03.31.07
Posted in Culture at 11:42 am by steve
How many people who consider themselves to be progressive bloggers have gone to school at Messiah College? Probably not many. I did. But not in the same sense as Monica Goodwin. Goodwin actually attended the college as a student. I was there more than two decades earlier attending vacation bible school.
I grew up, if not within walking distance of the college, certainly within bicycling distance. A number of my friends had parents who taught there or worked as administrators. For some time the church my parents attended was on campus. And so, when I was in grade school I got sent to vacation bible school (VBS).
Now, I have to admit that my own experience was probably not typical. The fact that VBS was filled with lots of people my age and therefore gave me a chance to be a good, sociable person was not one that I valued as much as most attendees might have. Nor did the stories. They always seemed targeted to people a lot younger than I was at the time. Actually, they seemed targeted to people a lot younger than I can ever remember being. And I can remember being two.
The music was alright, but we never did sing the “Noah’s Arky” song. Ours was a serious religion. And anything that made us laugh or smile was considered evil. The logic that supported this point of view can be roughly approximated by this fallacious syllogism:
1) All things evil are enjoyable
2) This is enjoyable
3) This is evil.
It is a curious thing to believe because it is wrong in a lot of odd ways. One of them is that its negation is just as wrong but in a different set of ways. We speculate that this is at the root of much of America’s unhappiness. But that is another discussion. Greek philosophers understood virtue pretty well. Their notions about living a constructive and cooperative social life could easily be have been informed by modern neuroscience’s discovery that cooperative acts actually release dopamine into our brains and cause us to feel pleasure. The Greeks, Aristotle in particular, might have posited:
1) All things good make us happy
2) This makes me happy
3) This is good.
In short, VBS was a sort of early trainiing that would help us live serious, measured, dour lives that would be productive but would turn from sour to bitter as the fruits of our labors matured and became our sustenance.
I freely admit that my experience is biased. It is colored by a single event that takes up 98 percent of my memory about that moment in time. Learning to be good and holy saps one’s energy mightily, even when one is in grade school. So the students have little breaks. We would emerge from the dark lecture hall and stand in the warm, waning sunlight.
I remember one such break. I stood with two other boys on the sidewalk in the courtyard. The grass and trees of the campus spread out in three directions. The spare, old concrete block building that smelled of mouldering books, old woodwork, and the sweat of study stood at my back. Eric, Craig, and I talked about something or other - something inconsequential and uncontroversial. Eric and Craig were jokers. Eric, golden haired and freckled, wore a perpetual smile that I would ever after grow to associate with the hyena, laughing over his dinner.
I don’t remember what I said. Or if I said anything. It seems to me the event in question had no causal trigger; but I remember Eric’s foot rising from the concrete sidewalk, moving upward swiftly, contacting my groin. I remember incredible pain. Then nothing.
I must have been out cold for at least a minute or two because the next thing I remember is a face. A dour old face. I couldn’t see it for the mist. the heavenly halo. Or rather, the detail. I saw the wrinkles, the grey and vacant eyes, the grey hair. I saw a person worried. Worried, I would imagine later, less for my well being than for her own. And God’s, perhaps. If I were injured what would that do to VBS? Had my collapse put VBS in peril? Was my collapse going to lead to the eventual collapse of VBS and God’s kingdom on earth? This is what that face communicated.
And it asked “What happened?”
“Eric kicked me in the balls.”*
One is disinclined to mince words when one has been kicked in the balls. Especially when emerging from the fog of unconsciousness. Being measured and civilized is not just far from consideration it is fundamentally impossible. The causal act is so dastardly that it does not exist in fight scenes in movies, except in comedies. Real men don’t do it. Cowards run away. There simply is no category for the act. It does not exist. All consideration of the subject ended with my utterance.
I am completely convinced that had Eric kicked me in the head or the thigh or the knee, had he punched me in the nose or chin or eye, he would have commited an infraction that was punishable under the VBS charter. But Eric had committed a crime that did not exist. He had assulted a deniable part of my anatomy. And because that part did not exist in Miss Eulalie’s reality, the crime was imaginary. My words denied both crime and its effect. They might as well have damned me to hell. They certainly saved Eric from punishment. That was definitely not my intention in speaking them.
I have no reason to believe that this is a typical event. I expect that most people do not experience VBS as a kick in the groin and violence against them unpunished. Nor do most people experience Messiah College in that way. It is a beautiful campus and aside from my experience with VBS, I have fond memories of times spent there with some of my childhood friends. I am grateful that the college then viewed itself as being a constructive part of the neighborhood and had a reasonable level of tolerance for people who - by the contemporary institutional measures - simply did not belong. Back then the college was a liberal arts college in the noblest sense of the word. And there was a sense in which dour old Miss Eulalie was as much out of place there as I was then or would be now.
But by the time I left home for college, the winds of change were blowing. There were a lot of people in the community and at the college who saw being Republican and being Christian as being interchangeable, indistinguishable. And they saw being Christian and being “blessed” in the same way. That meant entitlement in the first person. The line of reasoning goes something like this.
1) God blesses most whom he loves best ( Thank, you Calvin.)
2) God’s blessings are material - good health, wealth, power, blond hair.
3) I am rich and powerful, therefore God loves me.
4) You are poor or wretched, and therefore despised of God.
Or, in the words of the obscure musical genius Dad Gum Swing Jesus Loves Me, but He Can’t Stand You!
The next logical step from this view of social order, is to turn opponents into “terrorists” or “defectives” and to use force to dispose of them in arbitrary ways, saving God the effort. It’s not a large step. It is so small, in fact, that it seems almost inevitable that should enough people who live at steps three and four also come to power, the final step is inevitable.
What rightly rouses wrath about Gonzogate and Monica’s role in it is her presumption to do just this. Gonzogate is about one party presuming to be good and right and holy and just in contradistinction to the other party which is bad and wrong and evil and corrupt. The judgment is made not on the basis of action, but on the basis of power, of stuff. It is made on the basis of “God’s blessing,” which, ironically in this case appears to be attained through use of fraud and arbitrary force. Gonzogate is about disposing of inconvenient people. It is categorically similar to other such disposal acts in other times and places. And it is motivated by the same logic.
Bad though the act is, it retains a kind of plausible deniability. It may be a kind of kick in the groin to justice, but where’s the law against it? Gonzo may not have golden hair, but he wears Eric’s laughing hyena grin. He and Goodwin and a few of their cadre have kicked justice in the balls. Let’s hope we deal with it more justly than did Miss Eulalie.
—-
*The event is real but some of the names have been changed.
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03.26.07
Posted in Rant and Rave at 5:54 am by steve
I have nothing in particular against Cracker Jack. I invoke it here partly because I like the sound of its name and partly because it has a number of qualities that seem apros pos. One quality is fluff. There is a lot air in the box, between bits of the product, and within. The product is coated with a sugary confection to make it crunchier. Except for calories, sugar lacks nutrients and it rots the teeth. Many people find it makes them feel more hungry. The product survived for decades on marketing muscle and gimmickry. Say what we will about it, the product is an almost perfect symbol of American consumerism and a certain brand of politics. Tastes great, but may be considered by some to lack substance or to be less fit for steady consumption than our tastes would have us believe.
As we contemplate Cracker Jack and its qualities real and symbolic we also think of this article. It describes why Donald Rumsfeld is to become an occasional editor of the Los Angeles Times Newspaper’s Editorial Page.
Examine the Bush administration. Find that there existed a core of insiders, people who ran it. People who made its policies and its decisions. There will be a handful of such people: Bush, Rice, Cheney, Rove, and Rumsfeld. Perhaps there were one or two others such as Gonzales. Then there was a sea of like-minded people who supported them and their policies, but who were not privy to the reasoning behind their actions. If one looks at the sum total of this administration’s acts and policies, the group of “deciders” remains the same. Nor can one argue at this juncture that the administration is profoundly different in nature now compared to what it was prior to Rumsfeld’s departure. Its practices and its issues of advocacy remain constant. Its effects remain so as well. So if the administration continues to make America a worse place either for its failure to perform or for its successes, Rumsfeld shares blame in roughly equal share with those who are still there.
No administration has been so unpopular for so long. None has won fewer presidential elections. The first one it lost in terms of popular votes cast; and even Florida, had all the votes been recounted, would have been lost to Bush, losing him the election. It becomes ever more evident that roughly the same is true of the second, with Ohio serving as the central problem. So it is wrong to argue that the Bush Administration was ever very popular. But popular support is fickle and it is not always properly indicative of success or failure, of constructive or destructive practices.
No administration has been so uniformly destructive of American liberties or of American social structure. The Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act exist to create classes of people beyond the protection of law, people like Jose Padilla, whom the administration has spent almost half a decade trying to set up as an example, a judicial precedent of this principle. Most of the acts the administration has performed have been excused as being acts of “idiots” because, if one assumes an administration were trying to do its best to preserve the Republic and elevate the stature of its people, they would make no sense whatsoever. But once one gives up on that assumption, the acts of the administration begin to take on an interconnected and interdependent quality; a sensible one.
In terms of acts that are either properly or improperly explained by incompetence, is it possible that any administration has approached this one in volume or quality of output? Has any been in the same universe of discourse with regards to corruption? Certainly not in a century. In fact, if one were to design an administration that would ignore its Constitutional mandate and use its powers instead to transform America from Republic into Empire ruled by thieves and scoundrels, one would be hard-pressed to find a team either better fit for the task or likely to come closer to success than the current administration.
As a founding member or the current admnistration, why is Rumsfeld editing the editorial pages of one of this nation’s top newspapers? Could Rumsfeld be trusted to edit the back panel of a Cracker Jack box? Why doesn’t he go away and sell missles to Iran like Dubya’s dad? Might do less harm in the long run.
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03.22.07
Posted in Social at 2:01 pm by steve
The Olympic torch was passing through Juneau Alaska, and students at the High School were given some time out of their studies to watch from the High School grounds. But then the unthinkable happened. A calamity of monstrous proportions. An earthshaking event. Several students unfurled a banner across from the school proclaiming “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.”
One of the students was caught and punished with detention. His school has a policy about certain kinds of speech. The school administration argues that this speech violated its policy. He objected. And his case is now being heard before the Supreme Court.
The case is discussed at Smirking Chimp and all of my facts come from that posting. It brings up many questions. One question is about speech. Should the standard for students be higher than the standard for adults? What is unconditionally protected? What is unprotected?
