Libertarianoid

John Donne

2012-02-20T09:40:00.003-08:00

Death, Be Not Proud
by John Donne (1610)

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

On Writing

2012-02-16T01:04:00.003-08:00

For me, at least, writing consists very largely of exploring intuition. A character is really the sense of a character, embodied, attired, and given voice as he or she seems to require. Where does this creature come from? From watching, I suppose. From reading emotional significance in gestures and inflections, as we all do all the time. These moments of intuitive recognition float free from their particular occasions and recombine themselves into nonexistent people the writer and, if all goes well, the reader feel they know.

There is a great difference, in fiction and in life, between knowing someone and knowing about someone. When a writer knows about his character, he is writing for plot. When he knows his character, he is writing to explore, to feel reality on a set of nerves somehow not quite his own. Words like “sympathy,” “empathy,” and “compassion” are overworked and overcharged—there is no word for the experience of seeing an embrace at a subway stop or hearing an argument at the next table in a restaurant. Every such instant has its own emotional coloration, which memory retains or heightens, and so the most sidelong, unintended moment becomes a part of what we have seen of the world. Then, I suppose, these moments, as they have seemed to us, constellate themselves into something a little like a spirit, a little like a human presence in its mystery and distinctiveness.

Two questions I can’t really answer about fiction are (1) where it comes from, and (2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute. There is a tendency, considered highly rational, to reason from a narrow set of interests, say survival and procreation, which are supposed to govern our lives, and then to treat everything that does not fit this model as anomalous clutter, extraneous to what we are and probably best done without. But all we really know about what we are is what we do. There is a tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and to try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell.

The advice I give my students is the same advice I give myself—forget definition, forget assumption, watch. We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small. No physicist would dispute this, though he or she might be less ready than I am to have recourse to the old language and call reality miraculous. By my lights, fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true. Why is it possible to speak of fiction as true or false? I have no idea. But if a time comes when I seem not to be making the distinction with some degree of reliability in my own work, I hope someone will be kind enough to let me know.

When I write fiction, I suppose my attempt is to simulate the integrative work of a mind perceiving and reflecting, drawing upon culture, memory, conscience, belief or assumption, circumstance, fear, and desire—a mind shaping the moment of experience and response and then reshaping them both as narrative, holding one thought against another for the effect of affinity or contrast, evaluating and rationalizing, feeling compassion, taking offense. These things do happen simultaneously, after all. None of them is active by itself, and none of them is determinative, because there is that mysterious thing the cognitive scientists call self-awareness, the human ability to consider and appraise one’s own thoughts. I suspect this self-awareness is what people used to call the soul.

--Marilynne Robinson

Thomas Paine Quote

2012-02-14T12:08:00.000-08:00

[I]t is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

On Bertrand Russell

2012-02-12T16:23:00.000-08:00

"In this bleak spring [of 1918], Bertrand Russell finally joined those Britons in prison. As their excuse, authorities seized on a few sentences in an article in the No-Conscription Fellowship's Tribunal, where Russell predicted that the American troops now starting to arrive in England and France might be used as strikebreakers, "an occupation to which the American Army is accustomed when at home." In court, the prosecutor claimed that this passage would have a "diabolical effect" and interfere with relations between Britain and a key ally. "A very despicable offence," thundered the judge, and sentenced Russell to six months."

From the book: To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918.

This is not what I remember, which was that he was jailed for distributing some pamphlets against the war. Maybe that is what got him fired from Cambridge.

Chomsky Quote

2012-02-11T03:27:00.000-08:00

"My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century." -Noam Chomsky

Funny Kafka

2012-02-10T01:42:00.001-08:00

A little fable, by Kafka.

"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."

"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

Funny Kafka

2012-02-09T05:54:00.000-08:00

"There is hope, but not for us." -Kafka

Russell's Epilogue to the first part of his autobiography

2012-02-07T13:25:00.000-08:00

My personal life since I returned from China has been happy and peaceful. I have derived from my children at least as much instinctive satisfaction as I anticipated, and have in the main regulated my life with reference to them. But while my personal life has been satisfying, my impersonal outlook has become increasingly sombre, and I have found it more and more difficult to believe that the hopes which I formerly cherished will be realised in any measurable future. I have endeavoured, by concerning myself with the education of my children and with making money for their benefit, to shut out from my thoughts the impersonal despairs which tend to settle upon me.

Ever since puberty I have believed in the value of two things: kindness and clear thinking. At first these two remained more or less distinct; when I felt triumphant I believed most in clear thinking, and in the opposite mood I believed most in kindness. Gradually, the two have come more and more together in my feelings. I find that much unclear thought exists as an excuse for cruelty, and that much cruelty is prompted by superstitious beliefs. The War made me vividly aware of the cruelty in human nature, but I hoped for a reaction when the War was over. Russia made me feel that little was to be hoped from revolt against existing governments in the way of an increase of kindness in the world, except possibly in regard to children. The cruelty to children involved in conventional methods of education is appalling, and I have been amazed at the horror which is felt against those who propose a kinder system.

As a patriot I am depressed by the downfall of England, as yet only partial, but likely to be far more complete before long. The history of England for the last four hundred years is in my blood, and I should have wished to hand on to my son the tradition of public spirit which has in the past been valuable. In the world that I foresee there will be no place for this tradition, and he will be lucky if he escapes with his life. The feeling of impending doom gives a kind of futility to all activities whose field is in England.

In the world at large, if civilisation survives, I foresee the domination of either America or Russia, and in either case of a system where a tight organisation subjects the individual to the State so completely that splendid individuals will be no longer possible.

And what of philosophy? The best years of my life were given to the Principles of Mathematics, in the hope of finding somewhere some certain knowledge. The whole of this effort, in spite of three big volumes, ended inwardly in doubt and bewilderment. As regards metaphysics, when, under the influence of Moore, I first threw off the belief in German idealism, I experienced the delight of believing that the sensible world is real. Bit by bit, chiefly under the influence of physics, this delight has faded, and I have been driven to a position not unlike that of Berkeley, without his God and his Anglican complacency.

When I survey my life, it seems to me to be a useless one, devoted to impossible ideals. I have not found in the post-war world any attainable ideals to replace those which I have come to think unattainable. So far as the things I have cared for are concerned, the world seems to me to be entering upon a period of darkness. When Rome fell, St Augustine, a Bolshevik of the period, could console himself with a new hope, but my outlook upon my own time is less like his than like that of the unfortunate Pagan philosophers of the time of Justinian, whom Gibbon describes as seeking asylum in Persia, but so disgusted by what they saw there that they returned to Athens, in spite of the Christian bigotry which forbade them to teach. Even they were more fortunate than I am in one respect, for they had an intellectual faith which remained firm. They entertained no doubt as to the greatness of Plato. For my part, I find in the most modern thought a corrosive solvent of the great systems of even the recent past, and I do not believe that the constructive efforts of present-day philosophers and men of science have anything approaching the validity that attaches to their destructive criticism.

My activities continue from force of habit, and in the company of others I forget the despair which underlies my daily pursuits and pleasure. But when I am alone and idle, I cannot conceal for myself that my life had no purpose, and that I know of no new purpose to which to devote my remaining years. I find myself involved in a vast mist of solitude both emotional and metaphysical, from which I can find no issue.

Bertrand Russell (1931)

Chomsky on Academics

2012-02-06T03:13:00.000-08:00

From Znet ChomskyChat forum:

Reply from NC, to EC, on scientific education and other matters.

First question was personal: why did I think about "leaving school and pursuing independent research"? Personal history has lots of accidents, so I don't think it is worth going into details. In brief, I entered college at 16 with great expectations -- the catalogue looked fascinating. These were quickly destroyed, just about every time a took a course. A year later I was thinking of quitting, and in a certain sense did: I starting taking grad courses in a rather exotic way and never really had a college or graduate education. When I had to enter the job market about 10 years later, I had no professional qualifications or particular interest in academic life, though there was work I was doing that I wanted to pursue. Ended up in the academic world by other flukes.

Second: Lakatos. The quote you give from an appendix to his 1976 book is to the point, and contrary to what I said (and believe) his actual opinion on the matter is. I'd frankly take it with a grain of salt. Also, notice that he doesn't entirely address the question we were discussing, which was comparative (science-math vs. other domains). But I think the quote you cite is wrong about "present mathematical and scientific education," and I also think he would have agreed that it is not to be taken too literally. It's worth looking at the context to try to figure out what he was trying to convey. One can find many comments by people I at least would take more seriously than Lakatos that are intended to shock, not to be taken literally. E.g., Ed Herman recently quoted a nice comment by Joan Robinson saying that the function of economists is "not to tell us what to do, but show why what were are doing anyway is in accord with proper principles." We understand the point she is making, a good one, but she surely did not intend the statement to be taken literally (I knew her, and am pretty confident about that). One has to look at the context and the purpose.

In Lakatos's case, if you are interested in following it up, you might want to have a look at his background, which I know of only from brief discussions with him about 30 years ago. According to what he told me, he had been a leading Stalinist hack in Hungary (he boasted, rightly or wrongly, of having hounded Lukacs), and then when he came to England became a camp follower of Popper (one of the most authoritarian figures I've ever run into), later a critic. At the time I met him, he described himself as a "friendly fascist," or something like that; seemed accurate, judging by his behavior and other comments. His own scientific education, I presume, was in central Europe; higher education in continental Europe (including science and math) is far more authoritarian and autocratic than in the Anglo-American tradition (Hungary in his days was presumably still worse). Bear in mind that this is mostly second-hand; I never was interested enough to check out his story. But if it's anywhere near accurate, one might want to ask whether he was describing his own background or the way science and math were taught at the graduate level at U. London, Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, MIT, etc. I'd guess the former.

On "scientific communities" and their resistance to new ideas, you don't have to convince me. That's why my whole professional life has been at MIT, not a university that had any tradition in the various fields in which I work. Or to take a non-personal case I've just come across, one topic that I've had some interest in over the years is insect communication, particularly honey bees, which according to the standard literature and leading authorities in the field have a quite remarkable communication system. I've often cited examples from this work. Just recently discovered that the whole story may be false. One insect biologist, who is quite respected in the field, has been doing careful studies for years that appear to undermine the orthodoxy completely, and claims that although his papers are published in technical journals, he has had a terrible time breaking through the barriers. He's written about it, attributing it (if I understand him) to the enthusiasm for descriptive ethology in the '60s. I'm going to look into it further when I have a chance, because I happen to have a special interest in the topic. I don't feel competent to evaluate the record, but it's not unfamiliar. And though this is not core "hard science," one can find similar cases there as well, some of them quite familiar (consider Mendel, for example).

But this should not blind us to what is obvious even from looking at scientific journals, and surely in graduate studies. It's taken for granted that the best ideas and best work will often be done by young people, and they are encouraged to challenge and to question. It's not a yes-or-no matter, but there are striking differences in this regard between the general culture of the sciences and the humanities. And for understandable reasons, I think.

I'm sorry you found "undergraduate and beginning graduate study in the US...very disappointing." They can certainly be. My own personal experience was quite similar to yours, as briefly mentioned, except that I effectively "dropped out" as an undergraduate and never followed any conventional academic program afterwards. Of course, I can't comment on your personal experience, but it sounds as though it was much like mine -- which is why I went off on a highly unconventional course, outside of any existing professional/academic framework. True, I was lucky; most people aren't. I got away with it largely by accident, and accidents don't generalize. On the other hand, within the mainstream of science and math, particularly at the graduate level, there are lots of such opportunities. They don't come automatically, and one sometimes has to work to find and use them. But they are there, and the US has the best record in the world in this regard, to my knowledge (and not a little experience).

The personal story you report seems ambiguous to me. You tell about "a certain bright postdoc who had a PhD in Quantum Field Theory and got interested in an alternative approach to the subject" but "could not find a job because the few people, who were interested in his research, could not procure enough funds to employ him," so he switched to somethng else and "does his real research as a holiday hobby." That's a familiar story to me, because it is my own story (though it wasn't quantum field theory, and began in undergraduate years). The first book I wrote, in 1955, was an 800-page manuscript that my wife and I ran off for a few friends on a hectograph machine (technology long gone, fortunately). I did submit it to MIT press, but it was returned with comments from professional readers that they had no idea what it was about, so the press turned it down. I didn't submit it elsewhere. I then proceeded much as your friend did, funded by research programs that I regarded as idiotic (and told the director of the lab so when he hired me), and fulfilling my teaching responsibilities with courses for grad students on how to fake their way through doctoral language exams -- very inspiring. And I did what interested me on the side. The manuscript, incidentally, was published in part 20 years later, by then mostly superseded. But my reaction was different from yours. I though that MIT press was right to turn down the ms, and that funding agencies were right in not supporting the work I wanted to do. The reason was just the one the readers of the ms gave, and that you report in the case of your friend. Professionals felt that the work didn't make any sense, so why should it be published and funded? I agreed with them: from their perspective, it made no sense, so their conclusions (and the judgment of the press, and the professional journals too) seemed to me correct. Fortunately, I was at a university based on science, and was able to exploit the opportunities that are there in an intellectual culture that is supportive of challenge and innovation. Years later, it became a recognized field.

Incidentally, your friend, as you describe his situation, was much better off than I was in one important respect. You say that there were a few (I presume senior) faculty who were interested in his research as a graduate student, but couldn't get funding for it. In my case, there were no senior faculty (in anything remotely like my field; there were a few mathematicians and others) who were interested in what I was doing or saw any point in it, and not many more in later years. No one even thought of trying to seek funding (nor did I). I don't believe any senior faculty in my field ever looked at the ms, or the chapter I handed in for a Phd (which incidentally made little sense even if one took any of this work seriously, since it was chapter 8 -- if I recall -- and presupposed what came before).

In short, the story you describe is very familiar to me, from my own life in this case, but at the time I drew different conclusions from the story, and still do. Again, I thought the reaction of the MIT press, the professional readers, senior faculty uniformly, etc., was not unreasonable: it made no sense at all from their perspective. It's hard to determine what is "creativity that should be protected," and what is a hopeless dead end. Or worse: you should see the manuscripts that I am sent by people all over the world, complaining that they can't break through establishment barriers; maybe some of them are right, but I'm confident that -- at least where I have any understanding -- most of them are not. Resources aren't infinite, and choices have to be made. Some turn out right, some wrong. What's unusual in the academic world about the sciences and math is that this is pretty much understood, at least in more serious circles, and that efforts are made to encourage and stimulate challenge and creativity, because that's how the fields remain alive. Simply imagine teaching a grad course the way you did 10 years ago, in these areas. And everyone knows that the changes have largely come from young people.

So while I think I understand your story (very well, if I have it right), it seems to me that one might draw different conclusions from it.

About Einstein's statement, I'd really suggest considerable skepticism. He was much given to aphorisms. Like Joan Robinson's statement quoted above, there is some truth to what he says in this case -- particularly in the continental European context. But despite mythology, he had quite a good "modern education," it didn't destroy his "scientific curiosity," and he had no problem having his work published and instantly recognized. That aside, what exactly does it mean to have "liberty" in education? Does it mean that all the manuscripts that reach me should be published, funded, the authors given professorships, etc.? It's a finite world; we can't avoid choices. Slogans are easy, choices harder.

Noam Chomsky

Returns on Research

2012-02-05T14:20:00.000-08:00

The Research Bust, by Mark Bauerlein.

In my hand I have a hefty article on a canonical English poet, published 10 years ago in a distinguished journal. It runs for 21 pages and has 31 footnotes, with extensive references to philosophy and art. The article is learned, wide-ranging, and conversant with scholarship on the poet and theoretical currents in literary studies. The argument is dense, the analysis acute, on its face a worthy illustration of academic study deserving broad notice and integration into subsequent research in the field.

That reception doesn't seem to have happened. When, on May 25, I typed the title into Google Scholar, only nine citations of the original article showed up. Of those nine, six of them make only perfunctory nods in a footnote, along the lines of "Recent examples include ... " and "For a recent essay on the subject, see. ... " The other three engage with the essay more substantively, but not by much, inserting in their text merely two or three sentences on the original essay. Additionally, in books on the English poet published from 2004 to 2011 that don't show up on Google Scholar (the search engine picks up most major humanities journals but is sketchy on books), the original article receives not a single citation.

That adds up to but a handful of sentences of commentary on the original article by other scholars in the 10 years after its publication. On the input side, we have 100-plus hours of hard work by a skilled academic, plus the money the university paid the professor to conduct the research. On the impact side, we can be sure of only a few scholars who incorporated it into their work. The quality is high, the professionalism obvious, but the reception of the article hasn't come close to matching the time and energy and talent it took to create it.

Unfortunately, this is not a singular instance. However much they certify their authors as professionals and win them jobs and tenure, essays and books of high scholarly merit in literary studies suffer the same inattention all the time. Why? Because after four decades of mountainous publication, literary studies has reached a saturation point, the cascade of research having exhausted most of the subfields and overwhelmed the capacity of individuals to absorb the annual output. Who can read all of the 80 items of scholarship that are published on George Eliot each year? After 5,000 studies of Melville since 1960, what can the 5,001st say that will have anything but a microscopic audience of interested readers?

To test that supposition, I devised a study of literary research in four English departments at public universities—the University of Georgia, the University at Buffalo, the University of Vermont, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—collecting data on salaries, books and articles published, and the reception of those works. The findings:

Those universities pay regular English faculty, on average, around $25,000 a year to produce research. According to the faculty handbooks, although universities don't like to set explicit proportions, research counts as at least one-third of professors' duties, and we may calculate one-third of their salaries as research pay. This figure does not include sabbaticals, travel funds, and internal grants, not to mention benefits, making the one-third formula a conservative estimate.
Professors in those departments respond diligently, producing ample numbers of books and articles in recent years. At Georgia, from 2004 to 2009, current faculty members produced 22 authored books, 15 edited books, and 200 research essays. The award of tenure didn't produce any drop-off in publication, either. Senior professors continue their inquiries, making their departments consistently relevant and industrious research centers.
Finally, I calculated the impact of those publications by using Google Scholar and my own review of books published in specific areas to count citations. Here the impressive investment and productivity appear in sobering context. Of 13 research articles published by current SUNY-Buffalo professors in 2004, 11 of them received zero to two citations, one had five, one 12. Of 23 articles by Georgia professors in 2004, 16 received zero to two citations, four of them three to six, one eight, one 11, and one 16.

Books performed better, but not enough when we consider how much more labor goes into a monograph. A 2000 book on Gerard Manley Hopkins collected four citations in eight relevant books on the poet published from 2007 to 2010. A 2003 book on Thomas Hardy garnered one citation in 16 relevant books published from 2007 to 2010. Of eight books published by Vermont professors from 2002 to 2005, four of them received zero to 10 citations in subsequent essays, and four received 11 to 20 (four of the top five were studies in film).

There are, of course, some breakout items. One book by an Illinois professor collected 82 citations in essays, another one 57. But in assessing the system, calculating its full costs and impact, we shouldn't let the few instances of abundant notice eclipse the others. If a department produces six books in one year, each one the product of four years of labor by each author, and only one of them attracts significant attention, we should set that one book on the benefit side and 24 years of labor on the cost side. The unfortunate conclusion is that the overall impact of literary research doesn't come close to justifying the money and effort that goes into it.

Of course, there are several immediate objections to these findings:

Research makes professors better teachers and colleagues. Agreed, but not at the current pace. We want teachers to be engaged in inquiry, but we don't need them to publish a book and six articles before we give them tenure. We shouldn't set a publication schedule that turns them into nervous, isolated beings who end up regarding an inquisitive student in office hours as an infringement. Let's allow 10 years for a book, and let's tenure people for three strong essays. The rush to print makes them worse teachers and colleagues.

So some works get overlooked—so what? We need lots of research activity to produce those few works of significance. Agreed, but how much, and at what cost? If a professor who makes $75,000 a year spends five years on a book on Charles Dickens (which sold 43 copies to individuals and 250 copies to libraries, the library copies averaging only two checkouts in the six years after its publication), the university paid $125,000 for its production. Certainly that money could have gone toward a more effective appreciation of that professor's expertise and talent. We can no longer pretend, too, that studies of Emily Dickinson are as needed today, after three decades have produced 2,007 items on the poet, as they were in 1965, when the previous three decades had produced only 233.

Google Scholar and citation counts are hardly the best way to examine humanities research. Yes, these are blunt, partial instruments, and a full assessment requires qualitative judgments. But they do initiate a process that is necessary at a time of scarce resources. With English and foreign languages having lost more than half of their share of undergraduate degrees in recent times, we cannot devote our energies to projects of little consequence. In 1988, when I left graduate school, writing a book stood tall as the most effective way of promoting English. Citation counts explode that pretense and point professors toward better advocacy of their fields, like organizing undergraduate reading groups.

People offering these objections are wrong not on principle, but on reality. Yes, research is an intellectual good, and yes, we shouldn't reduce our measures to bean counting. But we can no longer ignore the costs of supporting research—financial costs (salaries, sabbaticals, grants, travel; the cost to libraries to buy and store material, to scholarly presses to evaluate, produce, and market it; and to peers to review it), opportunity costs (not mentoring undergraduates, not pushing foreign languages in general-education requirements, etc.), and human costs (asking smart, conscientious people to labor their lives away on unappreciated things).

The research identity is a powerful allure, flattering people that they have cutting-edge brilliance. Few of them readily trade the graduate seminar for the composition classroom. But we have reached the point at which the commitment to research at the current level actually damages the humanities, turning the human capital of the discipline toward ineffectual toil. More books and articles don't expand the audience for literary studies. A spurt of publications in a department does not attract more sophomores to the major, nor does it make the dean add another tenure-track line, nor does it urge a curriculum committee to add another English course to the general requirements. All it does is "author-ize" the producers.

Deep down, everybody knows this, but nobody wants to take the first step in reducing the demand. It's like a prisoner's dilemma. People at the University of X worry that if they say, "We no longer require a book for tenure," their peers at the Universities of Y and Z will use it against them: "Look at X, they're lowering their standards." The time has come, however, for departments firmly to declare the counterpoint: "No! We ask for less because we judge on quality, not quantity. We are raising standards, not lowering them."

Sheer output is a pretense ready to be exploded, but still, it will take departments of the highest prestige to set a different standard, along with the Modern Language Association, whose recent and current leadership has recognized the problem but can go further in developing explicit quantity recommendations. Those leaders may find a grateful constituency among the professoriate, none of whom favor the current system.

Deans and department heads always fear faculty reaction, but if they cast their policy changes as making faculty lives and labors better, less wasteful, and more meaningful, 20 years from now we may look back upon the research years of literary studies, 1970 to 2010, as a remarkable epoch that arose, evolved, and waned as has every other cultural movement over time.

Louis CK

2012-02-05T02:39:00.000-08:00

Louis CK released his December 2011 standup comedy routine via his website with the following intelligent note:

To those who might wish to "torrent" this video: look, I don't really get the whole "torrent" thing. I don't know enough about it to judge either way. But I'd just like you to consider this: I made this video extremely easy to use against well-informed advice. I was told that it would be easier to torrent the way I made it, but I chose to do it this way anyway, because I want it to be easy for people to watch and enjoy this video in any way they want without "corporate" restrictions.

Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I'm just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me. So, please help me keep this being a good idea. I can't stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.

Sincerely,
Louis C.K.

On Chomsky

2012-02-03T08:03:00.000-08:00

In response to:

A Special Supplement: The Responsibility of Intellectuals from the February 23, 1967 issue

To the Editors:

I would like to congratulate The New York Review on its publication [Feb. 23] of the extraordinary article by Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” Chomsky’s morally impassioned and powerfully argued denunciation of American aggression in Vietnam and throughout the world is the most moving political document I have read since the death of Leon Trotsky. It is inspiring to see a brilliant scientist risk his prestige, his access to lucrative government grants, and his reputation for Olympian objectivity by taking a clearcut, no-holds-barred, adversary position on the burning moral-political issue of the day, and by castigating the complacent mythology of “specialized expertise” under which many academic intellectuals shrug off the crimes committed by their government, only provided they are not naked enough (e.g., the Dominican intervention) to defy the most accomplished casuistry.

It will be said that Chomsky’s account of American foreign policy is drawn in black and white, and that politics is in reality a spectrum of shades of gray. And this objection would be sound, if Chomsky were writing as a detached observer on Mars. Sure, Viet Cong terrorists have murdered, mutilated, and intimidated their opposition. Certainly, Red China has been far more hysterically aggressive than Chomsky admits (so much as to have frightened their Communist allies, as well as half their own population). But I salute Chomsky for not caring to appear fair to the facts on both sides. For the facts are known well enough by now. It is the moral evaluation of our foreign policy and the decision as to what we are going to do about it that is now in order. At precisely this moment we have the best, perhaps the only, chance to stop the senseless slaughter in Vietnam and achieve a détente with the Communist nations. Why doesn’t President Johnson stop the bombing of North Vietnam, as he promised to do, if only he would receive some sign—when everyone knows he has received all sorts of frantic signs? I hope Chomsky’s indignation will prove infectious, and that he will have convinced many of his fellow scientists that judgments of right and wrong need not and should not be left to technical experts on geopolitics or the theory of thermonuclear games.

Raziel Abelson
Chairman
Department of Philosophy
New York University

Mark Twain

2012-02-01T02:59:00.000-08:00

The essay "Corn-pone Opinions":

FIFTY YEARS AGO, when I was a boy of fifteen and helping to inhabit a Missourian village on the banks of the Mississippi, I had a friend whose society was very dear to me because I was forbidden by my mother to partake of it. He was a gay and impudent and satirical and delightful young black man -a slave -who daily preached sermons from the top of his master's woodpile, with me for sole audience. He imitated the pulpit style of the several clergymen of the village, and did it well, and with fine passion and energy. To me he was a wonder. I believed he was the greatest orator in the United States and would some day be heard from. But it did not happen; in the distribution of rewards he was overlooked. It is the way, in this world.

He interrupted his preaching, now and then, to saw a stick of wood; but the sawing was a pretense -he did it with his mouth; exactly imitating the sound the bucksaw makes in shrieking its way through the wood. But it served its purpose; it kept his master from coming out to see how the work was getting along. I listened to the sermons from the open window of a lumber room at the back of the house. One of his texts was this:

"You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is."

