I read an old column of Alexander Cockburn’s yesterday, from 1999. The substance of the column was that the left in the U.S. was a joke, led by phonies like Jesse Jackson and Michael Moore, and the only progressive political energy was, bizarrely, on the right, where there was a healthy hatred of the government.
Now, as is the case with many Cockburn columns, this was too clever by half. But lopping off the too clever half, he had a point – the only people who were truly, actively against U.S. intervention in Kosovo were rightwingers like Jack Kemp.
Given that politics is mostly positioning, that opposition to war has melted on the right with the Republicans in power. But I do think it could come back. In fact, I think it has, among the grassroots. Save for those who are swayed by the logic of Suttee, which posits that sacrifice demands, in itself, further blind sacrifice (thus the soldiers killed in Iraq are not killed in vain if further soldiers are killed in Iraq), the American will to continue the madness there is crumbling. There is, unfortunately, a lot of anger on the left about this with no forum – the Democrats have long been a coalition of the cowardly, and the irritant of their presence on the scene is mitigated only by their almost total irrelevance and impotence. What LI thinks should be happening is some reaching out to the paleoconservatives. The paleos are really hostile to the wasting of American lives in the service of the great Moloch, Washington D.C. And the wasting of these lives is becoming, increasingly, a vanity project, as the courtiers around King George refuse to confront him about his madness. What one would like to see is an alliance of convenience. The recent discussion about Harry’s Place in LI’s comments was interesting insofar as the writers of that blog present themselves as leftists. So do many who support the mad war. Unfortunately, anti-war people have not yet exploited the opening given by the left-symp war supporters.
These kinds of people – their lifestyles, their vocabulary, their gestures -- evoke blind rage among rightwingers, even as they grudgingly rally to them. It would seem an eminently fair step, in terms of propaganda, to exploit that rage – to present the war as what it is, a faux Leninist project. LI has always thought that the most consistent anti-war position is derived from Burkean conservatism. Yet the antiwar left continually drives away their allies by pulling in extraneous domestic matters. Allies don’t have to be converts – in fact, every ally, in strategic terms, is a potential enemy. The fact that the left doesn’t use the enormous, pent up hostility to D.C. is a historic relic from the time that the liberals controlled D.C. That time is gone, and the D.C. centric gesture ossifies a self defeating politics.
Saturday, June 11, 2005
Friday, June 10, 2005
Nietzsche, again
LI received a letter the other day wishing us good luck on our Nietzsche postings, but warning us that we were probably on a fool’s errand. Maybe so. Still, it does seem to us that the controversy about Nietzsche and fascism makes a strange detour around the arguments of the fascists themselves, and this is something we’d like to correct. And we’d like to correct it using one of Nietzsche’s own habitual methods: the question, for us, is what problems faced a philosopher who wanted to make Nietzsche into a proto-Nazi? And, a companion question, what benefit did Nietzsche bring to Nazism?
In Lehmann’s intro, one of the problems that has to be dealt with is that Nietzsche happens to have been multiply claimed between 1890 and 1933. Here’s the way Lehnmann states the problem:
It is not the year 1900, the year of Nietzsche’s death, that is decisive in bringing to a close the mental reality that we call the 19th century. It was only 1914 that decisively pushed that reality into the past. And if we say that we are closest to Nietzsche not only of all his contemporaries, but among all German thinkers of the past, we meant that his will and his greatness only became visible through the experience of the first world war.
This is how we understand the curious fact that more than a quarter century of Nietzsche scholarship has not succeeded in bringing the philosophy of this thinker out into the open. A writer of such wonderful clarity and transparency of language, who has spoken so often and so extensively about his intentions and tasks – does it require a particular interpretation and the instrument of interpretation, “philology”, in order to grasp his fundamental concepts? Just this, that each person who reads Nietzsche thinks that he is the master of his thought, was the cause of the misunderstanding of his philosophy.”
What is behind Lehmann’s time scheme?
We are all familiar with the pictures and trivia – the picture of Hitler at Nietzsche’s house, posing with a simpering, aged Elizabeth; Hitler sending Nietzsche’s collected works to Mussolini as a present sealing the Axis pact; etc., etc. Those scenes, and their precedent in the work of people like Lehmann, succeeded in one crucial aspect: they pretty much sealed the relation between Nietzsche and fascism, driving out rival claims. But it gives us a very skewed picture of Nietzsche’s reception to think that only the fascists claimed Nietzsche at this time. In fact, the Goethe-kultur of the German speaking countries had absorbed Nietzsche as the last German classic long before then. We know about the effect Nietzsche had on the modernist generation between 1890 and 1914 (which Lehmann denigrates, following, in this, Nazi policy): the influence on Gide, on Svevo, on Shaw, on Barres, on Hamsum, on Hesse, on Mann, on Musil – it is hard to find a writer from that time who hadn’t some opinion of Nietzsche. Or several, over the course of a lifetime – Musil and Mann are notable in this respect. There was also the influence on Jewish culture – in this period, Nietzsche was considered, as Otto Weiniger puts it somewhere, a “philo-Semite.” Martin Buber translated Zarathustra into Polish. The greatest Jewish philosopher, perhaps, of the twentieth century, Franz Rosenzweig, built Der Stern der Erloesung partly out of his struggle with N. But less noted is the political claiming of Nietzsche. The liberal-social democratic party in Germany was particularly attracted to Nietzsche. The German politician who first declared himself Nietzsche’s follower was not Hitler, but Hitler’s antithesis, Walter Rathenau, who was assassinated in 1922, after Rapello. In Nazi eyes, Rathenau was an ideal devil: a rich, liberal, Jewish industrialist associated with that government party that surrendered in 1918 – which is surely not the effect Lehmann wants to emphasize. In a polemic with Sloterdjik over Nietzsche, (the Right Nietzsche in the belly of a left Trojan Horse) Detlef Hartman claims that Nietzsche work was the “most radical driver’ behind the Taylor-Fordist regime advocated by Rathenau, Weber and Schumpeter – that indeed, the idea of ‘creative destruction” has a Nietzschian geneology.
Tucholsky made fun of the overuse of Nietzsche, in this period. Like a lot of the Vienna spirits, Tucholsky went from admiring Nietzsche to comparing him, unfavorably, with Schopenhauer:
“Tell me what you need, and I will find a Nietzsche quote for you. With Schopenhauer, this isn’t so easy. With Nietzsche? Pro Germany and anti-German. For peace and against peace. For literature and against literature. Whatever you like.”
In that atmosphere, the first and most successful Nazi move was to clear out rivals.
I am not, by the way, making an exculpatory argument – or not yet. There is a newspaper logic that goes like this: x says that the world is round, and y says that the world is flat. So the truth must be in the middle – the world is shaped like a Frisbee. That’s the very definition, to me, of what Nietzsche called herd thinking. Because many sides claimed Nietzsche doesn’t mean one side was not correct. While I think Nietzsche’s thinking contains a good many themes that allow one to see the belligerance, nationalism, and worship of power of the fascists as symptoms of nihilism, I also think there are plenty of footholds in Nietzsche lending themselves to a rightwing reading. There is a line of thought that says, the Nazis misunderstood Nietzsche – and fundamentally I agree with that. But they also understood things about Nietzsche. The hagiographic approach to Nietzsche, criticized by T.V., is all about avoiding those things. So the question is, pace Tucholsky, – did the Nazi editing of Nietzsche have internal textual and conceptual support from the man who wrote, in the Antichrist: ‘The weak and misbegotten shall be driven to extinction. This is the first law of our love of humanity. And one should give them a helping hand”? A sentence over which, as Nietzsche might have put it, a Verhaengniss hangs.
More, hopefully, tomorrow.
In Lehmann’s intro, one of the problems that has to be dealt with is that Nietzsche happens to have been multiply claimed between 1890 and 1933. Here’s the way Lehnmann states the problem:
It is not the year 1900, the year of Nietzsche’s death, that is decisive in bringing to a close the mental reality that we call the 19th century. It was only 1914 that decisively pushed that reality into the past. And if we say that we are closest to Nietzsche not only of all his contemporaries, but among all German thinkers of the past, we meant that his will and his greatness only became visible through the experience of the first world war.
This is how we understand the curious fact that more than a quarter century of Nietzsche scholarship has not succeeded in bringing the philosophy of this thinker out into the open. A writer of such wonderful clarity and transparency of language, who has spoken so often and so extensively about his intentions and tasks – does it require a particular interpretation and the instrument of interpretation, “philology”, in order to grasp his fundamental concepts? Just this, that each person who reads Nietzsche thinks that he is the master of his thought, was the cause of the misunderstanding of his philosophy.”
What is behind Lehmann’s time scheme?
We are all familiar with the pictures and trivia – the picture of Hitler at Nietzsche’s house, posing with a simpering, aged Elizabeth; Hitler sending Nietzsche’s collected works to Mussolini as a present sealing the Axis pact; etc., etc. Those scenes, and their precedent in the work of people like Lehmann, succeeded in one crucial aspect: they pretty much sealed the relation between Nietzsche and fascism, driving out rival claims. But it gives us a very skewed picture of Nietzsche’s reception to think that only the fascists claimed Nietzsche at this time. In fact, the Goethe-kultur of the German speaking countries had absorbed Nietzsche as the last German classic long before then. We know about the effect Nietzsche had on the modernist generation between 1890 and 1914 (which Lehmann denigrates, following, in this, Nazi policy): the influence on Gide, on Svevo, on Shaw, on Barres, on Hamsum, on Hesse, on Mann, on Musil – it is hard to find a writer from that time who hadn’t some opinion of Nietzsche. Or several, over the course of a lifetime – Musil and Mann are notable in this respect. There was also the influence on Jewish culture – in this period, Nietzsche was considered, as Otto Weiniger puts it somewhere, a “philo-Semite.” Martin Buber translated Zarathustra into Polish. The greatest Jewish philosopher, perhaps, of the twentieth century, Franz Rosenzweig, built Der Stern der Erloesung partly out of his struggle with N. But less noted is the political claiming of Nietzsche. The liberal-social democratic party in Germany was particularly attracted to Nietzsche. The German politician who first declared himself Nietzsche’s follower was not Hitler, but Hitler’s antithesis, Walter Rathenau, who was assassinated in 1922, after Rapello. In Nazi eyes, Rathenau was an ideal devil: a rich, liberal, Jewish industrialist associated with that government party that surrendered in 1918 – which is surely not the effect Lehmann wants to emphasize. In a polemic with Sloterdjik over Nietzsche, (the Right Nietzsche in the belly of a left Trojan Horse) Detlef Hartman claims that Nietzsche work was the “most radical driver’ behind the Taylor-Fordist regime advocated by Rathenau, Weber and Schumpeter – that indeed, the idea of ‘creative destruction” has a Nietzschian geneology.
Tucholsky made fun of the overuse of Nietzsche, in this period. Like a lot of the Vienna spirits, Tucholsky went from admiring Nietzsche to comparing him, unfavorably, with Schopenhauer:
“Tell me what you need, and I will find a Nietzsche quote for you. With Schopenhauer, this isn’t so easy. With Nietzsche? Pro Germany and anti-German. For peace and against peace. For literature and against literature. Whatever you like.”
In that atmosphere, the first and most successful Nazi move was to clear out rivals.
I am not, by the way, making an exculpatory argument – or not yet. There is a newspaper logic that goes like this: x says that the world is round, and y says that the world is flat. So the truth must be in the middle – the world is shaped like a Frisbee. That’s the very definition, to me, of what Nietzsche called herd thinking. Because many sides claimed Nietzsche doesn’t mean one side was not correct. While I think Nietzsche’s thinking contains a good many themes that allow one to see the belligerance, nationalism, and worship of power of the fascists as symptoms of nihilism, I also think there are plenty of footholds in Nietzsche lending themselves to a rightwing reading. There is a line of thought that says, the Nazis misunderstood Nietzsche – and fundamentally I agree with that. But they also understood things about Nietzsche. The hagiographic approach to Nietzsche, criticized by T.V., is all about avoiding those things. So the question is, pace Tucholsky, – did the Nazi editing of Nietzsche have internal textual and conceptual support from the man who wrote, in the Antichrist: ‘The weak and misbegotten shall be driven to extinction. This is the first law of our love of humanity. And one should give them a helping hand”? A sentence over which, as Nietzsche might have put it, a Verhaengniss hangs.
More, hopefully, tomorrow.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
a short and not so sweet post
LI has been terrible lately. We know it. Exhaustion on this end. And also – there is a strange cycle in trying to write posts daily. Sometimes, what comes out of my fingers seems like gold – and then sometimes it seems like fool’s gold. I am rather fascinated by that volatility, even if LI's poor readers might find it less than engrossing. It isn’t connected to the quality of ideas – writing isn’t a command and control process, in which the concepts come first and tell the language, or one’s share of it, how to get to work. The concepts are vaguely there, a sort of drape fluttering and room hum, and one’s share of the language is sprawled on the floor, grinding up crayons and picking their noses. And then some cognitive throat clearing occurs, and the language either jumps up and starts spontaneously doing the dance of the bumble bee back from the pollen laden flowers – which is good -- or it bucks and whinnies like a dying mule – which is bad.
Our recommend for your reading pleasure this morning is this Knight Ridder article about the freedom loving Iraqi government our boys and gals are dying for. Those boys and gals are probably proud as punch that the Iraqi gov has discovered such creative uses for the electric drill as an instrument of information gathering. Gee, it is almost as if our boys and gals are dying to reincarnate the very forms and ceremonies of the last Iraq government, Saddam Hussein’s. But that can’t be – can one imagine Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, supporting that kind of thing?
Your neighbors. Their blood. Your hands. The virtuous circle rides again, and it is mornin’ in Bush’s America.
Our other recommend is a much longer and lasting read. Santayana's philosophical masterpiece, the Life of Reason, has been put up in all five volumes at the Gutenberg site. We think Santayana was the most important conservative philosopher of the twentieth century, and maybe the sole original American contribution to conservative thought. Plus, he is an excellent writer (too excellent, many philosophers claim -- he liked writing a little bit too much). He makes the Strausses and Kirks look like amateur pikers.
Our recommend for your reading pleasure this morning is this Knight Ridder article about the freedom loving Iraqi government our boys and gals are dying for. Those boys and gals are probably proud as punch that the Iraqi gov has discovered such creative uses for the electric drill as an instrument of information gathering. Gee, it is almost as if our boys and gals are dying to reincarnate the very forms and ceremonies of the last Iraq government, Saddam Hussein’s. But that can’t be – can one imagine Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, supporting that kind of thing?
Your neighbors. Their blood. Your hands. The virtuous circle rides again, and it is mornin’ in Bush’s America.
Our other recommend is a much longer and lasting read. Santayana's philosophical masterpiece, the Life of Reason, has been put up in all five volumes at the Gutenberg site. We think Santayana was the most important conservative philosopher of the twentieth century, and maybe the sole original American contribution to conservative thought. Plus, he is an excellent writer (too excellent, many philosophers claim -- he liked writing a little bit too much). He makes the Strausses and Kirks look like amateur pikers.
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
too much blog talk
Mr Turbulent Velvet replied to our post about Nietzsche, sort of preemptively killing us in the windup. But we are still determined to trace out one of Nietzsche's posthumous "becomings" -- how N. became a Nazi -- in order to demonstrate that the selective reading of Nietzsche that made him acceptable to the nazis is picked up and reproduced by those who criticize him for being a protofascist without questioning the history of that image. Unfortunately, I’m doing some heavy lifting in another part of my life right now – the editing part – so that I just don’t have the energy today.
So, instead of Nietzsche, a little short post about a funny blog thing. A couple of days ago, at one of our favorite blogs, Charlotte Street, there was a post about “bruschetta brigade” – which I guess is the equivalent, in the U.K., of limousine liberals. It was a nice riff that ended like this:
“Here is ‘mere talk’; meanwhile others must make tough decisions etc. ‘Bruschetta’ has the added advantage of sounding foreign – there is always something somehow foreign and unpatriotic about these intellectuals, non? Thus, the phrase glides along grooves ideologically pre-prepared. It is little more than a Barthesian mytheme.”
We made a few comments in the comments section about luxury and its ambiguity in both the classical economic tradition and in Marx.
Well, these comments were seized upon as the quintessence of po-mo nonsense by another blog, Harry’s Place. And, in order to add a little of the necessary irony to the mix, the comments were then attributed to the guy who writes Charlotte Street. Who then writes about the HP people coming to his site and making pissy comments on the post. Thus completing the circle, which is either a vicious circle or a circle jerk – or both. First, you get the drift of the signature. Second, the politics of citation. Third is the blissful repetition of the gesture I was criticizing in my thesis without any consciousness that the gesture was being repeated. The unconsciousness is not my subjective interpretation -- several remarks showed that commentors had inversed the sense of the thesis I was making. And it wasn't a difficult thesis. The scorn poured on the meaningless phrases, all with words of more than two syllables, all obviously “unnecessary” when common sense would tell you all about luxury – how could this be anything other than the reactivation of the very trope I was pointing to? And finally, to put the icing on the eclair, I believe that some commenters on the HP blog must have read earlier posts of mine, stuff I’ve written over the years about my habitual destitution, and transferred the sense of that to the writer of the Charlotte Street blog – there was some discussion about whether the writer of the latter was unemployed.