Another question is about institutional authority and its bounds. What constitutes speech on school grounds? Is all speech that is made by students and is received on school grounds by other students subject to the school’s authority? Or does the school have legitimate claims on all the speech of its students, regardless of when and where they speak?
Institutional Mandate
Before we start, it is useful to try to place school in the context of its institutional mandate. We imagine that schools are primarily to teach subject matter. But schools are just as much about being models of society as they are about teaching subject matter. The expectations that are set of students in schools will be the expectations to which the students conform in society. This suggests that if there are behaviors that are important to societies and to personal success in society, but whose mandate is not well addressed by law, it is essential that schools inculcate or eliminate the behavior - as appropriate - by employing all the methods of school discipline at its disposal. In other words. For the school to carry out its mandate, it must create rules that are more restrictive on behavior than is law. If it does otherwise, a school fails to prepare its students for the social world they will inhabit. For this reason, schools may reasonably set higher standards for speech than those society has. In fact, they fail if they do not. Students will rightly object. Yet those standards will serve the purposes of the students and of the society they enter when they leave school.
What bearing does this reasoning have on the case? That depends. In the first place it depends upon how we define inappropriate speech. In the second place, it depends upon how we define the legitimate reach of the institution.
Speech Lawful and Appropriate
Among adults, inappropriate speech is speech that incites to violence. Misrepresentations of the truth also can be inappropriate and illegal, so long as they are not caused by or sanctioned by Great Leader. In certain communities, speech that is deemed pornographic is off limits. Speech that is humanly degrading, or speech that lures one into destructive or illegal behavior may also be regulated by law. Soliciting sex for pay, for example. Or the appearance of ads for cigarettes in certain media. In cases where speech is regulated in any way, the regulation is posed to prevent a clear societal harm that would result from the speech in question. We may agree or disagree about whether the harm in regulating speech is greater or lesser than the harm that would otherwise be done by the speech acts, but at least there is some quid pro quo that justifies the bounding of a fundamental right.
We also note that the purpose of freedom of speech is primarily political. Political speech is the first sort of speech normally threatened by opressive governments. And it is the kind of speech that typically is required to keep governments on-track. Thus the protections of political speech deserve particular scrutiny. When speech appears to be political in nature it warrants an assumption of protection that other kinds of speech may not warrant. The standard for harm in this cas has to be high; the speech would be the primary and imminent cause of loss of life or severe injury.
So we must evaluate this instance of speech on the basis of whether it does harm and on the basis of whether it is political. If we find that it is political and that it does no harm, it certainly must be allowable.
In this case, what is the harm? Is the speech advocating drug use? That’s hard to determine. How would one support that interpretation? Is there something about what Jesus calls men to be that resembles the state one is in if one is properly stoned? If that were the case, then perhaps there is good reason to keep Jesus and Bong Hits far from institutions that would train us to be good little industrious worker-ants. There would be great threat of harm here to captains of industry. Or is the speech making the argument in reverse, a sort of allusion to “opiate of the masses?” That’s subversive, too I suppose. It violates a different religion. It is a little hard to support these points of view to the exclusion of all others. And clearly this is not causing loss of life or injury. Any losses are financial and highly hypothetical, not physical and imminent.
Or is it just an absurdist joke? Picture Jesus: serious and sober, all dressed in an expensive business suit, clean shaven, painstakingly coiffed, sitting like a chairman of the board at the end of a long table. In front of him is a leather portfolio, a laptop, and a bong.
At this point we begin to run up against the problem. If schools set high standards and prohibit language that promotes drug use, the treatment of certain words or phrases becomes a problem. It might be assumed, for instance, that the commonplace slang terms for drugs and their associated paraphenelia are part of affirmative advocacy and therefore can be banned. Then, if one needs to talk about the consumption of those substances and the paraphenelia associated with them one uses the proper language.
But this is an error. Advocacy is not about the simple use of a word any more than mere nakedness is de facto lewdness. That would make even showering alone antisocial behavior and showering in school locker rooms criminal. The error is at least as old as the prohibition movement which advocated total abstention in order to end problems of intoxication. But the problem of intoxication is intoxication itself and the incapacities that arise from it, not due to the alcohol alone. Alcohol is the medium for intoxication, yes, but there is a difference between a medium and its effect when abused. Only in certain cases is total abstention the solution. Similarly, the problem with drugs - at least the ones that are not profoundly addictive - is not their use but their abuse. The same is true for of language. It is not the mention of bongs that is the problem. One might say “Ewww, the stench bong water,” and that would hardly be heard as advocacy for smoking marijuana. “Bong hit” cannot be treated as language that must categorially be offensive. It cannot be taken as axiomatic that its use promotes drug abuse.
The phrase “bong hits” in this message clearly refers to smoking marijuana. The second half of the message “4 Jesus” refers to a cliche that is normally used to associate groups of people with Christiantity. The juxtaposition immediately strikes us as absurd. The reason for the absurdity is that we are taught to associate Christianity with all things good and drugs with all things evil. The phrase sets up a sort of cognitive dissonance, a sense of absurdity.
Absurdist messages are not the same as advocacy messages. In this case, one might interpret the message as subverting the idea that people ought to join the Christian faith “because everyone is doing it.” That’s actually a Biblically sound message, at least when judged against the Gospels. It is reasonable for knowledgable Christians to join in advocacy of the student in question.
One might intepret the message as subverting the idea that bong hits are bad. That might place it in the realm of drug advocacy. But there is a difference between subverting the idea that a thing is “bad” and arguing that a person ought to do it. The former is about how we think about things; the latter is about how we act. Furthermore, it may be that our drug policies are as absurd as the message itself. So we might grow to learn that this message and ones like it help us examine drug policy rationally, and reach more sensible practices.
Nobody knows what the message means. And until someone does, it is hard to argue why it would do any harm. The fact that the speech is mildly subversive means that it ought to be treated under the presumption that it is a political statement. And because it is a political statement, it reasonably ought to be offered special considerations; for political speech calls for the strongest protections. The continuous and unconditonal permission to lampoon stupid policies is the only way one can hope to keep societies from going Hutu, especially when they have fallen prey to the divisiveness and demagoguery that characterize a certan cabal of radical Republicans.
Institutional Reach
Curiously, there does not seem to be a question in this case about what constitutes speech on the grounds of the school. It is generally accepted that because the students were off-campus when they unfurled the banner, the speech occurred off campus. Like the argument for prohibition, this has the benefit of definitional clarity. But like the argument for prohibition, it also has the drawback of inaccurately representing reality. The speech act originated off campus but its message was heard on-campus. That was both its purpose and its reason for offense. Had no students observed it, it would have been just another tree falling silently in the woods.
The school has an interest both in what its students say and in what they hear. It may ban telecommunication devices that receive radio or television broadcasts in order to focus students’ attention on their work. Or it might do the same with cell-phones. Similarly, one might imagine that a school board might work to prevent billboards from being erected that are off of school grounds but within sight of students in order to keep them from being distracted. A school may not have the authority to ban such billboards, but it may have an interest in trying to do so. The simple fact that the message was received by students on school grounds gives one reason to argue that it constitutes speech on school grounds, even if the message originated elsewhere.
Instead, the argument made by the school, apparently, is that it has a right to regulate the behavior of students off-campus. What does it mean?
If the argument is that the students were on school time and were being managed under the auspices of the school administration, then one might conceivably punish them for leaving campus without authorization. Or one might argue that their speech fell under the purview of the administration because they were supposed to be on school grounds. School authorities are charged with managing students and they hold some responsibility for their whereabouts and what students do during the hours they are presumed to be in school.
This line of reasoning was not mentioned in the Smirking Chimp article. Rather, the argument appears to be that school has some durable authority over the life and conduct of students. One comment on that article picks up on this and argues further that other institutions do the same; employers do random drug testing which implicitly interferes with peoples’ rights to do as they please on their own time. Once we think like this, individual liberty is an antique artifact. The revolution was nothing but a skirmish over tea and stamps. And we lost.
Back at the courthouse: Had the students left the school grounds during normal school hours with permission of the school, then the school would have no claims over their actions. But my guess is that the students left the grounds without permission. That would place them under the auspices of the administration. Perhaps the punishment ought to have been for leaving the school grounds without permission. If the SCOTUS uses this argument to establish that the students were bound by school policy, I think it is reasonable.
If they argue instead that the school’s authority reaches beyond the temporal and geographic bounds set by the agreed upon place and time of normal l school sponsored and supervised activities, we need to be very, very afraid. If this were the rationale for a decision it would imply a creeping hegemony of institutional power that threatens to destroy what our society once enjoyed of personal liberty. No. Institutions may own the faculties we pledge to them, but they do not own the rest. See also, slavery.
In this case, the school punished the one student they caught. Perhaps that punishment was less because that student did something harmful than because he did something embarassing. That is a bad basis for punishment, but it is not unprecedented at higher places in our society. See also “Heckuva job, Brownie.” And it is suggestive of a society suffering the pains of overbearing central authority.
Conclusion
How the case is reasoned may turn out to be much more important than its verdict. We have argued here that 1) Schools have an interest in defining appropriate speech more narrowly than societal standards for adults and 2) The student in question was probably under the auspices of the administration and therefore bound by the school’s rules. Taken together, these rules would suggest a ruling in favor of the school administration. But the speech in question resembles political speech closely enough that it arguably deserves special protections. The notion of special protections for political speech is not, to my knowledge, a current legal theory. But we will continue arguing here that it ought to be one.
The case provides an interesting study on limits we place on speech. In the final analysis, “Bong hits 4 Jesus” is subtly subversive, and it does no harm. There is nothing to be gained by banning or punishing the speech. Furthermore, it arguably deserves special protections because it amounts to political speech. The Bush administration recognizes that it is subtly subversive, I think. Could this be why they are arguing that it is “disruptive?” A threat to authoritarian rule?
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Posted in Energy - NonRenewable at 3:14 am by steve
Is Senator Imhofe (R-OK) advocating Communism? That’s what I had to ask when I viewed him trying to get Al Gore to pledge to use “no more energy than the average American” Gore recognized his question as a cheap rhetorical trick. He responded with an answer that makes a crucial distinction; it is not energy usage per se that causes CO2 and global warming, it is the burning of fossil fuels and the use of energy derived from that process. Use electricity derived from the wind or from solar or nuclear energy, and the global warming issues are mitigated.