I can never forget it. It was deeply impressed upon me. By my mother. Not upon my memory, but elsewhere. She had slipped in upon me while I was absorbed and not watching. The black philosopher's idea was that a man is not independent, and cannot afford views which might interfere with his bread and butter. If he would prosper, he must train with the majority; in matters of large moment, like politics and religion, he must think and feel with the bulk of his neighbors, or suffer damage in his social standing and in his business prosperities. He must restrict himself to corn-pone opinions -- at least on the surface. He must get his opinions from other people; he must reason out none for himself; he must have no first-hand views.

I think Jerry was right, in the main, but I think he did not go far enough.

1. It was his idea that a man conforms to the majority view of his locality by calculation and intention. This happens, but I think it is not the rule.

2. It was his idea that there is such a thing as a first-hand opinion; an original opinion; an opinion which is coldly reasoned out in a man's head, by a searching analysis of the facts involved, with the heart unconsulted, and the jury room closed against outside influences. It may be that such an opinion has been born somewhere, at some time or other, but I suppose it got away before they could catch it and stuff it and put it in the museum.

I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing -- if it has indeed ever existed.

A new thing in costume appears -- the flaring hoopskirt, for example -- and the passers-by are shocked, and the irreverent laugh. Six months later everybody is reconciled; the fashion has established itself; it is admired, now, and no one laughs. Public opinion resented it before, public opinion accepts it now, and is happy in it. Why? Was the resentment reasoned out? Was the acceptance reasoned out? No. The instinct that moves to conformity did the work. It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval. We all have to bow to that; there are no exceptions. Even the woman who refuses from first to last to wear the hoop skirt comes under that law and is its slave; she could not wear the skirt and have her own approval; and that she must have, she cannot help herself. But as a rule our self-approval has its source in but one place and not elsewhere -- the approval of other people. A person of vast consequences can introduce any kind of novelty in dress and the general world will presently adopt it -- moved to do it, in the first place, by the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority, and in the second place by the human instinct to train with the multitude and have its approval. An empress introduced the hoopskirt, and we know the result. A nobody introduced the bloomer, and we know the result. If Eve should come again, in her ripe renown, and reintroduce her quaint styles -- well, we know what would happen. And we should be cruelly embarrassed, along at first.

The hoopskirt runs its course and disappears. Nobody reasons about it. One woman abandons the fashion; her neighbor notices this and follows her lead; this influences the next woman; and so on and so on, and presently the skirt has vanished out of the world, no one knows how nor why, nor cares, for that matter. It will come again, by and by and in due course will go again.

Twenty-five years ago, in England, six or eight wine glasses stood grouped by each person's plate at a dinner party, and they were used, not left idle and empty; to-day there are but three or four in the group, and the average guest sparingly uses about two of them. We have not adopted this new fashion yet, but we shall do it presently. We shall not think it out; we shall merely conform, and let it go at that. We get our notions and habits and opinions from outside influences; we do not have to study them out.

Our table manners, and company manners, and street manners change from time to time, but the changes are not reasoned out; we merely notice and conform. We are creatures of outside influences; as a rule we do not think, we only imitate. We cannot invent standards that will stick; what we mistake for standards are only fashions, and perishable. We may continue to admire them, but we drop the use of them. We notice this in literature. Shakespeare is a standard, and fifty years ago we used to write tragedies which we couldn't tell from -- from somebody else's; but we don't do it any more, now. Our prose standard, three quarters of a century ago, was ornate and diffuse; some authority or other changed it in the direction of compactness and simplicity, and conformity followed, without argument. The historical novel starts up suddenly, and sweeps the land. Everybody writes one, and the nation is glad. We had historical novels before; but nobody read them, and the rest of us conformed -- without reasoning it out. We are conforming in the other way, now, because it is another case of everybody.

The outside influences are always pouring in upon us, and we are always obeying their orders and accepting their verdicts. The Smiths like the new play; the Joneses go to see it, and they copy the Smith verdict. Morals, religions, politics, get their following from surrounding influences and atmospheres, almost entirely; not from study, not from thinking. A man must and will have his own approval first of all, in each and every moment and circumstance of his life -- even if he must repent of a self-approved act the moment after its commission, in order to get his self-approval again: but, speaking in general terms, a man's self-approval in the large concerns of life has its source in the approval of the peoples about him, and not in a searching personal examination of the matter. Mohammedans are Mohammedans because they are born and reared among that sect, not because they have thought it out and can furnish sound reasons for being Mohammedans; we know why Catholics are Catholics; why Presbyterians are Presbyterians; why Baptists are Baptists; why Mormons are Mormons; why thieves are thieves; why monarchists are monarchists; why Republicans are Republicans and Democrats, Democrats. We know it is a matter of association and sympathy, not reasoning and examination; that hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, corn-pone stands for self-approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is conformity. Sometimes conformity has a sordid business interest -- the bread-and-butter interest -- but not in most cases, I think. I think that in the majority of cases it is unconscious and not calculated; that it is born of the human being's natural yearning to stand well with his fellows and have their inspiring approval and praise -- a yearning which is commonly so strong and so insistent that it cannot be effectually resisted, and must have its way. A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force in its two chief varieties -- the pocketbook variety, which has its origin in self-interest, and the bigger variety, the sentimental variety -- the one which can't bear to be outside the pale; can't bear to be in disfavor; can't endure the averted face and the cold shoulder; wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words, "He's on the right track!" Uttered, perhaps by an ass, but still an ass of high degree, an ass whose approval is gold and diamonds to a smaller ass, and confers glory and honor and happiness, and membership in the herd. For these gauds many a man will dump his life-long principles into the street, and his conscience along with them. We have seen it happen. In some millions of instances.

Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand and are of no particular value. They swarm with their party, they feel with their party, they are happy in their party's approval; and where the party leads they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals.

In our late canvass half of the nation passionately believed that in silver lay salvation, the other half as passionately believed that that way lay destruction. Do you believe that a tenth part of the people, on either side, had any rational excuse for having an opinion about the matter at all? I studied that mighty question to the bottom -- came out empty. Half of our people passionately believe in high tariff, the other half believe otherwise. Does this mean study and examination, or only feeling? The latter, I think. I have deeply studied that question, too -- and didn't arrive. We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it the Voice of God.

Excerpt from "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower"

2012-01-31T00:48:00.000-08:00

by (the adjunct-by-necessity) Professor X:

But as the years pass, and the stack of archived grade books and attendance sheets grows taller in my attic, the colleges have lost their power to distract me. I can’t get it out of my mind: the same societal urges that lowered the bar for homeownership have lowered the bar for higher education, and the similarity haunts me. I am at the nexus of it all, for I, who fell victim to the original pyramid scheme of real estate, the constant expansion of the base of buyers to keep demand and prices up, have used the educational pyramid scheme, the redefining of who college students are, for my own salvation.

Last week, I visited the campus library. I found I could hardly work because of the noise. I was tempted to go out and write in my car. Some of the students were working hard, but most weren’t. Most were just bullshitting. We sat in an area next to a sign: MODIFIED QUIET STUDY AREA: QUIET CONVERSATIONS ONLY. I really don’t know what that means. What is modified quiet? Is it possible really to have quiet if there are any sorts of conversations going on, even quiet ones? Why can’t the library just be unambiguously quiet? I thought back to my own college days. Were the libraries quiet? The MODIFIED QUIET STUDY AREA: QUIET CONVERSATIONS ONLY sign started to depress me. It seemed to indicate, in rather a cynical fashion, a surrender of institutional will. The library administration has called for a sort-of quiet study area—no one can say that it hasn’t—but the rule has no teeth, no one enforces the regulation, no one cares. The students don’t care to be quiet and the librarians don’t care to compel them to be. Even the library, that sanctuary I love, seemed at that moment rather a cynical place.

My household finances have improved. They would have anyway, without all the adjuncting, but I continue to teach as many courses as I can. It’s a part of who I am. So long as there are potential firemen required to learn the MLA format for the research paper, I will have work. Teaching has helped me to stay afloat. My old cracked wallpaper is up. My boiler seems peeved at having to work past its retirement age. I’ve got loose sconces and a driveway in need of resealing, lawns in need of reseeding, a kitchen in need of updating. But what I don’t have is the old terror. Adjuncting helped rescue me. My mortgage is still annoyingly large each month, but the balance does dip, slowly, slowly.

In the course of time, something like peace returned to our home and our marriage. The one thing throwing our life off-kilter, the box in which we resided, faded in our minds as the rest of life expanded, mostly as the children grew and blossomed and their lives, so rich with possibility, seemed to fill the space. Our fears diminished. The house began to recede in our consciousness, becoming more like the ideal expressed by Le Corbusier: a machine for living in. We took less notice of its demands. More and more, my wife and I found ourselves inhabiting our old world. Worries gradually lifted—most worries, anyway, on most days. The general cloud of concern that dimmed our vision and made our eyes teary finally seemed to disperse. After a while, the house still seemed an error, but perhaps not a fatal one.

The writer composes a draft, puts it away in a drawer for a week, and upon reexamining it, discovers its flaws to be shockingly apparent. All the defects, the gaps in logic, the ideas not fully thought out and certainly not fully explained, stand out in brilliant high relief, as though someone else had written the thing—which, in a way, is the case. The prose has captured the writer’s essence at the moment of composition; the writer, now older and more experienced by just a single week, nonetheless is a different person. Time passing creates critical distance. That fellow from ten years ago, the one who bought the house in the village, who gave up on literature and craved leaded glass windows—he’s just a rather slipshod draft of myself. His errors stand out in their own brilliant high relief. I live with the havoc he has wrought, but at least it doesn’t frighten and mystify and debilitate me anymore. His mistakes seem, after all this time, rather comic. I feel well able to cope with his screwups.

My wife and I remain attuned to the fragility of our existence together. We are careful. I hope we are careful enough. I have great faith in both of us—more in her than me.

Joe Bageant Quote

2012-01-30T02:49:00.000-08:00

The great (and late) Joe Bageant on the US constitution:

"(T)he big money is constitutionally protected. Our Constitution is first and foremost a property document protecting their money. In actual practice, our constitutional civil liberties, inspiring as they are in concept to people around the world, are mainly side action to make the institutionalization of the owning class more palatable. You can argue that may not have been the intent of the slave owning, rent collecting, upper class founding fathers. But you would be full of shit."

Competition vs Aloneness

2012-01-27T05:15:00.000-08:00

"precisely at that time in his life when a muted response to the world outside and sharpest attention to the vibrations of the inner ear could most propitiously shape and characterize his art ... the menace of the competitive idea is that through its emphasis upon consensus, it extracts that mean, indisputable, readily certifiable core of competence and leaves its eager, ill-advised suppliants forever stunted, victims of a spiritual lobotomy" -Glenn Gould

Joe Stiglitz Essay

2012-01-22T03:22:00.001-08:00

Parts from "What I Learned At The World Economic Crisis" by Joe Stiglitz:

The global economic crisis began in Thailand, on July 2, 1997. The countries of East Asia were coming off a miraculous three decades: incomes had soared, health had improved, poverty had fallen dramatically. Not only was literacy now universal, but, on international science and math tests, many of these countries outperformed the United States. Some had not suffered a single year of recession in 30 years.

But the seeds of calamity had already been planted. In the early '90s, East Asian countries had liberalized their financial and capital markets--not because they needed to attract more funds (savings rates were already 30 percent or more) but because of international pressure, including some from the U.S. Treasury Department. These changes provoked a flood of short-term capital--that is, the kind of capital that looks for the highest return in the next day, week, or month, as opposed to long-term investment in things like factories. In Thailand, this short-term capital helped fuel an unsustainable real estate boom. And, as people around the world (including Americans) have painfully learned, every real estate bubble eventually bursts, often with disastrous consequences. Just as suddenly as capital flowed in, it flowed out. And, when everybody tries to pull their money out at the same time, it causes an economic problem. A big economic problem.

The last set of financial crises had occurred in Latin America in the 1980s, when bloated public deficits and loose monetary policies led to runaway inflation. There, the IMF had correctly imposed fiscal austerity (balanced budgets) and tighter monetary policies, demanding that governments pursue those policies as a precondition for receiving aid. So, in 1997 the IMF imposed the same demands on Thailand. Austerity, the fund's leaders said, would restore confidence in the Thai economy. As the crisis spread to other East Asian nations--and even as evidence of the policy's failure mounted--the IMF barely blinked, delivering the same medicine to each ailing nation that showed up on its doorstep.

I thought this was a mistake. For one thing, unlike the Latin American nations, the East Asian countries were already running budget surpluses. In Thailand, the government was running such large surpluses that it was actually starving the economy of much-needed investments in education and infrastructure, both essential to economic growth. And the East Asian nations already had tight monetary policies, as well: inflation was low and falling. (In South Korea, for example, inflation stood at a very respectable four percent.) The problem was not imprudent government, as in Latin America; the problem was an imprudent private sector--all those bankers and borrowers, for instance, who'd gambled on the real estate bubble.

Under such circumstances, I feared, austerity measures would not revive the economies of East Asia--it would plunge them into recession or even depression. High interest rates might devastate highly indebted East Asian firms, causing more bankruptcies and defaults. Reduced government expenditures would only shrink the economy further.

So I began lobbying to change the policy. I talked to Stanley Fischer, a distinguished former Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor and former chief economist of the World Bank, who had become the IMF's first deputy managing director. I met with fellow economists at the World Bank who might have contacts or influence within the IMF, encouraging them to do everything they could to move the IMF bureaucracy.

Convincing people at the World Bank of my analysis proved easy; changing minds at the IMF was virtually impossible ... It was maddening, not just because the IMF's inertia was so hard to stop but because, with everything going on behind closed doors, it was impossible to know who was the real obstacle to change ... I shouldn't have been surprised. The IMF likes to go about its business without outsiders asking too many questions. In theory, the fund supports democratic institutions in the nations it assists. In practice, it undermines the democratic process by imposing policies. Officially, of course, the IMF doesn't "impose" anything. It "negotiates" the conditions for receiving aid. But all the power in the negotiations is on one side--the IMF's--and the fund rarely allows sufficient time for broad consensus-building or even widespread consultations with either parliaments or civil society. Sometimes the IMF dispenses with the pretense of openness altogether and negotiates secret covenants.

When the IMF decides to assist a country, it dispatches a "mission" of economists. These economists frequently lack extensive experience in the country; they are more likely to have firsthand knowledge of its five-star hotels than of the villages that dot its countryside. They work hard, poring over numbers deep into the night. But their task is impossible. In a period of days or, at most, weeks, they are charged with developing a coherent program sensitive to the needs of the country. Needless to say, a little number-crunching rarely provides adequate insights into the development strategy for an entire nation. Even worse, the number-crunching isn't always that good. The mathematical models the IMF uses are frequently flawed or out-of-date. Critics accuse the institution of taking a cookie-cutter approach to economics, and they're right. Country teams have been known to compose draft reports before visiting. I heard stories of one unfortunate incident when team members copied large parts of the text for one country's report and transferred them wholesale to another. They might have gotten away with it, except the "search and replace" function on the word processor didn't work properly, leaving the original country's name in a few places. Oops.

It's not fair to say that IMF economists don't care about the citizens of developing nations. But the older men who staff the fund--and they are overwhelmingly older men--act as if they are shouldering Rudyard Kipling's white man's burden. IMF experts believe they are brighter, more educated, and less politically motivated than the economists in the countries they visit. In fact, the economic leaders from those countries are pretty good--in many cases brighter or better-educated than the IMF staff, which frequently consists of third-rank students from first-rate universities. (Trust me: I've taught at Oxford University, MIT, Stanford University, Yale University, and Princeton University, and the IMF almost never succeeded in recruiting any of the best students.)

The IMF pressed ahead, demanding reductions in government spending. And so subsidies for basic necessities like food and fuel were eliminated at the very time when contractionary policies made those subsidies more desperately needed than ever ... Not only was the IMF not restoring economic confidence in East Asia, it was undermining the region's social fabric. And then, in the spring and summer of 1998, the crisis spread beyond East Asia to the most explosive country of all--Russia.

Today, Russia remains in desperate shape. High oil prices and the long-resisted ruble devaluation have helped it regain some footing. But standards of living remain far below where they were at the start of the transition. The nation is beset by enormous inequality, and most Russians, embittered by experience, have lost confidence in the free market. A significant fall in oil prices would almost certainly reverse what modest progress has been made.

East Asia is better off, though it still struggles, too. Close to 40 percent of Thailand's loans are still not performing; Indonesia remains deeply mired in recession. Unemployment rates remain far higher than they were before the crisis, even in East Asia's best-performing country, Korea. IMF boosters suggest that the recession's end is a testament to the effectiveness of the agency's policies. Nonsense. Every recession eventually ends. All the IMF did was make East Asia's recessions deeper, longer, and harder. Indeed, Thailand, which followed the IMF's prescriptions the most closely, has performed worse than Malaysia and South Korea, which followed more independent courses.

I was often asked how smart--even brilliant--people could have created such bad policies. One reason is that these smart people were not using smart economics. Time and again, I was dismayed at how out-of-date--and how out-of-tune with reality--the models Washington economists employed were. For example, microeconomic phenomena such as bankruptcy and the fear of default were at the center of the East Asian crisis. But the macroeconomic models used to analyze these crises were not typically rooted in microfoundations, so they took no account of bankruptcy.

But bad economics was only a symptom of the real problem: secrecy. Smart people are more likely to do stupid things when they close themselves off from outside criticism and advice. If there's one thing I've learned in government, it's that openness is most essential in those realms where expertise seems to matter most.

A Poem

2012-01-16T14:25:00.001-08:00

Read this on a forum:

Roses Are Red
My Name Is Dave
This Poem Makes No Sense
Microwave.

Chomsky Essay

2012-01-12T04:09:00.001-08:00

The reasons for my concern, by Noam Chomsky.

The main reasons for my concern with U.S. foreign policy are that I find it, in general, horrifying, and that I think that it is possible for me to do something to modify it, at least to mitigate some of its most dangerous and destructive aspects. In the concrete circumstances of my own society, where I live and work, there are various ways to do this: speaking, writing, organizing, demonstrating, resisting, and others. Over the years, I've been engaged in a variety of such activities.

The foreign policy of other states is also in general horrifying -- roughly speaking, states are violent to the extent that they have the power to act in the interests of those with domestic power -- but there is not very much that I can do about it. It is, for example, easy enough for an American intellectual to write critical analyses of the behavior of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe (or in supporting the Argentine generals), but such efforts have little if any effect in modifying or reversing the actions of the U.S.S.R. Rather, such efforts, which are naturally much welcomed by those who dominate the ideological institutions here, may serve to contribute to the violence of the American state, by reinforcing the images of Soviet brutality (often accurate) that are used to frighten Americans into conformity and obedience. I do not suggest that this is a reason to avoid critical analysis of the U.S.S.R.; in fact, I have often written on the foreign policy of the Soviet state. Nor would I criticize someone who devotes much, even all his work to this task. But we should understand that the moral value of this work is at best very slight, where the moral value of an action is judged in terms of its human consequences. In fact, rather delicate judgments sometimes arise, for people who are committed to decent moral values. Suppose, for example, that some German intellectual chose in 1943 to write articles on terrible things done by Britain, or the U.S., or the Jews. What he wrote might be correct, but we would not be very much impressed.

The same comments hold for a Soviet intellectual who devotes himself to a critical analysis of U.S. atrocities in Southeast Asia or Central America (or to the American support for the Argentine generals). What he says may be correct; its significance, for people being bombed or terrorized or tortured within the domains of American power and influence is negligible, possibly even negative. These are truisms, constantly denied by intellectual servants of state power who, for obvious reasons, pretend not to understand them and typically criticize those who act in accordance with decent moral principles as having a "double standard" or worse.

I try to concentrate my political activities -- writing included -- in areas where there is some moral significance to these activities, hence primarily in areas where people I can reach may act to change policies that are abhorrent, dangerous and destructive. Of course there are other factors that influence my choices, facts about my personal history, etc., which are of no interest here. One can have many reasons for engaging in political action. If the reasons are to help suffering people, to avert threats or catastrophes, and so on, then the criteria are fairly clear. For an American intellectual, these criteria dictate a prime concern for policies undertaken and pursued here, whether in the international or domestic arenas.

In some intellectual circles, it is considered naive or foolish to be guided by moral principles. About this form of idiocy, I will have nothing to say.

I should emphasize that I have tried to follow these criteria (qualified by matters of personal interest and personal history) in all of the areas of political action in which I have been engaged. Writing has been only one part of this and and in fact a rather small part. I do a vast amount of speaking, and for many years was engaged in direct action of one sort or another (demonstrations, resistance, etc.)

Here questions of tactical judgment arise. In the current situation here, there are a number of contributions that intellectuals can make to the struggle for peace and justice.... One is to serve as a "resource," to provide information and analysis. American intellectuals are highly privileged. They have the kind of training, facilities, access to information and opportunity to organize and control their own work that enable them to make a very significant contribution to people who are trying to escape the confines of indoctrination and to understand something about the real world in which they live; in particular to people who may be willing to act to change this world. For the same reasons, they can be active and effective as organizers. Furthermore, by virtue of their privilege, intellectuals are often "visible." They can exploit their privilege in valuable and important ways. For example, if actions of civil disobedience are undertaken by people who do not enjoy the privilege that is very unequally distributed in a class society, they are likely to be neglected, or crushed by force. If people who enjoy such privilege play a visible role in such actions, the danger of state violence is considerably lessened (in the U.S., not everywhere), and the effectiveness of the action may also be enhanced.

These are quite substantive issues, which constantly arise in all forms of political action. People make different decisions, based on their tactical judgments and personal preference, as to how to distribute their commitments and actions among the various possibilities that the society allows. Some of my closest friends have chosen to dedicate themselves almost completely to organizing and direct action. I've chosen a somewhat different mixture, and it has varied at different times. In the 1960s, for example, I was much more involved in direct action on both foreign policy and domestic issues than I am today, the reasons being a different judgment as to how I can most effectively use my energy, my talents, and my privilege.

The reasons I have devoted most of my writing and direct political action -- though not all of it -- to problems of foreign policy are several. In part, it reflects a judgment as to relative importance: the impact of U.S. foreign policy on millions of people throughout the world is enormous, and furthermore these policies substantially increase the probability of superpower conflict and global catastrophe. In part, it reflects my feeling that while many people here do excellent and important work concerning crucial domestic issues, very few concerned themselves in the same way and with the same depth of commitment to foreign policy issues. In part, I suppose, it reflects personal factors which, again, are of little interest here.

In the domain of foreign policy, I have tried to focus my energies in areas that are not only significant, by the criteria just mentioned, but also relatively ignored.... Putting it a bit crudely, it is best to tell people that which they least want to hear, to take up the least popular causes, other things being equal. These are, of course, transitory and sometimes personal judgments....

Limerick

2012-01-08T10:00:00.001-08:00

Solstice Reflection,
by BenjaminTheDonkey

The solstice brings time for reflection,
Like, how there’ll be no course correction:
We’re headed for doom,
Via whimper or boom,
With no way to change our direction.

Nice Quote

2012-01-07T04:13:00.001-08:00

Hunter Thompson:

"We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of True Romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness."

Nice

2012-01-06T07:18:00.000-08:00

"Juridically they are both equal [the worker and capitalist]; but economically the worker is the serf of the capitalist . . . thereby the worker sells his person and his liberty for a given time. The worker is in the position of a serf because this terrible threat of starvation which daily hangs over his head and over his family, will force him to accept any conditions imposed by the gainful calculations of the capitalist, the industrialist, the employer. . . .The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to do so? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forces him to sell himself to the first employer. Thus the worker's liberty . . . is only a theoretical freedom, lacking any means for its possible realisation, and consequently it is only a fictitious liberty, an utter falsehood. The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom -- voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory from an economic sense -- broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery." -Bakunin

A Quote

2012-01-06T04:33:00.000-08:00

This nice paragraph by George Steiner is somewhat in the vein of the Nietzsche quote on religion: "There is not enough love in this world to waste on imaginary beings".

"The simple yet appalling fact is that we have very little solid evidence that literary studies do very much to enrich or stabilize moral perception, that they humanize. We have little proof that a tradition of literary studies in fact makes a man more humane. What is worse — a certain body of evidence points the other way. When barbarism came to twentieth-century Europe, the arts faculties in more than one university offered very little moral resistance, and this is not a trivial or local accident. In a disturbing number of cases the literary imagination gave servile or ecstatic welcome to political bestiality. That bestiality was at times enforced and refined by individuals educated in the culture of traditional humanism. Knowledge of Goethe, a delight in the poetry of Rilke, seemed no bar to personal and institutionalized sadism. Literary values and the most utmost of hideous inhumanity could coexist in the same community, in the same individual sensibility….

…I find myself unable to assert confidently that the humanities humanize. Indeed, I would go further: it is at least conceivable that the focusing of consciousness on a written text which is the substance of our training and pursuit diminishes the sharpness and readiness of our actual moral response. Because we are trained to give psychological and moral credence to the imaginary, to the character in a play or a novel, to the condition of spirit we gather from a poem, we may find it more difficult to identify with the real world, to take the world of actual experience to heart…The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room. Thus there may be a covert, betraying link between the cultivation of aesthetic response and the potential of personal inhumanity."
—George Steiner, “To Civilize Our Gentlemen,” in Language and Silence

HT: Corey Robin.

Nice Story

2012-01-02T03:24:00.000-08:00

A friend was telling me how at one point his father had to apply for joining a social organization. The decision on whether to accept him in the organization was made in the following way: every current member of the organization had one vote, but also his father was given the option of casting a vote. And the majority answer was the decision taken.

I remarked that obviously his father voted to allow himself to join the organization.

But he told me that in fact his father had voted against himself. His father's reasoning: the only way his father's vote would count is if the remaining votes are tied. In which case his father did not want to join a social organization where half the members did not want him.

Nice.

A Quote

2012-01-01T07:03:00.001-08:00

"The essence of all slavery consists in taking the product of anothers labor by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded upon ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live" - Leo Tolstoy

Economics

2011-12-26T22:52:00.000-08:00

An excellent essay from NakedCapitalism:

The Trouble with Principles: Or, How to Not Lose Friends and Alienate People When Learning Economics (#OccupyWallStreet, #OWS)

By Jake Romero, an economics student at Portland State University.

Economics has always been something of a battleground, but in November a group of about seventy Harvard students opened a new front in the ongoing hostilities: its introductory pedagogy. In solidarity with the Occupy movement, the students staged a walkout of their principles course to protest what they called its “inherent bias.”

