oh that liberal political strategy

LI is still on vacation. We tried, unsuccessfully, to get one of our far flung correspondents, C., to write a post about her first pregnancy – a report from the frontlines. This might still happen, if we turn on the Svengali.

Small topic today: if our readers want to know why the Democratic party is brain dead, go to the Wesley Clark op ed in the Washington Post today. The tone and feel of it – the inanity surmounted by arrogance – the blindness – it is all there, like an indigestible stew served to a dying invalid in a poorhouse. We particularly liked this graf, both for its meaninglessness and as a true gauge of how D.C. thinks about their war, three years after:

“On the political side, the timeline for the agreements on the Constitution is less important than the substance of the document. It is up to American leadership to help engineer, implement and sustain a compromise that will avoid the "red lines" of the respective factions and leave in place a state that both we and Iraq's neighbors can support. So no Kurdish vote on independence, a restricted role for Islam and limited autonomy in the south. And no private militias.”

This is a man pissing in the wind and complaining about rain.

The LI theory is not, pace Harry, to disestablish the Dems – it is that the liberal of today must explore multiple tracks. This means supporting independent movements to strangle the U.S. military’s capacity for continuing in Iraq as well as re-engaging with the… G.O.P. The liberal influence on the G.O.P. is non-existent. That is because liberals, after Vietnam, gave up on the G.O.P. and allowed themselves to be bought by the Dems. Well, that was a silly strategy, and we’ve been paying for it for years. Liberals should start picking Republicans to support, and they should start doing it now. Let’s revive the Bull moose faction of the Repug party.

Let’s… well, we aren’t going to get carried away. Doubtless the power of LI to affect the liberal mindset is less than that of a goose fart in a whirlwind. But the blogger manner is to pretend that one is some crowned Humpty Dumpty reigning over the scene, and who am I to violate the blogger stylebook?

Bush/Ubu

In an essay on Peron’s dictatorship, Borges claimed that recent argentinian history happened on two levels: one, a sordid theatrical farce, and the other, a literature for washerwomen – the paperback romance.
The Bush culture, more straightforwardly, takes its cues from Ubu Roi. Thus the latest sequence from Iraq. In one way, it is heartening. As readers of this blog know, the Iraq that emerged from the election was a theocracy in formation, with the Sunnis operating as the appalled but powerless spectators and the Kurds maneuvering to save their autonomy even at the risk of planting the seeds of a monster to the South. The Kurdish leadership, remember, found it convenient, at one point in the now forgotten civil war between warlords that occurred in 1996, to call in Saddam Hussein. This is the same leadership routinely praised, nowadays, for its commitment to democracy.
The defenders of the war, and even its opponents, have the disturbing habit of ignoring Iraqi reality when it doesn’t fit American rhetoric. For the belligerents, the Iraqi government we are defending is committed to democracy and human rights. Only the jihadists want to create an Islamic state. Of course, this turn away from reality has been occasionally pierced by the media, which, in fits of absent mindedness, sometimes reports on the inconvenient reality settling down in, say, Southern Iraq. This is a part of the country where the insurgents are replaced by the Sadr and Sciri paramilitaries, the lion lies down with the lamb, and coed college gatherings can result in attack, assault and murder at the hands of the guardians of the New Iraq. The neo-cons, who would have delighted Jarry, think that they have lit the fire of freedom in the middle east; they have, of course, acted unconsciously to spread the doctrine of Khomeini.
That being said, there is a certain schizophrenia on the pro-war side that has its counterpart on the anti-war side. On the one hand, the insurgency is in the last throes, or it is confined to merely three provinces, or it is simply something like the unruliness of the Nazis in occupied Germany. On the other hands, the insurgency is so powerful that American withdrawal would lead to Iraq falling into the hands of Zarquawi. Alan Philps, writing a surprisingly pessimistic column in the pro-war Telegraph, plays this tune:
“ feeling is growing in the West that it is time to remove troops from Iraq. Foreign troops, it is argued, are the problem, not the solution. The generals, anxiously watching the opinion polls, want nothing more than an excuse to start reducing troop numbers. So why not now? It is undeniable that the casualties are appalling and that every week Iraq produces more and more insurgents trained and bloodied in battle. The anti-war camp argues rightly that these jihadists did not exist in Iraq before the invasion. But they exist now. If they win, they will spread out to fight Arab regimes and no doubt try to bloody America as well.
So many mistakes have been made that success - the installation of a functioning secular democracy - is out of the question. But we owe it to the Iraqis not to hand them over to the new crop of warlords. What we started we must try to finish. “
The new crop of warlords, contra Philps, is precisely who we are fighting for. On the other hand, there is no reason to think that the Iraqi government would have less of a chance to suppress the insurgency than any other Middle Eastern government at this point.
The question that fascinates us Jarry-philes is how the neo-cons will turn on this dime. The defense of the rightful place of Islam in deciding petty things, like whether women receive an education or not, is going to be interesting. I’d suggest these useful lines of dialogue as a guide. Mere Ubu is trying to persuade Pere Ubu to kill the king of Poland and take his place:
Pere Ubu:
Eh vraiment! et puis après? N'ai-je pas un cul comme les autres?

MERE UBU
A ta place, ce cul, je voudrais l'installer sur un trône. Tu pourrais augmenter indéfiniment tes richesses, manger fort souvent de l'andouille et rouler carrosse par les rues.

PERE UBU
Si j'étais roi, je me ferais construire une grande capeline comme celle que j'avais en Aragon et que ces gredins d'Espagnols m'ont impudemment volée.

MERE UBU
Tu pourrais aussi te procurer un parapluie et un grand caban qui te tomberait sur les talons.

PERE UBU
Ah! je cède à la tentation. Bougre de merdre Ah! je cède à la tentation. Bougre de merdre, merdre de bougre, si jamais je le rencontre au coin d'un bois, il passera un mauvais quart d'heure.

liberation in chelsea

I am in a museum dedicated to Himalayan art in Chelsea. The site was formerly occupied by a Barneys. There are two musicians, arrayed in white, seated at the foot of the staircase, playing trancelike music representative of a certain Pakistani genre. The staircase is a holiday for architects -- a crooked, cubist thing that ascends up six flights. I like the staircase. My friends and I decide to listen to the guide, who appears at 2:30. The guide is a loud, gray haired Brooklyn-ite with the Yogi Bear figure towards which middle aged American avoirdupois seems inevitably to tend. In a barker's voice he points out salient aspects of Buddhist iconography, and gives a compressed version of Gautama Buddha's message to the world: the letting go of craving, fear, anger and attachment.

Later, my friend K. tells me that she is plagued by craving. She wishes she could purify herself, annihilate it.

Now, I am not a stranger to the purifying impulse. I, too, would like to toss into some ultimate refiner's fire all the dross encumbering my life: the pennyante terrors of my economic life, the irresistable impulse to manufacture opinion that crowds out more valuable contemplative matter in my mindspace, the gnawing, daily sexual lust. But as I told K, I am not so certain that the purifying impulse is the equivalent of life more abundant -- it could well be the hollowing out of life itself. There is a moment in letting go in which liberation crosses over into surrender. In better moods, I believe that the moral point of the secular life is not to get rid of craving, but to get to its very center -- to sink into it until one has unlocked its puzzles. I am disinclined to think that the achievement of some state of gilded hibernation should be called enlightenment. My friend A., at Milinda's Questions, claims that I am a prisoner of my chains. To which my response is: where does that metaphor come from? It seems to me that, if these are chains, human life itself is a chain -- and the symbol of the chain, thus ramified into a world of chains, chains endlessly, loses its edge. I doubt that the Buddha touched earth as a chain touches another chain. In fact, I want to liberate myself from this particular metaphor as my part in freeing myself from the chains...

By the way, the exhibit of the handprints and footprints of the various incarnations of Buddha is extraordinary.

the lamentable state of dangling

According to Dr. Johnson, "whatever busies the mind without corrupting it, has at least this use, that it rescues the day from idleness, and he that is never idle will not often be vicious." We like the hesitating "will not often" that modifies the sentiment -- however, LI has plunged into as much idleness as saving up for two months can purchase. Instead of attending to Ms. Sheehan, or the bad faith scare, on the left, that Bush is preparing to invade Iran (with, one must ask, what army?); instead of paying attention to the Iranian repression of the Kurds (as our friend Brooding Persian is doing) -- we've been attending Tanglewood concerts and going to lakes and summer movies.

About which -- LI often wonders what they will make, one hundred years from now, of the descent of taste in the latter part of the 20th century. For a long time we simply refused to participate in it -- for instance, by never going to one of the Lucas Space operas. But in the past five years, we have dropped that stance. This means that we have accumulated a certain cache of experience in the twisty logic of action movies; we have sorted the good, the bad, and the ugly; and we have found certain sequences growing stale...

Not, of course, the car chase, the wet dream of a society of traffic jam sitters. There are certain kinds of artistry the quality of which depends on the re-enactment, within some rigid design, of the same thing. In a sense, there is only one car chase, just as there is only one wedding, and one death of the hero. All variants are simulacra of this single and singular event.

We are talking about something else -- the no-thing. This thing can happen as much as it wants, but it never emerges beyond the zero. Such a thing is the "hanging from the cable" scene.