Imhofe was not satisfied. He wanted a direct answer to his question. An argument ensued. Imhofe finally decided to ask questions and not let Gore answer. Very funny. Funnier still was the line of argument Imhofe wished to follow. He was arguing implicitly that Gore was trying to set himself up as a model and therefore ought to live as one. Gore was arguing that he actually was behaving responsibly.
If one followed the logic of Imhofe’s argument, it required nobody to use more energy than “the average.” But for that to be true, everyone has to use the same amount. When I was growing up, we called that Communism. Is Imhofe advocating Communism? Seems unlikely. It seems more likely that he was trying to set up a line of argumentation that would require that Gore choose between being a Communist and being a Hypocrite.
Is this the way we do public policy? This is not a hearing. Hearings are about establishing fact and debating policy. This is a lynching. Lynchings are about destroying people we don’t like, not because they broke the law or acted unethically, but because they are on the wrong side. Gore, fortunately, did not fall for it.
I happen to be much less sanguine than Gore about the possibility of a green future. I am unconvinced that we can change. And I am unconvinced that if we change we will do so in time to realize the putative benefits. Yet I support the notion that we must try. We need to act with determination. Fossil fuels are an addiction. One does not easily walk away from an addiction. That is the definition of addiction. But the purveyors of addictive goods extract more from their customers than do pueveyors of non-addictive goods. That is why we owe it to ourselves to work on sustainable energy. To free our necks from a stranglehold. It will improve both our breathing and our peripheral view.
Because of our addiction, purveyors of fossil fuels really don’t have to worry about US kicking the habit before things get pretty bad. Addicts don’t generally reform before they “hit the wall.” So why should energy companies worry if competing technologies are promoted? Imhofe and the rest of the lot would not need to deny global warming. They would only need to deny the necessity of interfering with free markets as did the Reaganites when confronted with sustainable energy proposals. So what’s the ruckus about over global warming? Why must Gore be crucified in the Senate? Why are free markets no longer sufficient to guarantee oil companies excess profits?
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03.19.07
Posted in Social at 4:38 am by steve
According to this article Khalid Sheik Mohammed has confessed. He was responsible for masterminding the attack on the WTC, he says. And for twenty seven other plans, most of which did not happen. Yes, he says, he was tortured. But we are led to believe that is not why he confessed.
It is impossible to claim that Khalid did not do any of the things the transcript claims Khalid claimed to have done. Perhaps he planned many attacks. Or some of them. We don’t really know what he claimed. We don’t know what he meant to claim. We don’t know what he claimed of his own free will, Of what he claimed freely we do not know which claims were truthful. We don’t know what he claimed because of the implicit threat of more torture. We don’t know what he has fabricated. We don’t know what was fabricated for him. In short, what does this trial tell us that is believable?
It tells us:
1) that Khalid exists
2) that he was tortured
3) that it was to get him to admit to certain plots that he was tortured.
More than this we cannot know because of the interrogation and trial procedures. This flies in the face of all we know about justice. Justice is an informative process, as much as it is a punitive one. The true story of a case serves to inform us about who we are as a people. Short-circuit this and much of the reason for the justice processes is lost. This process fails to inform on at least three counts: the treatment of the witness, many of the evidentiary and trial procedures, and the secrecy of the procedings. The witness is tortured. Exculpatory evidence may be concealed as may torture records. And the hearing occurs behind closed doors. If one wishes to undermine the judiciary process, it is hard to do more without abandoning even its pretenses.
We might assume that this trial was mediated by fair-minded people. There is reason to believe so. But create a trial process that is secretive, and the ultimate result is that it must become less fair than a show trial. At least in a show trial, one can observe the miscarriage of justice and assign blame. In secretive trials, the blame lies with the system of secrecy. That system absolves its abusers of much of the guilt of misconduct. Secrecy assures that eventually, misconduct will be part of the process. This sort of abuse of justice has no precedence in my limited and informal knowledge of jurisprudence. Even the most corrupt trials in communist countries were public. So were trials in the darkest of the dark ages more than a millennium ago. The Tutsis, after over a hundred thousand of their tribe had been hacked to death by Hutu in Rwanda, held public trials. None of these examples comes close to tempting the kinds of abuses of a system of secret trials. It is not just uncivilized; It is unhuman.
So, given an understanding of the nature of the forum in which we learned it, what were Khalid’s plots:
Other plots he said he was responsible for included planned attacks against the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Empire State Building and New York Stock Exchange, the Panama Canal and Big Ben and Heathrow Airport in London - none of which happened.
He said he was involved in planning assassination attempts against former Presidents Carter and Clinton, attacks on U.S. nuclear power plants and suspension bridges in New York, the destruction of American and Israeli embassies in Asia and Australia, attacks on American naval vessels and oil tankers around the world, and an attempt to “destroy'’ an oil company he said was owned by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on Sumatra, Indonesia.
He also claimed he shared responsibility for assassination attempts against Pope John Paul II and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.
The list contains items of two natures. One nature is things of limited scope and a certain obscurity. The other nature is of things grandiose and iconic. The events that have occurred, for the most part, are the ones limited and obscure. In other words, assume one were being tortured and had to make things up, what would one choose? The presidents of the US and prominent landmarks. A pope. A nuclear plant for good measure. We have been led to believe this might also be the things one might choose to target if one were a terrorist. But it makes one wonder. A terrorist might choose to do things that are like the ones that actually happened; the bombing in Balinese nightclub, a hole in the destroyer Cole, Reid’s dysfunctional exloding shoes. A tortured one might fabricate the ones that did not. There really is a different quality to those. The terrorist plots that happened tended to be focussed, limited in scope and scale. The ones that did not happen tended to be grandiose, almost too big for people to identify with. Or they suffer from some problem of plausibility.
Take the question of killing President Carter. Was this supposed to happen during Carter’s presidency? Are we to believe that before the CIA under Robert Gates even contracted with bin Laden to work against the Soviets in Afghanistan bad guys in the CIA were planning an assassination of the president? Or that the CIA chose to work with al Qaida because they didn’t like Carter either? Or that they didn’t know who they were dealing with? Or was the assassination to be on former president Carter? What could that possibly do? Conservatives loathe Carter because he stood for all that they do not. Most liberals are shamed by him because he represents what they cannot hope to be. Nobody in America or outside of it cares about Carter. Myself, perhaps, being one of few exceptions. Is it credible that terrorists would imagine striking at someone whom nobody seems to care about? Or, if Khalid is telling the truth, could it be that someone cares more deeply for Carter than we are led to believe? But why would bin Laden? Without a significant amount of narrative detail this claim is implausible.
We are to believe that bin Laden targeted only Democratic presidents? We are to believe that all the problems that motivate terrorism and violence in the mideast cease when Republicans are presidents? Sort of the way violence ceased in Iraq and Afghanistan while Bush was president, I suppose?
What about all these landmarks? It was in an NYT Review of Books article reviewing a book about Bin Laden that I remember reading that al Qaida had this ambitious plan to fly airplanes into the WTC but had trouble producing pilots. They had given up. Then, miraculously, some young fellows arrived from the US, visited bin Laden and said “hey, we can do that.” I read elsewhere (perhaps in association with the Moussoui trial) that one of the supposed hijackers was living in the home of a paid FBI informant while taking flying lessons in California. What are we saying? It is not clear that al Qaida could have managed to do what they supposedly did in the absence of some help from other outside institutions or individuals. If things happened this way, in fact, one is tempted to imagine that the trip was a formality, one that could be used to support the plausibility of the claim that al Qaida was connected to 9/11.
Meanwhile, al Qaida had the connections to US intelligence. And that the hijackers might have been better known to the FBI than they were to al-Qaida. Conspiracy theory? Well, yes. It wasn’t a single person who flew two jets into those buildings, unless they were controlled remotely. There is no question about conspiracy in this case, not if we believe al Qaida was involved in some fashion. The question is or ought to be about who was involved and how, who conspired, who knew, who did not? If we are not asking such questions, the next question is, “Why not?” How do we know what we know and how are we certain of it? And if we know the answer to all this, then why do we need to torture four hundred some Moslems on a corner of a Caribbean Island in violation or US and international law? One is tempted to wonder whether this is not at least partly about something else.
Khalid is a bad guy, I imagine. Al Quaida was a group of bad guys, too. Khalid planned attacks on innocent civilians and he saw that they were carried out, I imagine. He admitted to planning crimes which we have reason to believe he actually did plan, I imagine. But part of the reason for particular processes in prosecuting criminal cases is to know the truth, as closely as one can come to doing so. And the reason torture was abandoned with the Inquisition is that it is notorious for producing fabrications that serve truth badly. Which of Khalid’s plans are real? Which are fabrications? What was his role in 9/11? And how did he execute it? Who was involved? What were their roles? What were their methods of recruitment in the US?
Sadly, this undertaking and the transcript of it shed no new light on these questions. It simply reminds us of the darkness. When asked whether his admission of guilt had any connection to his treatment Khalid’s response, according to the transcript, is inscruitable. We are left with the impression that Khalid did what any reasonable person would do in the same situation; admit what is required, fabricate what is necessary, come as close to undermining its veracity as one could get without being put on the water table again. No part of justice is served here. The punitive part is ill served because Khalid’s treatment is likely to cause more of the same behavior rather than less. The informative part is ill served because it fails completely to inform. Is this the future of justice in America?
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03.14.07
Posted in Philosophy &c, Social at 2:28 am by steve
It was more than a decade ago when I heard a prominent television news newsperson refer to an interview he once held with a prominent middle eastern politician or diplomat. Perhaps the interview in question would have been in the 1980’s or early 1990’s. “Are you afraid of the rise in religious fundamentalism in your region?” the interviewer asked. “I am much more concerned about the rise in religious fundamentalism in the west,” replied the middle eastern politician. When I heard of that conversation in the mid 1990s, I thought two things:
- 1) “what a remarkable thing to say: what has fundamentalism in the west done to harm anyone?” and
- 2) “even if the answer is nothing, the same phenomenon makes me uneasy, too. I wonder why?”
Ever since that point in time I have noticed how fundamentalism has been eroding ideas and ideals that are central to western liberal society, ideals about tolerance, fairness, equality, rule of law. If one examines the ideals that distinguish western society favorably from other societies, one will find that most of these ideals are eroded by fundamentalism. What is fundamentalism and how does it drive these changes?
