Remora
The mentally unstable bovine has rather slipped from the popular consciousness, now that we have real diseases, like anthrax, to worry about. So was it all simply fun and games, the hecatombs of beef? Shall we crank up the Peggy Lee? Is that all there is?
In Salon, there's a report on a report by the GAO, which says, inevitably, that :
"Mad cow disease could slip into the country and infect cattle herds because of weaknesses in import controls and lax enforcement of animal feed rules, congressional investigators warned Tuesday."
This report is a little screwy. The search for BSE in this country has been, shall we say, lackadaisical. In fact, cows that are down aren't routinely inspected for BSE. We know that American minks and deer have a BSE like disease, and that it is becoming endemic. Nodowners is a good site to start with if you want to get a jump on the next plague. They have a report on down cattle and the incidence of other animal spongiform encephalopathies.
They also have a report about the downed cattle bill:
"UPDATE! For the first time since the Humane Slaughter Act was enacted in the 1950's, farm animal protection legislation has passed both the United States House or Representatives and the United States Senate. This legislation, which prohibits the marketing and dragging of downed animals at stockyards and requires these incapacitated animals to be humanely euthanized, has now been included in both the House and Senate Farm Bills.The Senate Farm Bill was passed on February 13th, 2002 and includes a downed animal provision that was championed by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Daniel Akaka (D-HI). This provision is nearly identical to the downed animal legislation which passed the U.S. House of Representatives on October 5th, 2001 as part of the House Farm Bill. In the House, the downed animal measure was championed by Representatives Gary Ackerman (D-NY) and Amo Houghton (R-NY) in a floor amendment."
So don't say that the house and senate has never done anything for ya. All it took them was four crucial years, since the first reports of BSE in Britain.
Thursday, February 28, 2002
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
Remora
As blood is to the mosquito, the vampire bat, the tick, the tse-tse fly, so is idiocy to Limited Inc. Naturally - yes, obviously, like your most predictable carpers, with the kind of grim satisfaction at all our most cherished, worst prejudices being realized exhibited by some harridan in a suburban subdivision, watching hubby come home from a drunk - we recommend that our readers go to the NYT article reporting the testimony of stockmarket analysts to the US Senate's investigation of Enron. The grafs that put us into a delirium of bloodlust are these:
"Eleven of 16 analysts who followed Enron were still rating it as a ``buy'' or ``strong buy'' as late as Nov. 8, two weeks after the Securities and Exchange Commission announced it had opened an inquiry into the company's accounting.
"``I did not own Enron stock,'' testified Anatol Feygin, a senior analyst at J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. ``I have complete freedom with respect to the recommendations that I make concerning any (stock) and my compensation is not tied to the recommendations that I make. ... I have never received any compensation in any form from any company that I analyze, including Enron.''
The analysts defense is that they are the stupidest people on earth. Because even slightly less stupid people, say some touched boy in a tribe that haven't developed a complete base ten counting system, can tell that an enterprise that goes from 90 to 2, whether the decline is measured in goats and chickens or dollars, is a losing enterprise. But Anatol Feygin, apparently, needs more information to make that kind of decision. Feygin is a veritable scientist.
Ah, but Limited Inc is just being cynical. Surely there is a reason, some reason, that we just don't understand, which justifies the Feygins of the world receiving compensations a thousand fold over your average MacDonald's burger flipper. There must be a class that explains this in some economics department. We don't understand economics, is what it is.
As blood is to the mosquito, the vampire bat, the tick, the tse-tse fly, so is idiocy to Limited Inc. Naturally - yes, obviously, like your most predictable carpers, with the kind of grim satisfaction at all our most cherished, worst prejudices being realized exhibited by some harridan in a suburban subdivision, watching hubby come home from a drunk - we recommend that our readers go to the NYT article reporting the testimony of stockmarket analysts to the US Senate's investigation of Enron. The grafs that put us into a delirium of bloodlust are these:
"Eleven of 16 analysts who followed Enron were still rating it as a ``buy'' or ``strong buy'' as late as Nov. 8, two weeks after the Securities and Exchange Commission announced it had opened an inquiry into the company's accounting.
"``I did not own Enron stock,'' testified Anatol Feygin, a senior analyst at J.P. Morgan Securities Inc. ``I have complete freedom with respect to the recommendations that I make concerning any (stock) and my compensation is not tied to the recommendations that I make. ... I have never received any compensation in any form from any company that I analyze, including Enron.''
The analysts defense is that they are the stupidest people on earth. Because even slightly less stupid people, say some touched boy in a tribe that haven't developed a complete base ten counting system, can tell that an enterprise that goes from 90 to 2, whether the decline is measured in goats and chickens or dollars, is a losing enterprise. But Anatol Feygin, apparently, needs more information to make that kind of decision. Feygin is a veritable scientist.
Ah, but Limited Inc is just being cynical. Surely there is a reason, some reason, that we just don't understand, which justifies the Feygins of the world receiving compensations a thousand fold over your average MacDonald's burger flipper. There must be a class that explains this in some economics department. We don't understand economics, is what it is.
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
Remora
Limited Inc, like Ronald Reagan, has a repertoire of anecdotes we go back to obsessively. One of them is that penicillin was not patented by Ernst Chain, Howard Florey and Edward Abraham, the Oxford scientists who took Alexander Fleming's discovery, purified it, and made it medically useful.
What can and can't be patented is one of the burning questions of our time -- but it burns, admittedly, far beneath the average consciousness, which doesn't know a patent from a property right, and doesn't know the smell of smoke from the fire that produced it. Unfortunately, the conservatives are winning this argument by default -- there are very few voices crying out against the extension of monopoly, which is what a patent is, or the public/private partnerships that routinely rip the public off, for private benefit.
In Tom Paine, Stephen Jones publishes an article that illustrates the rip off. Since the article is about wheat seeds, there will be readers out there who will balk. But wheat seeds are important! (the hysterical man with the red face shouted). Here's the essential two grafs:
"What is wrong with universities working hand in glove with corporations to develop our food crops and getting a return on investment? One of the main issues is the ownership itself. Who owns wheat, for example? The food grain was first domesticated over 10,000 years ago in the Middle East. It is not native to this country and we would not be growing it here if we did not receive the help and genetic materials from farmers and public breeders worldwide.
A second issue is the restricted flow of information. Because of developing ownership issues, most international breeders are no longer willing to share material. This is hurting research. Now, many of the products researched by publicly-funded scientists in public labs are being developed under confidentiality agreements and with strict limitations on publication. Some 50 percent of public breeders said they had been hindered in seeking exchanges of genetic material, according to a 1999 University of Wisconsin poll. Twenty-five percent reported having difficulty in graduate student training and research because of this limited access."
Limited Inc has said this before, and will say it again: the difference between political factions does not have to do with the state. Although the right habitually oozes about the magic of the marketplace, what the right really wants is a completely contractualized world -- which requires an unheard of extension of state granted monopolies. The right wants to squeeze out the commons. The soviet variety of the left wanted the same thing -- wanted to identify the commons with the state. It is this commonality of goals that makes the ideal world of the right look so much like the real world of the soviet left. In both, social cost -- and with it an honest perception of the commons -- is locked in a closet. But social cost is the ideological ghost that will haunt our banquets of gene altered wheat seed -- believe us, reader.
Limited Inc, like Ronald Reagan, has a repertoire of anecdotes we go back to obsessively. One of them is that penicillin was not patented by Ernst Chain, Howard Florey and Edward Abraham, the Oxford scientists who took Alexander Fleming's discovery, purified it, and made it medically useful.
What can and can't be patented is one of the burning questions of our time -- but it burns, admittedly, far beneath the average consciousness, which doesn't know a patent from a property right, and doesn't know the smell of smoke from the fire that produced it. Unfortunately, the conservatives are winning this argument by default -- there are very few voices crying out against the extension of monopoly, which is what a patent is, or the public/private partnerships that routinely rip the public off, for private benefit.
In Tom Paine, Stephen Jones publishes an article that illustrates the rip off. Since the article is about wheat seeds, there will be readers out there who will balk. But wheat seeds are important! (the hysterical man with the red face shouted). Here's the essential two grafs:
"What is wrong with universities working hand in glove with corporations to develop our food crops and getting a return on investment? One of the main issues is the ownership itself. Who owns wheat, for example? The food grain was first domesticated over 10,000 years ago in the Middle East. It is not native to this country and we would not be growing it here if we did not receive the help and genetic materials from farmers and public breeders worldwide.
A second issue is the restricted flow of information. Because of developing ownership issues, most international breeders are no longer willing to share material. This is hurting research. Now, many of the products researched by publicly-funded scientists in public labs are being developed under confidentiality agreements and with strict limitations on publication. Some 50 percent of public breeders said they had been hindered in seeking exchanges of genetic material, according to a 1999 University of Wisconsin poll. Twenty-five percent reported having difficulty in graduate student training and research because of this limited access."
Limited Inc has said this before, and will say it again: the difference between political factions does not have to do with the state. Although the right habitually oozes about the magic of the marketplace, what the right really wants is a completely contractualized world -- which requires an unheard of extension of state granted monopolies. The right wants to squeeze out the commons. The soviet variety of the left wanted the same thing -- wanted to identify the commons with the state. It is this commonality of goals that makes the ideal world of the right look so much like the real world of the soviet left. In both, social cost -- and with it an honest perception of the commons -- is locked in a closet. But social cost is the ideological ghost that will haunt our banquets of gene altered wheat seed -- believe us, reader.
Sunday, February 24, 2002
Dope
Reader, go to the WP magazine section and read the very sad story of the "cheating scandal" in Silver Springs, Maryland. Last year, a teacher in the Silver Springs International school, a rather miraculous school in Montgomery County distinguished for using tried and true progressive methods, was 'released' for having used the questions from some inane comprehensive test before giving the test, thus breaching the 'security' of the test. Never mind that the test had no security, that copies of it float around throughout the system. Any excuse to liquidate an alternative. This is the slogan of all sclerotic bureaucracies.
Silver Springs was one of those miracles that prove that all the aims and goals of the progressive agenda are not dead, but come up, spontaneously, scattered about, seeding the future. The principle, Renee Brimfield, was trained at the Sorbonne, and came to the school, which had a considerable ethnic mix, and an income level below the D.C. average, determined to really teach her kids. Classes mixed ability levels. In the cafeteria, students were assigned seats -- "because, Brimfield said, they might segregate themselves by race and class elsewhere, but not in her lunchroom." It was an island, and islands get targetted for bombing practice. Destruction came from the Montgomery Superintendent of Education, who did not appreciate Brimfield not getting with the program -- which program consists of giving children inane tests, teaching to the tests, and in general doing the yeoman's work of distracting children, from the age of seven to the age of eighteen, from anything resembling culture.
The sad thing is, the story of compulsory, obsessive standard testing is dialectically ingenious. Who opposes it? Not the poor. For many poor schools, it is the only plan there is, the only way children are guaranteed some education. WP's Michael Sokolove does an admirable job of complicating our response to the whole testing gestalt. The devil in the testing complex, according to Sokolove, is that the more standardized tests "are used as a single measure to make sweeping judgments -- the more high-stakes they become -- the less reliable they are. Teachers and principals who operate under the threat that their school will be "reconstituted," that their career or some monetary reward hangs in the balance, or even that they will be shamed when their school's test results are disclosed to the public, will find a way to make scores go up. "
But if, like Limited Inc, one longs for the historically annointed proletariat to rise up, workers all, and join the fight against testing -- well, that isn't the vector from which resistance comes. There's a dialectical irony here:
"The public debate over standardized testing is largely an argument about how best to lift up poor children -- and, not far below the surface, an argument over whether efforts on behalf of poor children will slow the progress of higher-achieving, wealthier students. That is why protests against testing have come mainly from parents in affluent communities who fear that testing and test prep will take time away from more enriching, challenging class work. Advocates for poor children, on the other hand, often view standardized tests as a kind of backstop, a guarantee that lower-achieving schools and children won't be invisible. But Rye says no parents at Silver Spring International were calling for greater emphasis on tests. "We had only been there a year and a half," she says. "We were just starting to get scores."
Opposition to Brimfield early on came from some well-to-do parents. Ellie Hamburger, a pediatrician, was among those who initially spoke out against the school's decision to mix students of all abilities except in foreign language and math classes. "I was won over," she says. "The kids had their assumptions challenged."
And so it ends, the Englightenment dream. The idea in the eighteenth century was that affluence would lead to virtue. When, in the preface to Major Barbara, Shaw says that poverty is the only vice, he is summarizing the trend of ideas from Jefferson through Mill to, really, the early twentieth century socialists. As so often in Shaw, one feels he is writing a platitude with a lightning bolt -- but what a lightning bolt!
"In the millionaire Undershaft I have represented a man who has become intellectually and spiritually as well as practically conscious of the irresistible natural truth which we all abhor and repudiate: to wit, that the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty, and that our first duty -- a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed -- is not to be poor. "Poor but honest," "the respectable poor," and such phrases are as intolerable and as immoral as "drumken but amiable," "fraudulent but a good afterdinner speaker," "splendidly criminal," or the like. Security, the chief pretence of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head, and where the alleged protection of our persons from violence is only an accidental result of the existence of a police force whose real business is to force the poor man to see his children starve whilst idle people overfeed pet dogs with the money that might feed and clothe them.
"
Robert Stone once said that Shaw invented fascism in Major Barbara. It is easy to see that the logic of viewing poverty as a security issue, which is not far from the bourgeois perception of the working class as the dangerous class, can run pretty far to the right. But Shaw did have hold of a basic social fact. The reason for according the monopoly of violence to the state remains that of forcing the poor man to see his children fed on cheap sugars and fats; to see his children arrested and hauled off, in large numbers, for having the entrepeneurial sense of our founding fathers, to wit, making money in intoxicants -- with the caveat that the rum upon which the good New England merchants depended was more criminal, insofar as it was whipped out of the skins of kidnapped Africans, while we know that the narco-peasantry is relatively well paid for their labors; to see all that, without the power of lifting his hand against the system, whilst idle people's children get to learn art appreciation in really good schools, from which they will go on to even better schools, from whence to get jobs in politics and the media that are wholly taken up with debasing the American mind with every possible superstition, fad, and slogan.
Education, as Americans practice it, is a sad sign that the miserable grip of four thousand years of scarcity, with the fear mongering it breeds, has not been loosened, even though the scarcity itself, from food to warmth, has been practically abolished. Matthew Arnold, not my favorite Victorian sage by a long shot, still had it right about that in which culture consists:
"...culture may with advantage continue to uphold steadily its ideal of human perfection; that this is an inward spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy."
We, however, have opted, in Arnold's terminology, for Anarchy... an anarchy of standardized tests. Meanwhile, at that moment in history where we can actually move from the Victorian sentimentality of sweetness and light to a real increase of life and sympathy, what do we do? We give our kids no. 2 pencils and four choices for each question, no talking, you have thirty minutes to complete the test, if you complete the test before thirty minutes do not go to the next test, check your answers and remain quiet, remain quiet, remain quiet...
Reader, go to the WP magazine section and read the very sad story of the "cheating scandal" in Silver Springs, Maryland. Last year, a teacher in the Silver Springs International school, a rather miraculous school in Montgomery County distinguished for using tried and true progressive methods, was 'released' for having used the questions from some inane comprehensive test before giving the test, thus breaching the 'security' of the test. Never mind that the test had no security, that copies of it float around throughout the system. Any excuse to liquidate an alternative. This is the slogan of all sclerotic bureaucracies.
Silver Springs was one of those miracles that prove that all the aims and goals of the progressive agenda are not dead, but come up, spontaneously, scattered about, seeding the future. The principle, Renee Brimfield, was trained at the Sorbonne, and came to the school, which had a considerable ethnic mix, and an income level below the D.C. average, determined to really teach her kids. Classes mixed ability levels. In the cafeteria, students were assigned seats -- "because, Brimfield said, they might segregate themselves by race and class elsewhere, but not in her lunchroom." It was an island, and islands get targetted for bombing practice. Destruction came from the Montgomery Superintendent of Education, who did not appreciate Brimfield not getting with the program -- which program consists of giving children inane tests, teaching to the tests, and in general doing the yeoman's work of distracting children, from the age of seven to the age of eighteen, from anything resembling culture.
The sad thing is, the story of compulsory, obsessive standard testing is dialectically ingenious. Who opposes it? Not the poor. For many poor schools, it is the only plan there is, the only way children are guaranteed some education. WP's Michael Sokolove does an admirable job of complicating our response to the whole testing gestalt. The devil in the testing complex, according to Sokolove, is that the more standardized tests "are used as a single measure to make sweeping judgments -- the more high-stakes they become -- the less reliable they are. Teachers and principals who operate under the threat that their school will be "reconstituted," that their career or some monetary reward hangs in the balance, or even that they will be shamed when their school's test results are disclosed to the public, will find a way to make scores go up. "
But if, like Limited Inc, one longs for the historically annointed proletariat to rise up, workers all, and join the fight against testing -- well, that isn't the vector from which resistance comes. There's a dialectical irony here:
"The public debate over standardized testing is largely an argument about how best to lift up poor children -- and, not far below the surface, an argument over whether efforts on behalf of poor children will slow the progress of higher-achieving, wealthier students. That is why protests against testing have come mainly from parents in affluent communities who fear that testing and test prep will take time away from more enriching, challenging class work. Advocates for poor children, on the other hand, often view standardized tests as a kind of backstop, a guarantee that lower-achieving schools and children won't be invisible. But Rye says no parents at Silver Spring International were calling for greater emphasis on tests. "We had only been there a year and a half," she says. "We were just starting to get scores."