In his rebuttal in the New York Times, Greg Mankiw countered that his teaching is careful to avoid policy conclusions and that its subject matter falls squarely within the current mainstream of the discipline. Narrowly correct, he nonetheless profoundly missed the broader points that his students, to be fair, seemed unable to articulate fully.

Firstly, one needn’t make explicit policy prescriptions to reproduce, in generation after generation of students, the fetishization of “free markets” that has been eroding civil society worldwide. If not quite a wink and a nod, then an omission here and oversimplification there will do just fine. That’s precisely the tack Mankiw takes in his introductory textbook, Principles of Economics. His approach is surely only in the name of student accessibility, but we all have good intentions, don’t we?

Secondly, it is precisely the mainstream of economics that is complicit in the ongoing economic upheaval and ensuing social unrest we’re witnessing worldwide. Mankiw is correct in pointing out that his textbook is hardly unique, but, to tweak the aphorism, one man’s modus tollens is another’s modus ponens. That Mankiw’s style of teaching basic economics is common is less exculpatory of this style than it is damning of his discipline for almost universally adopting it. If Mankiw wants to quote Paul Samuelson, he should also heed his lament shortly before his passing: “Alas, many textbooks have strayed too far toward over-complacent libertarianism.”

The great irony and tragedy of “intro econ” is that it is at its introductory level that economic theory is both most broadly consumed and most malignantly simplistic. In a recent study, economists at the University of Washington found there to be an “indoctrination effect” for non-majors who take an economics course: on average, they behave more selfishly and hold less regard for others after taking such a course.

Generations of the world’s business people and public policy makers have been nursed on such courses. To gain some insight into why our economies and institutions are crumbling beneath us, then, imagine an engineer equipped with a rudimentary understanding of physics that omits gravity, and a certain above-average disregard for human life not his own. Now imagine him building all the major bridges in the world.

From personal experience, I can attest that a good principles course, taught by someone with a sense of responsibility for her students, can be a mind-expanding experience. Taught by someone else, it can be a profoundly narrowing one. Surely Professor Mankiw would have no trouble agreeing that not all teachers of introductory economics are of his caliber. But, on the one hand, if even someone of his stature can mislead some (most?) students, imagine what’s going on out in the provinces. On the other, the children of the elite have an outsized influence on our culture and institutions. Perhaps some arrive to Ec 10 precociously predisposed to “over-complacent libertarianism,” but, given their likely future influence, isn’t that all the more reason to challenge their biases?

The typical introductory economics course, taught carelessly, corrupts even as it enlightens. With a rhetorical sloppiness that turns mathematical idealization into socially destructive ideology, it compels the naive reader to think like a “rational actor,” without offering any caveat about how doing so undermines community, stifles creativity, enervates leadership, and licenses greed.

Like Occupiers more generally, the students of “Occupy Economics” may not have been able to make the best case for their action, but they were smart enough to recognize a good intuition when they sensed it. By providing an occasion for reflection, they’ve succeeded in reminding us that the manner in which economics is taught can make it easier or harder to abuse economic theory in ways that perpetuate the greed and underwrite the shamelessness of the one percent.

We’re now reaping the bitter harvest of generations of this kind of corruption—gross inequality, debased values, a corroded civil society. It now falls on a new generation to resist, combat, and ultimately root out such insidiously pervasive abuses of the language and logic of the market.

As illustration, let’s spend some time in the interstices between economic theory and economic reality to point out a few things to keep in mind if you’re an economics student who wishes to retain his conscience, or just someone who values intellectual responsibility:

Ten Principles of Responsible Economics

1) In theory, rational people think at the margin. In reality, these people are a fiction that exist only in mathematical models

You are not a “rational” actor—not in the economic sense of the term. The newcomer to economics, well-intentioned as she is, surely wants to be rational in the everyday sense. Having learned from her textbook that, without qualification, to be rational is to be a self-interested utility-maximizer, she learns to emulate such behavior. So begins the process of learning to deprecate non-market values—which are “irrational,” after all—and rely exclusively on self-interest to justify and understand action. This naive economism’s implicit justification for selfishness is that acting in one’s self-interest at the margin is “only rational.” Inside the fictional world of an economic model, this is tautologically true. Outside of it, we still call that sociopathic greed.

2) In theory, there is no difference between self-interest and greed. In reality, economists aren’t typically trained in moral philosophy

Spend enough time studying economics, and you might eventually feel greed become empty of meaning. You’ve learned that acting in your own self-interest is not only rational but virtuous—it creates better outcomes for everyone—and surmised that greed is perhaps merely an expression of envy or an atavism from a benighted age of religious taboo. You would be wrong. In the real world, greed exists. As a crude approximation: acting in your own self-interest just means “not shooting yourself in the foot.” You can think of greed as shooting the other guy in the foot so you can get away with his wallet.

3) In theory, voluntary trade can make everyone better off. In reality, it’s often not so voluntary, makes some people better off while making others worse off, and empowers the beneficiaries to make sure they get to keep their gains

“Free market” reforms generally improve aggregate outcomes while increasing inequality, so that poverty increases even as overall wealth does. Basic economic analysis treats distribution as a secondary concern—it assumes that once the market maximizes benefits in the aggregate, the political system can ensure that they’ll be redistributed in an equitable way. But as we’ve been learning all too well, with greater wealth comes greater control over the political system.

4) In theory, markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity. In reality, “markets in everything” has a way of sliding into “everything into markets”

There’s a difference between thinking about a real-world interaction as if it were a market—market analysis—and transforming that real interaction into an actual market—marketization. The latter is a natural seduction once you’ve gained some facility with the former, and some people seem to reflexively think organizing any activity as an actual market would be an improvement over the status quo. We can think of these people as blowtorch-wielding pyromaniac children playing in a barn, but they are not, of course, actually blowtorch-wielding pyromaniac children playing in a barn.

5) In theory, market models assume that the existing distribution of wealth is just. In reality, poor people exist

Hiding in plain sight in many marketization proposals is something of a dirty little secret: When you apply an idealized market model to the messiness of reality, some people, those without enough purchasing power to enter the market in the first place, will have to go without in the name of efficiency. Famine, thirst, and lack of access to education can be effective market solutions.

6) In theory, people respond to incentives. In reality, different people respond differently to different incentives, and not always the way you hoped for

“Pay for performance” is sold as “more money for better results” but typically results in “gaming the metrics to get that cash money now.” The people who respond best to monetary incentives are the people who value money the most, not necessarily the people who value education or innovation or whatever you’d like them to value the most. Such incentive schemes also tend to result in sacrificing long-term or substantive success in favor of superficial short-term gain.

7) In theory, governments can sometimes improve market outcomes. In reality, sometimes sometimes means often

Real markets are always imperfect and intrinsically tend toward monopoly, a market failure. Introductory textbooks make note of such market failures, but typically only in a way that makes them seem like outliers. They are in fact the norm.

8) In theory, there’s a distinction between “positive” and “normative” economics. In reality, the positive is at once fictional and normative in effect

Ostensibly, “positive” economics refers to the description of economic reality—the “is” questions–while normative economics deals with policy prescriptions—the “ought” questions. But in the context of neoclassical economics, the only reality we have access to is a set of rather crude idealizations—in a sense, we study the reality of a fiction—and since studying positive economics clearly has an effect on people’s behavioral patterns, it is de facto normative.

9) In theory, models are just aids to reasoning—the map is not the territory. In reality, it’s just so easy to reify

Many lesser economists have a habit of justifying the strong modeling assumptions of economics by claiming they’re “generally true” or excusing them with a wave of the hand and a “well, there are always exceptions, right?” This is a telltale marker of someone who takes his models too literally. Properly understood, the toy models of economics are tools for organizing thought, testing intuition, and generating sets of hypotheses to be tested against data—not objective descriptions of reality.

10) In theory, economics is a science. In reality, economics is a science the way Ayn Rand is a literary luminary

To casually label economics a science is at best aspirational, at worst manipulative, at a minimum misleading. At the introductory level, the issue at stake is less one of methodology than of how deferential the layperson or novice should be to the authority of expert or policy entrepreneur appeal to economic theory. Skepticism is always a virtue. When evaluating claims based on simple economic models, it’s self-defense.

Growing Old

2011-12-25T05:42:00.000-08:00

"Growing old is painful, but it is better than the alternative."

An interesting take on Chomsky's work

2011-12-09T21:06:00.000-08:00

An insightful review of a book on Chomsky:

Review of Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, by Robert Barsky.
Published by MIT Press 1997

John Goldsmith

1. Noam Chomsky – need it be said? – has earned legendary status for his prolific writing in linguistics and radical politics, as well as for his prodigious personal correspondence, his crushing schedule of lectures, his inspiring teaching, his technical brilliance, his take-no-prisoners debating style, and his personal generosity towards his students and other younger scholars. [Footnote 1]Now in his late 60s, he is retiring from his position at MIT, and this retrospective on Chomsky’s career by Robert Barsky, an assistant professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, is as close as we are likely to get to a personal memoir from Chomsky’s own hand. It hews closely to Chomsky’s published views on his work, and it contains many lengthy quotations from Barsky’s correspondence with Chomsky, allowing the reader to hear the unbuttoned Chomsky – to hear the opinions that he can state plainly which he’d put more cautiously in a form overtly meant for publication.

[Footnote 1: I am grateful for comments on a draft of this from Ami Kronfeld, Robert Barsky, Geoffrey Huck, and Fritz Newmeyer. Some or all of them may continue to think that I am insufficiently sympathetic in what I present below to the material that I criticize. They are probably correct, and I thank them for several improvements in what follows.]

A Life of Dissent is a close-up shot of an extraordinary individual whose work has touched for the better the lives of many, including the writer of this review. But it seems to me to be – alas! – idiosyncratic and often cranky history. There are, after all, two questions that beg to be answered in any profile of Noam Chomsky: first, how does he in retrospect see the changes he and his colleagues brought to linguistics under the banner of generative grammar, and second, what has been the relationship between his work in linguistics and his political activism? The question of how Chomsky’s work in linguistics relates to that of other linguists is one that I know better, and the vision that emerges in this book is one that is in a number of important respects inaccurate, and in certain other respects surprising for their lack of perspective. With regard to how Chomsky has managed to integrate two careers of mythic proportion, in activism and in academia – one can only listen with a certain degree of awe; but something is nonetheless missing here, like a great sauce lacking an important ingredient, and I will return to what it might be below in Section 3.

Barsky does provide what will be for most readers new and revelatory information about the political milieu in which Chomsky, and his mentor Zellig Harris, navigated in the middle decades of this century, with a very interesting chapter on Harris, Avukah and Hashomer Hatzair.

2. One of the essential elements in Barsky’s account of Chomsky’s career is an element of what I’d call a myth in the origin of many heroes: the notion that Chomsky came to the field of linguistics as an outsider, overcoming great hostility despite a lack of support from the leading lights in the field. [FN 2] Barsky writes, "In the summer of 1954…Chomsky was still an outsider to the field….He did manage to publish a few reviews and articles, often outside the field of linguistics" (81-82) "So, by the mid-1950s, Noam Chomsky, a newly minted scholar, stood at the forefront of a nonexistent field. He was also unemployed."(84). "In 1955…Chomsky, in his own words, ‘had no identifiable field or credentials in anything."(86).

[FN 2: Similar points are made, with considerably greater wit, by Geoff Pullum (1991, chapter 6). ]

The facts, as Barsky describes them, suggest quite a different picture. Chomsky studied closely for several years with one of the leading theoreticians in linguistics, Zellig Harris, in one of the leading departments of linguistics, at the University of Pennsylvania, and he studied with other outstanding scholars there, notably the philosopher Nelson Goodman. A year after receiving his B.A. at the tender age of 20, he obtained a 4-year junior fellowship with the Harvard Society of Fellows (arguably the country’s most prestigious home for young scholars) with Harris’ and Nelson Goodman’s backing. When that was completed, a joined a machine translation project at MIT, again with Harris’ backing, under Victor Yngve’s supervision; Chomsky was viewed by many then as an outstanding young scholar, and Yngve’s appointment of Chomsky was based in large part on Harris’ strong backing of Chomsky (Yngve, p.c.). In the summer of 1954, Chomsky was as little an outsider to the field of linguistics as a 25-year-old man could possibly be, and by 1955 or 1956, he had parlayed – and why not! – his credentials and his backing (now from other scholars, including the legendary Roman Jakobson ) into a tenure-track position at MIT; tenure and promotion followed quickly after that.

I’ve already alluded to another aspect of this myth – that Chomsky’s work was so outré that he had difficulty getting it published. The record, as far as I have been able to find it, suggests that Chomsky had no more trouble in his youth than any one else. Did personalities and schisms play a role? No doubt, as they always do. André Martinet, twenty years old than Chomsky and editor of a major journal in the mid 1950s, does recount with some smug glee in his memoirs how he ensured that his journal did not publish an early Chomsky submission, though Martinet’s account mixes in two other factors: first, that Martinet’s junior colleague at Columbia, Uriel Weinreich, was a strong advocate of Chomsky’s work at that point, and second, that Martinet ultimately held it against both Chomsky and Weinreich that they practiced what Martinet perceived to be a Jewish sort of linguistics. [Footnote 3]

[Footnote 3: The reader may imagine for himself what might lie behind Martinet’s perverse categories. For his part, Martinet in his memoirs (Martinet 1993) says that Jewish linguistics is the kind of linguistics where you don’t pay enough attention to facts, unlike his own kind. Martinet’s evident hostility to Chomsky in this work is worth a second thought. That hostility appears to derive to some degree from Chomsky’s cultural background -- for Martinet does not fail to draw the reader’s attention to a linguist’s religion when the linguist is Jewish – but to a greater degree derives from Chomsky’s considerable professional success and influence. ]

One area that I found particularly interesting is Barsky’s description of Chomsky’s relation to the heated disagreements between the generative semanticists and the interpretive semanticists – what Randy Harris has called "the linguistic wars." [FN 4] Barsky’s account, again, largely follows Chomsky’s present view of those events. This view is that during that period, he "had quite different things on [his] mind." (151). Barsky says, "While the battle [the linguistic wars] raged on at MIT, Chomsky reached ‘the peak’ of his antiwar activity. Between fulfilling this commitment, conducting his linguistic research, and publishing the results, he ‘hardly would have had time for ‘power struggles’ even if I had been interested.’" (151, with an internal quote from correspondence with Chomsky dated 14 August 1995). This is, blessedly, the only place where special pleading is offered in Chomsky’s defense, though it is unattractive enough in this single place. Filling out Chomsky and Barsky’s argument are the unspoken assumptions, something like this: others may judge the quality and the intensity of an intellectual debate by the written record, and one may judge that Lakoff, Ross, Postal, McCawley, Jackendoff, and others were caught up in the passion of that linguistic moment in just that way. But Chomsky’s involvement in these questions cannot be judged on the same grounds, for when his mind turned from linguistics, it turned to truly important things, like the war in Vietnam, while when the other linguists’ minds turned from linguistics to other things (like their kids’ sniffles or their mortgage payments, perhaps), they continued to feel swept up in a debate that was a tempest in a teapot, when viewed from, say, the perspective of the United Nations or the draft resistance movement. Ironically, it is this Barsky-Chomsky version of history that puts the major emphasis on intangible and subjective human emotions (and does it through the treacherously unreliable lens of personal recollections twenty years later, rather than through documentary record) rather than careful evaluation of the issues involved. [FN 5]

[FN 4: My interest is reflected, among other things, in a book that I wrote on the subject with Geoffrey Huck.]

[FN 5: Ami Kronfeld has pointed out to me that Chomsky has long remarked that he consciously let go of certain research projects that he had been seriously involved in because of his commitment to the anti-war effort. As far as I know, this refers to areas such as mathematical linguistics and phonology, two areas that Chomsky did not return to after this point. But the issues joined during the linguistic wars were those that Chomsky remained interested in. ]

And one cannot help but wonder how seriously this argument is meant to be taken, when offered in the context of factually inaccurate remarks. Chomsky is quoted as saying that the appointments made in his department were of generative semanticists, citing Postal, Ross, Perlmutter, and Kiparsky (151). But Postal became a generative semanticist after he left MIT, Ross long after he was hired, Perlmutter was never a generative semanticist (as far as I can see, and as far as Perlmutter himself is concerned [personal communication, 1987]), and Kiparsky, of course, was a phonologist, who was a co-author of a single paper that could be interpreted as generative semanticist in tone ("Fact," with Carol Kiparsky).

Curiously (at least, to me as a linguist it seems curious) Barsky does not attempt to say just what it is that constituted the great break with American structuralism, nor what the reasoning was that underlay Chomsky’s decision to make that break. The fundamental issue is the nature of learning – the developmental process that leads to knowledge. Once Chomsky had decided to take his views of transformational syntax seriously, he had to decide how to deal with the fact (for it certainly seemed to be a fact) that nothing in any way like the associationist learning strategies envisaged by psychology in the 1940s and 1950s could provide an account that took linguistic data as input and produced a generative grammar as output.

Chomsky took a major leap, and decided that if his theory of syntax was correct, then those theories of learning must be wrong. In the first (and in my view, much more interesting phase) of generative grammar – the phase that lasted from The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (published in 1975, but written in 1955) through Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965)– he proposed that linguistic knowledge was epistemologically justified by its formal simplicity, as long as the grammar generated sentences that were largely consistent with the data of the language; a critical aspect of this position was that the formal simplicity at issue here was one that possibly (in Chomsky’s view, almost certainly) was genetically idiosyncratic. General principles of theoretical simplicity would take one only a small part of the way towards developing a model of universal grammar in which the formally simple grammars are the ones that are epistemologically preferred, on Chomsky’s view. Chomsky held little hope for the prospects of engaging information theory in the service of linguistic theory, despite information theory’s considerable cachet at the time at MIT. Further properties of grammars found consistently among human languages which are arguably taken by the human language faculty as desirable (or expected, that is preferred as analysis on the basis of suggestive primary data) characteristics of grammar would be discovered by linguists, on Chomsky’s view, and many of these would be explainable only in an evolutionary sense.

This interesting perspective was largely abandoned, beginning perhaps with Chomsky and Lasnik’s "Filters and Control" (1977), to be replaced by the principles and parameters view, which is in essence an abandonment of the notion of learning – or to put it even more tendentiously, a call to the position that linguistics has nothing of significance to say about the human learning, for there is essentially no learning in the matter of linguistics.

These are issues that go well beyond technical questions in linguistics, even if understanding them in all their details may be an intellectually daunting enterprise. A full-bore analysis of Chomsky’s intellectual career must come to grips with this, not least because the issue of learnability in cognition is not ultimately unrelated to the issue of how malleable human beings are with regard to their needs and desires in a political context.

3. Politics Chomsky’s public activism first reached a wide audience in connection with his uncompromising stance against American military involvement in Vietnam, through his articles in The New York Review of Books and his book, American Power and the New Mandarins, published in 1969 by Pantheon. His wide-ranging scholarly apparatus and his devastating rebuke of what he saw as liberal complicity in the public justification of an utterly immoral war in Southeast Asia won for him broad recognition and a loyal following as early as 1967. In the years since, he has published a range of detailed criticisms of Western journalists and academic writers who, on Chomsky’s view, violate the most elementary principles of logic and argumentation in order to justify and maintain the first world’s political and economic order. He has attacked the hypocrisy and the ideologically-based weakness rampant in writing at virtually every level in mainstream political discourse in this country.

For this alone, Chomsky would receive any prize that I might have to award for courageously opposing such evils as American involvement in Vietnam. But in the context of Barsky’s book, we’d like to know more about how Chomsky’s political activism is connected to his views on human nature, and Barsky offers some thoughts on this matter that seem, by and large, to be inadequate, in my view.

From early on in his political writings, Chomsky has rejected this easy connection between a belief in human plasticity and optimistic political utopianism, in favor of the view (one associated in some circles with the early Marx) that humans have a richly definable nature, with natural inclinations towards creativity, constructive and cooperative energy, and egalitarian social relations. Barsky cites on several occasions Chomsky’s first political essay, written when Chomsky was 10, on the Spanish Civil War, and he discusses at some length Chomsky’s view that the anarchist movement in Barcelona during the Civil War, described by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, was one of the rare occurrences in modern history where, in Chomsky’s opinion, human political nature was allowed to surface (to use a linguist’s turn of phrase). I remember very clearly as a college student in the late 1960s how much this same view was widely held, and widely seen as being implemented (as well as could be managed) by Castro’s and Mao’s New Economic Man, in only slightly different form. [FN 6]

[FN 6:Ami Kronfeld has raised the question as to whether this is a fair connection to make; were not the policies of Castro and Mao far more hospitable to an avant-gardist view of the revolutionary party, the revolutionary party leading the worker malgré lui? Whoever mistook Castro for a left anarchist, after all? My recollection is rather clear that many people who, like this writer, were in college in the late 1960s had precisely that image, one that was explored at length in socialist publications in this country at that time. This point is not without some considerable relevance, for the image of a utopia founded on workers’ control of their means of production will always be judged by how plausible it is to imagine that system as the principal organizing principle of society. If Israeli kibbutzim (or the short-lived workers’ councils in Barcelona during the Spanish Revolution) can serve as an existence proof for such a view, their existence will undercut the view (compelling, for many, in this day and age) that both historical and essentialist forces conspire to lead non-market-driven societies to economic ruin, to police-state, or both. ]

Barsky observes that human beings require liberty and a nurturing environment in which to express their humanity (113), and notes that this has been central to Chomsky’s thought. He cites Humboldt on this : "when free of external control, ‘all peasants and craftsmen could be transformed into artists, i.e., people who love their craft for its own sake, who refine it with their self-guided energy and inventiveness, and who in so doing cultivate their own intellectual energies, ennoble their character, and increase their enjoyments."(113).

In the political realm, then, human nature can be characterized, but those characteristics are expressed by a highly malleable nature that responds to the nurturing or the hostile environment in which it finds itself. And that nature is fundamentally good. It would be good for humankind globally for each individual to achieve this self-realization. This view leaves insufficient room, in my opinion, for the roots of evil in human nature; all evil ends up being attributed to the system, and all good to individual human nature, surely an untenable disjunction.

In the end, Barsky’s account of Chomsky’s views leave the difficult questions unanswered, and barely asked, I fear. [FN 7]

[FN 7: The reader of this book should be prepared for unexpected apologetics from Barsky (though these have nothing to do with Chomsky, as far as I can tell): "The Soviet Union was, and still is, false referred to and condemned as a communist or Marxist state by historians, journalists, and political scientists. It was, in fact, a Bolshevik state led by ironfisted totalitarian leaders and supported by a powerful and omnipresent army committed to upholding interests and power structures that would never have been permitted to exist in a truly communist state."(39). ]

4. History. A number of unfortunate – in some cases, misleading – errors of historical record can be found in this book. There is an allusion to "the Stalinist-Fascist pact that was forged during World War II" (29), presumably a reference to the short-lived treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union, signed August 23, 1939, before World War II is generally taken to have started -- and of course Hitler ignored the pact and invaded the Soviet Union, and their war is what was forged during World War II, not their pact. (Barsky’s next sentence is, "The misrepresentation of events persists even today in standard historical texts," though what he is referring to is unclear). This in turn is followed by a passage that is difficult to follow, because it seems to suggest that at a point when Chomsky was seven years old (that is, through most of 1936; he was born December 7, 1928), his political analysis of the Spanish Civil War led him to understand Stalin’s psychology better than most adult Stalinist sympathizers, many of whom were taken by surprise by Stalin’s outrageous purges during the late 1930s. By comparison, Chomsky’s friend Seymour Melman had to wait until 1939 when (he tells Barsky) "this famous Russian general defected and wrote articles in the Saturday Evening Post" (he is clearly referring to General Walter Krivitsky, European chief of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence apparatus, who defected in 1938, following Stalin’s assassination of Ignace Poretsky/Reiss in Switzerland). In retrospect it seems obvious that anyone who could not conclude that Stalin was functionally insane by the late 1930s needed to have his glasses cleaned, but what this had to do with a six or seven year old boy in Philadelphia remains obscure.

Barsky on occasion seems to put some odd thoughts into Chomsky’s head. At one point (p. 123f), Barsky writes, "[h]e knew what had happened to figures such as Rosa Luxemburg (murdered), Antonio Gramsci (jailed), Bertrand Russell (jailed, as well), Karl Korsch (marginalized), and Sacco and Vanzetti." Sacco and Vanzetti? Sacco, according to recent accounts (Russell 1986), was indeed guilty of murdering the paymaster in 1920, though perhaps – as with Lee Harvey Oswald, Alger Hiss, and Judge Crater – we’ll never really know. But Barsky is to be encouraged to watch his historical parallels. And of course, Bertrand Russell won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Chomsky-Faurisson Affair in 1979 remains a sore point for some in the discussion of Chomsky’s political writings, and is discussed at length by Barsky. For Chomsky as for Barsky, Chomsky’s involvement was entirely a matter of supporting freedom of expression. Unsympathetic critics used it as an opportunity to brand Chomsky with anti-Semitic labels, but even critics potentially sympathetic to Chomsky’s political views felt his remarks showed lack of judgment. When Chomsky asserted (whether in all honesty, or as a rhetorical device, we’ll never know) that he had not read what it was that Faurisson had written, and that he did not care, because what was at issue was Faurisson’s right to express his views, not the validity of those views – when Chomsky asserted that, critics (myself included) shook their heads. Surely Chomsky should have taken the opportunity to read what was at issue: surely he had taken the opportunity: is there anything, after all, that the man does not read? Was Chomsky’s statement that he hadn’t read it just a rhetorical device? And if he had taken the opportunity to read it, why did he not say what we might expect him to say: something like, in the light of what we have long known about Nazi-sponsored extermination of European Jews, surely a contemporary who questions the broad outlines of that proposition must have either a screw loose or a highly dubious political agenda; but either way, I defend his right to say it and publish it without being taken to court by the State as a criminal.

It seems to me that it was the fact that this expectation was not met was what stuck in the craw of many of his critics. It is hard – well, impossible – to accept at face value the notion that a principle (such as that of freedom of expression) is so broad, deep, and exceptionless that one need not look at any particular case to determine whether freedom of expression is what is at issue; and yet that seems to be what Chomsky (at least as presented by Barsky) asks us to accept.

