the muse of human extinction and other new year's thoughts

Richard Posner, that curiously coldblooded judge, wrote a book in 2004 that considered the economics and law of human catastrophes. It was reviewed in Slate, from which I take this precis of one of his thought experiments.

“Consider the possibility that atomic particles, colliding in a powerful accelerator such as Brookhaven Lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, could reassemble themselves into a compressed object called a stranglet that would destroy the world. Posner sets out to "monetize" the costs and benefits of this "extremely unlikely" disaster. He estimates "the cost of extinction of the human race" at $600 trillion and the annual probability of such a disaster at 1 in 10 million.”

The six hundred trillion dollar figure is  absurd and … almost touching. What Posner has stumbled onto is one of the theological conundrums of economics, much like the scholastic chestnut about whether God could create a rock that he couldn’t lift.  The scholastic chestnut was a way of parsing the logic of divine omnipotence. The six hundred trillion dollars is a way of parsing the limit of money and the economics attached to it, since a dollar without a human being to use it is surely a worthless dollar, one whose material carrier has suddenly lost all significance.

Since, with the election of Donald Trump, we are postponing for another four years any confrontation with the global disaster of climate change, we might want to start considering that six hundred trillion dollars as a sort of black hole:  the hole into which the Holocene disappeared.  I’m going to have a hard time, obviously, reading papers or thinking about “politics” over the next four years – since the headlines will be so many cocked guns placed at my ‘privileged’ head – and I can’t think I’m alone in this dilemma. Watching America under Trump will be much like cleaning up a public restroom stall that has been visited by a succession of drunks the night before. Or substitute your own image of overwhelming visceral disgust.  But I nominate for the muse of this epoch that mythical, mystical 600 trillion dollars, that impossible self-annulling sum. Someday, it will be as plain as the Jehovah’s writing on the walls of the King of Babylon: Even billionaires won’t be able to enjoy their tax breaks when we are all extinct.

And with that… Happy new years! 

Coming back to L'america

Going to France on Aer Lingus was a gas. Returning from France on Aer Lingus was, unfortunately, less gaseous. Or more, if I count my stomach. On our flight to, the plane was half empty. On our flight back, it was full of Irish moms who thought it was cute when their three or six year olds woke you up over the mid-Atlantic at what your body clock claimed was two o’clock a.m. It was like that.

In front of me, though, something interesting happened. Two guys sat down, and they quickly revealed themselves to be Bouvard and Pecuchet. The one, who I mentally nicknamed yeahyeahyeah for his habit of saying same when he allowed his seatmate to speak, began by recapping news events and quickly drifted into a soliloquy that lasted, I believe, for around three hours. He was obviously a Ted talk waiting to happen. His topics included his awesome college record, people he had met, the Spanish American war explained, how to invest, how Facebook is an awesome company, how to buy furniture, the nature of mathematics and intuition, and amazing facts you could cull from Wikipedia about ancient Greece. There wasn’t a conventional wisdom cliché that he didn’t leap at – from the fact that the Internet is about the “democratisation of knowledge” to the fact that our intuitions evolved before our mathematics did. It was as if he had swallowed the complete works of Malcolm Gladwell and was experiencing a bad case of hangover. His seatmate, who I nicknamed right right right for his habit of muttering this when yeahyeahyeah was on this or that spiel, was very impressed by the fount he found himself seated next to, and shared his own feelings about investment, buying furniture, the meaning of Trump, American foreign policy in the age of McKinley, and the whole evolution of life and mathematics conundrum. Yeahyeahyeah had one of those very male voices that cover all the crevices in audible space – he didn’t yell, but somehow his voice stuck out like a sore thumb (one that stuck itself in my ear) in the aircraft as we were all trying to find the kind of idiot movie or tv show that would lull away the tiresome hours. After this went on for literally hours, I began to develop a sort of admiration for yeahyeahyeah. Yes, 2017 will be a Trump imprinted disaster, but as long as there is a yeahyeahyeah around, it can be processed and made into an op ed; the world of cliché, mansplaining and sottise will endure. Florida may flood, and civil rights disappear, but Malcolm Gladwellism will reign, eternal, a Platonic form (Plato was born in ancient Athens, and form is one of his philosophical terms, which comes out of a story he told about a cave that proved that humans are shadows. It turns out that modern science has overturned this theory).  