All of which is pretty funny. If I’d set up a psych experiment on Derrida’s notion of the effects of a text, I couldn’t have come up with a set of more validating inputs. Plus, to me, the luxury of watching my original tracing of the psychopathology of luxury create responses that blindly repeat that psychopathology in another domain (that of rhetoric). I wonder if this is how Pavlov felt when walking through the kennel?
So, instead of Nietzsche, a little short post about a funny blog thing. A couple of days ago, at one of our favorite blogs, Charlotte Street, there was a post about “bruschetta brigade” – which I guess is the equivalent, in the U.K., of limousine liberals. It was a nice riff that ended like this:
“Here is ‘mere talk’; meanwhile others must make tough decisions etc. ‘Bruschetta’ has the added advantage of sounding foreign – there is always something somehow foreign and unpatriotic about these intellectuals, non? Thus, the phrase glides along grooves ideologically pre-prepared. It is little more than a Barthesian mytheme.”
We made a few comments in the comments section about luxury and its ambiguity in both the classical economic tradition and in Marx.
Well, these comments were seized upon as the quintessence of po-mo nonsense by another blog, Harry’s Place. And, in order to add a little of the necessary irony to the mix, the comments were then attributed to the guy who writes Charlotte Street. Who then writes about the HP people coming to his site and making pissy comments on the post. Thus completing the circle, which is either a vicious circle or a circle jerk – or both. First, you get the drift of the signature. Second, the politics of citation. Third is the blissful repetition of the gesture I was criticizing in my thesis without any consciousness that the gesture was being repeated. The unconsciousness is not my subjective interpretation -- several remarks showed that commentors had inversed the sense of the thesis I was making. And it wasn't a difficult thesis. The scorn poured on the meaningless phrases, all with words of more than two syllables, all obviously “unnecessary” when common sense would tell you all about luxury – how could this be anything other than the reactivation of the very trope I was pointing to? And finally, to put the icing on the eclair, I believe that some commenters on the HP blog must have read earlier posts of mine, stuff I’ve written over the years about my habitual destitution, and transferred the sense of that to the writer of the Charlotte Street blog – there was some discussion about whether the writer of the latter was unemployed.
All of which is pretty funny. If I’d set up a psych experiment on Derrida’s notion of the effects of a text, I couldn’t have come up with a set of more validating inputs. Plus, to me, the luxury of watching my original tracing of the psychopathology of luxury create responses that blindly repeat that psychopathology in another domain (that of rhetoric). I wonder if this is how Pavlov felt when walking through the kennel?
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Nietzsche and fascinating fascism
A busy schedule has made LI haphazard and sloppy about posting, lately. We hoped to have up a post about Nietzsche, today, but instead we have this galimatias.
Nietzsche is surely the writer we have studied most closely, and who has had the greatest impact on our life. Consequently, we don’t really like to write about the man. Arguing about Nietzsche is much less fun, in our view, than applying Nietzsche’s m.o. Still, we’ve been following UFO Breakfast’s intermittent series of posts attacking the Big N. and, in particular, his status right now on the left. LI is, if anything, a lefty Nietzschian, so we are going to take a crack at replying to this charge:
“I do think that even if Nietzsche was an innocent reactionary aphorist, there is something peculiar about his work that, when appropriated by progressives, leads not so much to fascism as fecklessness.”
The writer of the blog, Turbulent Velvet, is very good. He employs those methods approved of by the legendary Mike Fink, who always began his fights with:
I'm a Salt River roarer! I'm a ring-tailed squealer! I'm a reg'lar screamer from
the ol' Massassip'i WHOOP! . . . I'm half wild horse and half cock-eyed alligator and the rest o' me is crooked snags an' red-hot snappin' turkle. I can hit like fourth-proof lightnin' an' every lick I make in the woods lets in an acre o' sunshine. I can out-run, out-jump, out-shoot, out-brag, out-drink, an' out-fight, rough-an'-tumble, no holts barred, ary man on both sides the river from Pittsburgh to New Orleans an' back ag'in to St. Louiee. Come on, you flatters, you bargers, you milk-white mechanics, an' see how tough I am to chaw!
The no holts barred polemic he launches on Nietzsche chaws right through him, using a reading of Geoff Waite’s Nietzsche’s Corpse to make the milk white followers of the zeitgeist, the fans, the causuists, the excusers, tremble in their boots:
“It's popular & common to forgive fascists because they invent funny one-liners at the expense of the weak and helpless. It's the main reason Clear Channel has taken over our culture. "He's just an entertainer."
Nietzsche hagiography is simply the tweed/punk sublation of that formation with a lacuna as big as the fuckin' sun.
2.
There's not much point in reading a dusty biography of Alexander Pope organized around the argument that "he was more sinned against than sinning." Why? Because a critic who derives all of his primary categories for evaluating an author directly from that author himself is doomed not just to write a hagiography but the precise hagiography that the author programmed him to write.
For the same reason there is no point in reading an approach to Nietzsche which takes him to be a "buffoon" or that his work should be divided into three stages because that's what he told us to think about him. Nietzsche fans are such good little boys and girls: they always do what they're told. (Granted, it's hard for Nietzsche fans to think for themselves because he makes them feel like such courageous naughty little rebels if they think like him instead. Rebel against me, said Zarathustra! And the fans quote him, even as they don't!)
Nietzsche is unique in his ability to inspire universal hagiographic abjection. And along with the hagiography comes an even more bizarre suspension of any suspicion about its obvious universality. For all other major philosophers one can find shelves of books written polemically against their work, often with no quarter given. The "anti" gesture is part of the tradition: Marx writes the anti-Hegel, Nietzsche the anti-Christ, D&G the anti-Freud. But there is no tradition of anti-Nietzsche to speak of, not even a tepid desire there should be one--especially on the Left where one would expect to find little else.”
So -- I am not going to take on Waite. Rather, I’d like to take the case of Nietzsche as fascist or Nazi from the mouth of the people who first made that case: the Nazis themselves. Luckily, Lehmann’s 1939 preface to Nietzsche’s works, which was produced in Nazi Germany, is up on the web. I often find it puzzling that the case for Nietzsche’s fascism is discussed as if it were a matter of Nietzsche and Heidegger and contemporary American and European philosophers, none of whom openly espouse fascism. As Husserl said to the blind man, go to the things themselves. What is left out of the equation are those who did espouse fascism, and thought Nietzsche was its prophet.
My argument that N. leads neither to fascism nor fecklessness is that: a., the fascist interpretation begins by seriously distorting Nietzsche’s reception, which is part of the general fascist reaction against modernism; b, that the reading of Nietzsche as a fascist systematically segregates and diminishes the critical dimension in Nietzsche; c, that the fascist interpretation, while rightly seeing the Will to Power as essential to Nietzsche’s philosophy, conflates it with “Macro Politics” (grosse Politik); and d, that the conflict in Nietzsche’s own politics, in the latter part of the work, has to do with finding the scale at which his models of power work. C. was the whole point of Bäumler’s work, which was key to the Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche. As Lehmann puts it:
“He has further shown, that Nietzsche, the political thinker, was the only one among his contemporaries to set the demands of the future and the making of Macro-Politics (“grosse” Politik zu treiben) in opposition to the Christian-nationalist state, the Second Reich, the bourgeois mass and class state, whose downfall he forsaw.”
This finds the right locus in Nietzsche, for it is his opposition to Bismarck and the Germany of his time that, to the fascists, skews Nietzsche to the right – and to me, skews Nietzsche to the critical. I wouldn’t say to the left, which was worker based and for which Nietzsche had no feel and only a distant appreciation. Nietzsche was no socialist. His own sense was that he had no political faction in Germany. His politics as a practical matter were hopelessly out of date -- he was a Frondeur, a supporter of the nobility against the monarchy, an impossible political position in the late 19th century, although a lively one in 17th century France.
But the obsolescence of his politics, his dandyism, freed him from being a partisan -- gave him the "fecklessness" to be critical. What I would say is that Nietzsche’s own political thinking picked out the totalitarian seed in the democratic state. I would say this is why, contra Mr. TV, Nietzsche's shock effect is not comfortably contained within an academic s/m fan club. The reigning myth is that democracy is opposed to totalitarianism – that totalitarianism comes from outside democracy, infests it like a disease, sickens it, overthrows it. Churchill's image of Lenin being conveyed into Russia on a sealed train like a bacillus picks up on this myth. Nietzsche, on the contrary, claims that the organizational form to which democracies tend – the party form – prefigures a new kind of tyranny. He saw that the party organization flourished in the democratic culture of the nineteenth century, and he saw how that organization reproduced itself by coordinating ideology and party interest. He saw how the tie between those two tends, inevitably, to advance party interest and hollow out ideology, insofar as the representatives of ideology becomes the party's ruling clique. He was certainly right that all of the significant tyrannies of the twentieth century in the West have come through parties, and have ruled through parties. This isn't true of tyrannies in the past.
This makes things interesting. The fascist claim on Nietzsche, here, and the left Nietzschian claim, both rely on constructing Nietzsche’s response to German statebuilding (even if that theme has been undercontextualized among contemporary Nietzschians) which of course happened while he was alive. That is probably where I will go after doing a post on Lehmann. I’m not sure if I am going to go into the d. too much. And I’m not sure if I will have time for too much of any of this. And, as I say, I find arguing about Nietzsche oftentimes besides the point. But as I am myself wondering about American politics in the age of Bush – and especially the debilitating lock of the parties on political alternatives – it fits with my present preoccupations.
Monday, June 06, 2005
oh that American rag...
The court decision on medical marijuana is unsurprising – this is a court that has consistently insulated the war on drugs from the Constitution, affirming, time and time again, the tactics of the police state and the destruction of the Bill of Rights -- as long as that destruction leads to the American penitentiary society of which we are all so proud. The NYT captures the weirdness of the vote:
"The states' core police powers have always included authority to define criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens," said O'Connor, who was joined in her dissent by two other states' rights advocates: Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas.
The legal question presented a dilemma for the court's conservatives, who have pushed to broaden states' rights in recent years. They earlier invalidated federal laws dealing with gun possession near schools and violence against women on the grounds the activity was too local to justify federal intrusion.”
The present court has, however, no problem with inconsistency – they simply convey the conservative agenda in all its many splendid contradiction, regarding the reach of state power. Still, the drug issue has been tied in for years with the system whereby the Federal government has increased its power over the states – the ban on narcotics traffic being, along with the protection of endangered animal fur and feathers, one of the first areas in which the Fed asserted its preemptive regulatory right to reach into the states economies, and thereby shape their general political culture.
If this were a consistent court, this ruling would lead to the affirmation of a broad array of federal regulatory powers – it would be, in other words, incredibly New Dealish. But this is a political court, and its rulings about Federal power over, say, land use will hew to that line which pleases the rich, while its rulings about drug use will hew to that line which pleases the evangelicals.
The advantages of inconsistency in politics outweighs the ponderous benefits of precedence. I think liberals have to start thinking of states rights in a new way, as the U.S. becomes more and more Confederate. The use of the federal government to break up apartheid was a great victory – but one shouldn’t be tied to an ossified form. That was then, this is now. When the AG’s office is filled by a torture advocate, the time to get out of the habit of increasing federal power is now.
"The states' core police powers have always included authority to define criminal law and to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens," said O'Connor, who was joined in her dissent by two other states' rights advocates: Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas.
The legal question presented a dilemma for the court's conservatives, who have pushed to broaden states' rights in recent years. They earlier invalidated federal laws dealing with gun possession near schools and violence against women on the grounds the activity was too local to justify federal intrusion.”
The present court has, however, no problem with inconsistency – they simply convey the conservative agenda in all its many splendid contradiction, regarding the reach of state power. Still, the drug issue has been tied in for years with the system whereby the Federal government has increased its power over the states – the ban on narcotics traffic being, along with the protection of endangered animal fur and feathers, one of the first areas in which the Fed asserted its preemptive regulatory right to reach into the states economies, and thereby shape their general political culture.
If this were a consistent court, this ruling would lead to the affirmation of a broad array of federal regulatory powers – it would be, in other words, incredibly New Dealish. But this is a political court, and its rulings about Federal power over, say, land use will hew to that line which pleases the rich, while its rulings about drug use will hew to that line which pleases the evangelicals.
The advantages of inconsistency in politics outweighs the ponderous benefits of precedence. I think liberals have to start thinking of states rights in a new way, as the U.S. becomes more and more Confederate. The use of the federal government to break up apartheid was a great victory – but one shouldn’t be tied to an ossified form. That was then, this is now. When the AG’s office is filled by a torture advocate, the time to get out of the habit of increasing federal power is now.
Russia
While it is illegal to experiment on a living human being, there are no laws against experimenting on nations. Poor Russia has suffered two great experiments – one, the Bolshevism of communism, and the other, after Gorbachev, the Bolshevism of capitalism. The latter, of course, is much favored in the Western press, which has gotten more worked up about the jailing of a billionaire Mafioso/oil tycoon than all the premature deaths in Moscow and Chechnya combined.
A reader wisely scored LI for suggesting that Central Europe would do better to create an EU-style union with Russia than with the EU. This is not going to happen – not only are the hostilities still too deep, but Russia has drifted back into its own history of disastrous strong men with Putin. There is a nice personal essay – St. Petersburg Portraits -- by Emma Lieber in this season’s Massachussetts Review. Portraits of St. Petersburg are a motif in Russian literature – Gogol’s Nevsky Prospect, for instance, which begins with the Prospect itself as a sort of generator of drama, out of which its characters -- its artist and the young prostitute -- arise as geographic coordinates of what becomes a typical Gogolian delirium. Lieber visited St. Petersburg as a student for a year – and her voice has that comfort with… no, more, that quiet relish in the slightly bizarre and backwards and louche that one picks up from all the American expat lit that has come out of stays in Eastern Europe (Arthur Phillips’ Prague is a good example). Americans have a special status there, since the scramble for existence in the capitalist system is being done by people who have learned it by the book -- learned it, that is, by inference from those books that demonized it. It is as if a culture had adopted Christianity as they had inferred it from the works of Alistair Crowley. Lieber has the preternatural actuarial wisdom that comes from having absorbed the statistics, which I guess is part of growing up and getting into a good college now. So she is grimly aware, for instance, of the statistics concerning life expectancy. For males in Russia, the emptying out of the male slot after forty has an alarming visibility:
“Vysula was my host father for five months of my stay in St. Petersburg. He is around 50 years old, and he expects to live another five years or so, ten years tops. Of his class of twelve boys at school, ten are already dead, from sickness or alcoholism or Communism, or some combination of these.”
“At any rate Vysula remains, alive and sober, one of the last of his childhood friends to have reached middle age, though while I was there he was always sick in some way. He usually had a cold or the flu and would wander from room to room with a scarf around his neck, quizzing me constantly about American medicines and offering absurd advice about how to stay healthy
(which always reminded me of the Woody Allen character in Sleeper, a '70s health-food nut who has been cryogenically frozen for several centuries and thaws out to find that cigarettes, deepfried
fat, and chocolate had been the healthy stuff all along). In general Vysula looked well-fed and sturdy, and I never could quite believe that he was sick. But if we're to judge by the statistics,
he probably will die in the next five or ten years.”
We’ve been told, again and again, that the free market shocks of the nineties were making all the difference for the Russians – and at the same time we’ve been told, again and again, that Russia is held together by criminal activity. Lieber is, of course, giving only her impressions, but it doesn’t seem too far fetched to think that an atmosphere so constituted by a monstrous past at the heel and the inability to shake off whole geological strata of expectations in order to free oneself to act must bear down upon people. On the advise of friends from Massachusetts, Lieber gets in touch with a Solugub scholar, Elizabeva, and meets her daughter and mother – no men in the household, another exemplar of the statistical norm:
It is perfectly typical in St. Petersburg for three generations to share their living space, because apartments are hard to come by and Russians don't tend to move out (although luckily the country is past the point where ex-spouses must live together for decades, as they did until rather recently). It is also fairly typical that these three generations should be made up entirely of women, since Russian men tend to die. Elisaveta's family, she
once told me smilingly, can't hold on to its men—first her father died, then her husband, then her brother. When her dog gave birth last year the male puppies died right away, but the females were healthy and strong.”
There is this amusing riff about Elisaveta’s mother:
“She lives with her two college-aged daughters, Valentina and Maria, and her mother, a
true Russian babushka (literally, grandmother), who is huge, takes a shot of vodka before every meal, dresses in a housedress and slippers, and paddles around making outraged remarks in a raspy, slurred voice to no one in particular. Elizavetas mother never leaves the house. I assumed that the reason was her much discussed bad heart, but Elizaveta explained matter-of-factly that "Mama hasn't wanted to go out since 1943," when, as a young woman during the siege, she was chased through the streets of Leningrad by cannibals.”
