One Teeny-Weensy Little Mint

Say what you will, the economic journalists do learn from their mistakes. A year ago they were saying that the world economy would be harmed if oil prices stayed above $50 a barrel. They’ve certainly learned not to say that anymore. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean they were wrong the first time, even though oil at $72 a barrel hasn’t resulted in an obvious slow down. It may just mean that the law of overshoot is in operation and that everybody will have lost interest in the catastrophe before it arrives and surprises their exhausted expectations. Even then, the temptation will be to ascribe the crisis to dramatic world events in Iran or Venezuela rather than to unsupportable underlying trends.

Everything happens at once, which is certainly inconvenient. Out here in California, for example, you still hear people insisting that our power crisis was the result of market manipulation rather than of a lack of generating capacity. Indeed, there would have been no blackouts had the power companies been staffed by angels. On the other hand, the narrowness of the reserve margins is what made it possible for Enron and the others to ravage the state. By the same token, when things go to hell over oil, some particular set of events will punctuate the transition to a new energy regime; but the fact that a civil war in Nigeria or an attack on Iran or another hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico could upset everything will have been a result of the advanced state of the game of Jenga in which we are currently engaged.

You need both the shit and the fan. Unfortunately, there isn’t any shortage of either.

Fallacies of Composition

If I climb up on a soapbox to see the parade, I’ll get a better view; but that doesn’t mean that if everybody climbs on a soapbox, they’ll all get a better view. While many people understand that, many people don’t notice that something similar obtains in education. If a child gets an elite education, they’ll do better than the others; but that doesn’t mean that if every child gets an elite evolution, they’ll all do better than the others. They just can’t: the whole point of privilege is to get more than an equal share. The magic of technology (it says here) may be able to universalize wealth, but not even nanotechnology can universalize prestige. Which is why the baby boomers went bad. In 1945, a college diploma was still a relatively rare accomplishment and acquiring one normally led to greater income, social status, and security. By 1965, millions were getting degrees, but the economic and cultural value of a college education had been drastically diluted and the country was full of young people who had nowhere to take their sense of entitlement. When the revolution didn’t materialize, the disappointed students turned utopian, seeking imaginary solutions to equations that had no real roots. And then they became very, very interested in money—at least I did. Meanwhile, American higher education, faced with the same realities, underwent an analogous set of adjustments, including vastly increased enrollments in professional and B School programs and a corresponding crash in the liberal arts.

Apportioning privilege is, of course, not the only function of education. For example teachers spend an enormous amount of time attempting to keep children from learning too much from their older peers—values education, sensu latu, is a rearguard action waged to decelerate cultural change—and part of the curriculum really does teach skills that everyone can use. People with higher levels of literacy and numeracy are more productive, which means skills education doesn’t fall prey to the fallacy of composition: it makes the whole society wealthier. The fun result of education remains the prospect of looking down on the others, however; and that’s a goal that cannot be generalized.

Anti-What?

The inevitable villains of thriller movies are unregenerate Nazis in nice suits who scheme to bring back the Reich. This cartoon has its uses. Since it would be simply eccentric to want to reprise an obsolete variety of mischief, the impression is created that radical political evil is now safely in the realm of fantasy as if a new, improved system of malevolence with its own peculiarities and stylistics were not a distinct possibility or actuality. The traditional figure of the Southern bigot has analogous functionality. Since modern right wingers don’t go around calling people niggers, they can tell themselves and others that what they are retailing isn’t a racist ideology. Which is rather like a contemporary girl-gone-wild who assures her father she’s not a floozy because, after all, she doesn’t dress like Betty Boop.

The question that these thoughts are leading to is this: circa 2006, has the figure of the anti-Semite also become for the most part an imaginary bugbear? I’m sure there are some people around who harbor a traditional hatred for Jews just as there really are American Nazis who wear retro uniforms and go around Heil Hitlering each other. In the America I grew up in, however, these coelacanths were already both scarce and old and bore very little resemblance to the international relations professors and leftist agitators who are routinely denounced as anti-Semitic by Alan Dershowitz. Exactly why are Jews supposed to be hated as Jews in a country where one is free to pick and choose one’s religion like a hobby and Jewish ethnicity is utterly unremarkable? Even in the early 60s, when I was in high school in L.A., being Jewish was about as exciting as being Scottish or Slovenian. It was a mere subdivision in a racial taxonomy whose only significant categories were white, black, Mexican, and oriental.

