The worst president - envelope please

 

I’m a structure man, not an agent man. I’m instinctively suspicious of lists – the most overrated movies, the hundred best novels, etc. Of course, I’m a sucker, like any good American, for such lists, and the arguments that result in comparing one’s opinion. But I argue in some bad faith.

That said – shoving aside my theoretical objections – I do have an opinion on the perennially sweet topic of bad presidents, as in, was Trump the worst?

This summer’s news is more proof that the answer is no. The answer is George W. Bush.

There are a heap of bad, criminal, insane things the Bush administration did. The retreat from Afghanistan recognizes, distantly, one of them. But one must judge in a harder category: what didn’t the president do? Negligence is an easy thing to overlook, except when, as in the case of Trump’s response to covid, it is an aggressive negligence. Thus, that Bush neglected to heed the numerous warnings in the summer of 2001 of an upcoming attack has always been pushed to the rear of our historical consciousness – because it wasn’t known except to a few for years after that attack happened. If Bush had called a news conference in August, 2001, and said the CIA was trying to protect its ass by predicting an attack by this guy, Omama bin Sodom, we would have as strong a sense of incompetence before disaster as we have from Trump’s “joke” about inoculating yourself with detergent.

But the most massive negligence, which now looms like a giant tsunami over the world, is the eight years, during a crucial climate window, of doing nothing about climate change. Of doubting it, encouraging the ever higher level of exhaust, of cementing into the twentieth century system the nineteenth century dependence on carbon based energy. That, more than “democracy”, might become America’s real contribution to world history.

It didn’t have to be like this. George H.W. Bush, accepting the science, led the effort to close the ozone hole with a series of international accords and model like domestic policies. If he’d been like his son, we would be in a very perilous position today. George W. Bush is merely a name for a whole host of interests and agents, but – I can’t kick against the naming convention.

So, I say again: George W. Bush was the worst president America has ever birthed. Lord, have mercy on our souls.

inverted envy - from A.O. Hirschman to twitter billionaire stans

Whenever I go on twitter and read the twits from stans of Elon Musk or Bebeeyed Bezos, I think of this post of mine.

In 1973, A.O. Hirschman, with his characteristic, concealing modesty (it covered up the fact that he was touching on big themes that economists liked to avoid), wrote an essay about envy and the egalitarian impulse in developing economies. For two decades, Hirschman had been at work as an economist and policy maker dealing with foreign aid and plans to elevate the poorer national economies into the league of the developed nations, as they were called back then. This was the era of multi-year plans and the fad for shrinking agriculture and favoring export industries, which often, paradoxically, called for putting barriers on imports. All of this, by now, has been swept away by the Washington Consensus and the aggressive syndicate of international institutions, multinationals, and neo-liberals.

In Hirschman’s time, third world countries were experiencing unprecedented growth. He observed that the profit from that growth largely accrued to the wealthy. What puzzled him was that this did not stimulate the kind of envy that was feared by the anti-communist establishment everywhere. Instead of revolution, for the most part, third world populations seemed patiently to be waiting. Hirschman devised a model to capture what one might call the dynamics of social envy. In this model, growth and the enrichment of the richest was tolerable as long as the larger population believed that the growth would eventually make themselves and their children richer. In other words, Hirschman believed that there was a larger tolerance for inequality than was reckoned with by the leftist agitator. This was puzzling if one took into account the work of George Foster, whose studies of peasant society in Mexico convinced him that traditional society is penetrated by what he called the “image of the limited good”. This means that the peasant views goods in terms of a zero-sum game, in which x’s possessions are viewed by y from the standpoint of scarcity – what x possesses, y does not possess. Like people in a lifeboat with limited rations, a careful watch is placed on the village populaton to make visible who has what. This is a situation in which savings is hidden, rather than invested.

What Foster calls the limited good, I would call nemesis. In my opinion, the great effect of the enlightenment and of the growing economies of the 19th century was to suppress nemesis – the social and human limit which demands respect in societies in which growth is sporadic and subject to decay. In such societies, time is cyclical; the myth of progress has no footing here.

I think Hirschman was right to tackle the theme of envy, but his model, it seems to me, lacks an important feature that one finds in success societies – societies, that is, where an ethos of success replaces the ethos of sacrifice. In the former, envy inevitably increases as the success of the wealthiest creates a larger and larger positional gap between the top and the rest. Here, however, an interesting, unconscious mechanism intervenes to protect the wealthiest. This mechanism inverts the direction of envy, the direction of the evil eye. Instead of the wealthiest being subject to the violence of envy, the poorest are subject to it.