As I see it, the point is (or is best viewed as) one which pragmatism has best articulated, and I don’t mean to use the term pragmatism as it has occasionally been used in a colloquial sense, to mean whatever works best for oneself in the short run. I mean rather the view of human activity that Barsky says was governing in the best education that Chomsky received, at his first school, one organized along the lines of John Dewey’s philosophy. Pragmatism takes principles to be always subject to revision and to reinterpretation, based on continued human experience. Principles applied without regard for their context, and principles applied to particular cases with no concern for learning about the eventual consequences of that mode of application of the principle – these are principles that have not evolved pragmatically. Even a school-child knows Justice Holmes’ classic formulation of the restriction on freedom of speech: one cannot cry "Fire!" in crowded theater, knowing that there is in fact no danger from fire. The French government has, apparently, made a criminal offense out of certain kinds of historical falsification (however that is defined in France). The arguments to be made against this are presumably the familiar ones, regarding the dangers to society of undertaking that kind of state-run censorship; that is how I see it, in any event, though it seems, from Barsky’s account, that Chomsky would strongly disagree with it, and might even view it as "a contemptible position" (178), for Chomsky is quoted as saying that it would be a contemptible position to defend freedom of speech on the grounds that the speech that might be suppressed, in an atmosphere that did not defend such freedom, would turn out to be valuable.

The issue is much like the debate concerning capital punishment. I don’t doubt that a large proportion of those firmly against capital punishment hold the position because of their belief in the sanctity of human life. So where do we fit in the argument (supposing that there is such an argument) against capital punishment on the grounds that it has not been effective in lowering the crime rate? Is it a sign of moral dwarfism to find a context in which that is of any relevance? Perhaps here some would say that such contingent, empirical matters should not enter into the discussion, but clearly others would disagree. If we lower the ante and consider vegetarianism, there would clearly be some who hold that eating animal flesh is wrong on purely moral grounds, while others would support vegetarianism on the grounds that it lowers the rate of heart disease. Few would object to the pragmatic view here: principles at various levels may interact, and on some occasions, principles that are morally more mundane may be as influential as those that are morally refined. Surely issues of freedom of speech fit into such a category.

In the end, this epitomizes much of what has been controversial about Chomsky’s views. On issues of importance, Chomsky’s utter certainty of the correctness of the position that he takes is captivating and attractive – up to a point, at least. For most of us humans, the critical points in our lives have been the moments when insight arrived and uncertainty evaporated. On Barsky’s account, Chomsky’s career has not been characterized by a series of scientific discoveries and personal triumphs, but has been just the general working out in an at times sympathetic environment of ideas that he started out with when he was about seven years old. Of course, that’s not very different from the Chomskian view of the language faculty. Maybe there’s a connection.

References

Huck, Geoffrey, and John Goldsmith. 1995. Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates. London: Routledge.

Martinet, André. 1993. Mémoires d’un linguiste. Paris: Quai Voltaire.

Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1991. The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Russell, Francis. 1986. Sacco and Vanzetti: The Case Resolved. New York: Harper and Row.

Happy Birthday, Noam Chomsky!

2011-12-07T08:37:00.001-08:00

Today Noam Chomsky turns 84!

Over the years countless letters have been written about him on this occasion. Hard to add anything substantially new. My life and views took a major turn on encountering his writings, as did my analytical abilities. As a critical review of a biography of his stated: "Noam Chomsky – need it be said? – has earned legendary status for his prolific writing in linguistics and radical politics, as well as for his prodigious personal correspondence, his crushing schedule of lectures, his inspiring teaching, his technical brilliance, his take-no-prisoners debating style, and his personal generosity towards his students and other younger scholars."

He really is a remarkable individual, one whose like we will probably not see again for a very long time.

Happy Birthday, Noam!

Here is one letter to him, and his reply:

Dear Noam Chomsky,

Hi, my name is Jason Chen and I'm a graduate of UC Santa Cruz. I've decided to write to you because I have recently seen a posting of one of your email responses to some random person and it made me think that you actually might respond to mine.

I want to say that you have been one of the largest influences in my life (including John Stuart Mill and Ralph Nader); I quote you constantly anytime I have a serious discussion.

I also want to say that I try to implement my beliefs, my philosophies into my life. I'm currently in China teaching English and I always try to implement independent thinking into my lessons. Sometimes I give my students censored material because I want them to question what they've been told. I'm surprised at the extent of the censorship here; it really angers me and I try to struggle against it. I guess it's my way of being an activist (I've always wanted to be one, but couldn't imagine myself marching outside and going head to head against police). I don't know how much difference it will make, but I will continue.

Anyways, I have been pondering a question for awhile and I think I've recently concluded on what I think, but I wanted to know your perspective.

I was on the subway yesterday and a homeless woman asked me for money and as usual, I ignored her. I ignore every homeless person who asks me for money and it has been bothering me for years. I'm a person who wants to “save the world” and I plan my life accordingly to how I want to do it. I dream about working with wind turbines and solar panels and I talk about it all the time with my friends. My goals are very ideal, but I feel as if all this “grand talk” means nothing if I don't help the people right in front of me.

Every reason that I have come up with to defend my act, I have concluded, seems to me more like an excuse. I tell myself that I should give them money and that I'll start doing it when I have a career, but it scares me to think that I'm just fooling myself.

What is the right thing to do?

This is really important to me.

Sincerely,
Keinst

Noam Chomsky's reply:

Each of us has finite time, resources, energy. Even if we devoted 100% of it to helping the needy, relieving suffering, etc., we'd have to make very painful choices, ignoring a huge amount that ought to be done. And no one can spend anything remotely like 100%, so the choices are harder, but inevitable. There's no general answer possible as to how to make them.

I once drove to a protest demonstration in New Delhi with a woman who really had devoted something like 100% of her time and energy to these endeavors. She had given up a professorship at the university in New Delhi to live in a deeply impoverished village in Rajasthan, living in poverty of a kind we can barely imagine, trying to work mostly on women's issues in a region where the oppression of women is grotesque. In India, even in the richer parts, if your car stops for a traffic light, you're likely to be besieged by utterly miserable people pleading for a coin. I noticed that she sat completely stolid, not even looking out the window, and she advised me to do the same. It's not that her heart is made of stone. Quite the opposite. She knew that she couldn't give a fraction of them anything meaningful, had chosen to devote herself to their misery in different ways, and understood that unless you pretend you do not see, you'll tear yourself to shreds, helping no one. In other circumstances, she would have given everything she had to some beggar.

That doesn't answer your question. Nothing does. You'll just have to decide for yourself, as each of us must, which is the right way for you, of the many we have available to us.

Noam

Nice

2011-12-06T14:06:00.001-08:00

"A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin." -Mencken

Chomsky

2011-12-02T03:51:00.001-08:00

The reply from Noam Chomsky on being asked if voting mattered:

It’s a question I’ve wrestled with all my life, for reasons rather like yours. Goldman’s statement is trenchant, but too strong. Sometimes choosing between two bad alternatives does actually make a difference. I greatly disliked Obama from the start, and not much that he’s done has surprised me (but some did; I wouldn’t have expected that he’d be that bad). But if I’d been in a swing state, I’d have voted against McCain-Palin in 2008 – meaning for Obama, holding my nose. Voting also sometimes makes a difference at lower levels. I don’t think there can be a formula. It varies. But I quite agree that it’s not a high-level decision. Activism makes a lot more difference.

Noam Chomsky

Graduate student psychology

2011-12-01T10:32:00.001-08:00

I have recently been having some nice discussions with a very dedicated young student who wishes to pursue his graduate studies. I have pointed out repeatedly the abysmal job situation. But to no avail. So this article made a lot of sense to me:

You Aren't the Exception
November 21, 2011 - 3:00am
By
Nate Kreuter

I was lucky to attend a graduate program that conducted itself, and so far as I know continues to conduct itself, quite ethically. During our orientation, my cohort was led into an auditorium where the department’s graduate director addressed us. After the typical messages of welcome and run-downs of various logistical need-to-know, the graduate director delivered a very somber warning.

He plainly and seriously warned us that of the 30 or so people in the room, only perhaps 40 percent of us would complete our degrees and secure academic appointments. That 40 percent, he warned, would be lucky to find any sort of academic job, even off the tenure track, and even fewer of us would be fortunate enough to secure tenure-track appointments. And nobody, he practically promised, would get their dream job. Considering the seriousness of the message, the mood among the grad students remained light. It was literally the first day of graduate school, and nobody worried. We adjourned to the bars near campus. But it wasn’t the last time we heard the warning.

Fast-forward six or eight years, to today. The economy has slackened (to put it mildly), and the bad academic job market that my cohort was warned about has become the abysmal job market that leads advisers to now say things to their grad students along the lines of "I don’t know. It's always been bad, but it's never been this bad." A lucky few members of my cohort have already filed their dissertations and found jobs, while a few more changed course along the way, and the majority are spending their first or second year on the job market, wondering when, if ever, a lucky (and deserved) break will arrive.

Why, I have wondered since that first day of graduate school, were so many of us, myself included, incapable of hearing the warning that the graduate director had so bluntly delivered? Why were we repeatedly shocked when the warning repeatedly proved true? While I’m no psychologist, and can’t claim any expertise in psychology, I'm willing to speculate that more than a little cognitive dissonance comes into play when graduate students are informed, in the most frank terms, about just how unlikely it is that they will land the job of their dreams, or any job. My layman's psychological theory is that the answer has a lot to do with the type of person who attends graduate school. The very same qualities that lead many graduate students to pursue higher degrees are the qualities that make them incapable of hearing and processing even the most dire warnings about their professional prospects.

Graduate students are, almost by definition, atypical students as undergraduates. In most cases, the types of people who enroll in graduate work were exceptionally bright, hardworking undergraduate students. As exceptional undergraduates, the people who eventually go on to graduate studies probably get very good at disregarding warnings. When, as an undergraduate, an instructor issued routine warnings to the class, the grad-school-bound student might have gotten very used to ignoring the sorts of admonitions that pervade the undergraduate experience: "My bibliographies are always perfect, and I turn everything in on time, so this warning to make sure that my APA formatting is correct and to have my paper turned in by Monday is nothing to worry about."

By the time they arrive at graduate school, and even if they are years removed from their undergraduate education, most grad students have been conditioned to see themselves as an exception, and as exceptional. So, when they begin to hear warnings about the realities of the job market in graduate school, the old conditioning kicks in, and the old thinking, so trustworthy before, also kicks in: "This doesn’t apply to me. My intelligence and hard work will see me through, just as they always have." The problem, of course, is that not everyone can actually be the exception. People will be disappointed, their studies abandoned, their dreams unfulfilled, their future paths unclear.

What is so impossible for many graduate students to understand is that everybody in their cohort is just as smart and hardworking as they themselves are. At the graduate level, the smarts and diligence that once set students apart from their undergraduate peers will no longer set them apart, but merely allow them to keep up. It is almost impossible for many beginning graduate students to grasp that having above average intelligence and an unimpeachable work ethic will mean only that they are average graduate students. That's quite a shock to some people.

Then there's luck. A tremendous amount of luck will begin to come into play during a graduate career. Because graduate students are older than undergraduates, there are simply more variables in play in their lives. They have families in many cases, and more susceptibility to serious health issues, and more financial obligations. Their parents are older, and more likely to need the student’s help at some point. There are simply more variables present in a graduate student's life that can interfere with studies than there are in the typical undergraduate’s life.

And that's where luck begins to come into play. Will personal, family, and health crises stay away, and allow students to finish their dissertations, or will crises intervene, possibly slowing or even stopping students’ progress? Will the dissertation the student chooses remain timely and relevant three years later, when it is defended? Or will it become irrelevant, or get "scooped" by another researcher working in the same area? Will the student’s dissertation director be attentive and look out for the student’s best interests, or be an actual inhibitor to progress? Will ambivalent dissertation committee members need to be swapped out, slowing the writing process? Will the student’s funding package remain in place, or will funding cuts force the student to take outside work to pay the bills? What else might go wrong?

And merit, many of us have realized with shock, plays a relatively small and marginalized role in who completes a degree and secures an appointment. Because smart, creative, hardworking researchers and teachers are not lacking at all in today’s academic job market. Every discipline is awash with smart, hardworking people doing innovative research and with exceptional teaching skills. As a result, a certain amount of luck will determine which of the 200 qualified applicants is selected for any particular job. From what I can tell, luck is more of a factor early in an academic career than late in one. At the late stages, the people who are most important within a discipline have earned it, through their research, hard work, and creative thinking. But getting one's foot in the door, to even have a chance to establish a career, that's the lucky part.

I'm not sure that there is a way to convey to the beginning graduate student just how much luck is involved in this life. Nor am I sure of how to convey to graduate students, in a way that they will understand and process, just exactly what sort of odds they face, though a recent open letter attempting just that has been making the digital rounds. I do know though that it is the obligation of graduate programs and graduate faculty to be frank and realistic with students about the numbers, now more than ever.

A Joke

2011-11-30T15:53:00.001-08:00

Two social workers are walking down the street when they spot a man lying bleeding in the gutter, having been beaten senseless. One says to the other: "The person who did that is really in need of help," as they walk away.

Chuck Norris Facts

2011-11-26T08:37:00.001-08:00

Previous ones here.

Chuck Norris has a gmail account: gmail@chucknorris.com

Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door.

A Nice Comment

2011-11-24T06:37:00.000-08:00

An obvious, but very well-written comment from a thread discussing the bad job situation for academic adjuncts:

When this article first appeared, I wondered how long it would take for the social darwinists to show up; now they are here in force, berating adjuncts (and other contingent faculty) for being "idiots and slackers" who made "poor choices" and therefore deserve neither sympathy nor assistance from their betters. "Cry me a river!" they sneer. "Take some responsibility!" they intone. It’s all about "supply and demand", they explain, and administrators would be "derelict" if they paid a living wage to those who can be bought for less than that. If you don’t enjoy being treated like human garbage then go do something else, they admonish. And if, after all you’ve been through, you are no longer good for anything else, well, "that’s just too bad." The way things are going, it would not surprise me if the next round of comments involves terms like "untermenschen" and "useless eaters."

Lost in all this self-righteous posturing by people who "chose" to go to rich Ivy League schools and "chose" to become well-heeled tenured professors and administrators is the fact that, as an ancient wise man once said, "the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all." That wisdom seems to have been forgotten by the self-righteous twits who so gleefully dance on the heads of those they obviously consider to be their inferiors.

Sure, we should all take more responsibility for our lives, and much misery could be avoided if no one ever made any mistakes. But we all make mistakes sooner or later, and sometimes there is no way to distinguish in advance between a boneheaded error and a reasonably calculated risk–or even a brilliant move that by rights ought to pan out but, in the end, simply doesn’t. It’s easy to invent explanations for why someone whose life has gone to hell ought to have "known better". The woman whose husband gives her AIDS and then abandons her for someone else? She should have chosen a better partner. The employee who is cheated by his boss and then fired for filing a grievance? He should have chosen to work in a better establishment. The people who lose their jobs and their house through no fault of their own and end up on the street with three little kids in tow? They shouldn’t have had children at all until they were sure they could support them comfortably for the next eighteen years. The twentysomething who joins the National Guard thinking he’s going to be doing flood relief, and then finds himself in some third-world hellhole and comes back shot to pieces and unable to work, only to be told there’s no benefits for people like him? He should have known better than to try to serve his country in the first place. And the young people who believed the bland assurances of their favorite professors that "people like you ought to go to grad school" and "you won’t have any trouble finding a job with a degree from a good school like this"? They should have known that eight or ten years down the road the economy was going to tank, the tenure track would be going away, and there would no longer be any demand for the field they spent a decade studying.

In short, everyone should have a crystal ball with infallible discernment of the future–and anyone who doesn’t have one should have the decency to shut up and stop bothering the rest of us about the consequences of their "poor choices." It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, "every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost!" These people need to stop whining and get with the program!

Problem is, no sane person really wants to live in a world like that. The social darwinists think they do, because for the moment they’re on top of the heap looking down at the rest of us. The darwinists take for granted that there will always be people who feel called to engage in socially valuable professions like teaching, medicine, and social work instead of more profitable enterprises such as, say, marketing corrupt financial derivatives; and they are perfectly willing to take advantage of other people’s decency and self-sacrifice even as they publicly vilify those same people as fools and idiots for entering such fields in the first place. They also turn into the biggest whiners you’ve ever heard when their carefully constructed world finally begins to fall apart and they have to start living like the rest of us. In fact, right here in this forum we’ve seen them become righteously enraged when the slaves they rely on to prop up their narcissistic little paradise threaten to begin operating according to the same self-centered competitive ethic that they themselves follow.

It’s the same story we see over and over again throughout history: The "haves" think they have the upper hand because they deserve to, while they grind their boots in the faces of the lesser breeds who were born to serve; and when the "have nots" plead for some modicum of mercy and human decency from their betters, they get nothing from them but insults and further abuse. One might hope that academics, of all people, might do better than this, if for no other reason than a practical self-interest born of the knowledge that, historically, such situations always end badly sooner or later; but judging by what we’ve seen in this and similar forums in recent years, such hopes appear to be in vain.

Poem

2011-11-22T07:03:00.000-08:00

One of my favourite poems:

THE TYGER (from Songs Of Experience)
By William Blake

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

A well-written essay on job situation in academia

2011-11-20T09:02:00.001-08:00

From here:

Open Letter to My Students: No, You Cannot be a Professor

In a way it is the greatest compliment a student can give. I ask them what they want to do with their history degree. They get all passionate and earnest and vulnerable as they answer, "I want your job. I am going to be a college professor!" Then they turn their smiling faces towards me, expectantly awaiting my validation and encouragement of their dreams. And I swallow hard, and I tell them....

No, my esteemed student, you are not going to be a history professor. It isn't going to happen. The sooner you accept this the better.

This is not because you are not bright enough. You are plenty bright. In any case, finishing a Ph.D. program is more a matter of persistence than intelligence. The reason you are not going to be a professor is because that job is going away, and yet doctoral programs continue to produce as many new Ph.D.s as ever. It is a simple calculation of odds--you are not going to win the lottery, you are not going to be struck by a meteorite, you are not going to be a professor. All of these things will happen to someone, somewhere, but none of them will happen to you.

First, let's look at the odds. Tenure track jobs are declining. The AHA recently reported that "The number of job openings in history plummeted last year, even as the number of new history PhDs soared. As a result, it appears the discipline is entering one of the most difficult academic job markets for historians in more than 15 years." And the job market was terrible 15 years ago. Very few of the people in history PhD programs right now are going to get teaching jobs--the Economist recently concluded that "doing a PhD is often a waste of time."

Ah, but you say, I am special. I am a 4.0 student (except in your class where you gave me that 3.8 and ruined my life). Every teacher since kindergarten has told me how delightfully clever I am. I have interesting ideas and I really really love history. I know how hard it is to become a professor, but I am willing to work hard, so those odds do not apply to me.

Yes they do. The thing about grad school is that everyone else is at least as special as you, and most of them are more so. They all had 4.0 GPAs, they all have gone through life in the same insulating cocoon of praise, they all really, really love history. Hell, some of them shoot rainbows out of their butts and smell like a pine forest after a spring rain--and they mostly aren't going to get jobs either.

I know that some of your other professors are encouraging your dreams of an academic career. It is natural to turn to your professors for advice on becoming a professor, and it natural for them to want to see you succeed. Remember though that we 1) mostly have not been on the job market lately and 2) in any case are atypical Ph.D.s in that we did land tenure track positions. To return to the lottery analogy, it is like asking lottery winners if you should buy a ticket. For our part, there is a lot of professional satisfaction in mentoring some bright young person, encouraging their dreams, writing them letters of recommendation and bragging of their subsequent acceptance into a good doctoral program. Job market? What job market?

Your professors are the last generation of tenure track faculty. Every long-term educational trend points towards the end of the professoriate. States continue to slash funding for higher education. Retiring professors are not replaced, or replaced with part-time faculty. Technology promises to provide education with far fewer teachers--and whether you buy into this vision of the future or not, state legislators and university administrators believe. The few faculty that remain will see increased service responsibilities (someone has to oversee those adjuncts!), deteriorating resources and facilities, and stagnant wages. After ten years of grad school you could make as much as the manager of a Hooters! But you won't be that lucky.

For a more accurate gauge of the job market speak with some of the people you find adjuncting at your university. Ask them about the pay and benefits they get for the hours worked--most are earning little more than minimum wage with no benefits. Or head over to the well of bitterness and despair that is Adjunct Nation, and peruse the articles on topics such as Avoiding Freeway Flyer Burnout or Kent State Faculty Senate Opposes Collective Bargaining For Part-time Faculty. This a far more likely vision of your future than is the happy mid-career faculty member who biked to work yesterday and met you in her sunny office with the pictures of her European vacation on the wall.

Finally, I want to look at one factor that is too-little addressed in these discussions: the opportunity costs spending 6-10 years preparing for a career that, even in the event of your actually landing a tenure-track job somewhere (and again, that is not going to happen) will leave you hundreds of thousands of dollars in the hole compared to your friends who started professional careers right out of their undergrad program. In six years you could have entered a career, risen to mid-rank, bought a house, and had your IRA off to a healthy beginning. If you go on for a PhD, instead you will find yourself with student loan payments equivalent of a home mortgage but no home (and no equity), no retirement savings, and banking on the thin chance of landing a job in some part of the country usually only seen on American Pickers. The opportunity costs are at least a million dollars. You don't care now, because you are young, but you will.

So no, my bright-eyed young scholar, you are not going to be a history professor. That is not to say that you cannot work with history. There are some great jobs in public history--working for local government, or federal agencies, or museums, or as an independent contractor, or a hundred other things. These jobs are also competitive and hard to break into, but there are more of them and you only need an MA. Or you could get certified and teach history in the public schools--again, quite competitive but not nearly so much as college teaching. Good luck!

Chomsky

2011-11-19T16:31:00.001-08:00

Chomsky on the energy situation:

There are several important things to bear in mind in considering these questions.

First, they are hard. The technologies are not well understood, the basic science is limited, and every option that is selected has innumerable consequences, many of them basically unknown or at best poorly understood.

Second, with regard to oil, the uncertainties are compounded by two factors:

(1) Most of the information has always been in the hands of the energy corporations, which are impenetrable, except by congressional subpoena. A lot was learned during the investigations of the Church committee in the '70s, which used subpoena power to pry the records open a bit, but that was a rare if very valuable event. The energy corporations are not about to tell anyone what they know.

(2) The "experts" (economists, policy-makers, etc.) are in the grip of a fanatic religious ideology which holds that everything will be solved by miracles: "the market," "technological progress," etc. As a result, the kinds of studies that should be done are not done. The OECD apparently does not even have a committee investigating long-term prospects for oil.

In brief, anything you read or hear should be evaluated with caution.

A few things seem fairly clear. The rate of discovery of oil rose from the earliest discoveries to the mid-1960s. Since then it has been declining steadily, despite new technologies, super-deep digging, etc. It's likely that most of what is exploitable without inordinate expense is already known, and being exhausted -- at an increasing rate. For the past 20 years, that rate has been going up fast, and with Asian (and some other) industrialization will go up faster. The rich countries are doing little to reduce extremely wasteful use of these resources (the US is doing essentially nothing -- in fact, making things worse with gasoline the cheapest it's been since World War II, larger cars, etc.). A serious problem is likely to arise, perhaps within the next few decades, though for the reasons mentioned, estimates are highly uncertain. One is that the "half-way point" (half the usable resources already consumed) is imminent, and that the role of the Middle East (which has most of the known resources) will return to what it was in 1970 and soon beyond, with incalculable consequences.

Another reasonable speculation is that the energy corporations and governments have been holding back on pursuing alternatives. Just how much, we cannot know, for the reasons mentioned. But there is pretty good reason to believe that there have been interventions and manipulations to keep the world tied to oil as long as possible. A look at history is instructive. The US had considerable resources, though not at the Middle East level. In the '50s, a conscious decision was made to use up US resources as fast as possible, turning the US ultimately (by the '70s) into an oil importer. So we are now filling up holes with foreign oil as a strategic reserve after having pretty much exhausted domestic oil. From the point of view of the population here (or anywhere) this was complete madness. From the point of view of the energy corporations and governments, which knew exactly what they were doing, it made good sense in terms of short-term profit.

Ergo,...

No reason to think that things have changed substantially since.

About Colombia, everything I've seen indicates that while it has plenty of oil, it is kind of a blip on the screen. It may change projections by a few years. And exploitation of its oil, which is surely in the cards, is likely to have an awful impact on the country, as you indicate. But that's no concern for the energy corporations and governments.

On "alternatives on the horizon," there is a considerable literature: solar, wind, tides, biomass, fusion, etc. But it's subject to the conditions already mentioned. You have to take everything with considerable caution. I doubt that anyone really knows very much, though you'll hear a lot of things said with great confidence.

I should say that I'm partly relying here on discussions with some really outstanding scientists, who have spent their lives on these topics, sometimes working with the oil companies (at arms length), and whose political stance is about the same as yours and mine.

Louis Kampf Quote

2011-11-18T04:43:00.000-08:00

Louis Kampf in his 1971 address to MLA as president elect:

"We are workers under industrial capitalism. If we understand that, we can understand our alienation, our sense of powerlessness. For teaching, we collect wages: that is our basic connection to educational institutions, not the claims of humanist rhetoric. We are, in short, an intellectual proletariat. Consciousness of this condition can lead to self-hatred or cynical careerism. It can also lead to our uniting around the oppression we share with other alienated workers, the better to rid ourselves of the oppressors."

A nice essay on certainty

2011-11-16T11:37:00.000-08:00

by Julian Baggini:

I've been told off more than once in this series for employing military metaphors such as "redrawing the battle lines" and "truce". I accept the criticism: to talk in confrontational terms invites confrontation. However, I don't think that all such pleas for more moderation should be granted. In particular, there is a tendency to advocate suspended judgment rather than definite opinion as the appropriate response to thorny ultimate questions.

Given that the thermometer on the God debate has so often tended to indicate overheating, it is obvious why voices of calm and moderation seem attractive– and agnosticism is about as calm and moderate as you can get. It should, therefore, be clear why uncertainty appeals, but this very fact seems contrary to what you often hear.

For instance, Mark Vernon has borrowed from John Hapgood (with full credit, of course) the phrase "the lust for certainty" to help explain what is wrong both with belief and unbelief. This is supposed to capture a malaise, perhaps contemporary, perhaps perennial, in which human beings crave fixed and certain truths in a fluid, uncertain world. It is a lust because it is excessive and irrational, and can never be sated. It therefore needs to be tamed, and agnosticism is the best way of doing so.