The word “fundamentalism” refers to a kind of reduction. In one sense it is a reduction to essentials. Ironically, most religions claim as their essential tenet to “treat others as you would be treated.” And this is the ideal that motivates liberal society. So fundamentalism must be about something else. It must be about something fundamentally different, something diametrically oppsed to this idea.
Before we talk about fundamentalism, we need to point out that it is a practice and a frame of mind, both. It is not peculiar to any society; almost every society has its fundamentalist proclivities. Nor is it necessarily religious in nature. What is required is a strong and almost unconditional identification with a group. Religious affiliations tend to give rise to these feelings of attachment, so to do national affiliations, and so do other “tribal” affiliations. The identification itself is not necessarily bad. But sometimes it can go bad.
Psychaiatrist Salman Akhtar defines fundamentalism as a psychological disorder characterized by five symptoms.
1) Ethnocentrism - “my group is better than your group..”
2) Religious Intolerance - “I am good and right and holy…”
3) Megalomania - “my dad can beat up your dad…”
4) Victimhood - “he hit me…”
5) Masochism - “na na na na na na … ”
He explains why fundamentalism is so alluring, and what one must do to overcome it. In this piece we intend to talk about its characteristics.
Ethnocentrism
As with any disorder, not all people have all the symptoms. And as with many disorders, there tends to be a progression of symptoms from one to the next. Most insular groups possess ethnocentrism. This must be the starting point of the pathology, but mild ethnocentrism is not necessarily pathological by itself.
Group identification is a trait in social animals, and it is both unavoidable and necessary. It would be nonsense to argue that all forms of group identification are pathological. Most economic activity forms in groups, and loyalty to those groups will frequently aid their causes. Similarly, there are cases where loyalty to a group is a vital part of survival. Actually, group loyalty is vital for all people except those who are rich enough to live without a paycheck. Whether the group is a family operating a farm or a society operating an isolated feudal community, or a number of oprational groups inside a large corporate conglomerate, loyalty to the group furthers everyone’s interest and it is vital to the success of their group. Group identification is both necessary and unavoidable. Yet group loyalty must be conditioned upon something. When group loyalty ceases to be conditional, it crosses the boundary to fundamentalism.
At its most benign, ethnocentralism is an expression of a fundamental force that allows individuals to agglomerate into social groups, social groups into communities, communities into cities, states, and nations. That force is vitally important if society is not to crumble into anarchy. But ethnocentrism has two components. One is a component that draws people into conhesive groups. The second is a component that makes distinctions at the boundaries of groups. Territoriality and defense of boundaries is also a behavior found throughout nature. It has certain evolutionary benefits. And a brief study of this in the context of game theory would suggest there is no viable way to make it go away, regardless of how bad we might judge its effects to be. Practically speaking, every group has its boundaries. It is a necessary fact of group formation.
Where ethnocentrism begins to go bad is where it starts making value judgments about people in other groups, and where these value judgments tend to dehumanize people in those groups. The simple ethnocentrist meme is “we are good; they are bad.” First person goodness is set in contrast to third person badness. This notion tends to infect the mind. And if this infection is not properly checked, it begins to cause other symptoms.
At its lowest level, ethnocentrism tends to form groups that are relatively small and tightly knit. In some cases those tightly knit groups occupy a defined spot of land. In rare cases they may administer larger areas as did the Imperial Romans or British. They share a common culture, a common body of law, common goals and expectations, common rituals. They see themselves as being central. The world “revolves around” the group in question. Rome put Galileo under house arrest for replacing the Vatican as the center of the solar system with the sun. The British set the standard for time by a line running through Greenwich. Ethnocentrism is a societal expression of an infantile assumption that puts the observer at the center of the cosmos and establishes all relationships in first person terms with the central character of group.
Ethnocentrism in its mildest forms is not necessarily pathological. It only becomes so when it gives rise to distinctions that make others somehow less human than ourselves.
Religious Intolerance
When Rome fell, Christianity became the de-facto political force in Europe. The Church became integrally involved in making law and conducting trials. Over a long period of time civil practice diverged from religious practice, but it took a thousand years. And in the mean time, Europe became insular and fundamentalist. Those are the days referred to by Renaissance writers as “the dark ages.” The dark ages ended when the Crusaders returned from the levant, enthusiastic about a bigger world. Venice capitalized on this first, trading extensively with the levant and with China directly, until the Arabs stopped it.
The Arab empire arose during Europe’s dark ages. The Arabs, too, succeeded in using religion to unify a swath of the world from Morocco to Indonesia, one several times as large as Europe. In its early days it was more prosperous as well.
Mohammed drew a distinction between “people of the book” and tribal peoples. And that distinction suggested that he understood that religion had the power to unify tribal peoples and accrue for them the social and personal benefits that he imagined only religion might bring. Even today in Afghanistan there are tribal laws and rites that are repressive by any measure, and there is Sharia law which tends to be more liberal and less opressive than tribal rites. (Even while it looks oppressive and illibral to us.) Viewed in its long historical view, Islam tended to bring an overarching commonality of religious practice that counterbalanced tribal tensions and decreased ethnocentricity within its boundaries.
So the original effect of both Christianity and Islam as religions was to unify diverse tribal peoples who otherwise were inclined to war against each other. Both religions tended to dissolve tribal boundaries; or at least to provide an overarching group of ideas and practices that would transcend tribalism. Both religions tended to lessen ethnocentric forces that divide people who belong to different tribes within the same religion. It did not stop the tribal wars or the tribal ethnocentrism, but it did bring a cause for unity.
Religion, however, has proven to be a two-edged sword. At the same time religions united areas, they made the discontinuities at its edges more profound. Vast areas with religious homogeneity made exchanges between people in different groups more rare. And this tended to cause the larger groups to become insular along religious boundaries. It made people less used to dealing with differences and it made them less tolerant of people outside those boundaries as a result.
Religious texts are written for people within a religion, and there is sometimes a tendency to treat those outside the religion harshly. Jewish newcomers returning to what we are told was once their patriarchical homeland in Canaan spent centuries slaying competing tribes on their fringes. At the peak of its days, the surrounding tribes were suppressed by force.
Mohammed advocates jihaad against infidels - tribes that fail to live up to the Moslem standard of charity and justice. He is clear that “people of the book” are not infidels. Yet this admonishment is sometimes forgotten by the Islamic fundamentalist.
The Catholic Church, similarly, had its Inquisition. It was a Catholic fundamentalist movement that grew so destructive that it proved to be a significant factor in the schism of the Church at the Reformation. This schism caused all sorts of bloodshed in England, and it caused the thirty years war in Europe. By the end of it, toleration won the day, if for no other reason than the fact that most of the fundamentalists on both sides had been killed.
In all of these cases, religions acting as institutions defended their turf. Institutions, if they endure, have to do such things. Such actions may be necessary from an institutional point of view; but to what extent is wrongful behavior justified if it is in the defense of a religious institution? It is a valid question to ask. For if a religious insitution resorts regularly to wrongful behavior it loses its mandate and its credibility. Wrongful behavior precipitated the Reformation. So a religion stands to lose as much as it might gain by behaving toward people in ways that violate our innate notions of humane treatment.
In some cases, religious texts do appear to call for violence against outsiders. But religious texts tend to be figurative and rhetorical, so it is not always easy to be sure what they mean. There always exists a group of readers who interprets figurative language literally. And this is where the problem starts. To a person writing figuratively, a “war” on evil is normally waged with helpful ideas, with words, and with good deeds. To an uneducated person reading literally, the war involves the flow of blood, sacrifice of sinners. The simple act of failing to distinguish between literal and figurative language tempts one to fall victim to the other symptoms of the disease.
Dr. Akhtar has been more careful in keeping focussed on the personal pshychological aspects of fundamentalism. He talks little about the social and organizational issues in fundamentalism. He talkse instead about the personal ones. He is talking about is a narrow, literal interpretation of writings.
While the most obvious examples of interpretations that are both too narrow and too literal may be found among bad interpretations of religious writings. The Old Testament, for instance is sometimes used to support the idea of the “Divine Right of Kings.” Yet Moses was careful to set up his new country without kings. The ones who did reign were highly flawed, and hereditory succession proved virtually impossible. If the OT were divinely inspired, it would soundly refute the “Divine Right of Kings.” Locke’s Two Treatises on Government do a much more thorough job.
Fundamentalism is expressed in narrow interpretations of other documents, as well. One is a recent “conservative” tendency to reduce judicial interpretations of the Constitution from “what it means” to “what it says.”
When writing is abstract, terse, and spare as it is in the Constitution, the ideas are not developed broadly or deeply. Sometimes principles are alluded to by example. At other times language is used in a particular way to allude to discussions in other forums. The writers alluded to things outside the Constitution that were well known to them and to their contemporaries, but such allusions may be lost on us. “Aid and comfort,” for instance, is a term of art that is quoted from a very thorough dissertation about treason given by British Lord Blackstone. A fundamentalist will interpret the phrase “aid and comfort” using contemporary connotations of the constituent words. But the actual meaning of comfort has changed in the English language, and the phrase is a term of art which must be taken in its totality, referring to something quite different, something we might today render “forming alliances with,” or “acting on behalf of.” Fundamentalists cannot be bothered with finding the sense of old language within its contemporary context. They tend to isolate words and phrases that support their own points of view, even if those phrases have meanings that were originally irrelevant to or contradictory to the points being made.
In one case, the fundamentalist mind might fail to see a right to privacy hidden there, despite the fact that at least two intrusions upon privacy - perhaps the only known two government intrusions at the time - are prohibited by provisions in The of the Bill of Rights. One is a guarantee against illegal search and siezure of personal effects. Another is prohibition of “quartering.” Not only does it take little imagination to see these as examples of rights to privacy, it is a little difficult to imagine how a fundamentalist mind might deny it. Yet that is the habit of the fundamentalist mind.
In any case, there is an interaction between an ethnocentric group, its body of literature, and history. And if an ethnocentric group is not provided the training to interpret its available literature correctly, it stands to stumble and fall in history. The attitude that drives this tendency to interpret narrowly, ethnocentrically, badly, is fundamentalism.