Opposition to Brimfield early on came from some well-to-do parents. Ellie Hamburger, a pediatrician, was among those who initially spoke out against the school's decision to mix students of all abilities except in foreign language and math classes. "I was won over," she says. "The kids had their assumptions challenged."
And so it ends, the Englightenment dream. The idea in the eighteenth century was that affluence would lead to virtue. When, in the preface to Major Barbara, Shaw says that poverty is the only vice, he is summarizing the trend of ideas from Jefferson through Mill to, really, the early twentieth century socialists. As so often in Shaw, one feels he is writing a platitude with a lightning bolt -- but what a lightning bolt!
"In the millionaire Undershaft I have represented a man who has become intellectually and spiritually as well as practically conscious of the irresistible natural truth which we all abhor and repudiate: to wit, that the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty, and that our first duty -- a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed -- is not to be poor. "Poor but honest," "the respectable poor," and such phrases are as intolerable and as immoral as "drumken but amiable," "fraudulent but a good afterdinner speaker," "splendidly criminal," or the like. Security, the chief pretence of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head, and where the alleged protection of our persons from violence is only an accidental result of the existence of a police force whose real business is to force the poor man to see his children starve whilst idle people overfeed pet dogs with the money that might feed and clothe them.
"
Robert Stone once said that Shaw invented fascism in Major Barbara. It is easy to see that the logic of viewing poverty as a security issue, which is not far from the bourgeois perception of the working class as the dangerous class, can run pretty far to the right. But Shaw did have hold of a basic social fact. The reason for according the monopoly of violence to the state remains that of forcing the poor man to see his children fed on cheap sugars and fats; to see his children arrested and hauled off, in large numbers, for having the entrepeneurial sense of our founding fathers, to wit, making money in intoxicants -- with the caveat that the rum upon which the good New England merchants depended was more criminal, insofar as it was whipped out of the skins of kidnapped Africans, while we know that the narco-peasantry is relatively well paid for their labors; to see all that, without the power of lifting his hand against the system, whilst idle people's children get to learn art appreciation in really good schools, from which they will go on to even better schools, from whence to get jobs in politics and the media that are wholly taken up with debasing the American mind with every possible superstition, fad, and slogan.
Education, as Americans practice it, is a sad sign that the miserable grip of four thousand years of scarcity, with the fear mongering it breeds, has not been loosened, even though the scarcity itself, from food to warmth, has been practically abolished. Matthew Arnold, not my favorite Victorian sage by a long shot, still had it right about that in which culture consists:
"...culture may with advantage continue to uphold steadily its ideal of human perfection; that this is an inward spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy."
We, however, have opted, in Arnold's terminology, for Anarchy... an anarchy of standardized tests. Meanwhile, at that moment in history where we can actually move from the Victorian sentimentality of sweetness and light to a real increase of life and sympathy, what do we do? We give our kids no. 2 pencils and four choices for each question, no talking, you have thirty minutes to complete the test, if you complete the test before thirty minutes do not go to the next test, check your answers and remain quiet, remain quiet, remain quiet...
Friday, February 22, 2002
Remora
There�s a nice review of God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945 by Claude Rawson in TNR last week. Limited Inc prepared for the worst in the intro grafs. Reviewer Jonathan Alter seemed to be heading into traffic in the usual way with the oblique hissing at the supposed �anti-Western� clique in the universities:
�Over the past two decades, with evidently growing vehemence, the critique of Western civilization has become the great preoccupation of the humanities in American institutions of higher learning, especially in departments of literary studies. (Edward Said's Orientalism, which appeared in 1978, was certainly one point of departure for this general trend, though not all the current assaults on the pernicious influence of the West can be traced to Said.) It is Western civilization, we are repeatedly told, that has perpetrated the evils of colonialism on a global scale, and in the postcolonial era it is Western capitalism that continues to exploit and to "immiserate" the masses of the developing world. The legacy of enslavement and murder that is abundantly manifested in colonialism, it is sometimes claimed, was merely brought to its logical fulfillment in the concentration-camp universe created by the Nazis.�
The key that this music is scored to is revealed by the word �pernicious.� It is, by the way, the whole art of reading, this finding of resonances within contexts, this uncovering of the codedness on the surface of the codes. For surely Limited Inc isn�t wrong to suppose that the word carries a value redolent of extravagantly mustachioed villains tying the village beauty to the railroad tracks? If colonialism is merely a matter of gaslight melodrama, surely it is nothing to get too upset about. And then there is the Marquis de Said � red light, red light, evacuate the craft. This is, we know, the New Republic, and Said is in the shooting gallery there. His is the face atop the silhouette of the menacing intifada warrior that Marty Peretz takes matitudinal aim at, with his .45.
But Alter is not going down that path. Leaving the simplicities of vilification behind, he has a genuinely interesting point to make � or at least he claims that Rawson does:
�What Rawson bracingly demonstrates is that humanistic inquiry still can be, and deserves to be, an empirically grounded activity. He decries the "selective use of evidence to support currently approved indignations (or the earlier ones they replace)," and he goes on to cite a tart characterization by Marjorie Perloff of how intellectual arrangements are now generally made in the groves of academe: "The preferred method is to know what one wants to prove ... and then to collect one's supportive exempla, the game being to ignore all `evidence' that might point in a contrary direction."
Much of Rawson's book is a documentation of Western imaginings of other races, ethnicities, and cultures, from Montaigne's "Des cannibales" to the propaganda of the Third Reich. (To Rawson's credit, in discussing this topic he avoids the pretentiousness of using the capitalized and hypostasized form "the Other," and he also eschews the Gallic barbarity of the abstraction "alterity.") Now, many of the images that he considers, both verbal and visual, are violent and troubling: the ethnic or racial others are imagined with both prurience and clinical condescension as embodiments of sexual license and depravity, as human approximations of the bestial, and hence as fit objects for subjugation, exploitation, and ultimately extermination. Still, as Rawson repeatedly shows, the simple story of racist abomination told by the postcolonial critics often does not correspond to the ambivalences or even the dialectical character of the actual Western images. And the others are often imagined, as Montaigne illustrates, not on a binary model of the good Europeans and the savage non-Europeans, but on a triadic model, a more complicated model that is not designed to provide any ideological satisfaction, in which both benign and brutal varieties of the others are considered as antitheses to the writer's own culture.�
Rawson�s suspicion of the unilateral moralist approach to colonial studies is captured, in a pretty damning way, in his criticism of Sander Gilman:
�Sander Gilman, a scholar who has made an academic career of chronicling racist stereotypes, describes the picture as an "erotic caricature of the Hottentot Venus," with the voyeur flatly defined as "a white, male observer." What Gilman astonishingly overlooks, as Rawson duly notes, is that the most obtrusive caricature in the engraving is the face of the man looking into the telescope. The man's face is depicted as a grotesque cross between the head of a bloated frog and the head of a dewlapped bulldog. The telescope thus becomes a satiric joke about European voyeurism; and, as Rawson suggests, the woman's thrusting posterior figures as a gesture of well-deserved contempt directed at the fat man with the telescope who is ogling her. The image is not an expression of power, it is a criticism of power.�
Even here, though, Limited Inc would like to remark that vulgar Foucaultians have demonized the word power, so that it is almost useless. Since Foucault�s point, following Nietzsche, is that there is no zero degree of power, it is difficult to see how any viewpoint could divest itself of power. Or how it could want to. What is the desire for an au-dela de pouvoir, anyway? In fact, Foucault�s further point was that the promotion of the myth that there is, indeed, some zero degree of power is part of the game of power. An important, and characteristic element of modernity, inherited from both the Platonic and Christian tradition.
Oddly, Limited Incs posts this week seem to return to the topic of the West and the Other. Unlike Alter, I think there�s a point to the capitalization. Since Alter seems to also diss alterity, for reasons that Derrida would have a field day with � find the name encrypted in the name, find the Latin that turns to gall in Gallic - I suppose he just doesn�t appreciate the concept, or its position in Hegel�s dialectic, and, necessarily, ours. Well, it is certainly there, with or without Alter�s approval.
Reading the West�s relationship to the Other through the Yahoos is a marvelous idea. Especially as it can never be said enough that the West, as a monolithic concept, was not the concept with which any intellectual up to the 19th century primarily thought.
There�s a nice review of God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492-1945 by Claude Rawson in TNR last week. Limited Inc prepared for the worst in the intro grafs. Reviewer Jonathan Alter seemed to be heading into traffic in the usual way with the oblique hissing at the supposed �anti-Western� clique in the universities:
�Over the past two decades, with evidently growing vehemence, the critique of Western civilization has become the great preoccupation of the humanities in American institutions of higher learning, especially in departments of literary studies. (Edward Said's Orientalism, which appeared in 1978, was certainly one point of departure for this general trend, though not all the current assaults on the pernicious influence of the West can be traced to Said.) It is Western civilization, we are repeatedly told, that has perpetrated the evils of colonialism on a global scale, and in the postcolonial era it is Western capitalism that continues to exploit and to "immiserate" the masses of the developing world. The legacy of enslavement and murder that is abundantly manifested in colonialism, it is sometimes claimed, was merely brought to its logical fulfillment in the concentration-camp universe created by the Nazis.�
The key that this music is scored to is revealed by the word �pernicious.� It is, by the way, the whole art of reading, this finding of resonances within contexts, this uncovering of the codedness on the surface of the codes. For surely Limited Inc isn�t wrong to suppose that the word carries a value redolent of extravagantly mustachioed villains tying the village beauty to the railroad tracks? If colonialism is merely a matter of gaslight melodrama, surely it is nothing to get too upset about. And then there is the Marquis de Said � red light, red light, evacuate the craft. This is, we know, the New Republic, and Said is in the shooting gallery there. His is the face atop the silhouette of the menacing intifada warrior that Marty Peretz takes matitudinal aim at, with his .45.
But Alter is not going down that path. Leaving the simplicities of vilification behind, he has a genuinely interesting point to make � or at least he claims that Rawson does:
�What Rawson bracingly demonstrates is that humanistic inquiry still can be, and deserves to be, an empirically grounded activity. He decries the "selective use of evidence to support currently approved indignations (or the earlier ones they replace)," and he goes on to cite a tart characterization by Marjorie Perloff of how intellectual arrangements are now generally made in the groves of academe: "The preferred method is to know what one wants to prove ... and then to collect one's supportive exempla, the game being to ignore all `evidence' that might point in a contrary direction."
Much of Rawson's book is a documentation of Western imaginings of other races, ethnicities, and cultures, from Montaigne's "Des cannibales" to the propaganda of the Third Reich. (To Rawson's credit, in discussing this topic he avoids the pretentiousness of using the capitalized and hypostasized form "the Other," and he also eschews the Gallic barbarity of the abstraction "alterity.") Now, many of the images that he considers, both verbal and visual, are violent and troubling: the ethnic or racial others are imagined with both prurience and clinical condescension as embodiments of sexual license and depravity, as human approximations of the bestial, and hence as fit objects for subjugation, exploitation, and ultimately extermination. Still, as Rawson repeatedly shows, the simple story of racist abomination told by the postcolonial critics often does not correspond to the ambivalences or even the dialectical character of the actual Western images. And the others are often imagined, as Montaigne illustrates, not on a binary model of the good Europeans and the savage non-Europeans, but on a triadic model, a more complicated model that is not designed to provide any ideological satisfaction, in which both benign and brutal varieties of the others are considered as antitheses to the writer's own culture.�
Rawson�s suspicion of the unilateral moralist approach to colonial studies is captured, in a pretty damning way, in his criticism of Sander Gilman:
�Sander Gilman, a scholar who has made an academic career of chronicling racist stereotypes, describes the picture as an "erotic caricature of the Hottentot Venus," with the voyeur flatly defined as "a white, male observer." What Gilman astonishingly overlooks, as Rawson duly notes, is that the most obtrusive caricature in the engraving is the face of the man looking into the telescope. The man's face is depicted as a grotesque cross between the head of a bloated frog and the head of a dewlapped bulldog. The telescope thus becomes a satiric joke about European voyeurism; and, as Rawson suggests, the woman's thrusting posterior figures as a gesture of well-deserved contempt directed at the fat man with the telescope who is ogling her. The image is not an expression of power, it is a criticism of power.�
Even here, though, Limited Inc would like to remark that vulgar Foucaultians have demonized the word power, so that it is almost useless. Since Foucault�s point, following Nietzsche, is that there is no zero degree of power, it is difficult to see how any viewpoint could divest itself of power. Or how it could want to. What is the desire for an au-dela de pouvoir, anyway? In fact, Foucault�s further point was that the promotion of the myth that there is, indeed, some zero degree of power is part of the game of power. An important, and characteristic element of modernity, inherited from both the Platonic and Christian tradition.
Oddly, Limited Incs posts this week seem to return to the topic of the West and the Other. Unlike Alter, I think there�s a point to the capitalization. Since Alter seems to also diss alterity, for reasons that Derrida would have a field day with � find the name encrypted in the name, find the Latin that turns to gall in Gallic - I suppose he just doesn�t appreciate the concept, or its position in Hegel�s dialectic, and, necessarily, ours. Well, it is certainly there, with or without Alter�s approval.
Reading the West�s relationship to the Other through the Yahoos is a marvelous idea. Especially as it can never be said enough that the West, as a monolithic concept, was not the concept with which any intellectual up to the 19th century primarily thought.
Thursday, February 21, 2002
Remora
Limited Inc reads the newspapers for much the same reasons that hard shell Baptists listen to hellfire sermons -- to produce a feeling of dys-empathy, an odd combination of melancholy and self satisfaction. Our love for all humanity is tempered by our satisfaction that humanity is being lead into various unbelievable disasters by the most greedy and dimwitted among us. Going to hell in a handbasket kind of thing, you know.
But sometimes, sometimes an item peeks through the gloom like a ray of golden sunshine. The best news in the NYT is in the science section today. No way to say this without a tremor of emotion in the voice: the Ivory Billed Woodpecker may STILL BE ALIVE!
"[] team that spent 30 days in a swampy Louisiana forest looking for a woodpecker long thought to be extinct reported yesterday that members may have heard the bird, but they did not see it."
The ivory billed woodpecker isn't simply a bird, but like the dodo, the great auk, the eskimo curlew, it is a totem, a dream image, an Audubon revery.
Some might call the evidence slim.
"On Jan. 27, at 3:30 p.m., four of the six members of the search team, in an undisclosed spot in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area near Slidell, La., heard a series of double raps characteristic of the drumming of the ivory-billed woodpecker. They managed to record the last double- rap of the sequence and some subsequent rapping.On the same day, members of a Cornell Lab of Ornithology research group heard a similar sound in the same area, and two days later, other members of the team heard loud rapping uncharacteristic of other woodpeckers. "
Oddly enough, the NYT doesn't mention that the last sighting of the species in toto was in Cuba.
In 1985, Dr. Lester Short obtained permission to Search for C. principalis in Cuba. That year he, together with George Reynard and Giraldo Alay�n, visited the Cupeyal reserve just west of the area of the 1956 sightings. No woodpeckers were observed but they found fresh marks of a foraging C. principalis and heard of a report from December 1984 in the area (14). Giraldo Alay�n and Alberto Estrada continued the Search in
"October 1985 and March 1986 (15) and followed George Lamb's 1956 route. Although the forest close to the coast, near Moa, appeared long gone, the species was apparently still present in Ojito de Agua, one of the most inland territories described by Lamb. On 13 March Alberta Estrada briefly saw a single C. principalis. Giraldo Alay�n then observed a female being attacked by two Cuban Crows, Corvus nasicus, on 16 March and in April that year an international team including Dr. Lester Short, Dr. Jennifer Horne and George Reynard saw at least one male and one female at the same spot (15). One year later, in the afternoon of 16 March 1987, an observation was made that would appear to be the very last positive record of the species. Giraldo Alay�n and Aim� Pasada saw a female woodpecker flying at a distance of about 200 m. A National Geographic expedition in 1988 which included Ted Parker and Jerome Jackson could not find the species, although an individual might have been glimpsed (7)."
Limited Inc reads the newspapers for much the same reasons that hard shell Baptists listen to hellfire sermons -- to produce a feeling of dys-empathy, an odd combination of melancholy and self satisfaction. Our love for all humanity is tempered by our satisfaction that humanity is being lead into various unbelievable disasters by the most greedy and dimwitted among us. Going to hell in a handbasket kind of thing, you know.
But sometimes, sometimes an item peeks through the gloom like a ray of golden sunshine. The best news in the NYT is in the science section today. No way to say this without a tremor of emotion in the voice: the Ivory Billed Woodpecker may STILL BE ALIVE!
"[] team that spent 30 days in a swampy Louisiana forest looking for a woodpecker long thought to be extinct reported yesterday that members may have heard the bird, but they did not see it."
The ivory billed woodpecker isn't simply a bird, but like the dodo, the great auk, the eskimo curlew, it is a totem, a dream image, an Audubon revery.
Some might call the evidence slim.
"On Jan. 27, at 3:30 p.m., four of the six members of the search team, in an undisclosed spot in the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area near Slidell, La., heard a series of double raps characteristic of the drumming of the ivory-billed woodpecker. They managed to record the last double- rap of the sequence and some subsequent rapping.On the same day, members of a Cornell Lab of Ornithology research group heard a similar sound in the same area, and two days later, other members of the team heard loud rapping uncharacteristic of other woodpeckers. "
Oddly enough, the NYT doesn't mention that the last sighting of the species in toto was in Cuba.