And so we came back to L’america.  

Kill kill kill kill kill the poor

One of my emphases in the little book I wrote on Marx some time ago was that Marx made the great leap towards what became Marxism in  Cologne in 1842, when he became the editor of a newspaper there and did a few articles on a local controversy: the new legislative rules that eliminated the time honored custom of gathering sticks in forests owned by the great landholders.  Marx at this time was a graduate of law school. He gets it that the legislature  is creating something new here – a property – out of the denial of something old – a customary right. But it occurred to him that it was not enough to remain on the level of the law – for what was driving the legislative proces was not so much any legal confusion, or any unfolding of some previous logic in the legal code, a la Hegel, but instead, was a basic, extra-legal social force.

The custom of gathering fallen wood, as Marx came to see it, had its roots in another kind of social order. Marx latter on considered this social order as pre-capitalist,  evidently defining it from the ‘stage’ that succeeds it. However, I think it is entirely within the Marxist spirit to define it differently, as the regime of the “image of the limited good”, a phrase coined by the anthropologist George Foster to describe the image of the world inherent to those who inhabit a social economy in which economic growth is not the norm. The norm, instead, for the peasants and their governors, is of rise and fall, in which prosperity can be expected to lead to superbia, or vanity, which in turn creates the condition for the fall. The image of the limited good is congruent with the iconography of nemesis, or justice, a blindfolded figure holding a scale in which our sins and accumulations are weighed.

In this world, it makes sense to talk about the poor. There is no sense that in this world, the laborer produces such wealth as will cause economic growth to be the primary fact of the social world.  Marx, in Cologne, began to sense the meaning of this.

To put this another way:  Marx made the very important discovery that “the poor”, as a socio-economic category, was vacuous. The poor were easily recognized in pre-capitalist economies: the beggars, the serfs, the slaves, they all exist under the sign of minus. They had less, and that quantitative fact defined their social existence. What Marx saw was that capitalist society was not just a matter of old wine in new bottles – the archaic poor were now free labor. Perhaps nothing so separates Marxism from religion as  this insight: in all the great monotheistic religions, poverty is viewed in feudal terms: the poor you will have always with you. But in capitalism, or modernity tout court, the poor continue to exist as a mystificatory category, usually in a binary with the rich. In fact, the real binary in society is capital and labor. The bourgeois economists, and even the non-scientific socialists, operate as though the archaic poor still exist. To help them, we need to develop a method of redistribution that is, in essence, charity – run by non-profits or run by the government, but still charity. But Marx saw this in very different terms. Labor produces the economic foundation of capitalism – value. In these terms, it is not a question of the poor being a qualitative or moral category – it is a question of the alienation of value, of surplus value, that circulates through the entire capitalist system and allows it to grow on its own, while at the same time making it vulnerable to crisis.

Baudelaire famously created a slogan for the 1848 revolution: Assommons les pauvres. Kill the poor! This seems on the surface to be the most radical and effective of  welfare schemes, for it would get rid of the poor once and for all. But Marx explains why it wouldn’t work: the poor describes an illformed social category, a survival from the past. To kill the working class would be to kill capitalism itself. What Marx learned in the forests of Koln was that capitalism was as atheist as could be against property. Far from being founded on the defense of property, capitalism was quite comfortable with changing its definition to suit – capital. What was once a right of the “poor” – for instance, to glean windfallen branches – could be swept away with a penstroke when the large landowners so desired. What was once the very definition of property - to have the full usage of an item one buys - can suddenly be hedged round with limitations when we try, for instance, to copy it and upload it on the internet. We are suddenly deprived of the inalienable right to give our property - and this is named Intellectual Property, and a legal structure grows up around it in a heartbeat.  Property is not, then,  a constant element, but a fluid one, changing its meaning and effect with the system of production in place. To describe the poor as having little “property”, in other words, reified property, placed it outside the social, and disguised the social conflicts encoded in what property is.

Marx’s logical clarity, however, is a bit too bright even for many of his own followers, who are as prone to fall into the language of the struggle between the poor and the rich as anybody else. It is, after all, one of the richest images we have, and leads irresistibly to a one-sided discourse on equality.

