Remora
Policy Review, a true blue, conservative journal, features a review by a Steven Menashi, of Mark Lilla�s new book.
The Lure of Syracuse, the last chapter in Lilla's book, was published in the NYRB in the black month of September. Limited Inc didn't have the heart, at the time, to make with the commentary. Lilla uses the story of Plato's supposed attraction to the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysus, to make a point. Or a couple of points. One is the point that the story should be about Plato's ultimate resistance to tyranny. The other is that twentieth century thinkers have been attracted to the philosopher slash murder king. The second point is the important one for Lilla.
On the one hand, Lilla�s point is true. A large part of the intelligentsia in every decade has embraced the most obnoxious governors, a crew of murderous and venal men like Hitler, Stalin, Mao. So, for that matter, have carpenters and farmers. The problem with Lilla�s story is that it is based on a falsely foreshortened sense of atrocity.
History is read through a special filter for Lilla -- and for that whole tradition arising out of the fifties merger of liberalism and cold war anti-communism. The murder of a Russian writer, in 1940, counts as a murder for this group. The murder of, say, a Sioux in 1870, or the starving to death of some Congolese family in 1900 doesn't count as an atrocity. In fact, it doesn't count at all. A philosophical overview of history that begins in mourning is fine, it is appropriate, lay on the organ tones and let�s all die; but Lilla�s group ends up mourning very selectively.
The NYRB site has segregated Lilla's essay into the for pay part of the site. But it is still up at this site. Let's start with the first false analogy in Lilla's piece.
"Dionysius is our contemporary. Over the last century he has assumed many names: Lenin and Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini, Mao and Ho, Castro and Trujillo, Amin and Bokassa, Saddam and Khomeini, Ceau�sescu and Milosevic�one's pen runs dry. In the nineteenth century optimistic souls could believe that tyranny was a thing of the past. After all, Europe had entered the modern age and everyone knew that complex modern societies, attached to secular, democratic values, simply could not be ruled by old-style despotic means. Modern societies might still be authoritarian, their bureaucracies cold and their workplaces cruel, but they could not be tyrannies in the sense that Syracuse was. Modernization would render the classical concept of tyranny obsolete, and as nations outside Europe modernized they, too, would enter the post-tyrannical future. We now know how wrong this was. The harems and food-tasters of ancient times are indeed gone but their places have been taken by propaganda ministers and revolutionary guards, drug barons and Swiss bankers. The tyrant has survived."
Well, the rhetorical flourish is nice. But Dionysis is not our contemporary, or at least he isn't our contemporary in the same way Hitler and Mussolini are. In fact, the collective gesture -- one that puts Hitler and Khomeini in the same set - is infantile, betraying no sense of historical circumstances. The nineteenth century optimism, by which one presumes Lilla means Mill and Comte (although he could mean Goethe and Marx -- the phrase is empty), still had to account for the Napoleons, tyrants of a type much closer to Dionysus than any in Lilla's first list. And of course there is the notion that the nations outside Europe "modernize." Is this a joke? If it isn�t, and we fear it isn�t, then it is more evidence that when the blind lead the blind through world history, they end up like the blind in Brueghel�s painting, headlong in the ditch.. Lilla's evident ignorance of what modernization entails cries out for correction. Before you play the shame game in the NYRB, do some research. Start with, say, the history of coffee growing. As I mentioned before, last week I read Mark Prendergast�s nice, exhaustive look at the coffee industry. Well, why not start there for the quick course in Europe�s heart of darkness complex? Lilla seems to be under the illusion that 19th century intellectuals were either unaware or uninvolved with what happened on the margins: those Iindians of the Yucatan, Guatamala, El Salvador, etc; those Brazilian slaves; those Chinese resisting Britain�s Opium trade. If he wants to find the roots of Hitlerism, it won't do to go to Syracuse -- go, instead, to Hitler's admiration for that eminent nineteenth century institution, the Indian Reservation. America's gift to the world. Or look at the penal practices of the French. The Communards were cast into Dachaus spaced at some distance from the Hexagon: Devil�s Island, French Guyana.
Lilla might claim that this is merely the blame game, death toll politics. But it isn't � it is looking at the context in which intellectuals might or might not have sympathy with forces that would overthrow �liberal democracy.� To mount a philosophical polemic based on a history and have no real comprehension of history is, well, typical of philosophical polemicists.
Still, even putting aside Lilla�s ignorance of the 19th century, his inability to understand how World War I effected the West reaches into the cases he wants to talk about. In fact, here, as elsewhere, the majority of the intelligentsia went along: most were not, like Bertrand Russell, willing to go to jail to oppose the senseless slaughter on both fronts. Not that Lilla is the type to honor Russell � in fact, whenever intellectuals are being knocked by other intellectuals in forums like the NYRB, you can be sure the political sympathies of the knockers is such that they would have favored locking up the Bertrand Russells and throwing away the key.
Still, context is not an excuse. The 20th century is full of philosophers who have favored tyranny of one sort or another. The list is well known, and the model case is Heidegger. But the Stalinism of Aragon, or the sympathy of the New Critics (Allen Tate, for example) for racism is well known. So if Lilla had the integrity to confront this problem in the spirit of real inquiry � why did it happen? Is there a pattern? Who opposed Stalinism, or apartheid, or Naziism, and why? If Lilla was proceeding along this path, I�d have more sympathy with him.
However, Limited Inc�s lack of sympathy is not shared by the Policy reviewer.
�Mark Lilla offers his latest book, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, as �a modest companion� to Milosz�s work. But The Reckless Mind turns out to be not so modest at all, for Lilla takes as his subject a question even more vexing than Milosz�s. We may understand why intellectuals living under tyranny, jaded by the degradations of war and intimidated by a totalitarian state, would submit to regnant orthodoxy. But what accounts for tyranny�s apologists in free societies? Why would an intellectual, unthreatened by censorship or official coercion, seek to justify repressive, dictatorial regimes �or, as was more common,� Lilla writes, �to deny any essential difference between tyranny and the free societies of the West?� Lilla seeks to answer the question, as Milosz did, through a series of profiles of modern intellectual.�
Menashi makes a curious move in his review to Strauss. Usually Straussians start going cross-eyed, in that Closing of the American Mind way, when they deal with such as Kojeve, but Menashi is actually thoughtful. A nice piece. Here�s the final graf:
�As it happens, during his lifetime Strauss produced studies of only three living thinkers: Heidegger, Schmitt, and Koj�ve � three theorists who had put their formidable talents in the service of tyrants, the first two to Hitler and the last to Stalin. In contrast to their zealotry, Strauss appears (contrary to his popular reputation) resolutely anti-dogmatic. �Philosophy is essentially not possession of the truth, but quest for the truth,� according to Strauss; he exhorts impulsive thinkers not to philosophical certainty, but to the philosopher�s moderate self-control. Against the religious dogmatism of these intellectuals, he juxtaposed the uncertain wisdom of Socrates: The true philosopher knows that he knows nothing.�
The last is a phrase is one philosophers like to use when they are getting sentimental, but like some old cheer intoned by the graduates of the class of 38 on the Yale lawn, they are going through the motions from nostalgia, not because they mean it.