In 1985, Dr. Lester Short obtained permission to Search for C. principalis in Cuba. That year he, together with George Reynard and Giraldo Alay�n, visited the Cupeyal reserve just west of the area of the 1956 sightings. No woodpeckers were observed but they found fresh marks of a foraging C. principalis and heard of a report from December 1984 in the area (14). Giraldo Alay�n and Alberto Estrada continued the Search in
"October 1985 and March 1986 (15) and followed George Lamb's 1956 route. Although the forest close to the coast, near Moa, appeared long gone, the species was apparently still present in Ojito de Agua, one of the most inland territories described by Lamb. On 13 March Alberta Estrada briefly saw a single C. principalis. Giraldo Alay�n then observed a female being attacked by two Cuban Crows, Corvus nasicus, on 16 March and in April that year an international team including Dr. Lester Short, Dr. Jennifer Horne and George Reynard saw at least one male and one female at the same spot (15). One year later, in the afternoon of 16 March 1987, an observation was made that would appear to be the very last positive record of the species. Giraldo Alay�n and Aim� Pasada saw a female woodpecker flying at a distance of about 200 m. A National Geographic expedition in 1988 which included Ted Parker and Jerome Jackson could not find the species, although an individual might have been glimpsed (7)."
Wednesday, February 20, 2002
Remora
Policy Review, a true blue, conservative journal, features a review by a Steven Menashi, of Mark Lilla�s new book.
The Lure of Syracuse, the last chapter in Lilla's book, was published in the NYRB in the black month of September. Limited Inc didn't have the heart, at the time, to make with the commentary. Lilla uses the story of Plato's supposed attraction to the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysus, to make a point. Or a couple of points. One is the point that the story should be about Plato's ultimate resistance to tyranny. The other is that twentieth century thinkers have been attracted to the philosopher slash murder king. The second point is the important one for Lilla.
On the one hand, Lilla�s point is true. A large part of the intelligentsia in every decade has embraced the most obnoxious governors, a crew of murderous and venal men like Hitler, Stalin, Mao. So, for that matter, have carpenters and farmers. The problem with Lilla�s story is that it is based on a falsely foreshortened sense of atrocity.
History is read through a special filter for Lilla -- and for that whole tradition arising out of the fifties merger of liberalism and cold war anti-communism. The murder of a Russian writer, in 1940, counts as a murder for this group. The murder of, say, a Sioux in 1870, or the starving to death of some Congolese family in 1900 doesn't count as an atrocity. In fact, it doesn't count at all. A philosophical overview of history that begins in mourning is fine, it is appropriate, lay on the organ tones and let�s all die; but Lilla�s group ends up mourning very selectively.
The NYRB site has segregated Lilla's essay into the for pay part of the site. But it is still up at this site. Let's start with the first false analogy in Lilla's piece.
"Dionysius is our contemporary. Over the last century he has assumed many names: Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, Mao and Ho, Castro and Trujillo, Amin and Bokassa, Saddam and Khomeini, Ceau�sescu and Milosevic�one's pen runs dry. In the nineteenth century optimistic souls could believe that tyranny was a thing of the past. After all, Europe had entered the modern age and everyone knew that complex modern societies, attached to secular, democratic values, simply could not be ruled by old-style despotic means. Modern societies might still be authoritarian, their bureaucracies cold and their workplaces cruel, but they could not be tyrannies in the sense that Syracuse was. Modernization would render the classical concept of tyranny obsolete, and as nations outside Europe modernized they, too, would enter the post-tyrannical future. We now know how wrong this was. The harems and food-tasters of ancient times are indeed gone but their places have been taken by propaganda ministers and revolutionary guards, drug barons and Swiss bankers. The tyrant has survived."
Well, the rhetorical flourish is nice. But Dionysis is not our contemporary, or at least he isn't our contemporary in the same way Hitler and Mussolini are. In fact, the collective gesture -- one that puts Hitler and Khomeini in the same set - is infantile, betraying no sense of historical circumstances. The nineteenth century optimism, by which one presumes Lilla means Mill and Comte (although he could mean Goethe and Marx -- the phrase is empty), still had to account for the Napoleons, tyrants of a type much closer to Dionysus than any in Lilla's first list. And of course there is the notion that the nations outside Europe "modernize." Is this a joke? If it isn�t, and we fear it isn�t, then it is more evidence that when the blind lead the blind through world history, they end up like the blind in Brueghel�s painting, headlong in the ditch.. Lilla's evident ignorance of what modernization entails cries out for correction. Before you play the shame game in the NYRB, do some research. Start with, say, the history of coffee growing. As I mentioned before, last week I read Mark Prendergast�s nice, exhaustive look at the coffee industry. Well, why not start there for the quick course in Europe�s heart of darkness complex? Lilla seems to be under the illusion that 19th century intellectuals were either unaware or uninvolved with what happened on the margins: those Iindians of the Yucatan, Guatamala, El Salvador, etc; those Brazilian slaves; those Chinese resisting Britain�s Opium trade. If he wants to find the roots of Hitlerism, it won't do to go to Syracuse -- go, instead, to Hitler's admiration for that eminent nineteenth century institution, the Indian Reservation. America's gift to the world. Or look at the penal practices of the French. The Communards were cast into Dachaus spaced at some distance from the Hexagon: Devil�s Island, French Guyana.
Lilla might claim that this is merely the blame game, death toll politics. But it isn't � it is looking at the context in which intellectuals might or might not have sympathy with forces that would overthrow �liberal democracy.� To mount a philosophical polemic based on a history and have no real comprehension of history is, well, typical of philosophical polemicists.
Still, even putting aside Lilla�s ignorance of the 19th century, his inability to understand how World War I effected the West reaches into the cases he wants to talk about. In fact, here, as elsewhere, the majority of the intelligentsia went along: most were not, like Bertrand Russell, willing to go to jail to oppose the senseless slaughter on both fronts. Not that Lilla is the type to honor Russell � in fact, whenever intellectuals are being knocked by other intellectuals in forums like the NYRB, you can be sure the political sympathies of the knockers is such that they would have favored locking up the Bertrand Russells and throwing away the key.
Still, context is not an excuse. The 20th century is full of philosophers who have favored tyranny of one sort or another. The list is well known, and the model case is Heidegger. But the Stalinism of Aragon, or the sympathy of the New Critics (Allen Tate, for example) for racism is well known. So if Lilla had the integrity to confront this problem in the spirit of real inquiry � why did it happen? Is there a pattern? Who opposed Stalinism, or apartheid, or Naziism, and why? If Lilla was proceeding along this path, I�d have more sympathy with him.
However, Limited Inc�s lack of sympathy is not shared by the Policy reviewer.
�Mark Lilla offers his latest book, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, as �a modest companion� to Milosz�s work. But The Reckless Mind turns out to be not so modest at all, for Lilla takes as his subject a question even more vexing than Milosz�s. We may understand why intellectuals living under tyranny, jaded by the degradations of war and intimidated by a totalitarian state, would submit to regnant orthodoxy. But what accounts for tyranny�s apologists in free societies? Why would an intellectual, unthreatened by censorship or official coercion, seek to justify repressive, dictatorial regimes �or, as was more common,� Lilla writes, �to deny any essential difference between tyranny and the free societies of the West?� Lilla seeks to answer the question, as Milosz did, through a series of profiles of modern intellectual.�
Menashi makes a curious move in his review to Strauss. Usually Straussians start going cross-eyed, in that Closing of the American Mind way, when they deal with such as Kojeve, but Menashi is actually thoughtful. A nice piece. Here�s the final graf:
�As it happens, during his lifetime Strauss produced studies of only three living thinkers: Heidegger, Schmitt, and Koj�ve � three theorists who had put their formidable talents in the service of tyrants, the first two to Hitler and the last to Stalin. In contrast to their zealotry, Strauss appears (contrary to his popular reputation) resolutely anti-dogmatic. �Philosophy is essentially not possession of the truth, but quest for the truth,� according to Strauss; he exhorts impulsive thinkers not to philosophical certainty, but to the philosopher�s moderate self-control. Against the religious dogmatism of these intellectuals, he juxtaposed the uncertain wisdom of Socrates: The true philosopher knows that he knows nothing.�
The last is a phrase is one philosophers like to use when they are getting sentimental, but like some old cheer intoned by the graduates of the class of 38 on the Yale lawn, they are going through the motions from nostalgia, not because they mean it.
Policy Review, a true blue, conservative journal, features a review by a Steven Menashi, of Mark Lilla�s new book.
The Lure of Syracuse, the last chapter in Lilla's book, was published in the NYRB in the black month of September. Limited Inc didn't have the heart, at the time, to make with the commentary. Lilla uses the story of Plato's supposed attraction to the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysus, to make a point. Or a couple of points. One is the point that the story should be about Plato's ultimate resistance to tyranny. The other is that twentieth century thinkers have been attracted to the philosopher slash murder king. The second point is the important one for Lilla.
On the one hand, Lilla�s point is true. A large part of the intelligentsia in every decade has embraced the most obnoxious governors, a crew of murderous and venal men like Hitler, Stalin, Mao. So, for that matter, have carpenters and farmers. The problem with Lilla�s story is that it is based on a falsely foreshortened sense of atrocity.
History is read through a special filter for Lilla -- and for that whole tradition arising out of the fifties merger of liberalism and cold war anti-communism. The murder of a Russian writer, in 1940, counts as a murder for this group. The murder of, say, a Sioux in 1870, or the starving to death of some Congolese family in 1900 doesn't count as an atrocity. In fact, it doesn't count at all. A philosophical overview of history that begins in mourning is fine, it is appropriate, lay on the organ tones and let�s all die; but Lilla�s group ends up mourning very selectively.
The NYRB site has segregated Lilla's essay into the for pay part of the site. But it is still up at this site. Let's start with the first false analogy in Lilla's piece.
"Dionysius is our contemporary. Over the last century he has assumed many names: Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, Mao and Ho, Castro and Trujillo, Amin and Bokassa, Saddam and Khomeini, Ceau�sescu and Milosevic�one's pen runs dry. In the nineteenth century optimistic souls could believe that tyranny was a thing of the past. After all, Europe had entered the modern age and everyone knew that complex modern societies, attached to secular, democratic values, simply could not be ruled by old-style despotic means. Modern societies might still be authoritarian, their bureaucracies cold and their workplaces cruel, but they could not be tyrannies in the sense that Syracuse was. Modernization would render the classical concept of tyranny obsolete, and as nations outside Europe modernized they, too, would enter the post-tyrannical future. We now know how wrong this was. The harems and food-tasters of ancient times are indeed gone but their places have been taken by propaganda ministers and revolutionary guards, drug barons and Swiss bankers. The tyrant has survived."
Well, the rhetorical flourish is nice. But Dionysis is not our contemporary, or at least he isn't our contemporary in the same way Hitler and Mussolini are. In fact, the collective gesture -- one that puts Hitler and Khomeini in the same set - is infantile, betraying no sense of historical circumstances. The nineteenth century optimism, by which one presumes Lilla means Mill and Comte (although he could mean Goethe and Marx -- the phrase is empty), still had to account for the Napoleons, tyrants of a type much closer to Dionysus than any in Lilla's first list. And of course there is the notion that the nations outside Europe "modernize." Is this a joke? If it isn�t, and we fear it isn�t, then it is more evidence that when the blind lead the blind through world history, they end up like the blind in Brueghel�s painting, headlong in the ditch.. Lilla's evident ignorance of what modernization entails cries out for correction. Before you play the shame game in the NYRB, do some research. Start with, say, the history of coffee growing. As I mentioned before, last week I read Mark Prendergast�s nice, exhaustive look at the coffee industry. Well, why not start there for the quick course in Europe�s heart of darkness complex? Lilla seems to be under the illusion that 19th century intellectuals were either unaware or uninvolved with what happened on the margins: those Iindians of the Yucatan, Guatamala, El Salvador, etc; those Brazilian slaves; those Chinese resisting Britain�s Opium trade. If he wants to find the roots of Hitlerism, it won't do to go to Syracuse -- go, instead, to Hitler's admiration for that eminent nineteenth century institution, the Indian Reservation. America's gift to the world. Or look at the penal practices of the French. The Communards were cast into Dachaus spaced at some distance from the Hexagon: Devil�s Island, French Guyana.
Lilla might claim that this is merely the blame game, death toll politics. But it isn't � it is looking at the context in which intellectuals might or might not have sympathy with forces that would overthrow �liberal democracy.� To mount a philosophical polemic based on a history and have no real comprehension of history is, well, typical of philosophical polemicists.
Still, even putting aside Lilla�s ignorance of the 19th century, his inability to understand how World War I effected the West reaches into the cases he wants to talk about. In fact, here, as elsewhere, the majority of the intelligentsia went along: most were not, like Bertrand Russell, willing to go to jail to oppose the senseless slaughter on both fronts. Not that Lilla is the type to honor Russell � in fact, whenever intellectuals are being knocked by other intellectuals in forums like the NYRB, you can be sure the political sympathies of the knockers is such that they would have favored locking up the Bertrand Russells and throwing away the key.
Still, context is not an excuse. The 20th century is full of philosophers who have favored tyranny of one sort or another. The list is well known, and the model case is Heidegger. But the Stalinism of Aragon, or the sympathy of the New Critics (Allen Tate, for example) for racism is well known. So if Lilla had the integrity to confront this problem in the spirit of real inquiry � why did it happen? Is there a pattern? Who opposed Stalinism, or apartheid, or Naziism, and why? If Lilla was proceeding along this path, I�d have more sympathy with him.
However, Limited Inc�s lack of sympathy is not shared by the Policy reviewer.
�Mark Lilla offers his latest book, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, as �a modest companion� to Milosz�s work. But The Reckless Mind turns out to be not so modest at all, for Lilla takes as his subject a question even more vexing than Milosz�s. We may understand why intellectuals living under tyranny, jaded by the degradations of war and intimidated by a totalitarian state, would submit to regnant orthodoxy. But what accounts for tyranny�s apologists in free societies? Why would an intellectual, unthreatened by censorship or official coercion, seek to justify repressive, dictatorial regimes �or, as was more common,� Lilla writes, �to deny any essential difference between tyranny and the free societies of the West?� Lilla seeks to answer the question, as Milosz did, through a series of profiles of modern intellectual.�
Menashi makes a curious move in his review to Strauss. Usually Straussians start going cross-eyed, in that Closing of the American Mind way, when they deal with such as Kojeve, but Menashi is actually thoughtful. A nice piece. Here�s the final graf:
�As it happens, during his lifetime Strauss produced studies of only three living thinkers: Heidegger, Schmitt, and Koj�ve � three theorists who had put their formidable talents in the service of tyrants, the first two to Hitler and the last to Stalin. In contrast to their zealotry, Strauss appears (contrary to his popular reputation) resolutely anti-dogmatic. �Philosophy is essentially not possession of the truth, but quest for the truth,� according to Strauss; he exhorts impulsive thinkers not to philosophical certainty, but to the philosopher�s moderate self-control. Against the religious dogmatism of these intellectuals, he juxtaposed the uncertain wisdom of Socrates: The true philosopher knows that he knows nothing.�
The last is a phrase is one philosophers like to use when they are getting sentimental, but like some old cheer intoned by the graduates of the class of 38 on the Yale lawn, they are going through the motions from nostalgia, not because they mean it.
Comments on yesterday's post from Alan:
"Roger,
I don't have access to the London Times article here at work so I'm flying
blind here. But here are a couple of observations.
--Rational self-interest, as conceived by free-market economists, would
never lead anyone to try to be president of the United States. There are a
whole lot less painful ways to get a whole lot richer. Besides, when you
grow up a rich kid like Georgie-poo, I suspect the marginal utility of
additional bucks is pretty much nil. I would think, in the absence of any
more particular motivations, that maximizing utility would consist in
finding ways to avoid boredom.
--We've got two questions here: GWB's character and motivation, and
Luttwak's. From a number of things I've read, I think it very likely that
since 9/11, GWB genuinely regards himself as a Man on a Mission. However,
unlike your version of Luttwak, I do not think that is a Good Thing. It
scares the shit out of me. There are few things in the world more dangerous
than a stupid and easily manipulable Man on a Mission.
It'll take me a while to work out the Venn diagram stuff. Also thinking
about the causes of famine in India, etc."
To which Limited Inc replied
Alan
-- Wow, either my Luttwak piece was good, or you are just in a discursive mood this morning. A spontaneous response!
Anyway,. my reading of maximizing one's advantage is that the particular advantage is an x, a variable. It could be money, it could be power, it could be popularity, it could be orgasms. Since rational agents live in a world of mixed value systems, their pursuit of one advantage theoretically entails not pursuing, with the same vigor, others. But I take it that the decision to pursue political power is the framework within which Bushiepoo is defining self interest. In this case, then, he would alter his behavior if he felt like it was negatively impacting his long term ability to retain political power. So, when he campaigned, he moderated everything that he promised in order to alienate as few voters as possible. What he has done since he attained power is use it for other self-interested ends, which are defined in other value frameworks. But just as we wouldn't confuse a man investing money with a man giving to charity simply because both actions entail an immediate outflow of money, so we shouldn't think of Bush as sacrificing his self interest in one framwork for a disinterested ideal in another just because, potentially, he could become unpopular. Luttwak conceivably could make that argument, but as I say, it would contradict the whole brunt of Bushiepoo's life up to now. The man with a mission is in the happy circumstance that his mission makes him popular, so Luttwak's has to present a hypothetical. He fails to even muster the elements for a hypothetical. Perhaps, like Lyndon Johnson, Bushypoo would pursue this mission even if it started to make him highly unpopular. But I think it is as likely that, having received Pavlovian gratification from being a warm monger, he might hedge the inevitable unpopularity that comes from being Santa Claus to the rich in a recession by sustaining his warmongering role, which does make him popular.