The current Batman movie -- a decent enough flick -- might have signaled the end of this sequence. You know what we mean -- the hero dangles from a wire, a cable, a chain, a rope, that depends from a moving train, a helicopter, even an airplane. Was this sequence invented in the James Bond movies? We dont' know. The suspence, here, is that the fight is waged on two axes. On the horizontal axis, the hero is threatened with annihilation by buildings, railroad bridges, tunnels, and any projecting solidity along that plane; on the vertical axis, the hero is in a sort of tug of war, compounded of bullets, flares, tugs, etc., with the Mr. Big in the vehicle. The current Batman steals, pretty much, the sequence in last year's Spiderman of having its hero ascend a chord attached to a moving train. It struck us that this was the weakest cord sequence we have ever seen. Perhaps audiences will be perpetually moved by the dangers along the two axes, but for us, the danger on both the vertical and horizontal axes has been long exhausted. Dangling is simply too silly -- nor does it have its roots (as the car chase sequence does) in the everyday libido.

Iraq -- the prisoner's dilemma

Crooked Timber pays entirely too much attention ot the ravings of Christopher Hitchens, if only to slag the man. However, a recent post on one of Hitchen's ineffably ignorant Slate columns regarding Iraq (a frequent subject of Hitchen's Slate columns, and proof that you can have a 100 percent failure rate in journalism and still find lucrative work, making it one of those soft industries, like filmmaking and politics, to whose compensation packages we can only aspire), provoking the usual comments pro and anti-war, once again made me think about the way the verb "support" has exerted an odd and malign hegemonic control over the discourse.

In reality, the Iraq war is a sort of prisoner's dilemma in which the rational response is to order one's preferences with reference to the chance of their being realized. "Support" of the war, and opposition to it, contains a disabling germ of confusion, since the vision of the victory that would end the war one way or another has never been clarified since the war started, and the meaning of that victory is impossible to predict. The more prudent course for the war opponent is to elaborate preferences according to the phase of the war.

For instance -- before the war, supporters of the war did their best to obscure the question of preferences. To revert to the prisoner dilemma model, it is as if they were all shouting for the prisoner in cell one to be silent, thus transforming a matter of probabilities and advantages into one of morality. Myself, I ranked my preferences between the coalition not invading at all -- most preferred -- and the American's invading unilaterally -- most disliked -- to range my realistic preferences around either delaying with the inspectors or forcing America to encumber itself with a real international coalition that could block its every move post invasion. On the question of deposing Saddam Hussein, I was all for that, in the absense of every other consideration. However, there were other considerations -- the failure of the Americans to stymie al qaeda, for instance. As to an overthrow that would minimize violence, maximize justice, and depose of Saddam, I didn't realistically see a way in the options on offer -- and certainly, of course, the larcenous Americans were a scary prospect.

Having the preference for a coalition helped me to see that the Bush strategy was to pretend to accede to coalition building while mounting such a campaign of threats and vituperation that any coalition partner would be powerless to stop what the Bushies had in mind. This happened. Nobody raised a finger to stop the Americans from attempting to elevate a convicted criminal to the leadership of Iraq, from dissolving the army, from guarding the oil ministry while the rest of the country was looted, from taking over the government of the country, from putting unpopular native patsies in governing bodies which Gunga Din himself would have had too much self esteem to have served on. Then there was the double plucking of Iraq. On the one hand, the taxpayers were plucked massively, as U.S. money poured into a consortium of the worst American corportations, War department leaches, GOP subsidiaries and the like. This was, of course, in the name of aiding Iraq. On the other hand, the Iraqis were plucked as their national treasury went into obscure gambits that ultimately benefited the same congery of corporate scoundrels.

At about the one year mark, then, my preferences were for world wide resistance to the Americans -- from the Iraqis, from the French, from the Iranians, etc. Again, however, just as wanting Saddam removed from power didn't entail "supporting" unilateral American action, supporting resistance to the Americans didn't mean "supporting" the insurgency.

All well and good, but do my "preferences" have an effect? Many people would say it is all bullshit. I think that is the real unrealism. Sitting in the Behemoth doesn't mean one is paralyzed. The promotion of the sense that American action in Iraq is wrong, unjust, and incompetently carried out was a minority view in May of 2003, but it has spread to achieve near majority status in the polls recently. How? Partly through harsh and unremitting attacks on the war by the left -- in blogs, in newspapers, whereever. There is a lot of curious anti-war worrying over the perception that the left is stabbing America in the back. To which I'd say: of course I'm stabbing America in the back! America, in this instance, is a giant dunderhead, and pricking the nerves is the only way to get his attention. Harshness and extremism have a tactical use. It frees people up by extending the range of their preferences. If people prefer to think America was well intentioned but misguided in this war, that is fine with me -- the misguiding that leads to withdrawal is the goal.

In terms of my preferences for Iraq --well, I do have them. In 2004, I was hopeful that perhaps some secularist middle would emerge -- neither pro-American nor theocratic terrorist. I didn't expect the liberal ideal, but I thought that it was possible that a coalition between Sistani Shi'ites and recovered Ba'athists might just be possible. It wasn't. If in fact a coalition had invaded Iraq, one strong enough to counter the Bush people, I think there would have been a chance for such a thing. But secularism is indelibly stained by the face put on it by the Americans -- the crook and the terrorist being the best patsies America could come up with. In the end, America shot itself in the foot -- without a strong secularist middle party, it was inevitable Iraq would drift into the Iranian orbit. The drift, which I think is inevitable, now has to be disguised in the American press. The press is very obediant to the idea that our withdrawal will be followed by a bloodbath, which ignores that our occupation is a bloodbath. It also ignores the fact that insurgencies in the Middle East are eventually put down with no help from the Yankees -- witness the Kurdish civil war in the nineties. No, below all of that is the suspicion that America's withdrawal will be the final stage in Iran's domination of the northern part of the Gulf. Personally, instead of fearing an American invasion of Iran, what we should be looking for are signals of American dickering with the final deal. That could well happen -- there is no allergy to private enterprise in Shi'ite theocracy. I imagine that the American death count -- and the Iraqi death count -- should be seen as a holding action while the Americans figure out how to deal with the unexpected result of their insane enterprise. Captain Ahab went down with the white whale, but we can always deal with the Whale and get the oil we need -- for a price.

We thought the U.S. should have been practicing detente with Iran since the mid nineties. Alas, it took thirty some thousand Iraqi dead and who knows how many Americans before it is all through to put us on this sensible course.

Blair's imam-catchers

Blair is a nasty piece of work. Even so, we have to stand in a bit of awe at the audacity of his latest pronouncements. They take us back to a distant era in which he would surely have flourished, when the threatened bombing of the Parliament, or the poisoning of the queen, produced a fair share of martyrs – this time not Islamic ones, but Catholic. That supercilious righteousness would have served him well then – and since, apparently, the police are to stage raids on mosques, Blair might really want to read up on the techniques of his spiritual ancestors. He needs what Queen Elizabeth had: a Richard Topcliffe. Talk about a torturer for all seasons – Topcliffe’s techniques have often been imitated – most recently by the American military in Iraq – but never really topped.

Topcliffe had a licence to operate a rack in his own house – an ingenious idea that Blair might consider reviving. I’m sure Blunkett would be just the man to operate a stretching machine.

Here’s a description of Topcliffe excerpted from J. Heath: Torture And English Law: An Administrative and Legal History from the Plantagenets to the Stuarts. The “Young” here is another, less colorful, rack master. Southwell, of course, is the famous Jesuit. The other names are of Catholics:

…It was also to Topcliffe and Young that, in 1591, the Law Officers were directed to leave Thomas Clinton. if torture seemed necessary: as “butchers’, the two men were linked in Southwell’s letter, of January, 1590, to Aquaviva. According to the Gerard autobiography, after Gerard’s arrest, his second examination—without torture—was before the two of them, at Young’s house. Their relative roles in the Government’s business deserve consideration. The Gerard autobiography seems to regard Young as the key figure in the politico-religious police of the metropolis. He was a justice of the peace, proceeding as such, although with peculiar determination, sometimes upon instructions from the Queen. generally in a special working relationship with the Council. Topcliffe was not a justice of the peace and indeed held no public office. He was, however, fanatically hostile to Roman Catholicism and successful in attaching himself to the highest centers of influence. Sometimes, he received instructions from the Council. and—including the case of Thomas Clinton the Conciliar records show nine instances of his employment where torture might be used. However, he attained to a special working relationship with the Queen herself and came to occupy in the prosecution of Roman Catholics for politico-religious offenses a position de facto resembling that of a justice of the peace, but without territorial limits being placed upon his authority within the realm, and to command from the Judicature more deference than any ordinary prosecuting justice would have received. Moreover, he found the funds to organize a considerable force of agents. He may be regarded, to this extent, as a primeval common ancestor of Pinkerton’s and the FBI.”

Ah, that Topcliffe spirit – just the thing for the current occasion. An imam-catcher, and a volunteer at that. Topcliffe also had a modern way of combining his work and his dick – he impregnated one of the Catholic women he caught, had one of his servants marry her, and used her info to uncover a hiding priest.

Heath’s conclusions concerning Elizabeth’s sanctioning of torture are in the purest spirit of Blairism.