One of the great contradictions of neo-liberalism is that it retains the vocabulary of the image of the limited good – “the poor” – while promoting an image of infinite growth – that is, of capitalism, with the financial sector dominant. Vox had a headline during the Democratic primaries that I thought was an exemplary reflection of this contradiction. The article criticized Sanders’ positions on trade, and the headline went: If you're poor in another country, this is the scariest thing Bernie Sanders has said. Poor here is taken as a group to which “we” must be charitable. If the headline had read, If you are an underpaid laborer in another country… the argument would have been more honest, although I am not sure the headline writer thought that he or she was being dishonest. Marx is very firm that the reserve army of the unemployed and the underpaid in all sectors are the foundations of the wealth of nations. Neoliberalism certainly recognizes their function, but disguises its intents by transforming this into a mawkish morality play.

In a sense, that headline is the exact moral antithesis to another famous slogan: workers of the world unit, you have nothing to lose but your chains.    

the political welfare state: why conservatives oppose political laissez faire

I've made this argument before, but it is always fun to make it again.
The electoral college is mostly treated as a political and ideological question. However, from the neo-classical economics viewpoint, it is obviously simply a question of welfare.
First, voting is, like buying and selling, an action regarding a property.
Given the rule that every citizen in a republic has the right to vote, we can treat voting in the way we treat income or earnings. The state can either lower the tax on voting - which means treated every vote the same way - or it can tax and redistribute the value of the vote.
In the electoral college, successful states are like successful corporations. They are defined by having more people. Unsuccessful states are defined by having less people. This definition ignores other standards for success, but it is functionally sound, in that those states with more people are also states that generally have higher GDPs. This is only semi-circular - although more people indicate more production, other conditions could limit the production, and thus the GDP. As it happens, though, the distribution of GDP through the fifty states corresponds closely with the population of the states.
Thus, "poor states" - those with lesser populations - would not, without the federal government intervening, have any more power than is defined by their population.
But the Electoral College changes this. Those states, like California, that are successful are taxed at a high rate politically, and the tax is given to poor states. Vis a vis Wyoming, for instance, California residents pay a seventy five percent tax - or, in other words, every vote cast by a Wyoming resident is worth three cast by a Californian.
This political welfare system, viewed in good neo-classical terms, is bound to create a system of effects - that is, of perverse incentives. A state like Kansas or Nebraska protects itself in the political market place using the welfare it is given. It entrenches itself in behaviors that lead not to successful statehood - ie more population and greater GDP, but in behaviors that continue the benefits it gets as a welfare beneficiary. Welfare discourages labor - or at least the neoclassicals assume. Political welfare discourages political labor. Nebraska or Kansas or other politically poor states are encouraged not to invest in education, or to make their states attractive to incomers, and they extend that opposition on the national level, trying to undermine states like New York or Florida or California or Texas.
This model gives us a nice fat paradox: conservative politics in the US depends, increasingly, on political welfare. In a system of political laissez faire, California would and should have a greater say simply because it has been politically successful. But conservatives oppose political laissez faire.

As we would expect, the welfare system's distentions are becoming evident and intolerable. Eventually, there will come a crash. Trump is a sign that the crash is coming.

genoa

I’m in Genoa, a city I never imagined I’d visit, even thought it is a city I have imagined. Lovely, the city, the port, the cafes, the grocery stores – food, consumption of, being the guts of tourism, museums being the eyes and brain – the wonderful colors of the houses, pastel meditteranean. If you think, as I do, that world civilization (and the at the time unnoticed end of the Holocene) began in 1492, then you have to say that Genoa has cast its shadow over the world, even if the world has not noticed it that much. I mean, the great Meditteranean Republic has never intruded its dramas on us, like Venice or Florence. The Renaissance, I’m told, has not retained much of a foothold in Genoa: a couple of streets. Nothing like the grand structures of the 19^th century, Nietzsche’s Genoa.  We looked at the façade of a wonderful church, not the cathedral but nevertheless bearing, as the Baedecker Guide from 1906 puts it, alternative courses of black and white tile, which gives it a cheerful, salt/peppershaker appearance, but also having the required raft of gargoyles. I haven’t yet set foot in this or any of the older Genoese structures. But I have been thinking about cathedrals, lately, reading Hugo’s Notre Dame, which is a very diffuse novel in which long excuseses take up such questions as the meanign and function of cathedrals. Hugo is never quoted by historians or sociologists of technology, but should be: in one of his excursuses, he explains the cathedral as a devise that, though intended by function to house the worship of god, actually, through its subordinate affordances – its rose windows, its statues, its spaces, its bas reliefs, etc. – operates as a veritable book, makes legible the stories of the tribe to the people who have constructed it and come to it to worship, or simply pass by it. In Hugo’s account, the cathedral’s competitor is not the Protestant church, or anything like that, but the printed book – or, in fact, the printing press itself. This balance between cathedral and printing press, this putting them into relation, precedes and must have influenced Henry Adams Virgin and the Dynamo, and still echoes today in the banal speech of technogeeks going on about “disruption” – lacking, of course, Hugo’s leonine roar. In Hugo’s system, its rock or paper – with paper destroying rock. And, in a nice karmic yo-yo, it is now paper versus silicon – metal destroying paper.