LI
There you have it comrades, actually controversy on this usually sleepy site. I'll be jiggered!
"Roger,
I don't have access to the London Times article here at work so I'm flying
blind here. But here are a couple of observations.
--Rational self-interest, as conceived by free-market economists, would
never lead anyone to try to be president of the United States. There are a
whole lot less painful ways to get a whole lot richer. Besides, when you
grow up a rich kid like Georgie-poo, I suspect the marginal utility of
additional bucks is pretty much nil. I would think, in the absence of any
more particular motivations, that maximizing utility would consist in
finding ways to avoid boredom.
--We've got two questions here: GWB's character and motivation, and
Luttwak's. From a number of things I've read, I think it very likely that
since 9/11, GWB genuinely regards himself as a Man on a Mission. However,
unlike your version of Luttwak, I do not think that is a Good Thing. It
scares the shit out of me. There are few things in the world more dangerous
than a stupid and easily manipulable Man on a Mission.
It'll take me a while to work out the Venn diagram stuff. Also thinking
about the causes of famine in India, etc."
To which Limited Inc replied
Alan
-- Wow, either my Luttwak piece was good, or you are just in a discursive mood this morning. A spontaneous response!
Anyway,. my reading of maximizing one's advantage is that the particular advantage is an x, a variable. It could be money, it could be power, it could be popularity, it could be orgasms. Since rational agents live in a world of mixed value systems, their pursuit of one advantage theoretically entails not pursuing, with the same vigor, others. But I take it that the decision to pursue political power is the framework within which Bushiepoo is defining self interest. In this case, then, he would alter his behavior if he felt like it was negatively impacting his long term ability to retain political power. So, when he campaigned, he moderated everything that he promised in order to alienate as few voters as possible. What he has done since he attained power is use it for other self-interested ends, which are defined in other value frameworks. But just as we wouldn't confuse a man investing money with a man giving to charity simply because both actions entail an immediate outflow of money, so we shouldn't think of Bush as sacrificing his self interest in one framwork for a disinterested ideal in another just because, potentially, he could become unpopular. Luttwak conceivably could make that argument, but as I say, it would contradict the whole brunt of Bushiepoo's life up to now. The man with a mission is in the happy circumstance that his mission makes him popular, so Luttwak's has to present a hypothetical. He fails to even muster the elements for a hypothetical. Perhaps, like Lyndon Johnson, Bushypoo would pursue this mission even if it started to make him highly unpopular. But I think it is as likely that, having received Pavlovian gratification from being a warm monger, he might hedge the inevitable unpopularity that comes from being Santa Claus to the rich in a recession by sustaining his warmongering role, which does make him popular.
LI
There you have it comrades, actually controversy on this usually sleepy site. I'll be jiggered!
Monday, February 18, 2002
Remora
When the best aren�t the brightest, and the brightest have to console themselves with Noam Chomsky. Or, put that in a Venn diagram and stuff it in your pipe, sailor.
Bush will go to war even if it puts him out of power is the headline of an article in the Sunday (London) Times by Edward Luttwak. Headlines are written by a specialized set of editorial room ghosts. This fact continually escapes readers. I know. I�ve written articles crowned by headlines that have the same relation to my article as the image of the barroom seen through a beer bottle by a drunk has to the barroom as seen by a sober boyscout. And in these cases, sophisticated readers (like you) often ask me to explain the headline, as though it flowed from my pen.
But in this case the headline sums up this farrago of nonsense quite well. Oh, get used to it. This is the type of drivel we shall all be reading a lot of, pretty soon. Luttwak is jumping ahead of the curve, crafty syncophant that he is. Building up for another 20 article year at TNR. He does indeed make the argument the headline proclaims: that Bush is going to go to war with Iraq even if it means sacrificing his presidency.
�Everyone who comes into personal contact with him reports that George W Bush has become a man of passionate conviction who sees the struggle to prevent another September 11 as his duty and destiny, regardless of the political consequences. He has been told many times that he now risks winning the war and losing the presidency because of a weak economy and now the huge Enron scandal, but he replies that winning the war is quite enough for him even if he loses the White House. �
When one wants to distinguish bad faith from an honest but fallacious argument, a good indicator is whether the expounder of an argument has thought through the question of self-interest. Luttwak, and Georgie Bush, are both very comfortable with free market economics. That economics relies on the theory that self-interest is a key factor in organizing markets. In fact, most neo-classical economists like equilibrium models because the self-interested agent is easily quantifiable. He or she fits pretty well into the various game theories that model the actions of markets.
So when we are faced with an article in which the premise is that a rational actor is willing to sacrifice his self-interest, we want to know a few things. Is this plausible? Are there self-interested explanations for his action? Does he have a self-sacrificing personality? Is there any indication, from his past history, that he has been self-sacrificing?
Let�s look at Luttwak�s article from the standpoint of plausibility. In the first sentence of the above graf, the phrase , �regardless of the political consequences,� implies the risk that G.B. will suffer politically for his convictions. To make this plausible, one searches around for, say, poll data showing that G.B. is suffering a loss of popularity for his tenacious stand on foreign policy. And that such a loss is not effecting him.
Luttwak doesn�t want to make that argument because, of course, it is ludicrous. G.B. is being rewarded with popularity for his current stand on the war. The first thing we should notice about the whole tenor of Luttwak�s article is the implausibility of one of the premises.
But perhaps he is saying that Bush is ignoring that rise in popularity. This is an odd assertion. If Bush were a corporation, would we want to say that it is continuing to sell a profitable item regardless of the fact that it is profitable? That�s the kind of saying that any economist will reject, rightly, out of hand. In fact, the direction of motivation should go the other way. Because G.B. is being rewarded, he wants to continue warmongering. This explanation takes into account self-interest in a traditional way. In fact, I would imagine Luttwak constructing just the opposite story for a politician like Saddam Hussein or Milosovic. There are even parallel reasons. If we are at war, a more plausible, a more conservative argument would go, it is probably to counter-balance things like a bad economy. A bad economy wiped out Bushie one.
Now, perhaps Luttwak thinks GBII�s �passion� is making him self-sacrificing. Are there evidences of this in his past? The short answer, and the long answer, are both no. Ever since joining the National Guard, GBII has been an exemplary rational agent, maximizing his gain at every opportunity. There is no evidence that he has ever sacrificed his own interests for something higher than himself. Closest, I suppose, would be his acceptance of our Lord Jesus Christ into his capacious heart, but that acceptance, on his own account, hinged on a quite utilitarian matter. He needed to stop drinking. Drunk driving tickets, as he knew, were a real career-killer. Hence, it was Jesus or pay some counselor that you'd have to hide, twenty years down the road, when you ran for political office in Texas. Jesus was the lower cost.
So, our question should be not, is Luttwak right here. It should be, what does Luttwak gain by this article? With an assessment of Iraq (�As for the American decision to finish with Saddam one way or another, its reasons are exactly as stated in the Bush speech before Congress: Saddam�s regime still wants to reoccupy Kuwait and dominate Arabia; it already has some weapons of mass destruction and is smuggling in technology for more. That combination is an unacceptable danger, which must be ended�) that is not only ridiculous, but contains no casus belli � as Luttwak, who is not an idiot, knows, and with the tactful dropping of the reference to Iran, we can see Luttwak positioning himself. He is, above all, serious. Because his article�s premises are ludicrous, and his defense of the American regime is less analysis than a wet tongued osculation of the good old White House derriere, Luttwak has to maintain that implacable, that politburo seriousness. Laugh, and the whole web of deceit falls away.
Laugh, reader. Cast a cold eye upon Luttwak (and his tribe � the commentariat that ranges from the Weekly Standard to the TNR � all right turns, as J. Edgar used to tell his chauffeur), and laugh. Laugh your melancholy butt off.
When the best aren�t the brightest, and the brightest have to console themselves with Noam Chomsky. Or, put that in a Venn diagram and stuff it in your pipe, sailor.
Bush will go to war even if it puts him out of power is the headline of an article in the Sunday (London) Times by Edward Luttwak. Headlines are written by a specialized set of editorial room ghosts. This fact continually escapes readers. I know. I�ve written articles crowned by headlines that have the same relation to my article as the image of the barroom seen through a beer bottle by a drunk has to the barroom as seen by a sober boyscout. And in these cases, sophisticated readers (like you) often ask me to explain the headline, as though it flowed from my pen.
But in this case the headline sums up this farrago of nonsense quite well. Oh, get used to it. This is the type of drivel we shall all be reading a lot of, pretty soon. Luttwak is jumping ahead of the curve, crafty syncophant that he is. Building up for another 20 article year at TNR. He does indeed make the argument the headline proclaims: that Bush is going to go to war with Iraq even if it means sacrificing his presidency.
�Everyone who comes into personal contact with him reports that George W Bush has become a man of passionate conviction who sees the struggle to prevent another September 11 as his duty and destiny, regardless of the political consequences. He has been told many times that he now risks winning the war and losing the presidency because of a weak economy and now the huge Enron scandal, but he replies that winning the war is quite enough for him even if he loses the White House. �
When one wants to distinguish bad faith from an honest but fallacious argument, a good indicator is whether the expounder of an argument has thought through the question of self-interest. Luttwak, and Georgie Bush, are both very comfortable with free market economics. That economics relies on the theory that self-interest is a key factor in organizing markets. In fact, most neo-classical economists like equilibrium models because the self-interested agent is easily quantifiable. He or she fits pretty well into the various game theories that model the actions of markets.
So when we are faced with an article in which the premise is that a rational actor is willing to sacrifice his self-interest, we want to know a few things. Is this plausible? Are there self-interested explanations for his action? Does he have a self-sacrificing personality? Is there any indication, from his past history, that he has been self-sacrificing?
Let�s look at Luttwak�s article from the standpoint of plausibility. In the first sentence of the above graf, the phrase , �regardless of the political consequences,� implies the risk that G.B. will suffer politically for his convictions. To make this plausible, one searches around for, say, poll data showing that G.B. is suffering a loss of popularity for his tenacious stand on foreign policy. And that such a loss is not effecting him.
Luttwak doesn�t want to make that argument because, of course, it is ludicrous. G.B. is being rewarded with popularity for his current stand on the war. The first thing we should notice about the whole tenor of Luttwak�s article is the implausibility of one of the premises.
But perhaps he is saying that Bush is ignoring that rise in popularity. This is an odd assertion. If Bush were a corporation, would we want to say that it is continuing to sell a profitable item regardless of the fact that it is profitable? That�s the kind of saying that any economist will reject, rightly, out of hand. In fact, the direction of motivation should go the other way. Because G.B. is being rewarded, he wants to continue warmongering. This explanation takes into account self-interest in a traditional way. In fact, I would imagine Luttwak constructing just the opposite story for a politician like Saddam Hussein or Milosovic. There are even parallel reasons. If we are at war, a more plausible, a more conservative argument would go, it is probably to counter-balance things like a bad economy. A bad economy wiped out Bushie one.
Now, perhaps Luttwak thinks GBII�s �passion� is making him self-sacrificing. Are there evidences of this in his past? The short answer, and the long answer, are both no. Ever since joining the National Guard, GBII has been an exemplary rational agent, maximizing his gain at every opportunity. There is no evidence that he has ever sacrificed his own interests for something higher than himself. Closest, I suppose, would be his acceptance of our Lord Jesus Christ into his capacious heart, but that acceptance, on his own account, hinged on a quite utilitarian matter. He needed to stop drinking. Drunk driving tickets, as he knew, were a real career-killer. Hence, it was Jesus or pay some counselor that you'd have to hide, twenty years down the road, when you ran for political office in Texas. Jesus was the lower cost.
So, our question should be not, is Luttwak right here. It should be, what does Luttwak gain by this article? With an assessment of Iraq (�As for the American decision to finish with Saddam one way or another, its reasons are exactly as stated in the Bush speech before Congress: Saddam�s regime still wants to reoccupy Kuwait and dominate Arabia; it already has some weapons of mass destruction and is smuggling in technology for more. That combination is an unacceptable danger, which must be ended�) that is not only ridiculous, but contains no casus belli � as Luttwak, who is not an idiot, knows, and with the tactful dropping of the reference to Iran, we can see Luttwak positioning himself. He is, above all, serious. Because his article�s premises are ludicrous, and his defense of the American regime is less analysis than a wet tongued osculation of the good old White House derriere, Luttwak has to maintain that implacable, that politburo seriousness. Laugh, and the whole web of deceit falls away.
Laugh, reader. Cast a cold eye upon Luttwak (and his tribe � the commentariat that ranges from the Weekly Standard to the TNR � all right turns, as J. Edgar used to tell his chauffeur), and laugh. Laugh your melancholy butt off.
Sunday, February 17, 2002
Remora
How about them corpses? Surely the movie is coming. Surely some b movie producer, some Hollywood scientologist, is on this like white on rice. Psycho is one thing, but Georgia rednecks are a whole other level of grotesque. They were good enough for Flannery O'Connor, so they should be good enough for you. The NYT story about the corpses of Walker County is another sad reminder that these are times that try the non-tv watcher's soul. I mean, camera man's delight. The woods. The voiceover. The faux conversation (Tammy, what is the sherriff saying about the body up in the crook of the pine tree there?). Essential tv. And here's the essential graf:
"After a dog walker stumbled over a skull on Friday, law enforcement officers discovered at least 120 rotting corpses in sheds and on the ground near the crematory, and state officials said that that figure could double by the time the area is fully examined. Some of the bodies had been there for years and were nearly skeletal, while others, fresh from the funeral home, still bore toe tags.Human bones, weathered white, were scattered through the woods like leaves, skulls mixed with leg bones in a ghoulish jumble that one state trooper compared to a scene from a Stephen King novel.
An infant's body was found in a box in the back of a rusting hearse.Some bodies had become mummified and may have been at the site more than 20 years, said Dr. Kris Sperry, Georgia's chief medical examiner. Nearly two dozen coffins that had once been buried were also found on the ground, Dr. Sperry said, and in some cases their embalmed contents had been dragged out and left exposed to the elements for years"
And here is the perfect tabloid ending. I mean, can a news story have a better sign off line?
"His wife and son just didn't want to spend the money to fix it up," said Mrs. Horton, who grew up in Noble and now lives in Atlanta. "Lord Jesus, I don't know how they could go to bed at night with all that outside their window."
All that outside their window. An image that reminds us of some impossible rencontre between Walter Benjamin and the National Enquirer at a funeral director's convention in Sarasota Springs.
How about them corpses? Surely the movie is coming. Surely some b movie producer, some Hollywood scientologist, is on this like white on rice. Psycho is one thing, but Georgia rednecks are a whole other level of grotesque. They were good enough for Flannery O'Connor, so they should be good enough for you. The NYT story about the corpses of Walker County is another sad reminder that these are times that try the non-tv watcher's soul. I mean, camera man's delight. The woods. The voiceover. The faux conversation (Tammy, what is the sherriff saying about the body up in the crook of the pine tree there?). Essential tv. And here's the essential graf:
"After a dog walker stumbled over a skull on Friday, law enforcement officers discovered at least 120 rotting corpses in sheds and on the ground near the crematory, and state officials said that that figure could double by the time the area is fully examined. Some of the bodies had been there for years and were nearly skeletal, while others, fresh from the funeral home, still bore toe tags.Human bones, weathered white, were scattered through the woods like leaves, skulls mixed with leg bones in a ghoulish jumble that one state trooper compared to a scene from a Stephen King novel.
An infant's body was found in a box in the back of a rusting hearse.Some bodies had become mummified and may have been at the site more than 20 years, said Dr. Kris Sperry, Georgia's chief medical examiner. Nearly two dozen coffins that had once been buried were also found on the ground, Dr. Sperry said, and in some cases their embalmed contents had been dragged out and left exposed to the elements for years"
And here is the perfect tabloid ending. I mean, can a news story have a better sign off line?
"His wife and son just didn't want to spend the money to fix it up," said Mrs. Horton, who grew up in Noble and now lives in Atlanta. "Lord Jesus, I don't know how they could go to bed at night with all that outside their window."
All that outside their window. An image that reminds us of some impossible rencontre between Walter Benjamin and the National Enquirer at a funeral director's convention in Sarasota Springs.
Saturday, February 16, 2002
Remora
Limited Inc is back, and campers, campers, settle down. I know, the overwhelming cards and letters sequence. The concern. The offers of sexual healing, food, socks. But who else out there is gonna give you such quality bitching? Such reports from the stark underground that your ancestors, your great grandfather, maybe, thought he'd left behind in the Old World? Our, our.... ressentiment, to use Max Scheler's term for the terminal condition, the termite ridden condition, of our seedy thoughts, such as they are..