History is a matter of more trick or treat than we like to think. And once you start getting the tricks, it is hard to stop.
A reader wisely scored LI for suggesting that Central Europe would do better to create an EU-style union with Russia than with the EU. This is not going to happen – not only are the hostilities still too deep, but Russia has drifted back into its own history of disastrous strong men with Putin. There is a nice personal essay – St. Petersburg Portraits -- by Emma Lieber in this season’s Massachussetts Review. Portraits of St. Petersburg are a motif in Russian literature – Gogol’s Nevsky Prospect, for instance, which begins with the Prospect itself as a sort of generator of drama, out of which its characters -- its artist and the young prostitute -- arise as geographic coordinates of what becomes a typical Gogolian delirium. Lieber visited St. Petersburg as a student for a year – and her voice has that comfort with… no, more, that quiet relish in the slightly bizarre and backwards and louche that one picks up from all the American expat lit that has come out of stays in Eastern Europe (Arthur Phillips’ Prague is a good example). Americans have a special status there, since the scramble for existence in the capitalist system is being done by people who have learned it by the book -- learned it, that is, by inference from those books that demonized it. It is as if a culture had adopted Christianity as they had inferred it from the works of Alistair Crowley. Lieber has the preternatural actuarial wisdom that comes from having absorbed the statistics, which I guess is part of growing up and getting into a good college now. So she is grimly aware, for instance, of the statistics concerning life expectancy. For males in Russia, the emptying out of the male slot after forty has an alarming visibility:
“Vysula was my host father for five months of my stay in St. Petersburg. He is around 50 years old, and he expects to live another five years or so, ten years tops. Of his class of twelve boys at school, ten are already dead, from sickness or alcoholism or Communism, or some combination of these.”
“At any rate Vysula remains, alive and sober, one of the last of his childhood friends to have reached middle age, though while I was there he was always sick in some way. He usually had a cold or the flu and would wander from room to room with a scarf around his neck, quizzing me constantly about American medicines and offering absurd advice about how to stay healthy
(which always reminded me of the Woody Allen character in Sleeper, a '70s health-food nut who has been cryogenically frozen for several centuries and thaws out to find that cigarettes, deepfried
fat, and chocolate had been the healthy stuff all along). In general Vysula looked well-fed and sturdy, and I never could quite believe that he was sick. But if we're to judge by the statistics,
he probably will die in the next five or ten years.”
We’ve been told, again and again, that the free market shocks of the nineties were making all the difference for the Russians – and at the same time we’ve been told, again and again, that Russia is held together by criminal activity. Lieber is, of course, giving only her impressions, but it doesn’t seem too far fetched to think that an atmosphere so constituted by a monstrous past at the heel and the inability to shake off whole geological strata of expectations in order to free oneself to act must bear down upon people. On the advise of friends from Massachusetts, Lieber gets in touch with a Solugub scholar, Elizabeva, and meets her daughter and mother – no men in the household, another exemplar of the statistical norm:
It is perfectly typical in St. Petersburg for three generations to share their living space, because apartments are hard to come by and Russians don't tend to move out (although luckily the country is past the point where ex-spouses must live together for decades, as they did until rather recently). It is also fairly typical that these three generations should be made up entirely of women, since Russian men tend to die. Elisaveta's family, she
once told me smilingly, can't hold on to its men—first her father died, then her husband, then her brother. When her dog gave birth last year the male puppies died right away, but the females were healthy and strong.”
There is this amusing riff about Elisaveta’s mother:
“She lives with her two college-aged daughters, Valentina and Maria, and her mother, a
true Russian babushka (literally, grandmother), who is huge, takes a shot of vodka before every meal, dresses in a housedress and slippers, and paddles around making outraged remarks in a raspy, slurred voice to no one in particular. Elizavetas mother never leaves the house. I assumed that the reason was her much discussed bad heart, but Elizaveta explained matter-of-factly that "Mama hasn't wanted to go out since 1943," when, as a young woman during the siege, she was chased through the streets of Leningrad by cannibals.”
History is a matter of more trick or treat than we like to think. And once you start getting the tricks, it is hard to stop.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
the good news just keeps pouring in...
“The Bush administration tried this week to counter the impression that Mr. Zarqawi and other insurgents were derailing the nascent Iraqi political process. Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday that American and Iraqi forces over the past few months had killed about 250 members of Mr. Zarqawi's network, including some top lieutenants, and captured more than 400.
General Myers, appearing Wednesday with Mr. Rumsfeld, said the number of attacks against American forces was down 20 percent from peaks last November, during the battle of Falluja, and in January, before the elections. But he did not mention that attacks had doubled, to about 70 a day now, from early April.”
NY Times
Thirty members of the Army National Guard, Army Reserve and Marine Corps Reserve died in the Iraq war in May, matching the highest toll for any month of the war, according to Pentagon figures…
The Guard and Reserve, which make up nearly half the force in Iraq, have generally had fewer than 20 deaths per month during the war, and it's not clear why their losses spiked to 30 in May. That matched the 30 deaths among the Guard and Reserve in January, and it compared with 11 in April, 13 in March and 16 in February.
-- USA today
General Myers, appearing Wednesday with Mr. Rumsfeld, said the number of attacks against American forces was down 20 percent from peaks last November, during the battle of Falluja, and in January, before the elections. But he did not mention that attacks had doubled, to about 70 a day now, from early April.”
NY Times
Thirty members of the Army National Guard, Army Reserve and Marine Corps Reserve died in the Iraq war in May, matching the highest toll for any month of the war, according to Pentagon figures…
The Guard and Reserve, which make up nearly half the force in Iraq, have generally had fewer than 20 deaths per month during the war, and it's not clear why their losses spiked to 30 in May. That matched the 30 deaths among the Guard and Reserve in January, and it compared with 11 in April, 13 in March and 16 in February.
-- USA today
Friday, June 03, 2005
war, what is it good for -- let me count the ways
Harry has an interesting and almost irony free post here which makes the very good point that those who toss around the chickenhawk label when it comes to the pro-Iraq war set aren’t exactly besieging the military recruitment offices to serve in Afghanistan and Kosovo. The larger point is that chickenhawk-hood is a status that crosses the ideological line between liberal and conservative.
That’s an important point. In fact, it was Clinton’s own shifty ways of getting out of fighting in Vietnam that made it hard to countenance his own use of military force in Kosovo. Clinton is a very clever man – he knew this was true. But to be president of the United States is to be president of a country that routinely spends about a trillion dollars every four or five years on the military. That spending is to war like the civit musk is to perfume – it is the pure essence. One simply has to find the right solution to dilute it in. Orwell was right: we live in a society that is perpetually at war.
What infuriates liberals is that Bush has escaped the shadow of non-service that haunted Clinton. How did this happen? LI suspects that, after 9/11, Bush was inoculated from all the damning old questions. But, unlike Harry, we don’t think that the liberals are wrong to push this agenda, even if they are hypocrites to do so. Hypocrisy is just another name for checks and balances – one opposes those forms one used to support when they turn against you. Short term memory loss is a politicians stock in trade. One of the symbolic checks on turning our in vitro wars into the real bloody thing is that there is a scale of responsibility, such that nobody can escape some participation. This was true after the civil war – it was one of the reasons that the Robber Barons achieved political power by supporting politicians instead of becoming politicians, since the J.P. Morgan set profited hugely from the Civil War by renting succedanea to serve for them – and it seems to have been true all the way up to 1992. That the last two presidents have defied that rule is not good – it shows a crack in the structure of symbolic equality that used to support the democratic culture in this country. It is as much a symptom of a country heading down the path of castes as is the salaries of CEOs.
A deeper mistake, we think, of the anti-war side is one we commit all the time – the reliance on the rebarbative horror of war. Lee was right – it is good that war is so horrible, lest we enjoy it too much. War is fun. There is no way around that. For proof, you can look no further than a five year old boy with a plastic soldier and some acorns to throw. Or the fifteen year old with the interactive game. War has always been fun. We need a whole structure of symbolic prohibitions – call it civilization – to keep the war of all against all from breaking out. Or to sublimate it. When the symbolic code that shames the person who supports a war from making some sacrifice for it – joining it, having his or her kids join it, paying for it – breaks down, that is bad news beyond the lesser question of whether liberals or conservative, little enders or big enders, are being coherent.
That’s an important point. In fact, it was Clinton’s own shifty ways of getting out of fighting in Vietnam that made it hard to countenance his own use of military force in Kosovo. Clinton is a very clever man – he knew this was true. But to be president of the United States is to be president of a country that routinely spends about a trillion dollars every four or five years on the military. That spending is to war like the civit musk is to perfume – it is the pure essence. One simply has to find the right solution to dilute it in. Orwell was right: we live in a society that is perpetually at war.
What infuriates liberals is that Bush has escaped the shadow of non-service that haunted Clinton. How did this happen? LI suspects that, after 9/11, Bush was inoculated from all the damning old questions. But, unlike Harry, we don’t think that the liberals are wrong to push this agenda, even if they are hypocrites to do so. Hypocrisy is just another name for checks and balances – one opposes those forms one used to support when they turn against you. Short term memory loss is a politicians stock in trade. One of the symbolic checks on turning our in vitro wars into the real bloody thing is that there is a scale of responsibility, such that nobody can escape some participation. This was true after the civil war – it was one of the reasons that the Robber Barons achieved political power by supporting politicians instead of becoming politicians, since the J.P. Morgan set profited hugely from the Civil War by renting succedanea to serve for them – and it seems to have been true all the way up to 1992. That the last two presidents have defied that rule is not good – it shows a crack in the structure of symbolic equality that used to support the democratic culture in this country. It is as much a symptom of a country heading down the path of castes as is the salaries of CEOs.
A deeper mistake, we think, of the anti-war side is one we commit all the time – the reliance on the rebarbative horror of war. Lee was right – it is good that war is so horrible, lest we enjoy it too much. War is fun. There is no way around that. For proof, you can look no further than a five year old boy with a plastic soldier and some acorns to throw. Or the fifteen year old with the interactive game. War has always been fun. We need a whole structure of symbolic prohibitions – call it civilization – to keep the war of all against all from breaking out. Or to sublimate it. When the symbolic code that shames the person who supports a war from making some sacrifice for it – joining it, having his or her kids join it, paying for it – breaks down, that is bad news beyond the lesser question of whether liberals or conservative, little enders or big enders, are being coherent.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
LI was planning on springing a grand sounding post on our readers entitled the Crisis of the Liberal Order – sweet, eh? Alas, our schedule is a bit too crowded today for the erecting of such monuments (or tombstones). We’ve been rather surprised by the commentary that followed the French no. The crowd at Crooked Timber became apoplectic about the whole thing. Ourselves, we think that the comment made by John Rentoul in the Independent is on the mark:
“French voters have given all sorts of reasons for voting No, many of them contradictory, but there can be little doubt that in the longer perspective of history, it will be seen as a vote that said: 'So far and no farther.' I would not characterise the mood of European peoples as being satisfied with the state of the Union, but the French referendum suggests that the balance between the powers of the nation state and the centre is regarded as being about right. The expansion from 15 to 25 members last year was a huge change not just in the size but in the nature of the Union, which many in France did not like because it diminished their influence. They did not want to take the risk that the constitution would set the seal on that diminution.”
On the other hand, like most English and American commentators, Rentoul follows this with the usual fallacious economic analysis:
“For some time, the argument has been moving in Britain's favour towards labour market flexibility and against counterproductive social protection. Franco-German attempts to 'protect' people's welfare by loading costs on employers and by protection against imports has resulted in high unemployment at home and poverty abroad.”
This is, firstly, an analysis with which LI vigorously disagrees. The French and German malaise is only partly due to rigid labour markets – it is mostly a typical Keynesian crisis, too much savings, not enough demand. To jigger with the labour markets (and even LI can concede that some tradeoffs may be necessary) before doing something about the tendency of the French and Germans to save instead of consume (because – of course – they are afraid of what happens when labour market flexibility means sinking wages and more unemployment – as they should be) is typical Thatcherite nuttiness.
In any case, the effort to achieve a scale that will preserve the will of the people, however attenuated the echo, within governable unity, is viewed, by some soi disant lefty-libs, as a sin as mortal as smoking at the non-smoking table. Serge July, in his editorial in Liberation (the message of which was so mangled by Jefferson Morley in the Washington Post roundup of media reaction to the Non that it provides prima facie evidence for our suspicion that American papers are only correct about a third of the time when it comes to reporting events that happen in non-English) reacted like a typical Euro-zombie:
“Referendum on the enlargement. Between the specter of Turkey which unambiguously points to the Moslems and the unfortunate Polish plumber, foreigners have been invited to stay home. Le Pen xenophobe, you can bank on that, but letting the leaders of the left make a campaign on this terrain, as Chirac in 2002 did on crime, one believed that xenophobia unthinkable…”
The collapse of distinctions, here, is the basis of the somnambulism. The enlargement was not a triumph of cosmopolitanism, but a disaster created by a very old politics – the politics of the Cold war. Poland and Central Europe were engulfed en masse even though their economies are not a natural fit for the older economies of Europe – far from it. Just as France began the European project by making the move to ally with (and limit) its old enemy, Germany, thus cementing sixty years of unparalleled prosperity and peace, so, too, the natural thing for Poland and Hungary to do would be to ally with Russia. The very thought gives the Americans the willies. Hence, the pressure to do what the EU did – in the process, screwing the populations of Germany and France. Turkey, we think, should certainly be a target of massive EU aid – as Greece was in the sixties. But the EU shouldn’t be a monster clone. Blind to this, the political class has decided that protests against it should be met with moral shaming. July is typical, here.
The best response we’ve read was Neal Ascherson’s in the Independent.
“As a British citizen, I signed an open letter begging the French to vote 'Oui'. But if I had been a French citizen, I would have voted 'Non'. I signed because the impact of the French 'Non' in Britain could only be dire. It gives heart to Europhobes of right and left who want to dismantle the supranational structures of the European Union. It will close more windows in Little England, leaving it an even smaller, darker, more asphyxiating place.
For France, though, Sunday's vote was a much-needed explosion of liberty. Many passions burst through, some of them rational and others ugly. There was loathing of the Chirac government. There was fear for jobs as industry relocates in cheaper lands, and foreign workers ('the Polish plumber') compete to provide services. There was dislike of the neo-liberal, 'American' social model, seen by many French as a betrayal of the old 'social' caring principles of partnership around which the European project was built.
But above all, there was a sense that the constitution was an insult to French intelligence " all the more painful because it was prepared by complacent French statesmen. One of my French nephews told me: 'I voted No because this is such a bad text. This is not a constitution at all, which should be drawn up by a democratically-elected assembly. This is just a treaty.'”
Alas, the July response – symptomatic of the petrification of intelligence in the PS – still seems dominant among the left's European leaders. The anger that Fabius ‘betrayed” the left by moving to the popular no side is one of the great and peculiar things about the affair, with Jack Lang’s comments (all the old corrupt Mitterardians) particularly offensive. Fabius saved the credibility of the party. It is that simple. That the militants voted to support something that was total anathema to the constituency is viewed, from the July heights, as a betrayal – by the constituency! Yes, get rid of this people and get me another one -- which is, effectively, what the enlargement means. The problem with the PS is the problem of all liberal parties in the West – the Democrats, the SPD, the Labour party – a misalignment between leadership and constituency. Frankly, the rich, white male leadership of the Democratic party would like to be leading another sector of the population than the one most loyal to them – that old and unexciting one of the unions, the blacks, the divorced women, etc. How much groovier to cherry pick among the Republican constituency – those Chablis drinking urban professionals with the fabulous apartments who understand the need for flexible labor markets. That the glass ceiling for blacks in the Democratic party is harder than it is in the Republican party says a lot about the demoralized state of the former. In France, however, there is a mobilized and active left that can simply reorganize – and might – outside the holy precincts of the PS. If the Socialist leaders continue to think of themselves as the secret Tony Blair party in Europe, they are doomed.
“French voters have given all sorts of reasons for voting No, many of them contradictory, but there can be little doubt that in the longer perspective of history, it will be seen as a vote that said: 'So far and no farther.' I would not characterise the mood of European peoples as being satisfied with the state of the Union, but the French referendum suggests that the balance between the powers of the nation state and the centre is regarded as being about right. The expansion from 15 to 25 members last year was a huge change not just in the size but in the nature of the Union, which many in France did not like because it diminished their influence. They did not want to take the risk that the constitution would set the seal on that diminution.”
On the other hand, like most English and American commentators, Rentoul follows this with the usual fallacious economic analysis:
“For some time, the argument has been moving in Britain's favour towards labour market flexibility and against counterproductive social protection. Franco-German attempts to 'protect' people's welfare by loading costs on employers and by protection against imports has resulted in high unemployment at home and poverty abroad.”