Megalomania
Each three year old believes “my dad can beat up your dad.” Not because it is true, but because it is necessary for a three year old to believe. Such a belief fosters a sense of security. And that sense of security is necessary if one is to take normal risks and forge new relationships. But fundamentally it is false at least half the time. Groups adopt roughly the same notion “my group can beat up your group” for the same psychological reason, to gain a sense of empowerment. So long as the belief remains purely hypothetical, it does no great harm, and it may do some considerable good, sometimes. A sense of empowerment emboldens action. And action is required if we are to eat or sleep in comfort.
The problem starts when one group begins to imagine exercising this power over another group. Normal levels of ethnocentricity always tempt this. But when groups conflict under normal levels of ethnocentricity, the acts are usually what we dismiss as “skirmishes.” They are wars of very limited scope and duration, usually making small incremental adjustments in territory or relative tribal strength. European history has a number of wars involving such adjustments, most of them are forgettable. The wars that one remembers, though, are ones that involved fundamentalist forces of inflamed religious zeal or inflamed nationalistic zeal.
An early example of megalomania occurs in Mexico and South America during the century after the Spanish landed. It is estimated that 90% of the indigenous population died within a century of the arrival of the Spanish. Much of that was due to smallpox. But the Spanish also put a lot of people to the sword, arguing “convert or die.” Converts were pledged to be loyal to the Spanish crown ( explicitly or implicitly.) Dead men could no longer voice their objections to bad policy or practice. That pratice in the New World coincided with the practice on the Iberian peninsula that was known as the Spanish Inquisition. Both of these were expressions of religious and nationalistic fundamentalism that caused great agony. Both arose, in part, out of a megalomania of a corrupt church and an ascendent, nationalistic monarchy. And these, together with the building and demise of the Spanish Armada set Spain firmly on the path to being a second-world nation for centuries. Fundamentalism ruins nations.
Megalomania tempts large scale undertakings. It tempted the Crusaders. It also tempted Napoleon. He exploited French nationalism - a force that united the French before similar forces had been well exploited among other European groups. Employing megalomania, his own and that of his troups, Napoleon came close to uniting Europe under the French flag. It was not for a number of decades after Napoleon fell that Germany would try the same thing.
Megalomania can be most effective when it involves both flavors of fundamentalism: “God and Country.” “God and Country” were integrally tied together by the Third Reich which purposefully created nationalistic festivals that would express the mystical qualities of religious rites in order to create a nationalist religion. Hitler became an entity beyond reach of the law, like God, himself. And his word was final; it had the authority of God himself. Hitler rode the rising tide of fundamentalism to his place. And he used it as a tool to control his nation. The tragic outcome was WWII, a war that cost many millions of lives. Happily, the second world war taught Europeans the cost of nationalism, the cost of religious intolerance, and the cost of megalomania.
Sadly, WWII seems to have taught America just the opposite. We stand today roughly where Weimar Germany did in the early 1930’s. We chant “God and Country” in our classrooms each morning. And we elect leaders who aggregate power far beyond those described by the Constitution. We abide by Constitutional forms but we eschew Constitutional sensibilities.
Megalomania has two impulses. One is “I shall rule the world…” Or, in some cases a small corner of it. It is insistent upon a triumph of one’s own group over another. The second impulse is that it is oblivious to cost of ruling in terms of blood or treasure. “…at any cost.” The question of cost is treated as being irrelevant. It is this attitude that makes fundamentalism so terribly destructive when provoked to action, because it is not so much a contest to see which side is stronger, as it is a fight to win or die trying. Such fights are much more bloody than the skirmishes we talked about above.
Victimhood
In any conflict that has a long history, each side tends to keep a detailed list of how it has been wronged by its opponent, while forgetting simultaneously all of the wrongs it has committed. This list-keeping process creates a profound sense of victimhood on at least one side of a conflict. In contemporary history the Israel-Palestine conflict is a perfect example. Both sides see themselves, to some extent, as victims. Both sides are prepared to act violently or cruelly toward the other side as a result.
The most profound backlash to victimhood may be the case of the Weimar Republic. War reparations negotiated by the French at Versailles after WWI created a profound sense of victimhood that festered in Germany and gave rise to Hitler. He knew how to exploit this fundamentalist weakness and make opertunistic use of it. This problem was framed as a problem with bankers and financiers, exploited as an ethnic problem, then turned into a source of nationalistic outrage. Finally, it was used as a justification for war. There is almost no question about whether Hitler could have gained and held power had the German “volk” not felt a profound sense of victimization as a result of the reparations.
A sense of victimhood provides the justification to act violently against another. While we have suitable psychological barriers against lashing out violently against those who pose no threat and those who have not hurt us, there is no such barrier against behaving violently against those who abuse us. Thus victimhood is a triggering event. Once a person or group with fundamentalist tendencies achieves a profound sense of victimhood, the psychological safety switch that keeps that entity from responding has been switched off. Violence is all but inevitable.
Masochism
Masochism is an insensitivity to another’s suffering. It is symbolized by the schoolyard taunt or by pulling wings off of flies. A root cause of masochism is a failure to empathize. It degrades the “other” usually for the purpose of elevating the self. People tend to do mean things to each other quite naturally, especially when they are young. But one reaches an age when one realizes that all masochistic behavior is destructive. Pulling the wings off flies really does hurt the flies, but it hurts oneself as well, if only a little bit.
By the time the disease of fundamentalism has reached the victimhood stage, it is likely to erupt into violence. Societies go to war. Hitler took France. Bush took Iraq. Mao took a long walk. Where there exist clear obstacles to war - where the victimized group understands that it cannot win war - random acts of violence against the interests of the opponent are pursued. These random acts have, from time to time, been called terrorism. And the reason is that they are calculated to exploit our fears. It may be that some terrorists derive no pleasure from the suffering of others, seeing it as nothing but a means to an end. In such a case, their acts are depraved and wrong; but perhaps they are not masochistic. In other cases, it seems likely that fundamentalists do derive pleasure from killing others. And this is clearly a masochistic impulse.
What prevents people from being destructive of each other more regularly? We erect barriers in our minds against certain kinds of acts. Several things can tend to break down those barriers. Seing a destructive act will sometimes do just that. There are lots of old Viking stories in which twelve people end up hacked to pieces becauses Lief stabbed Sven.
Seeing violence can cause violence. So can being the target of violence.
Internal barriers can make it difficult for some people to act violently Soldiers will sometimes find shooting to kill difficult at first, then find it a lot easier. Some will find that although it is easier, they feel a little disturbed by the act each time they do it. Others actually enjoy the sense of empowerment that comes from hurting or from killing other human beings. This is our interpretation of masochism, a sense of enjoyment at inflicting harm.
Those videos of people being beheaded that show on Al Jazeera are videos of fundamentalism turned masochistic. Those photos of piles of naked bodies at Abu Ghraib are videos of fundamentalism turned masochistic. In both cases, the impulse to photograph the incident comes from the same impulse to act - it is an expression of personal power over a victim. The whole thing is an expression of the starting premise “I am good; you are bad,” or “I am human; you are not,” or “I am powerful; you are powerless.” Whenever we hear such messages, no matter how they are packaged, and no matter whose group they come from, we need to refute them, or to run away. Because these are the messages that find expression in our cruelest acts, from schoolyard taunting ( touted recently by a fundamentalist blonde ) to ceremonial beheadings. They are flavors of the same hateful thing.
Fundamentalism Abstracted
We commented in a previous piece that liberalism rejects certain ideas and practices. Liberalism rejects fundamentalism in all its forms. It even rejects the premise upon which fundamentalistic practice is built; that in matters of religion or public policy there can exist some knowable, tangible, philosophical “ultimate truth.” Once one accepts the premise that some ultimate truth can be known, it is not long before one accepts as well that this ultimate truth is known, and that it is known in the first person. At this point, who believes it has baptized himself in the blood of belief and the fundamentalist process of self-destruction has begun. It may take some time before the whole thing comes to a head; but it is just a matter of time before bloodletting will ensue. Then, when enough blood is spilled the fundamentalist fever is broken.
One might object that we are replacing one religious tenet with another; but liberalism’s rejection of fundamentalism is not done on the basis of faith. It is done on the basis of obersvation. To behave otherwise is to invite bloodletting.
Familiarity with this process was what drove the founding fathers of this nation to establish it as a state without a religion. The right to worship as one might choose arises directly from the “no establishment” of relgion idea. And its purpose is not to prosecute the faithful, but to allow them to express their faith as they will. The only proviso is that each person gets to choose his own faith and practice, to the extent that this does not violate rights of others. Religion is one of the areas in which man is tempted to fundamentalist practice. And the particular treatment of religion that the founding fathers employed was liberal of necessity, informed by recent histories of great bloodlettings in England and on the continent.
Freedom of religion is the perfect expression of tolerance. And tolerance is the curative to the condition of fundamentalism. Mills, in his monumental work On Liberty makes the point that the things we argue about, we argue about precisely because they are unknown and unknowable. The process of advocacy, correctly carried out, is to clarify some of what we do not know, to bring facts and organizing ideas to bear on what otherwise seems chaos. He argues that in matters of public policy, things are ultimately unknowable. That is why we argue. And when we decide, the decision is provisional. We need to be careful that it does not become orthodoxy too quickly.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her introduction to the Penguin edition of J.S. Mill’s On Liberty argues that Mills is wrong. Himmlefarb imagines some “ultimate truth.” But this idea which she treats almost parenthetically is completely antithetical to what Mills is arguing. He is arguing that the very idea of a knowable “ultimate truth” is both wrong and destructive. As we just asserted, things we argue about most are precisely the ones about which we know the least. Policy decisions cannot be made on the basis of “ultimate truth.” A sufficient reason would be because it does not actually exist. The problem is much more than that; its because imagining “ultimate truth” does exist destroys society by compromiing the decision-making process. ( See On Knowledge Part III, The Decision Making Process below )
We argue that there is such a close relationship between the notion of “ultimate truth” held in the first person and fundamentalism that we are hard pressed to distinguish between the two. The former is a kind of philosophical abstraction that embodies and justifies the latter. It is a kind of philosophical premise or a theological notion that allows one to enforce one’s ideas on others without allowing any objections. It is a sleight of hand, a distraction, a dose of sugar to make the medicine go down. Call it what you will, but it is not the genuine article. There are few cases in which problems between factions have arisen and caused extreme violence and bloodshed in the absence of such first-person certainty. Abstracting it doesn’t change either its fundamental nature or its effects.