Limited Inc, back in the dreamtime of the race, used to be enamored of Marx. Marxists have a way of knocking that out of you. We still like Mike Davis, the author of Ecology of Fear, and a recent book on the "Late Victorian Holocaust." Davis has focused on the combination of incipient free trade capitalism and bad, bad weather at the end of the 19th century. The death toll from these converging forces, from India to Egypt to Brazil, is pretty startling. Here's the first graf of a Guardian review of that scarifying, and mostly, of course, overlooked book:
"Recording the past can be a tricky business for historians. Prophesying the future is even more hazardous. In 1901, shortly before the death of Queen Victoria, the radical writer William Digby looked back to the 1876 Madras famine and confidently asserted: "When the part played by the British Empire in the 19th century is regarded by the historian 50 years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument." Who now remembers the Madrasis?"
Hey, but, do we really care? Indeed, the only famines that register in the Western consciousness are those associated with the failure of Communism. Although Robert Conquest's book on Stalin's de-kulakization has become the standard condemnatory text, where's the companion text, the one about Churchill's engineering of the Bengal famine of 1943? We know that the very fact that one remembers such things is a mark of extremism -- the reasonable man has long ago absorbed the reasons of state that led the heroic Brits to fertilize the Bengal plains with the bones of starving Indians:
"One of the most extraordinary examples of such whitewashing of history is the sustained, continuing deletion of two centuries of massive, recurrent, man-made famine in British India from British and world history, and hence from general public perception. This massive, sustained lying by omission by two centuries of British academic historians occurred in a society having Parliamentary democracy, the means to readily disseminate information and a steadily expanding literate population. Furthermore, this process of lying by omission continues to this day in Britain and its English-speaking offshoots, such as Australia, countries having free speech, high literacy, democracy, prosperity and extensive media of all kinds.
To dramatise this perversion, imagine that the Jewish Holocaust was almost completely deleted from our history books and from general public perception, that there was virtually a total absence of any mention at all of this cataclysm in our newspapers and electronic media or in our schools and universities. Truth, reason, ethics and humanity aside, objective analysis suggests that such a situation would greatly increase the probability of recurrence of racial mass murder. Fortunately, in reality, virtually everyone is aware of this event and indeed in Germany today it is a criminal offence to deny the actuality of the Jewish Holocaust.
In contrast, during the Second World War, a man-made catastrophe occurred within the British Empire that killed almost as many people as died in the Jewish Holocaust, but which has been effectively deleted from history, it is a 'forgotten holocaust'. The man-made famine in British-ruled Bengal in 1943-1944 ultimately took the lives of about 4-million people, about 90% of the total British Empire casualties of that conflict, and was accompanied by a multitude of horrors, not the least being massive civilian and military sexual abuse of starving women and young girls that compares unfavourable with the comfort women abuses of the Japanese Army."
Marxism has now become a mode of memory for those who walked out of the dreamtime. We're a shaken, unreliable crew. Davis is an exemplary Marxman, an unearther of those family secrets bid good riddance by the End of History, which has found its axis of evil in the destruction of the World Trade Centrer, and recognizes no precedent, nor mitigating circumstance, nor any limit to the justice it can extract from the rest of the world. In an article on 9/11 in the New Left Review, Davis starts out with an amazingly prescient throwaway by H.G. Wells, written in his heyday before WW1:
"For many generations New York had taken no heed of war, save as a thing that happened far away, that affected prices and supplied the newspapers with exciting headlines and pictures. The New Yorkers felt that war in their own land was an impossible thing . . . They saw war as they saw history, through an iridescent mist, deodorized, scented indeed, with all its essential cruelties tactfully hidden away. They cheered the flag by habit and tradition, they despised other nations, and whenever there was an international difficulty they were intensely patriotic, that is to say, they were ardently against any native politician who did not say, threaten, and do harsh and uncompromising things to the antagonist people. [2]
When a foreign policy dominated by the Trusts and Monopolies entangles America in a general War of the Powers, New Yorkers, still oblivious to any real danger, rally to flags, confetti and an imperial Presidency.
And then suddenly, into a world peacefully busied for the most part upon armaments and the perfection of explosives, war came . . . The immediate effect on New York . . . was merely to intensify her normal vehemence. Great crowds assembled . . . to listen to and cheer patriotic speeches, and there was a veritable epidemic of little flags and buttons . . . strong men wept at the sight of the national banner . . . the trade in small arms was enormously stimulated . . . and it was dangerous not to wear a war button . . . One of the most striking facts historically about this war, and one that makes complete the separation between the methods of warfare and democracy, was the effectual secrecy of Washington . . . They did not bother to confide a single fact of their preparations to the public. They did not even condescend to talk to Congress. They burked and suppressed every inquiry. The war was fought by the President and the Secretary of State in an entirely autocratic manner."
Davis takes a tour of the images of the "black utopia" -- the utopia of a capitalism armed and triumphant. It is a phrase he steals from Ernst Bloch. As always, Davis is a coiner of phrases. I can't resist another long quote -- notice how this paragraph patiently rolls towards its reversal in the first sentence of the next paragraph. Davis is discussing "fear studies," which he, of all people, should know about. Watch how he manipulates one reversal with another. Like a man trying to piece together an approximate image of his face in a funhouse mirror, Davis works by patiently angling one half truth with another. At some indeterminate point, one hopes that the image of the real jumps out at one. If you are good, very good, this happens. It happens like this:
...Barry Glassner systematically debunked some of the more common goblins�young Black men, street drugs, terroristic political correctness, and so on�that deliberately spook the path toward public understanding of such social problems as unemployment, bad schools, racism and world hunger. He carefully showed how media-conjured scares were guilty �oblique expressions� of the post-liberal refusal to reform real conditions of inequality. Fear had become the chief ballast of the rightward shift since 1980. Americans, in his view, �were afraid of the wrong things�, and were being hoaxed by the latter-day equivalents of Orson Welles�s notorious �War of the Worlds� broadcast. �The Martians,� he underscored, � aren�t coming.� [8]
But, alas, they have come, brandishing box-cutters."
Limited Inc is back, and campers, campers, settle down. I know, the overwhelming cards and letters sequence. The concern. The offers of sexual healing, food, socks. But who else out there is gonna give you such quality bitching? Such reports from the stark underground that your ancestors, your great grandfather, maybe, thought he'd left behind in the Old World? Our, our.... ressentiment, to use Max Scheler's term for the terminal condition, the termite ridden condition, of our seedy thoughts, such as they are..
Limited Inc, back in the dreamtime of the race, used to be enamored of Marx. Marxists have a way of knocking that out of you. We still like Mike Davis, the author of Ecology of Fear, and a recent book on the "Late Victorian Holocaust." Davis has focused on the combination of incipient free trade capitalism and bad, bad weather at the end of the 19th century. The death toll from these converging forces, from India to Egypt to Brazil, is pretty startling. Here's the first graf of a Guardian review of that scarifying, and mostly, of course, overlooked book:
"Recording the past can be a tricky business for historians. Prophesying the future is even more hazardous. In 1901, shortly before the death of Queen Victoria, the radical writer William Digby looked back to the 1876 Madras famine and confidently asserted: "When the part played by the British Empire in the 19th century is regarded by the historian 50 years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument." Who now remembers the Madrasis?"
Hey, but, do we really care? Indeed, the only famines that register in the Western consciousness are those associated with the failure of Communism. Although Robert Conquest's book on Stalin's de-kulakization has become the standard condemnatory text, where's the companion text, the one about Churchill's engineering of the Bengal famine of 1943? We know that the very fact that one remembers such things is a mark of extremism -- the reasonable man has long ago absorbed the reasons of state that led the heroic Brits to fertilize the Bengal plains with the bones of starving Indians:
"One of the most extraordinary examples of such whitewashing of history is the sustained, continuing deletion of two centuries of massive, recurrent, man-made famine in British India from British and world history, and hence from general public perception. This massive, sustained lying by omission by two centuries of British academic historians occurred in a society having Parliamentary democracy, the means to readily disseminate information and a steadily expanding literate population. Furthermore, this process of lying by omission continues to this day in Britain and its English-speaking offshoots, such as Australia, countries having free speech, high literacy, democracy, prosperity and extensive media of all kinds.
To dramatise this perversion, imagine that the Jewish Holocaust was almost completely deleted from our history books and from general public perception, that there was virtually a total absence of any mention at all of this cataclysm in our newspapers and electronic media or in our schools and universities. Truth, reason, ethics and humanity aside, objective analysis suggests that such a situation would greatly increase the probability of recurrence of racial mass murder. Fortunately, in reality, virtually everyone is aware of this event and indeed in Germany today it is a criminal offence to deny the actuality of the Jewish Holocaust.
In contrast, during the Second World War, a man-made catastrophe occurred within the British Empire that killed almost as many people as died in the Jewish Holocaust, but which has been effectively deleted from history, it is a 'forgotten holocaust'. The man-made famine in British-ruled Bengal in 1943-1944 ultimately took the lives of about 4-million people, about 90% of the total British Empire casualties of that conflict, and was accompanied by a multitude of horrors, not the least being massive civilian and military sexual abuse of starving women and young girls that compares unfavourable with the comfort women abuses of the Japanese Army."
Marxism has now become a mode of memory for those who walked out of the dreamtime. We're a shaken, unreliable crew. Davis is an exemplary Marxman, an unearther of those family secrets bid good riddance by the End of History, which has found its axis of evil in the destruction of the World Trade Centrer, and recognizes no precedent, nor mitigating circumstance, nor any limit to the justice it can extract from the rest of the world. In an article on 9/11 in the New Left Review, Davis starts out with an amazingly prescient throwaway by H.G. Wells, written in his heyday before WW1:
"For many generations New York had taken no heed of war, save as a thing that happened far away, that affected prices and supplied the newspapers with exciting headlines and pictures. The New Yorkers felt that war in their own land was an impossible thing . . . They saw war as they saw history, through an iridescent mist, deodorized, scented indeed, with all its essential cruelties tactfully hidden away. They cheered the flag by habit and tradition, they despised other nations, and whenever there was an international difficulty they were intensely patriotic, that is to say, they were ardently against any native politician who did not say, threaten, and do harsh and uncompromising things to the antagonist people. [2]
When a foreign policy dominated by the Trusts and Monopolies entangles America in a general War of the Powers, New Yorkers, still oblivious to any real danger, rally to flags, confetti and an imperial Presidency.
And then suddenly, into a world peacefully busied for the most part upon armaments and the perfection of explosives, war came . . . The immediate effect on New York . . . was merely to intensify her normal vehemence. Great crowds assembled . . . to listen to and cheer patriotic speeches, and there was a veritable epidemic of little flags and buttons . . . strong men wept at the sight of the national banner . . . the trade in small arms was enormously stimulated . . . and it was dangerous not to wear a war button . . . One of the most striking facts historically about this war, and one that makes complete the separation between the methods of warfare and democracy, was the effectual secrecy of Washington . . . They did not bother to confide a single fact of their preparations to the public. They did not even condescend to talk to Congress. They burked and suppressed every inquiry. The war was fought by the President and the Secretary of State in an entirely autocratic manner."
Davis takes a tour of the images of the "black utopia" -- the utopia of a capitalism armed and triumphant. It is a phrase he steals from Ernst Bloch. As always, Davis is a coiner of phrases. I can't resist another long quote -- notice how this paragraph patiently rolls towards its reversal in the first sentence of the next paragraph. Davis is discussing "fear studies," which he, of all people, should know about. Watch how he manipulates one reversal with another. Like a man trying to piece together an approximate image of his face in a funhouse mirror, Davis works by patiently angling one half truth with another. At some indeterminate point, one hopes that the image of the real jumps out at one. If you are good, very good, this happens. It happens like this:
...Barry Glassner systematically debunked some of the more common goblins�young Black men, street drugs, terroristic political correctness, and so on�that deliberately spook the path toward public understanding of such social problems as unemployment, bad schools, racism and world hunger. He carefully showed how media-conjured scares were guilty �oblique expressions� of the post-liberal refusal to reform real conditions of inequality. Fear had become the chief ballast of the rightward shift since 1980. Americans, in his view, �were afraid of the wrong things�, and were being hoaxed by the latter-day equivalents of Orson Welles�s notorious �War of the Worlds� broadcast. �The Martians,� he underscored, � aren�t coming.� [8]
But, alas, they have come, brandishing box-cutters."
Sunday, February 10, 2002
Friday, February 8, 2002
Remora
CEO Time
The adulation of the CEO, one of the more puzzling cultural features of the nineties, is turning, predictably, into revulsion. Since Limited Inc has always maintained that most CEOs could easily be replaced by much cheaper computer programs (with the multiple advantages accruing from having a thing at the top that won't borrow money, buy glitzy spreads, aquire trophy girlfriends or wives, or give bogus leadership tips to the young exec crowd), revulsion has always seemed about the right emotional stance to take towards this set. Forbes now has a nice section, CEO Strikeout, targetting these formerly flattered non-entities (although Limited Inc must say that the Strikeout mcguffin, which requires telling the story of a rise and fall by way of balls, strikes, fouls, and, presumably, hits, is a funny idea that should be used once, and then trashed). Today's Bad boy is the CEO of World Comm, Bernard Ebbers. World Comm has been dodging rumors that its accounting structure is creative. Ah, creative, the magic word. Here's the last graf:
"The Next Pitch: WorldCom reports its fourth-quarter earnings tomorrow. If they are reassuring, this stock will be due for a snapback--especially if the report helps Ebbers put to rest some of the rumors dogging his firm. But that snapback, if it comes, may do little more than boost WorldCom back up over the $10 level. And the stock's main appeal--as an acquisition play--could be fading. Today The New York Times reported that the most likely acquirers, SBC Communications and Verizon Communications, have lost interest, due to concerns about the challenges facing the long-distance businesses. The Bells also were said to be nervous about WorldCom's possibly aggressive accounting practices. WorldCom stoutly denies that it has any accounting "issues." But if tomorrow's earnings report fails to clear the air and provide the hoped-for bounce, Ebbers will find himself under increasing pressure to use his deal-making skills to arrange one last merger--one that inevitably would leave WorldCom in the hands of some other CEO."
The Net Economy has a more up close and personal view of Ebbers. They get in his sock drawer, rummage through his underwear, check out his check book, and guess what? It is one of those check books with a calendar, and today Ebbers has written down, guess I'll have to find that $150 million to pay off my loan. Well, since Ebbers is such a neat guy, his company will probably pitch in, like they've done before. Here's the first two grafs:
"It must be nice to be able to look at $180 million as if it's a dirty penny on the street, hardly worth bending over to pick up. That's how some analysts seem to view WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers' $183-million loan that came due this week.
Ebbers had until the end of the day Thursday to pay back the loan from Bank of America, which he secured last year using 11.3 million shares of WorldCom stock. The loan was called because WorldCom's stock price dropped below $10 a share Wednesday. WorldCom is expected to pay off the loan, just as it did in 2000, when it anted up $150 million to cover another of Ebber's debts."
Meritocracy, man. What a wonderful system.
CEO Time
The adulation of the CEO, one of the more puzzling cultural features of the nineties, is turning, predictably, into revulsion. Since Limited Inc has always maintained that most CEOs could easily be replaced by much cheaper computer programs (with the multiple advantages accruing from having a thing at the top that won't borrow money, buy glitzy spreads, aquire trophy girlfriends or wives, or give bogus leadership tips to the young exec crowd), revulsion has always seemed about the right emotional stance to take towards this set. Forbes now has a nice section, CEO Strikeout, targetting these formerly flattered non-entities (although Limited Inc must say that the Strikeout mcguffin, which requires telling the story of a rise and fall by way of balls, strikes, fouls, and, presumably, hits, is a funny idea that should be used once, and then trashed). Today's Bad boy is the CEO of World Comm, Bernard Ebbers. World Comm has been dodging rumors that its accounting structure is creative. Ah, creative, the magic word. Here's the last graf:
"The Next Pitch: WorldCom reports its fourth-quarter earnings tomorrow. If they are reassuring, this stock will be due for a snapback--especially if the report helps Ebbers put to rest some of the rumors dogging his firm. But that snapback, if it comes, may do little more than boost WorldCom back up over the $10 level. And the stock's main appeal--as an acquisition play--could be fading. Today The New York Times reported that the most likely acquirers, SBC Communications and Verizon Communications, have lost interest, due to concerns about the challenges facing the long-distance businesses. The Bells also were said to be nervous about WorldCom's possibly aggressive accounting practices. WorldCom stoutly denies that it has any accounting "issues." But if tomorrow's earnings report fails to clear the air and provide the hoped-for bounce, Ebbers will find himself under increasing pressure to use his deal-making skills to arrange one last merger--one that inevitably would leave WorldCom in the hands of some other CEO."
The Net Economy has a more up close and personal view of Ebbers. They get in his sock drawer, rummage through his underwear, check out his check book, and guess what? It is one of those check books with a calendar, and today Ebbers has written down, guess I'll have to find that $150 million to pay off my loan. Well, since Ebbers is such a neat guy, his company will probably pitch in, like they've done before. Here's the first two grafs:
"It must be nice to be able to look at $180 million as if it's a dirty penny on the street, hardly worth bending over to pick up. That's how some analysts seem to view WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers' $183-million loan that came due this week.
Ebbers had until the end of the day Thursday to pay back the loan from Bank of America, which he secured last year using 11.3 million shares of WorldCom stock. The loan was called because WorldCom's stock price dropped below $10 a share Wednesday. WorldCom is expected to pay off the loan, just as it did in 2000, when it anted up $150 million to cover another of Ebber's debts."
Meritocracy, man. What a wonderful system.