Well, leaving these thoughts behind, we are all enjoying Italian views and speech, and thinking a bit about Nietzsche, who lived in Genoa at various high points in his life. According to the editors of his works, he at first kept his address in Genoa – the second time, though, he found lodgings in Salite della Battistini. Genoa was associated in Nietzsche’s mind with the writing of the Froehliche Wissenschaft – the Gay Science – one of his masterpieces. The Battistini is pictured here, on a site that seems to lament the Genoese forgetting of Nietzsche http://www.primocanale.it/notizie/l-oblio-di-nietzsche-tra-i-graffiti-e-l-incuria-in-salita-delle-battistine-a-genova-152109.html

Nietzsche took ship from Genoa for various trips: to Naples, or to Nice. Genoa was still a great port In the late nineteenth century, but not the port it became, according to my friend Luca, in the trentes annees glorieuses of the postwar period. Then the industry collapsed. But the port is still a major loading area. From the café on the pebbled beach where I am writing this, I can see a vast freighter out there in the water. Santa Monica, with its pleasurecraft, has been left a world  behind.  I’m told that globalisation has reached here, and that the ships I see are manned by Phillipine sailors.  The Phillipines, that far reach of the global system “discovered” by Magellan. In an exclusionary move typical of the free flow of goods and capital over our borders, these phillipine sailors don’t come ashore. They don’t get drunk and go whoring in the dark streets around the docks. There are no dark streets there. Instead, they stay on board ship, lacking the proper papers to plant their feet on Italian soil. No dancing in the street like the sailors in a musical for them! Slave labor has been replaced by contract labor, which breathes freedom, freedom and freedom to the ears of neolibs everywhere. But the freedom of contract is strangely one sided,  with the makers of the contract having all the freedom, and the signers of it having only the freedom to sign it, and undergoing its burdens after that magic moment. To oppress or compress what the contract makers can put in the contract is, as we know, the sheerest tyranny. Luckily, our globalised competitive nation states aren’t about to compell the contractors to follow the rules of human dignity.

Nietzsche felt that in Genoa he began his recuperation – from both bodily and mental sicknesses (and how he would have hated how, a hundred twenty years after him, we have so comfortably adopted the ‘metaphor’ of healing – the conjunction of the medical and the ideational, the shock derived from it, having become so banal as to bring tears to my eyes every time I hear someone use the word healing – and yet knowing that even so, a bit of enlightenment lies in the overused trope) and expressed his gratitude to Genoa in a letter to a friend, Koeselitz: And so once again I am going to try to fix myself, and Genoa seems to me the right place, three times a day my heart overflows here, with the auguring mountains in the distance and their adventurous mightyness. Here I have crowds and rest and high mountain paths and that which is even more beautiful than my dream of it, the Campo Santo. The Campo Santo was the famous Genoa cemetary, and Nietzsche shows himself to be a solid nineteenth century man with his ecstatic mention of it.