This is, firstly, an analysis with which LI vigorously disagrees. The French and German malaise is only partly due to rigid labour markets – it is mostly a typical Keynesian crisis, too much savings, not enough demand. To jigger with the labour markets (and even LI can concede that some tradeoffs may be necessary) before doing something about the tendency of the French and Germans to save instead of consume (because – of course – they are afraid of what happens when labour market flexibility means sinking wages and more unemployment – as they should be) is typical Thatcherite nuttiness.
In any case, the effort to achieve a scale that will preserve the will of the people, however attenuated the echo, within governable unity, is viewed, by some soi disant lefty-libs, as a sin as mortal as smoking at the non-smoking table. Serge July, in his editorial in Liberation (the message of which was so mangled by Jefferson Morley in the Washington Post roundup of media reaction to the Non that it provides prima facie evidence for our suspicion that American papers are only correct about a third of the time when it comes to reporting events that happen in non-English) reacted like a typical Euro-zombie:
“Referendum on the enlargement. Between the specter of Turkey which unambiguously points to the Moslems and the unfortunate Polish plumber, foreigners have been invited to stay home. Le Pen xenophobe, you can bank on that, but letting the leaders of the left make a campaign on this terrain, as Chirac in 2002 did on crime, one believed that xenophobia unthinkable…”
The collapse of distinctions, here, is the basis of the somnambulism. The enlargement was not a triumph of cosmopolitanism, but a disaster created by a very old politics – the politics of the Cold war. Poland and Central Europe were engulfed en masse even though their economies are not a natural fit for the older economies of Europe – far from it. Just as France began the European project by making the move to ally with (and limit) its old enemy, Germany, thus cementing sixty years of unparalleled prosperity and peace, so, too, the natural thing for Poland and Hungary to do would be to ally with Russia. The very thought gives the Americans the willies. Hence, the pressure to do what the EU did – in the process, screwing the populations of Germany and France. Turkey, we think, should certainly be a target of massive EU aid – as Greece was in the sixties. But the EU shouldn’t be a monster clone. Blind to this, the political class has decided that protests against it should be met with moral shaming. July is typical, here.
The best response we’ve read was Neal Ascherson’s in the Independent.
“As a British citizen, I signed an open letter begging the French to vote 'Oui'. But if I had been a French citizen, I would have voted 'Non'. I signed because the impact of the French 'Non' in Britain could only be dire. It gives heart to Europhobes of right and left who want to dismantle the supranational structures of the European Union. It will close more windows in Little England, leaving it an even smaller, darker, more asphyxiating place.
For France, though, Sunday's vote was a much-needed explosion of liberty. Many passions burst through, some of them rational and others ugly. There was loathing of the Chirac government. There was fear for jobs as industry relocates in cheaper lands, and foreign workers ('the Polish plumber') compete to provide services. There was dislike of the neo-liberal, 'American' social model, seen by many French as a betrayal of the old 'social' caring principles of partnership around which the European project was built.
But above all, there was a sense that the constitution was an insult to French intelligence " all the more painful because it was prepared by complacent French statesmen. One of my French nephews told me: 'I voted No because this is such a bad text. This is not a constitution at all, which should be drawn up by a democratically-elected assembly. This is just a treaty.'”
Alas, the July response – symptomatic of the petrification of intelligence in the PS – still seems dominant among the left's European leaders. The anger that Fabius ‘betrayed” the left by moving to the popular no side is one of the great and peculiar things about the affair, with Jack Lang’s comments (all the old corrupt Mitterardians) particularly offensive. Fabius saved the credibility of the party. It is that simple. That the militants voted to support something that was total anathema to the constituency is viewed, from the July heights, as a betrayal – by the constituency! Yes, get rid of this people and get me another one -- which is, effectively, what the enlargement means. The problem with the PS is the problem of all liberal parties in the West – the Democrats, the SPD, the Labour party – a misalignment between leadership and constituency. Frankly, the rich, white male leadership of the Democratic party would like to be leading another sector of the population than the one most loyal to them – that old and unexciting one of the unions, the blacks, the divorced women, etc. How much groovier to cherry pick among the Republican constituency – those Chablis drinking urban professionals with the fabulous apartments who understand the need for flexible labor markets. That the glass ceiling for blacks in the Democratic party is harder than it is in the Republican party says a lot about the demoralized state of the former. In France, however, there is a mobilized and active left that can simply reorganize – and might – outside the holy precincts of the PS. If the Socialist leaders continue to think of themselves as the secret Tony Blair party in Europe, they are doomed.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
war for the fans
The month began with great, obsequious stories in the NYT about how the war is now over (except for getting the native guards armed and trained) in Iraq. It ends with more than twice the number of Americans killed than were killed in March, with the latest being the four that went down in a single engine plane – bizarrely, the U.S. has apparently decided to outfit the Iraqi airforce with planes that you can also rent for birthdays and holiday travel. Must mean, according to the wondrous pretzel logic of the Pentagon, that we are winning. This logic has two sides. When casualties go down, it is obvious that we are winning. And when casualties go up, it is obvious the other side is desperate.
This logic is also used by six year olds to explain why they don’t want to eat the vegetables.
In fact, this has penetrated the Times enough that they are starting to question their own ludicrous headlines of last week. Remember that 40,000 Iraqi troops were supposed to be sweeping Baghdad this week. A week later, the wakeup is setting in – hey, they don’t have 40, 000 troops. Well, gee, that was hard to figure out.
In other post Memorial military news – there is a fascinating story in the Globe about Col. David Hackworth. He’s being buried at Arlington. One of the most decorated American soldiers, and one of the most hated by the Pentagon. He’s the guy who appeared on Dick Cavett in 1971, in full dress uniform, and said, hey, we should get out of Vietnam. We’ve lost. He’s also the guy who pulled the plug on the wearing of fake medals by chief of naval operations, Admiral Jeremy M. ''Mike" Boorda. Boorda committed suicide over the charge, showing – to put it delicately – that this was not a man one wanted in command of a unit that could come under fire.
“He earned a a chestful of medals, including two Distinguished Service Medals, 10 Silver Stars, eight Bronze Stars, and eight Purple Hearts. His adversary became the US military bureaucracy, which he railed against for 30 years on grounds that it failed to put the troops first. He also opposed military action in Bosnia, Kosovo, and especially Iraq.But while the military leadership may be absent from the funeral, hundreds -- and probably thousands -- are expected to attend. The numbers would be larger, except that many who consider him a hero aren't in Washington. Hackworth became a touchstone for soldiers in the Middle East who questioned the Pentagon but didn't feel comfortable raising complaints with superiors.''He had an incredible communication line to the barracks and the trenches," said Roger Charles, president of Soldiers for the Truth, Hackworth's organization, which has a website that averages about 1 million hits a day.
''He answered all the e-mails."
Soldiers for Truth is an interesting site. It is written in that Military Speech so popular in paperback romances about Navy Seals and such –yes, there is a whole genre out there. And, of course, it bristles with conservative biases. But it is also informative. This article about deserters, for instance, is well worth reading. The author can’t understand why the army and marines aren’t going after deserters. LI can. This is an unpopular war already. Its continuation is built on what might be called the Memento premise. Assuming that America is subject to short term memory loss, the Bush agenda is to exploit the diminishing attenting span for maximum gain. Thus, the planned program of non-sacrifice – as long as the American population can be insulated enough to neither feel nor think about Iraq, it will begrudge the Neocon adventure. That means no draft, and no going after deserters in such a way that it would make the news. It means no pictures of coffins or the wounded. The whole point of the Bush administration is to coddle its constituency, which will ultimately be the victim of Bush policies, by moving the impact of those policies forward into the future. The IOUs for the tax giveaway to the rich and the abuse of the national and state guard are products of a unified political logic. In a sense, the Bush administration wants to make the war like a specialized cable channel – an ESPN war. In America, the war is only supposed to be for its fans.
This logic is also used by six year olds to explain why they don’t want to eat the vegetables.
In fact, this has penetrated the Times enough that they are starting to question their own ludicrous headlines of last week. Remember that 40,000 Iraqi troops were supposed to be sweeping Baghdad this week. A week later, the wakeup is setting in – hey, they don’t have 40, 000 troops. Well, gee, that was hard to figure out.
In other post Memorial military news – there is a fascinating story in the Globe about Col. David Hackworth. He’s being buried at Arlington. One of the most decorated American soldiers, and one of the most hated by the Pentagon. He’s the guy who appeared on Dick Cavett in 1971, in full dress uniform, and said, hey, we should get out of Vietnam. We’ve lost. He’s also the guy who pulled the plug on the wearing of fake medals by chief of naval operations, Admiral Jeremy M. ''Mike" Boorda. Boorda committed suicide over the charge, showing – to put it delicately – that this was not a man one wanted in command of a unit that could come under fire.
“He earned a a chestful of medals, including two Distinguished Service Medals, 10 Silver Stars, eight Bronze Stars, and eight Purple Hearts. His adversary became the US military bureaucracy, which he railed against for 30 years on grounds that it failed to put the troops first. He also opposed military action in Bosnia, Kosovo, and especially Iraq.But while the military leadership may be absent from the funeral, hundreds -- and probably thousands -- are expected to attend. The numbers would be larger, except that many who consider him a hero aren't in Washington. Hackworth became a touchstone for soldiers in the Middle East who questioned the Pentagon but didn't feel comfortable raising complaints with superiors.''He had an incredible communication line to the barracks and the trenches," said Roger Charles, president of Soldiers for the Truth, Hackworth's organization, which has a website that averages about 1 million hits a day.
''He answered all the e-mails."
Soldiers for Truth is an interesting site. It is written in that Military Speech so popular in paperback romances about Navy Seals and such –yes, there is a whole genre out there. And, of course, it bristles with conservative biases. But it is also informative. This article about deserters, for instance, is well worth reading. The author can’t understand why the army and marines aren’t going after deserters. LI can. This is an unpopular war already. Its continuation is built on what might be called the Memento premise. Assuming that America is subject to short term memory loss, the Bush agenda is to exploit the diminishing attenting span for maximum gain. Thus, the planned program of non-sacrifice – as long as the American population can be insulated enough to neither feel nor think about Iraq, it will begrudge the Neocon adventure. That means no draft, and no going after deserters in such a way that it would make the news. It means no pictures of coffins or the wounded. The whole point of the Bush administration is to coddle its constituency, which will ultimately be the victim of Bush policies, by moving the impact of those policies forward into the future. The IOUs for the tax giveaway to the rich and the abuse of the national and state guard are products of a unified political logic. In a sense, the Bush administration wants to make the war like a specialized cable channel – an ESPN war. In America, the war is only supposed to be for its fans.
Monday, May 30, 2005
the national imaginary
LI wrote a friend last night that we were proud of France. And indeed, we are. From the U.S. perspective, it might seem that the oui vote was a sad necessity. Creating a counter-balance to the mad, bad power of the U.S. seems like a good idea, if you live in a place where they broadcast excerpts of speeches by Bush on the radio. I was vaguely of that opinion. But a less heated perspective is in order. The peculiar U.S. move for a harsher and more direct hegemony is meeting its natural limits already. It isn’t just the fact that the U.S. economy is fueled by an unsustainable explosion of private and public debt – there is also the very real regionalisation of America’s natural peripheral economy, Latin America, with its tendency to turn its back on the U.S. and its face towards China – it is the fatal overstretch of military power, rapidly coming to the point at which Bush will have to decide whether to pull back or destroy his popularity by asking for (gasp!) such sacrifices as a draft would entail. And there is the silent, spreading collapse of pension plans, from the 300 billion dollar deficit for public employees in the states to the crisis in GMFordDaimlerChrysler. Plus, what does it mean to “create” a counter-balance? This is the kind of things elites jump on. So – the non campaign in France, as one sifts through the data, seems to have localized in the old left.
When the Left’s incubus, France’s answer to Tony Blair, Lionel Jospin, jumped in to support Chirac, it was a sign that the constitution was doomed. But the dooming of the constitution was merely a sign of a much deeper discontent with the dirigiste class. In truth, the consensus among Left and Right policymakers since around 1985 has been that Europe must adopt Thatcher lite policies. Which is why you could put in your input – vote – for either party, and you’d get the same output – liberalization. That nobody wanted it didn’t matter – the elites, who will benefit the most from it, decided that it was good for you. The Left honchos decided to disguise their adoption of the economics of Thatcher by annexing the ideology of a charity. In this way, not only could they destructure working class culture and destroy its economy, but they could also shame them for being racist. A moral two-fer! And thus was born that curious bird, the upper middle class liberal – absolutely passionate about preserving, say, Aborigine cultures in Australia, while at the same time profiting hugely from the destruction of manufacturing culture here at home.
While LI is on board with the civilization project – the destruction of racism, homophobia, sexism and the rest of the Unbehagen in our culture – we are maximally suspicious of the emigration of liberating rhetoric to support liberalizing (read – anti social insurance) projects. The winner in France could be the Fabius wing of the PS. It was Fabius (a sort of PS John McCain) who said the obvious about the constitution last year – what kind of constitution goes to five hundred pages? If only the PS can break with the essential defeatism of its leadership – who still dream of being the Third Way, Blair’s partners in an Anglo-Saxon Europe – they can fill the vacuum between Sarkozy (France’s scariest politician) and Le Pen (an old clown whose moment of prominence in the last election disguised the fact that he received pretty much the vote he always received – it was the Socialist collapse that made it appear new and startling). The two English analyses we liked best were by Larry Elliott and Will Hutton.
However, as a sample of elite opinion, we recommend, for those of you who read French, this article that first appeared in Liberation last year. “Derriere la social, la nation” by Francois Dubet is a perfect expression of elite contempt for the working class – time to liquidate the rednecks – in the form of a diagnosis of the ‘non’ mentality. For the elite, labor mobility is an essential and non-problematic part of capitalism. LI actually thinks that this is probably true – but we also think that it is a truth from which the elite is comfortably insulated, since, somehow, French companies don’t look for cheaper CEOs among Algerian immigrants. That the sector of society most insulated from competition is always urging the sector most exposed to it to just get over it somehow, gosh, gets the peons mad. Imagine that! The keynote of Dubet’s analysis is struck, here: “Everywhere [in Europe’ things seem “normal” save in France, where there is installed a no of the left identified with resistance to savage liberalism, the defense of public services and social attainments uprooted from the thread of its history and its struggles. In France, the claims and social worries traditionally borne by the left tip towards the defense of a national identity: the social becomes national. One could think that French particularity is enough to understand and justify this weirdness. [I can’t translate the full, rich flavor of that last sentence. In the French it is “On peut penser que la « spécificité française » suffit à comprendre et à justifier cette bizarrerie.”]
Having embraced the jet and been to New York, how are you gonna keep em down on the farm in Poitiers? seems to be the underlying message. The weird idea that you should defend a – shudder – nation, of all things, percolates through Dubet’s sociologue’s soul like a laxative. Everything is here. Professor Dubet would, himself, definitely be throwing caution to the wind and climbing the barricades himself, but alas, the ‘revolutionary project’ is dead. Rather convenient, actually. It means that the defense of the left’s successes, the social democratic state, can only be undertaken by a mutton headed left that doesn’t understand this central point and is obviously latently racist. The proof? Why, the incomprehensible idea that the scale of governance should be at the level of the traditional nation:
“Beyond the critique of liberalism, of which a constitution could always protect us more than an accumulation of free exchange treaties, the no of the left expresses the defense of a national republican model anchored in the heart of our “imaginaire politique.”” Actually, the first clause of that sentence is absolutely bogus. But the main thing, here, is the socio-psychoanalysis a la Lacan’s imaginaire – a handy scalpel suddenly appears in Dr. Frankenstein’s hand, and now he can go to work. “
"The sage alternativist appeals to international economic regulation don’t resist a radical anti-capitalism that is not even associated to a revolutionary project. Under the pretext of refusing ultraliberalism, all the “others”, from within or without, appear as potential enemies. The cultural claims are rejected from the outset into the hell of communitarianism, even if we become, us too, more and more communitarian, as a good part of the left finds itself silent in the face of demonstrations against “anti-white” racism or the banal xenophobia against the entry of Turkey.”
Never has the appeal to one’s virtuous adherence to the “revolutionary project” served a more abject goal as the shoring up of the constitution of Valery Giscard D’estaing. It is, depressingly, but not surprising, that this stuff was reprinted in Multitudes, the on-line outlet for the Badiou-wing of radical philosophy. This is Rawlsism with a Che Guevara face. And it stinks.