Thursday, February 21, 2002
Wednesday, February 20, 2002
Comments on yesterday's post from Alan:
"Roger,
I don't have access to the London Times article here at work so I'm flying
blind here. But here are a couple of observations.
--Rational self-interest, as conceived by free-market economists, would
never lead anyone to try to be president of the United States. There are a
whole lot less painful ways to get a whole lot richer. Besides, when you
grow up a rich kid like Georgie-poo, I suspect the marginal utility of
additional bucks is pretty much nil. I would think, in the absence of any
more particular motivations, that maximizing utility would consist in
finding ways to avoid boredom.
--We've got two questions here: GWB's character and motivation, and
Luttwak's. From a number of things I've read, I think it very likely that
since 9/11, GWB genuinely regards himself as a Man on a Mission. However,
unlike your version of Luttwak, I do not think that is a Good Thing. It
scares the shit out of me. There are few things in the world more dangerous
than a stupid and easily manipulable Man on a Mission.
It'll take me a while to work out the Venn diagram stuff. Also thinking
about the causes of famine in India, etc."
To which Limited Inc replied
Alan
-- Wow, either my Luttwak piece was good, or you are just in a discursive mood this morning. A spontaneous response!
Anyway,. my reading of maximizing one's advantage is that the particular advantage is an x, a variable. It could be money, it could be power, it could be popularity, it could be orgasms. Since rational agents live in a world of mixed value systems, their pursuit of one advantage theoretically entails not pursuing, with the same vigor, others. But I take it that the decision to pursue political power is the framework within which Bushiepoo is defining self interest. In this case, then, he would alter his behavior if he felt like it was negatively impacting his long term ability to retain political power. So, when he campaigned, he moderated everything that he promised in order to alienate as few voters as possible. What he has done since he attained power is use it for other self-interested ends, which are defined in other value frameworks. But just as we wouldn't confuse a man investing money with a man giving to charity simply because both actions entail an immediate outflow of money, so we shouldn't think of Bush as sacrificing his self interest in one framwork for a disinterested ideal in another just because, potentially, he could become unpopular. Luttwak conceivably could make that argument, but as I say, it would contradict the whole brunt of Bushiepoo's life up to now. The man with a mission is in the happy circumstance that his mission makes him popular, so Luttwak's has to present a hypothetical. He fails to even muster the elements for a hypothetical. Perhaps, like Lyndon Johnson, Bushypoo would pursue this mission even if it started to make him highly unpopular. But I think it is as likely that, having received Pavlovian gratification from being a warm monger, he might hedge the inevitable unpopularity that comes from being Santa Claus to the rich in a recession by sustaining his warmongering role, which does make him popular.
LI
There you have it comrades, actually controversy on this usually sleepy site. I'll be jiggered!
"Roger,
I don't have access to the London Times article here at work so I'm flying
blind here. But here are a couple of observations.
--Rational self-interest, as conceived by free-market economists, would
never lead anyone to try to be president of the United States. There are a
whole lot less painful ways to get a whole lot richer. Besides, when you
grow up a rich kid like Georgie-poo, I suspect the marginal utility of
additional bucks is pretty much nil. I would think, in the absence of any
more particular motivations, that maximizing utility would consist in
finding ways to avoid boredom.
--We've got two questions here: GWB's character and motivation, and
Luttwak's. From a number of things I've read, I think it very likely that
since 9/11, GWB genuinely regards himself as a Man on a Mission. However,
unlike your version of Luttwak, I do not think that is a Good Thing. It
scares the shit out of me. There are few things in the world more dangerous
than a stupid and easily manipulable Man on a Mission.
It'll take me a while to work out the Venn diagram stuff. Also thinking
about the causes of famine in India, etc."
To which Limited Inc replied
Alan
-- Wow, either my Luttwak piece was good, or you are just in a discursive mood this morning. A spontaneous response!
Anyway,. my reading of maximizing one's advantage is that the particular advantage is an x, a variable. It could be money, it could be power, it could be popularity, it could be orgasms. Since rational agents live in a world of mixed value systems, their pursuit of one advantage theoretically entails not pursuing, with the same vigor, others. But I take it that the decision to pursue political power is the framework within which Bushiepoo is defining self interest. In this case, then, he would alter his behavior if he felt like it was negatively impacting his long term ability to retain political power. So, when he campaigned, he moderated everything that he promised in order to alienate as few voters as possible. What he has done since he attained power is use it for other self-interested ends, which are defined in other value frameworks. But just as we wouldn't confuse a man investing money with a man giving to charity simply because both actions entail an immediate outflow of money, so we shouldn't think of Bush as sacrificing his self interest in one framwork for a disinterested ideal in another just because, potentially, he could become unpopular. Luttwak conceivably could make that argument, but as I say, it would contradict the whole brunt of Bushiepoo's life up to now. The man with a mission is in the happy circumstance that his mission makes him popular, so Luttwak's has to present a hypothetical. He fails to even muster the elements for a hypothetical. Perhaps, like Lyndon Johnson, Bushypoo would pursue this mission even if it started to make him highly unpopular. But I think it is as likely that, having received Pavlovian gratification from being a warm monger, he might hedge the inevitable unpopularity that comes from being Santa Claus to the rich in a recession by sustaining his warmongering role, which does make him popular.
LI
There you have it comrades, actually controversy on this usually sleepy site. I'll be jiggered!
Tuesday, February 19, 2002
Remora
When the best aren�t the brightest, and the brightest have to console themselves with Noam Chomsky. Or, put that in a Venn diagram and stuff it in your pipe, sailor.