“What may be true is that torture was not used, for whatever result, in an entirely cynical mood: that it was not used without a fairly strong sense that the examinate had brought it upon himself by withholding the truth. Before the present period, several relevant Conciliar records in political or politico-religious cases, and one in a case of ordinary crime, refer to obstinacy of the examinate. During the present period, there are seven more although in only one does the record contemplate an ordinary crime. Of course, such references might have been humbug, but we may recall the case of William Weston who. as above noticed, escaped torture, although there is no reason to suppose that without it he liberally supplied the authorities with means of destroying other Roman Catholics.”

Hear hear for English humanitarianism! This is the stuff. A cynical mood is far from “our way of life,” the Blairist can well say. And if they are going to criticize, out on their ear! The British have always been against foreigners coming into a country and taking things over and kicking the natives around … uh, well with a few exceptions.

it's too gashly...

LI is going to be gone for a month. We might drop by the site and leave a few bits of wisdom, or whatever it is we produce here. But mostly we are going to try to forget the art of writing, the art of reading, the war, the Bush, etc., etc.

We have been thinking of partings ... and especially the parting of Peregrinus, the cynic. He built a pyre in Elia, mounted it, and lit it, thus ascending to the heights of Mount Olympia on wings of fire.

Lucian of Samothrace, a satirist, left a lively account of the scene, and of Peregrinus’ life as a philosophical scoundrel. The English translation omits certain nice, dirty bits you can find (bien sur) in the French translation, like the Cynics habit of masturbating in public. That’s nicely omitted here. Lucien’s account is cast into the form of a letter to a friend:

“ I imagine you’ll laugh yourself to death imaging that old senile piker – I can just hear you saying “what a farce! and really, what misplaced vanity!” and a thousand other similar abjurations. Well, as distant as I am from hearing your indignation, I was that close – at the very foot of the pyre – that I emptied my little sack and said everything I thought of the comedy, right in the heart of a crowd of spectators scandalized by my reaction, all of them open mouthed with admiration before the vaudeville turn of that old idiot.”

Needless to say, LI wants to depart this life in the same way, although we doubt we’ll attract a crowd of spectators. Still, Peregrinus never really died – he was reborn as the Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn, Milo Minderbinder in Catch 22, and any number of academics and new age mystics and think tank foreign policy analysts and every guest on every current affairs talk show. But we like to think that we embody a purer form of his purely scandalous fraudulence than any of these.

Lucian’s satire would no doubt have been thrown on the flames by some mad monk long ago, except that it contains precious info about the early Christians. Peregrinus spent his life looking for just that intersection of gullibility and metaphysics that so many have made a good living exploiting. He started out in life along classical lines: the seduced girl with a little number in the belly, the flight out the window leaving behind his clothes, the hush money paid by his folks. Well, of course, one good turn deserves another, so Peregrinus helped his poor old dad enter into the afterlife through a strategically placed pillow (the old guy was suffering, and there was the inheritance to think about). Peregrinus was surprised to discover that his native village was filled with hidden anti-euthanasia freaks, so the best part of discretion blew him to other lands – notably Palestine, where he became a Christian among Christians.

He quickly found some followers, disciples, proclaimed himself their prophet, their theasiarch, their head of the synagogue – in brief, he granted himself all the powers, proposed to analyze their holy books, cut them up to his hearts content and added whatever texts struck his fancy. So much so that the Christians began to regard him as their pontiff. He ended up elevating himself to the level of the one these Palestinians adored, who suffered being put on the cross, guilty, according to his peers, of inventing new mysteries for humanity.”

Well, the old rogue, no doubt after penning some of Jesus’ more dubious sentences, got thrown into jail. Luckily, the governor of Syria had a fatal penchant for philosophy, which was Peregrinus’ clef de champs. Going back to his home town, he found that there was some harsh memories of his merciful treatment of the Parent. In the end, he was rather forced to spend the inheritance among the poor just to keep from being lynched. So it was time to go elsewhere, which is how he passed into Egypt, stage left, and became a cynic:

“He enterprised a third pilgrimage, this time to Egypt, where he met Agathobulus who instructed him in the métier, which he exercized up to the day of his death. His skull shaved, his face smeared with mud, he masturbated in public without the least embarrassment, something the Cynics consider completely natural. He whipped himself – or had himself whipped – with a ruler, and executed a thousand silly pranks in the same vein.”

A regular guy, in other words, that any ancient Mediterranean ville would pass by without a glance. But it was the big send off that Lucian wrote about, and that made Peregrinus’ name. Having found followers – the more absurd the doctrine, the more ardent the follower – he built a nice pyre to burn himself up in Elia.

Everybody’s a critic: Lucian has a lot of fault to find with the theater of Peregrinus’ last hours, although he admits he was three sheets to the wind, and a heckler to boot. But give Peregrinus some credit – he invited, seemingly, a funeral orator who laughed himself silly about the whole thing and told the crowd that Peregrinus was a faker, a hoodlum, a cocksman, and a joke.

How can I not identify? As I write this with my right hand, with my left I’m raising a glass of Montepulciano to the old reprobate’s ashes.

"It's a dead man. Yes, indeedy; naked, too. He's ben shot in de back. I reck'n he's ben dead two er three days. Come in, Huck, but doan' look at his face -- it's too gashly."

A block party!

We considered making this yet another Iraq post. But we like to think of ourselves as America’s blog. We like to think that we love kids, dogs, and yes, sometimes we like to watch American Idol, like you all do. And we Americans don’t want to have bloody bits of soldiers rubbed in our faces. We are too busy and too caring. The message is: we care. We are a great nation, shopping for great deals at world class malls. In the world, America is famous for our freedom, which is why they hate us. So instead, we are linking to this article about our world class legislators in D.C. God bless em. Some of the hardest working Christians you would ever want to see. But even Christians can let their hair down, occasionally.

The article details the way lobbyists are able to show their appreciation for the service to the country shown by these fine men and women. They are in the line of fire every day. Many of them are making financial sacrifice by serving in Congress, and will only be able to make it up by accepting top flight jobs from the corporations that bribed them to pass those bills that so gaily loot the Treasury after their patriotic service is over. As journalist Carl Hulse notes, the recent scandals around Tom Delay and “Duke” Cunningham was notable only for the notable stupidity displayed by the two outstanding Christians, since getting around ethics rules has been designed to be user friendly, and could be performed, if necessary, by a retarded rabbit.

For those who think that the Democrats aren’t sufficiently Christian – well here’s a nice surprise for you all:

“During the past five years, members of Congress have received $18.3 million worth of travel at the expense of private organizations, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, a nonpartisan research service. That includes 628 lawmakers who made 6,242 trips, 57 percent of which were taken by Democrats.

The most popular destinations were vacation spots, according to a study by the Medill News Service and American Public Media, which produces programs for public radio stations. From January 2000 to mid-2004, No. 1 was Florida with more than 500 trips, followed by California with nearly 400 trips and New York with more than 300. West Virginia, home to the Greenbrier resort, was the fourth most popular destination, with more than 200 trips. These were permitted because they were connected to "official duties" -- one of the requirements that the ethics rules impose on privately paid trips.”

Seeing the awesome, divinely created majesty of the ski slopes, or the beauty of a Las Vegas floor show, is the best way of instilling that respect for Credit Card companies, oil companies, and, most of all, our brave Defense corporations, which naturally results in votes that are good for the country. Those who criticize the Congress show a lack of understanding about what makes this whole faith based mechanism work – which is why we have to try extra hard to spread our way of life around the world. Although they died for so many reasons, among the reasons 1800 Americans have given their lives for the Islamic Republic of Iraq is to make sure that our legislatures can continue to live free, unfettered lives.

I’m not saying that we should take away the sacred right to expression from the critics who will always dog our way of life, bitter deadender leftists, but I am saying that jail time, under the Patriot Act provisions that Justice Roberts will thoughtfully construe in the spirit in which they are intended, might be one answer to anti-American slanderers and fifth columnists in our own country.

“…barely a week passes when at least one out-of-town fundraising event doesn't entice contributors with golf, a boat excursion or skiing. The House Republicans' event list between mid-July and mid-August advertises 12 golf outings, four baseball games, a musical show and a night of "champagne and caviar."
The competition for donors is so intense that lawmakers try to outdo each other with innovative fundraising come-ons. Four members of the House Ways and Means Committee held what they called a "block party" to make it easier for lobbyists to drop off checks. The lawmakers, who live on the same block on Capitol Hill, each offered a different alcoholic beverage to donors as they stopped by on the same evening this spring.

"There are 20 to 40 fundraisers a day that people have a chance to go to, and they can't make them all," said Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), who conceived and benefited from the block party. "You want to make sure yours stands out and that people say, 'That's fun!' "

P.S. LI does like to imitate the small town touches that used to make Paul Harvey's radio broadcasts such a delight. Harvey was always looking for the little, telling story: the one that focused on what was right and good in this country. In that spirit, we couldn't help noticing that the LAT story about the deaths of those marines yesterday was nestled next to a box with today's top emailed stories. Rightfully, Americans rejected pointless bad news from Iraq. Why clutter the mind? No, it take a resilient people to lose 44 soldiers in the past couple days and make this the most popular headline of the day: "20 of the most delicious deals you'll find around town."

Say what you like, this country has its eyes on the prize. No wonder we've been voted most moral 200 years running!