When the Left’s incubus, France’s answer to Tony Blair, Lionel Jospin, jumped in to support Chirac, it was a sign that the constitution was doomed. But the dooming of the constitution was merely a sign of a much deeper discontent with the dirigiste class. In truth, the consensus among Left and Right policymakers since around 1985 has been that Europe must adopt Thatcher lite policies. Which is why you could put in your input – vote – for either party, and you’d get the same output – liberalization. That nobody wanted it didn’t matter – the elites, who will benefit the most from it, decided that it was good for you. The Left honchos decided to disguise their adoption of the economics of Thatcher by annexing the ideology of a charity. In this way, not only could they destructure working class culture and destroy its economy, but they could also shame them for being racist. A moral two-fer! And thus was born that curious bird, the upper middle class liberal – absolutely passionate about preserving, say, Aborigine cultures in Australia, while at the same time profiting hugely from the destruction of manufacturing culture here at home.
While LI is on board with the civilization project – the destruction of racism, homophobia, sexism and the rest of the Unbehagen in our culture – we are maximally suspicious of the emigration of liberating rhetoric to support liberalizing (read – anti social insurance) projects. The winner in France could be the Fabius wing of the PS. It was Fabius (a sort of PS John McCain) who said the obvious about the constitution last year – what kind of constitution goes to five hundred pages? If only the PS can break with the essential defeatism of its leadership – who still dream of being the Third Way, Blair’s partners in an Anglo-Saxon Europe – they can fill the vacuum between Sarkozy (France’s scariest politician) and Le Pen (an old clown whose moment of prominence in the last election disguised the fact that he received pretty much the vote he always received – it was the Socialist collapse that made it appear new and startling). The two English analyses we liked best were by Larry Elliott and Will Hutton.
However, as a sample of elite opinion, we recommend, for those of you who read French, this article that first appeared in Liberation last year. “Derriere la social, la nation” by Francois Dubet is a perfect expression of elite contempt for the working class – time to liquidate the rednecks – in the form of a diagnosis of the ‘non’ mentality. For the elite, labor mobility is an essential and non-problematic part of capitalism. LI actually thinks that this is probably true – but we also think that it is a truth from which the elite is comfortably insulated, since, somehow, French companies don’t look for cheaper CEOs among Algerian immigrants. That the sector of society most insulated from competition is always urging the sector most exposed to it to just get over it somehow, gosh, gets the peons mad. Imagine that! The keynote of Dubet’s analysis is struck, here: “Everywhere [in Europe’ things seem “normal” save in France, where there is installed a no of the left identified with resistance to savage liberalism, the defense of public services and social attainments uprooted from the thread of its history and its struggles. In France, the claims and social worries traditionally borne by the left tip towards the defense of a national identity: the social becomes national. One could think that French particularity is enough to understand and justify this weirdness. [I can’t translate the full, rich flavor of that last sentence. In the French it is “On peut penser que la « spécificité française » suffit à comprendre et à justifier cette bizarrerie.”]
Having embraced the jet and been to New York, how are you gonna keep em down on the farm in Poitiers? seems to be the underlying message. The weird idea that you should defend a – shudder – nation, of all things, percolates through Dubet’s sociologue’s soul like a laxative. Everything is here. Professor Dubet would, himself, definitely be throwing caution to the wind and climbing the barricades himself, but alas, the ‘revolutionary project’ is dead. Rather convenient, actually. It means that the defense of the left’s successes, the social democratic state, can only be undertaken by a mutton headed left that doesn’t understand this central point and is obviously latently racist. The proof? Why, the incomprehensible idea that the scale of governance should be at the level of the traditional nation:
“Beyond the critique of liberalism, of which a constitution could always protect us more than an accumulation of free exchange treaties, the no of the left expresses the defense of a national republican model anchored in the heart of our “imaginaire politique.”” Actually, the first clause of that sentence is absolutely bogus. But the main thing, here, is the socio-psychoanalysis a la Lacan’s imaginaire – a handy scalpel suddenly appears in Dr. Frankenstein’s hand, and now he can go to work. “
"The sage alternativist appeals to international economic regulation don’t resist a radical anti-capitalism that is not even associated to a revolutionary project. Under the pretext of refusing ultraliberalism, all the “others”, from within or without, appear as potential enemies. The cultural claims are rejected from the outset into the hell of communitarianism, even if we become, us too, more and more communitarian, as a good part of the left finds itself silent in the face of demonstrations against “anti-white” racism or the banal xenophobia against the entry of Turkey.”
Never has the appeal to one’s virtuous adherence to the “revolutionary project” served a more abject goal as the shoring up of the constitution of Valery Giscard D’estaing. It is, depressingly, but not surprising, that this stuff was reprinted in Multitudes, the on-line outlet for the Badiou-wing of radical philosophy. This is Rawlsism with a Che Guevara face. And it stinks.
Sunday, May 29, 2005
Memorial Day
H.R. 1815 SEC. 1223. WITHDRAWAL OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES FROM IRAQ. It is the sense of Congress that the President should-- (1) develop a plan as soon as practicable after the date of the enactment of this Act to provide for the withdrawal of United States Armed Forces from Iraq; and (2) transmit to the congressional defense committees a report that contains the plan described in paragraph
LI got this from Scratchings. The resolution was defeated, 128 to 300. However, it is the first time this kind of resolution reached the floor. Plus, the Republican who is most famous for having French fried renamed Freedom Fries not only voted for it, but he spoke for it. This is from Truthout:
Perhaps the most important speech in favor of an exit strategy came from Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC). His district in North Carolina is one that is very supportive of the military. His opposition to the continuation of the war is of interest because he had been a supporter of the war, a point he highlighted in his opening: "This is about a policy, that I believed when I voted 2 years ago to commit the troops that I was making my decision on facts. Since that time I have been very disappointed in what I have learned about the justification for going into Iraq." He explained:
" . . . all this amendment does is just say that it is time for the Congress to meet its responsibility. The responsibility of Congress is to make decisions whether we should send our men and women to war or not send them to war. What we are saying here tonight is we think it is time for the Congress to begin, to start the debate and discussion of what the exit strategy is of this government . . ."
If the antiwar movement – what there is of it – could just overcome its delusion that it should be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party and work for, well, the end of the American involvement in the war – work, that is, to create an anti-war wing in both parties, which we believe would be relatively easy to do – who knows, we might be able to save a ten thousand plus American lives, plus God knows how many Iraqi ones.
H.R. 1815 SEC. 1223. WITHDRAWAL OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES FROM IRAQ. It is the sense of Congress that the President should-- (1) develop a plan as soon as practicable after the date of the enactment of this Act to provide for the withdrawal of United States Armed Forces from Iraq; and (2) transmit to the congressional defense committees a report that contains the plan described in paragraph
LI got this from Scratchings. The resolution was defeated, 128 to 300. However, it is the first time this kind of resolution reached the floor. Plus, the Republican who is most famous for having French fried renamed Freedom Fries not only voted for it, but he spoke for it. This is from Truthout:
Perhaps the most important speech in favor of an exit strategy came from Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC). His district in North Carolina is one that is very supportive of the military. His opposition to the continuation of the war is of interest because he had been a supporter of the war, a point he highlighted in his opening: "This is about a policy, that I believed when I voted 2 years ago to commit the troops that I was making my decision on facts. Since that time I have been very disappointed in what I have learned about the justification for going into Iraq." He explained:
" . . . all this amendment does is just say that it is time for the Congress to meet its responsibility. The responsibility of Congress is to make decisions whether we should send our men and women to war or not send them to war. What we are saying here tonight is we think it is time for the Congress to begin, to start the debate and discussion of what the exit strategy is of this government . . ."
If the antiwar movement – what there is of it – could just overcome its delusion that it should be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party and work for, well, the end of the American involvement in the war – work, that is, to create an anti-war wing in both parties, which we believe would be relatively easy to do – who knows, we might be able to save a ten thousand plus American lives, plus God knows how many Iraqi ones.
Saturday, May 28, 2005
Our government knows what it is doing
In the great tradition of American government, only the truly important things get rushed though. Hence, the bankruptcy bill was the first thing herded through this year. It was an emergency. Credit card companies had recorded a mere 30 billion dollars in profits last year. Many of them, out of pure humanitarianism, were charging their customers a mere 29 to 34 percent after the inevitable late fees that did not have to be late fees on a specific card, but late on any payment. This is almost 0.5% percent less than the going rate Al Capone charged. We are, after all, talking about active Christians.
Then there were the earthshaking investigations into steroid use among home run hitters. America simply stopped in its tracks, since, as is well known, nothing effects every household in America like a distorted home run record. It causes little children to cry and grown men to hurl themselves from tall buildings.
But though grave issues require speed, other issues – like paying the trash that die or are wounded in Iraq and can’t figure out how to game the system like our President once did – can go on the backburner.
Here’s a story from the Boston Herald – a two bit paper obviously so desperate for news that it pays attention to a wounded military guy
“Winthrop Marine Lance Cpl. James Crosby's effort to give combat-wounded soldiers special pay while they recover moved closer to becoming law with a U.S. House vote last week.
``It will make such an impact,'' said Crosby's father, Kevin. ``My son is in constant pain 24 hours a day. No amount of money can ever make up for that, but at least there's something for these people and their families who have been torn apart.''
A rocket attack in Iraq last year left the younger Crosby, 20, paralyzed from the waist down. When he left Iraq, his combat pay was cut while he fought for his life.
The measure, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Malden), would give $430 a month to soldiers who are wounded and evacuated from the combat zone.”
Supposedly, if it goes through in the House, the Senate might debate it in July, and who knows, Bush might even sign it by September, if he has nothing better to do. That will be after another, say, 800 to 1,000 are wounded in the war for our wonderful freedom lovin’ Iraqis, trusting the averages from the Iraqi coalition casualties page.
It is a bit much to give to the trash. On the bright side, what with the new tools given to the Credit card cos. in that Bankruptcy bill, it will probably be absorbed as late fee detritus by the investors in Discover, Visa, MBNA, Citibank and Bank of America who could really use it. Who says America isn’t still the land of opportunity? It's the ownership society, baby.
Then there were the earthshaking investigations into steroid use among home run hitters. America simply stopped in its tracks, since, as is well known, nothing effects every household in America like a distorted home run record. It causes little children to cry and grown men to hurl themselves from tall buildings.
But though grave issues require speed, other issues – like paying the trash that die or are wounded in Iraq and can’t figure out how to game the system like our President once did – can go on the backburner.
Here’s a story from the Boston Herald – a two bit paper obviously so desperate for news that it pays attention to a wounded military guy
“Winthrop Marine Lance Cpl. James Crosby's effort to give combat-wounded soldiers special pay while they recover moved closer to becoming law with a U.S. House vote last week.
``It will make such an impact,'' said Crosby's father, Kevin. ``My son is in constant pain 24 hours a day. No amount of money can ever make up for that, but at least there's something for these people and their families who have been torn apart.''
A rocket attack in Iraq last year left the younger Crosby, 20, paralyzed from the waist down. When he left Iraq, his combat pay was cut while he fought for his life.
The measure, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Malden), would give $430 a month to soldiers who are wounded and evacuated from the combat zone.”
Supposedly, if it goes through in the House, the Senate might debate it in July, and who knows, Bush might even sign it by September, if he has nothing better to do. That will be after another, say, 800 to 1,000 are wounded in the war for our wonderful freedom lovin’ Iraqis, trusting the averages from the Iraqi coalition casualties page.
It is a bit much to give to the trash. On the bright side, what with the new tools given to the Credit card cos. in that Bankruptcy bill, it will probably be absorbed as late fee detritus by the investors in Discover, Visa, MBNA, Citibank and Bank of America who could really use it. Who says America isn’t still the land of opportunity? It's the ownership society, baby.
Friday, May 27, 2005
Atlas finally shrugs
Last night LI wrote Paul a semi apology. Starting this series of posts three days ago, we intended to obliquely angle into Paul’s post on ethical individualism. However, we admit the degree of obliquity seems a bit, well, excessive. An unkind critic might call it multitudinously losing the point. Paul wrote back:
“Yeah, I was gonna write you an email from work today, with the subject of "Atlas - start shrugging"! I'm not sure what crazy scheme you have in mind - neither, apparently, do you (though your daimon does!) - but I look forward to reading the resulting opus.”
LI will sniffily ignore the reference to that appalling novel and try to get down to brass tacks in this post. Paul’s post is an enthusiastic appreciation of a book by David L. Norton entitled Personal Destinies: a philosophy of ethical individualism. We thought this was among the best bits we’ve ever read on his site:
“Of especial interest is the fact that Norton understands his account to ground a kind of individualism - an "ism" in disrepute with both Left (collectivism) and Right (communitarianism). Those two poles are often likeminded in taking individualism necessarily to be of the "atomistic" (Hobbesian; sc., merely numerical) variety. Norton's eudaimonism claims to establish "qualitative" individualism: each person, ex hypothesi, is obliged to actualize an excellence uniquely his own; to live in truth to his daimon. The social entailment of this doctrine is the "complementarity of excellences," implying the need for counterparts. Hence an individualism is possible which at once celebrates independence and affirms interdependence and sociality of a kind.”
Our response to this has been to consider a certain set of adventures of the concept of the “ratio,” (oops -- the Germanic amplification of the genitive -- the curse of philosophical class. Sorry) insofar as the human individual is supposed to embody it. If one is to “live in truth” to one’s daimon, it is important to think about the various ways one usually lives – unlike some purists, we like Weber’s term, “lifestyle”, for this. The truth, here, seems to do double duty: it implies, on the one hand, some standard of authenticity to which one can compare one’s lifestyle, and on the other hand, it seems performative – the criteria of authenticity is not prefigured, but is constituted in the living. That doubleness isn't incoherent -- a set of truths can be constituted over time in such a way that future acts can be judged against it -- but it does imply a limit on one's liberty that may, in time, become onerous. No more lighting out for the territory, no more second acts.
…
One of the perennial philosophical worries is the degree of error inherent in these various lifestyles. This is why we think the match between Gigerenzer vs. Tversky and Kahnman is fascinating, and casts a certain light upon the qualitatively different points of view that are each haunted, in Paul’s view, by a daimon.
Now, this idea of the daimon is interestingly ambiguous in terms of its site. Where, exactly, is it? this parallels the question we have been pursuing – where exactly is the innate tendency to error – if there is one? Where, that is, is its systematic place?
The early moderns were all very anxious about error. However, until Kant, error was conceived as a thing exterior to the subject. Among other of his functions, Descartes malin genie embodied the exteriority of deception. Hume inflected this line of thinking in a way, insofar as he showed that induction was not logically grounded. However, his intent wasn’t to delegitimize induction – rather, it was to estrange us from our mania about the framework of error and falsity. Induction, being on the side of life or habit, couldn’t be turned off, or doubted in any practical way. All of which went into Hume’s project of showing that reason was and should be the slave of the passions. It is important to note that at the same time that the natural philosophers were worried so about the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the rising merchant/professional class was increasing sensitive to original sin. But let’s bracket that circumstance.
It was Kant, I think, who first interiorized error as an inevitable formation of the reason itself. There’s a famous passage in the Critique of Pure Reason from the section on the transcendental semblence (Schein). That semblence is the idea that one can deduce how the world is (for instance, whether the world has a beginning or not) from what I would call logic – that is, a conceptual analysis of beginning. Kant writes:
“The cause [of the transcendental semblence (Schein)] is this, that in our Reason (perceived, subjectively, as the human capacity to know) lie fundamental rules and maxims of its use, which have the total appearance of objective principles, and through which it appears, that the subjective necessity of a certain conjunction of our concepts, supported by the understanding, can be maintained. This is an unavoidable illusion, as much one as the illusion, that the sea seems higher on the horizon than on the shore, because we see the former through higher beams of light than the latter; or, even more, so little as astronomer can keep the moon from seeming greater in its setting, even if he is not deceived by this appearance.”
It isn’t surprising that Gigerenzer, too, uses visual illusion as an analogy for cognitive illusion. In Gigerenzer’s work, the necessity he is looking for is ecological – what living function does illusion serve? – rather than metaphysical.
The notion of an error inside (the logical equivalent of Jim Thompson's Killer Inside Me) might seem, at first glance, to have nothing to do with Norton (and Craddick’s) qualitatively different demon. And yet that demon seems inherited from the most famous of all daimons – Socrates. And Socrates is definitely a corrective daimon – a negating spirit. It is not a constructive one:
In the Apology, Socrates says: “…something divine and spiritual comes to me, the very thing which Meletus ridiculed in his indictment. I have had this from my childhood; it is a sort of voice that comes to me, ("some divine (theîon) and spiritual (daimónion) [thing] comes to me...")
and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward. This it is which opposes my engaging in politics. And I think this opposition is a very good thing; for you may be quite sure, men of Athens, that if I had undertaken to go into politics, I should have been put to death long ago and should have done no good to you or to myself. And do not be angry with me for speaking the truth; the fact is that no man will save his life who nobly opposes you or any other populace and prevents many unjust and illegal things from happening in the state. A man who really fights for the right, if he is to preserve his life for even a little while, must be a private citizen, not a public man.”
If Socrates is speaking truly, then perhaps the daimon is insufficient to ground Paul’s desire that “an individualism is possible which at once celebrates independence and affirms interdependence and sociality of a kind.”
