the prestige that comes with nuclear power, especially since their national identity has been repeatedly and painfully disrespected down through the centuries? Even if the Iranians lacked a practical reason for wanting the definitive deterrent in the face of what they see as a paranoid Israel and an aggressive, erratic America, their self-definition would demand the bomb. Which is why it is probably impossible to deny it to them even in the medium term. What we have here is not the whim of some maximum leader like Kim Il Sung or even part of the program of some party or sect. It isn’t just the mullahs who want the weapons. I suspect it isn’t even especially the mullahs. And Iran is a big country with considerable resources, not a basket case like North Korea. They’re going to get the bombs.
Meanwhile, I know I’m supposed to be very worried about the Persian bomb, but I’m mostly worried of the consequences of efforts to forestall it. In a different time line, one in which we had pursued a calm and principled foreign policy, America might be in a position to argue against the bomb with more justice. As it is, our options are to go on practicing our own policy of delay or to unleash the Israelis or resort to a bombing campaign of our own. Between the disastrous consequences of a violent response and learning to live with a nuclear Iran, I’d opt for the latter. I think the dangers of such an eventuality are vastly overstated. Meanwhile, nobody with a paying job seems to be willing to notice its upside. At least an Iranian bomb would prevent prevention.
Unlike the first few nuclear club members, India, Pakistan, and even China have not built a huge number of bombs or delivery systems. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. still have thousands of warheads and the British and French hundreds, presumably because they once upon a time seriously considered using them. Having a notably smaller arsenal has a different logic. India, Pakistan, and China have enough megatonnage to hugely raise the ante for any country that contemplated attacking them, but acquiring the continent-destroying power of even the Force de Frappe would be pointless. A nuclear India isn’t going to get in an arms race with the United States or even Europe, and a nuclear Iranian isn’t going to either. It couldn’t afford the investment and would have no prospect of success against any of the big powers. From an Iranian perspective, however, the inability to compete is irrelevant because the point of having the bomb is to preserve their sovereignty against aggressive countries like the U.S. whose public intellectuals frequently speak blandly about attacking Iran as if it were Guatemala or Haiti.
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
We Must, We Must, Develop Robust
The President recently made some offhand remarks supportive of introducing intelligent design into high school curricula. Although some educators and scientists were upset, I doubt if his comments were calculated for political advantage. He didn’t make much of an issue of the matter, and his own science advisors are on the record that ID is not a credible scientific theory. In a very general way, I suppose, evincing skepticism about evolution is a way of demonstrating solidarity with your base, but surely nobody has any reason to doubt Bush’s bona fides as a member of the culture of ignorance. Creationism is a default position. You don’t have to take a course or read a book to be wrong about these things. It’s as natural as breathing. Living things may have developed without effort and forethought, but it requires effort and thought to arrive at understand how they could have developed without such inputs. The truth is located on an upper floor, and there is no elevator in the building.
Some of the heavy lifting involved in actually figuring things out is on display in Andreas Wagner’s new book Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems. Wagner’s aim is to examine how living things manage to persist, reproduce, and evolve despite the noisiness of their environment. Or to use Wagner’s own words, “Why is an organism not a molecular house of cards?” Stuart Kauffman wrote an influential book some years ago called the Origins of Order. Wagner’s book is about the durability of order, an equally challenging problem. Mutations are inevitable in genetic systems and even a top of the line Xerox machine eventually fails to reproduce a visible image as it copies copies of copies. Even during the life of a given organism, random thermal motions constantly perturb the intricate network of chemical processes that make up metabolism. So how do you have a picnic during a tornado? And why doesn’t the sheer complexity of a single cell, let alone a multi-cellular organism, make life simply impossible? According to Murphy’s Law what can go wrong will go wrong. There are vastly more things to go wrong in a cat than in a can opener, but the cats are still here. Indeed, contrary to what one might think, reliability actually seems to increase with complexity.
Wagner addresses two main questions. He examines the mechanisms that make living systems robust on the genetic, metabolic, and developmental levels; but he also looks at possible explanations of how these systems became robust. Quite a lot is known about the first problem. For example, computer simulations show that the genetic code is optimized for robustness in the sense that random mutations tend to code for chemically similar amino acids more often in the existing code than in all or almost all of the zillions of alternative possibilities. Which means, in turn, that a large proportion of the proteins derived from mutated genes will have the same general chemical properties as the originals and retain or enhance their functionality despite the changes. The chemical pathways of the cell also show a high degree of resiliency that allows metabolism to continue even when one or more enzymes fails, and developmental pathways can be drastically reorganized without obviously changing the morphology of the adult organisms—I was particularly impressed with Wagner’s account of how the embryology of insects in the hymenopteran suborder Apocrita differ depending on their lifestyles, with yolky, Drosophila-style eggs for the free living and ecotoparasitic forms and tiny, yolk-poor eggs for endoparasites. Evidently ontogeny doesn’t always recapitulate phylogeny as revolutionary alterations of developmental processes can occur without altering the end product very much.
How life came to be so tough in the face of noise and mutation is a separate and less clear-cut question. Wagner supplies some suggestions. There is some evidence that living things can and have evolved in the direction of greater robustness, but it isn’t always obvious that straightforward natural selection can account for the trend. For one thing, robustness can be too much of a good thing at some levels. For example, proteins are more stable if they reliably fold into the same shape despite thermal noise, but enzymes often have to be able to change their conformations in order to catalyze chemical changes. There are trade-offs. It is also unclear whether genetic systems can become more robust under individual natural selection, because the inclusive fitness of individuals is not increased by mutations that make future generations less sensitive to mutations. In that case, however, it may well be that the same mutations that increase the robustness of metabolic processes to thermal noise have the more-or-less automatic side effect of increasing the resistance of the genome to unfavorable mutations. Thus the same heat shock protein that protects proteins from folding improperly at high temperatures buffers the effect of mutations as well—knock out the now-celebrated Hsp90 and you and your fruit flies will manifest a host of abnormalities.
Wagner ends his book with a brief look at man-made systems. The telephone grid is like a living body by virtue of its enormous scale and intricacy but also because it is remarkably reliable (~99.999%). As Wagner points out, the great majority of service interruptions occur not because of the failure of individual parts—such failures occur at a rate comparable to the genetic mutation rate in living things, mostly without obvious consequences—but simply because the phone companies decided it wasn’t worth the money to build a big enough system to withstand the occasional overload. In other words, the fragility of the system is planned. Its robustness is not. It is a side effect of the way the system evolved. During the long, piecemeal process of its development, defects and failures continually occurred and were responded to with various ad hoc expediencies. As a result, the grid, like the genetic, metabolic, and developmental systems of living things, looks like a crazy guilt or, if you’re old enough to catch the reference, like a Rube Goldberg contraption. Nevertheless, it works in the sublunary world better than any rationally designed system whose elegant structure is likely to be hopelessly brittle.