The War is Over, and We Won
(Headline, AEI magazine, April, 2005):

Contrary to the impression given by most newspaper headlines, the United States has won the day in Iraq. In 2004, our military fought fierce battles in Najaf, Fallujah, and Sadr City. Many thousands of terrorists were killed, with comparatively little collateral damage. As examples of the very hardest sorts of urban combat, these will go down in history as smashing U.S. victories.

And our successes at urban combat (which, scandalously, are mostly untold stories in the U.S.) made it crystal clear to both the terrorists and the millions of moderate Iraqis that the insurgents simply cannot win against today’s U.S. Army and Marines. That’s why everyday citizens have surged into politics instead.”

August 3, 2005
14 U.S. Marines Killed in Iraq When Vehicle Hits a Huge Bomb
-- Headline, NYT.

American Journalist Is Shot to Death in Iraq -

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 3 - An American journalist writing about the rise of fundamentalist Islam was shot dead overnight after being abducted in the southern port city of Basra, American embassy and Iraqi officials said today. The journalist's translator was also shot and is in serious condition at a Basra hospital.
-- story, NYT, August 3, 2005. The journalist wrote for the National Review.

Address, Counter-recruitment site, youth and the military.

Strike against the vanity war. Let's shrink Rumsfeld’s army to the size of his heart.

expected headlines

The headlines in the Washington Post were expected:

"President Bush sidestepped the U.S. Senate on Monday and installed controversial nominee Scott Peterson as ambassador to the United Nations, saying the post was "too important to leave vacant any longer."
Speaking at the White House, Bush said he was sending Peterson to the United Nations with his "complete confidence." “Peterson has his marching orders. I expect him to deal with the U.N. as he has dealt with the women in his life.”

"The White House move comes over the vociferous protests of Senate Democrats, who had complained that the blunt, combative Peterson lacked credibility, being in prison under sentence of death. The Senate had twice voted to sustain a filibuster against Peterson. But Bush refused to give up on his nominee.

"A majority of U.S. senators agree that he is the right man for the job," Bush said at the White House. "but because of partisan delaying tactics by a handful of senators, Scott was denied the up and down vote he deserves."

Scott, an outspoken conservative who had often criticized the United Nations as reminding him of ‘bitches”, triggered controversy from the moment Bush nominated him March 8. Members of the White House press corps who have watched this administration for years agreed that this is another stand tall moment for a tough talking president who doesn’t mind stretching the envelop. According to Dr. Tom Curtis, of the Unhealed Rabies Victims for Invading Iran, "we will look back on this moment as a turning point. I've worked with Scott. He's determined to bomb as many places as we can on the President's deadline. We have all these bombs, and Canada is so close... and as they say, Jesus was not a Canadian.

Previous ambassadors have kept a small staff in Washington in a modest suite. Peterson told several colleagues he needed more space and a larger staff in Washington because, if confirmed, he intended to spend more time here than his predecessors did. "Peterson isn't going to sit in New York while policy gets made in Washington," the administration source said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the source lacked authorization to discuss this on the record. “After you’ve been in stir for a while, you just don’t want to be pegged down.”

I have seen the future, and it is United

Anyone interested in what Bush’s reformed Social Security would look like should look at the NYT article about United Airline’s pension fund today. It is a fun article. Here's how the movie goes: Wall Street persuades a viable pension fund to redo its safe strategy of investing for a much more groovy strategy of growth growth growth in equities. Big money is made by everybody on the Street as the pension fund shrinks, disappears, goes into a black hole. Everybody is very sorry that the beneficiaries of the fund have nothing left, but everybody also points out – the beneficiaries are scum. Mere workers. Pilots, for god’s sakes. Imagine, some stewardess somewhere is bawling cause her measely 200 thou went to some really nice Manhattan bistros. As if she deserved it. The best and the brightest, in the new Hobbesian Randian world, feast upon such little lambs.

Bush’s plan has those advantages too. By targeting middle America’s vast wealth and accelerating the burgling of it, in a record amount of time the top 10 percent income percentile can capture even more of America’s wealth. This money will be used much more efficiently. For instance, many retiring congressmen will be able to find lobbying jobs that will launch them into the higher regions of financial security when the theft is completed. Meanwhile, in a blow against the French, Americans will work harder. They will have to, as their retirement will be approximately equal, in value, to the price you can get for confetti that’s been cleaned off of streets and sidewalks after the parade is over.

The first three grafs of the article map a strategy that is almost a perfect parallel of the Bush reforms:

“HAD anyone listened to Doug Wilsman, tens of thousands of United Airlines employees would not be facing big cuts in their pensions. And the federal agency that guarantees pensions might not be struggling with its biggest losses ever.

So who is Doug Wilsman? He is a retired pilot and a former fiduciary of United's pension plan for pilots, and in 1987 he discovered that the company had abandoned its older, tried-and-true approach of investing retirees' money in bonds timed to pay when the pensions came due. Instead, it had bought into the promises of Wall Street that it could put less money into the plan - and take out more later - if it just put most of the assets into the stock market.

Mr. Wilsman was skeptical of such promises, and soon after learning of the change in strategy, he filed a grievance with his union, the Air Line Pilots Association. "Hey, you guys are really building yourselves a trap," he recalled warning them at the time. "Someday, at the worst possible moment, when the bottom falls out of the stock market, the plan is going to have to come up with new money, and it's going to be enough to kill the company."

Wilsman has got to be a traitor, and one hopes he will be roundly denounced on the rightwing media circuit. More voices like his would blow the perfect caper. He obviously wasn’t clued in that DJ 36,000 was just around the corner.

As even the article admits, the result of the Bush-like investment strategy proved highly satisfactory:

“While the money managers and other pension professionals who ran United's pension plan walked away from the wreck unscathed - indeed, they collected about $125 million in fees over the last five years alone, records show - the ones who will have to pick up the bill for the advisers' collective failure will be the airline's 130,000 employees and pensioners, the federal pension guarantor and probably, someday, the taxpayers.”

Million dollar payouts for high level failure have become America’s secret weapon for achieving true greatness. As for the employees – they merely work for a living. Piss on em, as the old Wall Street saying goes. Also, the federal government has proven that almost any problem can be solved if you have a gigantic enough credit card. Put those pensions on the card and have the Chinese buy more of our dollars, as they say in the corridors of the Treasury department.
Here’s a nice window into what Social Security is gonna look like once we get it all licked into shape:
“United is far from unique. Lifting the lid on how most pension funds are invested might raise an outcry if the 44 million Americans covered by company plans knew these things:
Pension investing is largely unregulated, even though the federal government effectively covers the investment losses when a defined-benefit plan fails. At United, this freewheeling approach gave rise to investments in junk bonds, dot-coms and even what appears to be an energy venture in Albania.
The Securities and Exchange Commission recently said that more than half of the consultants who help pension funds invest their money have outside business relationships that could taint their advice.”
I, for one, am totally psyched.
Three more irresistible grafs. Your congress at work!

"While the federal agency tries to pinpoint its obligations, apparently no one in an official capacity is pausing to ask who the plans' outside investment professionals were, much less how they made their decisions and how they responded as the airline's fortunes faded.

"It's just a nonstarter," said Richard A. Ippolito, the pension agency's former chief economist, who is now retired. A few years ago, he recalled, a director of the federal pension agency appeared before Congress and suggested that if companies wanted to invest their pension funds in stocks, they should pay more for their pension insurance coverage.
"I could politely say that he was vilified," he said. "They basically accused him of being un-American because he was asking companies to pay for the privilege of investing in stocks. He just dropped that idea."

rub raw the sores of social discontent

"The despair is there; now it's up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change. We'll give them a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy. We'll start with specific issues -- taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution -- and from there move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations. Once you organize people, they'll keep advancing from issue to issue toward the ultimate objective: people power. We'll not only give them a cause, we'll make life goddamn exciting for them again -- life instead of existence. We'll turn them on. -- Saul Alinsky


LI recommends this story as the most heartening news of the week. Labor has spent decades as the Democrat’s dog. In return, the Democrats have supported every nasty perk that has puffed upper management to the absurd financial status it now holds, from the awful Lieberman threatening the SEC, in the 90s, not to investigate accounting abuses to the bankruptcy bill that passed this year with crucial Dem support; the Democrats passed Nafta, otherwise known as the spread the impoverishment act; the Dems for a decade left Greenspan, that well known hater of labor, in his place as the most powerful single setter of the economic agenda in America ; and every four years, the Dems tapped union money the way frat boys gang bang a keg to run presidential candidates who ranged on the charisma scale from Mondale (as charismatic as socks) to Kerry (as charismatic as loafers).

We’ve been reading Murray Kempton’s Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties book. It was published in 1955, we believe. At that time, Unions were still gigantic in America, and the politics of the CIO was headline news. Kempton etched an acid picture of Lee Pressman, a communist who became one of the great labor councilors for John L. Lewis. Lewis was a man who breathed the worker cause – Kempton tells a story about how once, in a mine, Lewis had to kill a mule that had become unhinged. He did it with a blow to the head, then covered up the cause of the death, since the mule was company property and Lewis would have been fired for killing it. That it endangered miners was no concern of the company – a dead miner wasn’t a cost. Pressman was, undoubtedly, one of those people who gave their heart to their vision of Stalin’s Russia. The vision was as inaccurate as the vision of Iraq currently promoted by the hawks. But the Commies were excellent organizers, and save for the support for Stalin, mostly right about the issues. The problem, as every witness that came out of the thirties testifies, is that the Communists smashed everything eventually into a Machiavellian framework of politics, the point of which was to drive out other progressive forces. Still, one of the great casualties of the early fifties was a strong, domestic American Communist party. Such a thing would have nicely leavened the American political scene.