I haven’t seen it yet, and perhaps won’t.

dead nestlings

 ”A peregrine soared above the valley in the morning sunshine and the warm south breeze. I could not see it, but its motion through the sky was re­flected on the ground be­neath in the restless rising of the plover, in the white swirl of gulls, in the clat­tering grey clouds of wood pigeons, in hundreds of bright birds’ eyes look­ing upward.” – J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

On my birthday we went to see Seasons, a documentary film by the crew  - Jacques Cluzaud, Michel Debats and Jacques Perrin - that made my favorite nature film, Winged Migration.  As in the latter film, Seasons is full of hard to credit film – passages in animal life that seem impossibly out of reach of human perception, and yet, of course, must be commonplace among the beastly individuals themselves – from a owl waking up to catch a mouse to the last evening of a boar, separated from its fellows and chased down by wolves. It is the intimacy that is astonishing, and makes one think that surely this was somehow set up. The film has a rather unfortunate narrative structure that adheres loosely to the history of the holocene in Europe. It was filmed in various spots all over Europe, including the ever mysterious Białowieża Forest of Poland (where the last European bison roam – and where, in a typically Nazicrazy vision, Herman Goering imagined reintroducing the Auroch from the Paleolithic). For the first hour, it is just animal life in the forest, but then a platitudinous speaker intones a little history, that involves man versus nature and animals “taking refuge” in the mountains, as though they were recent casualties from the Euro and USA incited wars in the Middle East.

It is true, of course, that the wolf was hunted to near extinction in most of Europe, deliberately. On the other hand, the wolf had a good run. Far from taking refuge in the Alps, as recently as 1447 the great bobtailed Courtaud with 12 other wolves appeared outside the city of Paris ready to party on sweet Parisian flesh. He was so fierce that it took a while to figure out how to put him and his buddies down. They lived in caves in an area called Le Louvrier, and guess what famous musee occupies that spot now? In 1450 they killed 50 Parisians - and then finally they were lured to the square in front of Notre Dame, the place was blocked off, and they were slaughtered.

In fact, for those paying attention, one of the odd things about life in the US and North America is the return of the predators – wolves, coyotes,  mountain lions on the island of Vancouver, bears wandering through the suburbs of Denver. On the East coast much of the former forest land that was cut down and farmed in the 18^th and 19^th centuries is gone to forest again. Along with the reforestation comes the predators – much debate rages over whether the timber wolf has migrated back into its old haunts in the Northeast US.

But what impressed me about seasons was not the pitfalls of the story told by the narrator, but – as in winged migration – the sense of being intimate and equal to the animals it shows. That equality is a difficult quality to recover. Certainly the cave painters had it – if anything, they would have laughed to hear that humans are superior to the beasts. They painted relatively few human things, and many beast things, because beasts so evidently dominated the world. They still do, of course – insects will be here long after the human blip in geological history has shot its blipwad – but we have come to think of ourselves as the lords and masters.

The quote I’ve put at the beginning of this things is by the man generally agreed to be the best writer about birds, and maybe animals, ever – the reclusive J.A. Baker. Baker lived in an area of Essex that was, in the fifties and sixties, a little off the track. It comes as a bit of a shock that he worked for an automobile association. His area of the world was very small, but he kept it very well scanned, much like the peregrines he recorded in his book. Baker evidently shucked off the feeling that is instilled in us by every principle of our social being – that we are divided from and superior to  the rest of ‘nature’.  Gillian Darley, in a LRB piece, calls this “nihilism’ – which is what it must appear to us to be. Once tamper with the inequality of man to ‘nature’, and you plunge the human beasty back into the components out of which he thinks he has arisen. I – and I imagine you – will never be so nihilistic as to think I am merely the equal of a mosquito or the squirrel that sometimes flights across our porch here in Santa Monica. But although I cannot feel this equality, I rather believe it – it is the logical result of  Darwinian theory. Usually this statement is made with an aha purpose – for, unlike the squirrel, I belong to a species that has constructed Darwinian theory! Whereas if the squirrel were to reply, no doubt it would point to my comic inability to scramble up the trunk of a mimosa tree in about three seconds. And even in this imaginary dialogue, I am putting myself in the place of the squirrel, whose consciousness and standards are utterly separate from mine. We use intelligence as though it was proper to one species, and we are surrounded by beasts who are dumb humans. This of course can’t be right. It is an evolutionary crock. But we accept it.