By the way, although Wagener doesn’t say a word on the topic and should not be blamed for my homily, his take on robustness suggests a veritable Argument from Non-Design to an infidel like me. To put things simply: We know that living things were not designed. After all, they work. Which brings us back to George Bush’s recent comments.
The President recently made some offhand remarks supportive of introducing intelligent design into high school curricula. Although some educators and scientists were upset, I doubt if his comments were calculated for political advantage. He didn’t make much of an issue of the matter, and his own science advisors are on the record that ID is not a credible scientific theory. In a very general way, I suppose, evincing skepticism about evolution is a way of demonstrating solidarity with your base, but surely nobody has any reason to doubt Bush’s bona fides as a member of the culture of ignorance. Creationism is a default position. You don’t have to take a course or read a book to be wrong about these things. It’s as natural as breathing. Living things may have developed without effort and forethought, but it requires effort and thought to arrive at understand how they could have developed without such inputs. The truth is located on an upper floor, and there is no elevator in the building.
Some of the heavy lifting involved in actually figuring things out is on display in Andreas Wagner’s new book Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems. Wagner’s aim is to examine how living things manage to persist, reproduce, and evolve despite the noisiness of their environment. Or to use Wagner’s own words, “Why is an organism not a molecular house of cards?” Stuart Kauffman wrote an influential book some years ago called the Origins of Order. Wagner’s book is about the durability of order, an equally challenging problem. Mutations are inevitable in genetic systems and even a top of the line Xerox machine eventually fails to reproduce a visible image as it copies copies of copies. Even during the life of a given organism, random thermal motions constantly perturb the intricate network of chemical processes that make up metabolism. So how do you have a picnic during a tornado? And why doesn’t the sheer complexity of a single cell, let alone a multi-cellular organism, make life simply impossible? According to Murphy’s Law what can go wrong will go wrong. There are vastly more things to go wrong in a cat than in a can opener, but the cats are still here. Indeed, contrary to what one might think, reliability actually seems to increase with complexity.
Wagner addresses two main questions. He examines the mechanisms that make living systems robust on the genetic, metabolic, and developmental levels; but he also looks at possible explanations of how these systems became robust. Quite a lot is known about the first problem. For example, computer simulations show that the genetic code is optimized for robustness in the sense that random mutations tend to code for chemically similar amino acids more often in the existing code than in all or almost all of the zillions of alternative possibilities. Which means, in turn, that a large proportion of the proteins derived from mutated genes will have the same general chemical properties as the originals and retain or enhance their functionality despite the changes. The chemical pathways of the cell also show a high degree of resiliency that allows metabolism to continue even when one or more enzymes fails, and developmental pathways can be drastically reorganized without obviously changing the morphology of the adult organisms—I was particularly impressed with Wagner’s account of how the embryology of insects in the hymenopteran suborder Apocrita differ depending on their lifestyles, with yolky, Drosophila-style eggs for the free living and ecotoparasitic forms and tiny, yolk-poor eggs for endoparasites. Evidently ontogeny doesn’t always recapitulate phylogeny as revolutionary alterations of developmental processes can occur without altering the end product very much.
How life came to be so tough in the face of noise and mutation is a separate and less clear-cut question. Wagner supplies some suggestions. There is some evidence that living things can and have evolved in the direction of greater robustness, but it isn’t always obvious that straightforward natural selection can account for the trend. For one thing, robustness can be too much of a good thing at some levels. For example, proteins are more stable if they reliably fold into the same shape despite thermal noise, but enzymes often have to be able to change their conformations in order to catalyze chemical changes. There are trade-offs. It is also unclear whether genetic systems can become more robust under individual natural selection, because the inclusive fitness of individuals is not increased by mutations that make future generations less sensitive to mutations. In that case, however, it may well be that the same mutations that increase the robustness of metabolic processes to thermal noise have the more-or-less automatic side effect of increasing the resistance of the genome to unfavorable mutations. Thus the same heat shock protein that protects proteins from folding improperly at high temperatures buffers the effect of mutations as well—knock out the now-celebrated Hsp90 and you and your fruit flies will manifest a host of abnormalities.
Wagner ends his book with a brief look at man-made systems. The telephone grid is like a living body by virtue of its enormous scale and intricacy but also because it is remarkably reliable (~99.999%). As Wagner points out, the great majority of service interruptions occur not because of the failure of individual parts—such failures occur at a rate comparable to the genetic mutation rate in living things, mostly without obvious consequences—but simply because the phone companies decided it wasn’t worth the money to build a big enough system to withstand the occasional overload. In other words, the fragility of the system is planned. Its robustness is not. It is a side effect of the way the system evolved. During the long, piecemeal process of its development, defects and failures continually occurred and were responded to with various ad hoc expediencies. As a result, the grid, like the genetic, metabolic, and developmental systems of living things, looks like a crazy guilt or, if you’re old enough to catch the reference, like a Rube Goldberg contraption. Nevertheless, it works in the sublunary world better than any rationally designed system whose elegant structure is likely to be hopelessly brittle.
By the way, although Wagener doesn’t say a word on the topic and should not be blamed for my homily, his take on robustness suggests a veritable Argument from Non-Design to an infidel like me. To put things simply: We know that living things were not designed. After all, they work. Which brings us back to George Bush’s recent comments.
Monday, August 01, 2005
Admission of Failure is not an Option
If nothing counts as losing, victory is inevitable. On a less flexible scoring system, Iraq sure looks like a failure. What we’ve bought at the cost of 300 billion and thousands of lives is a wrecked nation stuck in a civil war. Under the circumstances, the most favorable outcome would be a country divided between a pro-Iranian Islamic republic in the South and a Kurdish ethnic state in the North. Even in that case, a more or less permanent insurgency would probably smolder in the middle subsidized on the cheap by irritated Sunnis in adjoining areas.
The right wing, seconded by many a pundit from America’s mindless middle, cheerfully responds to the endless train wreck with rhetorical maneuvers patterned on theological apologetics. It isn’t that they examine the facts on the ground and conclude that things are going well. They begin with the conclusion and track back, just as defenders of Christianity or Islam seldom argue for the truth of the faith from the evidence but beg the question from the get go. Since assessing the situation might yield unacceptible results, both the theologians and the political commentators content themselves with the not very challenging task of explaining how a predestined conclusion can be represented as consistent with the acknowledged facts of the case. Such explanations are always possible: “True, no living things more elaborate than Lepidoptera survive in the poisoned wastes of post-war Mesopotamia, but the outcome is as good as anyone could have reasonably expected, and we can thank the President that Manhattan remains markedly less radioactive than Bagdad.” Consistency is a very cheap commodity and worth its price.