Remora
Brothers and sisters, are you aware of the Swiss site, culture actif? It is a little treasure trove of unexpected essays for the cultural critics among us. Limited Inc urges a visit. They have a five part interview with Jean Starobinski on his latest book, a meditation on the emergence of the term "reaction." Action et R�action: vie et aventures d�un couple. Don't be skeptical -- just as Sherlock Holmes amazed his companion by lighting on the fact of cigar ash or a hissing sound as the main clue to a murder or theft, the good philosophe spots such seemingly peripheral instances of usage in the language and takes them to be curious. It is the ability to see the familiar as something that once wasn't there, that exists now because of some concantenation of acts, which allows the philosopher to justly appeal to language. The modern philosophical act is liberating in so far as it frees us, momentarily, from a false image of necessity - the idea that because our words make sense, now, they have always made sense. That words are place-markers for this eternal sense. The traditional philosophical act, of course, sought just the opposite - sought to prove that the image of necessity we perceive in the language we speak was, in fact, derived from a true image of the world.
The interview -- Limited Inc has only read the first page, it is rich enough for one visit -- takes us up to the moment that Newton introduces the word reaction in his famous third axiom. What went before the coupling of action and reaction was action and passion. Here's what Starobinski has to say about it:
Les anciens opposent antith�tiquement, action et passion ; action et, traduisons " passion " dans un quasi synonyme " souffrance ", " agir et souffrir ". Cette souffrance, dans la pens�e de certains philosophes de l�antiquit� -Aristote, par exemple- elle est partout, et l�action aussi est partout. Quand Aristote r�fl�chit aux divers types de mouvements, il envisage un type de mouvement parmi d�autres qui est le mouvement dans l�espace; le mouvement local, celui que nous constatons quand nous donnons un coup � un corps dur ; dans le choc, le corps nous r�siste ; le doigt appuie sur la pierre et nous avons le sentiment que la pierre appuie sur le doigt. La pierre est d�une certaine fa�on passive quand nous appuyons notre doigt dessus et elle exerce quelque chose comme une action en retour, une r�pulsion : les anciens parlaient de passion. Le mot " r�action ", � travers des d�rivations qui ont pass� par le grec, n�a pas �t� constitu� dans la langue latine ancienne ; il n�existait pas ; oui, la r�pulsion, mais pas la r�action. Comment ce mot s�est-il form� ? Et bien il a fallu, tr�s probablement, qu�� travers des traductions arabes, ou en revenant au texte grec, des savants, th�ologiens, philosophes du Moyen-�ge, comme Albert le Grand, essaient d�adapter certains mots grecs, ou certains mots arabes � la langue latine sp�cialis�e qui �tait la leur. C'est alors qu'on pourra voir le mot " r�action " doubler le mot " passion ". Toute passion est une r�action ; elle est passive. La r�action est con�ue comme quelque chose de passif, mais qui partage quand m�me avec l�action une qualit� dynamique.
"The ancients opposed, authentically, action and passion; action and, translating passion in its quasi synonym, sufferance, to act and to suffer. That sufferance, in the thought of certain ancient philosophers, Aristotle for example, is everywhere, and action is also everywhere. When Aristotle reflects on the diverse types of movement, he envisions a type of movement among others which is movement in space; local movement, that which we observe when we give a blow to a hard body. In the shock, the body resists us. [In the blow] we hold a finger on a stone and we have the sentiment that the stone holds on the finger. The stone is in a certain manner passive when we rest our finger upon it and it exercizes something like an action in return, a repulsion: the ancients spoke of passion. The word, reaction, going through all the derivations that occured in Greek, wasn't constituted in ancient latin. It didn't exist. Yes, repulsion, , but not reaction. How was this word formed. Well, it was necessary, probably, that by way of arabic translation, or in returning to the Greek text, the thinkers, theologians, philosophers of the Middle Ages, like Albert the Great, tried to adapt certain greek words or certain arabic words to the specialized latin peculiar to them. It is thus that one can see the word "reaction" double the word "passion." All passion is a reaction. It is passive. Reaction is conceived as something passive, but which shared, nonetheless, a dynamic quality with action."
Brothers and sisters, are you aware of the Swiss site, culture actif? It is a little treasure trove of unexpected essays for the cultural critics among us. Limited Inc urges a visit. They have a five part interview with Jean Starobinski on his latest book, a meditation on the emergence of the term "reaction." Action et R�action: vie et aventures d�un couple. Don't be skeptical -- just as Sherlock Holmes amazed his companion by lighting on the fact of cigar ash or a hissing sound as the main clue to a murder or theft, the good philosophe spots such seemingly peripheral instances of usage in the language and takes them to be curious. It is the ability to see the familiar as something that once wasn't there, that exists now because of some concantenation of acts, which allows the philosopher to justly appeal to language. The modern philosophical act is liberating in so far as it frees us, momentarily, from a false image of necessity - the idea that because our words make sense, now, they have always made sense. That words are place-markers for this eternal sense. The traditional philosophical act, of course, sought just the opposite - sought to prove that the image of necessity we perceive in the language we speak was, in fact, derived from a true image of the world.
The interview -- Limited Inc has only read the first page, it is rich enough for one visit -- takes us up to the moment that Newton introduces the word reaction in his famous third axiom. What went before the coupling of action and reaction was action and passion. Here's what Starobinski has to say about it:
Les anciens opposent antith�tiquement, action et passion ; action et, traduisons " passion " dans un quasi synonyme " souffrance ", " agir et souffrir ". Cette souffrance, dans la pens�e de certains philosophes de l�antiquit� -Aristote, par exemple- elle est partout, et l�action aussi est partout. Quand Aristote r�fl�chit aux divers types de mouvements, il envisage un type de mouvement parmi d�autres qui est le mouvement dans l�espace; le mouvement local, celui que nous constatons quand nous donnons un coup � un corps dur ; dans le choc, le corps nous r�siste ; le doigt appuie sur la pierre et nous avons le sentiment que la pierre appuie sur le doigt. La pierre est d�une certaine fa�on passive quand nous appuyons notre doigt dessus et elle exerce quelque chose comme une action en retour, une r�pulsion : les anciens parlaient de passion. Le mot " r�action ", � travers des d�rivations qui ont pass� par le grec, n�a pas �t� constitu� dans la langue latine ancienne ; il n�existait pas ; oui, la r�pulsion, mais pas la r�action. Comment ce mot s�est-il form� ? Et bien il a fallu, tr�s probablement, qu�� travers des traductions arabes, ou en revenant au texte grec, des savants, th�ologiens, philosophes du Moyen-�ge, comme Albert le Grand, essaient d�adapter certains mots grecs, ou certains mots arabes � la langue latine sp�cialis�e qui �tait la leur. C'est alors qu'on pourra voir le mot " r�action " doubler le mot " passion ". Toute passion est une r�action ; elle est passive. La r�action est con�ue comme quelque chose de passif, mais qui partage quand m�me avec l�action une qualit� dynamique.
"The ancients opposed, authentically, action and passion; action and, translating passion in its quasi synonym, sufferance, to act and to suffer. That sufferance, in the thought of certain ancient philosophers, Aristotle for example, is everywhere, and action is also everywhere. When Aristotle reflects on the diverse types of movement, he envisions a type of movement among others which is movement in space; local movement, that which we observe when we give a blow to a hard body. In the shock, the body resists us. [In the blow] we hold a finger on a stone and we have the sentiment that the stone holds on the finger. The stone is in a certain manner passive when we rest our finger upon it and it exercizes something like an action in return, a repulsion: the ancients spoke of passion. The word, reaction, going through all the derivations that occured in Greek, wasn't constituted in ancient latin. It didn't exist. Yes, repulsion, , but not reaction. How was this word formed. Well, it was necessary, probably, that by way of arabic translation, or in returning to the Greek text, the thinkers, theologians, philosophers of the Middle Ages, like Albert the Great, tried to adapt certain greek words or certain arabic words to the specialized latin peculiar to them. It is thus that one can see the word "reaction" double the word "passion." All passion is a reaction. It is passive. Reaction is conceived as something passive, but which shared, nonetheless, a dynamic quality with action."
Thursday, February 7, 2002
Remora
Tom Powers made the case, years ago, that Heisenberg intentionally monkey-wrenched the Nazi Atom Bomb program. He could make this case because of the curious fact that the German atom bomb team had the resources to make much more progress towards the development of the bomb than they actually did. Richard Rhodes book on the hydrogen bomb, Dark Sun, shows that even the Soviet team was closing in on the bomb in the last years of the war. The Soviets, of course, had the advantages accrued from an espionage system that was delivering primo content about the Americans, yet the Soviet physicists got pretty far along on their own, too.
When Powers' book, Heisenberg's War, was published, it re-opened a debate about Heisenberg's role in the war. Powers thesis has been disputed for a while due to the release of transcripts showing what German physicists, interned in Farm Hall in England, said to each other when they heard the news about Hiroshima. Heisenberg said, "One can say that the first time large funds were made available in Germany was in the spring of 1942, after our meeting with Rust [the education minister] when we convinced him that we had absolutely definite proof that it could be done." There is also this interesting conversation between Heisenberg and Weisaecker:
"HEISENBERG: The point is that the whole structure of the relationship between the scientist and the state in Germany was such that although we were not 100% anxious to do it, on the other hand we were so little trusted by the state that even if we had wanted to do it, it would not have been easy to get it through.
DIEBNER: Because the officials were only interested in immediate results. They didn't want to work on a long-term policy as America did.
WEIZSAECKER: Even if we had gotten everything that we wanted, it is by no means certain whether we would have gotten as far as the Americans and English have now. There is no question that we were very nearly as far as they were, but it is a fact that we were all convinced that the thing could not have been completed during the war.
HEISENBERG: Well, that's not quite right. I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium engine, but I never thought we would make a bomb, and at the bottom of my heart I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a bomb. I must admit that.
What is at the bottom of a man's heart is seen by the Lord alone, as we know here at Limited Inc. And we also know there is no Lord, so it is seen by no-one -- an eminently Heisenbergian problem.
In any case, Heisenberg's enthusiasm has now been decisively clarified with the publication of a letter (subject to this report in the NYT) that Neils Bohr drafted (but never sent) to Heisenberg about a 1942 meeting between the two of them.
"Bohr, who died 40 years ago, said that under his beloved prot�g�, "everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons."
In particular, the documents describe a meeting that Heisenberg initiated between the two men in occupied Denmark in September 1941.
After the war, Heisenberg said he traveled to Copenhagen to share his qualms about nuclear weapons. But the papers, released by the Bohr family and posted on the Niels Bohr Web site, www.nba.nbi.dk, which is maintained by the Niels Bohr Archive, tell a different story."
Powers still claims that Bohr and Heisenberg were talking past each other. But the Farm Hall recording (made without the physicists being aware of it) seems to accord pretty well with Bohr's memory. Of course, Heisenberg wasn't a Nazi. He knew that the Nazi attack on "Jewish science" was utter nonsense. But he was a patriotic German. His stance was shared by much of the German high command, external and damning obedience while sustaining, in the inner exile at the bottom of the heart, his dissent.
Sounds like the way Limited Inc is living through the Bush era.
Tom Powers made the case, years ago, that Heisenberg intentionally monkey-wrenched the Nazi Atom Bomb program. He could make this case because of the curious fact that the German atom bomb team had the resources to make much more progress towards the development of the bomb than they actually did. Richard Rhodes book on the hydrogen bomb, Dark Sun, shows that even the Soviet team was closing in on the bomb in the last years of the war. The Soviets, of course, had the advantages accrued from an espionage system that was delivering primo content about the Americans, yet the Soviet physicists got pretty far along on their own, too.
When Powers' book, Heisenberg's War, was published, it re-opened a debate about Heisenberg's role in the war. Powers thesis has been disputed for a while due to the release of transcripts showing what German physicists, interned in Farm Hall in England, said to each other when they heard the news about Hiroshima. Heisenberg said, "One can say that the first time large funds were made available in Germany was in the spring of 1942, after our meeting with Rust [the education minister] when we convinced him that we had absolutely definite proof that it could be done." There is also this interesting conversation between Heisenberg and Weisaecker:
"HEISENBERG: The point is that the whole structure of the relationship between the scientist and the state in Germany was such that although we were not 100% anxious to do it, on the other hand we were so little trusted by the state that even if we had wanted to do it, it would not have been easy to get it through.
DIEBNER: Because the officials were only interested in immediate results. They didn't want to work on a long-term policy as America did.
WEIZSAECKER: Even if we had gotten everything that we wanted, it is by no means certain whether we would have gotten as far as the Americans and English have now. There is no question that we were very nearly as far as they were, but it is a fact that we were all convinced that the thing could not have been completed during the war.
HEISENBERG: Well, that's not quite right. I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium engine, but I never thought we would make a bomb, and at the bottom of my heart I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a bomb. I must admit that.
What is at the bottom of a man's heart is seen by the Lord alone, as we know here at Limited Inc. And we also know there is no Lord, so it is seen by no-one -- an eminently Heisenbergian problem.
In any case, Heisenberg's enthusiasm has now been decisively clarified with the publication of a letter (subject to this report in the NYT) that Neils Bohr drafted (but never sent) to Heisenberg about a 1942 meeting between the two of them.
"Bohr, who died 40 years ago, said that under his beloved prot�g�, "everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons."
In particular, the documents describe a meeting that Heisenberg initiated between the two men in occupied Denmark in September 1941.
After the war, Heisenberg said he traveled to Copenhagen to share his qualms about nuclear weapons. But the papers, released by the Bohr family and posted on the Niels Bohr Web site, www.nba.nbi.dk, which is maintained by the Niels Bohr Archive, tell a different story."
Powers still claims that Bohr and Heisenberg were talking past each other. But the Farm Hall recording (made without the physicists being aware of it) seems to accord pretty well with Bohr's memory. Of course, Heisenberg wasn't a Nazi. He knew that the Nazi attack on "Jewish science" was utter nonsense. But he was a patriotic German. His stance was shared by much of the German high command, external and damning obedience while sustaining, in the inner exile at the bottom of the heart, his dissent.
Sounds like the way Limited Inc is living through the Bush era.
Wednesday, February 6, 2002
Remora
Limited Inc wants to point you, this morning, to this article by Ken Silverstein in the American Prospect.The article is a variation on shooting ducks in a barrel -- Silverstein trolls the American press for its past coverage of various Latin American free marketeers, who have recently been coming to bad ends, along with their countries. The coverage, it turns out (to no one's surprise) was more starry eyed than accurate, reflecting the usual fantasies of the exploiter class. Oh, drat, there's that Marxist vocabulary again! What we meant to say is that it reflected the innovative but sometimes not quite realistic thinking of the entrepeneurial class. Is that better?
Here's a pin-em-to-the-wall graf:
"Among Latin America's "reform-minded leaders," according to a laudatory 1991 article in the Post, were Menem, Carlos Andres Perez in Venezuela, Carlos Salinas in Mexico, Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil, and Alberto Fujimori in Peru. A decade later, one of these five crusading reformers has been impeached, three live abroad in disgrace, and the other, Menem, is widely reviled and suspected of plundering Argentina's state treasury. Had the U.S. press not cavalierly dismissed the "short-term pain of millions," [a phrase used in another Post article] maybe none of this would have come as such a big surprise."
Silverstein flips through the careers of the big five highlighted by the Post. What do we find in the eight years since Latin America discovered the magic of the marketplace? Thuggery, bribetaking, bubble markets, devaluations, suitcase toting exile, police repression, and ineffectual bail-outs. Sound familiar? Sound like the seventies? Sound like the eighties? It should. The same situations get repeated over and over because there is no cool vision about just whose interest is being served in the formation of economic policy. Why, after all, should the US be considered a neutral party when it operates, and has always operated, in its self interest? I've just finished an interesting book about just this subject: Uncommon Grounds, the history of coffee and how it transformed our world, by Mark Pendergrast. Coffee once accounted for up to 40% of Brazil's GDP. It is still a major export. The US is the major consumer of the drink. And the history of the trade between the US and all the coffee producing countries of Central and South America is poisonous, a matter of stolen Indian land, oversupply, and continual pressure by the US to keep coffee prices as low as possible. I think we will have more to say about this book in a later post.
Here's another Silverstein graf. Venezuala is in the news today -- its current honcho, Chavez, apparently thinks Castro's polity is some kind of model to mimic. A back to the future kind of thing. A let's get retro kind of thing. Here's the background.
"Consider Venezuela. After Perez was elected in 1989, its economy was the first in Latin America to be deemed a miracle. The country's gross national product climbed sharply at the start of Perez's tenure, but simultaneous austerity policies caused the real value of salaries to fall by almost half. In 1989 the government decided to triple bus fares. Riots broke out, and the security forces summoned to quell them killed somewhere between 400 and several thousand people, mostly in the poor barrios. Perez's popularity plummeted. For some reason, this baffled The Miami Herald, which reported in 1992 that international economists were "puzzled by Venezuela's generalized malaise because this oil-rich country is the economic star of the Americas."
Implicated in a series of corruption scandals, Perez was forced to resign in 1993. He now resides in the Dominican Republic. Last December a Venezuelan judge announced that his court was considering bringing charges against the former president and that Perez would be placed under house arrest if he returns home."
Limited Inc wants to point you, this morning, to this article by Ken Silverstein in the American Prospect.The article is a variation on shooting ducks in a barrel -- Silverstein trolls the American press for its past coverage of various Latin American free marketeers, who have recently been coming to bad ends, along with their countries. The coverage, it turns out (to no one's surprise) was more starry eyed than accurate, reflecting the usual fantasies of the exploiter class. Oh, drat, there's that Marxist vocabulary again! What we meant to say is that it reflected the innovative but sometimes not quite realistic thinking of the entrepeneurial class. Is that better?