So -- this is the end of this series of posts. A null-set end? An irony? Not really. LI is neither playing the village explainer or the answer guy, here, but simply responding to an interesting idea with a bunch of his own questions.
“Yeah, I was gonna write you an email from work today, with the subject of "Atlas - start shrugging"! I'm not sure what crazy scheme you have in mind - neither, apparently, do you (though your daimon does!) - but I look forward to reading the resulting opus.”
LI will sniffily ignore the reference to that appalling novel and try to get down to brass tacks in this post. Paul’s post is an enthusiastic appreciation of a book by David L. Norton entitled Personal Destinies: a philosophy of ethical individualism. We thought this was among the best bits we’ve ever read on his site:
“Of especial interest is the fact that Norton understands his account to ground a kind of individualism - an "ism" in disrepute with both Left (collectivism) and Right (communitarianism). Those two poles are often likeminded in taking individualism necessarily to be of the "atomistic" (Hobbesian; sc., merely numerical) variety. Norton's eudaimonism claims to establish "qualitative" individualism: each person, ex hypothesi, is obliged to actualize an excellence uniquely his own; to live in truth to his daimon. The social entailment of this doctrine is the "complementarity of excellences," implying the need for counterparts. Hence an individualism is possible which at once celebrates independence and affirms interdependence and sociality of a kind.”
Our response to this has been to consider a certain set of adventures of the concept of the “ratio,” (oops -- the Germanic amplification of the genitive -- the curse of philosophical class. Sorry) insofar as the human individual is supposed to embody it. If one is to “live in truth” to one’s daimon, it is important to think about the various ways one usually lives – unlike some purists, we like Weber’s term, “lifestyle”, for this. The truth, here, seems to do double duty: it implies, on the one hand, some standard of authenticity to which one can compare one’s lifestyle, and on the other hand, it seems performative – the criteria of authenticity is not prefigured, but is constituted in the living. That doubleness isn't incoherent -- a set of truths can be constituted over time in such a way that future acts can be judged against it -- but it does imply a limit on one's liberty that may, in time, become onerous. No more lighting out for the territory, no more second acts.
…
One of the perennial philosophical worries is the degree of error inherent in these various lifestyles. This is why we think the match between Gigerenzer vs. Tversky and Kahnman is fascinating, and casts a certain light upon the qualitatively different points of view that are each haunted, in Paul’s view, by a daimon.
Now, this idea of the daimon is interestingly ambiguous in terms of its site. Where, exactly, is it? this parallels the question we have been pursuing – where exactly is the innate tendency to error – if there is one? Where, that is, is its systematic place?
The early moderns were all very anxious about error. However, until Kant, error was conceived as a thing exterior to the subject. Among other of his functions, Descartes malin genie embodied the exteriority of deception. Hume inflected this line of thinking in a way, insofar as he showed that induction was not logically grounded. However, his intent wasn’t to delegitimize induction – rather, it was to estrange us from our mania about the framework of error and falsity. Induction, being on the side of life or habit, couldn’t be turned off, or doubted in any practical way. All of which went into Hume’s project of showing that reason was and should be the slave of the passions. It is important to note that at the same time that the natural philosophers were worried so about the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the rising merchant/professional class was increasing sensitive to original sin. But let’s bracket that circumstance.
It was Kant, I think, who first interiorized error as an inevitable formation of the reason itself. There’s a famous passage in the Critique of Pure Reason from the section on the transcendental semblence (Schein). That semblence is the idea that one can deduce how the world is (for instance, whether the world has a beginning or not) from what I would call logic – that is, a conceptual analysis of beginning. Kant writes:
“The cause [of the transcendental semblence (Schein)] is this, that in our Reason (perceived, subjectively, as the human capacity to know) lie fundamental rules and maxims of its use, which have the total appearance of objective principles, and through which it appears, that the subjective necessity of a certain conjunction of our concepts, supported by the understanding, can be maintained. This is an unavoidable illusion, as much one as the illusion, that the sea seems higher on the horizon than on the shore, because we see the former through higher beams of light than the latter; or, even more, so little as astronomer can keep the moon from seeming greater in its setting, even if he is not deceived by this appearance.”
It isn’t surprising that Gigerenzer, too, uses visual illusion as an analogy for cognitive illusion. In Gigerenzer’s work, the necessity he is looking for is ecological – what living function does illusion serve? – rather than metaphysical.
The notion of an error inside (the logical equivalent of Jim Thompson's Killer Inside Me) might seem, at first glance, to have nothing to do with Norton (and Craddick’s) qualitatively different demon. And yet that demon seems inherited from the most famous of all daimons – Socrates. And Socrates is definitely a corrective daimon – a negating spirit. It is not a constructive one:
In the Apology, Socrates says: “…something divine and spiritual comes to me, the very thing which Meletus ridiculed in his indictment. I have had this from my childhood; it is a sort of voice that comes to me, ("some divine (theîon) and spiritual (daimónion) [thing] comes to me...")
and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward. This it is which opposes my engaging in politics. And I think this opposition is a very good thing; for you may be quite sure, men of Athens, that if I had undertaken to go into politics, I should have been put to death long ago and should have done no good to you or to myself. And do not be angry with me for speaking the truth; the fact is that no man will save his life who nobly opposes you or any other populace and prevents many unjust and illegal things from happening in the state. A man who really fights for the right, if he is to preserve his life for even a little while, must be a private citizen, not a public man.”
If Socrates is speaking truly, then perhaps the daimon is insufficient to ground Paul’s desire that “an individualism is possible which at once celebrates independence and affirms interdependence and sociality of a kind.”
So -- this is the end of this series of posts. A null-set end? An irony? Not really. LI is neither playing the village explainer or the answer guy, here, but simply responding to an interesting idea with a bunch of his own questions.
Thursday, May 26, 2005
clearing the table
Yesterday, we lined up things for Gigerenzer’s first shot.
Okay, to briefly reprise – although to follow this post, you will have to read yesterday’s post: Tversky and Kahnman claim to have shown a pattern of illogical response to problems that transform sets into the language of probability. The conjunction problem, or what’s wrong with Linda, was one of those conundrums.
Here’s the problem as T and K present it:
Linda is 31, outgoing, single. She majored in philosophy in college. As a student she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination.
Which of the two alternatives is more probable:
Linda is a bank teller
Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement?
The b is, as Gigerenzer points out, rather like the question Piaget posed to children: here is a picture of flowers, 6 of which are daisies and four of which are not. Are there more daisies or flowers in the picture? In the Piaget case, by the time children are eight, they recognize that the daisies are flowers, and that the confusing thing in the question is really that it makes it falsely appear like daisies are categorially equal to flowers, instead of a subset of them. (well, they realize this in child-brain speech, as in, that’s a trick question). But T and K consistently found that college students would chose b. So what gives?
“I argue that the irrationality is not to be found in adult reasoning but in the logical norm. Consider what the norm is: the probability of an event A is larger than (or equal to) the probability of the events A and B, that is, p(A) > P(AAB). This conjunction rule is used as a
content-blind norm for judgment: the content of the As and Bs is not considered relevant to evaluating good reasoning. All that counts is the mathematical probability p and the logical '^ and correct judgment is attested when people use the English terms probable and and in this and
only this way. This amounts to a purely syntactic definition of rational reasoning, and therefore, of an error in judgment.”
Putting his money on the table, so to speak, Gigerenzer rearranges T and K’s question to this one:
“Consider the following version of the Linda problem. Here the polysemy of the word probable is eliminated by using the phrase how many:
There are 100 persons who fit the description above (that is, Linda's). How many of them are:
Bank tellers?
Bank tellers and active in the feminist movement? '^
This change is sufficient to make the apparently stable cognitive illusion largely disappear. In one experiment, every single participant answered that there are more bank tellers {Hertwig and Gigerenzer, 1999; for similar results see Fiedler, 1988; Tversky and Kahneman, 1983). The
experiment also showed that the majority of participants interpreted how many in the sense of mathematical probability, but more probable as meaning "possible," "conceivable," or one of the other nonmathematical meanings listed in the OED.”
If Gigerenzer is right, he is onto something major – like, Meno style major. Like, maybe education is actually possible – confounding the cynics among you. Alas, T and K have tinkered with rephrasing the question in terms of “how many,” discovering that simply changing the b phrase slightly (to “bank tellers and active feminists”) can again dramatically change the responses.
All of which leads Gigerenzer to ask whether the problem, here, is that T and K are abstracting the mind from our ecology. This is how the Great G puts it:
“What have we learned from some 20 years and hundreds of experiments on the conjunction fallacy? We have leamed more about the limits of logic as norms than about the workings of the mind. In fact, I do not know of any new Insight that this activity has produced. Logical norms distract us from understanding intelligent behavior.”
At this point, LI is tempted to go down the trail, shooting up the Bush age obsession with testing as education, and the foreseeable result (further cretinization of a vulnerable population) by the No Child having anything to think with but their Behind Act. But we will simply lay down a marker for future reference.
To return, however. Our topic, in our last post, was supposed to be the individual, considered as an autonomous thing – the person, in short. Since Kant – at least, that is how the intellectual history story goes, but in actuality Kant simply codified what was in the child-speak of the Western mass mind for a long time – we’ve operated on the assumption that the autonomy of the individual is the bedrock of ethics. Philosophy’s safecrackers – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, etc, etc – have found it pretty easy to break into that concept and show up its flaws, just as Marx found it easy to point to the historical trajectory of class interest that produces the “character mask” of the subject under capitalism. Old Kant’s original formulation of the autonomy thesis is notably eccentric, since it excludes the sensibility – the animal collective that howls around the noumenal X that we proudly bear through our trials and temptations. While Gigerenzer is no overt Kantian, his theory does lend credence to the idea that the sensibility can, indeed, breach our autonomy – or, to put it another way, that the way in which we perceive things is so framed by elements given by the sensibility that “logical norms distract us from intelligent behavior.” To illustrate which, Gigerenzer cites a psychological experiment created from a cliché:
“Consider an experiment in which a full glass of water and an empty glass are put in front of a participant (Sher and McKenzie, 2003). The experimenter asks the participant to pour half of the full glass into the other glass, and then asks the participant to hand him the half empty glass. Which one does the participant pick? Most people picked the previously full glass. When they were asked, however, to hand over the half-full glass, most participants picked the previously empty one. This experiment reveals that the two statements are not pragmatically equivalent (see also McKenzie and Nelson, 2003). People extract surplus information from the framing of the question, and this surplus information concems the dynamics or history of the situation, which helps to guess what is meant.”
Okay, one more post on this topic, tomorrow.
Okay, to briefly reprise – although to follow this post, you will have to read yesterday’s post: Tversky and Kahnman claim to have shown a pattern of illogical response to problems that transform sets into the language of probability. The conjunction problem, or what’s wrong with Linda, was one of those conundrums.
Here’s the problem as T and K present it:
Linda is 31, outgoing, single. She majored in philosophy in college. As a student she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination.
Which of the two alternatives is more probable:
Linda is a bank teller
Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement?
The b is, as Gigerenzer points out, rather like the question Piaget posed to children: here is a picture of flowers, 6 of which are daisies and four of which are not. Are there more daisies or flowers in the picture? In the Piaget case, by the time children are eight, they recognize that the daisies are flowers, and that the confusing thing in the question is really that it makes it falsely appear like daisies are categorially equal to flowers, instead of a subset of them. (well, they realize this in child-brain speech, as in, that’s a trick question). But T and K consistently found that college students would chose b. So what gives?
“I argue that the irrationality is not to be found in adult reasoning but in the logical norm. Consider what the norm is: the probability of an event A is larger than (or equal to) the probability of the events A and B, that is, p(A) > P(AAB). This conjunction rule is used as a
content-blind norm for judgment: the content of the As and Bs is not considered relevant to evaluating good reasoning. All that counts is the mathematical probability p and the logical '^ and correct judgment is attested when people use the English terms probable and and in this and
only this way. This amounts to a purely syntactic definition of rational reasoning, and therefore, of an error in judgment.”
Putting his money on the table, so to speak, Gigerenzer rearranges T and K’s question to this one:
“Consider the following version of the Linda problem. Here the polysemy of the word probable is eliminated by using the phrase how many:
There are 100 persons who fit the description above (that is, Linda's). How many of them are:
Bank tellers?
Bank tellers and active in the feminist movement? '^
This change is sufficient to make the apparently stable cognitive illusion largely disappear. In one experiment, every single participant answered that there are more bank tellers {Hertwig and Gigerenzer, 1999; for similar results see Fiedler, 1988; Tversky and Kahneman, 1983). The
experiment also showed that the majority of participants interpreted how many in the sense of mathematical probability, but more probable as meaning "possible," "conceivable," or one of the other nonmathematical meanings listed in the OED.”
If Gigerenzer is right, he is onto something major – like, Meno style major. Like, maybe education is actually possible – confounding the cynics among you. Alas, T and K have tinkered with rephrasing the question in terms of “how many,” discovering that simply changing the b phrase slightly (to “bank tellers and active feminists”) can again dramatically change the responses.
All of which leads Gigerenzer to ask whether the problem, here, is that T and K are abstracting the mind from our ecology. This is how the Great G puts it:
“What have we learned from some 20 years and hundreds of experiments on the conjunction fallacy? We have leamed more about the limits of logic as norms than about the workings of the mind. In fact, I do not know of any new Insight that this activity has produced. Logical norms distract us from understanding intelligent behavior.”
At this point, LI is tempted to go down the trail, shooting up the Bush age obsession with testing as education, and the foreseeable result (further cretinization of a vulnerable population) by the No Child having anything to think with but their Behind Act. But we will simply lay down a marker for future reference.
To return, however. Our topic, in our last post, was supposed to be the individual, considered as an autonomous thing – the person, in short. Since Kant – at least, that is how the intellectual history story goes, but in actuality Kant simply codified what was in the child-speak of the Western mass mind for a long time – we’ve operated on the assumption that the autonomy of the individual is the bedrock of ethics. Philosophy’s safecrackers – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, etc, etc – have found it pretty easy to break into that concept and show up its flaws, just as Marx found it easy to point to the historical trajectory of class interest that produces the “character mask” of the subject under capitalism. Old Kant’s original formulation of the autonomy thesis is notably eccentric, since it excludes the sensibility – the animal collective that howls around the noumenal X that we proudly bear through our trials and temptations. While Gigerenzer is no overt Kantian, his theory does lend credence to the idea that the sensibility can, indeed, breach our autonomy – or, to put it another way, that the way in which we perceive things is so framed by elements given by the sensibility that “logical norms distract us from intelligent behavior.” To illustrate which, Gigerenzer cites a psychological experiment created from a cliché:
“Consider an experiment in which a full glass of water and an empty glass are put in front of a participant (Sher and McKenzie, 2003). The experimenter asks the participant to pour half of the full glass into the other glass, and then asks the participant to hand him the half empty glass. Which one does the participant pick? Most people picked the previously full glass. When they were asked, however, to hand over the half-full glass, most participants picked the previously empty one. This experiment reveals that the two statements are not pragmatically equivalent (see also McKenzie and Nelson, 2003). People extract surplus information from the framing of the question, and this surplus information concems the dynamics or history of the situation, which helps to guess what is meant.”
Okay, one more post on this topic, tomorrow.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Linda you sly fox
Lately, LI has been a little baggy and disorganized. Unfortunately, I foresee this post straying into chaos too – I can feel its edges, even now, being pulled towards some strange attractors -- but I will try to be a bit more disciplined.
See, I want to write about two different things. I want to write about my web pal Paul’s post on the daemonic interpretation of the person – which rings some bells with me. And I also want to write about Gerd Gigerenzer’s essay in the new issue of Social Theory, I think, therefore I err. And at some point I wanted to use Schopenhauer’s image of the Veil of Maya to talk about traffic fatalities.
Uhh, right. Okay. Three things.
As fans of prospect theory know, Gigerenzer plays Moriarty to Kahneman and Tversky’s Holmes and Watson. Prospect theory – which takes the datum from psychological testing to understand patterns in how people make decisions according to their perspective of the probabilities involved in adopting a course of behavior – has busily revamped the way economists think of the rational agent. Kahneman and Tversky found that certain patterns of logical error occur across groups. For instance, given a constant probability of a course of action, one can manipulate responses to that course by framing it in terms of gain or loss. K and T developed what is called the Asian disease problem. Using students and professors as their pool of respondents, they posed this problem:
Imagine that the US is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows:
If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.
If Program B is adopted, there is 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and 2/3 probability that no people will be saved.
72 percent chose A, 28 B. Then they proposed this problem:
Problem 2
If Program C is adopted 400 people will die.
If Program D is adopted there is 1/3 probability that nobody will die, and 2/3 probability that 600 people will die.
Which of the two programs would you favor?”
22 percent went for C, and 78 percent went for D.