Vernon's advocacy of passionate agnosticism offers soothing camomile tea to those jittery after the triple espressos of the new atheists and religious fundamentalists. Since he is as genial in person as he is on the page, attacking him does feel rather like kicking a Labrador puppy. But if we are serious about religion, being truthful must sometimes trump being nice, and intellectually, if not personally, Vernon needs a good kicking.

Vernon says: "We live in an age intolerant of doubt." But it seems to me that there is at least a class of educated, liberal westerners for whom the opposite is true. Uncertainty is what they desire more than anything else. This seems to me to have two sources, "dogmatophobia" and binary thinking.

What I call dogmatophobia is the liberal fear of being judgmental of the beliefs of others. Because everyone has a right to her opinion and no one has a monopoly on the truth, there is a tendency to think that any kind of assertion of a truth, other than of the blandest factual kind ("Paris is the capital of France"), is intolerant and morally imperialistic. Hence, people who assiduously avoid factory-farmed meat will go out of their way not to condemn ritual animal slaughter that causes needless suffering. People who would not tolerate even the sniff of sexism in their workplace bend over backwards to allow religious traditions their "right" to systemically discriminate against women.

This breed of excessively permissive liberalism – which is not the only kind, by the way – needs uncertainty to thrive. Where truths are even reasonably clear, there is no scope to say: "Who am I to say?" or "That may be true for you, but it may not be true to others." And so an understandable and generally laudable desire to be as inclusive and pluralistic as possible ends up with an unhealthy lust for uncertainty.

The second root of the problem is that people who officially embrace fuzziness of values are in other ways as hypnotised by clear but false dichotomies as anyone else. But there is no choice that has to be made between certainty and uncertainty. Rather, certainty is a matter of degree. It may be that nothing is certain, but not everything is equally uncertain. It is not certain that global warming is both real and anthropogenic, but that does not mean that those who advocate action on the belief that it is have fallen victim to a lust for certainty. The mistaken ones are those who make too much of this uncertainty and use it as a reason for inaction.

It is, of course, true that an excessive desire for certainty is deeply problematic. But pretty much every reasonable person agrees with this, and most are not agnostic. Accepting that the world is full of uncertainty and ambiguity does not and should not stop people from being pretty sure about a lot of things. To criticise people who express a firm belief as suffering from a lust for certainty is therefore to see the speck in another's eye while missing the plank in one's own: an excessive lust for uncertainty that makes any conviction appear misplaced.

The mark of a mature, psychologically healthy mind is indeed the ability to live with uncertainty and ambiguity, but only as much as there really is. Uncertainty is no virtue when the facts are clear, and ambiguity is mere obfuscation when more precise terms are applicable. Unfortunately, the middle ground in the God debate is occupied by too many people who screw up their eyes to create the illusion of a mist when the view is really clear. And this is not just wrong: it's dangerous, because if we make too much of our inability to be certain, we make ourselves incapable of clear and unequivocal condemnation of just those extreme dogmatists whom agnostics and moderate but committed believers fear. The main problem with young-Earth creationists who assert that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, for instance, is not that they are certain, but that they are wrong. It's the matter of the belief that is pernicious, not just the manner of its holding.

So of one thing we can be sure: it's high time we realised that adopting a moderate position in the God debate is not the same as adopting a non-judgmental one in which uncertainty becomes the new object of veneration.

Iris Chang

2011-11-16T09:51:00.000-08:00

Suicide notes left by Iris Chang.

The first draft:

When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day — but by the minute. It is far better that you remember me as I was — in my heyday as a best-selling author — than the wild-eyed wreck who returned from Louisville... Each breath is becoming difficult for me to take — the anxiety can be compared to drowning in an open sea. I know that my actions will transfer some of this pain to others, indeed those who love me the most. Please forgive me. Forgive me because I cannot forgive myself.

The second draft:

There are aspects of my experience in Louisville that I will never understand. Deep down I suspect that you may have more answers about this than I do. I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the CIA or some other organization I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me.

Days before I left for Louisville I had a deep foreboding about my safety. I sensed suddenly threats to my own life: an eerie feeling that I was being followed in the streets, the white van parked outside my house, damaged mail arriving at my P.O. Box. I believe my detention at Norton Hospital was the government's attempt to discredit me.

I had considered running away, but I will never be able to escape from myself and my thoughts. I am doing this because I am too weak to withstand the years of pain and agony ahead.

Quotes

2011-11-14T13:59:00.000-08:00

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is apt to spread discontent among those who are." -- H. L. Mencken

Structured Procrastination

2011-11-10T22:35:00.000-08:00

A funny (and insightful!) essay that won the Ig Nobel prize this year:

Structured Procrastination
John Perry

". . . anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment." -- Robert Benchley, in Chips off the Old Benchley, 1949

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

The most perfect situation for structured procrastination that I ever had was when my wife and I served as Resident Fellows in Soto House, a Stanford dormitory. In the evening, faced with papers to grade, lectures to prepare, committee work to be done, I would leave our cottage next to the dorm and go over to the lounge and play ping-pong with the residents, or talk over things with them in their rooms, or just sit there and read the paper. I got a reputation for being a terrific Resident Fellow, and one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a set up: play ping pong as a way of not doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr. Chips.

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.

The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I'm sure the same is true for most other large institutions. Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article anyway? Not so important that at some point something that seems more important won't come along. Then I'll get to work on it.

Another example is book order forms. I write this in June. In October, I will teach a class on Epistemology. The book order forms are already overdue at the book store. It is easy to take this as an important task with a pressing deadline (for you non-procrastinators, I will observe that deadlines really start to press a week or two after they pass.) I get almost daily reminders from the department secretary, students sometimes ask me what we will be reading, and the unfilled order form sits right in the middle of my desk, right under the wrapping from the sandwich I ate last Wednesday. This task is near the top of my list; it bothers me, and motivates me to do other useful but superficially less important things. But in fact, the book store is plenty busy with forms already filed by non-procrastinators. I can get mine in mid-Summer and things will be fine. I just need to order popular well-known books from efficient publishers. I will accept some other, apparently more important, task sometime between now and, say, August 1st. Then my psyche will feel comfortable about filling out the order forms as a way of not doing this new task.

The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?

Karen Dalton

2011-11-10T13:45:00.000-08:00

Discovered the wonderfully melancholic song "Something on your mind" by Karen Dalton, who lived as such:

Tall, beautiful, and haunted by hard drugs and alcohol, a situation that left her homeless and nearly toothless at her death in New York in 1993, Karen Dalton never found commercial success in her lifetime, but her extremely small recording legacy (just two albums, 1969's It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best and 1971's In My Own Time, and now this double-disc live set from 1962) reveals a maverick and singular musician utterly unlike anyone else on the folk (or any other) scene.

Possessing an eerie, riveting voice and vocal style that could almost be called harrowing if it didn't carry so much of the real world in its emotional depths, Dalton's folk-blues repertoire consisted of odd bits of traditional fare (which she generally took in directions only she could have imagined), an assortment of Fred Neil songs (the artist she most resembles emotionally), Billie Holiday's "God Bless the Child" (Dalton's vocal phrasing has recalled Holiday's for many listeners), and assorted R&B songs, often those made famous by Ray Charles, which she stripped down and took into startling new places. Accompanying herself on a Gibson 12-string acoustic guitar or her trademark long-neck banjo, Dalton performed live sets that were tense, draining affairs, leaving little doubt that this was a woman who sang from a place few others had ever even glimpsed. This remarkable live set was taped in October of 1962 at the Attic coffeehouse in Boulder, CO, by Joe Loop, and it unveils as a stilled and stark reading of Dalton's musical story, offering her eerie and moody version of Ray Charles' "It's Alright," an absolutely haunting take on the old fiddle tune "Cotton Eyed Joe," a real-as-it-gets rendition of Fred Neil's "Blues on the Ceiling," and a stunning run-through of the traditional (and for all practical purposes, Dalton's signature tune) "Katie Cruel," all of it done with the unhurried pace of an intense all-night conversation.

Dalton has said that one doesn't sing songs, one speaks them, and that philosophy helps explain her idiosyncratic vocal style, which shifts lines into unexpected patterns, mimicking, in a way, the pace and flow of solo speech, although make no mistake, what Dalton does is singing, and singing done with a hushed urgency, and in a way, it is more like a free-flight jazz horn break on an old blues standard than anything else. Dalton's approach isn't for everyone, and this is far from an album to throw on at a party -- the barely veiled emotional power of these vocal performances is much more likely to produce a stunned silence than any kind of levity.

The really good news is that this two-disc package now doubles the amount of Karen Dalton recordings available in the world, and it adds an additional DVD with videos of Dalton singing "God Bless the Child," "It Hurts Me Too," Fred Neil's "A Little Bit of Rain," and the traditional "Blues Jumped the Rabbit" in New York in 1969 and Summerville in 1970. She was one of a kind, and the real tragedy is that people are only discovering that now some dozen years and more after her death.

Feynman on Philosophy

2011-11-10T03:11:00.000-08:00

"Another most interesting change in the ideas and philosophy of science brought about by quantum mechanics is this: it is not possible to predict exactly what will happen in any circumstance. For example, it is possible to arrange an atom which is ready to emit light, and we can measure when it has emitted light by picking up a photon particle, which we shall describe shortly. We cannot, however, predict when it is going to emit the light or, with several atoms, which one is going to. You may say that this is because there are some internal “wheels” which we have not looked at closely enough. No, there are no internal wheels; nature, as we understand it today, behaves in such a way that it is fundamentally impossible to make a precise prediction of exactly what will happen in a given experiment. This is a horrible thing; in fact, philosophers have said before that one of the fundamental requisites of science is that whenever you set up the same conditions, the same thing must happen. This is simply not true, it is not a fundamental condition of science. The fact is that the same thing does not happen, that we can find only an average, statistically, as to what happens. Nevertheless, science has not completely collapsed. Philosophers, incidentally, say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong. For example, some philosopher or other said it is fundamental to the scientific effort that if an experiment is performed in, say, Stockholm, and then the same experiment is done in, say, Quito, the same results must occur. That is quite false. It is not necessary that science do that; it may be a fact of experience, but it is not necessary." Feynman, 1965.

The Year 2011

2011-11-06T07:09:00.000-08:00

"It is, regrettably, no exaggeration to say that we are living in an era of irrationality, deception, confusion, anger, and unfocused fear — an ominous combination, with few precedents." - Noam Chomsky in 2011

Einstein Essay

2011-11-06T03:39:00.000-08:00

Why Socialism?

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has—as is well known—been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called “the predatory phase” of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.

Second, socialism is directed towards a social-ethical end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and—if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous—are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.

For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.

Innumerable voices have been asserting for some time now that human society is passing through a crisis, that its stability has been gravely shattered. It is characteristic of such a situation that individuals feel indifferent or even hostile toward the group, small or large, to which they belong. In order to illustrate my meaning, let me record here a personal experience. I recently discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war, which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I remarked that only a supra-national organization would offer protection from that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly, said to me: “Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?”

I am sure that as little as a century ago no one would have so lightly made a statement of this kind. It is the statement of a man who has striven in vain to attain an equilibrium within himself and has more or less lost hope of succeeding. It is the expression of a painful solitude and isolation from which so many people are suffering in these days. What is the cause? Is there a way out?

It is easy to raise such questions, but difficult to answer them with any degree of assurance. I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the existence of these varied, frequently conflicting, strivings accounts for the special character of a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society. It is quite possible that the relative strength of these two drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior. The abstract concept “society” means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is “society” which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word “society.”

It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished—just as in the case of ants and bees. However, while the whole life process of ants and bees is fixed down to the smallest detail by rigid, hereditary instincts, the social pattern and interrelationships of human beings are very variable and susceptible to change. Memory, the capacity to make new combinations, the gift of oral communication have made possible developments among human being which are not dictated by biological necessities. Such developments manifest themselves in traditions, institutions, and organizations; in literature; in scientific and engineering accomplishments; in works of art. This explains how it happens that, in a certain sense, man can influence his life through his own conduct, and that in this process conscious thinking and wanting can play a part.

Man acquires at birth, through heredity, a biological constitution which we must consider fixed and unalterable, including the natural urges which are characteristic of the human species. In addition, during his lifetime, he acquires a cultural constitution which he adopts from society through communication and through many other types of influences. It is this cultural constitution which, with the passage of time, is subject to change and which determines to a very large extent the relationship between the individual and society. Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of organization which predominate in society. It is on this that those who are striving to improve the lot of man may ground their hopes: human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.

If we ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible, we should constantly be conscious of the fact that there are certain conditions which we are unable to modify. As mentioned before, the biological nature of man is, for all practical purposes, not subject to change. Furthermore, technological and demographic developments of the last few centuries have created conditions which are here to stay. In relatively densely settled populations with the goods which are indispensable to their continued existence, an extreme division of labor and a highly-centralized productive apparatus are absolutely necessary. The time—which, looking back, seems so idyllic—is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.

I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production—although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is “free,” what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists’ requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the “free labor contract” for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present day economy does not differ much from “pure” capitalism.

Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers’ goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.

Coleman on Teaching

2011-11-05T08:13:00.001-07:00

Sidney Coleman on teaching:

Or even special topics courses. Teaching is unpleasant work. No question about it. It has its rewards. One feels happy about having a job well done. Washing the dishes, waxing the floors (things I also do on a regular basis since I'm a bachelor) have their rewards. I am pleased when I have done a good job waxing the floor and I've taken an enormous pile of dirty dishes and reduced them to sparkling clean ones. On the other hand, if I didn't have to, I would never engage in waxing the floors, although I'm good at it. I'm also good at teaching; I'm considered very good at teaching, both by myself and others. And I'm also terrifically good at washing dishes, in fact. On the other hand, I certainly would never make a bunch of dirty dishes just for the joy of washing them and I would not teach a course just for the joy of teaching a course.

On Education

2011-11-02T16:45:00.000-07:00

Apart from misrepresenting Dewey, a good historical view of education by Guy Mcpherson:

The entire system of public education in the United States was designed specifically to prevent students from thinking for themselves. That’s a pretty strong assertion, so I will review the evidence that supports it.

In an earlier letter, I quoted Jules Henry’s book, Culture Against Man: “School is indeed a training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less) but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare fear of failure, envy of success, and absurdity.” Henry reached this conclusion after spending hundreds of hours in the classrooms of our public school system and reviewing a mountain of published evidence. His scathing critique of American culture strongly supports the notion that individuality and creativity are purposely eviscerated from students well before they complete high school.

The roots of the cultural crisis run much deeper than the counter-culture days of the 1960s, and well beyond the sphere of education. But education has long been fundamental to the destruction of individuality, creativity, and, for lack of a better word, soul. Consider, for example, a few words in a speech to businessmen by President Woodrow Wilson: “We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” Wilson’s sentiments echoed those of William Torrey Harris in his 1906 book The Philosophy of Education: Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.” In vogue with his time, Harris extended the idea of subsumption to the land as well as the individual: “The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places …. It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature.” As I indicated in previous correspondence, Harris was the U.S. commissioner of education from 1889 to 1906.

Harris was not the only influential educator willing to express his desire for docile American citizens during 1906. That same year, the Rockefeller Education Board, a major advocate of compulsory public education, issued this statement: “In our dreams … people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poet or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple … we will organize children … and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”

The statement by the Rockefeller Education Board and the book by Harris were preceded a year earlier by Elwood Cubberly’s dissertation at Columbia Teachers College. The future dean of education at Stanford University wrote that schools should be factories “in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products … manufactured like nails, and the specification for manufacturing will come from government and industry.”

Tracing these ideas further back in time, we find the 1888 Report of the Senate Committee on Education, a summary of which is provided by a single sentence on page 1,382 of this gargantuan document: “We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes.” According to John Taylor Gatto, award-winning educator and author of the 1992 book Dumbing Us Down, the committee was justifiably nervous about the high qualify of education provided by nonstandardized, local schools where students were actually taught to think for themselves. The Senate Report parallels the 1897 writings of famous philosopher and industrial educator John Dewey. Dewey’s famous pedagogic creed, first published in The School Journal, included this thought about the role of teachers in society: “I believe that every teacher … should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth.” Cubberly provided the “proper social order” and the “right social growth” less than a decade after Dewey and the U.S. Senate supplied the rationale for herding the masses on behalf of business.

In other words, the captains of industry and leaders of government set out to create an educational system that would maintain social order (and increase their profits). How? By teaching students just enough to serve industry but not enough so they could think for themselves. Questioning the sociopolitical order and communicating articulately were not part of the plan. Americans were to become drones in a government-subsidized country ruled by corporations. While Reagan-era neo-conservatives were excoriating communism as a system in which government controls industry, they were promoting a system built on an even worse idea, one in which industry controls government.

Mind you, the development and implementation of K-12 concentration camps is not part of some giant conspiracy. Rather, it is the outcome of the way our educational system was created. Most of the people who originally developed the system believed they were doing the right thing, and they did not try to hide their plans or intentions. It was completely consistent with the perspective, derived from religious organizations, that the domination, cohesion, and vitality of society were inversely related to individualism; permitting free inquiry and action were anathema to control by religious societies and also by corporate society.

Today, the blueprint of “education to serve corporations” remains unchanged. Although the reasons behind the blueprint have been largely obscured by history, they are still known by many contemporary educators. As clinical psychologist Bruce Levine wrote in Commonsense Rebellion: “I once consulted with a teacher of an extremely bright eight-year-old boy labeled with oppositional defiant disorder. I suggested that perhaps the boy didn’t have a disease, but was just bored. His teacher, a pleasant woman, agreed with me. However, she added, ‘They told us at the state conference that our job is to get them ready for the work world … that the children have to get used to not being stimulated all the time or they will lose their jobs in the real world.’” In other words, citizens who are capable of thinking for themselves cannot properly serve the corporations that run the country.

The main point of this history lesson is simple, and you’ve heard me say it before: Get used to swimming upstream. Most people do not want to think for themselves (or perhaps they actually think they are doing so, which is even more terrifying). In fact, they have only rarely been asked to think for themselves. A century of standardized education in support of business pushes society ever closer to corporate hegemony and therefore, in the case of American-style capitalism, ever closer to exterminating the world’s cultures and species. A fine recent example of standardization at the expense of thoughtful reflection is the federal No Child Left Behind Act, a bill strongly supported by Business Party I and Business Party II before being signed in January 2002 by self-proclaimed “business” (and later “wartime”) president, George W. Bush.

None of which gives you the right to surrender, of course. If resistance is futile, all hope is lost.

From "Letters to a young academic", by Guy Mcpherson.

A Good Line

2011-11-02T14:41:00.000-07:00

I was sorry to hear that Chris Floyd's father passed away recently, which he posted about with a beautiful line from Hamlet:

"He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again."

So True

2011-11-02T03:19:00.000-07:00

"If you are smart enough to do a PhD., then you are smart enough to not do one."

Favorite Third-Eye Blind Songs

2011-11-01T07:42:00.000-07:00

The alternate rock band 'Third-Eye Blind' has created some very catchy songs. Moreover (and to its credit), it has a 'tendency in the right direction': dark depressing themes sung in melancholic vocals over catchy hooks. However its claim at greatness is thwarted by two things: dreadfully trite lyrics, and too clean a sound (no atmosphere, no ambiance, sharp clean instrumentation, crisp vocals). So not at the level of Shoegaze, not even in the Smashing Pumpkins territory. But pretty good entertainment.

My favorite Third-Eye Blind songs:

1. Jumper
2. The Background
3. Semi-Charmed life
4. Never let you go
5. Deep inside of you
6. How's it going to be
7. Burning Man
8. Graduate

Russell Quote

2011-10-30T10:23:00.000-07:00

"In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired, and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire - such as the acquisition of indubitable knowledge about something or other — as essentially unattainable. But very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself. Like others who had a Puritan education, I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself — no doubt justly — a miserable specimen. Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to centre my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection." --Conquest of Happiness

Simple and Enlightening

2011-10-28T03:30:00.000-07:00

Dawkins presents philosopher David Hume's argument that miracle claims should only be seriously accepted if it would be a bigger miracle that the claimant was either lying or mistaken.

The PhD Degree

2011-10-26T16:35:00.000-07:00

Due to a variety of reasons, there has been a consistent overproduction of PhDs for the past 30-40 years. The situation is particularly bad in humanities, but also getting pretty sad in the sciences and other technical areas. A nice article on the humanities situation here. But I was shocked to read this by William James on a somewhat similar problem, written more than a 100 years ago! (wish current faculty had such concern for the plight of students):

"But there is a third class of persons who are genuinely, and in the most pathetic sense, the institution's victims. For this type of character the academic life may become, after a certain point, a virulent poison. Men without marked originality or native force, but fond of truth and especially of books and study, ambitious of reward and recognition, poor often, and needing a degree to get a teaching position… There are individuals of this sort for whom to pass one degree after another seems the limit of earthly aspiration. Your private advice does not discourage them. They will fail, and go away to recuperate, and then present themselves for another ordeal, and sometimes prolong the process into middle life. Or else, if they are less heroic morally they will accept the failure as a sentence of doom that they are not fit, and are broken-spirited men thereafter.

We of the university faculties are responsible for deliberately creating this new class of American social failures, and heavy is the responsibility. We advertise our "schools" and send out our degree-requirements, knowing well that aspirants of all sorts will be attracted… We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light. They come at a time when failure can no longer be repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent…

The more widespread becomes the popular belief that our diplomas are indispensable hall-marks to show the sterling metal of their holders, the more widespread these corruptions will become…"

HT: 100 Reasons NOT To Go to Graduate School

Funny and True

2011-10-24T02:38:00.000-07:00

I like the following retort of Robert May, in reply to calls for "debate" with crackpots, conspiracy theorists, religious nuts, astrologists, flat-earthers:

"That would look great on your CV, not so good on mine."

Polya Quote

2011-10-19T23:54:00.000-07:00

"I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hungarian for the lower classes of the gymnasium, for kids from 10 to 14. I never made use of this teaching certificate. And then I came to philosophy, physics, and mathematics. In fact, I came to mathematics indirectly. I was really more interested in physics and philosophy and thought about those. It is a little shortened but not quite wrong to say: I thought I am not good enough for physics and I am too good for philosophy. Mathematics is in between." Polya on his 90th birthday.

I am not proud of myself today

2011-10-17T07:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday (Sunday) I saw the horrifying documentary 'The End of the Line' on the decimating effects of over-fishing on blue-fin tuna, cod, and several other marine life. I shook my head while watching it, not proud to be a human being.

An unfortunate (and unanticipated!) side-effect of the documentary was that today morning I woke up with a intense hankering for tuna. After some token moral resistance (no doubt at the same time part of my brain was planning the most efficient route to Nordsee), I yielded to the temptation.

I am not proud of myself today.

On Wage Slaves

2011-10-14T16:16:00.000-07:00

An excellent point by Yves Smith:

"I'm beginning to wonder whether the right to assemble is effectively dead in the US. No one who is a wage slave (which is the overwhelming majority of the population) can afford to have an arrest record, even a misdemeanor, in this age of short job tenures and rising use of background checks."

David Foster Wallace

2011-10-12T08:10:00.000-07:00

David Foster Wallace's commencement address at Kenyon College 2005, three years before he killed himself:

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education--least in my own case--is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Fuck the humans

2011-10-09T20:31:00.000-07:00

That is the natural reaction of any empathetic person after watching the recent movie "Rise of the Planet of the Apes". It is hard not to side with Apes as they rise against the cruelty, callousness, greed, vanity, and stupidity of humans.

Actually, there seems to be a trend in recent movies portraying the human race as the cancer that destroys habitats. And given what we are doing to the world and to each other - climate change, over-population, genocides, wars, torture, financial chicanery, overfishing, oil depletion, extinction of a record-number of species, pollution - I would say it is about time.

Another well-made movie in recent memory with a similar theme is Avatar, about which James Kunstler had this to say:

As the end-credits rolled for James Cameron's new movie, Avatar, the audience burst into rowdy applause. It seemed to me that they were applauding the sheer computerized dazzlement of the show -- but in the story itself they had just watched the US suffer a humiliating defeat on a distant planet. In the final frames, American soldiers and the corporate executives they had failed to protect were shown lined up as prisoners-of-war about to embark on a death march.

More to the point, the depiction of our national character through the whole course of the film was of a thuggish, cruel, cynical, stupid, detestable, and totally corrupt people bent on the complete destruction of nature. Nice. And the final irony was that Cameron had used theatrical technology of the latest and greatest kind to depict America's broader techno-grandiosity -- as the army's brute robotic warriors fell to the spears and arrows of the simple blue space aliens. Altogether, it was a weird moment in entertainment history, and perhaps in the American experience per se. No doubt audiences overseas will go wild with delight, too, but perhaps with a clearer notion of what they are clapping for than the enthralled masses of zombie Americans.

Brilliant essay on caution in choosing research topics

2011-10-08T20:52:00.000-07:00

Higher Order Truths about Chmess
by Daniel Dennett

Philosophy is an a priori discipline, like mathematics, or at least it has an a priori methodology at its core, and this fact cuts two ways.(1) On the one hand, it excuses philosophers from spending tedious hours in the lab or the field, and from learning data-gathering techniques, statistical methods, geography, history, foreign languages. . . . ., empirical science, so they have plenty of time for honing their philosophical skills. On the other hand, as is often noted, you can make philosophy out of just about anything, and this is not always a blessing. The point of this little essay is to alert graduate students entering the field to a way in which the very freedom and abstractness of philosophy can be a weakness.

Consider, as a paradigm of a priori truths, the truths of chess. It is an empirical fact that people play chess, and there are mountains of other empirical facts about chess, about how people have been playing it for centuries, often use handsomely carved pieces on inlaid boards, and so forth. No knowledge of these empirical facts plays an indispensable role in the activity of working out the a priori truths of chess, which also exist in abundance. All you need to know are the rules of the game. There are exactly twenty legal opening moves for white (sixteen pawn moves and four knight moves); a king and lone bishop cannot achieve checkmate, and neither can a king and lone knight, and so forth. Working out these a priori truths about chess is not child's play. Proving just what is and is not possible within the rules of chess is an intricate task, and mistakes can be made that get perpetuated. For instance, a few years ago, a computer chess program discovered a mating net-a guaranteed win-consisting of over two hundred moves without a capture. This disproved a long-standing 'theorem' of chess and has forced a change in the rules of the game. It used to be that fifty moves without a capture by either side constituted a draw (stalemate), but since this lengthy mating net is unbreakable, and leads to a win, it is unreasonable to maintain the fifty-move stalemate. (Before computers began playing chess, nobody imagined that there could be a guaranteed win of anywhere near this length.) All this can be pretty interesting, and many highly intelligent people have devoted their minds to investigating this system of a priori truths of chess.