To judge by the polls, the American public is not buying the optimism of the right these days; but it is not clear that what the people think matters much as long as the levers of power are in the hands of true believers. Which means that we are at the mercy of a group of people who have decided that it is unmanly and unpatriotic to learn from their own mistakes. Since political stupidities have real costs, however, this principle can only be implemented by cupping your hands around your ears and repeating “la-la-la, I can’t hear you!” Unfortunately, denial is like running up the balances on your credit cards. Only God almighty can afford to be complacent forever.
If nothing counts as losing, victory is inevitable. On a less flexible scoring system, Iraq sure looks like a failure. What we’ve bought at the cost of 300 billion and thousands of lives is a wrecked nation stuck in a civil war. Under the circumstances, the most favorable outcome would be a country divided between a pro-Iranian Islamic republic in the South and a Kurdish ethnic state in the North. Even in that case, a more or less permanent insurgency would probably smolder in the middle subsidized on the cheap by irritated Sunnis in adjoining areas.
The right wing, seconded by many a pundit from America’s mindless middle, cheerfully responds to the endless train wreck with rhetorical maneuvers patterned on theological apologetics. It isn’t that they examine the facts on the ground and conclude that things are going well. They begin with the conclusion and track back, just as defenders of Christianity or Islam seldom argue for the truth of the faith from the evidence but beg the question from the get go. Since assessing the situation might yield unacceptible results, both the theologians and the political commentators content themselves with the not very challenging task of explaining how a predestined conclusion can be represented as consistent with the acknowledged facts of the case. Such explanations are always possible: “True, no living things more elaborate than Lepidoptera survive in the poisoned wastes of post-war Mesopotamia, but the outcome is as good as anyone could have reasonably expected, and we can thank the President that Manhattan remains markedly less radioactive than Bagdad.” Consistency is a very cheap commodity and worth its price.
To judge by the polls, the American public is not buying the optimism of the right these days; but it is not clear that what the people think matters much as long as the levers of power are in the hands of true believers. Which means that we are at the mercy of a group of people who have decided that it is unmanly and unpatriotic to learn from their own mistakes. Since political stupidities have real costs, however, this principle can only be implemented by cupping your hands around your ears and repeating “la-la-la, I can’t hear you!” Unfortunately, denial is like running up the balances on your credit cards. Only God almighty can afford to be complacent forever.
Friday, July 22, 2005
Doubtlessly
Even I have to allow that some eternal verities have a kernel of truth. For example, the cliché that scientific results are always provisional is correct as a matter of principle since on any reasonable account of what the “empirical” in empirical science means, it doesn’t mean deduced deductively from unquestionable axioms. Formally speaking, we could perfectly well discover next Tuesday that DNA never codes for protein or learn to our surprise that due to a clerical error we were wrong all along about the atomic number of oxygen. At least in a contemporary context, however, the rhetorical force of such avowals of methodological modesty depends on a covert awareness that DNA damned well codes for protein and the atomic number of oxygen really is 8. An enormous number of scientific issues are up in the air, of course; but the guilty secret of the researchers is that they actually can and have achieved results that are materially correct. Nobody’s going to come along and overturn the periodic table. It just isn’t going to happen. I don’t think we’ve come to terms with this embarrassing fact and its many implications.
Even I have to allow that some eternal verities have a kernel of truth. For example, the cliché that scientific results are always provisional is correct as a matter of principle since on any reasonable account of what the “empirical” in empirical science means, it doesn’t mean deduced deductively from unquestionable axioms. Formally speaking, we could perfectly well discover next Tuesday that DNA never codes for protein or learn to our surprise that due to a clerical error we were wrong all along about the atomic number of oxygen. At least in a contemporary context, however, the rhetorical force of such avowals of methodological modesty depends on a covert awareness that DNA damned well codes for protein and the atomic number of oxygen really is 8. An enormous number of scientific issues are up in the air, of course; but the guilty secret of the researchers is that they actually can and have achieved results that are materially correct. Nobody’s going to come along and overturn the periodic table. It just isn’t going to happen. I don’t think we’ve come to terms with this embarrassing fact and its many implications.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
The Fluoride of the Progressives
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been making the rounds of talk shows talking up the idea that autism is caused by thimerosal, a mercury compound formerly used in this country as a preservative in childhood vaccines. While some right-wingers are also upset about thimerosal, most of the concern about it comes from the left, which is peculiar in a way since suspicion about vaccination is traditionally a conservative preoccupation that reflects a programmatic unwillingness to bear even tiny personal risks for the general good. To be sure, Kennedy and Arianna Huffington and various folks at Salon and Rolling Stone claim to support vaccination and relate their attacks on thimerosal to an anti-corporate theme. Their narrative is all about how Big Pharma conspired with bunch of bought-off scientists to cover up the connection between mercury and autism. Of course if thimerosal really is a cause of autism, the motives of its critics don’t matter very much. What is the state of the evidence?
No official scientific agency in the United States and Europe has reported any link between thimerosal and autism or any other neurological problem, but a consensus developed that it should not be used in vaccines because of a general concern about mercury exposure. For this reason, thimerosal has not been used in vaccines in this country since 1999 while research into the possible effects of thimerosal has continued without turning up any very definitive results. As with many recent epidemological issues—the health effects of electro-magnetic fields, for example—the technical difficulties of defining the real risks are formidable, in part because the association between the agent and the effect is so weak. Nobody is claiming that flu shots are to autism what cigarettes are to lung cancer. Mercury is not good for the nervous system, but the toxicity of mercury depends upon its chemical form. Thimerosal delivers ethyl mercury to the body whereas environmental exposure to mercury largely takes the form of methyl mercury. The pharmacology of ethyl mercury remains to be elucidated. While methyl mercury tends to linger in the body, ethyl mercury is rapidly excreted in the feces. On the other hand, some babies may not be as capable of excreting ethyl mercury as others; and ethyl mercury from a vaccine injection comes as a single big dose while methyl mercury from food and water is ingested a little at a time. A bolus of mercury may produce a more severe effect than an incremental exposure.