Bush will go to war even if it puts him out of power is the headline of an article in the Sunday (London) Times by Edward Luttwak. Headlines are written by a specialized set of editorial room ghosts. This fact continually escapes readers. I know. I�ve written articles crowned by headlines that have the same relation to my article as the image of the barroom seen through a beer bottle by a drunk has to the barroom as seen by a sober boyscout. And in these cases, sophisticated readers (like you) often ask me to explain the headline, as though it flowed from my pen.
But in this case the headline sums up this farrago of nonsense quite well. Oh, get used to it. This is the type of drivel we shall all be reading a lot of, pretty soon. Luttwak is jumping ahead of the curve, crafty syncophant that he is. Building up for another 20 article year at TNR. He does indeed make the argument the headline proclaims: that Bush is going to go to war with Iraq even if it means sacrificing his presidency.
�Everyone who comes into personal contact with him reports that George W Bush has become a man of passionate conviction who sees the struggle to prevent another September 11 as his duty and destiny, regardless of the political consequences. He has been told many times that he now risks winning the war and losing the presidency because of a weak economy and now the huge Enron scandal, but he replies that winning the war is quite enough for him even if he loses the White House. �
When one wants to distinguish bad faith from an honest but fallacious argument, a good indicator is whether the expounder of an argument has thought through the question of self-interest. Luttwak, and Georgie Bush, are both very comfortable with free market economics. That economics relies on the theory that self-interest is a key factor in organizing markets. In fact, most neo-classical economists like equilibrium models because the self-interested agent is easily quantifiable. He or she fits pretty well into the various game theories that model the actions of markets.
So when we are faced with an article in which the premise is that a rational actor is willing to sacrifice his self-interest, we want to know a few things. Is this plausible? Are there self-interested explanations for his action? Does he have a self-sacrificing personality? Is there any indication, from his past history, that he has been self-sacrificing?
Let�s look at Luttwak�s article from the standpoint of plausibility. In the first sentence of the above graf, the phrase , �regardless of the political consequences,� implies the risk that G.B. will suffer politically for his convictions. To make this plausible, one searches around for, say, poll data showing that G.B. is suffering a loss of popularity for his tenacious stand on foreign policy. And that such a loss is not effecting him.
Luttwak doesn�t want to make that argument because, of course, it is ludicrous. G.B. is being rewarded with popularity for his current stand on the war. The first thing we should notice about the whole tenor of Luttwak�s article is the implausibility of one of the premises.
But perhaps he is saying that Bush is ignoring that rise in popularity. This is an odd assertion. If Bush were a corporation, would we want to say that it is continuing to sell a profitable item regardless of the fact that it is profitable? That�s the kind of saying that any economist will reject, rightly, out of hand. In fact, the direction of motivation should go the other way. Because G.B. is being rewarded, he wants to continue warmongering. This explanation takes into account self-interest in a traditional way. In fact, I would imagine Luttwak constructing just the opposite story for a politician like Saddam Hussein or Milosovic. There are even parallel reasons. If we are at war, a more plausible, a more conservative argument would go, it is probably to counter-balance things like a bad economy. A bad economy wiped out Bushie one.
Now, perhaps Luttwak thinks GBII�s �passion� is making him self-sacrificing. Are there evidences of this in his past? The short answer, and the long answer, are both no. Ever since joining the National Guard, GBII has been an exemplary rational agent, maximizing his gain at every opportunity. There is no evidence that he has ever sacrificed his own interests for something higher than himself. Closest, I suppose, would be his acceptance of our Lord Jesus Christ into his capacious heart, but that acceptance, on his own account, hinged on a quite utilitarian matter. He needed to stop drinking. Drunk driving tickets, as he knew, were a real career-killer. Hence, it was Jesus or pay some counselor that you'd have to hide, twenty years down the road, when you ran for political office in Texas. Jesus was the lower cost.
So, our question should be not, is Luttwak right here. It should be, what does Luttwak gain by this article? With an assessment of Iraq (�As for the American decision to finish with Saddam one way or another, its reasons are exactly as stated in the Bush speech before Congress: Saddam�s regime still wants to reoccupy Kuwait and dominate Arabia; it already has some weapons of mass destruction and is smuggling in technology for more. That combination is an unacceptable danger, which must be ended�) that is not only ridiculous, but contains no casus belli � as Luttwak, who is not an idiot, knows, and with the tactful dropping of the reference to Iran, we can see Luttwak positioning himself. He is, above all, serious. Because his article�s premises are ludicrous, and his defense of the American regime is less analysis than a wet tongued osculation of the good old White House derriere, Luttwak has to maintain that implacable, that politburo seriousness. Laugh, and the whole web of deceit falls away.
Laugh, reader. Cast a cold eye upon Luttwak (and his tribe � the commentariat that ranges from the Weekly Standard to the TNR � all right turns, as J. Edgar used to tell his chauffeur), and laugh. Laugh your melancholy butt off.
When the best aren�t the brightest, and the brightest have to console themselves with Noam Chomsky. Or, put that in a Venn diagram and stuff it in your pipe, sailor.
Bush will go to war even if it puts him out of power is the headline of an article in the Sunday (London) Times by Edward Luttwak. Headlines are written by a specialized set of editorial room ghosts. This fact continually escapes readers. I know. I�ve written articles crowned by headlines that have the same relation to my article as the image of the barroom seen through a beer bottle by a drunk has to the barroom as seen by a sober boyscout. And in these cases, sophisticated readers (like you) often ask me to explain the headline, as though it flowed from my pen.
But in this case the headline sums up this farrago of nonsense quite well. Oh, get used to it. This is the type of drivel we shall all be reading a lot of, pretty soon. Luttwak is jumping ahead of the curve, crafty syncophant that he is. Building up for another 20 article year at TNR. He does indeed make the argument the headline proclaims: that Bush is going to go to war with Iraq even if it means sacrificing his presidency.
�Everyone who comes into personal contact with him reports that George W Bush has become a man of passionate conviction who sees the struggle to prevent another September 11 as his duty and destiny, regardless of the political consequences. He has been told many times that he now risks winning the war and losing the presidency because of a weak economy and now the huge Enron scandal, but he replies that winning the war is quite enough for him even if he loses the White House. �
When one wants to distinguish bad faith from an honest but fallacious argument, a good indicator is whether the expounder of an argument has thought through the question of self-interest. Luttwak, and Georgie Bush, are both very comfortable with free market economics. That economics relies on the theory that self-interest is a key factor in organizing markets. In fact, most neo-classical economists like equilibrium models because the self-interested agent is easily quantifiable. He or she fits pretty well into the various game theories that model the actions of markets.