Some philosophical research projects-or problematics, to speak with the more literary types-are rather like working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed upon rules are presupposed-and seldom discussed-and the implications of those rules are worked out, articulated, debated, refined. So far, so good. But some philosophical research projects are more like working out the truths of chmess. Chmess is just like chess except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not one. I just invented it-though no doubt others have explored it in depth to see if it is worth playing. Probably it isn't. It probably has other names. I didn't bother investigating these questions because although they have true answers, they just aren't worth my time and energy to discover. Or so I think. There are just as many a priori truths of chmess as there are of chess (an infinity), and they are just as hard to discover. And that means that if people actually did get involved in investigating the truths of chmess, they would make mistakes, which would need to be corrected, and this opens up a whole new field of a priori investigation, the higher order truths of chmess, such as the following:

1. Jones's (1989) proof that p is a truth of chmess is flawed: he overlooks the following possibility . . . .
2. Smith's (2002) claim that Jones's (1989) proof is flawed presupposes the truth of Brown's lemma (1975), which has recently been challenged by Garfinkle (2002). . . .

Now none of this is child's play. In fact, one might be able to demonstrate considerable brilliance in the group activity of working out the higher order truths of chmess. Here is where Donald Hebb's dictum comes in handy:

If it isn't worth doing, it isn't worth doing well.

Each of us can readily think of an ongoing controversy in philosophy whose participants would be out of work if Hebb's dictum were ruthlessly applied, but we no doubt disagree on just which cottage industries should be shut down. Probably there is no investigation in our capacious discipline that is not believed by some school of thought to be wasted effort, brilliance squandered on taking in each other's laundry. Voting would not yield results worth heeding, and dictatorship would be even worse, so let a thousand flowers bloom, I say. But just remember: if you let a thousand flowers bloom, count on 995 of them to wilt. The alert I want to offer you is just this: try to avoid committing your precious formative years to a research agenda with a short shelf life. Philosophical fads quickly go extinct and there may be some truth to the rule of thumb: the hotter the topic, the sooner it will burn out.

One good test to make sure you're not just exploring the higher order truths of chmess is to see if people aside from philosophers actually play the game. Can anybody outside of academic philosophy be made to care whether you're right about whether Jones's counterexample works against Smith's principle? Another good test is to try to teach the stuff to uninitiated undergraduates. If they don't "get it," you really should consider the hypothesis that you're following a self-supporting community of experts into an artifactual trap.

Here is one way the trap works. Philosophy is to some extent an unnatural act, and the more intelligent you are, the more qualms and reservations you are likely to have about whether you get it, whether you're "doing it right," whether you have any talent for this discipline and even on whether the discipline is worth entering in the first place. So bright student Jones is appropriately insecure about going into philosophy. Intrigued by Professor Brown's discussion, Jones takes a stab at it, writing a paper on hot topic H that is given an "A" by Professor Brown. "You've got real talent, Jones," says Brown, and Jones has just discovered something that might make suitable life work. Jones begins to invest in learning the rules of this particular game, and playing it ferociously with the other young aspirants. "Hey, we're good at this!" they say, egging each other on. Doubts about the enabling assumptions of the enterprise tend to be muffled or squelched "for the sake of argument". Publications follow.

So don't count on the validation of your fellow graduate students or your favorite professors to settle the issue. They all have a vested interest in keeping the enterprise going. It's what they know how to do; it's what they are good at. (This is a problem in other fields too, of course, and it can be even harder to break out of. Experimentalists who master a technique and equip an expensive lab for pursuing it often get stuck filling in the blanks of data matrices that nobody cares about any longer. What are they supposed to do? Throw away all that expensive apparatus? It can be a nasty problem.) It is actually easier and cheaper for philosophers to re-tool. After all, our "training" is not, in general, high-tech. It's mainly a matter of learning our way around in various literatures, learning the moves that have been tried and tested. And here the trap to avoid is simply this: you see that somebody eminent has asserted something untenable or dubious in print; Professor Goofmaker's clever but flawed piece is a sitting duck, just the right target for an eye-catching debut publication. Go for it. You weigh in, along with a dozen others, and now you must watch your step, because by the time you've all cited each other and responded to the responses, you're a budding expert on How to Deal with How to Deal with Responses to Goofmaker's overstatement. Neither the truths nor the falsehoods of chmess are worth a career.

Of course some people are quite content to find a congenial group of smart people with whom to share "the fun of discovery, the pleasures of cooperation, and the satisfaction of reaching agreement." as John Austin once put it(2), without worrying about whether the joint task is worth doing. And if enough people do it, it eventually becomes a phenomenon in its own right, worth studying. As Burton Dreben used to say to the graduate students at Harvard, "Philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship." Some garbage is more important than other garbage, however, and it's hard to decide which of it is worthy of scholarship. In another lecture published in the same book, Austin gave us the following snide masterpiece:

It is not unusual for an audience at a lecture to include some who prefer things to be important, and to them now, in case there are any such present, there is owed a peroration. ("Ifs and Cans," p179).

Austin was a brilliant philosopher, but most of the very promising philosophers who orbited around him, no doubt chuckling at this remark, have vanished without a trace, their oh-so-clever work in ordinary language philosophy duly published and then utterly and deservedly ignored within a few years of publication. It has happened many times.

So what should you do? The tests I have mentioned-seeing if folks outside philosophy, or bright undergraduates, can be made to care-are only warning signs, not definitive. Certainly there have been, and will be, forbiddingly abstruse and difficult topics of philosophical investigation well worth pursuing, in spite of the fact that the uninitiated remain unimpressed. I certainly don't want to discourage explorations that defy the ambient presumptions about what is interesting and important. On the contrary, the best bold strokes in the field will almost always be met by stony incredulity or ridicule at first, and these should not deter you. My point is just that you should not settle complacently into a seat on the bandwagon just because you have found some brilliant fellow travelers who find your work on the issue as unignorable as you find theirs. You may all be taking each other for a ride.

Daniel C. Dennett
Tufts University
March 8, 2002

1. This piece grew out of informal discussions with graduate students attending the Brown University Graduate Philosophy Conference on February 16, 2002, and my own graduate students at Tufts. I thank them, and colleagues at Tufts and elsewhere, for valuable reactions and suggestions.

2. J. L. Austin, 1961, "A Plea for Excuses," in his Philosophical Papers, Oxford University Press, p123.

New Songs

2011-10-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

Discovered two new songs that I can't stop listening to:

Radio Dept - Against the tide (the last 90 secs are close to my ideal song - sweeping instrumentals over homogenous drums)
Of Montreal - The past is a grotesque animal (mainly the last 4 minutes).

Too Many Of Us

2011-10-06T17:23:00.000-07:00

Part of Helen Mirren's answer on being asked why she had no children:

"There are far too many people in the world. It is my contribution to ecology."

Existential Terrors

2011-10-06T16:27:00.000-07:00

A poem by the newly-minted Nobel laureate of literature:

Kyrie
Tomas Tranströmer

At times my life suddenly opens its eyes in the dark.
A feeling of masses of people pushing blindly
through the streets, excitedly, toward some miracle,
while I remain here and no one sees me.

It is like the child who falls asleep in terror
listening to the heavy thumps of his heart.
For a long, long time till morning puts his light in the locks
and the doors of darkness open.

Tolstoy

2011-10-05T15:12:00.000-07:00

From Tolstoy’s Letters, Vol. II, 1880-1910:

"…When people tell me that one side is solely to blame in a war, I can’t agree. You may admit that one sides acts worse in any war that flares up, but an analysis of which one it is that acts worse doesn’t explain the immediate cause of thee origin of such a terrible, cruel and inhuman phenomenon as war. To any man who doesn’t shut his eyes to them, these causes are perfectly obvious, as they are now with the Boer War and with all wars that have happened recently.

These causes are three: first – the unequal distribution of property, i.e., the robbery of some people by others; second – the existence of a military class, i.e., people brought up for and intended for murder; and third – false, and for the most part deliberately deceitful religious teaching, on which young generations are forcibly brought up. And so I think that it’s not only useless but harmful to see the cause of wars in [this politician or that leader], and thereby conceal from ourselves the real causes which are far more immediate and to which we ourselves are a party.

We can only be angry with the leaders and politicians and abuse them; but our anger and abuse will only spoil our blood, not change the course of things: the leaders and politicians are blind instruments of forces which lie a long way behind them. They act as they have to act, and can't act otherwise. All history is a series of just such acts by all politicians as the Boer War, and so it's completely useless, even impossible, to be angry with them and condemn them, when you see the true causes of their activity and when you feel that you yourself are to blame for this or that activity of theirs according to your attitude to the three basic causes I mentioned.

As long as we go on enjoying exceptional wealth while the masses of people are ground down by hard work there will always be wars for markets, goldmines, etc., which we need to support our exceptional wealth. Wars will be all the more inevitable as long as we are party to a military class, tolerate its existence, and don't fight against it with all our powers. We ourselves serve in the army, or regard it as not only necessary but commendable, and then when war breaks out we condemn some politician or other for it. But the thing is that there will be war as long as we not only preach but tolerate without anger and indignation that perversion of Christianity which is called ecclesiastical Christianity whereby it is possible to have a Christ-loving army, the blessing of guns and the acceptance of war as an act justified by Christianity. We teach our children this religion, we profess it ourselves, and then say that this or that politician is to blame for the fact that people kill one another.

That is why I disagree with you and cannot reproach blind instruments of ignorance and evil, but see the causes of war in those phenomena, the evil of which I myself can help to reduce or increase. To help to share out property equally in brotherly fashion, and to enjoy as little as possible the advantages which have fallen to one's lot; not to be party to war in any aspect and to destroy the hypnosis by means of which people transform themselves into hired murderers and think they are doing a good deed by doing military service; and above all to profess a reasonable Christian doctrine, trying with all one's powers to destroy the cruel deceit of false Christianity on which young generations are forcibly brought up – this threefold activity, I think, constitutes the duty of any man wishing to serve good and rightly disturbed by the terrible war which has disturbed you too.

HT: Chris Floyd.

Edward Said Quote

2011-10-04T15:56:00.000-07:00

There is no point to intellectual and political work if one were a pessimist. Intellectual and political work require, nay, demand optimism. -Edward Said

Missing Bill Hicks

2011-10-01T11:45:00.000-07:00

The last written word of Bill Hicks before he died of cancer on February 26, 1994:

February 7, 1994 –

I was born William Melvin Hicks on December 16, 1961 in Valdosta, Georgia. Ugh. Melvin Hicks from Georgia. Yee Har! I already had gotten off to life on the wrong foot. I was always “awake,” I guess you’d say. Some part of me clamoring for new insights and new ways to make the world a better place.

All of this came out years down the line, in my multitude of creative interests that are the tools I now bring to the Party. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who’ve helped me. I’d read these words and off I went – dreaming my own imaginative dreams. Exercising them at will, eventually to form bands, comedy, more bands, movies, anything creative. This is the coin of the realm I use in my words – Vision.

On June 16, 1993 I was diagnosed with having “liver cancer that had spread from the pancreas.” One of life’s weirdest and worst jokes imaginable. I’d been making such progress recently in my attitude, my career and realizing my dreams that it just stood me on my head for a while. “Why me!?” I would cry out, and “Why now!?”

Well, I know now there may never be any answers to those particular questions, but maybe in telling a little about myself, we can find some other answers to other questions. That might help our way down our own particular paths, towards realizing my dream of New Hope and New Happiness.

Amen

I left in love, in laughter, and in truth and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit.

Chomsky

2011-09-30T22:27:00.000-07:00

It seems safe to say that no living intellectual has enraged more people with more predictable regularity than Noam Chomsky. A biting and voluble critic of American power, Chomsky has been denounced as a traitor, a well-poisoner, the author of over 200 largely unreadable books, a pompous would-be prophet drunk on his own claims to moral authority, and a naïve apologist for Hezbollah [1] and the Khmer Rouge [2]. His political writings, speeches, and interviews over the past five decades have made him a hero of the global left and the world’s most quoted living thinker.
Sitting in his office at the Department of Philosophy and Linguistics at MIT, Chomsky appears as an avuncular, white-haired presence in baggy blue jeans and a navy crewneck sweater who visibly struggles to retain physical and emotional details against the force of a powerful structuralist imagination. He is a lively conversational presence who enjoys intellectual thrust and parry, and who moves quickly to the attack when challenged. When the tone changes, or a new idea catches his fancy, he steps back and quickly resets. He is less interested in people than he is in ideas, and he is more interested in general rules than in the highly textured specifics that might interest a cell biologist or an historian.

There is a noticeable gap between the incredible quickness of Chomsky’s mind and the unadorned banality of his political rhetoric. While his political tracts decorate the shelves of his outer office, his inner sanctum is lined with flourishing plants and souvenirs from his travels around the world. His bookshelves hold a very Chomskian mix of tattered academic books about linguistics and nicely bound literary volumes about other countries and cultures, displaying a mind that finds equal pleasure in Into Tibet [3] and a Festschrift [4] for Roman Jakobson. Staring out from the wall near the door is a large, saintly looking portrait of Bertrand Russell accompanied by a motto: “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life; the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” On his desk is a framed photograph of a memorial stone for his wife, the linguist Carol Schatz, who died in December 2008 of cancer.

Chomsky’s political writing can seem like a deliberate casting-off of the habits of mind that made him perhaps the last great thinker of the Enlightenment, so that he could take his place on the intellectual cafeteria line, serving up politically useful slop. The sheer volume of his output, which can seem equally thrilling and nauseating even to people who write for a living, seems at times like a loopy attempted proof for the linguist’s terse and methodical academic work of the 1950s and 1960s, which posited the existence of a fixed set of inborn rules that allow humans to form sentences.

Yet there is also something awe-inspiring about the consistency and breadth of Chomsky’s political writing over the decades that defies even the most dogged attempts to label him a hack. The theory of generative grammar that Chomsky laid out in a series of papers that began with his master’s thesis at the University of Pennsylvania and culminated in his landmark 1957 paper “Syntactic Structures [5]” has to be regarded as one of the most powerful and influential ideas of the 20th century, reshaping crucial debates in the fields of linguistics, behavioral psychology, and cognitive science. It is hard to identify another thinker who has combined Chomsky’s breadth of interest with the depth and productivity of his best ideas, aside from Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein.

I talked with Chomsky about his upbringing in a Jewish home in Philadelphia by Cultural Zionist [6] parents who devoted their lives to the revival of Hebrew language and culture, and about some of the strange bedfellows that he has acquired in five decades of impassioned crusading. I left his office with a sense of a specifically Jewish Chomsky that in three decades of engagement with his political writing, his academic work, and a few dozen of his radio appearances had never really struck me before, and now seems obvious and unavoidable.

You grew up in a home that was heavily influenced by Ahad Ha’am [7], the father of cultural Zionism.

My father was a great sympathizer of Ahad Ha’am. Every Friday night we would read Hebrew together, and often the reading was Ahad Ha’am’s essays. He was the founding figure of what came to be called cultural Zionism, meaning that there should be a Zionist revival in Israel, in Palestine, and it should be a cultural center for the Jewish people. He wrote in Hebrew, which was novel, because Hebrew was then the language of prayer and the Bible. He saw Jews as primarily a Diaspora community that needed a cultural center that had a physical presence, but he was very sympathetic to the Palestinians. In fact he wrote some very sharp essays, after a visit to Palestine, criticizing the way the new settlers were treating the indigenous population. He said, “You can’t treat people like that.” Also, on practical grounds, he didn’t want to create enemies. A Jewish cultural center in Palestine was his ideal.

Now I won’t swear to the precise accuracy of this, because these are childhood memories, but I remember reading together with my father an essay that Ahad Ha’am wrote about Moses. The basic idea was there are two Moseses—the first is the historical Moses, if there was such a person, and the other is the image of Moses that was constructed and came down through the ages and occupies an important place in the national mythology.

Ahad Ha’am was an early advocate of the idea that later became famous with [the Marxist political scientist] Ben Anderson, when he wrote his books about how nations are imagined communities. He said there’s an imagined—I don’t think he used the term—but there’s an imagined Jewish community, in which Moses plays a central role, and it really doesn’t matter if there was a historical Moses or not. That’s part of the national myth, which is a sophisticated version of what [author [8]] Shlomo Sand was trying to get at. Sand debunks the historical Moses, but from Ha’am’s point of view, it makes no difference.

Did you read Nivi’im, the prophets, with your father in Hebrew?

The word “prophet” is a very bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word, navi. Nobody knows what it means. But today they’d be called dissident intellectuals. They were giving geopolitical analysis, arguing that the acts of the rulers were going to destroy society. And they condemned the acts of evil kings. They called for justice and mercy to orphans and widows and so on.

I don’t want to say it was all beautiful. Dissident intellectuals aren’t all beautiful. You read Sakharov, who is sometimes appalling. Or Solzhenitsyn. And the nivi’im were treated the way dissident intellectuals always are. They weren’t praised. They weren’t honored. They were imprisoned like Jeremiah. They were driven into the desert. They were hated. Now at the time, there were intellectuals, “prophets,” who were very well treated. They were the flatterers of the court. Centuries later, they were called “false prophets.”

People who criticize power in the Jewish community are regarded the way Ahab treated Elijah: You’re a traitor. You’ve got to serve power. You can’t argue that the policies that Israel is following are going to lead to its destruction, which I thought then and still do.

Did you imagine yourself as a navi, a prophet, when you were a child reading those texts alone in your room or on Friday night with your father?

Sure. In fact, my favorite prophet, then and still, is Amos. I particularly admired his comments that he’s not an intellectual. I forget the Hebrew, but lo navi ela anochi lo ben navi—I’m not a prophet, I’m not the son of a prophet, I’m a simple shepherd. So he translated “prophet” correctly. He’s saying, “I’m not an intellectual.” He was a simple farmer and he wanted just to tell the truth. I admire that.

Did religion play a role in the life of your home? Did your mother light Shabbat candles?

We did those things, but they were—I don’t know how you grew up, but my parents were part of the Enlightenment tradition, the haskalah. So you keep the symbols, but it doesn’t involve religious faith.

At the age of 10 I came to the conclusion that the God I learned about in school didn’t exist.

I remember how I did that. I remember it very well. My father’s family was super Orthodox. They came from a little shtetl somewhere in Russia. My father told me that they had regressed even beyond a medieval level. You couldn’t study Hebrew, you couldn’t study Russian. Mathematics was out of the question. We went to see them for the holidays. My grandfather had a long beard, I don’t think he knew he was in the United States. He spoke Yiddish and lived in a couple of blocks of his friends. We were there on Pesach, and I noticed that he was smoking.

So I asked my father, how could he smoke? There’s a line in the Talmud that says, ayn bein shabbat v’yom tov ela b’inyan achilah. I said, “How come he’s smoking?” He said, “Well, he decided that smoking is eating.” And a sudden flash came to me: Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile. He can’t figure these things out. If that’s what it is, I don’t want anything to do with it.

And what did your father say?

I was just thinking about that. He just quoted the line to me and then explained, “He thinks he is eating.”

Your father, Zev, was one of the significant Hebrew grammarians of the past century, and you did your early academic work on medieval Hebrew. Did something interest you about the structure of the language, or was it just available to you as the language in your home?

It wasn’t the language in the home. We spoke English. My parents would never utter a word of Yiddish, which was their native language. You have to remember there was real kulturkampf going on at this time, in the 1930s, between the Yiddish and the Hebrew tendencies. So we never heard a word—my wife either—of Yiddish. Hebrew was the language we studied. And then when I got to be a teenager I was immersed in novels.

You returned to Hebrew for your college thesis.

When I got to college, I had to do an undergraduate thesis. I was in linguistics then, so I figured, “OK, I’ll write about Hebrew. It’s kind of interesting.” I started the way I was taught to: You get an informant, and you do field work and take a corpus. So I started working with an informant, and I realized after a couple of weeks, this is totally idiotic. I know the answers to all the questions. And the only thing I don’t know is the phonetics, but I don’t care about that. So I just dropped the informant and started doing it myself.

My work was more or less influenced by the style of medieval Hebrew and Arabic grammar. It was historical analysis. But you can translate the basic ideas into a kind of a synchronic interpretation, a description of the system as it actually exists, and out of that came the early stages of generative grammar, which nobody looked at.

So your theory of generative grammar in its early stages came out of your study of medieval Hebrew and Arabic?

Yes. When I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, I was actually reading the proofs of my father’s doctoral dissertation [9], which was on David Kimhi’s Hebrew grammar, and then I read articles on the history of the language and Semitic philology. When I got to college I started studying Arabic. I wanted to learn Arabic, and I got pretty far.

It’s the same basic structure, but Hebrew is based on a root vowel pattern distinction, so there’s a root, which is neither a noun nor anything else, and it’s not plural or past tense or anything. It’s a root, typically a tri-consonant root, with a couple of exceptions, and it fits into any large array of different vowel patterns, which determine what its function is in a sentence. Is it a verb? Is it a noun? If it’s a verb, is it third-person plural, does it agree with some other nouns? The whole language builds up from that. And that’s how I treated it in my early work, which is kind of the way it was done in traditional grammar. Now people do it differently, rightly or wrongly.

Of course the modern Hebrew language is quite different. I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.

When you were refused entry to the West Bank recently by the Israeli Interior Ministry, did you talk Hebrew to the people who sent you back to Jordan?

I could’ve, but I didn’t. I’ve done it before, at security. Back in the 1980s I attended a conference in Jerusalem, and on the way out of the country you have to go through security. There were two of us, and the other guy was a friend who I don’t think is Jewish, and they opened everything in his suitcase, took out his dirty socks. There were things in my suitcase I didn’t want them to see. It was during the First Intifada and I had managed to break curfew a couple of times and get into places under curfew until we were picked up by soldiers. I had found a container for a grenade that had stamped on it the name of some place in Pennsylvania, and I wanted to bring that home.

I also had a lot of illegal pamphlets. Israeli security could never find out how they were circulating these pamphlets. In fact it was young kids jumping over rooftops. So I had a collection of these pamphlets that I wanted to bring home, and I was hoping I wouldn’t get inspected. When I got to the inspection, the woman security officer took my passport, and said, “Oh, you have a weird name.” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “Do you speak Hebrew?” So I said, “Yeah.” Then we went on to have a discussion in Hebrew. “Did you visit your relatives, did you have a good time.” And she never bothered to look in my suitcase.
pullquote: Q: At the age of 10 I came to the conclusion that God didn’t exist. A: Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.

Were there any gentiles in your parents’ world?

Practically not. In fact there weren’t even Yiddish-speaking Jews. They lived in if not a physical ghetto then in a cultural ghetto. Their friends were all people deeply involved in the revival of the Hebrew language and cultural Zionism. I happened to have some non-Jewish friends, but that’s just from school.

Describe Mikveh Israel, the synagogue that you grew up in and where your father first taught.

Well, Mikveh Israel [10] was actually Sephardic, so I grew up in the Sephardic tradition. It was kind of the elite synagogue in Philadelphia, like the Portuguese synagogue in New York. It was Sephardic because the original settlers were Sephardic Jews from Holland. So we had a Dutch, actually originally Portuguese, rabbi, and the hazan was from Morocco. We learned all the Sephardic rituals, and pronunciation and everything, even though everyone in the community was from eastern Europe. It was kind of the Jewish elite, but it was also the center of a Hebrew renaissance-oriented small society. The people were either teachers, rabbis, there were businessmen and others, but they all shared a passionate interest in Hebrew cultural revival. My father was the head of the school. My mother was running the Hadassah meetings.

Did your mother also come from a religious family?

She came to America with her family when she was 1 year old. They were so religious that she told me that when she was a teenager, talking with her girlfriends on the street, if she saw her father coming toward them, she would get them to cross the street so that she didn’t have to suffer the embarrassment of having her father walk past her and not acknowledge her because she was a girl. It was a very Orthodox family. Of course, they grew up here, and the kids lost it quickly. My father came here in 1917. He and my mother shared many interests and experiences in common.

They were so dedicated. I remember friends of my father and mother, a couple of women, who when they called a department store downtown, they would insist on talking Hebrew, in the hopes of convincing them to hire a Hebrew-language operator. I mean they all spoke English. It was real dedication. It had to be. How do you revive a dead language?

Was that what motivated you to live in Israel?

My wife and I were there in ’53. We lived in a kibbutz for a while and planned to stay, actually. I came back and had to finish my Ph.D. We thought we’d go back.

Was it the idea of the kibbutz, or was it the fact of speaking Hebrew, or what was it?

It was political. I was interested in Hebrew, but that wasn’t the driving force. I liked the kibbutz life and the kibbutz ideals. It has pretty much disappeared now, I should say. But that time was incredible in spirit. For one thing it was a poor country. The kibbutz I went to, and I picked it for this reason, was actually originally Buberite [11]. It came from German refugees in the 1930s and had a kind of Buberite style. It was the center for Arab outreach activities in Mapam [12]. There was plenty of racism, I should say. I lived with it. But mostly against Mizrahim.

When you think of the motivations of people like your parents or the people who founded those Mapam kibbutzim, you don’t think of those motivations as being inherently linked to some desire to oppress others?

By then I was old enough to separate from my parents. I’d been on my own intellectually since I was a teenager. I gravitated toward Zionist groups that were not in their milieu, like Hashomer Ha’tzair [13].

My father grew up in Hashomer.

I could never join Hashomer because in those days they were split between Stalinist and Trotskyite, and I was anti-Leninist. But I was in the neighborhood. It was a Hashomer kibbutz that we went to, Kibbutz Hazore’a [14]. It’s changed a lot. We would never have lasted. It was sort of a mixed story. They were binationalists. So up until 1948 they were anti-state. There were those who gravitated toward or who were involved in efforts of Arab-Jewish working-class cooperation and who were for socialist binationalist Palestine. Those ideas sound exotic today, but they didn’t at the time. It’s because the world has changed.