This inversion of envy at first seems incredible. How could the poorest be an object of envy? However, anyone with ears to hear in America’s dining and living rooms, or in American work places, will here the tale of the high living poor. The poor don’t work. They luxuriate on welfare payments. The government only works for the poor. The Great slump was caused by the poor cheating the naïve banks who were forced by the government to give them mortgages they couldn’t pay. This story and variations of it are told over and over. We sometimes wonder over some savage custom, thinking, how could it be believed that, say, a woman who has a miscarriage causes drought – one of the thousands of such beliefs recorded in the Golden Bough? But the inversion of envy in success societies, the most pure of which is the US, should teach us that the unlikelihood of a belief, its grossly ridiculous nature when laid out in cold logic, is no bar to its being held true. Although newspaper sociologists like to insist on the hopeful, aspirational beliefs of Americans as the sort of national glue that keeps down radicalism, I would say that, more powerfully, it is the inverted envy, its manipulation and thousand and one uses (inverted envy is deeply associated with racism in America, for instance) that makes it very hard to achieve any kind of lasting social justice in the US

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Heidi-land

Life… makes nothing happen.

I, too, heard the cowbells Mom

Crossing the border into Switzerland

And of course I thought of you.

I thought of Heidi, and then of you

And then of you and me

Watching Heidi, was it in color or b&w?

When you had the power to make me watch

Movies. A coercible five.

You “loved this movie” when you were a girl.

Me, Heidi’s hair bun repulsed me

And the uterine pull

Of the cornsilk blond’s family

In a Nazi dream of the Alps

Lent its props

To various of my nightmares.

If I let go

Of my mudwrestler’s grip on you, Mom

Will I plunge in my worst dream

down some Heidi cursed cliff?

- Karen Chamisso

Coincidence and science - when Laplace isn't enough

 

In Mill’s Logic, that grand old lumber room, in Chapter 18 of Book three, a principle is spelled out that, in our day, has been shorthanded into the sometimes tendentious phrase, correlation does not prove causation:

“Although two or more cases in which the phenomenon a has been met with may have no common antecedent except A, this does not prove that there is any connection between a and A, since a may have many causes, and may have been produced, in these different instances, not by any thing which the instances had in common, but by some of those elements in them which were different.”

Mill, in keeping with his practical bent, distills from this a question: “After how many and what sort of instances may it be concluded that an observed coincidence between two phenomena is not the effect of chance?”

Another way of putting this question is: when is a coincidence really a coincidence?

As Francois Mentre has pointed out, the French mathematician and scientist, Cournot, was also intested in this question, or at least in one of its guises: the reality of probability. Cournot worked in the shadow of Laplace; but where Laplace, finally, came down on the side of a universal determinism, Cournot was sure that this move was not justified by Laplace’s mathematics. “He could not admit that chance was nothing but a “vain sound, flatus vocis, which we use, as Laplace said, to disguise our ignorance of true causes.” For him [Cournot], chance had an objective reality independent of our knowledge.” (144) Cournot spelled out his ontological conviction by way of a critique of Laplace. Laplace wrote that Nature obeys “a small number of immutable laws.” Cournot’s disproof of Laplace’s determinism moves from this idea: “it suffices, said Cournot, that there be only two, perfectly independent one from the other, in order that we must make a place for the fortuitous in the government of the world. Whether or not we do or do not know the literal law for each of the independent two series, as soon as they intersect, there is chance. Chance thus does not derive from our ignorance of the laws of the universe, no more than it diminishes as the measure of our knowledge extends. It subsists in the eyes of the expert as well as those of the ignoramus. It is necessary to accept it as an irreducible, sui generis fact that has a notable part in the government of the world.” (209)

This, though, is hard to accept, either for the expert or the ignoramus or that hybrid of the two, the modern mystic, either in the guise of a policeman, an economist, or a conspiracy theorist

One can see that Cournot’s observation blocks two popular explanations of coincidence (or chance – in fact, I am using coincidence here as a proxy for a semantic family that includes the French hasard and the German Zufall. True coincidence can neither be purely the effect of human ignorance of the causes in place, nor can itself be characteristic of some autonomous law – a law of synchronicity or seriality. For Cournot, coincidence can be described but not understood, in as much as understanding has to do with cause. The same reasoning Cournot applies to other laws would apply in this case, so that any law of synchronicity would inevitably generate coincidences that would fall outside its domain as it intersected with other universal laws, creating, if you will, hypercoincidences.

One way of looking at physics in the 20th century is that the physicists were both moved by the fact that the world given by a structure that was governed by two or more irreducible laws would have to accord a large place to chance – such that probability was no longer a way of mathematically stylizing elements that were, to an all powerful intelligence, always certain – and a movement to unify the laws of physics, to reduce them to some grand single principle, which would drive out coincidence.