So when we are faced with an article in which the premise is that a rational actor is willing to sacrifice his self-interest, we want to know a few things. Is this plausible? Are there self-interested explanations for his action? Does he have a self-sacrificing personality? Is there any indication, from his past history, that he has been self-sacrificing?
Let�s look at Luttwak�s article from the standpoint of plausibility. In the first sentence of the above graf, the phrase , �regardless of the political consequences,� implies the risk that G.B. will suffer politically for his convictions. To make this plausible, one searches around for, say, poll data showing that G.B. is suffering a loss of popularity for his tenacious stand on foreign policy. And that such a loss is not effecting him.
Luttwak doesn�t want to make that argument because, of course, it is ludicrous. G.B. is being rewarded with popularity for his current stand on the war. The first thing we should notice about the whole tenor of Luttwak�s article is the implausibility of one of the premises.
But perhaps he is saying that Bush is ignoring that rise in popularity. This is an odd assertion. If Bush were a corporation, would we want to say that it is continuing to sell a profitable item regardless of the fact that it is profitable? That�s the kind of saying that any economist will reject, rightly, out of hand. In fact, the direction of motivation should go the other way. Because G.B. is being rewarded, he wants to continue warmongering. This explanation takes into account self-interest in a traditional way. In fact, I would imagine Luttwak constructing just the opposite story for a politician like Saddam Hussein or Milosovic. There are even parallel reasons. If we are at war, a more plausible, a more conservative argument would go, it is probably to counter-balance things like a bad economy. A bad economy wiped out Bushie one.
Now, perhaps Luttwak thinks GBII�s �passion� is making him self-sacrificing. Are there evidences of this in his past? The short answer, and the long answer, are both no. Ever since joining the National Guard, GBII has been an exemplary rational agent, maximizing his gain at every opportunity. There is no evidence that he has ever sacrificed his own interests for something higher than himself. Closest, I suppose, would be his acceptance of our Lord Jesus Christ into his capacious heart, but that acceptance, on his own account, hinged on a quite utilitarian matter. He needed to stop drinking. Drunk driving tickets, as he knew, were a real career-killer. Hence, it was Jesus or pay some counselor that you'd have to hide, twenty years down the road, when you ran for political office in Texas. Jesus was the lower cost.
So, our question should be not, is Luttwak right here. It should be, what does Luttwak gain by this article? With an assessment of Iraq (�As for the American decision to finish with Saddam one way or another, its reasons are exactly as stated in the Bush speech before Congress: Saddam�s regime still wants to reoccupy Kuwait and dominate Arabia; it already has some weapons of mass destruction and is smuggling in technology for more. That combination is an unacceptable danger, which must be ended�) that is not only ridiculous, but contains no casus belli � as Luttwak, who is not an idiot, knows, and with the tactful dropping of the reference to Iran, we can see Luttwak positioning himself. He is, above all, serious. Because his article�s premises are ludicrous, and his defense of the American regime is less analysis than a wet tongued osculation of the good old White House derriere, Luttwak has to maintain that implacable, that politburo seriousness. Laugh, and the whole web of deceit falls away.
Laugh, reader. Cast a cold eye upon Luttwak (and his tribe � the commentariat that ranges from the Weekly Standard to the TNR � all right turns, as J. Edgar used to tell his chauffeur), and laugh. Laugh your melancholy butt off.
Sunday, February 17, 2002
Remora
How about them corpses? Surely the movie is coming. Surely some b movie producer, some Hollywood scientologist, is on this like white on rice. Psycho is one thing, but Georgia rednecks are a whole other level of grotesque. They were good enough for Flannery O'Connor, so they should be good enough for you. The NYT story about the corpses of Walker County is another sad reminder that these are times that try the non-tv watcher's soul. I mean, camera man's delight. The woods. The voiceover. The faux conversation (Tammy, what is the sherriff saying about the body up in the crook of the pine tree there?). Essential tv. And here's the essential graf:
"After a dog walker stumbled over a skull on Friday, law enforcement officers discovered at least 120 rotting corpses in sheds and on the ground near the crematory, and state officials said that that figure could double by the time the area is fully examined. Some of the bodies had been there for years and were nearly skeletal, while others, fresh from the funeral home, still bore toe tags.Human bones, weathered white, were scattered through the woods like leaves, skulls mixed with leg bones in a ghoulish jumble that one state trooper compared to a scene from a Stephen King novel.
An infant's body was found in a box in the back of a rusting hearse.Some bodies had become mummified and may have been at the site more than 20 years, said Dr. Kris Sperry, Georgia's chief medical examiner. Nearly two dozen coffins that had once been buried were also found on the ground, Dr. Sperry said, and in some cases their embalmed contents had been dragged out and left exposed to the elements for years"
And here is the perfect tabloid ending. I mean, can a news story have a better sign off line?
"His wife and son just didn't want to spend the money to fix it up," said Mrs. Horton, who grew up in Noble and now lives in Atlanta. "Lord Jesus, I don't know how they could go to bed at night with all that outside their window."
All that outside their window. An image that reminds us of some impossible rencontre between Walter Benjamin and the National Enquirer at a funeral director's convention in Sarasota Springs.
How about them corpses? Surely the movie is coming. Surely some b movie producer, some Hollywood scientologist, is on this like white on rice. Psycho is one thing, but Georgia rednecks are a whole other level of grotesque. They were good enough for Flannery O'Connor, so they should be good enough for you. The NYT story about the corpses of Walker County is another sad reminder that these are times that try the non-tv watcher's soul. I mean, camera man's delight. The woods. The voiceover. The faux conversation (Tammy, what is the sherriff saying about the body up in the crook of the pine tree there?). Essential tv. And here's the essential graf:
"After a dog walker stumbled over a skull on Friday, law enforcement officers discovered at least 120 rotting corpses in sheds and on the ground near the crematory, and state officials said that that figure could double by the time the area is fully examined. Some of the bodies had been there for years and were nearly skeletal, while others, fresh from the funeral home, still bore toe tags.Human bones, weathered white, were scattered through the woods like leaves, skulls mixed with leg bones in a ghoulish jumble that one state trooper compared to a scene from a Stephen King novel.