Continue reading [15]: Hezbollah, Robert Faurisson, and Israeli crimes. Or view as a single page [16].
But there was an element of oppression I couldn’t get around. If you know the history, you know that most idealistic anti-nationalist settlers insisted on a closed Hebrew society, you can’t hire outside labor, that sort of thing. You could see the motivation. They didn’t want to become what the first settlers were: landowners who had cheap Arab labor. They wanted to work the land. Nevertheless, there’s an exclusionary character to it. Which then led into the policy of the state and became quite ugly later. So it was kind of an internal conflict that was never resolved.

You believe that the job of the intellectual is to dissent, to speak truth to power, and to wrestle with power. But there is a troubling way in which your single-minded emphasis on opposing power can lead to your having some very strange bedfellows. It’s still startling to me to see you at a Hezbollah rally in Lebanon. Hezbollah is not an outfit dedicated to the secular model of human freedom that you support. What were you doing there?

Notice that you don’t know what I did in Lebanon. You know what the propaganda system said I did.

That’s why I was asking. Why were you there?

I was invited to Lebanon by the secular left. Those were my associations and my meetings. This last trip but also my previous trip, I spent much more time with [Druze leader] Walid Jumblatt then with—

He’s a great talker.

You’ve met him?

Yes.

Within the Lebanese spectrum he’s maybe the most open. But the only thing that gets mentioned is that I was involved with Hezbollah. Either you don’t go to southern Lebanon at all, or you go in connection with Hezbollah, because they run it. Furthermore, Hezbollah is regarded, even by people like Jumblatt, as a national liberation movement. The last trip I had—happened to be—I gave a talk [17] on May 25 at the UNESCO building, a talk run by the secular left. May 25 is a national holiday. It’s liberation day. That’s the day when Israel is thrust out of Lebanon by Hezbollah.

Remember that Hezbollah happens to be the majority party.

Hezbollah is not the majority party in Lebanon.

It’s part of a coalition. They won the last election with 53 percent of the vote. Because of the method of distributing seats, they don’t get the majority of parliament. So we’re talking about basically a majority coalition, which runs the south almost entirely. You can like it or not like it.

I had been there before the war in 2006. It was a period of a lot of excitement. I met a lot of people, visited the southern Lebanon cultural centers. I wanted to see what had happened since. You want to go back, so you go under the guidance of Hezbollah. There’s no other way to visit.

Hezbollah is a highly militarized organization that runs South Lebanon in a way that is hardly reflective of secular democratic ideals.

It’s interesting that secular Lebanese would not take that attitude.

Most of them see Hezbollah as an extension of Iran.

No, they don’t.

They believe that the Iranians are trying to rip up their state.

Ultra-right-wing Lebanese think that. But the person who organized my trip was Fawwaz Trabulsi, the leading figure in the secular left. And he insisted we go through Hezbollah, and he didn’t look at it that way. If you read Rami Khouri [18], you can’t look at it that way. If you get to the ultra-nationalist right, they do look at it that way. But that’s not Lebanon.

In your work, there are two separate things that you’ve written that touch on the political question of anti-Semitism and that I look at together and try to reconcile. The first was the introduction you wrote to a book by Robert Faurisson, who became notorious for writing two letters to Le Monde denying that the gas chambers existed and claiming that the suggestion that they did exist was part of a Jewish plot or hoax.

No, I didn’t, actually that’s more propaganda. That’s more propaganda. Are you asking why I would support Faurisson’s right of freedom of speech?

Freedom of speech is one thing. Denial—

Freedom of speech is the whole issue for me. I happen to be an anti-Stalinist and an anti-Nazi, so I don’t think that the state should be granted the right to determine historical truth and to punish people who deviate from it. That is the one and only issue. The so-called introduction was a statement I was asked to write. It’s called “Some elementary remarks on freedom of expression.” That’s what it’s about: Freedom of expression.

You were simply concerned about the attempt of the French state to censor Faurisson, and you didn’t care what he wrote?

It’s more than censoring. It’s determining historical truth. The issue at that time, if you actually read the title of his memoir, it said, “Memoir in defense against those who accuse me of falsification of history.”

Alan Dershowitz’s critique [19] of your engagement with Faurisson centered around your use of the word “findings,” which he said implied that you believed that Faurisson’s claims had some historical grounding.

But that is just childish! I can talk about Stalin and say he presented his findings—or the Ku Klux Klan. I can say that John Birch Society presented their findings and they were all worthless. That means nothing. This is a desperate effort by extremist ultra-nationalists to undermine any critical analysis. “Findings” is a perfectly neutral word.

Furthermore it wasn’t my word. It was a word that was in a petition, of which I was one of 500 signers. I mean Iranian radical clerics probably go after petitions that I signed, too. The word “findings” is absolutely neutral. I can use it about the stuff that Alan Dershowitz writes. As for the effort to try to turn a defense of freedom of speech into support for the idea that the gas chambers didn’t exist, this is really desperation.

The second thing I wanted to talk about was your critique [20] on Znet of the Walt and Mearsheimer article [21] published in The London Review of Books. I was grateful when I read your critique, because the thing that puzzled me the most about their paper was how such an unsophisticated understanding of American power could gain any traction among intellectuals. American imperial policy in the Middle East is shaped by the whims of a small coterie of Jews? Where does this stuff come from?

It’s very simple. Did you ever study international relations?

To my misfortune.

Walt and Mearsheimer are realists—what are called realists. Realists have a doctrine that says that states are the actors in international affairs and follow something called the “national interest,” which is some abstract ideal which is independent of the interests of the corporate sector. What they see from that point of view is that the United States is supposed to be pursuing its national interest, and they know what the national interest is. The fact that Intel and Lockheed Martin and Goldman Sachs don’t agree with them is irrelevant.

From their point of view, then, somehow the United States is not pursuing what they see as its national interest in the Middle East. So there must be some extraneous factor that’s driving it away from its path of innocence and perfection.

You have that very interesting remark at the end of your response, where you describe the motivation behind their assertions as stemming from the desire to salvage the Wilsonian idea of American innocence.

They’re not trying consciously. American innocence is built into international relations theory. That’s what American exceptionalism means. If you read the founders of the theory, like Hans Morgenthau, it’s very straightforward. Hans Morgenthau was a smart guy, a very decent guy, incidentally. He has a book called The Purpose of America. He said the historical record doesn’t conform with the purpose of America, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have the purpose. In fact he says, this is like atheists criticizing religion because people do bad things. The truths are still there, even if the record conflicts with them. That is the foundation of realist international relations theory.

Another comment that you had about Walt and Mearsheimer’s argument was: Well, who says this hasn’t worked?

It worked great. I think the same criticism holds of other critiques of American policy. Take, say, the blowback theories. I like Chalmers Johnson, he’s a very good guy, but he argues that the U.S. policy of installing the shah didn’t work, because look at the blowback. Didn’t work? It worked perfectly for 25 years! That’s a long time in international affairs. Nobody plans for 50 years from now.

You understand the State of Israel as having some independent existence, coming from Jewish culture and history, aside from simply being an American imperial vessel.

It didn’t become an American imperial vessel, if that’s the right term, until after ’67. That was a choice. It’s often misunderstood, but in 1971, Israel had a very important decision to make. Sadat had offered a full peace treaty. In return they were supposed to withdraw from the Sinai. There were other conditions, but they didn’t matter. And they talked about it, and they decided not to accept it, because they preferred expansion into the Sinai. If they had settled with Egypt in ’71, there’d be no security problem. Egypt was the only major Arab force. And at that point, once you decide to sacrifice security for expansion, you need a superpower patron. That’s where the dependence on U.S. power comes.

At the time I was writing that I thought that people who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction. And I think that was correct, unfortunately.

It is possible for you to imagine a State of Israel that didn’t act as an extension of American power. But is it too late?

No. I don’t think so. It gets harder as time goes on. As they get more—as the occupation role becomes more powerful, that influences the national culture. It gets harder to disentangle from that. They have to face the fact—they don’t like to—but they have to face the fact that they’re becoming an international pariah. Not because of anti-Semitism, but because they’re the only state that is occupying another country in violation—gross violation—of international law and U.N. Security Council orders.

I’m no supporter of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land or of state-sanctioned murder. But I always find something funny when people criticize Israelis for their very real abuses at checkpoints, and then you pick up the paper and you read that 40 people were wrongly killed by U.S. soldiers at checkpoints in Afghanistan and no one was punished. We blow up wedding parties with missiles fired from drones over Pakistan and sometimes we pay money to the grieving families, but no American is ever held responsible. I’ve come to the idea that part of the outrage about Israeli abuses has an underlying unconscious purpose of obscuring even grosser abuses that America commits directly, as a matter of state policy.

That they’re killing Afghans is the least of it. How about invading Iraq and destroying it? Killing hundreds of thousands of people, driving millions into exile. Part of American national culture is that we don’t look at ourselves. In fact if you look at what I write about Israel, it’s overwhelmingly about the United States. It’s about U.S. support for the Israelis, not what Israel does. What Israel does is not nice, but no state is nice.

But it’s quite different for us. We don’t support killings in the eastern Congo. Or Chinese repression of dissidents. But we’re completely responsible for what Israel does. Israel isn’t entirely an American satellite, but pretty close to it. They couldn’t do what they’re doing if it weren’t for the decisive support of the United States.

When you speak about Israeli crimes, do you feel that you have a special responsibility to speak out as someone who comes from a specific Jewish tradition, or do you simply speak as an American?

There are many factors, as always. A sufficient factor is that the United States is responsible. But of course there’s a lot more. Background. Childhood. Emotional connections. Friends. All sorts of things. But they’re kind of irrelevant to the fundamental issue, those personal things. The fundamental issue is quite simple: Every U.S. taxpayer is responsible for Israeli crimes. They can’t carry them out without the decisive military, economic, ideological, and diplomatic support of the United States.

The United States destroyed Iraq. Of course that should be harshly condemned. In fact I do it much more than I talk about Israel. In the case of the Vietnam war, we basically destroyed three countries. They’ll never recover. Same with Nicaragua. Same with Cuba. Go on and on. Same with Chile. That’s what we ought to be concentrating on. Israel happens to be a subcase of a larger problem. And yes, for me personally, it’s additional things.

Those additional things—namely, your parents, your childhood memories, your sense of emotional connection—

It’s all there. You can’t get out of your skin. But when we get down to the moral issue, it’s independent of one’s personal background.

R.I.P. Samuel Menashe

2011-09-28T16:17:00.000-07:00

Pity us
By the sea
On the sands
So briefly.

Rue

For what I did
And did not do
And do without
In my old age
Rue, not rage
Against that night
We go into,
Sets me straight
On what to do
Before I die–
Sit in the shade,
Look at the sky

Twilight

Looking across
The water we are
Startled by a star –
It is not dark yet
The sun has just set

Looking across
The water we are
Alone as that star
That startled us,
And as far

So Fucking True

2011-09-27T08:56:00.000-07:00

Read this somewhere about Facebook:

"If you don’t pay for a service, chances are you are not the customer – you’re the product being sold."

Of Dog and Man

2011-09-25T14:54:00.000-07:00

From the Wikipedia page of the Northern Inuit:

They are intelligent, independent thinkers, which can make them more difficult to train than other, more biddable breeds.

Noam Nisan on Evaluating Academic Work

2011-09-25T06:48:00.000-07:00

Evaluation of scientific research is notoriously hard, almost by definition: success means something not done before, but if it was not done before, then how can we evaluate it? We are now seeing everywhere a huge shift in how this is done: it used to be that we designated some person as the authority for such judgement and then asked him (only rarely was it “her”): the chair of the anthropology department (say) decided which anthropologist to hire, hopefully after getting authoritative ”letters” from other anthropologists. Similarly, some committee of Full Professors used their authority judgment to decide which departments in the university should grow, which research projects should be funded, or which universities in a country to pour money into. Instead, we are increasingly seeing a huge shift into evaluating everything by numbers: counting publications, journal rankings, impact factors, citations, H factors, grant amounts, numeric assessment exercises, and so on, attempting to base more and more scientific evaluations on such measures.

Many academics are viciously opposed to this numeric evaluation trend: they point correctly to various errors and short-comings of the numeric measures; they point out that in order to reasonably evaluate work in anthropology (say) you must understand this type of work; they object to popularity contests determining scientific progress; and they fear that the mechanical-economic-political control that these bibliometric approaches bring into the process of scientific discovery, will bias it away from the “true” path.
I agree with many of these criticisms of bibliometric evaluation, however I have to admit that I see the authority-based system as even more problematic. The local authorities are people and as such they have huge biases: obviously they share various common human ethnic/religious/gender biases — biases absent from non-viciously-chosen bibliometric measures. Even more troublesome are personal biases: we all tend to think that our friends and students are smarter than others that we don’t yet personally know. Worst of all are scientific biases: the authorities tend to defend their scientific turf against new approaches, new fields, competing ideas, and so on. The combination of these natural biases encourages inbreeding, conformity, and discourages change and innovation — the very things academia should encourage. This bites especially hard in two cases where it counts most: the first case is if we happen to start with weak authorities (as the quadratic law of hiring says: 1st rate people hire 1st rate people, but 2nd rate people hire 4th rate people), and the second case is areas which are in rapid flux. It is not that numeric systems are completely free from all these problems since ultimately they are based on human authorities too (those who accept papers for publication, cite them, or award grants) but as they are more global, more transparent, and involve a larger number of people, they are less prone to biases, and may support faster adoption of change. Additionally there is the issue of minimizing self-interest: Professors can not be trusted to evaluate themselves any more (or less) than any other segment of the population can. I can not see a single academic department whose self-evaluation will be “we stink — don’t give us any money”, even though I can see many that will get this evaluation by any non-self-interested evaluation method used.
Additionally, measuring scientific success in a way that can be understood and believed from the outside is simply unavoidable. The taxpayers are being called to fund scientific research in ever increasing amounts. They want to know why. Frankly, society will not continue funding it (i.e. us academics) if we do not make a convincing argument why supporting research is preferable to improving elementary schools, building roads, increasing minimum wage, or reducing taxes. This question will be asked in one way or another by every politician who needs to allocate the money and in every political system. Luckily, there are excellent answers demonstrating the human value of academic research, innovation, and critical thinking, with examples ranging from the Socratic method to the Internet. These answers seem to be quite effective and in many places the political system has indeed been convinced that pouring more money into academic research is a good idea. But, very few administrators will be convinced that a carte blanche is called for. In fact the more academic research is deemed to be “useful” (whether practically or just in the sense of advancing humanity’s quest for truth and beauty) the more emphasis will be put on its measurement and “optimization”. The close ties of academic research and education and the ever increasing numbers of college and university students only strengthen this further. The charm of bibliometric/numeric measurements in comparison with authority based ones is that its harder to corrupt them or politically bias them, as the latter very often are.
So, given that we are moving to more mechanical forms of evaluating academic excellence, how can we avoid most of the pitfalls? This question applies at all levels from the evaluation of single candidates for appointment or tenure, to funding departments within an organization, to national policy. This is really a critical question in our day and age, where entire countries are overhauling the way that they evaluate their academic research. Famously and transparently this is the case for Great Britain, but it is also true in a large sense for China, as well as my own country, Israel, and many other nations (at various levels of explicitness). These changes may turn out to have profound implications on human progress, whether good or bad, we surely do not yet know, but should definitely aim for the good.
So here are some suggestions on how to sanely use bibliometric/mechanical evaluations:

Don’t be silly: Don’t use indications that obviously do not make sense. If in some field of knowledge publication of books or presentations in conferences are de facto a stronger indication of excellence than journal publicaions, then counting only the latter is simply silly.
Measure quality, not quantity: Do not count papers, count citations. Do not count number of faculty members, count number of award-winning faculty members. Do not count Ph.D.s produced, count Ph.D. that got good positions.
Measure strategically: Count what is harder to artificially fake; scarcity and competition is some signal of quality; ease of measurement matters. Self-citations are not an indication of influence; self-published books are not an indication of excellence; excellence of a conference or journal is negatively correlated with its acceptance rate and positively with the number of attendees or readers.
Measure globally: There is no reason why excellence of a computer scientist, philosopher, or almost any other researcher should be judged differently in different institutes or different countries. If you are from a small country and publish in your own country — that is usually not a sign of excellence. (It is usually not a good sign if French researchers publish in French or Chinese one in Chinese.) Pick two random universities A and B with their different evaluation systems — in most cases, using B’s system to evaluate A gives more honest indications than using A’s system.
Measure widely: There are many different ways to count anything such or university rankings or citation counts. (E.g. web-based sites that offer easy to access citation counts in CS include at least Google Scholar, arnetminer,citeseer, Microsoft academic search, as well doubtless others.) They differ from each other in many parameters of what they count and even what they aim to capture. The average of several (reasonable) citation counts is usually preferable to any single one. As non-numeric committees always do, it is best to take into account as many indicators of excellence as possible (e.g. citation counts, publication-venue ranking, prizes, grants, esteemed academic responsibilities, …)
Vary your measurements: Occasionally varying the technical details of what you measure makes it harder for the evaluated to strategically game the system, and allows the gradual optimization of the evaluation process.
Judgement and responsibility remain with people: Any numerical measurement is only a proxy for excellence and not the thing itself. If you recoginize excellence that is not captured by the numerical system that you are using, then it is still your responsibility to use your judgement. This ofcourse should be rare, should come with a strong explanation, and may use-up some of your professional credit, but the responsibility always remains with the people making the decision.

So Fucking True

2011-09-24T08:48:00.000-07:00

"There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage." - David Foster Wallace

A more specific reference by Wallace in another place:

"So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tried to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As [Lewis] Hyde. . .puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage." This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly funny to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing by trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow. . .oppressed." - In E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction

In fact, here is more by Wallace on irony:

"Make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us.

Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? “Sure.” Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, “then” what do we do?

Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.

The problem is that, however misprised it’s been, what’s been passed down from the postmodern heyday is sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language; we’re so in it we don’t even see that it’s one perspective, one among many possible ways of seeing. Postmodern irony’s become our environment.

All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I say.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How very banal to ask what I mean.” Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels.

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows."

Quote

2011-09-23T18:13:00.000-07:00

"The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second." John Steinbeck

Favourite Haunting Songs

2011-09-22T17:44:00.000-07:00

Below is a list of my favorite haunting songs. "Haunting" doesn't mean simply sad, or memorable, or scary, or depressing or atmospheric. It is hard to say explicitly, but it is the kind of song that pervades your entire being through and through, temporarily changing the way you look at things. It puts you in a different mood, perhaps one that erodes after some time, but the smell of this mood remains with you for a long time.

The Cure - Plainsong ("ridiculously gorgeous" I read somewhere)
Simon & Garfunkel - The Sounds of Silence
Pink Floyd - Hey you
Collective Soul - The World I Know
Gary Jules - Mad world
Cocteau Twins - Lazy calm
The Black Keys - The lengths
Slowdive - Alison
Gomez - We haven't turned around
Modest Mouse - Trailer trash

A Movement I Could Belong To

2011-09-21T08:04:00.000-07:00

The slow movement.

Summary of it's philosophy:

"The only thing for certain is that everything changes. The rate of change increases. If you want to hang on you better speed up. That is the message of today. It could however be useful to remind everyone that our basic needs never change. The need to be seen and appreciated! It is the need to belong. The need for nearness and care, and for a little love! This is given only through slowness in human relations. In order to master changes, we have to recover slowness, reflection and togetherness. There we will find real renewal."

Student Evaluations, Grades, and the Internet

2011-09-18T06:38:00.000-07:00

Student Evaluations, Grades, and the Internet

Over the last thirty years, the system of student evaluation of teachers in colleges evolved—step by step—as a result of an implicit plot by academic administrators (who are unable to fill classes by students properly prepared to attend these classes) and by unqualified students (who want to be awarded high grades without either having or getting skills and knowledge). For great educational experience—nobody talks about great education—teachers are an obstacle or a nuisance. They should be intimidated and pushed to certify illiteracy by perfect grades. The use of student evaluation (SEI scores) by administrators in making personnel decisions on promotion, tenure, and salary adjustments became the whip which keeps the faculty in line and keeps grade inflation (or to say it more simply, cheating of the public) intact.

These abstract comments are not necessarily related to Ohio State University or my department but they give a general framework all of us function in. Recently, all these thoughts came in mind when the debate about electronic SEIs and making them public online erupted at OSU. We read a series of articles in a student newspaper the Lantern about SEI forms, RMP website (http://ratemyprofessors.com) or rumors about federal standardized tests. A student Timo Atkinson is frank and straightforward: “When we fill out these evaluations, we answer questions that are not geared toward how much you learned, but rather instructor organization and teaching effectiveness.” The students’ perception of TEACHING EFFECTIVENESS has nothing to do with HOW MUCH YOU LEARNED. A teacher who is a students’ hero pictured by Annie Hall gives students the grade of their own choice. As we learn on his RMP page: “The guy is flippin nuts. The class is like a quarter long circus but in the end you get to give yourself whatever grade youwant.” “Very easy class, but you won’t learn much.” “Very very great teacher.” “Very amusing professor, but not very instructive.” High leval rating is guaranteed.

But his colleague in Engineering College has perfect RMP rating 5.0 with the following comments: “Easiest class I’ve taken in a long time. …class is four days a week, but you only have to go twice to get the material. Tests are EXACTLY like the homework, no surprises. Really nice teacher and a good guy.” “Bring him a bottle of scotch and you’ve got an A [happy face].” A Business College student is almost poetic: “Practice questions are for chumps, and Sample exams is how we roll.” (In 1998 the Notices published my letter on how destructive sample tests are for undergraduate mathematical education.)

Will these pedagogical methods make the OSU a national leader in college education? Or are they, together with SEI procedures, pillars of an EDUCATION-LITE model of a store where sophisticated customers are shopping for cheaper grades and discounted diplomas?

-Boris Mityagin

Timothy Gowers on Examples

2011-09-16T06:02:00.000-07:00

Dear Doron,
I've just looked at your opinions page for the first time for awhile, and read your article on two pedagogical principles. I was particularly interested in the first, because as a resultof editing the Princeton Companion I have become incredibly conscious of it myself -- I'm tempted to say that I discoveredit independently. Of course, it doesn't bother me that Gelfandgot there first -- it is SO clearly correct that it would be amiracle if I had not been anticipated. Instead, we have thedepressing miracle that something so obvious should be practisedby such a small percentage of mathematicians. I feel quite evangelisticabout this, and have already started a one-man (except that nowI see that you are an ally) campaign to publicize the principle.For example, a few weeks ago I was asked to give a talk aboutthe Princeton Companion, and EXAMPLES FIRST was one of the mainthemes (which I illustrated by an example first: I gave a ridiculousand unmemorable definition of a "C-space" which was in fact amathematical model of a car, and as soon as the word "car" wasuttered, the definition was magically easier to remember).

I had always been aware, of course, of the value of giving thesimplest non-trivial example. The thing that has really struckme is the value of giving it FIRST. I think it is very importantto stress that this is an independently important part of theGelfand principle (or else, if you were not including it, a separate and equally important principle).
Here is my "proof" that it is better to start with concrete examples and proceed to abstract definitions than it is to beginwith the abstract definitions. If you give the example first, then itis easy for the reader to understand, so not much effort is neededto remember anything. Then, when you are presented with the abstractdefinition, you have a mental picture of an example, so the variouscomponents of the abstract definition become labels that you attachto this picture. If, on the other hand, you give the abstract definitionfirst, then the components are meaningless, so you have no choice butto memorize them as if you were learning Chinese vocabulary or something.Then when you see the example, you have to go back and see how thismeaningless stuff does in fact mean something. But that effort ofmemorization should have been unnecessary!

I have a theory about why it is customary to do things the wrongway round. Suppose, for example (again -- it's very important that I should stick to my principles) that you want to explain what aLie group is. What could be more natural than to start with thewords, "A Lie group is"? But if you do that, then you are more orless forced to give the abstract definition. The naturalness of thewrong approach means that the examples-first principle is a habit you have to get into rather than something that should happen with no effort at all. That is why I think it should be publicized as much as possible.
I have just written a long article that is largely on how we memorizemathematics. When I feel happy with it I'll put it up on my website.It deals with some of these questions.
The main thing I wanted to ask was whether you know the history ofthe Gelfand principle. Has he ever gone into print with it? If thereis something I could refer to then I'd like to do so. Best wishes, Tim PS I think I agree with the second principle too, but I feel lesspassionately about it.

Best Prank Ever

2011-09-14T08:57:00.001-07:00

I do not know if this is fake or not, but one of the funniest pranks I've seen here.

Marc Faber Quote

2011-09-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

"The federal government is sending each of us a $600 rebate. If we spend that money at Wal-Mart, the money goes to China. If we spend it on gasoline it goes to the Arabs. If we buy a computer it will go to India. If we purchase fruit and vegetables it will go to Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala. If we purchase a good car it will go to Germany. If we purchase useless crap it will go to Taiwan and none of it will help the American economy. The only way to keep that money here at home is to spend it on prostitutes and beer, since these are the only products still produced in US. I've been doing my part." -- Marc Faber

Marc Faber

2011-09-13T14:19:00.000-07:00

This exchange is from 2005, between Marc Faber and Daniel Yergin:

Faber: The wider issue is why is the U.S. not particularly popular. Because they have this belief that they are kind of a new empire in the world, the way the Romans were an empire. And nobody has ever liked empires because empires have always bullied people around. I mean, the Romans crucified people. Good example: they crucified Jesus Christ because they didn't like him. He was considered to be a rebel.

Daniel Yergin: Ok so we'll stop buying goods from Asia, we'll stop buying goods from the other parts of the world. I mean, what is this American Empire, supposedly? I mean isn't part of the reason people just don't like the United States because United States did very well in the 1990s and people don't like that we are doing very well presently.

Faber: I know countries such as Cambodia or Laos that have been carpet bombed that did not particularly enjoy the carpet bombing, as an example.

See this priceless exchange (especially Marc's suddenly stern expression) here (0.20-1.20).

Capitalism, 1911

2011-09-12T13:18:00.000-07:00

The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux

2011-09-11T11:40:00.000-07:00

A very good self-summary of the main themes in Chomsky's political thinking:

The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Redux, by Noam Chomsky.