The abstraction process is simply a way of making the argument “I am right; you are wrong” at a higher, less obvious level. It always starts by preaching some religious orthodoxy that is “true.” That fundamental truth is used to justify a host of beliefs and practices that otherwise would be unjustfiable. Usually, there exists a kernal of truth to the article of religious orthodoxy, just enough to make it believable. And usually all of the conditions that would make that kernal of truth false or inapplicable to a vast number of specific areas has been purposefully avoided or forgotten as it is applied to those very areas. We have talked elsewhere about laissez affaire economics as being just such a fundamentalist religious orthodoxy. Just as with other religious institutions, those who so much as question these religious orthodoxies get thrown into the darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Conclusion
Dr. Salman Akhtar defines fundamentalism as a pathology of the psyche. He defines it as a mental illness. In our interpretation of his work, the basic symptom is the unshakable belief of being good and right and holy and powerful in the first person in contradistinction to being bad and wrong and impious and weak in the second and third person. The tendency to this point of view is one that is easily spotted in young children. And Akhtar points out that both religous practice and certain kinds of governance tend to simultaneously encourage and exploit this tendency. They make children of us.
Narrow and literal interpretation of religious writing and works with broad and abstract scope tends to nurse the virulence of the symptoms. Demagogues exploit human weaknesses using propaganda that fans the fires of fanaticism until the sufferer imagines his foe to be inhuman and can be squashed like a cockroach. It is an unfortunate metamorphosis, since the process frequently works simultaneously on opposing parties.
The temptation to fundamentalism lies in each one of us. Every child, at some point, is in the “in crowd” or not. Every child, at some point taunts or is taunted. Every child wants to belong to his group. The ethnocentric impulse is in every child. So, too is the megalomania and the masochism. It is for these reasons that it is so easy for a demagogue to gain power by appealing to these impulses. Treat people as children and they become them.
Part of the socialization process in schools is - or ought to be - to subject these impulses to more critical executive functions of the brain, to socialize us to see the arbitrariness of groups, to accept them for their benefits, but to reject their abuses. We must learn to read critically and gain the ability to interpret broadly, figuratively, and to see overarching ideas. We must see past the words themselves. Doing this requires interpretive practice and encouragement. And it is why mandatory education goes on eight years after one can read passably well. We need to learn how to get this skill back into schools. Whether it is by accident or on purpose that teaching critical thinking and broad interpretive skill has been excised from the cirriculum, we find today that both are absent and both are sorely missed. Finally, what are we to say about a daily ritual that binds us slavishly to God and Country? When did that start? And what does it do to us?
Fundamentalism has reached fever pitch in the US. It is an escalating problem in other nations, as well. We need to think more critically about our beliefs, our policies, our practices. We need to think more critically about how we indoctrinate our children, and about what skills we teach them. If we fail, they will learn the costs of fundamentalism the hard way; the way the the French under Napoleon and the way the Germans did under Hitler. When the dust settles the next time, however, less could be left to build upon.
Sanity, argues, Dr. Akhtar, has its costs. But the cost of the alternative is ultimately bigger.
Permalink
03.11.07
Posted in Culture at 5:37 pm by steve
Daylight saving, some people argue, is an exercise in self-deception. But I have long enjoyed its results. Being both a frugal person and one of independent thought, I recently decided not simply to embrace daylight savings time as an idea, but to work out a way of improving upon it. So I identified all the rational decision criteria, worked out the relevant equations, created a spreadsheet model, ran the numbers, and set my clock forward 28 hours 48 minutes, 36.06 seconds, roughly speaking. The change has meant longer waits for meetings, but I never miss a flight, and I am confident that come summer it will pay off. I will be able to start enjoying Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day with fewer crowds. And I expect to be enjoying long, quiet twilights when everyone else is stuck in rush-hour traffic. Or has been asleep for hours. (darn dyslexia) Either way, I get the sunsets to myself, and I can feel quite self-satisfied that I am saving more daylight than anyone else.
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03.10.07
Posted in Social at 7:34 am by steve
Paul Krugman recently wrote a piece about saving the American middle class from extinction. His article makes a solid argument that the deterioration of the middle class and the growth of the super-rich within the top 1 percent of the US population were promoted by a change in political climate.
The Problem of Growing Inequality
The problem is that since 1980 the top 1 percent have been getting much, much richer. The bottom 80 percent have been losing ground. Being worse off economically is bad, in and of itself. No person wishes to be worse off. No good person wishes the same of others. The real problem, however, is that gross inequality in economic power degrades the quality of rule of law. A super-rich class lives above the sanctions of the law while a super-poor class lives below its protections. And the social repercussions of such a system make life miserable for all involved. The poor are angered at their mistreatment and may go to great lengths to make their point; the rich fear the poor. And the few people who fall in between just try to avoid the problems of both other classes. It’s the stuff of banana republics.
It is the perpetual two-class problem that plagues banana republics. The super-wealthy minority will sometimes rule with some sort of proto-fascist regime. The poor will sometimes promote populist demagogues such as Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro who will embrace communism.
This problem of inequality leading to instability in democracies is not new. Plato comments in The Republic that democracies tend to fail. And they do so when people begin to pay more attention to the trappings of material wealth than they do to political policies and practices. The implication is that once there is a class with great wealth and the corresponding power of wealth, democracies tend to lose their special and endearing qualities. They are soon ruled by tyrants, he says. Kind of a description of the USA today.
How serious is the problem of economic inequality? Those who like the story numbers can tell can look at the Wikipedia entry on Gini coefficients. Nations with low coefficients tend to be wealthy, egalitarian, democratic, open. Scandinavian countries come to mind first. Most of Europe is not far behind. Canada and Australia, too. One notices that ntaions with very high Gini coefficients tend to be poor, authoritarian, politically unstable, and prone to violence. Columbia, Venezuela, Guatemala, El Salvador are on this list. America is definitely not among the countries with the lowest Gini coefficients. In fact, it finds itself not far from a crowd of nations with serious social problems that arise from gross income inequality.
So there are two issues of concern. One is the simple fact that the bottom 80% of Americans today are worse of than that class was in 1980. The second is that this problem bodes ill for a stable government.
Declining Middle Class: Cause and Cure
Krugman talks only of the declinine itself, and of its cause. He argues that political change preceded economic change, and that it was the cause of it. And he argues implicitly that if we were all persuaded that it was a bad idea, the problem could be corrected and presumably we would live happily ever after.
The political fight to make things as they are started a long time ago. By the time Goldwater was a Presidential nominee, in 1964 the movement that created our view of thigs today was more than a decade old. But it was when Reagan came to office that the movement came of age. Reagan wasted little time in reducing the top marginal tax rate from 80% to 39%. There are those who have argued that this, in fact, was the cause of the inequality. Krugman argues otherwise. He argues that both the tax cut and the inequality are a product of other social forces. This is a vital fact to grasp, if we are to create a durable and constructive solution to the problem.
He cites a number of those forces, a prominent one of which was the decline of unions. Unions had had their hayday by the time Reagan came to office, but he came pretty close to dooming them to obscurity. Take the example of Reagan firing the air traffic controllers; that was the shot heard ’round the country. It was a metaphorical “just say no” to unions. Unions had been under pressure before that point, but this was a kind of “breaking point.” The president himself had busted unions; it was okay for everyone else. Laws were broken, but that was ignored.
Reagan’s installation as president also marked a turning point from an era in which corporations were viewed as crucial social institutions, serving economic needs of their customers, their workers, their suppliers, and their shareholders, to an era in which corporations were viewed as a financial medium to be exploited for the personal gain of its directors. The means to do so was the stock option. A recent Economist article on executive pay suggests that at the height of the “boom” in 1999 there were a number of companies in which the size of option grants amounted to 7% of stockholder equity per year. I could not be convinced that Atilla the Hun managed to carry off that much in even his most lucrative raids. Such outsized grants are not only obscene, they are also potentially lethal to the companies involved. And when that happens, everyone loses.
Krugman argues that in the 1950’s and 1960’s corporate officers simply could not reap such huge gains from companies because public pressure prevented it. It was a changing attitude about the place corporations have in public life that changed the way corporations treated their boards and their lowest employees. The new attitude “greed is good” transformed what once might have been enlightened self interest into a pathological practice of pillage at the highest levels. ( See also what is K-Street. But that is another article. )
To the extent that the concern about American middle class is purely distributive, Krugman’s argument is pretty well made. The corollary is that if America is to have a vital middle class, it needs to have social policies that echo those of other nations that have vital middle classes.
- Public health care is one. Nations with middle classes have public health care. Nations without do not. End of story. Since health care bills are the leading cause of bankrupcy in the USA, it is clear that our failure in providing for public health care is costing us more than we recon in dollars and in sense. Americans could spend half as much on health care and get better outcomes with a public plan. And that, ironically, explains why such a plan is politically impossible - at least so long as campaigns run on dollars rather than issues. Figure it out for yourself.
- Vital unions led by trustworthy leaders is a second. If a first course in microeconomics fails to teach one that collective bargaining is a necessary part of paying labor what it is worth, a second course in the subject cannot fail. Labor is not always a differentiated input. And where it is not, it always trades for far less than it is worth. That it trades for less in a marginal sense is vital to the ability of a business to earn an ordinary profit. But when it does so in a gross sense that simply transfers huge amounts of wealth from workers to directors, the process threatens all of the societal goods that the institution is capable of generating.
- A social point of view that embraces a responsible, educated, industrious middle class is a third. That point of view would similarly pose some skepticism about how valuable a CEO might be - specifically whether it is a good deal for all stakeholders to pay one $210 million to quit the post. Things like that.
- A political point of view that we live in a common society and we have common interests. When we deny the existence of these common interests we do it at the peril of denying the funamental humanity of people with whom we share society. This tendency to deny common interests causes us to see all policy in terms of zero-sum games; but most policy is not a zero-sum game. Most policy decisions are about more than dividing a fixed-size pie. Some are about helping the piemakers make the pie. Some are about helping to make sure that once it has been divided, all get served. At least the crumbs. This is not a point Krugman makes, but I think it is a kind of vital counterpoint to the “hands-free” appraoach to government that got us here.