I freely admit that I may be utterly wrong about this. Maybe the population of the nation harbors mysterious reservoirs of paranoid rage towards the People of Moses—if we’re really anti-Semitic, I guess we’ll have to start talking like that again. Or maybe my indifference to Catskill shtick is a symptom of a hidden spiritual canker. On the other hand, it could be that anti-Semitism really is obsolete and that criticism of Israel has a range of other motivations, some good, some bad.

Political Theology

Marxism was supposed to be a synthesis of German philosophy, French politics, and English economics. The list of ingredients for mainstream Christianity is the Jewish prophetic tradition, Greek philosophy, and Roman politics, but mostly Roman politics. The crucial moment in the evolution of the religion was not the crucifixion, but Constantine’s religio-political coup. Before Constantine, the various Christian groups represented a challenge to the unity of an Empire that had come to insist on an ideological conformity alien to the traditional tolerance of pagan societies. Adopting—and adapting—Christianity as the state religion resolved this conflict. But what triumphed was quite distinct from the Christianity of the sects. It was a chimera that combined some of the elements of the old faith with the persecuting machinery of the Roman state. Many people have pointed out that the theological mysteries defined as orthodoxy at Nicaea and other early councils were simply frozen political compromises; but the true mysterium was not that Christ was all man and all god, but that the faith would henceforth be simultaneously all spirituality and all politics.

Christianity was merely a large minority before the emperors began to patronize it. The emperors made Europe Christian, not only by directly imposing the religion on the Romans but by providing an example to the princes that created the new states in barbarian lands. While individuals were certainly susceptible to the appeal of the new faith, the wholesale conversion of the pagans was accomplished from above by ambitious kings when it wasn’t simply enforced at the point of Frankish swords. The one exception I’m aware of is Medieval Iceland, where there were no kings; but even there the decision to convert to Christianity was made for overtly political reasons at a memorable meeting of the Althing in the year 1000.

Skank Eye

Eric R. Pianka, whose webpage photo reminds me of a famous painting of John Brown, is the University of Texas ecology professor under attack for suggesting in a public lecture that there were just too many human beings on the planet. His accusers claimed he was actively rooting for a super-Ebola virus that could kill off 90% of the population—one of his critics, William Dembski, actually reported him to the Department of Homeland Security. In fact Pianka wasn’t saying very much that isn’t a commonplace. One hardly has to be a votary of the Earth Mother to recognize the anomaly of a single species absorbing so huge a proportion of the primary productivity of an entire planet or to expect exponential growth of any kind to result eventually in exponential decline. But Pianka wasn’t attacked because he voiced a prohibited idea. He was charged under suspicion of harboring an impermissible wish. A pattern that should be familiar by now: how often have critics of the Iraq War been accused of wishing the deaths of American soldiers? A similar thought crime.

I doubt if Eric Pianka wants anybody dead. As he wrote on his website, he certainly doesn’t want his grandchildren to die. And the propaganda theme of murderous-minded lefties is surely a projection, coming as it does from folks whose homicidal dreams are easy to document. The more important point here, however, is far simpler: Wishing just doesn’t make it so. Having the Urge to Kill is not quite the same thing as attempted murder except for the terminally superstitious who have trouble distinguishing fantasy and reality. Old-fashion totalitarians of both the Christian and the Stalinist dispensations used to police thought. That doesn’t suffice for the American theocratic right. They want to police dreams and feelings as well. The state, the party, and the church must be protected against the evil eye.

He Said, He Said

Critics, including me, complain that the mass media acts irresponsibly when it reports both sides of every issue as if the Tobacco Institute really has the same credibility as the National Institute of Health. There are exceptions to this rule, however. Where received wisdom coincides with corporate interests, the networks don’t bother with the balance business. In coverage of the current crisis in France over labor practices, for example, it is simply taken for granted that the protestors are obviously wrong and that their point of view need not be aired—that something like two-thirds of the French population agrees with the protestors is seldom mentioned either. That last fact is apparently irrelevant since CNN, like Bush and Brezhnev, believes that the people have no right to be wrong.