Baker writes, however, as if he didn’t. In my quote, one notices that not only is  he aware of the peregrine falcon, but he is aware that his pair of eyes are not the only one’s in the field: there are “hundreds of bright birds’ eyes look­ing upward.” When he compares the way a peregrine falcon flies in the wind to the way an otter swims in the floods of a river, his comparison not only makes us think of the air as something liquid, but it puts the peregrine and the otter together in a world. The likeness, the metaphor, is –as is always the case – a way of worldmaking. In this way, The Peregrine is not just a book about birdwatching, but rather, it is a book about the meaning of the peregrine falcon – its significance in the small, connected  world of the Chelmsford countryside.

Like all nature writing, its exaltations ride on the back of despair. The nature of Essex was being changed brutally by the industrialization of agriculture that Marx had predicted a hundred years before. The aggregate dump of chemicals was such as to change literally everything. If you loved peregrines, you had to be aware – as Rachel Carson made us aware – that pesticides were killing them through the reproductive route. Thinner eggshells, dead peregrine nestlings. Of course, the chemical debauch of seventy years ago has continued to this day, and is now thinning our own eggshell, that climate in which we evolved and against the change of which we have developed no defense whatsoever. More Mars-like weather, dead human nestlings.

And with that, I’m ending this. Today we fly to Paris. Happy Trumpian lets shit on the planet holiday, you all!       

RFK, the Beverly Hillbillies, and Chicago in the 60s

In 1968, Robert Kennedy made a much heralded visit to Eastern Kentucky. He’s interviewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1DK2hiEm1gIt is a flashback to a time when Democratic politicians were not full of mush in their mouth (human capital, retraining, green jobs), but said things like look at how wealthy we are, and look how poor our citizens live, and this reflects on all of us.
At the same time, of course, popular culture was nattering on libidinously and nastily, as it does. In 1968, the Beverly Hillbillies was in its sixth season. What Amos and Andy was to African Americans, the Beverly Hillbillies was to poor white folks.
In Chicago, Studs Terkel had found thousands of poor white folks from the South crowding the North side. They lived below the belt of affluent white suburbs – where Hillary Clinton grew up. The mainstream idea is that black and white are two lumps, each homogenous in itself. But we know that this isn’t so – we’ve seen the Beverly Hillbillies, for instance. Clinton’s problem with a certain group of white midwesterners is always approached in term of the white working class, and never approached in terms of the relatively recent relocation to the Midwest of millions of Southern and Appalachian whites, just in time for the great slowdown of the seventies and the great trade sellouts of the nineties.
Racism becomes a variable that reflects the resentment of a white working force that started out as a disdained but useful working force for the white middle class. In reality, those wealthy suburbs have long found ways to protect themselves from integration. Terkel interviewed one ostracized Evanston homeowner, Mrs. James Winslow, who, with her husband, fought to integrate the more prosperous neighborhoods of Evanston – but in vain: “The Winslows were becomoing profoundly disquieted, especially in the matter of housing. One of his Negro clients  - there  were few Negro lawyers in the suburb – was denied the right to add a bbathroom to his house by the zoning board. “Why in the world would the board not allow a Negro to upgrade his home?” Further study revealed that not one Negro block was zoned for single-family dwellings. “Yet this was Evanston’s great drawing card…’”

The million and one tricks of deniability have become familiar and wearisome to us all. It is a system that points to the dissipation of the feeling of race hatred while, at the same time, creating a labyrinthian structure to maintain racism’s historic product.  So, at the same time this structure deflected racism into a matter of sentiments – of heart – it sought out the actors of that hate and found them in poor whites. Meanwhile, poor whites saw that they were being systematically excluded from the neighborhoods and institutions by the movers and shakers of such places as Evanston, and came to the conclusion that these people were making the “government” for the blacks. Illusions and delusions in social life have effects that are as real as any other social force.  In many ways – and here I am going to engage in pure speculation – Clinton’s difficulty finding the correct tone in the Midwest and Pennsylvania (a state where her family had a summer house when she was growing up) can, perhaps, be tied to the perplexities of trying to navigate the conservative but happy and prosperous upbringing she had in an all white upper middle class Chicago suburb and the reality of the Chicago of which it was a satellite. We all know the literature produced by the Midwesterner who goes to the East Coast – Sinclair Lewis,Scott Fitzgerald, Dawn Powell, and even Jonathan Franzen. But how about the Midwesterner who returns from the East Coast? This was the story – or one of the stories – in which Clinton was entangled.