The famous paper by Eugene Wigner, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences (1963), that questions what can reasonably be called a hypercoincidence: namely, that using mathematics, we can make predictions about nature. By nature, I mean the object of the sciences, be they biology, physics, chemistry, etc. Is there a hyper-law connecting mathematics to these phenomena? And if there is, how would we explore it? With another form of mathematics? Do we need a “higher numerology”?

In the margins, meanwhile, there was also a tradition, a fringe tradition, that rejected the whole idea that coincidence wasn’t subject to its own proper law. Instead, it sought that law. This was an especially popular theme in Germany in the 20s, coexisting with a faddish interest in psychoanalysis, physiognomics, graphology, paranormal psychology, etc. Arthur Koestler, who grew from pup to dog during this era, was infected with this idea. When he abandoned militant anti-communism he plunged into the world of cosmic coincidences, and never came back.

Psychoanalysis had a tentative relationship with these things, which fascinated Freud, but which, finally, he diagnosed as cultural symptoms of a mass psychopathology. However, I find one of the best descriptions of coincidence from the “subjective” side – to use the totally inadequate vocabulary that philosophy seemingly cannot get rid of – is in Freud’s The Uncanny. There is a kind of setting in our consciousness that goes off when it meets an excess of accident. Perhaps this is the origin of the spirit of science – not in rationality, but in superstitious dread.

dead horses - Frederick Engels on animals

 Dead Horses

I have always had a soft spot for Frederick Engels. In spite of the man’s obvious gifts, he will forever be the annotation to his friend Marx: the follower, the supporter, the man on whom Marx depended, the man whose own writings are folded into Marx’s. It was his fate to be a part of another man’s gigantic whole.

But the part speaks. In fact, Engels wrote well. He thought not only in terms of the categories Marx so laboriously forged, but also in terms of the philosophy he studied in his youth – thus the odd flotsam of natural philosophy that float to the surface of his works from the 1880s, like the Dialectic of Nature, works that have been viewed, alternately, as embarrassing anachronisms or illuminations of … Marx.

I was reading Keith Thomas’ Man and the Natural world last night. Thomas quotes a passage from Engels that I had to look up, so I did this morning. It is from the Dialectic of Nature:

“Comparison with animals proves that this explanation of the origin of language from and in the process of labour is the only correct one. The little that even the most highly- developed animals need to communicate to one another can be communicated even without the aid of articulate speech. In a state of nature, no animal feels its inability to speak or to understand human speech. It is quite different when it has been tamed by man. The dog and the horse, by association with man, have developed such a good ear for articulate speech that they easily learn to understand any language within the range of their circle of ideas. Moreover they have acquired the capacity for feelings, such as affection for man, gratitude, etc., which were previously foreign to them. Anyone who has had much to do with such animals will hardly be able to escape the conviction that there are plenty of cases where they now feel their inability to speak is a defect, although, unfortunately, it can no longer be remedied owing to their vocal organs being specialised in a definite direction.”

The idea that dogs and cats feel their inability to speak strikes me as so marvelously mysterious, such an odd and overlooked insertion into the vast Gulf Stream of Marxism, that surely it should be pointed to and pondered. This was written in the same decade that another philosopher actually heard a horse speak, in Turin. The horse, it seems, contained the spirit of Richard Wagner. The philosopher, of course, is Friedrich Nietzsche.

Tocqueville speaks of the historians task as a ‘descent into the tomb” – and among those things that stir in the tomb of the nineteenth century, and have no correspondent in our own lives, is the heavy reliance of the whole of urban civilization on the horse. In fact, that use of the horse goes on well up through the 20th century, with the greatest mobilization of horses in any war occurring, as a matter of fact, in WWII. In Ice Horses, one of Malaparte’s semi-fictional accounts of the war from the Axis side in his book, Kaput, he reports on going with a group of soldiers to Lake Ladoga, in Finland, in the spring of 1943, to chop out of the ice a thousand horses frozen there after escaping from a fire in a battle in 1942.

“The lake looked like a vast sheet of white marble on which rested hundreds and hundreds of horses’ heads. They appeared to have been chopped off cleanly with an axe. Only the heads stuck out of the crust of ice. And they were all facing the shore. The white flame of terror still burnt in their wide-open eyes. Close to the shore a tangle of wildly rearing horses rose from the prison of ice.”