Since we often cannot see what is happening before our eyes, it is perhaps not too surprising that what is at a slight distance removed is utterly invisible. We have just witnessed an instructive example: President Obama’s dispatch of 79 commandos into Pakistan on May 1 to carry out what was evidently a planned assassination of the prime suspect in the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, Osama bin Laden. Though the target of the operation, unarmed and with no protection, could easily have been apprehended, he was simply murdered, his body dumped at sea without autopsy. The action was deemed “just and necessary” in the liberal press. There will be no trial, as there was in the case of Nazi criminals—a fact not overlooked by legal authorities abroad who approve of the operation but object to the procedure. As Elaine Scarry reminds us, the prohibition of assassination in international law traces back to a forceful denunciation of the practice by Abraham Lincoln, who condemned the call for assassination as “international outlawry” in 1863, an “outrage,” which “civilized nations” view with “horror” and merits the “sternest retaliation.”

In 1967, writing about the deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam, I discussed the responsibility of intellectuals, borrowing the phrase from an important essay of Dwight Macdonald’s after World War II. With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 arriving, and widespread approval in the United States of the assassination of the chief suspect, it seems a fitting time to revisit that issue. But before thinking about the responsibility of intellectuals, it is worth clarifying to whom we are referring.

The concept of intellectuals in the modern sense gained prominence with the 1898 “Manifesto of the Intellectuals” produced by the Dreyfusards who, inspired by Emile Zola’s open letter of protest to France’s president, condemned both the framing of French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus on charges of treason and the subsequent military cover-up. The Dreyfusards’ stance conveys the image of intellectuals as defenders of justice, confronting power with courage and integrity. But they were hardly seen that way at the time. A minority of the educated classes, the Dreyfusards were bitterly condemned in the mainstream of intellectual life, in particular by prominent figures among “the immortals of the strongly anti-Dreyfusard Académie Française,” Steven Lukes writes. To the novelist, politician, and anti-Dreyfusard leader Maurice Barrès, Dreyfusards were “anarchists of the lecture-platform.” To another of these immortals, Ferdinand Brunetière, the very word “intellectual” signified “one of the most ridiculous eccentricities of our time—I mean the pretension of raising writers, scientists, professors and philologists to the rank of supermen,” who dare to “treat our generals as idiots, our social institutions as absurd and our traditions as unhealthy.”

Who then were the intellectuals? The minority inspired by Zola (who was sentenced to jail for libel, and fled the country)? Or the immortals of the academy? The question resonates through the ages, in one or another form, and today offers a framework for determining the “responsibility of intellectuals.” The phrase is ambiguous: does it refer to intellectuals’ moral responsibility as decent human beings in a position to use their privilege and status to advance the causes of freedom, justice, mercy, peace, and other such sentimental concerns? Or does it refer to the role they are expected to play, serving, not derogating, leadership and established institutions?

One answer came during World War I, when prominent intellectuals on all sides lined up enthusiastically in support of their own states.

In their “Manifesto of 93 German Intellectuals,” leading figures in one of the world’s most enlightened states called on the West to “have faith in us! Believe, that we shall carry on this war to the end as a civilized nation, to whom the legacy of a Goethe, a Beethoven, and a Kant, is just as sacred as its own hearths and homes.” Their counterparts on the other side of the intellectual trenches matched them in enthusiasm for the noble cause, but went beyond in self-adulation. In The New Republic they proclaimed, “The effective and decisive work on behalf of the war has been accomplished by . . . a class which must be comprehensively but loosely described as the ‘intellectuals.’” These progressives believed they were ensuring that the United States entered the war “under the influence of a moral verdict reached, after the utmost deliberation by the more thoughtful members of the community.” They were, in fact, the victims of concoctions of the British Ministry of Information, which secretly sought “to direct the thought of most of the world,” but particularly the thought of American progressive intellectuals who might help to whip a pacifist country into war fever.

John Dewey was impressed by the great “psychological and educational lesson” of the war, which proved that human beings—more precisely, “the intelligent men of the community”—can “take hold of human affairs and manage them . . . deliberately and intelligently” to achieve the ends sought, admirable by definition.

Not everyone toed the line so obediently, of course. Notable figures such as Bertrand Russell, Eugene Debs, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht were, like Zola, sentenced to prison. Debs was punished with particular severity—a ten-year prison term for raising questions about President Wilson’s “war for democracy and human rights.” Wilson refused him amnesty after the war ended, though Harding finally relented. Some, such as Thorstein Veblen, were chastised but treated less harshly; Veblen was fired from his position in the Food Administration after preparing a report showing that the shortage of farm labor could be overcome by ending Wilson’s brutal persecution of labor, specifically the International Workers of the World. Randolph Bourne was dropped by the progressive journals after criticizing the “league of benevolently imperialistic nations” and their exalted endeavors.

The pattern of praise and punishment is a familiar one throughout history: those who line up in the service of the state are typically praised by the general intellectual community, and those who refuse to line up in service of the state are punished. Thus in retrospect Wilson and the progressive intellectuals who offered him their services are greatly honored, but not Debs. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered and have hardly been heroes of the intellectual mainstream. Russell continued to be bitterly condemned until after his death—and in current biographies still is.

In the 1970s prominent scholars distinguished the two categories of intellectuals more explicitly. A 1975 study, The Crisis of Democracy, labeled Brunetière’s ridiculous eccentrics “value-oriented intellectuals” who pose a “challenge to democratic government which is, potentially at least, as serious as those posed in the past by aristocratic cliques, fascist movements, and communist parties.” Among other misdeeds, these dangerous creatures “devote themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging of authority,” and they challenge the institutions responsible for “the indoctrination of the young.” Some even sink to the depths of questioning the nobility of war aims, as Bourne had. This castigation of the miscreants who question authority and the established order was delivered by the scholars of the liberal internationalist Trilateral Commission; the Carter administration was largely drawn from their ranks.

Like The New Republic progressives during World War I, the authors of The Crisis of Democracy extend the concept of the “intellectual” beyond Brunetière’s ridiculous eccentrics to include the better sort as well: the “technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals,” responsible and serious thinkers who devote themselves to the constructive work of shaping policy within established institutions and to ensuring that indoctrination of the young proceeds on course.

It took Dewey only a few years to shift from the responsible technocratic and policy-oriented intellectual of World War I to an anarchist of the lecture-platform, as he denounced the “un-free press” and questioned “how far genuine intellectual freedom and social responsibility are possible on any large scale under the existing economic regime.”

What particularly troubled the Trilateral scholars was the “excess of democracy” during the time of troubles, the 1960s, when normally passive and apathetic parts of the population entered the political arena to advance their concerns: minorities, women, the young, the old, working people . . . in short, the population, sometimes called the “special interests.” They are to be distinguished from those whom Adam Smith called the “masters of mankind,” who are “the principal architects” of government policy and pursue their “vile maxim”: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people.” The role of the masters in the political arena is not deplored, or discussed, in the Trilateral volume, presumably because the masters represent “the national interest,” like those who applauded themselves for leading the country to war “after the utmost deliberation by the more thoughtful members of the community” had reached its “moral verdict.”

To overcome the excessive burden imposed on the state by the special interests, the Trilateralists called for more “moderation in democracy,” a return to passivity on the part of the less deserving, perhaps even a return to the happy days when “Truman had been able to govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers,” and democracy therefore flourished.

The Trilateralists could well have claimed to be adhering to the original intent of the Constitution, “intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period” by delivering power to a “better sort” of people and barring “those who were not rich, well born, or prominent from exercising political power,” in the accurate words of the historian Gordon Wood. In Madison’s defense, however, we should recognize that his mentality was pre-capitalist. In determining that power should be in the hands of “the wealth of the nation,” “a the more capable set of men,” he envisioned those men on the model of the “enlightened Statesmen” and “benevolent philosopher” of the imagined Roman world. They would be “pure and noble,” “men of intelligence, patriotism, property, and independent circumstances” “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” So endowed, these men would “refine and enlarge the public views,” guarding the public interest against the “mischiefs” of democratic majorities. In a similar vein, the progressive Wilsonian intellectuals might have taken comfort in the discoveries of the behavioral sciences, explained in 1939 by the psychologist and education theorist Edward Thorndike:

It is the great good fortune of mankind that there is a substantial correlation between intelligence and morality including good will toward one’s fellows . . . . Consequently our superiors in ability are on the average our benefactors, and it is often safer to trust our interests to them than to ourselves.

A comforting doctrine, though some might feel that Adam Smith had the sharper eye.

Since power tends to prevail, intellectuals who serve their governments are considered responsible, and value-oriented intellectuals are dismissed or denigrated. At home that is.

With regard to enemies, the distinction between the two categories of intellectuals is retained, but with values reversed. In the old Soviet Union, the value-oriented intellectuals were the honored dissidents, while we had only contempt for the apparatchiks and commissars, the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals. Similarly in Iran we honor the courageous dissidents and condemn those who defend the clerical establishment. And elsewhere generally.

The honorable term “dissident” is used selectively. It does not, of course, apply, with its favorable connotations, to value-oriented intellectuals at home or to those who combat U.S.-supported tyranny abroad. Take the interesting case of Nelson Mandela, who was removed from the official terrorist list in 2008, and can now travel to the United States without special authorization.

Twenty years earlier, he was the criminal leader of one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” according to a Pentagon report. That is why President Reagan had to support the apartheid regime, increasing trade with South Africa in violation of congressional sanctions and supporting South Africa’s depredations in neighboring countries, which led, according to a UN study, to 1.5 million deaths. That was only one episode in the war on terrorism that Reagan declared to combat “the plague of the modern age,” or, as Secretary of State George Shultz had it, “a return to barbarism in the modern age.” We may add hundreds of thousands of corpses in Central America and tens of thousands more in the Middle East, among other achievements. Small wonder that the Great Communicator is worshipped by Hoover Institution scholars as a colossus whose “spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost,” recently honored further by a statue that defaces the American Embassy in London.

The Latin American case is revealing. Those who called for freedom and justice in Latin America are not admitted to the pantheon of honored dissidents. For example, a week after the fall of the Berlin Wall, six leading Latin American intellectuals, all Jesuit priests, had their heads blown off on the direct orders of the Salvadoran high command. The perpetrators were from an elite battalion armed and trained by Washington that had already left a gruesome trail of blood and terror, and had just returned from renewed training at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The murdered priests are not commemorated as honored dissidents, nor are others like them throughout the hemisphere. Honored dissidents are those who called for freedom in enemy domains in Eastern Europe, who certainly suffered, but not remotely like their counterparts in Latin America.

The distinction is worth examination, and tells us a lot about the two senses of the phrase “responsibility of intellectuals,” and about ourselves. It is not seriously in question, as John Coatsworth writes in the recently published Cambridge University History of the Cold War, that from 1960 to “the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites.” Among the executed were many religious martyrs, and there were mass slaughters as well, consistently supported or initiated by Washington.

Why then the distinction? It might be argued that what happened in Eastern Europe is far more momentous than the fate of the South at our hands. It would be interesting to see the argument spelled out. And also to see the argument explaining why we should disregard elementary moral principles, among them that if we are serious about suffering and atrocities, about justice and rights, we will focus our efforts on where we can do the most good—typically, where we share responsibility for what is being done. We have no difficulty demanding that our enemies follow such principles.

Few of us care, or should, what Andrei Sakharov or Shirin Ebadi say about U.S. or Israeli crimes; we admire them for what they say and do about those of their own states, and the conclusion holds far more strongly for those who live in more free and democratic societies, and therefore have far greater opportunities to act effectively. It is of some interest that in the most respected circles, practice is virtually the opposite of what elementary moral values dictate.

But let us conform and keep only to the matter of historical import.

The U.S. wars in Latin America from 1960 to 1990, quite apart from their horrors, have long-term historical significance. To consider just one important aspect, in no small measure they were wars against the Church, undertaken to crush a terrible heresy proclaimed at Vatican II in 1962, which, under the leadership of Pope John XXIII, “ushered in a new era in the history of the Catholic Church,” in the words of the distinguished theologian Hans Küng, restoring the teachings of the gospels that had been put to rest in the fourth century when the Emperor Constantine established Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire, instituting “a revolution” that converted “the persecuted church” to a “persecuting church.” The heresy of Vatican II was taken up by Latin American bishops who adopted the “preferential option for the poor.” Priests, nuns, and laypersons then brought the radical pacifist message of the gospels to the poor, helping them organize to ameliorate their bitter fate in the domains of U.S. power.

That same year, 1962, President Kennedy made several critical decisions. One was to shift the mission of the militaries of Latin America from “hemispheric defense”—an anachronism from World War II—to “internal security,” in effect, war against the domestic population, if they raise their heads. Charles Maechling, who led U.S. counterinsurgency and internal defense planning from 1961 to 1966, describes the unsurprising consequences of the 1962 decision as a shift from toleration “of the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military” to “direct complicity” in their crimes to U.S. support for “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.” One major initiative was a military coup in Brazil, planned in Washington and implemented shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, instituting a murderous and brutal national security state. The plague of repression then spread through the hemisphere, including the 1973 coup installing the Pinochet dictatorship, and later the most vicious of all, the Argentine dictatorship, Reagan’s favorite. Central America’s turn—not for the first time—came in the 1980s under the leadership of the “warm and friendly ghost” who is now revered for his achievements.

The murder of the Jesuit intellectuals as the Berlin wall fell was a final blow in defeating the heresy, culminating a decade of horror in El Salvador that opened with the assassination, by much the same hands, of Archbishop Óscar Romero, the “voice for the voiceless.” The victors in the war against the Church declare their responsibility with pride. The School of the Americas (since renamed), famous for its training of Latin American killers, announces as one of its “talking points” that the liberation theology that was initiated at Vatican II was “defeated with the assistance of the US army.”

Actually, the November 1989 assassinations were almost a final blow. More was needed.

A year later Haiti had its first free election, and to the surprise and shock of Washington, which like others had anticipated the easy victory of its own candidate from the privileged elite, the organized public in the slums and hills elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a popular priest committed to liberation theology. The United States at once moved to undermine the elected government, and after the military coup that overthrew it a few months later, lent substantial support to the vicious military junta and its elite supporters. Trade was increased in violation of international sanctions and increased further under Clinton, who also authorized the Texaco oil company to supply the murderous rulers, in defiance of his own directives.

I will skip the disgraceful aftermath, amply reviewed elsewhere, except to point out that in 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti, France and the United States, joined by Canada, forcefully intervened, kidnapped President Aristide (who had been elected again), and shipped him off to central Africa. He and his party were effectively barred from the farcical 2010–11 elections, the most recent episode in a horrendous history that goes back hundreds of years and is barely known among the perpetrators of the crimes, who prefer tales of dedicated efforts to save the suffering people from their grim fate.

Another fateful Kennedy decision in 1962 was to send a special forces mission to Colombia, led by General William Yarborough, who advised the Colombian security forces to undertake “paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents,” activities that “should be backed by the United States.” The meaning of the phrase “communist proponents” was spelled out by the respected president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights, former Minister of Foreign Affairs Alfredo Vázquez Carrizosa, who wrote that the Kennedy administration “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads,” ushering in

what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine. . . . [not] defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the game . . . [with] the right to combat the internal enemy, as set forth in the Brazilian doctrine, the Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan doctrine, and the Colombian doctrine: it is the right to fight and to exterminate social workers, trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists. And this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as myself.

In a 1980 study, Lars Schoultz, the leading U.S. academic specialist on human rights in Latin America, found that U.S. aid “has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens . . . to the hemisphere’s relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights.” That included military aid, was independent of need, and continued through the Carter years. Ever since the Reagan administration, it has been superfluous to carry out such a study. In the 1980s one of the most notorious violators was El Salvador, which accordingly became the leading recipient of U.S. military aid, to be replaced by Colombia when it took the lead as the worst violator of human rights in the hemisphere. Vázquez Carrizosa himself was living under heavy guard in his Bogotá residence when I visited him there in 2002 as part of a mission of Amnesty International, which was opening its year-long campaign to protect human rights defenders in Colombia because of the country’s horrifying record of attacks against human rights and labor activists, and mostly the usual victims of state terror: the poor and defenseless. Terror and torture in Colombia were supplemented by chemical warfare (“fumigation”), under the pretext of the war on drugs, leading to huge flight to urban slums and misery for the survivors. Colombia’s attorney general’s office now estimates that more than 140,000 people have been killed by paramilitaries, often acting in close collaboration with the U.S.-funded military.

Signs of the slaughter are everywhere. On a nearly impassible dirt road to a remote village in southern Colombia a year ago, my companions and I passed a small clearing with many simple crosses marking the graves of victims of a paramilitary attack on a local bus. Reports of the killings are graphic enough; spending a little time with the survivors, who are among the kindest and most compassionate people I have ever had the privilege of meeting, makes the picture more vivid, and only more painful.

This is the briefest sketch of terrible crimes for which Americans bear substantial culpability, and that we could easily ameliorate, at the very least.

But it is more gratifying to bask in praise for courageously protesting the abuses of official enemies, a fine activity, but not the priority of a value-oriented intellectual who takes the responsibilities of that stance seriously.

The victims within our domains, unlike those in enemy states, are not merely ignored and quickly forgotten, but are also cynically insulted. One striking illustration came a few weeks after the murder of the Latin American intellectuals in El Salvador. Vaclav Havel visited Washington and addressed a joint session of Congress. Before his enraptured audience, Havel lauded the “defenders of freedom” in Washington who “understood the responsibility that flowed from” being “the most powerful nation on earth”—crucially, their responsibility for the brutal assassination of his Salvadoran counterparts shortly before.

The liberal intellectual class was enthralled by his presentation. Havel reminds us that “we live in a romantic age,” Anthony Lewis gushed. Other prominent liberal commentators reveled in Havel’s “idealism, his irony, his humanity,” as he “preached a difficult doctrine of individual responsibility” while Congress “obviously ached with respect” for his genius and integrity; and asked why America lacks intellectuals so profound, who “elevate morality over self-interest” in this way, praising us for the tortured and mutilated corpses that litter the countries that we have left in misery. We need not tarry on what the reaction would have been had Father Ellacuría, the most prominent of the murdered Jesuit intellectuals, spoken such words at the Duma after elite forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union assassinated Havel and half a dozen of his associates—a performance that is inconceivable.

The assassination of bin Laden, too, directs our attention to our insulted victims. There is much more to say about the operation—including Washington’s willingness to face a serious risk of major war and even leakage of fissile materials to jihadis, as I have discussed elsewhere—but let us keep to the choice of name: Operation Geronimo. The name caused outrage in Mexico and was protested by indigenous groups in the United States, but there seems to have been no further notice of the fact that Obama was identifying bin Laden with the Apache Indian chief. Geronimo led the courageous resistance to invaders who sought to consign his people to the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty, among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement,” in the words of the grand strategist John Quincy Adams, the intellectual architect of manifest destiny, uttered long after his own contributions to these sins. The casual choice of the name is reminiscent of the ease with which we name our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Blackhawk, Cheyenne . . . We might react differently if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

Denial of these “heinous sins” is sometimes explicit. To mention a few recent cases, two years ago in one of the world’s leading left-liberal intellectual journals, The New York Review of Books, Russell Baker outlined what he learned from the work of the “heroic historian” Edmund Morgan: namely, that when Columbus and the early explorers arrived they “found a continental vastness sparsely populated by farming and hunting people . . . . In the limitless and unspoiled world stretching from tropical jungle to the frozen north, there may have been scarcely more than a million inhabitants.” The calculation is off by many tens of millions, and the “vastness” included advanced civilizations throughout the continent. No reactions appeared, though four months later the editors issued a correction, noting that in North America there may have been as many as 18 million people—and, unmentioned, tens of millions more “from tropical jungle to the frozen north.” This was all well known decades ago—including the advanced civilizations and the “merciless and perfidious cruelty” of the “extermination”—but not important enough even for a casual phrase. In London Review of Books a year later, the noted historian Mark Mazower mentioned American “mistreatment of the Native Americans,” again eliciting no comment. Would we accept the word “mistreatment” for comparable crimes committed by enemies?

If the responsibility of intellectuals refers to their moral responsibility as decent human beings in a position to use their privilege and status to advance the cause of freedom, justice, mercy, and peace—and to speak out not simply about the abuses of our enemies, but, far more significantly, about the crimes in which we are implicated and can ameliorate or terminate if we choose—how should we think of 9/11?

The notion that 9/11 “changed the world” is widely held, understandably. The events of that day certainly had major consequences, domestic and international. One was to lead President Bush to re-declare Ronald Reagan’s war on terrorism—the first one has been effectively “disappeared,” to borrow the phrase of our favorite Latin American killers and torturers, presumably because the consequences do not fit well with preferred self images. Another consequence was the invasion of Afghanistan, then Iraq, and more recently military interventions in several other countries in the region and regular threats of an attack on Iran (“all options are open,” in the standard phrase). The costs, in every dimension, have been enormous. That suggests a rather obvious question, not asked for the first time: was there an alternative?

A number of analysts have observed that bin Laden won major successes in his war against the United States. “He repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat its satraps was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them,” the journalist Eric Margolis writes.

The United States, first under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama, rushed right into bin Laden’s trap. . . . Grotesquely overblown military outlays and debt addiction . . . . may be the most pernicious legacy of the man who thought he could defeat the United States.

A report from the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies estimates that the final bill will be $3.2–4 trillion. Quite an impressive achievement by bin Laden.

That Washington was intent on rushing into bin Laden’s trap was evident at once. Michael Scheuer, the senior CIA analyst responsible for tracking bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, writes, “Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us.” The al Qaeda leader, Scheuer continues, “is out to drastically alter U.S. and Western policies toward the Islamic world.”

And, as Scheuer explains, bin Laden largely succeeded: “U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.” And arguably remains so, even after his death.

There is good reason to believe that the jihadi movement could have been split and undermined after the 9/11 attack, which was criticized harshly within the movement. Furthermore, the “crime against humanity,” as it was rightly called, could have been approached as a crime, with an international operation to apprehend the likely suspects. That was recognized in the immediate aftermath of the attack, but no such idea was even considered by decision-makers in government. It seems no thought was given to the Taliban’s tentative offer—how serious an offer, we cannot know—to present the al Qaeda leaders for a judicial proceeding.

At the time, I quoted Robert Fisk’s conclusion that the horrendous crime of 9/11 was committed with “wickedness and awesome cruelty”—an accurate judgment. The crimes could have been even worse. Suppose that Flight 93, downed by courageous passengers in Pennsylvania, had bombed the White House, killing the president. Suppose that the perpetrators of the crime planned to, and did, impose a military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands. Suppose the new dictatorship established, with the support of the criminals, an international terror center that helped impose similar torture-and-terror states elsewhere, and, as icing on the cake, brought in a team of economists—call them “the Kandahar boys”—who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.

As we all should know, this is not a thought experiment. It happened. I am, of course, referring to what in Latin America is often called “the first 9/11”: September 11, 1973, when the United States succeeded in its intensive efforts to overthrow the democratic government of Salvador Allende in Chile with a military coup that placed General Pinochet’s ghastly regime in office. The dictatorship then installed the Chicago Boys—economists trained at the University of Chicago—to reshape Chile’s economy. Consider the economic destruction, the torture and kidnappings, and multiply the numbers killed by 25 to yield per capita equivalents, and you will see just how much more devastating the first 9/11 was.

The goal of the overthrow, in the words of the Nixon administration, was to kill the “virus” that might encourage all those “foreigners [who] are out to screw us”—screw us by trying to take over their own resources and more generally to pursue a policy of independent development along lines disliked by Washington. In the background was the conclusion of Nixon’s National Security Council that if the United States could not control Latin America, it could not expect “to achieve a successful order elsewhere in the world.” Washington’s “credibility” would be undermined, as Henry Kissinger put it.

The first 9/11, unlike the second, did not change the world. It was “nothing of very great consequence,” Kissinger assured his boss a few days later. And judging by how it figures in conventional history, his words can hardly be faulted, though the survivors may see the matter differently.

These events of little consequence were not limited to the military coup that destroyed Chilean democracy and set in motion the horror story that followed. As already discussed, the first 9/11 was just one act in the drama that began in 1962 when Kennedy shifted the mission of the Latin American militaries to “internal security.” The shattering aftermath is also of little consequence, the familiar pattern when history is guarded by responsible intellectuals.

It seems to be close to a historical universal that conformist intellectuals, the ones who support official aims and ignore or rationalize official crimes, are honored and privileged in their own societies, and the value-oriented punished in one or another way. The pattern goes back to the earliest records. It was the man accused of corrupting the youth of Athens who drank the hemlock, much as Dreyfusards were accused of “corrupting souls, and, in due course, society as a whole” and the value-oriented intellectuals of the 1960s were charged with interference with “indoctrination of the young.”

In the Hebrew scriptures there are figures who by contemporary standards are dissident intellectuals, called “prophets” in the English translation. They bitterly angered the establishment with their critical geopolitical analysis, their condemnation of the crimes of the powerful, their calls for justice and concern for the poor and suffering. King Ahab, the most evil of the kings, denounced the Prophet Elijah as a hater of Israel, the first “self-hating Jew” or “anti-American” in the modern counterparts. The prophets were treated harshly, unlike the flatterers at the court, who were later condemned as false prophets. The pattern is understandable. It would be surprising if it were otherwise.

As for the responsibility of intellectuals, there does not seem to me to be much to say beyond some simple truths. Intellectuals are typically privileged—merely an observation about usage of the term. Privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices.

Robert Smith

2011-09-10T07:49:00.000-07:00

"I've never regretted not having children. My mindset in that regard has been constant. I objected to being born, and I refuse to impose life on someone else. Living, it's awful for me. I can't on one hand argue the futility of life and the pointlessness of existence and have a family. It doesn't sit comfortably." --Robert Smith.

As a huge fan of The Cure, I am glad Robert Smith exists. "Plainsong" is truly marvelous (as Smith says: "In the past we have attempted different styles, and it was often good. It can be satisfying to experiment even if it's only on a small scale. But I really know that what it all boils down to is there is one particular kind of music, an atmospheric type of music, that I enjoy making with the Cure. I enjoy it a lot more than any other kind of sound.").

Childhood Favourite Intros

2011-09-09T03:22:00.000-07:00

In my experience, there has always been a close positive correlation of the quality of a TV show with the awesomeness (mainly in music) of its intro. My favorite childhood intros:

1. Wiseguy

2. The Wizard

3. Airwolf

4. Knightrider
I can happily spend a lifetime watching Airwolf and KITT fly/drive around. Looping this and this comes close, though. Who said machines could not be elegant.

5. Magnum P.I.

6. Miami Vice
What drums!

7. Cover Up

8. Wildfire

Vonnegut

2011-09-07T03:40:00.000-07:00

Oh, a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen--
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice
Such very different people
In the same device!