Here's a pin-em-to-the-wall graf:
"Among Latin America's "reform-minded leaders," according to a laudatory 1991 article in the Post, were Menem, Carlos Andres Perez in Venezuela, Carlos Salinas in Mexico, Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil, and Alberto Fujimori in Peru. A decade later, one of these five crusading reformers has been impeached, three live abroad in disgrace, and the other, Menem, is widely reviled and suspected of plundering Argentina's state treasury. Had the U.S. press not cavalierly dismissed the "short-term pain of millions," [a phrase used in another Post article] maybe none of this would have come as such a big surprise."
Silverstein flips through the careers of the big five highlighted by the Post. What do we find in the eight years since Latin America discovered the magic of the marketplace? Thuggery, bribetaking, bubble markets, devaluations, suitcase toting exile, police repression, and ineffectual bail-outs. Sound familiar? Sound like the seventies? Sound like the eighties? It should. The same situations get repeated over and over because there is no cool vision about just whose interest is being served in the formation of economic policy. Why, after all, should the US be considered a neutral party when it operates, and has always operated, in its self interest? I've just finished an interesting book about just this subject: Uncommon Grounds, the history of coffee and how it transformed our world, by Mark Pendergrast. Coffee once accounted for up to 40% of Brazil's GDP. It is still a major export. The US is the major consumer of the drink. And the history of the trade between the US and all the coffee producing countries of Central and South America is poisonous, a matter of stolen Indian land, oversupply, and continual pressure by the US to keep coffee prices as low as possible. I think we will have more to say about this book in a later post.
Here's another Silverstein graf. Venezuala is in the news today -- its current honcho, Chavez, apparently thinks Castro's polity is some kind of model to mimic. A back to the future kind of thing. A let's get retro kind of thing. Here's the background.
"Consider Venezuela. After Perez was elected in 1989, its economy was the first in Latin America to be deemed a miracle. The country's gross national product climbed sharply at the start of Perez's tenure, but simultaneous austerity policies caused the real value of salaries to fall by almost half. In 1989 the government decided to triple bus fares. Riots broke out, and the security forces summoned to quell them killed somewhere between 400 and several thousand people, mostly in the poor barrios. Perez's popularity plummeted. For some reason, this baffled The Miami Herald, which reported in 1992 that international economists were "puzzled by Venezuela's generalized malaise because this oil-rich country is the economic star of the Americas."
Implicated in a series of corruption scandals, Perez was forced to resign in 1993. He now resides in the Dominican Republic. Last December a Venezuelan judge announced that his court was considering bringing charges against the former president and that Perez would be placed under house arrest if he returns home."
Tuesday, February 5, 2002
Dope
Limited Inc amused a friend in L.A. a month ago by arguing that the 20th century's greatest scientist, in terms of the impact of his work on human history, was not Albert Einstein, but Fritz Haber. True, if Time Magazine had put Haber's picture on the cover as the greatest person of the century, the iconic resonance would have been somewhat less. As in, people would say, who the hell is Fritz Haber?
Here's what Haber did:
"On July 2, 1909, Haber and a colleague in the laboratory at Karlsruhe produced a continuous flow of liquid ammonia, about a pint in five hours, from hydrogen and nitrogen fed into a hot five-inch iron tube a couple of feet tall, the gases at 200 atmospheres pressure over an osmium metal catalyst."
Sounds, well, boring, right? But before Haber synthesized nitrogen, the world agricultural system depended on either organism induced nitrogen enrichment -- via the humble legume -- or enrichment by way of waste, whether that of birds (guano) or of humans (nightsoil) or of the beasts of the field and the street (which is why the immense amounts of horse shit deposited in cities in the 19th century eventually wound its way back to the field). My friend was amused because this sounds like a curious, but in itself unimportant, fact. It is something only a crank would pounce on. As you know, dear reader, Limited Inc has never been afraid of crankishness. Haber, whose work was put into workable factory order by Bosch (hence the name for the Haber-Bosch process), was not the genius Einstein was -- in fact, he wasn't a genius at all, just an exceptionally clever chemist. Probably someone else would have come along and synthesized nitrogen in the 20th century if Haber hadn't done it -- but the fact is, Haber did do it. As William McNeill wrote in Something New Under the Sun, his environmental history of the 20th century, without synthesized fertilizer, the world could only support its present human population by putting an area of land equal to the size of Latin America under cultivation.
Environmentalists, Limited Inc feels, have never fully confronted this fact. The assumption of those who decry the quantity of environmental harm caused by fertilizers -- and it is immense -- is that if these fertilizers didn't exist, a Malthusian mechanism would have culled the world population, thus maintaining an equilibrium between population and resources. Yet this kind of thinking -- which is based on the classical economic models of the 19th century -- doesn't convince us. Perhaps the one to two billion extra people we can surely attibute to synthesized nitrogen just wouldn't have materialized given the more restrained resources of the pre-Haber world; yet look at the 19th century's patterns of cultivation, the seemingly unstoppable acquisition and use of lands as diverse as the Great Prairies and the pampas, and it is easy to imagine another case, in which even greater swathes of tropical land area would be put to the plow as food needs expand.
The American Scientist review of Vaclav Smil's book on Haber draws the consequences of Haber's work for you, sitting at home with your cornflakes:
"In the year 2000, Haber�Bosch synthesis worldwide produced about 2 million tons of ammonia a week. For the 6 billion of us to be fed now, Haber� Bosch synthesis provides more than
99 percent of all inorganic nitrogen inputs to farms. Synthetic ammonia supplies about the same nitrogen tonnage in fertilizer for our crops as all green nature gains both from its microorganisms and from lightning. The raw materials for Haber�Bosch synthesis are atmospheric N2 and the natural gas that supplies both hydrogen and most of the energy. Haber�Bosch today uses energy quite frugally; only one-sixtieth of commercial fuel worldwide is now used to make ammonia.
The country that now synthesizes most ammonia is neither Germany nor Japan nor the United States, but the land where the most people sit daily to table�China. About one-third of its limited natural gas is used to make fertilizer, and in many older, smaller plants much coal is used as well. Children in the developing world feed on crops grown with fertilizer made from synthetic ammonia, and the 2 or 3 billion more of us who will arrive by mid-century will do the same."
It is hard to imagine the world without synthetic ammonia. Certainly it would be a world much less urbanized than our own. The great fact of the 20th century is that rural society, as the dominant force in culture, disappears, at least in the Western Industrial societies. In fact, it has disappeared so rapidly, and so completely, that few people are aware of the negative space, so to speak, thereby created.
As for Fritz Haber, his life could have figured in a play by his contemporary, Georg Kaiser:
"The Haber-Bosch process is generally credited with keeping Germany supplied with fertilizers and munitions during World War I, after the British naval blockade cut off supplies of nitrates from Chile. During the war Haber threw his energies and those of his institute into further support for the German side. He developed a new weapon�poison gas, the first example of which was chlorine gas�and supervised its initial deployment on the Western Front at Ypres, Belgium, in 1915. His promotion of this frightening weapon precipitated the suicide of his wife, who was herself a chemist, and many others condemned him for his wartime role. There was great consternation when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for 1918 for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements.
After World War I, Haber was remarkably successful in building up his institute, but in 1933 the anti-Jewish decrees of the Nazi regime made his position untenable. He retired a broken man, although at the time of his death he was on his way to investigate a possible senior research position at Rehovot in Palestine (now Israel)."
Limited Inc amused a friend in L.A. a month ago by arguing that the 20th century's greatest scientist, in terms of the impact of his work on human history, was not Albert Einstein, but Fritz Haber. True, if Time Magazine had put Haber's picture on the cover as the greatest person of the century, the iconic resonance would have been somewhat less. As in, people would say, who the hell is Fritz Haber?
Here's what Haber did:
"On July 2, 1909, Haber and a colleague in the laboratory at Karlsruhe produced a continuous flow of liquid ammonia, about a pint in five hours, from hydrogen and nitrogen fed into a hot five-inch iron tube a couple of feet tall, the gases at 200 atmospheres pressure over an osmium metal catalyst."
Sounds, well, boring, right? But before Haber synthesized nitrogen, the world agricultural system depended on either organism induced nitrogen enrichment -- via the humble legume -- or enrichment by way of waste, whether that of birds (guano) or of humans (nightsoil) or of the beasts of the field and the street (which is why the immense amounts of horse shit deposited in cities in the 19th century eventually wound its way back to the field). My friend was amused because this sounds like a curious, but in itself unimportant, fact. It is something only a crank would pounce on. As you know, dear reader, Limited Inc has never been afraid of crankishness. Haber, whose work was put into workable factory order by Bosch (hence the name for the Haber-Bosch process), was not the genius Einstein was -- in fact, he wasn't a genius at all, just an exceptionally clever chemist. Probably someone else would have come along and synthesized nitrogen in the 20th century if Haber hadn't done it -- but the fact is, Haber did do it. As William McNeill wrote in Something New Under the Sun, his environmental history of the 20th century, without synthesized fertilizer, the world could only support its present human population by putting an area of land equal to the size of Latin America under cultivation.
Environmentalists, Limited Inc feels, have never fully confronted this fact. The assumption of those who decry the quantity of environmental harm caused by fertilizers -- and it is immense -- is that if these fertilizers didn't exist, a Malthusian mechanism would have culled the world population, thus maintaining an equilibrium between population and resources. Yet this kind of thinking -- which is based on the classical economic models of the 19th century -- doesn't convince us. Perhaps the one to two billion extra people we can surely attibute to synthesized nitrogen just wouldn't have materialized given the more restrained resources of the pre-Haber world; yet look at the 19th century's patterns of cultivation, the seemingly unstoppable acquisition and use of lands as diverse as the Great Prairies and the pampas, and it is easy to imagine another case, in which even greater swathes of tropical land area would be put to the plow as food needs expand.
The American Scientist review of Vaclav Smil's book on Haber draws the consequences of Haber's work for you, sitting at home with your cornflakes:
"In the year 2000, Haber�Bosch synthesis worldwide produced about 2 million tons of ammonia a week. For the 6 billion of us to be fed now, Haber� Bosch synthesis provides more than
99 percent of all inorganic nitrogen inputs to farms. Synthetic ammonia supplies about the same nitrogen tonnage in fertilizer for our crops as all green nature gains both from its microorganisms and from lightning. The raw materials for Haber�Bosch synthesis are atmospheric N2 and the natural gas that supplies both hydrogen and most of the energy. Haber�Bosch today uses energy quite frugally; only one-sixtieth of commercial fuel worldwide is now used to make ammonia.
The country that now synthesizes most ammonia is neither Germany nor Japan nor the United States, but the land where the most people sit daily to table�China. About one-third of its limited natural gas is used to make fertilizer, and in many older, smaller plants much coal is used as well. Children in the developing world feed on crops grown with fertilizer made from synthetic ammonia, and the 2 or 3 billion more of us who will arrive by mid-century will do the same."
It is hard to imagine the world without synthetic ammonia. Certainly it would be a world much less urbanized than our own. The great fact of the 20th century is that rural society, as the dominant force in culture, disappears, at least in the Western Industrial societies. In fact, it has disappeared so rapidly, and so completely, that few people are aware of the negative space, so to speak, thereby created.
As for Fritz Haber, his life could have figured in a play by his contemporary, Georg Kaiser:
"The Haber-Bosch process is generally credited with keeping Germany supplied with fertilizers and munitions during World War I, after the British naval blockade cut off supplies of nitrates from Chile. During the war Haber threw his energies and those of his institute into further support for the German side. He developed a new weapon�poison gas, the first example of which was chlorine gas�and supervised its initial deployment on the Western Front at Ypres, Belgium, in 1915. His promotion of this frightening weapon precipitated the suicide of his wife, who was herself a chemist, and many others condemned him for his wartime role. There was great consternation when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for 1918 for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements.
After World War I, Haber was remarkably successful in building up his institute, but in 1933 the anti-Jewish decrees of the Nazi regime made his position untenable. He retired a broken man, although at the time of his death he was on his way to investigate a possible senior research position at Rehovot in Palestine (now Israel)."
Monday, February 4, 2002
Remora
Our readers are francophiles to a manjack, right? Or if they aren't, what are they doing reading a weblog named for Derrida's famous invective? Well, messieurs et mesdames, you must go to Eric Ormsby's piece on Louis Simpson's Villon translations in the New Criterion. The first couple of paragraphs try to hard to make the case that Villon was, supremely, the poet of farewell -- although there is, certainly, something to that notion, Ormsby is warming to his subject, and isn't quite there yet. We are being tickled with rhetoric, here. Still, it is a useful idea. One is reminded of that Mandelstam verse, "I have studied the science of farewells", in Tristia -- 'farewells' we prefer to goodbys, and surely to parting, as in this translation of Mandelstam's most famous poem in Archipelago:
I have studied the science of parting
In the bareheaded laments of night.
Oxen chew, the waiting drags on
As the vigil stretches the night�s last hour.
I honored the ritual of the crowing night
When I took up the traveler�s heavy grief.
I saw in a woman�s distant eyes
Tears mingling with the muses� song.
Villon, who knew to the intake of smelly breath the stable sounds of chewing oxen, was not burdened with Mandelstam's history. His farewells do not ring out with our knowledge of the slaughtered past and to come. They are, rather, the goodbys launched by men about to be hung for bawdry, theft, murder -- all the ways of the riotous reprobate. Villon, of course, can be made into a sentimental roustabout -- in the same way Rabelais becomes Rabelaisian, an excuse for Victorian scatology. Orwell pointed out how all too embarrassing the term Rabelaisian is in some essay. Ormsby avoids that image in his review, pulling up, instead, those features in Villon that re-emerge in Baudelaire, in Rimbaud, in Celine -- that omni-directional rage, with its curious intervals of complete self-lessness. Here's a beautiful passage on Villon's women:
"Villon clearly loved women, for whom he had a surprisingly subtle and sympathetic regard; they are certainly the dominant figures in his testamentary poetry: not only his own mother or the Virgin Mary, but also the various lovers he alternately excoriates, cajoles, and caresses. His masterpiece in this genre is undoubtedly the long lament usually known as �La Belle Heaulmi�re,� or �The Beautiful Helmet Maker,� after its protagonist. Villon�s poem is an extended illustration, if one were needed, of Baudelaire�s line four-hundred years later that �c�est un dur m�tier d��tre belle femme� (�It�s hard work being a bombshell�). An old woman, la Belle Heaulmi�re, catalogues her charms as they once were and as they are now; like Villon, she grasps herself only in the backward glance. The poem is remarkable in that its compassion is tacit and arises from the unflinching scrutiny of a woman�s body in decline. Unlike other compositions of the time, it is not prompted by malicious delight or the kind of Tartuffian schadenfreude that seems to have motivated so many medieval denunciations of the female form. Instead, pity and terror are aroused.
Pretty shoulders, long and slender
Arms; beautiful hands and wrists,
That my fate seemed to intend for
Heated tourneys in the lists
Of passion � small, tilting breasts,
Rounded thighs, wide loins, and then
The vulva in its little nest
In the middle of the garden.
Horribly, these have now become:
Wrinkled forehead and gray hair,
Sunken eyebrows, and the eyes
Whose laughter drove men to despair,
Clouding � again to itemize.
The nose that was a perfect size,
Hooked. Two hairy ears hang down.
You�d have to look hard to realize
This death�s-head is a face you�ve known.
Ah, as Limited Inc plummets through middle age like Lucifer thrown out of the American heaven of perpetual adolescence, the death's head is rapidly becoming his own inexcusable, unmitigated face. We must go out and read some Villon today.
Our readers are francophiles to a manjack, right? Or if they aren't, what are they doing reading a weblog named for Derrida's famous invective? Well, messieurs et mesdames, you must go to Eric Ormsby's piece on Louis Simpson's Villon translations in the New Criterion. The first couple of paragraphs try to hard to make the case that Villon was, supremely, the poet of farewell -- although there is, certainly, something to that notion, Ormsby is warming to his subject, and isn't quite there yet. We are being tickled with rhetoric, here. Still, it is a useful idea. One is reminded of that Mandelstam verse, "I have studied the science of farewells", in Tristia -- 'farewells' we prefer to goodbys, and surely to parting, as in this translation of Mandelstam's most famous poem in Archipelago:
I have studied the science of parting
In the bareheaded laments of night.
Oxen chew, the waiting drags on
As the vigil stretches the night�s last hour.
I honored the ritual of the crowing night
When I took up the traveler�s heavy grief.
I saw in a woman�s distant eyes
Tears mingling with the muses� song.
Villon, who knew to the intake of smelly breath the stable sounds of chewing oxen, was not burdened with Mandelstam's history. His farewells do not ring out with our knowledge of the slaughtered past and to come. They are, rather, the goodbys launched by men about to be hung for bawdry, theft, murder -- all the ways of the riotous reprobate. Villon, of course, can be made into a sentimental roustabout -- in the same way Rabelais becomes Rabelaisian, an excuse for Victorian scatology. Orwell pointed out how all too embarrassing the term Rabelaisian is in some essay. Ormsby avoids that image in his review, pulling up, instead, those features in Villon that re-emerge in Baudelaire, in Rimbaud, in Celine -- that omni-directional rage, with its curious intervals of complete self-lessness. Here's a beautiful passage on Villon's women:
"Villon clearly loved women, for whom he had a surprisingly subtle and sympathetic regard; they are certainly the dominant figures in his testamentary poetry: not only his own mother or the Virgin Mary, but also the various lovers he alternately excoriates, cajoles, and caresses. His masterpiece in this genre is undoubtedly the long lament usually known as �La Belle Heaulmi�re,� or �The Beautiful Helmet Maker,� after its protagonist. Villon�s poem is an extended illustration, if one were needed, of Baudelaire�s line four-hundred years later that �c�est un dur m�tier d��tre belle femme� (�It�s hard work being a bombshell�). An old woman, la Belle Heaulmi�re, catalogues her charms as they once were and as they are now; like Villon, she grasps herself only in the backward glance. The poem is remarkable in that its compassion is tacit and arises from the unflinching scrutiny of a woman�s body in decline. Unlike other compositions of the time, it is not prompted by malicious delight or the kind of Tartuffian schadenfreude that seems to have motivated so many medieval denunciations of the female form. Instead, pity and terror are aroused.