All of these are issues that repudiate the religious orthodoxy of laissez affaire economics, a religious orthodoxy, a faith that cannot be substantiated by fact, a belief that is based on assumptions that are violated for virtually every good and in virtually every economic exchange. Sometimes subtly, sometimes profoundly. It is both demonstrably wrong and demonstrably destructive. Blind faith in this orthodoxy has imperiled the American middle class as an institution, and democracy itself. And it is time to identify it as the culprit.
Krugman does not talk about laissez affaire economics. He does not work to root out a common philosophical idea that accounts for the sundry ill effects. He addresses the issue of the shrinking American middle class as if it were purely a distributive problem with a set of disparate observable causes. It is a solid and defensible stance. We must praise him for not saying more than he can be quite certain about. That is a sign of good academic training. But we wish that academics of his caliber would sometimes make informed guesses where such guesses would help quell ideas simultaneously more dangerous, more speculative, and more broadly held. We wish he had talked about the common source of those problems.
And we wish he had talked about another troubling aspect of the problem. The problem of the shrinking American middle class might be seen as more than just a distributive problem. It may be seen as a generative problem. Put it this way, “to what extent was the lifeboat problem with the Titanic one of distribution?” That ship simply did not have the number of lifeboats that would be needed if it were to sink. Similarly, we might ask, “to what extent would redistributing America’s wealth solve the economic problems of her citizens?” It may be that the growing problem of maldistribution is, itself a symtom of an even bigger and more profound problem. It is a symptom of an American system that fails to create wealth at a level consistent with the expectations of Americans. It is hard to write a more effective recipe for financial melt-down. Inflation follows hard on the heals of this problem.
Abusing metaphorical language further, to talk about the problem of wealth in America only in distributive terms is a little like getting in an argument with the dry cleaner over a button damaged by his reckless shirt-presser while some guy outside drives away with the idling Hummer. The distributive problem is real. But it may be just a small distraction compared to the really big problem. One doesn’t know until the argument is lost, or won, and one learns the Hummer is gone. In one interpretation of the metaphor the button was the pretext for a distraction. We doubt very much whether anyone would argue for a problem of distribution to distract us from other problems that arise from the same root cause. So if we push the metaphor far beyond the breaking point, it would be the war in Iraq that would be the broken button. Point is, if there were a fundamental meltdown in the US economy, the problem of distribution would seem irellevant even if it shared with the meltdown the same root cause.
Offshoring of manufacturing has cost America much, and it is not yet clear that we have finished paying. It is the productive industries that fundamentally make possible good pay in other areas. Fail to create excess wealth through effective manufacturing, and you must eventually fail to be successful in all of the ancillary services as well. (In this argument we take manufacturing to be production of goods for which there is necessarily a steady need of consumption: food, productive tools, vehicles, furnishings, entertainment, clothing, and so on.) In a fast-changing economy it is not practical to have manufacturing too far from engineering, or engineering too far from marketing, or accounting too far from any of these functions. All of these functions require external support functions. Move the manufacturing site and everyone else loses, too. It is not clear that we have seen the ultimate end to which disinvestment in America might lead. I doubt that we can claim to have done so before all our foreign debts are paid in full.
We can agree with laissez affaire economists that trade itself is very, very good. Also, finding more efficient means of production, on average, helps everyone. But it specifically hurts some people. China has proven to be a great success. For this we can be happy. But when it finally becomes time to pay the debt to China for our gross overconsumption, Americans will have to face the full reconning of accounts with the Chinese. It will not be pretty, especially if that day of reconning is coincident with a residential real estate correction - which we will talk about below.
The problem is that we have expectations forged of a successful people in an expanding manufacturing-driven economy, but we have outsourced many of the sources of that strength. We live on borrowed money and borrowed time. We suffer from a serious and growing gap between high expectations and low output. Do Americans corporately produce we consume? Not even close. The gap is filled by debt. Chinese and Japanese who spend half of what they earn save the rest. This they invest in US bonds. ( That’s right, according to an Economist article a year back, virtually all of the net saving of the world takes place in China and Japan and virtually of this excess gets spent by Americans. Ultimately, they save, we spend, we write IOU’s. One day they collect.) Let’s hope that when the time comes to pay, we will be willing, able, and happy to do so. But I am skeptical. To secure our debt, we re-mortgage our homes. We stand to lose more than laissez affaire capitalists might have led us to believe.
Dislocation Cure, or Similar Effects, Similar Causes
Krugman notes that the rise of the middle class in the US came with America’s recovery from the Great Depression. Laissez affaire economics - presumably by some other name - was partly to blame for the Depression. It was a great failure of institutions that was caused by an avalanche of debt: banks held margined positions in the equity markets. And when those markets went against their bets in a big way, they lost in a big way. Banks gambled with other peoples’ money and lost. People who had saved were busted. Businesses failed. Bread lines got long.
Krugman hopes that the conditions that caused the rise of the American middle class are not necessary to create its resurgence. I share his hope. But I am less sanguine about the prospect. While the economic conditions today are completely different in their particulars, they share many of the same generalities. The Republican Congress in the mid 1990’s reunited banks with other financial institutions. Many of these hold large positions in hedge funds. And hedge funds do magical and badly understood things with financial derivatives. In essence thay bet on the direction of the market just like speculators in the 1920’s did. And they make a lot of money on it, just like the speculators of the 1920’s did. And if really unusual things happened, huge hedge funds could fail in a really big way and do to institutions what Black Friday did to Banks and their depositors in the 1920’s.
Speculative bubbles always burst. It happened with tulips in Holland in the seventeenth century. It happened with equities in the 1920’s. It will happen with housing prices in twenty-first century America, at least on the coasts. By any measure they are overvalued by at least a factor of two. In some locations it may be a factor of four. Imagine that ten million people own homes whose trading price is an average of $400,000. Now, imagine that they wake up one day and find that those homes are worth $200,000. That is a collective loss of two quadrillion dollars. At $20 per hour that would amount to 100 billion hours of labor, 10,000 hours apiece. Or about five years - before taxes. Look at it another way: how long does one normally work in order to save five year’s wages? Twenty, maybe thirty years? About the length of a mortgage.
Frequently, corrections over-correct. And if that proved to be the case in the real-estate crash, then things could be much worse. Nor would it affect just ten million people. It might affect five times as many. The problem is so astronomically huge that it boggles the mind. It will take at least a full generation to recover. That will not be a happy generation, either. They will be working for a pittance to pay for goods we have already consumed.
The real estate crash may not ever happen. Or, it may have started. There have been a number of institutions that once lent to the sub-prime mortgage market who have gone out of business due to credit failures, mostly in California. Some of these failures are artifacts of shaky business practices. But those same practices once were lucrative; so by any measure the environment is more risky today.
Once the slide starts, the perception will be that real estate is not a bullet-proof investment, and that perception will drive the process even faster. Foreign investors will begin pulling money out of US investments. That will drive up the price of borrowing, raise interest rates, and further depress the nominal value of homes. At least half of the runup in price of homes over the last twenty-odd years has been due to falling interest rates. Between all these forces prices could fall by 50% or more. A real estate crash could drain a huge amount of liquidity out of the economy. In other words, there could be a big crunch. Experts would not talk about this because part of the effect is psychological. Fortunately the six people who read this are unlikely to single-handedly cause a real-estate collapse, so I don’t have to worry about varnishing the truth.
There are other problems looming that are at least as big; massive federal deficits, for instance. Or peak oil. Whether that is a problem now or twenty years hence, it will be a big problem because all that we came to assume as given since WWII has been made possible by oil. Everything. We must hope that peak oil’s pinch does not hit while we are trying to deal with a real estate collapse, else social order will be threatened in ways it never was during the Great Depression. At least then most people lived in small towns near farms. Today, even those who live in small towns may live far from farms. Then, the problem was simply financial and so were the fixes. With peak oil the problem is not a matter of defining who has what and the conditions of the trade, it is a fundamental problem of producing and transporting all material goods and services. If Americans were hit with it quickly and without really viable alternative energy plans, it would make a real-estate collapse look trivial by comparison.
These problems are hypothetical. Yet the more we discount them as real possibilities, the less hypothetical they must become. Both issues are problems of sustainability. Real estate prices cannot go up faster than wages indefinitely. Nor can one use an exhaustable resource indefinitely. In both cases there is an end to the game. And in both cases the longer one ignores and discounts this fundamental fact, the more painful must be the end. One of the pains of sanity - to expand on Salman Akhtar’s thesis about fundamentalism - is to accept that things that please us can end. If we are to act reasonably, sanely, as adults, we need accept this and plan for it. If we fail to do this, we will find the transition much more painful. And we will share culpability for the problems.
Either of these hypothetical events could precipitate a change that would save the middle class. But either could also place it far beyond the possibility of being saved. Krugman’s argument suggests that Americans learned the hard way last time around. I have been arguing for some time that it might take a catastrophe to change Americans this time around. So on this point we see things similarly. He is hopeful Americans can change without a major economic meltdown. I am less so.
Will it take a catastrophe to get us to look at the way we have been living, to question whether it is sensible, to question faulty assumptions, and to make changes that allow us to live in a society in which the notion of political equality is no longer strangled by gross economic inequality? I hope not.
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03.07.07
Posted in Social at 8:30 pm by steve
Wednesday Worry of the Week
It has come to my attention that there will be a Presidential election in 2008. The nearly two year long run-up to the event will tell us everything we never wanted to know about the process while carefully avoiding any discussion about issues that might affect voters. The good news is for those of you who might have been worried that with flagging interest in the failed Iraq war the press would begin taking on issues of real societal importance. You may relax and stop worrying. Government by distraction is working well as well as ever. We get treated to ever more clever analyses of how one candidate outflanks another, but we get no sense for how they intend to govern.
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03.06.07
Posted in Philosophy &c at 9:30 pm by steve
When they arrived at Easter Island ca 900 CE, the several families who would settle there found a pleasant, forested land. They brought with them several sorts of livestock, of which the chicken was the most prized. Inside a few centuries they had built a blossoming civilization rich with trade and arts. Testimony to their success are the hundreds of huge carved stone heads that stand erect near the coast gazing seaward as if to scare away invaders.
At the height of the civilization, Twenty thousand people lived on the island just a few miles in diameter. Then it happened: the last tree was cut Simultaneously, agriculture failed. Society collapsed. By the time Cook arrived in the seventeenth century, the population had fallen to perhaps as little as one tenth of its peak. And the people were underdeveloped and extremely nervous from persistent malnutrition and very real dangers of canibalism. Three centuries later the island is without trees. And it leaves the impression of being barren of life.