Now we live in an America run by villains, of course. The causes next to their compassionate heart are things like helping companies that have poisoned thousand of people with asbestos and who continue to do so with the use, for instance, of asbestos in brakes, literally get away with murder. LI’s notion is that this state of things has happened partly because the balance of forces between social movements and the parties long ago shifted to the parties. As long as the Unions are adjuncts of the Democratic party, Union positions will be abused by that party – for the leadership of it is basically indistinguishable from the leadership of the Republican party, give or take a belief in evolution or two. Whenever that leadership is forced to do something progressive, distress signals immediately leak out of D.C. in the form of articles decrying “special interests’ in the New Republic. According to the WP article:

“Stern began his insurgency two years ago. His vision was that the demands of a rapidly changing global economy require a consolidation by labor. By this reckoning, the loose affiliation of unions, many of them small, that characterize the AFL-CIO is no match for well-financed international corporations. Stern believes that unions must be forced to merge to create larger units that can dominate economic sectors, and that labor must shift more of its union dues into large-scale organizing campaigns and less distributing money to influence political races.

If his ideas prevail, Stern boasted, "the next decade can be a time of innovation, new strategies, new energy, new growth, and new ideas that will bring to life a new, 21st century American Dream."

Unions have a choice, we think: they can continue to be respectable, and disappear, or they can become disrespectable, they can support large scale actions that defy current laws – how about sit down strikes in selected Walmarts across the country? – and become strong again. Class warfare is another name for everyday life. I’d like to see some better generalship from my side of it.

PS -- on the war resistance front: see this interesting post on Counter-recruitment at the Huffington Blog. The poster even uses "Starve the Beast" to entitle the post -- which happens to be the title we gave our own counter-recruitment post two weeks ago. Since then, we've been busy publicizing counter-recruitment. Oh well, no time to worry about intellectual priority -- the cause is greater than our vanity.

the human rights of the last man

In the South Atlantic Review of last summer there is an interesting essay by Susan Maslan (The Anti-Human: Man and Citizen before the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen) that wrestles with the identity of “man” and “citizen” as it was forged in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Maslan’s idea is this: “man” was never a political entity in the same sense as “citizen” before the French revolution. Man could be many things – a creature with ties of blood to other creatures, a soul, a thinker – but as man, he was merely the substratum upon which the political selectively operated. This is a rather natural stance to take for a European society busy enslaving and conquering. Or perhaps I have the causal sequence wrong – it isn’t that the slaving and conquering produced the notion of man – substructure to superstructure – but that both the concept and the activity were held within one large framework, a political episteme.

Maslan finds it surprising that the French Revolutionaries were so quick to identify man and citizen. And she contrasts the result of this – the Declaration – with the American bill of rights:

“The authors of the Declaration understood that they were in the process of elaborating two distinct kinds of rights: rights proper to an individual outside of any constituted political body—that is, in the language
of the eighteenth century, natural rights—and rights proper to a member of an organized political body or state. It would appear, then, that natural rights are those that belong to man and political and civil rights are those at the disposal of the citizen. Asians and Africans, both favorite French examples of oppressed peoples, would be recognized by the Declaration not as citizens of France, of course, but rather in their capacity as men—a title which confers upon them a body of rights that must be acknowledged and recognized by all other human beings, and a title to which the slave, Target [one of the framers of the Declaration] suggests, does not even know he can lay claim. The simple fact of being born—regardless of to whom, where, in what circumstances—endowed the human being with rights. The inclusion of man, as opposed to, say, Frenchman, as a subject of rights within the Declaration is what distinguishes it so radically from the American Bill of Rights, a document that makes no claim to apply beyond the confines of its national authority. It is a wonderful sort of irony, one that demands serious reflection, that the invention of the Rights of Man played and continues to play such a predominant role in the creation and perpetuation of French national identity.”

Maslan’s tends to consider this problem in the light of its object – man – rather than in the light of its enonciation – by men. To track a point in the convergence of man and citizen, Maslan goes back to Horace, Corneille’s 1640 play. Horace is about the liberation of Rome – or its second founding. Horace has the choice of renouncing ties of blood symbolized by his sister’s marriage to Curiaci, of one of the families of Alba – the Curatii – or of loyalty to that blood, and the renunciation of his tie to Rome. The latter is a tie to something that doesn’t quite exist yet – its existence will ensue upon Horace’s action. If Horace defeats the Curatii, Rome will conquer Alba and be set on the road to becoming an empire – a conquest machine. Curiaci pronounces his choice not to duel Horace in a verse that LI wholeheartedly endorses:

“Et si Rome demande une vertu plus haute,/
Je rends grâces aux Dieux de n’être point Romain,/
Pour conserver encor quelque chose d’humain.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves, the man modestly remarked. Really, this is our motto vis a vis the American kingdom.

Horace, the Roman, kills Cuiaci and his sister. Of Horace’s unyieldingness, Maslan writes:

“If, however, the criterion for membership in the political order of Rome is the willingness (or, as we shall see in Horace’s case, the eagerness) to exterminate all ties of affection and blood, then not everyone in Rome is fully Roman; indeed, the Roman soldiers described at the end of the first act resemble Curiacemore closely than they doHorace. Like Curiace, these soldiers are both human and citizens: unlike Horace, they persist in recognizing their kin relations and the affective bonds those relations create.”

Such acts of ad hoc resistance (think of the invisible strike against enlistment that is going on, at present, in the U.S.) are marks of the pre-political “man,” separating this entity from the citizen. For Maslan, this means that the pre-Revolutionary troping of “man” makes something about being a citizen “inhuman.” The ties to the state – the mark of the political – are ties of inhumanity.

However, we wonder whether the logic of Horace’s action can be simply projected on the divergence between “man” and “citizen” that, Maslan holds, characterizes those semantic fields in 1640. Notably, Maslan brackets the religious – which is surely a stress upon the use and dynamic of these terms in the seventeenth century. That Rome was pagan was a convenience – it offered a sort of ideal in which to test in dramatic terms the divergence between Maslan’s terms. However, those terms in the purely human world take on a different light in a world in which there is a God of love. Oddly, Maslan’s essay – which begins with a quote from Abbe Gregoire’s pamphlet on the liberation of the Jews – does not take into consideration the religious. We like her resounding final grafs:

“Horace’s project—the creation of citizenship through the destruction of humanity—is a failure because it entails the impossibility of law since law requires the recognition of others as, like oneself, subjects of law andHorace, by placing himself outside the order of humanity, consciously renders himself incapable of recognizing others as ‘‘other selves.’’ Horace is the founding text in what would be a 150-year-long literary-political undertaking to create and to comprehend the categories of and the relation between man and citizen. As in the case of Horace, these imaginings not always but often ended in visions of violence and destruction.When drafters and supporters of the 1789 Declaration announced that the ‘‘truths’’ of the rights of man and of the citizen were not only eternal and immutable but immediately recognizable
to all—‘‘ce que tout le monde sait, ce que tout le monde sent’’ (what everyone knows, what everyone feels)—they, like Rome, were dissimulating, hiding what was in fact an ongoing struggle to form the categories of man and citizen so perfectly that they could end forever not only les malheurs publics but
indeed all unhappiness.

If we tend to think that ‘‘human’’ and ‘‘citizen’’ are or should be corresponding and harmoniously continuous categories it is because we think in the wake of the 1789 Declaration. In the early modern political imagination to be a citizen meant to cease to be human. This is the legacy that the Declaration
tries to overcome and that it conceals. The Declaration sought to reconcile these two forms of existence that had been severed violently. Such an aim, of course, could not be fully realized and so the new Republic turned to—or, better put, invented—the language of universalism to repress and resolve the tensions it could neither dissipate nor acknowledge. It remains today the impossible burden of this language to adjudicate the claims of humanity and the claims of citizenship.”

eating our words in the great culture of Bush

LI is again having to eat its words this morning. We so often complain that the Bush culture has exclusively favored the wealthy. In a story in the WP this morning, there is a great refutation of that thesis in the lifestory of Sunny L. Sims:

“Three years ago, Sunnye L. Sims lived in a two-bedroom apartment north of San Diego, paying $1,025 in monthly rent. Then she landed a dream job, with $5.4 million in pay for nine months of work.

Now she owns a $1.9 million stucco mansion with lofty ceilings on a hilltop, featuring sun-splashed palm trees and a circular driveway.”