Such are not the scenes of affection between man and his close circle of beasts that Engels was thinking about. And in fact, when scientists go on about “intelligence” – by which, of course, they mean, as the Greeks once meant, logos, human intelligence – they tend to downgrade the pussy cat and the lapdog in favor of the porpoise and the sperm whale. At the same time, who can deny the good ear of the dog, cat, or horse? An ear that is not shared by the human, who guesses at barks and meows and whinnies. Although, to be fair, this odd communicative couple of pet and petowner does seems to transcend the merely lexical, and speak to one another heart to heart. But it is not just of pets that Engels is speaking, but of his day to day experience of horses. The horse in the city was to Engels, naturally, what the car in the city is to us. Although I suspect the horse will return as the cities burn down and we discover that our massive betrayal of the atmosphere, our offering to the heavens of four hundred million years of organic matter, creates an unbearable world in which our children’s children will die, shaking their fist at this generation of world class vipers.

Elisabeth de Fontenay calls attention, in her essay on Philanthropia and the animal in the Greco-Roman world, to a passage in Plutarch’s life of Cato in which Plutarch ponders a duty that is not a duty – the duty towards the beast. A thing that is without law, and yet not without love – and towards which we express either our humanity by going beyond the law, or our inhumanity by adhering strictly to the letter of the law.

“Yet certainly, in my judgment, it marks an over-rigid temper for a man to take the work out of his servants as out of brute beasts, turning them off and selling them in their old age, and thinking there ought to be no further commerce between man and man than whilst there arises some profit by it. We see that kindness or humanity has a larger field than bare justice to exercise itself in; law and justice we cannot, in the nature of things, employ on others than men; but we may extend our goodness and charity even to irrational creatures; and such acts flow from a gentle nature, as water from an abundant spring. It is doubtless the part of a kind-natured man to keep even worn-out horses and dogs, and not only take care of them when they are foals and whelps, but also when they are grown old."

1Chris Hudson

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on Ferdinand Kürnberger, for Vienna Modern mokes

 

Der Mensch ist geboren, nackt zu gehen und Kokosnüsse zu essen, nicht Uniformen zu tragen und Militärbudgets zu bewilligen. 

 

“Man is born to go about naked and eat coconuts, not to wear uniforms and approve military budgets.” – Such is the conclusion of Ferdinand Kürnberger, a Viennese satirist from Nestroy’s generation. His essay on Cold weather and world history, written in 1865, laments the wrong turn made by history when the inhabitants of the Indus, enjoying great weather and blue skies, decided to migrate to the Danube and upwards: a mistake! “And thus hot Indians became cold Germans.”

Kürnberger was a radical – he was on the socialist-anarchist side, against the prevailing classical liberalism of the time, or at least in the beginning. He was even suspected of being a part of a ring of conspirators who brought off the storming of the war ministry in Vienna in 1848 and the lynching of the war minister, Latour. He spent a lot of time hopping from one German town to another, trying to escape shadowy policemen. From this experience he developed an outsider’s distance and a satiric edge, which he especially used to dissect the Austrian government. He was also a great fan of Schopenhauer – whose reactionary instincts became, transformed, a subversive theme in Viennese culture.  Kürnberger’s phrase “life doesn’t live” is quoted not only by Wittgenstein, but by Adorno in Minima Moralia. There’s a melancholy here that preceded the war-defined twentieth century, as Austrian intellectuals, living in the Funhouse of the Habsburg Empire, instinctively felt the black spot in classical liberal culture, the distortions it was producing. Karl Kraus’s prophetic career was fed by these springs.

Kürnberger’s novels and plays are forgotten – by which I mean that they are fodder for the stray dissertation, but have no real hearing in intellectual life. In contrast, his occasional essays are still alive. He was a master of the feuilleton, which he transformed into the anti-feuilleton, a critique of nineteenth century progress and all of the newspapers that followed in its wake. He is a spiritual descendent of Nicholas Chamfort – although aren’t we all? Some of the Viennese wits have English language fans – I’m thinking of Clive James attempt to make Alfred Polgar a name to at least recognize among the literati. Kürnberger has not been so lucky. Although what is luck to a dead writer?

There is, I feel, a large appreciation and even nostalgia in American literary culture for Vienna. That Jonathan Franzen chose to write a book on Karl Kraus, or a translation of Karl Kraus, doesn’t seem that odd when you consider that books like Wittgenstein’s Vienna sold, for academic books, very well. Musil is now on the list of author’s one might not read, but one must recognize (and sigh and say, I’m going to read The man without qualities one of these days). For those who groove to Vienna Modern,  Kürnberger is a nicely prefiguring nineteenth century marginal. In his introduction to a collection of his literary essays, he speaks about his relation to the collection of them, in his desk drawer, as one more of an editor to posthumous works than of an author to his own living work – a trope picked up by Musil for his own essay collection. And his anti-ornamentalism definitely influenced Adolf Loos. Kürnberger was highly sensitive to the exponential increase in visuals – drawings, paintings, photographs, etc. – in his time, and correctly saw the newspapers as a key mediator between an older, visually abstemious culture and his visually decadent one. He predicted the coming of the filmed adaptation of the “classics” – which for him was a product of the decline of the imagination.