The case against thimerosal also assumes that the incidence of autism has increased markedly in step with the frequency of childhood immunizations. This assumption is not obviously valid. You sometimes read that autism was unknown before the introduction of vaccines with thimerosal, but what happened in the forties was the introduction of the term autism, not the sudden appearance of withdrawn, affectless children. Many cases of what we would now call autism are described in the older medical literature, just as millions of people died from heart attacks over the years even though myocardial infarction was only defined in the 20th Century. Because the clinical definition of autism is so vague, it is perfectly possible that its increasing incidence reflects to some degree the tendency of doctors to make trendy diagnoses in borderline cases, an instance of that syndrome inflation or societal hypochondria familiar from the ADD saga. In this regard, I find it telling that follow up studies of children diagnosed as autistic in recent decades find that many of them go on to college and careers while the autistic kids of yesteryear are still banging their heads against a wall.
Because as a rule it is hard and expensive to figure things out, none of the questions about thimerosal are going to be answered quickly and anybody who issues conclusive statements about the matter is overstating his or her case. That said, I confess that I lost interest in the issue a couple of years ago because of a simple consideration. Thimerosal was removed from vaccines in Denmark in 1992 but the reported incidence of autism continued to rise sharply thereafter (Science, Vol 301, Issue 5639, 1454-1455, 12 September 2003). That finding doesn’t guarantee that the mercury in vaccines has no relationship whatsoever with autism, of course; but it certainly deflates the notion that thimerosal is the fundamental problem. The research also reminds us that a giant and crucial experiment is already underway in this country. If thimerosal really was the cause of a U.S. autism epidemic, the epidemic should be coming to an end shortly since vaccines no longer contain thimerosal. Since this vast if accidental test will much larger and more conclusive than any feasible planned study, I think it makes sense to reserve scarce research dollars to deal with other issues.
Note: for a rundown of information on thimerosal that includes links to sources on both sides of the issue, see this Wikipedia page.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been making the rounds of talk shows talking up the idea that autism is caused by thimerosal, a mercury compound formerly used in this country as a preservative in childhood vaccines. While some right-wingers are also upset about thimerosal, most of the concern about it comes from the left, which is peculiar in a way since suspicion about vaccination is traditionally a conservative preoccupation that reflects a programmatic unwillingness to bear even tiny personal risks for the general good. To be sure, Kennedy and Arianna Huffington and various folks at Salon and Rolling Stone claim to support vaccination and relate their attacks on thimerosal to an anti-corporate theme. Their narrative is all about how Big Pharma conspired with bunch of bought-off scientists to cover up the connection between mercury and autism. Of course if thimerosal really is a cause of autism, the motives of its critics don’t matter very much. What is the state of the evidence?
No official scientific agency in the United States and Europe has reported any link between thimerosal and autism or any other neurological problem, but a consensus developed that it should not be used in vaccines because of a general concern about mercury exposure. For this reason, thimerosal has not been used in vaccines in this country since 1999 while research into the possible effects of thimerosal has continued without turning up any very definitive results. As with many recent epidemological issues—the health effects of electro-magnetic fields, for example—the technical difficulties of defining the real risks are formidable, in part because the association between the agent and the effect is so weak. Nobody is claiming that flu shots are to autism what cigarettes are to lung cancer. Mercury is not good for the nervous system, but the toxicity of mercury depends upon its chemical form. Thimerosal delivers ethyl mercury to the body whereas environmental exposure to mercury largely takes the form of methyl mercury. The pharmacology of ethyl mercury remains to be elucidated. While methyl mercury tends to linger in the body, ethyl mercury is rapidly excreted in the feces. On the other hand, some babies may not be as capable of excreting ethyl mercury as others; and ethyl mercury from a vaccine injection comes as a single big dose while methyl mercury from food and water is ingested a little at a time. A bolus of mercury may produce a more severe effect than an incremental exposure.
The case against thimerosal also assumes that the incidence of autism has increased markedly in step with the frequency of childhood immunizations. This assumption is not obviously valid. You sometimes read that autism was unknown before the introduction of vaccines with thimerosal, but what happened in the forties was the introduction of the term autism, not the sudden appearance of withdrawn, affectless children. Many cases of what we would now call autism are described in the older medical literature, just as millions of people died from heart attacks over the years even though myocardial infarction was only defined in the 20th Century. Because the clinical definition of autism is so vague, it is perfectly possible that its increasing incidence reflects to some degree the tendency of doctors to make trendy diagnoses in borderline cases, an instance of that syndrome inflation or societal hypochondria familiar from the ADD saga. In this regard, I find it telling that follow up studies of children diagnosed as autistic in recent decades find that many of them go on to college and careers while the autistic kids of yesteryear are still banging their heads against a wall.
Because as a rule it is hard and expensive to figure things out, none of the questions about thimerosal are going to be answered quickly and anybody who issues conclusive statements about the matter is overstating his or her case. That said, I confess that I lost interest in the issue a couple of years ago because of a simple consideration. Thimerosal was removed from vaccines in Denmark in 1992 but the reported incidence of autism continued to rise sharply thereafter (Science, Vol 301, Issue 5639, 1454-1455, 12 September 2003). That finding doesn’t guarantee that the mercury in vaccines has no relationship whatsoever with autism, of course; but it certainly deflates the notion that thimerosal is the fundamental problem. The research also reminds us that a giant and crucial experiment is already underway in this country. If thimerosal really was the cause of a U.S. autism epidemic, the epidemic should be coming to an end shortly since vaccines no longer contain thimerosal. Since this vast if accidental test will much larger and more conclusive than any feasible planned study, I think it makes sense to reserve scarce research dollars to deal with other issues.
Note: for a rundown of information on thimerosal that includes links to sources on both sides of the issue, see this Wikipedia page.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Le Meme Chose
In Goethe’s play, Faust sells the Holy Roman Emperor on the idea of issuing paper money backed up by buried treasure since the emperor is entitled to such hordes by imperial law and the gold will turn up eventually. Naturally, the float sinks; but the brilliant absurd notion is no crazier than what various philosophers and scientists have promoted in earnest. Hume, as an impatient young man, advertised his initial epistemology as the application of Newtonian methods to the physics of ideas as if sense impressions formed little solar systems governed by simple laws of attraction. A.J. Ayer’s also proposed to cut all the Gordian knots at one stroke by assassinating traditional ethics and epistemology with a superficially plausible theory of meaning. This sort of thing can also be institutionalized. Some Sumerian grad student once got the bright idea of keeping track of what happened in Mesopotamian politics when comets appeared or the moon was eclipsed, but his program continues to this day as astrology. Learning theory in psychology can’t claim such a long run, but it is also based on an obvious methodological insight. All we’ve got to do is find the law that relates stimulus and response! Well, that’s the sort of thing that works when it works and, in any case, is always easy to explain, which counts for a lot.