My point is not that it is necessarily a good idea for the French to continue current restrictions on the firing of young workers—I have no opinion on that since in the absence of any real understanding of what’s going on, I don’t have a right to an opinion. I do know enough to recognize that more is going on than lazy slackers in berets idiotically resisting the immutable laws of economics. For example, the law that has so outraged the French population was evidently passed by what might be called semi-extra- constitutional maneuvers, which is why the whole affair is going into the courts. After all, the current French government, like our own, has a well-earned reputation for sleazy dealings. A change in the law may or may not benefit the mass of the populations–who knows?—but it is of immediate benefit to the big companies that bankroll the right. Anyhow, although you’d never guess it to hear the anchormen pumping out the party line, it is not a given that the inability to freely fire workers is a major cause of French economic problems. It’s just a commonplace.

The Privy Secrets of the Heart

I understand why John McCain supports the administration even though the Bush’s people have repeatedly treated him with contempt. A man harboring presidential ambitions can’t afford too much self-respect and can only murmur, like Wonder Warthog in an old head Comix, “Fortunately, my superpowers don’t include pride.” The spectacle of Arlen Specter defending Bush is harder to stomach. What kind of creature is so benighted as to not be inspired to a little integrity by the approach of his own death?

A Job Opening for Philistines

The assumption is that the difficult philosophers are hiding a secret in all those tortured phrases, but I’m inclined to think that the complexity of the presentation is necessary because of the simplicity of the content. That doesn’t mean that a Foucault or a Heidegger has nothing important to tell us—far from it—or that their jargon was just a marketing device, though it was certainly that too. Mystification is evidence of a lack of self-confidence as if just blurting it out would reveal that one had nothing worthwhile to say. But such doubts are inevitable. We normally judge the worth of an idea by comparing it to other ideas we already value. A radically new thought cannot be recognized at all, even or especially by the one who thinks it first.

Antihumanismus
Just as Bush is learning that it’s not enough to nail the evil part to count as an evil genius, I have to admit that I’m not a secular humanist because, though I’m certainly secular, I’m no humanist. It’s not that I think that very much of great interest is going on without human participation, but that’s a bit like admitting that phone calls wouldn’t amount to much without the switchboard. The attempt to imagine that the whole drama of reality is staged in the intimate theater of the private mind strikes me as the fundamental error of the last couple of centuries, and the materialist version of the mistake is no improvement. You can’t cram the cosmos in a cranium anymore than you shoehorn heaven and earth in a sensorium. The world is not in MAN (note the caps). Men and women are in the world, a rather elementary fact, you’d think; but people still persist in thinking that psychology is somehow the master science and that everything takes place two inches behind their right eye. Au contraire, as William Blake never said, where nature (and history) is not, man is barren.

It may be that the anthropological prejudice is changing. That the Dewey Decimal System shelves books on psychology in the same subdivision with philosophy already seems a little quaint and 19th Century. Why not lump philosophy in with mechanical engineering or taxidermy instead? What does the investigation of fundamental truths have to do with a ragged bundle of therapeutic cults and orphaned research traditions? People with Ph.D.s in psychology may do all sorts of worthwhile things; but to go on claiming that any of them are of great theoretical or strategic importance would be simply hobbyhorsical, a quirk comparable to that of the dentist in V who understood everything in terms of root canal. I also take it as a good sign that Psychology Today, which was a highly visible and influential magazine in the 60s and 70s, is utterly obscure these days—I was amazed to discover they still bother to print it.

The Naked Reverse

I’m not saying that observant believers are all immoral, but I do note that traditional Christianity treats people as career criminals who are barely restrained from violence and fraud by human or supernatural sanction. You have to wonder if the folks who subscribe to this understanding of the human condition aren’t generalizing from their own case. Do you really want somebody who thinks of themselves like that taking care of your children? It’s one thing to be realistic about your own failings, quite another to cast oneself as the protagonist of an endless soapbox opera of sin and repentance. Maybe you really are more loathsome than a spider. If so, speak for yourself.

For the record, talk about morality doesn’t have to be addressed to the transgressor. Secular ethics, which recognizes human fallibility and weakness but assumes that the moral actor is responsible for his or her own actions, is a very different enterprise than pop religious ethics. Instead of focusing on “how do I keep from doing wrong?”—a question that assumes that we already know what to do—it addresses the more fundamental question of “what should I do?” because in a world without oracles we are responsible for deciding that, too. While the religious identify with the role of the servant, whose virtue comes down at last to obedience, the upright unbelievers think of themselves as authorities, individuals whose moral burden is all the greater precisely because, if only by default, they actually are responsible.