“When a Goethe, with the mightiest poetic imagery, brought forth a Gretchen, what sketcher, shaver and doodler should dare place himself between me and Goethe with his pretension: you should imagine Gretchen not as Goethe willed her, but as I do? Can that be even allowed? What after all is all the intellectual pleasure of poetry more than the stimulus, which the phantasy of the poet communicates to the fantasy of the reader? And now, between the two, we have to have a dabbler push himself in, who illustrates, and between the union of us two makes himself the third?  I imagine that there is more than one kind of union that is too intimate, too personal for a third!”

This has been a minor but persistent complaint about visual culture since the cultural industry overwhelmed us with its own pics, films, etc. I am a child of the cultural industry, myself, and can’t imagine certain characters from novels without imagining the actors who played them. That purity of contact – the sort of fucking that Kürnberger sees as the model for reading – is a thing I doubt. Goethe’s Gretchen and Gretchen’s Gretchen are distinct entities – perhaps one of Kürnberger’s faults as a novelist, in as much as his novels are pretty much forgotten, is that he has way too idealistic view of fantasy, and the contract between author, image, and reader. I suppose this is a good place to mention that Kürnberger was a friend of Sacher-Masoch and prefaced one of his novels.

 

 

 

 

 

turning points - the American conversion story

 

What would history be like if you knocked out the years, days, weeks, centuries? How would we show, for instance, change? In one sense, philosophical history does just that – it rejects the mathematical symbols of chronology as accidents of historical structure that have functioned to place people in time for various interests – religious, political, existential – but that veil the real pattern of change (and blocks of changelessness). These are the crutches of the historian, according to the philosophical historian, who brings a sort of human need – even a servile need – into the telling of history. Instead, a philosophical history will find its before-after structure in the actual substance of history, under the assumption that there is an actual substance to history.

In the case of the most famous philosophical history, Hegel’s, a before and after, a movement, is only given by the conceptual figures that arise and interact in themselves. To introduce a date, here, is to introduce a limit on the movement of the absolute. A limit which, moreover, from the side of the absolute, seems to be merely a superstition, the result of a ceremony of labeling founded on the arbitrary, and ultimately, on the fear of time itself, that deathdealer.

 

Andrew Abbott, in his book, Time Matters, issues an interesting defence of “narrative” as a legitimate sociological method, which is founded on understanding time outside of a state or cult ordained inventory. The chapter on turning points is especially rich.

 

“Note that this "narrative" character of turning points emerges quite as

strongly in quantitative and variable-based methods as in qualitative or

case-based ones. If quantitative turning points could be identified merely

with reference to the past and the immediate present, algorithms locating

turning points could beat the stock market. It is precisely the "hindsight"

character of turning points-their definition in terms of future as well as

past and present-that forbids this.

 

Given this narrative quality, we can reformulate and generalize our con­

cept of turning point to include simpler "bends" in a curve. What defines a

turning point as such is the fact that the turn that takes place within it con­

trasts with a relative straightness outside (both before and after).”

 

The turning point is definitionally linked to the “new” and its value. The archetypal American turning point, I think, is usually a conversion story. These stories are oddly powerful – x describes, say, being a leftist and then confronting a reality that makes him or her realize that leftism is bogus. In this story, what seems to be told about is x’s variable judgment, which one would think would disqualify x from analysing leftism or rightism. But that is not how the story signifies. It signifies as a conversion experience, an account given from beyond some turning point. It doesn’t imply the continuity of the foolishness of x, but x’s newfound wisdom. These cases can be found throughout our newspapers, tv, movies, novels, poems, etc. American conversion is a genre in itself.

 

Abbott digs into this a bit in his own way: “There is for the individual actor a curious inversion of " causality" and "explanation" in the trajectory-turning point model of careers or life cycles.  From the point of view of the actor moving from trajectory to trajectory, the "regular" periods of the trajectories are far less consequential and causally important than are the "random" periods of the turning points. The causally

comprehensible phase seems unimportant, while the causally incomprehensible phase seems far more so.”

 

I think this says much about affect and time. But time is short, and I have other non-turning points to turn to.