Although every successful theory gets mechanically applied to every available problem, in most cases all that gets transferred is a set of buzzwords. That’s certainly true in relationship to the current fad for applying ideas drawn from evolutionary biology to discussions of the transmission and fate of ideas and institutions in human society—the meme meme. Since both living things and cultures change through time, it’s hardly surprising that the processes involved in their evolution are analogous. The trouble is, they are aren’t apparently homologous, i.e. the terms of the theory of natural selection—genes, genotypes, phenotypes, fitness—don’t match up one-to-one with the corresponding cultural terms, assuming there are corresponding terms. While genes prosper because the organisms to which they belong survive and reproduce better than organisms with other genes, the success of melodies, jokes, poems, slogans, gestures, gods, faiths, philosophies, and other cultural detritus seems to mostly depend merely on their tendency to be copied. Meanwhile, while it is possible to define what gets replicated in natural evolution—crudely speaking, stretches of nucleic acids—almost anything can and has been identified as a meme, though only a few candidates for memehood have anything like the specificity of an allele. It may be possible to model the fate of a catchy melody or an exactly repeated ritual by recourse to the mathematics of population genetics, but, as Scott Atran points out in his book In Gods We Trust, even something so apparently cut and dried as the Ten Commandments is impossible to specify. We’re not talking about a series of sounds in Hebrew or a series of letters in the KJV, after all, but the meaning of a form of words. In lieu of anything like the chemical formula that defines a gene or a protein, such entities are, as I like to say, boneless. Just think for a moment of the admirable flexibility of the Thou Shalt Not Kill provision.
Knowledge is limited by the intelligibility of its objects. Natural evolution is understandable because living things have genetic and developmental systems that drastically constrain how they change over time. They are good to think. The cultural systems that are best understood—languages, folk taxonomies, musical systems—are also apparently constrained by nature, which is to say human neural biology. Where such preexisting regularities are lacking, the will to know will simply create superstitions. I think that’s what’s happening with memology, which seems remarkably like the Intelligent Design movement in its endless production of programmatic statements and its utter lack of a research program.
In Goethe’s play, Faust sells the Holy Roman Emperor on the idea of issuing paper money backed up by buried treasure since the emperor is entitled to such hordes by imperial law and the gold will turn up eventually. Naturally, the float sinks; but the brilliant absurd notion is no crazier than what various philosophers and scientists have promoted in earnest. Hume, as an impatient young man, advertised his initial epistemology as the application of Newtonian methods to the physics of ideas as if sense impressions formed little solar systems governed by simple laws of attraction. A.J. Ayer’s also proposed to cut all the Gordian knots at one stroke by assassinating traditional ethics and epistemology with a superficially plausible theory of meaning. This sort of thing can also be institutionalized. Some Sumerian grad student once got the bright idea of keeping track of what happened in Mesopotamian politics when comets appeared or the moon was eclipsed, but his program continues to this day as astrology. Learning theory in psychology can’t claim such a long run, but it is also based on an obvious methodological insight. All we’ve got to do is find the law that relates stimulus and response! Well, that’s the sort of thing that works when it works and, in any case, is always easy to explain, which counts for a lot.
Although every successful theory gets mechanically applied to every available problem, in most cases all that gets transferred is a set of buzzwords. That’s certainly true in relationship to the current fad for applying ideas drawn from evolutionary biology to discussions of the transmission and fate of ideas and institutions in human society—the meme meme. Since both living things and cultures change through time, it’s hardly surprising that the processes involved in their evolution are analogous. The trouble is, they are aren’t apparently homologous, i.e. the terms of the theory of natural selection—genes, genotypes, phenotypes, fitness—don’t match up one-to-one with the corresponding cultural terms, assuming there are corresponding terms. While genes prosper because the organisms to which they belong survive and reproduce better than organisms with other genes, the success of melodies, jokes, poems, slogans, gestures, gods, faiths, philosophies, and other cultural detritus seems to mostly depend merely on their tendency to be copied. Meanwhile, while it is possible to define what gets replicated in natural evolution—crudely speaking, stretches of nucleic acids—almost anything can and has been identified as a meme, though only a few candidates for memehood have anything like the specificity of an allele. It may be possible to model the fate of a catchy melody or an exactly repeated ritual by recourse to the mathematics of population genetics, but, as Scott Atran points out in his book In Gods We Trust, even something so apparently cut and dried as the Ten Commandments is impossible to specify. We’re not talking about a series of sounds in Hebrew or a series of letters in the KJV, after all, but the meaning of a form of words. In lieu of anything like the chemical formula that defines a gene or a protein, such entities are, as I like to say, boneless. Just think for a moment of the admirable flexibility of the Thou Shalt Not Kill provision.
Knowledge is limited by the intelligibility of its objects. Natural evolution is understandable because living things have genetic and developmental systems that drastically constrain how they change over time. They are good to think. The cultural systems that are best understood—languages, folk taxonomies, musical systems—are also apparently constrained by nature, which is to say human neural biology. Where such preexisting regularities are lacking, the will to know will simply create superstitions. I think that’s what’s happening with memology, which seems remarkably like the Intelligent Design movement in its endless production of programmatic statements and its utter lack of a research program.
Monday, July 11, 2005
Even If This Isn’t the City of God
I once tried to make the point to a bunch of libertarians that the worst political excesses of the 20th Century were committed by ideologues whose hostility to the state ran as deeply as theirs. Since from the libertarian point of view the state simply has to be the root of all evil, they couldn’t hear what I was proposing, though it was hardly sophisticated idea. I merely noted that the revolutionaries of the last hundred years treated the traditional state with contempt, sometimes merely ignoring it and building parallel institutions that exercised the real power, sometimes allowing it to function but only as a tool of their own interests. The fascists, Nazis, Bolsheviks, Maoists, Young Turks, Peronists, Iranian Mullahs, and Baathists had no use for parliaments or bureaucracies with real independence. They were parties acting in lieu of governments and rejected any real distinction between the administration and the state, often going so far as to argue that bureaucratic, juridical, scientific, and other professional norms of objectivity that justify the independence of the state apparatus are illusions or frauds. Which is why it was a critical moment in the Second Russian Revolution when Gorbachev decided to govern as President rather than Party Leader.
That the state and its institutions have in fact oppressed individuals and groups is not in dispute, of course; but the charter of the state is not to play favorites but to create artificial spaces in which individuals and groups differing in wealth and power can compete or cooperate without violence: parliaments, courts, markets. In these leveled arenas in which the din and stench of mammalian contention has been quieted and deodorized to some extent, men, who are certainly not created equal, are made equal for certain purposes. The cogency and benefits of this program are obvious. Even those who scoff at civilization generally don’t dispute the theory of the thing, but many people apparently think that human beings are quite incapable of the disinterested actions that make the City possible.