An infant's body was found in a box in the back of a rusting hearse.Some bodies had become mummified and may have been at the site more than 20 years, said Dr. Kris Sperry, Georgia's chief medical examiner. Nearly two dozen coffins that had once been buried were also found on the ground, Dr. Sperry said, and in some cases their embalmed contents had been dragged out and left exposed to the elements for years"
And here is the perfect tabloid ending. I mean, can a news story have a better sign off line?
"His wife and son just didn't want to spend the money to fix it up," said Mrs. Horton, who grew up in Noble and now lives in Atlanta. "Lord Jesus, I don't know how they could go to bed at night with all that outside their window."
All that outside their window. An image that reminds us of some impossible rencontre between Walter Benjamin and the National Enquirer at a funeral director's convention in Sarasota Springs.
Remora
Limited Inc is back, and campers, campers, settle down. I know, the overwhelming cards and letters sequence. The concern. The offers of sexual healing, food, socks. But who else out there is gonna give you such quality bitching? Such reports from the stark underground that your ancestors, your great grandfather, maybe, thought he'd left behind in the Old World? Our, our.... ressentiment, to use Max Scheler's term for the terminal condition, the termite ridden condition, of our seedy thoughts, such as they are..
Limited Inc, back in the dreamtime of the race, used to be enamored of Marx. Marxists have a way of knocking that out of you. We still like Mike Davis, the author of Ecology of Fear, and a recent book on the "Late Victorian Holocaust." Davis has focused on the combination of incipient free trade capitalism and bad, bad weather at the end of the 19th century. The death toll from these converging forces, from India to Egypt to Brazil, is pretty startling. Here's the first graf of a Guardian review of that scarifying, and mostly, of course, overlooked book:
"Recording the past can be a tricky business for historians. Prophesying the future is even more hazardous. In 1901, shortly before the death of Queen Victoria, the radical writer William Digby looked back to the 1876 Madras famine and confidently asserted: "When the part played by the British Empire in the 19th century is regarded by the historian 50 years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument." Who now remembers the Madrasis?"
Hey, but, do we really care? Indeed, the only famines that register in the Western consciousness are those associated with the failure of Communism. Although Robert Conquest's book on Stalin's de-kulakization has become the standard condemnatory text, where's the companion text, the one about Churchill's engineering of the Bengal famine of 1943? We know that the very fact that one remembers such things is a mark of extremism -- the reasonable man has long ago absorbed the reasons of state that led the heroic Brits to fertilize the Bengal plains with the bones of starving Indians:
"One of the most extraordinary examples of such whitewashing of history is the sustained, continuing deletion of two centuries of massive, recurrent, man-made famine in British India from British and world history, and hence from general public perception. This massive, sustained lying by omission by two centuries of British academic historians occurred in a society having Parliamentary democracy, the means to readily disseminate information and a steadily expanding literate population. Furthermore, this process of lying by omission continues to this day in Britain and its English-speaking offshoots, such as Australia, countries having free speech, high literacy, democracy, prosperity and extensive media of all kinds.
To dramatise this perversion, imagine that the Jewish Holocaust was almost completely deleted from our history books and from general public perception, that there was virtually a total absence of any mention at all of this cataclysm in our newspapers and electronic media or in our schools and universities. Truth, reason, ethics and humanity aside, objective analysis suggests that such a situation would greatly increase the probability of recurrence of racial mass murder. Fortunately, in reality, virtually everyone is aware of this event and indeed in Germany today it is a criminal offence to deny the actuality of the Jewish Holocaust.
In contrast, during the Second World War, a man-made catastrophe occurred within the British Empire that killed almost as many people as died in the Jewish Holocaust, but which has been effectively deleted from history, it is a 'forgotten holocaust'. The man-made famine in British-ruled Bengal in 1943-1944 ultimately took the lives of about 4-million people, about 90% of the total British Empire casualties of that conflict, and was accompanied by a multitude of horrors, not the least being massive civilian and military sexual abuse of starving women and young girls that compares unfavourable with the comfort women abuses of the Japanese Army."
Marxism has now become a mode of memory for those who walked out of the dreamtime. We're a shaken, unreliable crew. Davis is an exemplary Marxman, an unearther of those family secrets bid good riddance by the End of History, which has found its axis of evil in the destruction of the World Trade Centrer, and recognizes no precedent, nor mitigating circumstance, nor any limit to the justice it can extract from the rest of the world. In an article on 9/11 in the New Left Review, Davis starts out with an amazingly prescient throwaway by H.G. Wells, written in his heyday before WW1:
"For many generations New York had taken no heed of war, save as a thing that happened far away, that affected prices and supplied the newspapers with exciting headlines and pictures. The New Yorkers felt that war in their own land was an impossible thing . . . They saw war as they saw history, through an iridescent mist, deodorized, scented indeed, with all its essential cruelties tactfully hidden away. They cheered the flag by habit and tradition, they despised other nations, and whenever there was an international difficulty they were intensely patriotic, that is to say, they were ardently against any native politician who did not say, threaten, and do harsh and uncompromising things to the antagonist people. [2]
When a foreign policy dominated by the Trusts and Monopolies entangles America in a general War of the Powers, New Yorkers, still oblivious to any real danger, rally to flags, confetti and an imperial Presidency.
And then suddenly, into a world peacefully busied for the most part upon armaments and the perfection of explosives, war came . . . The immediate effect on New York . . . was merely to intensify her normal vehemence. Great crowds assembled . . . to listen to and cheer patriotic speeches, and there was a veritable epidemic of little flags and buttons . . . strong men wept at the sight of the national banner . . . the trade in small arms was enormously stimulated . . . and it was dangerous not to wear a war button . . . One of the most striking facts historically about this war, and one that makes complete the separation between the methods of warfare and democracy, was the effectual secrecy of Washington . . . They did not bother to confide a single fact of their preparations to the public. They did not even condescend to talk to Congress. They burked and suppressed every inquiry. The war was fought by the President and the Secretary of State in an entirely autocratic manner."