Put Not Your Faith in Princes…

Isn’t necessarily a dig at princes. Like everything else, treachery and triangulation can be overdone; but politics isn’t about noble gestures. Indeed, in the context of a struggle for power, the noble gesture is just another P.R. tactic; and principled leaders sometimes have to be trimmers in order to accomplish what needs to be done. Which is why I haven’t been automatically hostile when the Congressional Democrats have spoken with exaggerated moderation about the Bush Administration. Whether or not it is a good idea to push for censure now, it probably wouldn’t have been politic in 2002, though the unwisdom if not the illegality of Republican policies was already perfectly clear. Fact was, it wasn’t clear to a frightened and passive population. And even when I think that the public is ready to hear some plain talk for a change, I remind myself that it might actual happen that somebody else’s judgment about these things is better that my own. All that said, the continuing timidity of the Democrats no longer makes strategic sense to me. Or rather, it is perfectly sensible, but only on the assumption that it is a strategy pursued for aims I do not share in a game I wish our leaders weren’t playing.

I don’t blame the politicians for attempting to put together a winning coalition, but it pains me to recognize yet again that Congress’ real constituents are not the voters but the individuals, families, and organizations that pay them off with bribes and campaign contributions. The true constitution of our state is rather similar to the charter of a corporation in which one has as many votes as shares. It doesn’t matter very often what the citizens as a whole think—and Bush and his policies are vastly unpopular—so long as there is no consensus among the real electorate, the boni homines of what may soon be referred to as the Late Republic in more ways than one. The mealy-mouthed calls for an investigation of the President’s wiretapping exploits makes no legal sense—since he admitted his crimes, there’s nothing to investigate—but the interests that count, though not necessarily happy about what’s going on, are terrified of rocking the boat. The Democrat’s craven excess of caution is aimed at winning them over, not the public. The public is very ready to listen. Indeed, that’s what scares the political classes most.

The Evasion of Responsibility

Any number of Law and Order episodes end with the DA explaining why the murderer can’t be let off the hook because of an unhappy childhood/genetic defect/the bad influence of television shows/whatever because to allow such excuses would destroy all personal responsibility. I’m still waiting for the show in which it is pointed out how often the infliction of heavy penalties on individuals is itself an evasion of responsibility. The semi-moronic monsters routinely put to death in Texas may deserve what they get, but their executions have an added advantage. These grim ceremonies of self-righteousness deflect attention from the fact that the authorities couldn’t be bothered by the abuse and neglect so many of these criminals suffered as children.

The recent efforts of the Federal government to put Zacarias Moussaoui to death have an analogous logic. A number of people have complained about the procedural abuses of the prosecutors in the case—reasonably enough since in an ordinary trial or before a judge with a modicum of integrity, the death penalty would have been taken off the table in the face of such behavior—but I haven’t encountered very many people who recognize the essential dishonesty of the entire proceeding. Moussaoui admitted to planning a terror attack and certainly belongs in prison, but holding him responsible for the 9/11 attacks, which nobody seems to think he had anything to do with, is simply a way for the administration to shift the blame for its own negligence. Moussaoui may not have provided an indirect warning of the possibility of an aerial attack but lots of other warnings were indeed given without effect. 9/11 wasn’t Moussaoui’s fault. It was the fault of Bush, Rice, Ashcroft, and Chaney. Indeed, if you’re in the market for complicated and far-fetched theories to justify prosecutions, it would be marginally more reasonable to execute the five Supreme Court justices who put Bush in office than the bumling, clownish Moussaouoi. Since the competent and vigilant Gore was intensely aware of the danger posed by Ben Laden, et. al, it is extremely unlikely that 9/11 would have occurred under his watch.

Sugar Water

Mystical philosophers have a problem analogous to the challenges that face the marketers of soft drinks. The content they have for sale—states of mind that are same everywhere and at all times—do not differentiate their brands. Coke is too much like Pepsi, Atman is too much like the Urgrund. Hence the need for escalating rhetoric and a huge budget for advertising. Since use and custom dull the appreciation of any insight, it is endlessly necessary to improvise fresh depths of spiritual understanding, not because the world really is infinitely deep, but for the same reason the even baking soda comes in a box labeled “New and Improved!”

Thoughts on the Ludendorf Complex

Intellectuals who desire power but understand their own lack of nerve and charisma are always cruising for a glamorous thug. Of course they tell themselves they’ll be able to steer the beast in the right direction. Unfortunately, the beasts routinely turn out to have their own ideas, and the users end up being used. We know what happened to Plato in Sicily: the bright young man types in the Bible apparently fared better with the kings and the pharaohs; but it should be kept in mind that the successes of the Josephs and the Daniels are more than legendary. They’re mythical.