The first question was framed in such a way that it brought out risk averseness: “the prospect of certainly saving 200 lives is more attractive than a risky prospect of equal expected value, that is, a one-in-three chance of saving 600 lives.” The second question brought out risk taking: “the certain death of 400 people is less acceptable than the two in three chance that 600 will die.”
Gigerenzer’s essay begins by showing that the paradigm within which Kahneman and Tversky are working is one that assumes that the brain is a logic machine. This goes back, according to G., to Piaget’s work. Piaget showed that children, as they get older, get better at answering questions that are, basically, about sets. For instance, children are shown a picture with ten flowers, of which five are daisies. They are asked if there are more daisies or more flowers in the picture. Eventually, by the age of eight or nine, they click to the fact that daisies are a subset of flowers, and thus, naturally, there are more flowers. But K. and T., those devils, upset this neat pattern by transposing the terms into probability terms with the famous Linda problem. Linda is 31 years old. Linda was a philosophy major. Linda is outspoken. Now, which one of the two is more probable? A. Linda is a bank teller. B. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement? People match Linda’s characteristics to b., and so choose b, even though – by the laws of probability – the conjunction of the probability of two states is less than their separate probabilities.
(The conjunction fallacy, by the way, was rife during the early days of the Iraq occupation, as LI liked to point out at the time. But I’m not going off in that direction today.)
So: what? Tomorrow I will write about Gigerenzer’s problem with the Linda problem.
See, I want to write about two different things. I want to write about my web pal Paul’s post on the daemonic interpretation of the person – which rings some bells with me. And I also want to write about Gerd Gigerenzer’s essay in the new issue of Social Theory, I think, therefore I err. And at some point I wanted to use Schopenhauer’s image of the Veil of Maya to talk about traffic fatalities.
Uhh, right. Okay. Three things.
As fans of prospect theory know, Gigerenzer plays Moriarty to Kahneman and Tversky’s Holmes and Watson. Prospect theory – which takes the datum from psychological testing to understand patterns in how people make decisions according to their perspective of the probabilities involved in adopting a course of behavior – has busily revamped the way economists think of the rational agent. Kahneman and Tversky found that certain patterns of logical error occur across groups. For instance, given a constant probability of a course of action, one can manipulate responses to that course by framing it in terms of gain or loss. K and T developed what is called the Asian disease problem. Using students and professors as their pool of respondents, they posed this problem:
Imagine that the US is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows:
If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.
If Program B is adopted, there is 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and 2/3 probability that no people will be saved.
72 percent chose A, 28 B. Then they proposed this problem:
Problem 2
If Program C is adopted 400 people will die.
If Program D is adopted there is 1/3 probability that nobody will die, and 2/3 probability that 600 people will die.
Which of the two programs would you favor?”
22 percent went for C, and 78 percent went for D.
The first question was framed in such a way that it brought out risk averseness: “the prospect of certainly saving 200 lives is more attractive than a risky prospect of equal expected value, that is, a one-in-three chance of saving 600 lives.” The second question brought out risk taking: “the certain death of 400 people is less acceptable than the two in three chance that 600 will die.”
Gigerenzer’s essay begins by showing that the paradigm within which Kahneman and Tversky are working is one that assumes that the brain is a logic machine. This goes back, according to G., to Piaget’s work. Piaget showed that children, as they get older, get better at answering questions that are, basically, about sets. For instance, children are shown a picture with ten flowers, of which five are daisies. They are asked if there are more daisies or more flowers in the picture. Eventually, by the age of eight or nine, they click to the fact that daisies are a subset of flowers, and thus, naturally, there are more flowers. But K. and T., those devils, upset this neat pattern by transposing the terms into probability terms with the famous Linda problem. Linda is 31 years old. Linda was a philosophy major. Linda is outspoken. Now, which one of the two is more probable? A. Linda is a bank teller. B. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement? People match Linda’s characteristics to b., and so choose b, even though – by the laws of probability – the conjunction of the probability of two states is less than their separate probabilities.
(The conjunction fallacy, by the way, was rife during the early days of the Iraq occupation, as LI liked to point out at the time. But I’m not going off in that direction today.)
So: what? Tomorrow I will write about Gigerenzer’s problem with the Linda problem.
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Doing our share
LI has been contemplating one of the latest developments in the War.
“In a joint statement at the end of a three-day visit by the Iranian foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi, the new Shiite-led Iraqi government said that Saddam Hussein, the overthrown Iraqi leader, and other officials in his government must be put on trial for committing "military aggression against the people of Iraq, Iran and Kuwait," as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes.”
Given this statement by our ally officially making that war a criminal offense, and given LI's well known sense of patriotism, we thought we'd start the ball rolling by fingering a few collaborators that the Iraqis might want to pick up in this country.
For instance: Weinberger, Caspar W. Description: lunatic, former Secretary of War under Ronald Reagan (president, U.S.A.). In his memoirs, written in 1990 “Weinberger holds the Ayatollah responsible for the war with Iraq, even though Iraq attacked first. Moreover, he asserts that Iran was able to hold its own in the war only because Iraq had decided it did not want to commit the substantial resources required for a military victory. The former secretary conveniently forgets that Iraq resorted even to chemical weapons.”
There’s a rundown of the dog’s criminal activities here.
Current resorts: “Cap” has been seen in Washington D.C. Method of capture suggested: ambush at meeting of the Forbes magazine board of directors, of which he is chairman; also can be picked up at the Winston Churchill Memorial Fund annual pigsticking hunt, or, if 20 to 30 thousand dollars is available, can be lured to speak at any event involving making money from the commerce of mass murder, i.e. defense related industry.
Rumsfeld, Donald. Description: lunatic, current secretary of War. Record: There's a rundown of beast's criminal role here.
Method of capture suggested: Rumsfeld, known to his associates as Babbling Don, is known to frequent a building on 1000 Defense, where he hangs out with various shady cronies. Warning: suspect is armed and should be considered dangerous.
Bush, George Herbert. Description: records show that the suspect may have been president of the United States. Information is considered highly unreliable, as it is unlikely a person so egregiously unpleasant could have been elected to position of dogcatcher, even among kaf'r. Record: partial list of crimes committed in La Times article here
Method of Capture suggested: last seen looking like prune went wrong way down windpipe in tsunami aid photo-op in Thailand. Likely to be anywhere wife is not in vicinity. May be lured by set up involving search for new spokesman for viagra related product, for which see Dole, Robert.
PS - Since we are doing our share in the Great Bush War Effort, we felt like sharing some more of the good news in Iraq.
Ali Hameed quit his job as a taxi driver because he no longer felt safe on Baghdad's streets. Increasingly desperate for money to help him get married, he hit on a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity - selling one of his kidneys.
Last week, in a shabby ward in the city's Al Karama hospital, he lay bandaged on a bed, one kidney lighter and $1,400 (about £765) richer after a three-hour operation.
In a nearby room, his body similarly bandaged, lay the man who had paid for it - the other player in a grim new black market trade in organs that is one of Iraq's few growth industries.
“In a joint statement at the end of a three-day visit by the Iranian foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi, the new Shiite-led Iraqi government said that Saddam Hussein, the overthrown Iraqi leader, and other officials in his government must be put on trial for committing "military aggression against the people of Iraq, Iran and Kuwait," as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes.”
Given this statement by our ally officially making that war a criminal offense, and given LI's well known sense of patriotism, we thought we'd start the ball rolling by fingering a few collaborators that the Iraqis might want to pick up in this country.
For instance: Weinberger, Caspar W. Description: lunatic, former Secretary of War under Ronald Reagan (president, U.S.A.). In his memoirs, written in 1990 “Weinberger holds the Ayatollah responsible for the war with Iraq, even though Iraq attacked first. Moreover, he asserts that Iran was able to hold its own in the war only because Iraq had decided it did not want to commit the substantial resources required for a military victory. The former secretary conveniently forgets that Iraq resorted even to chemical weapons.”
There’s a rundown of the dog’s criminal activities here.
Current resorts: “Cap” has been seen in Washington D.C. Method of capture suggested: ambush at meeting of the Forbes magazine board of directors, of which he is chairman; also can be picked up at the Winston Churchill Memorial Fund annual pigsticking hunt, or, if 20 to 30 thousand dollars is available, can be lured to speak at any event involving making money from the commerce of mass murder, i.e. defense related industry.
Rumsfeld, Donald. Description: lunatic, current secretary of War. Record: There's a rundown of beast's criminal role here.
Method of capture suggested: Rumsfeld, known to his associates as Babbling Don, is known to frequent a building on 1000 Defense, where he hangs out with various shady cronies. Warning: suspect is armed and should be considered dangerous.
Bush, George Herbert. Description: records show that the suspect may have been president of the United States. Information is considered highly unreliable, as it is unlikely a person so egregiously unpleasant could have been elected to position of dogcatcher, even among kaf'r. Record: partial list of crimes committed in La Times article here
Method of Capture suggested: last seen looking like prune went wrong way down windpipe in tsunami aid photo-op in Thailand. Likely to be anywhere wife is not in vicinity. May be lured by set up involving search for new spokesman for viagra related product, for which see Dole, Robert.
PS - Since we are doing our share in the Great Bush War Effort, we felt like sharing some more of the good news in Iraq.
Ali Hameed quit his job as a taxi driver because he no longer felt safe on Baghdad's streets. Increasingly desperate for money to help him get married, he hit on a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity - selling one of his kidneys.
Last week, in a shabby ward in the city's Al Karama hospital, he lay bandaged on a bed, one kidney lighter and $1,400 (about £765) richer after a three-hour operation.
In a nearby room, his body similarly bandaged, lay the man who had paid for it - the other player in a grim new black market trade in organs that is one of Iraq's few growth industries.
Monday, May 23, 2005
LI read a fascinating article by Mary Morgan in the Winter Philosophy of Science journal, and we want to write about it. Mary Morgan, Margaret Morrison, Nancy Cartwright, and Ronald Giere form, in LI’s mind, a sort of collective that bridges the distance between the Latourian Science in Action school and the last gasp tradition of the Popperians. Significantly, many come out of the London School of Economics, long a stronghold of the late Popperian school.
As philosophers of science know, the first thing that scientists will mention when asked for a philosophy of science is falsification. This is less a thoughtful judgment of the practice of science as they have observed it than boilerplate. As is well known, the falsification criteria comes from the Logical Positivist school in the twenties. More specifically, it comes from Karl Popper, as a leading thesis in the investigation of the “logic of discovery.” What those scientists usually don’t know is that the leading thesis was part of a program that claimed to offer a devastating and final refutation of induction in science.
The idea that science could be captured in a logic is an essential move in the logical positivist program of reducing all salient questions of knowledge to questions of formal language. This inflation of the notion of language signals the lineage of the philosophy: language functions, here, much as Kant’s reason functions in the Critiques. We won’t go over the adventures and impasses of this program. Suffice it to say that Popper’s picture of science was confessedly abbreviated. It didn’t tell us much about how statistics decisively changed the practice and meaning of experimentation in science. It didn’t tell us much about models. It made assumptions about hypothesis building that isolated that activity from science practice. But, mainly, it was aimed at telling us about the truth – with the idea that science is ultimately constructed around the truth. Other Popperians – Lakatos, Feyerabend, Kuhn, etc – extended to Popperian impulse to larger views of research programs, and in the process destroyed Popperian rationality. It was self mined from the very beginning. But the essential idea – that at the heart of science there is a wholly deductive program that is theoretically capturable in a formal language – still remained, yearly becoming much worse for wear. As, indeed, the original and simple thesis of falsification proved itself unable to account for large swatches of science, and fell into logical difficulties of its own (Hempel’s White Raven paradox).
Actually, in LI’s eyes, the logical positivists simply encoded, in a new form, the reaction of philosophy to science that arose during the early modern period – notably, the Cartesian idea that science advances by the hypothetico-deductive method. It was that idea which Newton fought against from the correspondence around his first paper, the great 1676 letter on light and color, to the Opticks which he published after the death of his inveterate enemy, Robert Hooke. Newton’s entire seriousness in not “framing hypotheses” was a great step towards separating, utterly, physics from metaphysics. It is a step the philosophers have never wholly forgiven him – or even wholly understood in him. Hence, the perennial urge to annex the natural sciences as a branch of logic.
Where does this leave philosophy of science, then? PoS has an uneasy relationship with Sociology of Science, insofar as it gives up the pretence of deducing the principles of science and applies itself to the observation of scientific practice. In one way, this makes PoS a very exciting field. Where other branches of philosophy amuse themselves with dubious thought experiments, PoS observes real ones.
Morgan’s paper takes a case from Economics – a model called the Edgeworth Box – and shows how it permutated over the course of a century, as economists mathematized their discipline. The Edgeworth Box (see this history by Humphrey ) was invented by Francis Edgeworth in “his now famous Mathematical Psychics ([1881] 2003), a book of almost impenetrable erudition from this Irish economist. For Edgeworth, mathematics was a form of expression, a language, and because of its special qualities it was a tool or instrument both for expression of economic ideas and for reasoning about them. But in Edgeworth's mind it was also an instrument of imagination.”
Edgeworth imagines two individuals with two goods to exchange. The world of these individuals is closed, to an extent: the traders do not have competitors. But they are free to contract or not. In other words, the Robinson Crusoe story so savaged by Marx. As Morgan puts it, the Edgeworth box “defines the locus of points at which exchange might be contracted as those where, whichever direction a move is made away from that set of points, one trader gets more and the other less utility. This set of points is termed the "contract curve.’” From Morgan: “Edgeworth's diagram refers to individual traders alongside their goods, and provides an indifference curve for each individual and their contract curve. And while it seems initially that the whole space is open for trade as in Marshall, the argument defining the contract curve in conjunction with the indifference curves through the origin (i.e., points at which utility is equivalent to that obtained from zero exchange) rules out some areas of the ninety-degree total space. Edgeworth is so impressed by his own diagram and the way that it allows him to work out some results which had previously failed to yield to general analysis, that he writes that his figure "is proved to be a correct representation" and that the diagram provides "an abstract typical representation" of a process (Edgeworth [1881] 2003, 36; my underlining).”
Now, the interesting thing about this abstract typical representation is that it represents a dynamic – although Morgan doesn’t mention it, surely there is some slight reference, here, to Maxwell’s fields, which are also constructed to capture trajectories. Morgan, instead, references Marshall’s theory of trade between two countries as the template for Edgeworth. LI notes this as a limit to exploring model building with an exclusive endogenous focus.
Morgan points out that Edgeworth’s original representation is not a box: “What might now be taken as the irreducible shape of the Box--namely, a closed set of two amounts of exchangeable items represented by the sides of the box, and two traders at opposite corners, each with two axes of potential commodities to trade with--are not there from the beginning.” Yet by 1950, the standard form of the Edgeworth diagram was a box. LI won’t reproduce Morgan’s history. But we are interested in the conclusion of that history: “For the economists in my case, learning to represent the economy in new ways was drawing new things. The mathematically expressed economic elements inside the Edgeworth Box--the indifference curves, the contract curve, the points of tangency and equilibrium, etc.--are new, mind's eye, conceptual elements, not old, body's eye, perceptual elements. Scitovsky's 1941 use of the diagram provides an excellent example of this point. The critical point of his article is the difference between allocative efficiency in which the total resources in the economy are fixed (denoted by a fixed size box) and those in which the resources change (denoted by a change in box size). The representation of the effect of this change proves to be quite difficult to understand for the modern user of such boxes. It is tempting for the reader of the diagram to suppose that, by expanding the box, there are just longer axes, more goods (for example, cheese and wine) to be exchanged for given indifference maps (representing tastes, which have no reason to alter). But of course these indifference lines represent contours in conceptual space, and increasing the total resources effectively expands the box from the middle. As the axes are lengthened, perceptual space expands, but so does the conceptual space, so that the original contract curve opens out to provide a region in the middle through which the new contract curve runs. This distinction between conceptual space and perceptual space also helps us to distinguish when a diagram is doing any work in the argument. If the diagram is about perceptual space but the argument about conceptual space, the reasoning will take place, as Mahoney describes it, "off the diagram" and the diagram will be, at best, an illustration, rather than a tool for experimentation and demonstration. (9)
Yet, as we know from Humphrey's 1996 history, during the early-twentieth-century period, the Edgeworth Box diagram was a creative tool used to derive propositions and prove theorems in economics. It was indeed a tool for reasoning about the economic world using the conceptual resources of the diagram.”