The cool thing is, she owes this upward trajectory entirely to the Bush administration’s decision not to do pesky supervising over private contractors working for Homeland Security. Ms. Sims, in the weeks after 9/11, incorporated a company, Eclipse Events Inc, which subcontracted events planning for another company, NCS Pearson Inc, and went big time on a non-competitive contract “… to help hire a government force of 60,000 airline passenger screeners on a tight deadline. With little experience, her tiny company was asked to help set up and run screener-assessment centers in a hurry at more than 150 hotels and other facilities. Her company eventually billed $24 million.” There are a few minor accounting matters: “$15 million in expenses submitted by Eclipse could not be substantiated. For example, auditors were able to find supporting documents for only $326,873 of the $5.8 million that Eclipse spent directly on accounting, administration, consulting, management and contract labor.” However, given the outstanding success of the Homeland Security department in doing the job that the Confederate government wants it to do – suck money into Republican and Red State venues to profit an array of defense industry businesses – one has to admire the fact that a program that supposedly was supposed to do things like hardening target sites like nuclear reactors has failed to do that almost all along the line, but has been tremendously successful at valeting and pouring sodas for meet and greets with potential passenger screeners.

And Ms. Sims? “The auditors noted that Sims not only paid herself $5.4 million in compensation as "President/Owner" but also that she gave herself a $270,000 pension.”

We are lead by geniuses.

genes

Jerry Fodor strings together some nice crochets against evolutionary psychology in the TLS this week. His argument, which in itself is pretty hard to beat, is that if psychology relies on motivations, it can’t, uncontroversially, reduce those to the “motivations” of the gene. Fodor uses one of those analytic uninteresting examples – Davidson liked buttering toast and lighting the furnace, and Fodor likes Mr. Jones carrying an umbrella. Fodor says that the fact that Mr. Jones is carrying an umbrella doesn’t tell us Mr. Jones’ motives for carrying an umbrella. He could think it is going to rain; he could want to give the umbrella back to its owner; he could be making a style statement. And then he writes: “It’s more of a problem – and Buller is quite clear on this – that an Adaptationist account of Jones’s behaviour may need to appeal to a motive that explains his action but that Jones didn’t actually have; not consciously, not unconsciously, not at all. It’s a main tenet of psychological Darwinism that the “ultimate” motivation for an adaptive behaviour is to maximize one’s relative contribution to the genetic endowment of one’s breeding group. So (still assuming it’s an adaptation) what Buller calls the “proximal” cause of Jones’s behaviour is that he wants (maybe consciously, maybe not) not to catch his death of cold and he believes (maybe consciously, maybe not) that he won’t catch his death of cold if he doesn’t get wet. But the “ultimate” cause of his behaviour is his wanting to maximize his contribution to the gene pool of his breeding group, which requires, inter alia, that he not be dead. That, to repeat, is what Jones really wants, assuming that his umbrella-carrying behaviour is an adaptation; and it’s what his ancestors were selected for wanting in the old days back on the savannah.

The trouble is, of course, that Jones wants no such thing – not consciously or unconsciously either. Jones may never have so much as heard about breeding groups; his ancestors certainly never did.So, really, what are we to make of motives that explain one’s actions even though one doesn’t have them? And who is it that is motivated by Jones’s genotypic ambitions if it isn’t Jones? Notice, once again, that this is a kind of puzzle that is proprietary to Psychological Adaptationism; it doesn’t arise for evolutionary explanations of the opposed thumb, or of bipedal gait, or of the anatomy of the retina; that’s because neither your motivations, nor your ancestors’, nor anybody else’s, come into the story about why thumbs work the way they do. It’s Psychological Adaptationism, not Adaptationism per se, that is raising this spectre of unattached motives.”

What Fodor is getting at is what Stephen Jay Gould called the bookkeeping fallacy. According to Gould, there is a difference between finding out that there is a mathematical spread of genes through a population and taking it to be the case that genes are riding organisms as vehicles to spread themselves through a population. The one could well be the effect of various causes in the population due to organisms – selection pressure could well be working at that level. The other view, however, has something that makes genes transcend selection. Or at least makes them agents of a mysterious kind. One could say that a successful toymaker has made toys that make him money, but the money hasn’t caused the success of the toys – that success came out of the things money bought, the advertising, the assembly line, the designers, the parents and kids who for their various reasons bought the toys, etc. It isn’t that there isn’t a selection level for money – one could invest in toys or armaments – but that the money itself is not a cause on the toy level (I could spend more money and make a suck toy, that gets nowhere, for instance).

It is odd that Fodor doesn’t mention Gould’s argument. There’s a letter to the Human Nature from Val Dusek that attributes the bookkeeping metaphor to William Wimsatt. Dusek sums up the idea nicely, commenting that it was employed, after Wimsatt, in an article by Lewontin and Sober: “Using Reichenbach's notion of "screening off" causes they [Lewontin and Sober] claim individual genes rarely if ever function as causes in selection processes. Dan Dennett lamely replies in Darwin's Dangerous Idea that counters can be important. Gould and Lewontin do not deny this. They simply say they are results not causes of selection. The situation is similar to that in economics. Labor can be a numeraire of profits, but that hardly justifies the labor theory of value, because many things can be numeraires. Stock predictors who use "technical" approaches do a kind of astrology on share price fluctuations and numbers of shares sold, but do not claim to be following causes of this within corporate structure and production that "fundamentalists" claim to be analyzing.”

I have doubts about this takedown of labor theory, but the analogy to technical analysis is pretty good. Except for one thing – technical analysis really does just use patterns in the past, whereas the theory of gene propagation is dealing with creatures that actually can endow or not, in various ways, their descendents with kinds of chromosomes. Hamilton’s work with ants was not only descriptive, but it has predicted patterns among ant societies having to do with descent. In a sense, the problem here is thinking that “bookkeeping” and the next “level” of selection are completely separate.

Dawkins and Smith and Williams have a different take. This is from Mark Ridley on the units of selection. He is considering lion hunting, which naturally involves selection. But is the important selection done by the organism “lion” or the genes?

“We must discuss one other matter before considering the significance of the genic unit of selection. Critics, such as Gould, have objected that gene frequencies change between generations only in a passive, "bookkeeping" sense. The frequency changes provide a record of evolution, but are not its fundamental cause. True natural selection, the critics would say, happens at the level of organismic survival and reproduction. For instance, the actual selection in the lion example happens when a lion catches, or fails to catch, its prey. The differential hunting success drives the gene frequency changes, and it is a mistake to identify the gene frequency changes as causal. Williams and Dawkins, however, do not deny that the ecological processes causing differential organismic survival produce gene frequency changes within a generation. What they deny is that this ecological interaction of organisms means that natural selection directly adjusts the frequencies of organisms over the evolutionary time scale of many generations.

An easy philosophical method has been developed for deciding whether natural selection works on genes, or larger phenotypic units. We can consider a phenotypic change such as a new hunting skill, and ask whether natural selection can work on it if it is produced genically and if it is produced non-genically. In the lion's case, the skill is produced genically--the advantageous new hunting behavior was caused by a genetic mutation. Now suppose that the same advantageous phenotypic change was caused by a non-heritable phenotypic change, such as individual learning or some developmental accident in the lion's nervous system. The thought-based experiment provides a test case between the organismic, phenotypic, and genic accounts of evolution. In the genic case, we know that natural selection favors the improved hunting type and the gene for it increases in frequency. But what happens in the phenotypic case? The individual lion with improved hunting ability will survive and produce more offspring than an average lion, but no evolution, or natural selection in any interesting sense, will occur. The trait will not be passed on to the next generation. Natural selection cannot work directly on organisms.”

That gives us, of course, a weird dualism in which the genes are something other than the organism. What are they? In the English school, they are ultimately bearers of information. Information longs to be free, and works through the mere lion. But of course one wonders what kind of improved hunting type we are talking about. If the organism doesn’t survive its childhood, or starves to death in a drought, it is not about to pass on those genes. It does seem like the “information” centric idea that has created a distinction between the gene and the vehicle to such a degree that natural selection only works on the information is not an entirely convincing model.

“What matters, in the process of natural selection, is that some of the lion's offspring inherit the mutation. These offspring, in turn, produce more offspring, and the gene increases in frequency. The gene can increase in frequency because it is not fragmented by meiosis (like the genome) or returned to dust by death (like the phenotype). The gene, in the form of copies of itself, is potentially immortal, and is at least Permanent enough to allow its frequency to be altered in successive generations.”

What matters, one feels like replying, is that the lion mates with a lioness. That permanence is so severely constrained that the horniest lion can’t mate with the most agreeable of mice.

In other words, the genocentric view defended by Ridley has the unintended consequence of virtually liquidating the notion of the species, which was where Darwin began. This isn’t good.

Perhaps I should say something about Hull’s interactor model. Or perhaps I’ll leave it for now.

LI is a little bummed. We wanted to stick out our tongue and dance around and pull down our pants and moon a petition that has been cobbled together to “condemn terrorism” that has attracted the signature of loony luminaries, like C. Hitchens and Nick Cohen and, etc., etc. You can tap dance out the rest. The whole gang. But Crooked Timber got there before us. So in the interests of economy, we’ll stick into this post our comment to CT, with some revision. Ah, but to preface this: what wasn’t argued about on the CT post was the very nature of these kinds of petitions. What in the world are they for? Are they supposed to go forth and make the conspiring militants in Samarra tremble as they hold the blasting cap? Are they supposed to rally a victim population that is crushed and trembling because they haven’t heard from the brigade of stalwart intellectuals just over the horizon? Are they supposed to influence policy in any country whatsoever? There is less sense and more vanity in this kind of petition than there is in anonymously dedicating a song to the one you love via your local dj.