This is a brief synopsis of Jared Diamond’s story about Easter Island as found in his book Collapse . Easter Island is one of several failed civilizations presented in that excellent book. In it Diamond makes a number of remarkable observations. One is that soil fertility and fuel availability are inextricably linked. In most ages in most places, trees play role either as a souce of organic matter or of ash or of some other quality.
Soil fertility is a common issue in almost all of the collapse scenarios Diamond explores. Collapses inevitably relate to crop failures. And these are caused either by soil fertility problems or water problems.
Even today we manufacture nitrogenous fertilizers from petroleum. Our corn is grown in heavily fertilized soil to the extent that, according to Michael Pollan, 15% of America’s food energy derives directly from natural gas. There are few exceptions to the link between fuel and food: the Azteks developed a method for fertilizing corn that proved not to require trees. But that, too, ultimately led to their downfall: human sacrifice. This fact reminds us of Iraq and oil wars, and of the tortilla shortage in Mexico thanks to the use of American corn to make ethanol. Food and fuel are inextricably linked. One cannot think of one without the other.
Diamond makes a broader and more general point, one that Adam Smith also made, and one that is persistently denied by the most orthodox laissez affaire economists. The laws of supply and demand are descriptive, not prescriptive. There exist extractive commodities that have a finite supply. Smith devotes at least a chapter talking about several types of good whose supply is finite. To imagine that higher price always makes more available is to commit two simultaneous errors.
One error is to assume that this is true in the first place. Of things manufactured from exclusively from raw materials of which there is no limit in supply, it is true, perhaps. Consider glass which is made from sand, and clay pots which are made from clay. Clay and sand are, for practical purposes, limitless resources. But in both cases heat is required to create glass or fired ceramic. So fuel is required. The processes stop when there is no fuel.
A second error is to imagine that all people can afford the good at a higher cost. Or that if this not so, it is an irrelevant fact. When the good is a piece of jewelry or a new car, it is not such a problem. One can save and save and save. In the end, one will either be able to afford the jewelry or one will not. In the case of jewelry it will not matter much. But when the good is a slice of bread, that can be a problem. One can only afford to save for so long before gaining access to bread.
By most accounts, it was a general paucity of bread that drove Parisians to behave as they did during the French Revolution. Certainly there were other dissatisfactions; and certain people exploited weakneses of the government, but fundamentally the mood was set by lack of bread.
Similarly, on Easter Island everything broke down when the highland trees were gone. Crops failed, agriculture failed, there was not fuel to cook food. In the laissez affaire view of things, one would just go out and get trees from somewhere else. But Easter Island is two thousand miles from the next closest neighboring land. There was a time at which islanders could have theoretically chosen to “go get more” but by the time the tree population was indisputably in peril, there were no more large trees suitable for making dugouts. Once that was true, they were stuck.
So they were living in a closed system. Now, the laissez-affaire economist would say “not to worry” trees are extremely valuable. They are used in agriculture, building, cooking, and the arts. In short, the whole of the Easter Island economy is built on trees. If there is a shortage, the price will escalate, and more will be produced. Failing that, a substitute would be introduced. One might use stone for building, turf for burning, and so on.
But this idealization of the world fails when an entire culture is built on one extractive resource and that extractive resource fails. In such a case the assumption of “someone will make more” is false because nobody is making it in the first place. And the assumption of “use alternatives” is false because there are no suitable alternatives. Once the trees were gone, twenty thousand inhabitants would burn all that was left to burn in shrubs and grass in a few short weeks. All of the economic assumptions that would save one from a dire outcome prove to be false.
Not only do extractive resources fail, but productive resources can also fail when weather changes. In the same book, Diamond talks about the Chaco canyon people. The civilization thrived for some time in the American Southwest. They cultivated corn in multiple colonies. The colonies were far enough apart that the vagueries of local weather would predispose some corn patches to be productive while others failed. And they had an efficient means of redistributing corn to sustain this hit-or-miss method. Then there were a few years in which the system broke down. There was evidently a wide-ranging and persistent drought. The crops failed everywhere. People went hungry, the social system broke down. Cannibalism broke out. And inside a decade the whole civilization vanished from existence. Nothing was left but a few buildings, and some empty soup pots containing human bones.
In their case the resouce in short supply was water. Now, a modern laissez affaire economist would say that the same thing could not happen today because we would just go and get the water we needed. And if there were not enough fresh water, we would desalinate ocean water. This is a correct point of view, so long as one has the technology to do it. And the resources. But if energy were to become too dear, this would not prove to be something we can do.
In fact, with the current cost of resources - cheap as they are compared to what they are likely to be in three decades from now - and with the current state of society, we cannot even afford to distribute fresh water to most people in most nations of the earth. Most of the population of the earth, until very recently did not have reliable access to potable water. And even today billions still do not. I once lived in a land where women would walk half the morning with empty pots on their heads to a stream. There, they would fill them. Then they would walk the second half of the morning back home to their villages. The afternoon would be spend crushing grain into meal for that day’s porrage. Water this dear can only be used for cooking; not for irrigation or washing. And if our civilization were to run out of fuel, we will be doing the same thing, some of us.
The point of confusion for the laissez affaire economist arises from a rather extraordinary historical chain of events. Europe’s first ascendency in Greek and Roman times was fueled by the arrival of new agricultural methods to new frontiers - frontiers that had until relatively recently been covered in ice. These frontiers had extremely low populations compared to what they could support with agricultural methods.
It was these new methods, arriving on a resource-rich frontier that created western civilization as we know it in Greece, perhaps three millennia ago. One can trace the “center of gravity” of this new frontier in an arc across the West: Athens, Rome, Madrid, Paris, London, New York.
Europe’s second ascendency was fueled by the discovery of the New World. The Americas proved to be a vast source of all kinds of resources: foodstuffs like maize, peppers, squash, and tomatoes; timber, minerals, and fertile land. All one needed to do was invest in their extraction. The population in the New World has still some way to go before it reaches an equilibrium level with its environment, and while that fact is true, there exist excess exploitable resources. The laissez affaire assumptions will hold some measure of validity for many kinds of economic problems, while we adapt to new frontiers. But we must remember that many western assumptions about economics and politics derive from the assumption of a shifting frontier and a vast source of untapped resources.
These excess exploitable resources allow laissez affaire economists to posit that the laws of supply and demand prove that a real shortage of anything cannot exist; for so long as there is a potentially productive frontier whose resources remain untapped, all that is required to get those resources is the capital investment. Once, however, there exist no slack resources, all bets are off. One cannot trade from one exhausted resource to a slighly more expensive unexhausted one.
The trick is to spot the potential resource while one still has resources that would be necessary to exploit it. Had the Easter Islanders somehow invented galleons with sails they might have harvested timber in South America and taken it to the Easter Islands. But once the last tree had been chopped down, there was no hope of doing this. Had they anticipated their problems, maybe they would have been able to react. Maybe not. The woodwork to create galleons would have required iron tools which they did not have.
Easter Island is the proof of what happens when we blithely live on the bounty of extracted resources, ignoring the possibility of their exhaustion. When its settlers arrived, the land was nothing but frontier, as the New World was to the Europeans. It looked rich in resources, as did the New World to the Europeans. And for some time it proved to be so, as is the New World to Europeans. But man’s reproductive capacities outstripped the regenerative capacities of Easter Island’s principle resources. And in the end society collapsed. The same is inevitably true for us so long as we operate under the same laissez affaire assumptions under which the Easter Islanders and the Chaco Canyon inhabitants did.
In the end, when there is no more of a resource, price is irrellevant. The laws of supply and demand are academic. You can give me a thousand tons of gold boullion or point a rifle at my head and if I have no food whatsoever, I will not be able to give it to you.
Diamond makes another point. Societies that have managed to take steps to forestall collapse have not done so using “the invisible hand.” Rather, they have done so using the collective powers of the society. He compares Haiti to the Dominican Republic. They share a common Caribbean island, yet the standard of living and the livability of the environment in the latter nation are both materially higher than those in the former. And at the time of the French Revolution, Haiti was a rich land; The Dominican Republic a poor one. So what happened?
At the risk of oversimplifying Diamond’s analysis, one important factor was that under one or two “strong-man” governments around the middle of the twentieth century in the Dominican Republic turned major portions of the island into federal parks, protected areas where logging and other extractive activities were curtailed. It was government intervention that made the difference.
Similarly, in Iceland the soil proved more fragile in the face of cultivation than the land’s settlers imagined. That society succeeded, in part, by instituting sound land management practices. A very successful fishing industry has helped as well. But one wonders to what extent that practice trades an exhausted frontier for one headed for collapse.
Diamond’s point is that the earth, like Easter island, is not near some other major and easily exploitable frontier. This means that when we overrun the resources we have, collapse is inevitable. The laws of supply and demand do not supply what does not exist. They only make available slack resources at an elevated price. We are rapidly running through those slack resources; and in five decade’s time even the coal we have will deliver a fraction of the heat we extracted once from high quality coal. Laissez affaire economists have insisted that we ignore the problem. Either it is due to a lack of imagination, or it is due to the worry that development of alternatives to fossil fuels might threaten the pocketbooks of a few very powerful capitalists. Mostly we imagine it to be the former.
Biofuels simply are not capable of taking up the slack; we consume too much energy. Nor can we be sure that solar is a positive factor in terms of power production. There are not many alternatives left: wind power and nuclear power. So long as we have power, we can hope to produce some of what we need. When we run out of power, all bets are off.
We can either choose to confront issues of limited resources now or we can live by the laissez affaire orthodoxy that prevailed in the failed cultures of Diamond’s book. In that case we and wait until serious shortages manifest themselves before we do anything. If we behave as the Easter Islanders and the Chaco Canyon dwellers we risk waiting until the fabric of society shreds and food can only by had by means of cannibalism.
The Chaco canyon people left a tasty recipe for a soup derived from the brains of laissez affaire economists and dried herbs, I am told. And if I am not mistaken, such a recipe would employ a slack resource.
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Note: Slack resource here is used in the sense it is used in linear programming; an available resource not being deployed in some currently optimal solution. A slack resource is usually one that is not being used because using it would raise the net cost of some economic activity, but in the absence of cheaper alternatives it can be used for essentially the same purpose as a cheaper resource.
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