Davis takes a tour of the images of the "black utopia" -- the utopia of a capitalism armed and triumphant. It is a phrase he steals from Ernst Bloch. As always, Davis is a coiner of phrases. I can't resist another long quote -- notice how this paragraph patiently rolls towards its reversal in the first sentence of the next paragraph. Davis is discussing "fear studies," which he, of all people, should know about. Watch how he manipulates one reversal with another. Like a man trying to piece together an approximate image of his face in a funhouse mirror, Davis works by patiently angling one half truth with another. At some indeterminate point, one hopes that the image of the real jumps out at one. If you are good, very good, this happens. It happens like this:
...Barry Glassner systematically debunked some of the more common goblins�young Black men, street drugs, terroristic political correctness, and so on�that deliberately spook the path toward public understanding of such social problems as unemployment, bad schools, racism and world hunger. He carefully showed how media-conjured scares were guilty �oblique expressions� of the post-liberal refusal to reform real conditions of inequality. Fear had become the chief ballast of the rightward shift since 1980. Americans, in his view, �were afraid of the wrong things�, and were being hoaxed by the latter-day equivalents of Orson Welles�s notorious �War of the Worlds� broadcast. �The Martians,� he underscored, � aren�t coming.� [8]
But, alas, they have come, brandishing box-cutters."
Limited Inc is back, and campers, campers, settle down. I know, the overwhelming cards and letters sequence. The concern. The offers of sexual healing, food, socks. But who else out there is gonna give you such quality bitching? Such reports from the stark underground that your ancestors, your great grandfather, maybe, thought he'd left behind in the Old World? Our, our.... ressentiment, to use Max Scheler's term for the terminal condition, the termite ridden condition, of our seedy thoughts, such as they are..
Limited Inc, back in the dreamtime of the race, used to be enamored of Marx. Marxists have a way of knocking that out of you. We still like Mike Davis, the author of Ecology of Fear, and a recent book on the "Late Victorian Holocaust." Davis has focused on the combination of incipient free trade capitalism and bad, bad weather at the end of the 19th century. The death toll from these converging forces, from India to Egypt to Brazil, is pretty startling. Here's the first graf of a Guardian review of that scarifying, and mostly, of course, overlooked book:
"Recording the past can be a tricky business for historians. Prophesying the future is even more hazardous. In 1901, shortly before the death of Queen Victoria, the radical writer William Digby looked back to the 1876 Madras famine and confidently asserted: "When the part played by the British Empire in the 19th century is regarded by the historian 50 years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument." Who now remembers the Madrasis?"
Hey, but, do we really care? Indeed, the only famines that register in the Western consciousness are those associated with the failure of Communism. Although Robert Conquest's book on Stalin's de-kulakization has become the standard condemnatory text, where's the companion text, the one about Churchill's engineering of the Bengal famine of 1943? We know that the very fact that one remembers such things is a mark of extremism -- the reasonable man has long ago absorbed the reasons of state that led the heroic Brits to fertilize the Bengal plains with the bones of starving Indians:
"One of the most extraordinary examples of such whitewashing of history is the sustained, continuing deletion of two centuries of massive, recurrent, man-made famine in British India from British and world history, and hence from general public perception. This massive, sustained lying by omission by two centuries of British academic historians occurred in a society having Parliamentary democracy, the means to readily disseminate information and a steadily expanding literate population. Furthermore, this process of lying by omission continues to this day in Britain and its English-speaking offshoots, such as Australia, countries having free speech, high literacy, democracy, prosperity and extensive media of all kinds.
To dramatise this perversion, imagine that the Jewish Holocaust was almost completely deleted from our history books and from general public perception, that there was virtually a total absence of any mention at all of this cataclysm in our newspapers and electronic media or in our schools and universities. Truth, reason, ethics and humanity aside, objective analysis suggests that such a situation would greatly increase the probability of recurrence of racial mass murder. Fortunately, in reality, virtually everyone is aware of this event and indeed in Germany today it is a criminal offence to deny the actuality of the Jewish Holocaust.
In contrast, during the Second World War, a man-made catastrophe occurred within the British Empire that killed almost as many people as died in the Jewish Holocaust, but which has been effectively deleted from history, it is a 'forgotten holocaust'. The man-made famine in British-ruled Bengal in 1943-1944 ultimately took the lives of about 4-million people, about 90% of the total British Empire casualties of that conflict, and was accompanied by a multitude of horrors, not the least being massive civilian and military sexual abuse of starving women and young girls that compares unfavourable with the comfort women abuses of the Japanese Army."
Marxism has now become a mode of memory for those who walked out of the dreamtime. We're a shaken, unreliable crew. Davis is an exemplary Marxman, an unearther of those family secrets bid good riddance by the End of History, which has found its axis of evil in the destruction of the World Trade Centrer, and recognizes no precedent, nor mitigating circumstance, nor any limit to the justice it can extract from the rest of the world. In an article on 9/11 in the New Left Review, Davis starts out with an amazingly prescient throwaway by H.G. Wells, written in his heyday before WW1:
"For many generations New York had taken no heed of war, save as a thing that happened far away, that affected prices and supplied the newspapers with exciting headlines and pictures. The New Yorkers felt that war in their own land was an impossible thing . . . They saw war as they saw history, through an iridescent mist, deodorized, scented indeed, with all its essential cruelties tactfully hidden away. They cheered the flag by habit and tradition, they despised other nations, and whenever there was an international difficulty they were intensely patriotic, that is to say, they were ardently against any native politician who did not say, threaten, and do harsh and uncompromising things to the antagonist people. [2]
When a foreign policy dominated by the Trusts and Monopolies entangles America in a general War of the Powers, New Yorkers, still oblivious to any real danger, rally to flags, confetti and an imperial Presidency.
And then suddenly, into a world peacefully busied for the most part upon armaments and the perfection of explosives, war came . . . The immediate effect on New York . . . was merely to intensify her normal vehemence. Great crowds assembled . . . to listen to and cheer patriotic speeches, and there was a veritable epidemic of little flags and buttons . . . strong men wept at the sight of the national banner . . . the trade in small arms was enormously stimulated . . . and it was dangerous not to wear a war button . . . One of the most striking facts historically about this war, and one that makes complete the separation between the methods of warfare and democracy, was the effectual secrecy of Washington . . . They did not bother to confide a single fact of their preparations to the public. They did not even condescend to talk to Congress. They burked and suppressed every inquiry. The war was fought by the President and the Secretary of State in an entirely autocratic manner."