Lots of doctors have given up telling their patients not to drink too much because, as everybody knows, they will often go on drinking. It has been shown, however, that the advice of physicians has a real and medically relevant effect on alcohol consumption. In common with most remedies, advice is not a panacea; but it isn’t a placebo either and even placebos work. The human capacity for principled behavior is another such imperfect medicine. Teachers sometimes punish students for disagreeing with their private prejudices; but most of them know that promoting a point of view is not their role and they can and often do put their own ideas aside. Like infant baptism and other routine wonders, I’ve seen it done. I’ve even done it myself. The case is similar in other public professions. Judges perfectly well know what it is to act judiciously, though they may choose to cheat or fall into self-deception at times. Judging fairly is a skill that human beings can acquire, just as they can learn to play the piano or make soup. The notion that disinterested action is impossible is not merely a sophisticated way of defending immoral behavior. It is factually incorrect.
I once tried to make the point to a bunch of libertarians that the worst political excesses of the 20th Century were committed by ideologues whose hostility to the state ran as deeply as theirs. Since from the libertarian point of view the state simply has to be the root of all evil, they couldn’t hear what I was proposing, though it was hardly sophisticated idea. I merely noted that the revolutionaries of the last hundred years treated the traditional state with contempt, sometimes merely ignoring it and building parallel institutions that exercised the real power, sometimes allowing it to function but only as a tool of their own interests. The fascists, Nazis, Bolsheviks, Maoists, Young Turks, Peronists, Iranian Mullahs, and Baathists had no use for parliaments or bureaucracies with real independence. They were parties acting in lieu of governments and rejected any real distinction between the administration and the state, often going so far as to argue that bureaucratic, juridical, scientific, and other professional norms of objectivity that justify the independence of the state apparatus are illusions or frauds. Which is why it was a critical moment in the Second Russian Revolution when Gorbachev decided to govern as President rather than Party Leader.
That the state and its institutions have in fact oppressed individuals and groups is not in dispute, of course; but the charter of the state is not to play favorites but to create artificial spaces in which individuals and groups differing in wealth and power can compete or cooperate without violence: parliaments, courts, markets. In these leveled arenas in which the din and stench of mammalian contention has been quieted and deodorized to some extent, men, who are certainly not created equal, are made equal for certain purposes. The cogency and benefits of this program are obvious. Even those who scoff at civilization generally don’t dispute the theory of the thing, but many people apparently think that human beings are quite incapable of the disinterested actions that make the City possible.
Lots of doctors have given up telling their patients not to drink too much because, as everybody knows, they will often go on drinking. It has been shown, however, that the advice of physicians has a real and medically relevant effect on alcohol consumption. In common with most remedies, advice is not a panacea; but it isn’t a placebo either and even placebos work. The human capacity for principled behavior is another such imperfect medicine. Teachers sometimes punish students for disagreeing with their private prejudices; but most of them know that promoting a point of view is not their role and they can and often do put their own ideas aside. Like infant baptism and other routine wonders, I’ve seen it done. I’ve even done it myself. The case is similar in other public professions. Judges perfectly well know what it is to act judiciously, though they may choose to cheat or fall into self-deception at times. Judging fairly is a skill that human beings can acquire, just as they can learn to play the piano or make soup. The notion that disinterested action is impossible is not merely a sophisticated way of defending immoral behavior. It is factually incorrect.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
It’s not War. It’s Extermination.
Various critics of the new War of the Worlds have interpreted it as an allegory of 9/11, citing in particular the way that the alien’s death ray turns human flesh into fine white ash. That observation may be fair enough, since Spielberg is an American and Americans understand everything that happens in terms of their own experience. If I were an Iraqi, however, I might venture a quite different take on the movie. The U.S. Army moves in hummers and tanks rather than in giant tripods and our air force doesn’t employ ray guns as far as we know, but we are the ones with the terrifying, invincible weaponry. Our drone aircraft and cruise missile can blow anybody to atoms, anywhere, at any time at the command of a distant operator. Our fuel-oil bombs can take out several city blocks at one time. I don’t know if it is more horrible to be vaporized by non-humans or burned to death by napalm. I do know, however, that the former monstrousness is in the realm of special effects while the later is a reality for whomever we chose to attack. So how do you suppose War of the Worlds will play in Tehran or Cairo?
Various critics of the new War of the Worlds have interpreted it as an allegory of 9/11, citing in particular the way that the alien’s death ray turns human flesh into fine white ash. That observation may be fair enough, since Spielberg is an American and Americans understand everything that happens in terms of their own experience. If I were an Iraqi, however, I might venture a quite different take on the movie. The U.S. Army moves in hummers and tanks rather than in giant tripods and our air force doesn’t employ ray guns as far as we know, but we are the ones with the terrifying, invincible weaponry. Our drone aircraft and cruise missile can blow anybody to atoms, anywhere, at any time at the command of a distant operator. Our fuel-oil bombs can take out several city blocks at one time. I don’t know if it is more horrible to be vaporized by non-humans or burned to death by napalm. I do know, however, that the former monstrousness is in the realm of special effects while the later is a reality for whomever we chose to attack. So how do you suppose War of the Worlds will play in Tehran or Cairo?
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom but What Makes You Think There’s an Off-Ramp?
Something rather like representative democracy may be the most rational goal of political action, but that doesn’t mean that democracy is the telos of history. Good things, after all, are anti-entropic almost by definition while a pile of ruins is a much more natural outcome. The sage does nothing, and everything is demolished. Anyhow, to desist from the metaphysical pronouncements and get empirical for once, a quick look around the world doesn’t necessarily support the notion that things tend towards democracy under current conditions. A series of ancien regimes has indeed been overthrown by the concerted action of populations, but the aftermath of the various velvet revolutions has been more equivocal because liberation is hard to sustain in face of the structural advantages that the oligarchs have over the democrats, especially when economic conditions change. Fukuyama, the author of a famous book on the end of history, himself believed that the triumph of liberalism resulted from the prosperity promised and then delivered by free institutions and market capitalism. If that prosperity falters, as we have good reason to believe it will, promoting the general good will be a less rational program for individuals than securing a greater share of a stagnant or declining economy for you and yours—recall the political monstrosities spawned by the last great global depression.
The commonplace assumption that the triumph of the liberal society is foreordained is very much like the faith of Old Reds in the inevitable triumph of Communism. It is an article of faith that is argued from more often than it is argued to. I myself incline to the ancient opinion that there is no stable form of government and that under the stress of events each type of polity is likely to succumb in turn to its own intrinsic contradictions—aristocracy, democracy, tyranny, paper, rock, scissors. And that’s assuming that some sort of overwhelming external force does not intervene in the frustrated dialectic like a Cretaceous meteorite. At best, political arrangements are temporary solutions to changing circumstances that depend crucially on the continuous efforts of men and women determined to make them work.