Any petition against terrorism that ignores the one glaring and salient fact—that the promise made by George Bush to bring down Osama bin Laden in 2001 was callously and criminally unfulfilled—doesn’t seem to me worth the piece of paper it is written on. I think a condemnation of terrorism that was serious would, at the very least, point the finger at the failure of financing governments like Pakistan’s , which have worked hand in glove with terrorism in the past, to “police” terrorism now; it would condemn any government or coalition that used the war on terror as a disguise to hatch a war for a very different purpose, as the U.S. and the U.K. did in 2002; and it would condemn the villification of real anti-terrorist measures (for instance, police measures) in favor of faux anti-terrorist measures (as in, military action against countries that were not generators of terror), such as happened in the last presidential campaign in the U.S. It would also remark on the continuing civil damage that occurs when the war on terror is used as a diversion to wage a war of choice. That civil damage consists in spreading an unease among the population as governments engage in preliminary deceits that have to be shored up with further deceits. When anti-terrorist politics goes hand in hand with the politics of manipulation and misinformation, we know that anti-terrorist measures are not aimed at terrorists, but at entrenching the governing class’ privileges and assaulting our rights. Among the signatories are many, such as Christopher Hitchens, who have spent a lot of ink in the last two years trying to persuade people that Osama b is either dead or so crippled he doesn’t matter—a use of diversionary propaganda in support of the policies of the invaders of a bystander country that is, arguably, acting with extreme negligence vis a vis any terrorist threat, if not constituting a passive aid to the terrorists themselves. I myself would sign an anti-terrorist petition – being always a brave blogger, willing to put my very signature, that most precious of things in the whole wide world – on a petition that clearly outlined how a malign symbiosis between terrorists and “anti-terrorist” politicians in the West has left civilians more vulnerable to violent death or injury, and how anti-terrorism requires a global reckoning with this fact as a preliminary to a real anti-terrorist policy.

keeping tabs on the latest vileness -- get it while its hot

Keeping tabs on the vile things the Bush administration is doing is an exhausting task. LI sometimes feels that it is all too much, and we should get some sleep. But duty calls. So, this little article in the Sunday NYT about the newest initiative to destroy effective HIV programs in Brazil in the name of that morality that has made the Red States famous (for meth use) caught our attention.

Brazil has a very good anti-AIDs policy. It involves making sure that prostitutes, who have a union in Brazil, have condoms. It involves distributing clean needles. It involves rationality.

“One gauge of Brazil's success in confronting AIDS is to compare the situation here with that of other developing countries, many of which have sent delegations to study the Brazilian program. In 1990, for example, Brazil and South Africa had roughly the same rate of prevalence of H.I.V. among their adult populations, just over 1 percent.

Today, some studies indicate that 20 percent or more of South African adults of reproductive age are infected with H.I.V. or have AIDS, an estimated total of more than 5 million of the country's 44 million people. In Brazil, in contrast, the rate has dropped nearly by half, and the number of patients being treated has held steady, at about 600,000 out of a total population of 180 million.”

The Bush response is to look at this from the compassionate viewpoint. Compassion tells us that a life isn’t worth being saved if it is engaging in promiscuity and getting high:

“Mark Dybul, deputy coordinator and chief medical officer for the Bush administration's global AIDS initiative, is also taking part, and says the prostitution controversy is not only overblown, but is also an example of the many misconceptions about American policy.
"On the ground, this isn't an issue," Dr. Dybul said in an interview here on Friday. "Part of a compassionate response involves meeting people where they are and working with them."
He added, "Each country has a sovereign right to make decisions for themselves, and we respect that." But in order to receive American aid, he said, "it does require an acknowledgment that prostitution is not a good thing and to be opposed to it."”

Isn’t that sweet? And so the U.S. is yanking its support for the Brazilian system, until Brazil does the right thing, the compassionate thing, and criminalizes prostitution, making prostitutes the jolly targets of serial killers and plague, like they are in God’s own country, the U.S. Sometimes, compassion means leaving the world just a little bit more hellish than you found it.

On to the incompetence scene, where an unusual rhetorical turnabout is happening. Back in 2002, Al Qaeda was connected to all America’s enemies, and all of America’s enemies were Saddam Hussein. But now, three years later, with Al qaeda a fully operating organization in Pakistan, the new line is that nothing is connected to Al Qaeda. After all, if the London and Egyptian explosions are connected to Osama, the uncomfortable question might be, who is that Osama fellow? Bush has answered that definitively last year, when he said in the debates, very strongly, that he knew who Osama was. He’d read all about him in the back of the Little Pet Goat book. The CIA had paperclipped a 5 page cartoon book showing him and his nefarious crew. There were arrows, too, pointing to all of the players and giving their names. It was very informative. The president is very informed. The president is very resolute. The president stays the course.

Today's message comes with a little phone tune: don't worry, be happy! It turns out that nothing has anything to do with Osama, that funny little cave dweller. This is from the NYT:

But Al Qaeda's true form these days is a question mark. A majority of the officials interviewed call it a badly hobbled, barely functioning organization. Its top commanders have been captured or killed, and its two top leaders - Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri - have been in hiding for nearly four years.

One senior counterterrorism official said, "Al Qaeda is finished. But there is Al Qaedaism. This is a powerful ideology that drives local groups to do what they think Osama bin Laden wants."

Keeping up the brave tradition of Judy Miller, the article is basically propaganda for the White House conveyed via the anonymous. Good Work! Message: we did not fuck up in the spring of 2002 by arrogently letting Osama escape while we turned to an unnecessary war that we shoehorned into the legitimate concern about terrorism. Not us. Not with a secretary of War as brave and cuddly as Rumsfeld, and his merry men, oh so bright and gay. We smashed Osama way up. He has nothing, nothing to do with any explosions you may hear in the background. Although, remember, he had everything to do with Saddam Hussein, you see, in a sly, subtle, non-verbal kind of way. One of those gang terrorist handshake kind of things.

The amazing success of America’s policy is bringing freedom lovin’ to a neighborhood near you! With compassion, of course, on the side.

The WP has a different story. Must not have surveyed the same top top top counterterrorism officials. It is headlined Al Qaeda Leaders Seen in Control. How terribly bad of those reporters. They obviously were using the wrong Rolodex to survey the proper experts.

“The back-to-back nature of the deadly attacks in Egypt and London, as well as similarities in the methods used, suggests that the al Qaeda leadership may have given the orders for both operations and is a clear sign that Osama bin Laden and his deputies remain in control of the network, according to interviews with counterterrorism analysts and government officials in Europe and the Middle East.”
That is not the right message. Message should be: we are safer today more than we’ve ever been before. It gets worse.
“But intelligence officials and terrorist experts said they suspect that bin Laden or his lieutenants may have sponsored both operations from afar, as well as other explosions that have killed hundreds of people in Spain, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Morocco since 2002. The hallmarks in each case: multiple bombings aimed at unguarded, civilian targets that are designed to scare Westerners and rattle the economy.”

So unhelpful. So uncompassionate. Luckily, we can completely turn our minds off to such articles. And put complete trust in the counter terrorism experts who run the gamut, from Douglas Feith to Karl Rove, in assuring us that there is no man with a bomb behind the curtain.

one more time

LI’s post, yesterday, on the Nagelian voter,was supposed to be clear as daylight, or the reflection of same from your beloved’s eye at the moment of spiritual union. It was also supposed to fit into our larger project of thinking about politics beyond parties. We take on the big projects at LI. We pull out the autocad. We hire the temps. Rereading it, I see I wasn’t as clear as daylight. There was a lot of scrambled egg in the spiritual union. Two points, then. Harry wrote a reply from the more skeptical side at Scratchings. I think I agree with Harry in one respect, and in one respect I don’t. The agreement is that the specific act of voting itself is a negligible political act. The unimportance of the act is emphasized by the convergence of the parties. The fact that there is no difference between the parties means that there is no difference made by the vote -- or at least that is the instrument used by the governing class to to degrade voting, and thereby assure themselves continued power. They can adopt this strategy because voting is a certain kind of social act. My post didn’t make it clear enough that the effect of the act, which is important, can and should be divorced from the act itself. The difference between the real effect of the vote and the global effect of voting is evidence that we are dealing, here, with a symbolic object in Victor Turner’s sense. To see how the vote is a symbolic object, think of other objects in games. A football, to use a standard example, is in itself merely an unintelligently designed ball, harder to hold than a standard round ball, harder to kick, and a little easier to toss long distances, compared to a round ball of equal size. One’s interest in the ball itself doesn’t really go much beyond these observations. A game in which possession of the football endows the players of the game with their positions and their roles arises, of course, not out of the football itself, but out of its symbolic value. There is some intersection between the affordances of the ball and the role it plays – that is, there is a reason that the peculiar shape of the football fits the game of football – but in general, the interest in the game does not arise from fascination with the ball itself. It is the very rare fan that cheers the ball, or worries about it. Nor do fans puzzle much over the importance of the ball. Other objects in the world can be imagined to have a personality. There are pornographic tales narrated by sofas. When I was a kid, I had to watch an anti-drug film narrated by a drop of LSD. But footballs in themselves aren’t haloed with even that kind of aura. My own view of voting is that there are times that it is better not to vote, but there are no times, in a democracy, when it is better not to be a voter. Not being a voter is a form of social death. A lesser form among the hierarchies of zombies, but a form, nevertheless. This is where I do disagree with the nihilistic approach to voting. It does make a difference that 25 percent of black males in Alabama have been disenfranchised. The termination of their legal right to vote is not the termination of a triviality. Alright then. Clear as a bell, eh? The second point I should clear up is that I meant, in my last post, to be descriptive. Whether or not I like the fact that voters are Nagelian, I think that is how they are. And the voters that are Lockean – the well informed voters, the meritorious voters – are not un-Nagelian. They are a sub-group of Nagelian voter. (The hopelessness of philosophy is that it drives you into these linguistic oddities, but so it goes). What that means is simple: Lockean voters view their intelligence, which convention defines by the comparison mechanisms in schools (an absurd way to define intelligence, but I’m not going to kick against the pricks) as much more important than other groups. There. All better now.

what is it like to be a voter?