To evoke an entirely different philosophical tradition – the notions at play here, in Derridian terms, subsist in the gap between language and text. Those who read Derrida as collapsing text into language – as a run of the mill social constructionist, with the usual language idealism -- don’t understand him at all. The Edgeworth box is an excellent example of the trajectory of signs that constitutes a “text”, in Derrida’s terms. And what Morgan says, finally, about the ontological status of the Box is exactly what deconstruction would predict:
“I should be careful here to point out that when the Edgeworth Box is described as a mathematical model, it is not only made of mathematics. We can illustrate this best by considering the allowable movements or manipulations which can be made in the model. The notion that the two traders will be at some kind of optimum when their indifference curves meet at a tangency makes use of mathematical concepts and logic. But the apparatus of offer curves, indifference curves, and so, for example, the spaces in which trade is ruled out, depends on understanding the conceptual content of the elements in the model. Thus, Scitovsky's diagram showing the implications of increasing the resources requires manipulations of the diagram which are determined by the economic meaning of these curves, not by the logic of geometry. Both mathematical and subject-matter conceptual knowledge constrain the details of the representation and define the allowable manipulations. This is surely not particular to models in the form of diagrams, and indeed it seems likely that most if not all "mathematical" models in economics depend on economic subject information to constrain or define their rules of manipulation. From this point of view, there would be as much difficulty in "translating" the Edgeworth Box into "just mathematics" with no subject content as into "just words" with no mathematical content. The Edgeworth Box diagram carries an independent representational function: (10) it contains conceptual apparatus which could not be represented, or manipulated, in verbal form and indeed cannot be entirely expressed in purely mathematical terms.”
Which last sentence opens up a few too many vistas.
As philosophers of science know, the first thing that scientists will mention when asked for a philosophy of science is falsification. This is less a thoughtful judgment of the practice of science as they have observed it than boilerplate. As is well known, the falsification criteria comes from the Logical Positivist school in the twenties. More specifically, it comes from Karl Popper, as a leading thesis in the investigation of the “logic of discovery.” What those scientists usually don’t know is that the leading thesis was part of a program that claimed to offer a devastating and final refutation of induction in science.
The idea that science could be captured in a logic is an essential move in the logical positivist program of reducing all salient questions of knowledge to questions of formal language. This inflation of the notion of language signals the lineage of the philosophy: language functions, here, much as Kant’s reason functions in the Critiques. We won’t go over the adventures and impasses of this program. Suffice it to say that Popper’s picture of science was confessedly abbreviated. It didn’t tell us much about how statistics decisively changed the practice and meaning of experimentation in science. It didn’t tell us much about models. It made assumptions about hypothesis building that isolated that activity from science practice. But, mainly, it was aimed at telling us about the truth – with the idea that science is ultimately constructed around the truth. Other Popperians – Lakatos, Feyerabend, Kuhn, etc – extended to Popperian impulse to larger views of research programs, and in the process destroyed Popperian rationality. It was self mined from the very beginning. But the essential idea – that at the heart of science there is a wholly deductive program that is theoretically capturable in a formal language – still remained, yearly becoming much worse for wear. As, indeed, the original and simple thesis of falsification proved itself unable to account for large swatches of science, and fell into logical difficulties of its own (Hempel’s White Raven paradox).
Actually, in LI’s eyes, the logical positivists simply encoded, in a new form, the reaction of philosophy to science that arose during the early modern period – notably, the Cartesian idea that science advances by the hypothetico-deductive method. It was that idea which Newton fought against from the correspondence around his first paper, the great 1676 letter on light and color, to the Opticks which he published after the death of his inveterate enemy, Robert Hooke. Newton’s entire seriousness in not “framing hypotheses” was a great step towards separating, utterly, physics from metaphysics. It is a step the philosophers have never wholly forgiven him – or even wholly understood in him. Hence, the perennial urge to annex the natural sciences as a branch of logic.
Where does this leave philosophy of science, then? PoS has an uneasy relationship with Sociology of Science, insofar as it gives up the pretence of deducing the principles of science and applies itself to the observation of scientific practice. In one way, this makes PoS a very exciting field. Where other branches of philosophy amuse themselves with dubious thought experiments, PoS observes real ones.
Morgan’s paper takes a case from Economics – a model called the Edgeworth Box – and shows how it permutated over the course of a century, as economists mathematized their discipline. The Edgeworth Box (see this history by Humphrey ) was invented by Francis Edgeworth in “his now famous Mathematical Psychics ([1881] 2003), a book of almost impenetrable erudition from this Irish economist. For Edgeworth, mathematics was a form of expression, a language, and because of its special qualities it was a tool or instrument both for expression of economic ideas and for reasoning about them. But in Edgeworth's mind it was also an instrument of imagination.”
Edgeworth imagines two individuals with two goods to exchange. The world of these individuals is closed, to an extent: the traders do not have competitors. But they are free to contract or not. In other words, the Robinson Crusoe story so savaged by Marx. As Morgan puts it, the Edgeworth box “defines the locus of points at which exchange might be contracted as those where, whichever direction a move is made away from that set of points, one trader gets more and the other less utility. This set of points is termed the "contract curve.’” From Morgan: “Edgeworth's diagram refers to individual traders alongside their goods, and provides an indifference curve for each individual and their contract curve. And while it seems initially that the whole space is open for trade as in Marshall, the argument defining the contract curve in conjunction with the indifference curves through the origin (i.e., points at which utility is equivalent to that obtained from zero exchange) rules out some areas of the ninety-degree total space. Edgeworth is so impressed by his own diagram and the way that it allows him to work out some results which had previously failed to yield to general analysis, that he writes that his figure "is proved to be a correct representation" and that the diagram provides "an abstract typical representation" of a process (Edgeworth [1881] 2003, 36; my underlining).”
Now, the interesting thing about this abstract typical representation is that it represents a dynamic – although Morgan doesn’t mention it, surely there is some slight reference, here, to Maxwell’s fields, which are also constructed to capture trajectories. Morgan, instead, references Marshall’s theory of trade between two countries as the template for Edgeworth. LI notes this as a limit to exploring model building with an exclusive endogenous focus.
Morgan points out that Edgeworth’s original representation is not a box: “What might now be taken as the irreducible shape of the Box--namely, a closed set of two amounts of exchangeable items represented by the sides of the box, and two traders at opposite corners, each with two axes of potential commodities to trade with--are not there from the beginning.” Yet by 1950, the standard form of the Edgeworth diagram was a box. LI won’t reproduce Morgan’s history. But we are interested in the conclusion of that history: “For the economists in my case, learning to represent the economy in new ways was drawing new things. The mathematically expressed economic elements inside the Edgeworth Box--the indifference curves, the contract curve, the points of tangency and equilibrium, etc.--are new, mind's eye, conceptual elements, not old, body's eye, perceptual elements. Scitovsky's 1941 use of the diagram provides an excellent example of this point. The critical point of his article is the difference between allocative efficiency in which the total resources in the economy are fixed (denoted by a fixed size box) and those in which the resources change (denoted by a change in box size). The representation of the effect of this change proves to be quite difficult to understand for the modern user of such boxes. It is tempting for the reader of the diagram to suppose that, by expanding the box, there are just longer axes, more goods (for example, cheese and wine) to be exchanged for given indifference maps (representing tastes, which have no reason to alter). But of course these indifference lines represent contours in conceptual space, and increasing the total resources effectively expands the box from the middle. As the axes are lengthened, perceptual space expands, but so does the conceptual space, so that the original contract curve opens out to provide a region in the middle through which the new contract curve runs. This distinction between conceptual space and perceptual space also helps us to distinguish when a diagram is doing any work in the argument. If the diagram is about perceptual space but the argument about conceptual space, the reasoning will take place, as Mahoney describes it, "off the diagram" and the diagram will be, at best, an illustration, rather than a tool for experimentation and demonstration. (9)
Yet, as we know from Humphrey's 1996 history, during the early-twentieth-century period, the Edgeworth Box diagram was a creative tool used to derive propositions and prove theorems in economics. It was indeed a tool for reasoning about the economic world using the conceptual resources of the diagram.”
To evoke an entirely different philosophical tradition – the notions at play here, in Derridian terms, subsist in the gap between language and text. Those who read Derrida as collapsing text into language – as a run of the mill social constructionist, with the usual language idealism -- don’t understand him at all. The Edgeworth box is an excellent example of the trajectory of signs that constitutes a “text”, in Derrida’s terms. And what Morgan says, finally, about the ontological status of the Box is exactly what deconstruction would predict:
“I should be careful here to point out that when the Edgeworth Box is described as a mathematical model, it is not only made of mathematics. We can illustrate this best by considering the allowable movements or manipulations which can be made in the model. The notion that the two traders will be at some kind of optimum when their indifference curves meet at a tangency makes use of mathematical concepts and logic. But the apparatus of offer curves, indifference curves, and so, for example, the spaces in which trade is ruled out, depends on understanding the conceptual content of the elements in the model. Thus, Scitovsky's diagram showing the implications of increasing the resources requires manipulations of the diagram which are determined by the economic meaning of these curves, not by the logic of geometry. Both mathematical and subject-matter conceptual knowledge constrain the details of the representation and define the allowable manipulations. This is surely not particular to models in the form of diagrams, and indeed it seems likely that most if not all "mathematical" models in economics depend on economic subject information to constrain or define their rules of manipulation. From this point of view, there would be as much difficulty in "translating" the Edgeworth Box into "just mathematics" with no subject content as into "just words" with no mathematical content. The Edgeworth Box diagram carries an independent representational function: (10) it contains conceptual apparatus which could not be represented, or manipulated, in verbal form and indeed cannot be entirely expressed in purely mathematical terms.”
Which last sentence opens up a few too many vistas.
Friday, May 20, 2005
Ruins and monuments of the Bush age
The week was pleasantly full of Bush age ironies. There was, first, the curious silence of the Bush administration regarding aging LBO king Perelman’s winning approximately 1.45 billion dollars from Morgan Stanley. Trivial law suits? Misuse of the courts? No, it is a misuse of the court when a man gets his arm sliced off in a meat factory and wins a million bucks from the jury. This is because the man is, originally, shit. Low class. A man who couldn’t make second place to a doorman position at one of the clubs Perelman belongs to. Basically, Bush’s liability reform is class warfare in the raw. Reform, whenever it comes out of the mouth of one of the Bush-ites, means entrenching and legalizing some corruption. Invariably. As anybody who pays attention knows, the big court losses are not to slaughter house workers or Mickey Dee’s customers assaulted by palsied clerks with hot coffee – they are to big corporate players. However, since the money circulates among the upper 1 percent income bracket, which is (to a degree of exclusion that would astonish Ronald Reagan) the only class that Bush cares about, there isn’t going to be any dickering with this system. Well, Morgan Stanley might, rightly, use one of their pawns in Congress to reverse the verdict, but shark fights are never about damaging the real interests of the pool of sharks. Their interest, actually, is to do what they do best – which is to bully. Now, LI recognizes that in every society, the bully rises to the top, and that inhuman cruelty is part of what makes this such a rich country for one and all. They may be sons of bitches, but at least they are our suns of bitches. But that Perelman can coolly extract 1.45 billion for the “bad advice” he got from Morgan Stanley about not pouring money into a company, Sunbeam, is a joke. Perelman, in this scenario, is a naïf. A poor shoeless billionaire. He invested in a company that a half hours acquaintance with any Business news index would tell you had basically come to the limit of its market. How did Perelman figure on making a return? He wanted the spoils that would accrue from sending in a criminal named Al Dunlop as CEO to screw those who had spent their lives working for the company while taking apart the infrastructure of the place – in preparation for daisy chaining it to some other company. Who knew that, in spite of his reputation as a thug, Dunlap was also an incredibly incompetent thug. Perelman should know the m.o. – he helped invent it in the eighties. See under Marvel.
But if sharks eat sharks, is a minnow like me going to shed a tear? Not really. Still, one should put down x-es – the best way to trace the intellectual corruption that puts its spurs into our sides at the moment.
Then, of course, there was a more traditional crushing of minnows into fishmeal, with the “bankruptcy” of United Air. There is no God, otherwise, just for amusement, he would have arranged the news for this to arrive the week Bush signed the new Bankruptcy bill that he has so drooled over. The very thought that some low caste widow of one of the suckers who died in Iraq going bankrupt and skipping those wonderful credit card payments – 40 percent and mounting, all usury, all the time – sends a black arrow through the heart of the worst and the vilest. The worst and vilest, while headquartered in the Pentagon, do have branch offices: Congress, the Treasury department, etc. So that widow is going to pay through the nose for the vacuum cleaner, the groceries, the new tires for the care (strumpet luxuries!) On the other hand, contractual obligations that have extended for fifty years can go out the window without a blink from Treasury Secretary Snow. Of course, only a raving Marxist would mention the 15 to 17 mil that United CEOs have received (keeping the company competitive in the labor marketplace) in compensation for their amazing leadership abilities. Those leadership abilities consisted of tracking their options in the high nineties. LI has already written a lot about the catastrophe in the private pension funds that is ticking away – funds that, hey, were not kept in a locked box but invested, just like Bushites want Social Security invested. That equity market, man. It just goes up. It is riskless. Shoe shine boys become millionaires on it. Or executives in companies with advance advice that the company’s profits are going to tank, as Bush did when he was finally skyhooked out of the series of small companies he ran into the ground and put in an essentially harmless position from which he could operate as a rentier. It’s the Ownership society – they own you. If there is ever a “truth in mottoes on coins” law, surely that should be the consensus choice.
Then, the lie that runs through the administration like the Nile, fertilizing every branch, there was the news from Iraq. Seems that a sovereign cabinet member had let the wine of power get to his head and banned raiding mosques. As if the little Mesopomoron didn’t know how business was run in fully democratic Iraq. It is run much as it was run by the Soviets in fully democratic East Germany.
The NYT sank this little jewel of a paragraph in one of their schizo news stories – a week ago Rumsfeld wasn’t bothering to even call the command in Iraq except on alternate Sundays, and only then to discuss the weather and fishing. This week the command is talking about another three, four years meatgrinding Americans – castoffs all, late on their credit card payments – and Iraqis – about which, do we care? Surely they will provide a few more purple thumb moments for us to smile about. And then we get this:
“Another problem cited by the senior officer in Baghdad was the new government's ban on raids on mosques, announced on Monday, which the American officer said he expected to be revised after high-level discussions on Wednesday between American commanders and Iraqi officials.”
LI likes the Soviet sound of this. The high level discussions. The consultation. The our fellow democracy. The brothers in the eternal struggle of liberty lovers.
So: all in all, a banner week.
But if sharks eat sharks, is a minnow like me going to shed a tear? Not really. Still, one should put down x-es – the best way to trace the intellectual corruption that puts its spurs into our sides at the moment.
Then, of course, there was a more traditional crushing of minnows into fishmeal, with the “bankruptcy” of United Air. There is no God, otherwise, just for amusement, he would have arranged the news for this to arrive the week Bush signed the new Bankruptcy bill that he has so drooled over. The very thought that some low caste widow of one of the suckers who died in Iraq going bankrupt and skipping those wonderful credit card payments – 40 percent and mounting, all usury, all the time – sends a black arrow through the heart of the worst and the vilest. The worst and vilest, while headquartered in the Pentagon, do have branch offices: Congress, the Treasury department, etc. So that widow is going to pay through the nose for the vacuum cleaner, the groceries, the new tires for the care (strumpet luxuries!) On the other hand, contractual obligations that have extended for fifty years can go out the window without a blink from Treasury Secretary Snow. Of course, only a raving Marxist would mention the 15 to 17 mil that United CEOs have received (keeping the company competitive in the labor marketplace) in compensation for their amazing leadership abilities. Those leadership abilities consisted of tracking their options in the high nineties. LI has already written a lot about the catastrophe in the private pension funds that is ticking away – funds that, hey, were not kept in a locked box but invested, just like Bushites want Social Security invested. That equity market, man. It just goes up. It is riskless. Shoe shine boys become millionaires on it. Or executives in companies with advance advice that the company’s profits are going to tank, as Bush did when he was finally skyhooked out of the series of small companies he ran into the ground and put in an essentially harmless position from which he could operate as a rentier. It’s the Ownership society – they own you. If there is ever a “truth in mottoes on coins” law, surely that should be the consensus choice.
Then, the lie that runs through the administration like the Nile, fertilizing every branch, there was the news from Iraq. Seems that a sovereign cabinet member had let the wine of power get to his head and banned raiding mosques. As if the little Mesopomoron didn’t know how business was run in fully democratic Iraq. It is run much as it was run by the Soviets in fully democratic East Germany.
The NYT sank this little jewel of a paragraph in one of their schizo news stories – a week ago Rumsfeld wasn’t bothering to even call the command in Iraq except on alternate Sundays, and only then to discuss the weather and fishing. This week the command is talking about another three, four years meatgrinding Americans – castoffs all, late on their credit card payments – and Iraqis – about which, do we care? Surely they will provide a few more purple thumb moments for us to smile about. And then we get this:
“Another problem cited by the senior officer in Baghdad was the new government's ban on raids on mosques, announced on Monday, which the American officer said he expected to be revised after high-level discussions on Wednesday between American commanders and Iraqi officials.”
LI likes the Soviet sound of this. The high level discussions. The consultation. The our fellow democracy. The brothers in the eternal struggle of liberty lovers.
So: all in all, a banner week.
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