The most recent democratic era in American history was made possible by the nation’s extraordinarily favorable international political and economic position after World War II; by cheap oil; by a series of technological breakthroughs; and, not least, by a genuine consensus in favor of open, inclusive, and responsible government. Most of these contextual factors have changed over the last thirty years; and, in response, functional, as opposed to notional, loyalty to the public good is becoming merely quaint—in this society, individuals of real integrity have something Amish about ‘em. The U.S. appears to be moving in the direction of a one-party state that uses interlocking government and corporate power to protect and extend the prerogatives of a small group of hyperwealthy families against the interests of an inert and infantilized population. One can surely imagine the fall of the current kings of the shining city on the dunghill—indeed, one can predict their fall with some confidence—but the removal of one mad prince isn’t going to restore the Republic because democracy doesn’t go very well with a declining empire. Even if democracy is the end of human history in some sense, I doubt if there will be very much of it at the end of our history.
Something rather like representative democracy may be the most rational goal of political action, but that doesn’t mean that democracy is the telos of history. Good things, after all, are anti-entropic almost by definition while a pile of ruins is a much more natural outcome. The sage does nothing, and everything is demolished. Anyhow, to desist from the metaphysical pronouncements and get empirical for once, a quick look around the world doesn’t necessarily support the notion that things tend towards democracy under current conditions. A series of ancien regimes has indeed been overthrown by the concerted action of populations, but the aftermath of the various velvet revolutions has been more equivocal because liberation is hard to sustain in face of the structural advantages that the oligarchs have over the democrats, especially when economic conditions change. Fukuyama, the author of a famous book on the end of history, himself believed that the triumph of liberalism resulted from the prosperity promised and then delivered by free institutions and market capitalism. If that prosperity falters, as we have good reason to believe it will, promoting the general good will be a less rational program for individuals than securing a greater share of a stagnant or declining economy for you and yours—recall the political monstrosities spawned by the last great global depression.
The commonplace assumption that the triumph of the liberal society is foreordained is very much like the faith of Old Reds in the inevitable triumph of Communism. It is an article of faith that is argued from more often than it is argued to. I myself incline to the ancient opinion that there is no stable form of government and that under the stress of events each type of polity is likely to succumb in turn to its own intrinsic contradictions—aristocracy, democracy, tyranny, paper, rock, scissors. And that’s assuming that some sort of overwhelming external force does not intervene in the frustrated dialectic like a Cretaceous meteorite. At best, political arrangements are temporary solutions to changing circumstances that depend crucially on the continuous efforts of men and women determined to make them work.
The most recent democratic era in American history was made possible by the nation’s extraordinarily favorable international political and economic position after World War II; by cheap oil; by a series of technological breakthroughs; and, not least, by a genuine consensus in favor of open, inclusive, and responsible government. Most of these contextual factors have changed over the last thirty years; and, in response, functional, as opposed to notional, loyalty to the public good is becoming merely quaint—in this society, individuals of real integrity have something Amish about ‘em. The U.S. appears to be moving in the direction of a one-party state that uses interlocking government and corporate power to protect and extend the prerogatives of a small group of hyperwealthy families against the interests of an inert and infantilized population. One can surely imagine the fall of the current kings of the shining city on the dunghill—indeed, one can predict their fall with some confidence—but the removal of one mad prince isn’t going to restore the Republic because democracy doesn’t go very well with a declining empire. Even if democracy is the end of human history in some sense, I doubt if there will be very much of it at the end of our history.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
A Protestant Misunderstanding of the Nature of Science
It may seem an excess of caution to feel a need to argue for the real presence of flour in the host, but our motto has always been “Dare to be dull.” We purpose to get it right even though the truth is bound to be pretty banal: it is largely banal, after all, since so much of it resides in the box labeled “Of Course.” Repeating the facts too often violates Grice’s rules of pragmatics and Shannon’s information theory, both of which mandate that every utterance must surprise or else it cannot inform. Fortunately for the leaden literalist, however, the world is full of fictions that people actually believe; and so long as they do, it will remain relevant to dispute them. Thanks to all.
Where was I? O, yeah. I was fixing to comment on how popular discussions of science presume that the sciences are really just debating societies whose output is a body of propositions. If you bother to click on the link to Panda’s Thumb over to the right of these paragraphs, you’ll discover that both the partisans of Intelligent Design and the defenders of evolutionary theory sound like participants in a particularly ill tempered 18th Century salon. That’s pretty much inevitable, of course, but only because the political debate over evolution and creationism doesn’t take place in the sciences at all. It is a sham combat, a clown fight with pig bladders. Real scientists really do argue with one another in the course of practicing science, obviously; but the novelty and value of the science derives from the degree to which it is not merely a conversation among people but a process that gives a voice to the objects its studies.
Back in the 16th Century, the Reformers made the error of thinking that Holy Writ sufficed to define right belief so long as it was read in good faith. The Genevan variety of intolerance followed from scriptura sola like a theorem; for if the doctrinal content of the Bible was clear, if followed that the Papists and the Socinians and Anabaptists and the Libertines just had to be lying. Even the most literal-minded of the Lutherans and Calvinists eventually had to finesse the theory of reading that underlay their theology, however, because at a minimum they themselves had to add a little something to the interpretation of the Old Testament to go on claiming that it made reference to Christ and the Trinity and they also had to tweak their own rendition of the New Testament to defend the utterly unscriptural practice of infant baptism. Meanwhile the Catholics made things much easier for themselves by maintaining that the basis of the faith was not the inert text itself but the scriptures as interpreted by a tradition continuously inspired by the spirit of God.
The sciences cleave to the Catholic view of the matter. The intelligibility, let alone the reliability, of scientific results does not derive from right reason or human authority but from the continuing real presence of the world in the process of research, which plays the same essential role for them that the holy ghost is said to play for the church. The novelty of the scientific method was to invite the things into the lab where they could offer their sometimes-coerced testimony to supplement and eventually supplant the testimonials of learned. Obviously this process crucially involved the development of new social and political institutions, but the whole point of the emerging research establishment was to get beyond merely human input and the interminable repetition of our favorite fantasies. Only a cartoon social constructionist could imagine that the content of the often unexpected findings of physics and biology originate from the fiat of any human mind since our minds just aren’t that creative—Millikan may have fudged his data, but he surely couldn’t have found the value of the charge on an electron in his head since -1.6 x 10-19 is not the sort of thing to be found in human heads.