Synergies

Recent studies suggest that the gradual warming of the oceans brought about by increasing greenhouse gases will result in more powerful hurricanes. That hardly seems unlikely, granted that hotter water means more energy is available to power up storms; but even if global warming doesn’t result in Hurricane Gimel bearing down on Biloxi one fine autumn morning, the enormous increase in the population of people living in areas subject to catastrophic floods guarantees that the next century will be the golden age of (semi-)natural disasters. As Mike Davis points out in his incredibly depressing book, Planet of Slums, “With the majority of the world’s urban population now concentrated on or near active tectonic plate margins, especially along Indian and Pacific Ocean littorals, several billion people are at risks from earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis, as well as from storm surges and typhoons.” If Davis had been writing copy for CNN, he would have added, “Even worse, upper middle class Americans may not be able to buy flood insurance for their second homes along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts…”

Speaking about reality’s irritating habit of letting more than one thing happen at once: it has been occasionally noticed that technological progress is proving far better at lowering the cost and increasing the performance of electronics than at supplying safe drinking water, affordable transportation, or decent health care. The inhabitants of the reeking slums of Mumbai may indeed be able to watch the irresistible advance of the ultimate tsunami on a HDTV, even if they have literally no place to go to deposit the bowel movements inspired by the brilliant visuals. What is less often noticed are the military implications of the unevenness of technological progress. I don’t know if SONY has a line of affordable IEDs in the works, but it’s a good bet that the wretched of the earth are going to be able to adapt the universally available consumer electronics to the work of vengeance. The presumption is that the Malthusian die back of the next hundred years will not discommode the First World very much because the poorer countries and peoples don’t have access to the means to so anything about it. Aside from the fact that the haves are vastly outnumbered by the have nots, it is far from clear that even the enormous investment in armaments of the U.S. can defeat the military potential of cheap electronics in the hands of sufficiently determined enemies. Does anybody know?

Joss in Translation

When somebody in these parts says that an act is good or bad karma, they aren’t usually implying much more than the belief that “that sort of thing usually ends well or badly.” What’s invoked is not an iron law of causality as ineluctable as arithmetic but a statistical tendency, a rule of thumb rather than the Dharma. Users of this language certainly aren’t signing on to the dubious hypothesis of rebirth. There is, however, a Sanskrit word that answers to the California usage of karma pretty closely. The term is mangala, which is generally translated rather grandly as auspicious—a reasonable equivalent if you think of such sentences as “If you find yourself constantly lying to your girlfriend, it’s a bad sign.” The terminological niceties are meaningful. Eliding the difference between karma and mangala makes it easy to think that Buddhism is a straightforward elaboration of commonsense that radically differs from other religions by avoiding the assertion of astonishing counterfactual claims. After all, we all eventually learn that actions have consequences. But Buddhism is a religion—a family of religions—after all, which is to say it is a system of false propositions. Taken seriously, dependent origination, the spiritual physics that underlies Karmic law, is as fantastic as transubstantiation.

Many practicing Buddhists, like many practicing Christians, regard doctrinal formulations with a sense of humor. Just as liberal Protestants aren’t scouring Mt. Ararat for the anchor of the ark, undogmatic Buddhists don’t really think that Buddha had a headache because as a child in a former life he hit a fish over the head. Promoting the notion that a comprehensive and implacable system of moral bookkeeping governs the actions of all conscious beings is an edifying claim useful in dealing with the lay people, but such skillful methods (upaya) should be taken with a grain of salt. The question for both contemporary Christians and Buddhists is how much of the fantastic element of their religious traditions they can jettison without jettisoning the tradition itself. In the Buddhist instance, for example, it’s one thing to admit that universe isn’t a despotic retribution and reward machine, but if there is no dharma at all, if some kind of moral law isn’t built into the machine language of the cosmos, karma really is just mangala. But maybe that’s not such a terrible thing to realize. The fact that quite a few Buddhists do seem to realize it is part of the reason the Buddhist tradition continues to appeal to me even though I’m well aware that it comes festooned with the same assortment of warts and boils as the other religions. It isn’t true, but maybe it’s mangala.