Pretty shoulders, long and slender
Arms; beautiful hands and wrists,
That my fate seemed to intend for
Heated tourneys in the lists
Of passion � small, tilting breasts,
Rounded thighs, wide loins, and then
The vulva in its little nest
In the middle of the garden.
Horribly, these have now become:
Wrinkled forehead and gray hair,
Sunken eyebrows, and the eyes
Whose laughter drove men to despair,
Clouding � again to itemize.
The nose that was a perfect size,
Hooked. Two hairy ears hang down.
You�d have to look hard to realize
This death�s-head is a face you�ve known.
Ah, as Limited Inc plummets through middle age like Lucifer thrown out of the American heaven of perpetual adolescence, the death's head is rapidly becoming his own inexcusable, unmitigated face. We must go out and read some Villon today.
Sunday, February 3, 2002
Remora
Limited Inc admits that we were once forced, in a philosophy class, to peruse Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick's masterpiece. We did not come away from the experience with the awe of the convert; we didn't even retain a polemical disdain for the book's sophistries. We simply found the book trite. Nozick's book generated excitement among a generation of philosophers trained in logic chopping and little else. Since logic chopping is a useful but minor instrument, they were left at a loss -- what do you do once you have diagrammed the prisoner's dilemma ten times over? They had no sense of repertoire, which they mistook this gap in their brains for a mission to make philosophy a science. Why read anything that wasn't in English? Why read anything that was written before 1945?
Well, in one sense the logic choppers have a point. The history of philosophy is, in itself, of little importance. Carnap once noted, somewhere, his distress at the philosophy department meetings in the U. of Chicago in the 40s, where collegues would say things like, oh, the important thing about evolution is that Thomas Acquinus refuted it in such and such a tractate. In other words, learned ignorance of the most repellent type.
What reading books, not articles, and books published before 1945, and books published even in French or German, mindboggling as that is, does is, it gives one a repertoire of themes, references, and variations. This, Limited Inc would argue, is an essential feature of the intellectual vocations.
Now, Robert Nozick is dead. The Economist published a review of his new book in order to praise the man. Unfortunately, the Economist reviewer has merely grazed philosophy, no doubt in his pre-law days at some fond U. The reviewer is impressed by Nozick's less than Wildean one-liners ("Yet in the vigour of its arguments, the punch of its formulations (taxation is �on a par with forced labour�; �to each as they choose, from each as they are chosen�) and the breadth of its attack, the book had an impact far beyond the academic world); he is obviously sympathetic with Nozick's conservativism; but he has no idea what philosophers, like, do. Here's a sample graf:
"After his first book, he turned to pure philosophy, joking that he did not want to write "Anarchy, State and Utopia II". In 1981 came "Philosophical Explanations", which contains a famous chapter asking a seemingly bootless question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?", as well as chapters on personal identity and on free will. It is best remembered for an ingenious argument against scepticism, and for a dispositional account of knowledge as true belief that would reliably stick with the truth (or self-correct) as relevant circumstances changed."
Wow. The reviewer has obviously never heard of Leibnitz -- and God knows what he thinks Heidegger did (most likely, he gets his idea of big H from the journals, and so thinks of Heidegger as Hitler's speech writer). The bootless question is also taken up by Shestov, figures in Sartre, and has been trampled on by hundreds of the lesser fry. And as for the Quinean tang of the Nozick's dispositional thesis, forget it. It is way over the reviewer's head.
However, it is the grace note at the end that will make the literate reader wince.
"Philosophy begins in wonder, he writes at the end, with a silent nod to A.N. Whitehead." That silent nod is Nozick snoozing off. We are riffing on a platitude that goes back to Aristotle. And not the Onassis one. The Economist would do well to select its encomiasts for dead philosophers among a pool of writers that has read one or two of them.
Limited Inc admits that we were once forced, in a philosophy class, to peruse Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick's masterpiece. We did not come away from the experience with the awe of the convert; we didn't even retain a polemical disdain for the book's sophistries. We simply found the book trite. Nozick's book generated excitement among a generation of philosophers trained in logic chopping and little else. Since logic chopping is a useful but minor instrument, they were left at a loss -- what do you do once you have diagrammed the prisoner's dilemma ten times over? They had no sense of repertoire, which they mistook this gap in their brains for a mission to make philosophy a science. Why read anything that wasn't in English? Why read anything that was written before 1945?
Well, in one sense the logic choppers have a point. The history of philosophy is, in itself, of little importance. Carnap once noted, somewhere, his distress at the philosophy department meetings in the U. of Chicago in the 40s, where collegues would say things like, oh, the important thing about evolution is that Thomas Acquinus refuted it in such and such a tractate. In other words, learned ignorance of the most repellent type.
What reading books, not articles, and books published before 1945, and books published even in French or German, mindboggling as that is, does is, it gives one a repertoire of themes, references, and variations. This, Limited Inc would argue, is an essential feature of the intellectual vocations.
Now, Robert Nozick is dead. The Economist published a review of his new book in order to praise the man. Unfortunately, the Economist reviewer has merely grazed philosophy, no doubt in his pre-law days at some fond U. The reviewer is impressed by Nozick's less than Wildean one-liners ("Yet in the vigour of its arguments, the punch of its formulations (taxation is �on a par with forced labour�; �to each as they choose, from each as they are chosen�) and the breadth of its attack, the book had an impact far beyond the academic world); he is obviously sympathetic with Nozick's conservativism; but he has no idea what philosophers, like, do. Here's a sample graf:
"After his first book, he turned to pure philosophy, joking that he did not want to write "Anarchy, State and Utopia II". In 1981 came "Philosophical Explanations", which contains a famous chapter asking a seemingly bootless question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?", as well as chapters on personal identity and on free will. It is best remembered for an ingenious argument against scepticism, and for a dispositional account of knowledge as true belief that would reliably stick with the truth (or self-correct) as relevant circumstances changed."
Wow. The reviewer has obviously never heard of Leibnitz -- and God knows what he thinks Heidegger did (most likely, he gets his idea of big H from the journals, and so thinks of Heidegger as Hitler's speech writer). The bootless question is also taken up by Shestov, figures in Sartre, and has been trampled on by hundreds of the lesser fry. And as for the Quinean tang of the Nozick's dispositional thesis, forget it. It is way over the reviewer's head.
However, it is the grace note at the end that will make the literate reader wince.
"Philosophy begins in wonder, he writes at the end, with a silent nod to A.N. Whitehead." That silent nod is Nozick snoozing off. We are riffing on a platitude that goes back to Aristotle. And not the Onassis one. The Economist would do well to select its encomiasts for dead philosophers among a pool of writers that has read one or two of them.
Friday, February 1, 2002
Remora
There's a weblog of the plutocrats ball in NYC. It has links to what's going on and how it is reported. The weblogger, Lance Knobel, seems mildly shocked by conspicuous consumption of the type reported by Alex KUCZYNSKI with her typical dry cocktail style -- mix champagne and battery acid, stir. We, of course, love it:
"Heidi Klum, the blond supermodel perhaps best known for her ability to display the charms of the Victoria's Secret Miracle Bra, stood in a crowd of bankers, diplomats, Nobel Prize winners and executives at Brasserie on Wednesday night, marveling at the roster of parties accompanying this year's World Economic Forum, held for the first time in New York.
There are so many, she said, some so exclusive that even she might not be invited, like the private Elton John concert for 200 guests sponsored by Lehman Brothers tonight at the Four Seasons restaurant.
Ms. Klum turned to her publicist, Desiree Gruber, and asked: "Well, are we going or not?"
"No," Ms. Gruber said, her mouth set in grim resignation. "We haven't been invited."
Ms. Kuczynski goes on to reveal that Sir Elton is playing his cheese for a cool million dished out by Lehman brothers. And you thought there was no reason for those mass layoffs on Wall Street, didn't you?
There's a weblog of the plutocrats ball in NYC. It has links to what's going on and how it is reported. The weblogger, Lance Knobel, seems mildly shocked by conspicuous consumption of the type reported by Alex KUCZYNSKI with her typical dry cocktail style -- mix champagne and battery acid, stir. We, of course, love it:
"Heidi Klum, the blond supermodel perhaps best known for her ability to display the charms of the Victoria's Secret Miracle Bra, stood in a crowd of bankers, diplomats, Nobel Prize winners and executives at Brasserie on Wednesday night, marveling at the roster of parties accompanying this year's World Economic Forum, held for the first time in New York.
There are so many, she said, some so exclusive that even she might not be invited, like the private Elton John concert for 200 guests sponsored by Lehman Brothers tonight at the Four Seasons restaurant.
Ms. Klum turned to her publicist, Desiree Gruber, and asked: "Well, are we going or not?"
"No," Ms. Gruber said, her mouth set in grim resignation. "We haven't been invited."
Ms. Kuczynski goes on to reveal that Sir Elton is playing his cheese for a cool million dished out by Lehman brothers. And you thought there was no reason for those mass layoffs on Wall Street, didn't you?
Dope
We put up our hot little relativism post [1/30/02] in much the same spirit that the Duke nailed up his posters for the Royal Nonesuch, with its final line: LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED: "if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!" Alas, our line didn't fetch em. Lately there has been a royal falling off of site hits. Proof, perhaps, that our obsessions are not those of the zeitgeist. Or proof that Limited Inc. should sprinkle our posts with "girles" or "tits" to fetch that crowd (peculiarly concentrated in Saudi Arabia for some reason) looking for a combo of both. But no, no, this is how far our head is up our ass: we figure to draw the multitudes with relativism.
So we wrote to one of our readers, Alan, who has previously figured on this site before as our in-house critic. We asked why our post didn't fetch him. Here's his reply:
One reason I didn't respond was I wasn't real sure what you were trying to
say, and so my response would have taken the form of indefinite expansion
("Your claim could be interpreted as A, B, or C. If A, then ...; if B, then
...,). But, since you goad me, I guess I'll have to jump into this one, so
here goes with an analytic-philosopher type question:
You say that
(1)Cultural diversity is unavoidable; cultures arise and form themselves
with regard to their differences.
I have a problem here; I don't see that there is anything conceptually
impossible about the notion of a hermetically sealed and isolated culture.
Can't we imagine a group of people who have, in the robust sense, a "way of
life", with religious and political institutions etc., while being
completely unaware of the existence of any other human groups. Empirically,
we don't find any such groups in the world, but that's another matter.
You say later on that
(2)[My relativism comes out of the idea that] Any point of view is formed by
struggle against other points of view -- it isn't given to us, ab nihilo.
Could we cite as an example here the Freudian view that the ego arises out
the conflict between the desires and mental representations of parental
authority? (Eschewing Teutonic jargon. If so, I see what you're getting at,
but then I don't see how anything about specifically cultural diversity
follows from it.
So . . . could you elaborate (1) in sufficiently determinate form so that I
can see how (2) is supposed to be a consequence thereof?
a.
And here is our reply:
Cool, I got you to bite.
Anyway, I would say that the crucial point is whether your idea of the hermetically sealed and isolated culture could be true. Your point is that one can imagine such a culture. But I don't really think one can imagine such a culture. That doesn't mean that there aren't Pitcairn islands where maroons, whether voluntary or not, do make themselves into a "culture," but even there they start to evolve. And of course they come from elsewhere -- not Adam and Eve, and but other cultures. To my mind, imagining a sealed and hermetic culture is like imagining a sealed and hermetic species -- this isn't just empirically non-existent, it couldn't be existent if evolutionary theory makes a true claim about speciation. Reversing your empirical/theoretical split, I'd say that no culture would long remain sealed and hermetic without producing cultural variants that would, in the long run, turn it into 2+ cultures.
That is my strong claim. Now, the question is, how can I back it up. And this would involve claiming a dialectical view of culture -- that the thing we call a culture, with its indistinct boundaries, is not just peripherally engaged in struggles with other cultures, but that struggle is how it builds as a culture. In other words, I hold to a thoroughly dialectical view of how cultures are.
Now if this dialectical view is right, a mono-culture, so to speak, will suffer a fall into diversity as surely as a mono-language will evolve dialects, because no culture has the instruments to arrest variation. I suppose I can imagine a culture of clones, but there is a rate of mutation in copying that simply can't be gotten around.
So, now: let's say cultural relativism makes some sense. It would seem that, to get off the ground, it has to claim that there are always going to be more than one cultures. Now this claim doesn't mean that there is more than one valuable culture, but I'd like to make that claim for the variant of relativism I am after -- one that actually can explain why cultural diversity is good. The difficulty here is much like the difficulty laissez faire people have with competition -- if you claim that competition is good, and you spot a tendency to monopoly, what do you do about it? I'd claim that human rights principles are going to function as a sort of anti-trust law, limiting the encroachment of mono-culture.
So there you have it: sizzling discussion, man. Is this a get down site or what? And remember: LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED.
We put up our hot little relativism post [1/30/02] in much the same spirit that the Duke nailed up his posters for the Royal Nonesuch, with its final line: LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED: "if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!" Alas, our line didn't fetch em. Lately there has been a royal falling off of site hits. Proof, perhaps, that our obsessions are not those of the zeitgeist. Or proof that Limited Inc. should sprinkle our posts with "girles" or "tits" to fetch that crowd (peculiarly concentrated in Saudi Arabia for some reason) looking for a combo of both. But no, no, this is how far our head is up our ass: we figure to draw the multitudes with relativism.
So we wrote to one of our readers, Alan, who has previously figured on this site before as our in-house critic. We asked why our post didn't fetch him. Here's his reply:
One reason I didn't respond was I wasn't real sure what you were trying to
say, and so my response would have taken the form of indefinite expansion
("Your claim could be interpreted as A, B, or C. If A, then ...; if B, then
...,). But, since you goad me, I guess I'll have to jump into this one, so
here goes with an analytic-philosopher type question:
You say that
(1)Cultural diversity is unavoidable; cultures arise and form themselves
with regard to their differences.
I have a problem here; I don't see that there is anything conceptually
impossible about the notion of a hermetically sealed and isolated culture.
Can't we imagine a group of people who have, in the robust sense, a "way of
life", with religious and political institutions etc., while being
completely unaware of the existence of any other human groups. Empirically,
we don't find any such groups in the world, but that's another matter.
You say later on that
(2)[My relativism comes out of the idea that] Any point of view is formed by
struggle against other points of view -- it isn't given to us, ab nihilo.
Could we cite as an example here the Freudian view that the ego arises out
the conflict between the desires and mental representations of parental
authority? (Eschewing Teutonic jargon. If so, I see what you're getting at,
but then I don't see how anything about specifically cultural diversity
follows from it.
So . . . could you elaborate (1) in sufficiently determinate form so that I
can see how (2) is supposed to be a consequence thereof?
a.
And here is our reply:
Cool, I got you to bite.
Anyway, I would say that the crucial point is whether your idea of the hermetically sealed and isolated culture could be true. Your point is that one can imagine such a culture. But I don't really think one can imagine such a culture. That doesn't mean that there aren't Pitcairn islands where maroons, whether voluntary or not, do make themselves into a "culture," but even there they start to evolve. And of course they come from elsewhere -- not Adam and Eve, and but other cultures. To my mind, imagining a sealed and hermetic culture is like imagining a sealed and hermetic species -- this isn't just empirically non-existent, it couldn't be existent if evolutionary theory makes a true claim about speciation. Reversing your empirical/theoretical split, I'd say that no culture would long remain sealed and hermetic without producing cultural variants that would, in the long run, turn it into 2+ cultures.
That is my strong claim. Now, the question is, how can I back it up. And this would involve claiming a dialectical view of culture -- that the thing we call a culture, with its indistinct boundaries, is not just peripherally engaged in struggles with other cultures, but that struggle is how it builds as a culture. In other words, I hold to a thoroughly dialectical view of how cultures are.
Now if this dialectical view is right, a mono-culture, so to speak, will suffer a fall into diversity as surely as a mono-language will evolve dialects, because no culture has the instruments to arrest variation. I suppose I can imagine a culture of clones, but there is a rate of mutation in copying that simply can't be gotten around.
So, now: let's say cultural relativism makes some sense. It would seem that, to get off the ground, it has to claim that there are always going to be more than one cultures. Now this claim doesn't mean that there is more than one valuable culture, but I'd like to make that claim for the variant of relativism I am after -- one that actually can explain why cultural diversity is good. The difficulty here is much like the difficulty laissez faire people have with competition -- if you claim that competition is good, and you spot a tendency to monopoly, what do you do about it? I'd claim that human rights principles are going to function as a sort of anti-trust law, limiting the encroachment of mono-culture.
So there you have it: sizzling discussion, man. Is this a get down site or what? And remember: LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED.
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