It may seem an excess of caution to feel a need to argue for the real presence of flour in the host, but our motto has always been “Dare to be dull.” We purpose to get it right even though the truth is bound to be pretty banal: it is largely banal, after all, since so much of it resides in the box labeled “Of Course.” Repeating the facts too often violates Grice’s rules of pragmatics and Shannon’s information theory, both of which mandate that every utterance must surprise or else it cannot inform. Fortunately for the leaden literalist, however, the world is full of fictions that people actually believe; and so long as they do, it will remain relevant to dispute them. Thanks to all.
Where was I? O, yeah. I was fixing to comment on how popular discussions of science presume that the sciences are really just debating societies whose output is a body of propositions. If you bother to click on the link to Panda’s Thumb over to the right of these paragraphs, you’ll discover that both the partisans of Intelligent Design and the defenders of evolutionary theory sound like participants in a particularly ill tempered 18th Century salon. That’s pretty much inevitable, of course, but only because the political debate over evolution and creationism doesn’t take place in the sciences at all. It is a sham combat, a clown fight with pig bladders. Real scientists really do argue with one another in the course of practicing science, obviously; but the novelty and value of the science derives from the degree to which it is not merely a conversation among people but a process that gives a voice to the objects its studies.
Back in the 16th Century, the Reformers made the error of thinking that Holy Writ sufficed to define right belief so long as it was read in good faith. The Genevan variety of intolerance followed from scriptura sola like a theorem; for if the doctrinal content of the Bible was clear, if followed that the Papists and the Socinians and Anabaptists and the Libertines just had to be lying. Even the most literal-minded of the Lutherans and Calvinists eventually had to finesse the theory of reading that underlay their theology, however, because at a minimum they themselves had to add a little something to the interpretation of the Old Testament to go on claiming that it made reference to Christ and the Trinity and they also had to tweak their own rendition of the New Testament to defend the utterly unscriptural practice of infant baptism. Meanwhile the Catholics made things much easier for themselves by maintaining that the basis of the faith was not the inert text itself but the scriptures as interpreted by a tradition continuously inspired by the spirit of God.
The sciences cleave to the Catholic view of the matter. The intelligibility, let alone the reliability, of scientific results does not derive from right reason or human authority but from the continuing real presence of the world in the process of research, which plays the same essential role for them that the holy ghost is said to play for the church. The novelty of the scientific method was to invite the things into the lab where they could offer their sometimes-coerced testimony to supplement and eventually supplant the testimonials of learned. Obviously this process crucially involved the development of new social and political institutions, but the whole point of the emerging research establishment was to get beyond merely human input and the interminable repetition of our favorite fantasies. Only a cartoon social constructionist could imagine that the content of the often unexpected findings of physics and biology originate from the fiat of any human mind since our minds just aren’t that creative—Millikan may have fudged his data, but he surely couldn’t have found the value of the charge on an electron in his head since -1.6 x 10-19 is not the sort of thing to be found in human heads.
Saturday, June 11, 2005
Power to the People?
Mainline Democrats are only slightly more democratic than their Republican opponents since a strongly egalitarian politics threatens the prerogatives of professional people as well as billionaires. Certainly, none of the relevant elites is about ready to let the mass of the population have a decisive say in foreign policy. The democrats really do have a different take on the proper use of power, but liberal imperialists who wish to rule through consensus are still imperialists. Which largely explains why the Democrats have been so helpless in confronting the Iraq war. Many of them more or less openly endorse the notion that we have a right to unilaterally impose our system and its values on others by the application of deadly force. The Weapons of Mass Destruction scam didn’t just provide cover for the right. The moderates that went along with Bush may have thought that Saddam had some mustard gas, but they also knew perfectly well that the WMDs were utterly inconsequential, the merest red herring. They knew, but they were as willing as Powell and the rest to use this phony excuse to manipulate the public because they have no scruples whatsoever about lying to the people. Whatever you think of their motives, that is what ruling classes do.
My point is not to suggest that the world would automatically be better or safer if the wishes of the public were seriously consulted, though I think the European public at least has been far wiser than the American Neocons about the Middle East. There are a great many things that should not be settled by a vote, indeed a great many things about which people in general have no right to an opinion. The problem is that our nation endlessly proclaims its democratic principles but denies them in practice in areas—war and peace, wealth and poverty—where everybody really does have an existential stake and therefore a right to be heard and listened to. Since democracy on these matters would interfere with the wishes and interests of the rulers, we get democracy where it doesn’t belong by way of compensation. The courts will become collection agencies for the corporations, but we will tenderly protect the people’s right to impose their sexual morals on everybody. We’ll steal your pensions and your social security contributions to pay off our political supporters, but you’ll be able to decide scientific issues like evolution by a show of hands. You want to pronounce it New-cu-lar, you go right ahead. See, we’re populists.
Mainline Democrats are only slightly more democratic than their Republican opponents since a strongly egalitarian politics threatens the prerogatives of professional people as well as billionaires. Certainly, none of the relevant elites is about ready to let the mass of the population have a decisive say in foreign policy. The democrats really do have a different take on the proper use of power, but liberal imperialists who wish to rule through consensus are still imperialists. Which largely explains why the Democrats have been so helpless in confronting the Iraq war. Many of them more or less openly endorse the notion that we have a right to unilaterally impose our system and its values on others by the application of deadly force. The Weapons of Mass Destruction scam didn’t just provide cover for the right. The moderates that went along with Bush may have thought that Saddam had some mustard gas, but they also knew perfectly well that the WMDs were utterly inconsequential, the merest red herring. They knew, but they were as willing as Powell and the rest to use this phony excuse to manipulate the public because they have no scruples whatsoever about lying to the people. Whatever you think of their motives, that is what ruling classes do.
My point is not to suggest that the world would automatically be better or safer if the wishes of the public were seriously consulted, though I think the European public at least has been far wiser than the American Neocons about the Middle East. There are a great many things that should not be settled by a vote, indeed a great many things about which people in general have no right to an opinion. The problem is that our nation endlessly proclaims its democratic principles but denies them in practice in areas—war and peace, wealth and poverty—where everybody really does have an existential stake and therefore a right to be heard and listened to. Since democracy on these matters would interfere with the wishes and interests of the rulers, we get democracy where it doesn’t belong by way of compensation. The courts will become collection agencies for the corporations, but we will tenderly protect the people’s right to impose their sexual morals on everybody. We’ll steal your pensions and your social security contributions to pay off our political supporters, but you’ll be able to decide scientific issues like evolution by a show of hands. You want to pronounce it New-cu-lar, you go right ahead. See, we’re populists.
Friday, June 10, 2005
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.
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.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
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.
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.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
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.
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.
Monday, June 06, 2005
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.
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.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
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.
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.
Monday, May 30, 2005
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
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.”
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.”
Saturday, May 21, 2005
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.”
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.”