Davis takes a tour of the images of the "black utopia" -- the utopia of a capitalism armed and triumphant. It is a phrase he steals from Ernst Bloch. As always, Davis is a coiner of phrases. I can't resist another long quote -- notice how this paragraph patiently rolls towards its reversal in the first sentence of the next paragraph. Davis is discussing "fear studies," which he, of all people, should know about. Watch how he manipulates one reversal with another. Like a man trying to piece together an approximate image of his face in a funhouse mirror, Davis works by patiently angling one half truth with another. At some indeterminate point, one hopes that the image of the real jumps out at one. If you are good, very good, this happens. It happens like this:
...Barry Glassner systematically debunked some of the more common goblins�young Black men, street drugs, terroristic political correctness, and so on�that deliberately spook the path toward public understanding of such social problems as unemployment, bad schools, racism and world hunger. He carefully showed how media-conjured scares were guilty �oblique expressions� of the post-liberal refusal to reform real conditions of inequality. Fear had become the chief ballast of the rightward shift since 1980. Americans, in his view, �were afraid of the wrong things�, and were being hoaxed by the latter-day equivalents of Orson Welles�s notorious �War of the Worlds� broadcast. �The Martians,� he underscored, � aren�t coming.� [8]
But, alas, they have come, brandishing box-cutters."
Sunday, February 10, 2002
Friday, February 08, 2002
Remora
CEO Time
The adulation of the CEO, one of the more puzzling cultural features of the nineties, is turning, predictably, into revulsion. Since Limited Inc has always maintained that most CEOs could easily be replaced by much cheaper computer programs (with the multiple advantages accruing from having a thing at the top that won't borrow money, buy glitzy spreads, aquire trophy girlfriends or wives, or give bogus leadership tips to the young exec crowd), revulsion has always seemed about the right emotional stance to take towards this set. Forbes now has a nice section, CEO Strikeout, targetting these formerly flattered non-entities (although Limited Inc must say that the Strikeout mcguffin, which requires telling the story of a rise and fall by way of balls, strikes, fouls, and, presumably, hits, is a funny idea that should be used once, and then trashed). Today's Bad boy is the CEO of World Comm, Bernard Ebbers. World Comm has been dodging rumors that its accounting structure is creative. Ah, creative, the magic word. Here's the last graf:
"The Next Pitch: WorldCom reports its fourth-quarter earnings tomorrow. If they are reassuring, this stock will be due for a snapback--especially if the report helps Ebbers put to rest some of the rumors dogging his firm. But that snapback, if it comes, may do little more than boost WorldCom back up over the $10 level. And the stock's main appeal--as an acquisition play--could be fading. Today The New York Times reported that the most likely acquirers, SBC Communications and Verizon Communications, have lost interest, due to concerns about the challenges facing the long-distance businesses. The Bells also were said to be nervous about WorldCom's possibly aggressive accounting practices. WorldCom stoutly denies that it has any accounting "issues." But if tomorrow's earnings report fails to clear the air and provide the hoped-for bounce, Ebbers will find himself under increasing pressure to use his deal-making skills to arrange one last merger--one that inevitably would leave WorldCom in the hands of some other CEO."
The Net Economy has a more up close and personal view of Ebbers. They get in his sock drawer, rummage through his underwear, check out his check book, and guess what? It is one of those check books with a calendar, and today Ebbers has written down, guess I'll have to find that $150 million to pay off my loan. Well, since Ebbers is such a neat guy, his company will probably pitch in, like they've done before. Here's the first two grafs:
"It must be nice to be able to look at $180 million as if it's a dirty penny on the street, hardly worth bending over to pick up. That's how some analysts seem to view WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers' $183-million loan that came due this week.
Ebbers had until the end of the day Thursday to pay back the loan from Bank of America, which he secured last year using 11.3 million shares of WorldCom stock. The loan was called because WorldCom's stock price dropped below $10 a share Wednesday. WorldCom is expected to pay off the loan, just as it did in 2000, when it anted up $150 million to cover another of Ebber's debts."
Meritocracy, man. What a wonderful system.
CEO Time
The adulation of the CEO, one of the more puzzling cultural features of the nineties, is turning, predictably, into revulsion. Since Limited Inc has always maintained that most CEOs could easily be replaced by much cheaper computer programs (with the multiple advantages accruing from having a thing at the top that won't borrow money, buy glitzy spreads, aquire trophy girlfriends or wives, or give bogus leadership tips to the young exec crowd), revulsion has always seemed about the right emotional stance to take towards this set. Forbes now has a nice section, CEO Strikeout, targetting these formerly flattered non-entities (although Limited Inc must say that the Strikeout mcguffin, which requires telling the story of a rise and fall by way of balls, strikes, fouls, and, presumably, hits, is a funny idea that should be used once, and then trashed). Today's Bad boy is the CEO of World Comm, Bernard Ebbers. World Comm has been dodging rumors that its accounting structure is creative. Ah, creative, the magic word. Here's the last graf:
"The Next Pitch: WorldCom reports its fourth-quarter earnings tomorrow. If they are reassuring, this stock will be due for a snapback--especially if the report helps Ebbers put to rest some of the rumors dogging his firm. But that snapback, if it comes, may do little more than boost WorldCom back up over the $10 level. And the stock's main appeal--as an acquisition play--could be fading. Today The New York Times reported that the most likely acquirers, SBC Communications and Verizon Communications, have lost interest, due to concerns about the challenges facing the long-distance businesses. The Bells also were said to be nervous about WorldCom's possibly aggressive accounting practices. WorldCom stoutly denies that it has any accounting "issues." But if tomorrow's earnings report fails to clear the air and provide the hoped-for bounce, Ebbers will find himself under increasing pressure to use his deal-making skills to arrange one last merger--one that inevitably would leave WorldCom in the hands of some other CEO."
The Net Economy has a more up close and personal view of Ebbers. They get in his sock drawer, rummage through his underwear, check out his check book, and guess what? It is one of those check books with a calendar, and today Ebbers has written down, guess I'll have to find that $150 million to pay off my loan. Well, since Ebbers is such a neat guy, his company will probably pitch in, like they've done before. Here's the first two grafs:
"It must be nice to be able to look at $180 million as if it's a dirty penny on the street, hardly worth bending over to pick up. That's how some analysts seem to view WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers' $183-million loan that came due this week.
Ebbers had until the end of the day Thursday to pay back the loan from Bank of America, which he secured last year using 11.3 million shares of WorldCom stock. The loan was called because WorldCom's stock price dropped below $10 a share Wednesday. WorldCom is expected to pay off the loan, just as it did in 2000, when it anted up $150 million to cover another of Ebber's debts."