Take Home Exam

1. Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson write: “To get the benefits of social learning, human beings have to be credulous, for the most part accepting the ways that they observe in their society as sensible and proper, but such credulity opens human minds to the spread of maladaptive beliefs. The problem is one of information costs. The advantage of culture is that individuals don’t have to invent everything for themselves. We get wondrous adaptations like kayaks and blowguns on the cheap. The trouble is that a greed for easy adaptive traditions easily leads to perpetuating maladaptions that somehow arise.” Discuss.

2. It has been suggested* that dada is to Surrealism what Theravada is Mahayana. To what extent is this analogy accurate? Your answer can be in either Pali or Sanskrit.

*In this sentence.

Reaction Norms

Biologists know that a given gene can only be said to be adaptive or maladaptive in the context of the other genes and in a particular environment. In the absence of malaria, the sickle cell trait, even in the heterozygous case, is a drag on the organism. Similarly, the mutation responsible for the paleness of Caucasians is simply a genetic defect in Australia where everybody’s hide is menaced by too much sun. The value of political principles is similarly situational. It isn’t just cases that are altered by circumstances.

If a presumptive prejudice in favor of civil rights made sense in the era of breeches and wigs and was even more important when bureaucrats and cops keep track of dissidents with human informants and file cabinets full of manila folders, it stands to reason that the advent of computers and omnipresent electronic surveillance makes such quaint taboos absolutely critical. Everybody talks about the Internet as if it were obviously an invention that promotes individual freedom, but it is actually the answer to the secret policeman’s dearest dream, the nearest thing yet to the TV’s in Orwell’s 1984 that watch the watchers. Every intemperate word written on every blog, every irritated comment typed into a comment section in the dead of night, every visit to a racy website gives the prosecutor and the political publicist another way to control the citizenry through the traditional combination of extortion and selective prosecution. In the face of such a drastic increase in the technical capability of oppression, a correspondingly absolute and uncompromising defense of individual rights is critical. The ACLU needs the bomb.

Generosity and Spite: A Linear Programming Problem

As an ideal, equality has little appeal for me. I’m not morally offended if some people are better off than others, at least if everyone can live decently. I don’t doubt that measures that artificially level wealth tend to result in lower or negative growth rates since it is the prospect of doing better than the others that fuels effort and enterprise. Insisting on equality of outcome amounts to adding an expensive constraint to the problem of maximizing the performance of an economy. The point is often missed, however, that an ideological insistence on a high level of inequality is just as artificial and perhaps just as likely to lower the overall outcome. In this connection, I note that the wealthiest Americans are currently rich beyond all measure, but the economy isn’t performing very well. With this much inequality, everybody–not just the contemporary Croesuses–should be rich as Croesus.

Divine Right Monarchy, the Worst Form of Government Except for All the Others

Does anybody actually believe in democracy? It’s easy to make fun of the Bush administration’s version of popular sovereignty, the Breshnevian doctrine that people have the absolute right to vote for candidates of the government’s choosing; but American politicians of all stripes have repeatedly found democracy inconvenient and have repeatedly amended the people’s errors by invasions, coups, and assassinations—recall Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua, Iran, Chile, and Cuba. When you bring up this track record, people regularly respond not by admitting that they don’t seriously believe in democracy, but by explaining why it was such a good idea to bump off Allende or prevent the Algerians from voting in an Islamic government. This is an evasion that becomes all the more problematic as the real power of voters declines at home as well as abroad. It isn’t just third-world wogs who are bombed if they do something foolish that hurts American interests, after all. Our domestic political arrangements, the contrivance of both Republicans and Democrats, are mostly a series of barricades and fortifications against the public will. In the first hundred or so years of our national history, government became more democratic in this country with the expansion of the franchise, the deepening of civil rights, and the direct election of senators. For a hundred years or more, however, the tide has been flowing in the other direction.

I’m not suggesting that the majority rule ought to be absolute. I directed my initial question as much at myself as at anybody else because I’m as distrustful of the people as any Conservative. Anybody who reads these pages knows that I could care less what the man in the street thinks about scientific or philosophical issues. Indeed, I don’t think that anybody has a right to an opinion about matters they know nothing about. What offends me is the Orwellian doublespeak of politicians who claim to promote democracy with high tech terror weapons while working tirelessly to ensure that the liberated masses, appropriately grateful, shut the fuck up and do what we want. And I have also come to believe as a matter of prudence that states in which the people have a real ability to influence policy are likely to be more stable, less corrupt, and less dangerous to the peace of the world than oligarchic republics like the contemporary United States. I got to thinking. Since democracy isn’t sacred, maybe it’s sometimes worthwhile.