I am, stripped of a few eccentricities, a Keynsian liberal. However, I think liberalism's attempt to shake the existential edge off politics is futile and ultimately damaging. The left, when it is healthy, and the right, when it is not, both know that politics is all about dread and ecstasy.

That politics might be an existentialist errand is very much part of what I take to be the salient characteristic of contemporary election-based democracies. To get to that characteristic, let me quote a recent comment to one of our posts by Kmort, and then let me tell you why I believe his point is misguided:

“The Rousseauian impulse is I believe a big problem of yankee politics. Populism is as bad for authentic liberals as it is for the more intelligent conservatives. With a few higher standards for voting--say basic reading comprehension test at the polls (I would say ex-felons who pass it should be permitted to vote) or a college-degree requirement think of how much more accurate and meaningful the vote would be.”

If election based democracy is simply about input from those with an intelligent grasp of the issues, the “Rousseauian impulse,” which gives a free ride to those who have no such grasp, would seem fatally flawed. However, I don’t think election based democracy is about those with an intelligent grasp of the issues, at least if that grasp is defined in terms of having informed opinions about policy. In our opinion, a philosophical defense of democracy has to begin with a better description of how voting functions in a democracy in the first place. What kind of feed back is voting? I propose that we look for the answer to that question using Thomas Nagel’s essay, What is it like to be a bat?

Now of course Nagel’s essay doesn’t seem like it is about politics at all. It is about the narrow set of questions that are posed by the cognitive sci school to frame the problem of consciousness. And, famously, Nagel suggests that these questions do not pose the central problem of consciousness at all : “…the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.”

What it is like questions grab hold of subjectivity, rather than deductive activity:

“We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.2 It is not analyzable in terms of the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior—for similar reasons.3 I do not deny that conscious mental states and events cause behavior, nor that they may be given functional characterizations. I deny only that this kind of thing exhausts their analysis. Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness. With out some idea, therefore, of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of physicalist theory.”

The defense of the participation of the people in the government has traditionally been couched in terms of their education and their information about the policy issues. The Kantian dictum about enlightenment -- that it is the people treated as adults, or grown into their adulthood -- is often taken to be about the people educated. Relieved of their superstitions by some suitable immersion in the bath of facts. However, to me the "adulthood" does not stand for a list of facts known. It stands for a complicated system of controls on behavior, for the capacity for a range of emotions, for imagination, for empathy, etc., etc. In the same way, defining the voters participation in the government in terms of checking things off the list of things known is much like defining the consciousness solely in terms of deductive or inductive mechanisms. Or, at a stretch, in terms of intentionality.

The picture I am against is like this: your educated voter looks up candidate x’s view on the issue of lowering or raising tariffs on the import of bananas, and looks up candidate y’s view of same, and – deciding which view accords with his own intelligent view of banana importation – votes accordingly. Votes, in fact, can be reduced to a digital function: for/not for.

I think this is a bare and distorted view of what voting is about, and how it functions in a democracy. The voter, on this account, merely confirms or disconfirms views represented by x and y. On this basis, we think, democracy has no real strength that would explain not only its survival, but its survival in competition with its rivals of all sorts. It would simply be a system with a lag in the decision making process, called an election, as opposed to say tyranny, where the lags are unpredictable, and are called the hysterical fits of the ruler. Since it is unlikely that any voter has the amount of knowledge to make a competent judgment about not only the banana import issue, but, say, subsidies to the ethanol industry and car safety standards and the proper foreign policy to assume towards Gabon, if election based democracies depended on a set of voters with competent listable knowledge alone, I wouldn't give it much chance of survival.

The question of success, here, is often obscured by the rhetoric of morality. Democracies are supposed to possess some moral superiority. I have my doubts about this. Any time a political system becomes dominant, you find intellectuals busy justifying the system as morally superior. So far, the most long lasting governmental arrangement known to man involved the ruler marrying his sister and being acclaimed, at some point or another, a god, before his dead body was embalmed and interred under a certain tonnage of rock. In my opinion, this doesn’t sound like the height of morality, although it makes for very impressive postcards. We think that the success of democracy, given the success of other governmental arrangements in the past, probably does not have to do with its moral status, and probably has more to do with structural qualities it possesses.

This is the reason I don't think voting is well described by the Lockean model. I don’t think voters are like that. I prefer the Nagel voter. The Nagel voter votes, of course, in the for/against mode. But the Nagel voter votes from what it is like to be him or her. This is why the motives of the Nagel voter aren't simply confirming or disconfirming, and why the appeal to him or her is going to be about the emotions around the issues, or the issues as passions. And why the idea that is sometimes bruited about by liberal commentators about injecting ideas into a race and the scandal of not doing so is wrong – not wrong morally, but wrong organizationally. When, for instance, in the last election, the Swift boat veterans threw mud at Kerry, it was a perfectly legitimate ploy. After all, we are voting for someone who is going to have mud thrown at them constantly. The people who believed the mud were likely not going to vote for Kerry anyway. But the people who were persuaded by that ploy were not persuaded so much by the idea that Kerry was, I don’t know, a coward or a traitor – it wasn’t the ideational content, in other words, that moved them – as much as they were moved by the response. This isn't to say the better man was elected. It is to say that politics is about electing politicians, not better men. And that the system's success is peculiarly linked to what makes politicians successful.

Of course, polls are not sensitive to these things: polls ask questions about itemized issues, in a pre-digested sentiential form. There are, of course, millions of Lockean voters out there, and they are variously scandalized by the lack of intellectual content in American political campaigns. And LI has sympathy for that indignation. In fact, my indignation is easily aroused about what I see as gross stupidity on the part of politicians. Or about lies. Etc. Of course, the latter is a good instance of the situatedness of a political slant. I find the lies leading up to the Iraq war very upsetting. But I find the lies Clinton used to cover up his sex with Monica Lewinsky very irrelevant, a proof, at best, that laws against sexual harrassment in the workplace have been badly framed.

Just as I don’t want to throw deduction out as the enemy of consciousness, we don't want to entirely junk the image of the well informed voter. But eventually, the voting input is about what it is like to be an Irish ex-cop in New York city, or what it is like to be a embittered ex writer and insane blogger in Austin, Texas, etc., etc.

So, in my example above, I am not as indignant about lies per se, due to my being well informed, as I am indignant because I am the type of person who gets indignant about certain lies at certain times, and that is finally due to my total situation. Now, if LI is right about this, it still begs the question of the social nature of that tacit knowledge. Votes are additive, whereas tacit knowledge is emergent. That's a perhaps inevitable discrepancy in social action. But I will reserve pondering that question for another time.

I will round this off with three paragraphs from Nagel’s essay that give us a sense of how the Lockean defense of democracy differs from a Nagel-like defense of it. The Lockean, remember, is one who, like the reductionist, believes the way to understand the functioning of a government is to find the elementary parts and their combinations. And, above all, to avoid the non-discursive. For the Lockean, the last sentence of the third paragraph in this quote contains an idea too shocking not to be wrong, since it seems to make it impossible to perfectly combine rationality and government. And, after all, if government is simply decision-making – with its past being a series of decisions made, and its future a series of decisions to be made - then the Lockean has to be right. But if what Nagel is calling experience is not a decision – if it is a style, a set of attitudes, unpredictable variations among language games – and if experience is what democracy depends on, then the decision to suspend a voter’s right to vote, or the decision to impeach the person voted for or in some other way suspend his voted upon term, has to be done with the utmost caution, since it injures the experiential core of democracy:

“In the case of experience, on the other hand, the connection with a particular point of view seems much closer. It is difficult to understand what could be meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat? But if experience does not have, in addition to its subjective character, an objective nature that can be apprehended from many different points of view, then how can it be supposed that a Martian investigating my brain might be observing physical processes which were my mental processes (as he might observe physical processes which were bolts of lightning), only from a different point of view? How, for that matter, could a human physiologist observe them from another point of view?10

... This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points of view toward the object of investigation. We describe it not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of its more general effects and of properties detectable by means other than the human senses. The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description. It is possible to follow this path because although the concepts and ideas we employ in thinking about the external world are initially applied from a point of view that involves our perceptual apparatus, they are used by us to refer to things beyond themselves—toward which we have the phenomenal point of view.

Therefore we can abandon it in favor of another, and still be thinking about the same things. Experience itself however, does not seem to fit the pattern. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favour of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing? Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us. If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.”