Meritocracy, man. What a wonderful system.
Remora
Brothers and sisters, are you aware of the Swiss site, culture actif? It is a little treasure trove of unexpected essays for the cultural critics among us. Limited Inc urges a visit. They have a five part interview with Jean Starobinski on his latest book, a meditation on the emergence of the term "reaction." Action et R�action: vie et aventures d�un couple. Don't be skeptical -- just as Sherlock Holmes amazed his companion by lighting on the fact of cigar ash or a hissing sound as the main clue to a murder or theft, the good philosophe spots such seemingly peripheral instances of usage in the language and takes them to be curious. It is the ability to see the familiar as something that once wasn't there, that exists now because of some concantenation of acts, which allows the philosopher to justly appeal to language. The modern philosophical act is liberating in so far as it frees us, momentarily, from a false image of necessity - the idea that because our words make sense, now, they have always made sense. That words are place-markers for this eternal sense. The traditional philosophical act, of course, sought just the opposite - sought to prove that the image of necessity we perceive in the language we speak was, in fact, derived from a true image of the world.
The interview -- Limited Inc has only read the first page, it is rich enough for one visit -- takes us up to the moment that Newton introduces the word reaction in his famous third axiom. What went before the coupling of action and reaction was action and passion. Here's what Starobinski has to say about it:
Les anciens opposent antith�tiquement, action et passion ; action et, traduisons " passion " dans un quasi synonyme " souffrance ", " agir et souffrir ". Cette souffrance, dans la pens�e de certains philosophes de l�antiquit� -Aristote, par exemple- elle est partout, et l�action aussi est partout. Quand Aristote r�fl�chit aux divers types de mouvements, il envisage un type de mouvement parmi d�autres qui est le mouvement dans l�espace; le mouvement local, celui que nous constatons quand nous donnons un coup � un corps dur ; dans le choc, le corps nous r�siste ; le doigt appuie sur la pierre et nous avons le sentiment que la pierre appuie sur le doigt. La pierre est d�une certaine fa�on passive quand nous appuyons notre doigt dessus et elle exerce quelque chose comme une action en retour, une r�pulsion : les anciens parlaient de passion. Le mot " r�action ", � travers des d�rivations qui ont pass� par le grec, n�a pas �t� constitu� dans la langue latine ancienne ; il n�existait pas ; oui, la r�pulsion, mais pas la r�action. Comment ce mot s�est-il form� ? Et bien il a fallu, tr�s probablement, qu�� travers des traductions arabes, ou en revenant au texte grec, des savants, th�ologiens, philosophes du Moyen-�ge, comme Albert le Grand, essaient d�adapter certains mots grecs, ou certains mots arabes � la langue latine sp�cialis�e qui �tait la leur. C'est alors qu'on pourra voir le mot " r�action " doubler le mot " passion ". Toute passion est une r�action ; elle est passive. La r�action est con�ue comme quelque chose de passif, mais qui partage quand m�me avec l�action une qualit� dynamique.
"The ancients opposed, authentically, action and passion; action and, translating passion in its quasi synonym, sufferance, to act and to suffer. That sufferance, in the thought of certain ancient philosophers, Aristotle for example, is everywhere, and action is also everywhere. When Aristotle reflects on the diverse types of movement, he envisions a type of movement among others which is movement in space; local movement, that which we observe when we give a blow to a hard body. In the shock, the body resists us. [In the blow] we hold a finger on a stone and we have the sentiment that the stone holds on the finger. The stone is in a certain manner passive when we rest our finger upon it and it exercizes something like an action in return, a repulsion: the ancients spoke of passion. The word, reaction, going through all the derivations that occured in Greek, wasn't constituted in ancient latin. It didn't exist. Yes, repulsion, , but not reaction. How was this word formed. Well, it was necessary, probably, that by way of arabic translation, or in returning to the Greek text, the thinkers, theologians, philosophers of the Middle Ages, like Albert the Great, tried to adapt certain greek words or certain arabic words to the specialized latin peculiar to them. It is thus that one can see the word "reaction" double the word "passion." All passion is a reaction. It is passive. Reaction is conceived as something passive, but which shared, nonetheless, a dynamic quality with action."
Brothers and sisters, are you aware of the Swiss site, culture actif? It is a little treasure trove of unexpected essays for the cultural critics among us. Limited Inc urges a visit. They have a five part interview with Jean Starobinski on his latest book, a meditation on the emergence of the term "reaction." Action et R�action: vie et aventures d�un couple. Don't be skeptical -- just as Sherlock Holmes amazed his companion by lighting on the fact of cigar ash or a hissing sound as the main clue to a murder or theft, the good philosophe spots such seemingly peripheral instances of usage in the language and takes them to be curious. It is the ability to see the familiar as something that once wasn't there, that exists now because of some concantenation of acts, which allows the philosopher to justly appeal to language. The modern philosophical act is liberating in so far as it frees us, momentarily, from a false image of necessity - the idea that because our words make sense, now, they have always made sense. That words are place-markers for this eternal sense. The traditional philosophical act, of course, sought just the opposite - sought to prove that the image of necessity we perceive in the language we speak was, in fact, derived from a true image of the world.
The interview -- Limited Inc has only read the first page, it is rich enough for one visit -- takes us up to the moment that Newton introduces the word reaction in his famous third axiom. What went before the coupling of action and reaction was action and passion. Here's what Starobinski has to say about it:
Les anciens opposent antith�tiquement, action et passion ; action et, traduisons " passion " dans un quasi synonyme " souffrance ", " agir et souffrir ". Cette souffrance, dans la pens�e de certains philosophes de l�antiquit� -Aristote, par exemple- elle est partout, et l�action aussi est partout. Quand Aristote r�fl�chit aux divers types de mouvements, il envisage un type de mouvement parmi d�autres qui est le mouvement dans l�espace; le mouvement local, celui que nous constatons quand nous donnons un coup � un corps dur ; dans le choc, le corps nous r�siste ; le doigt appuie sur la pierre et nous avons le sentiment que la pierre appuie sur le doigt. La pierre est d�une certaine fa�on passive quand nous appuyons notre doigt dessus et elle exerce quelque chose comme une action en retour, une r�pulsion : les anciens parlaient de passion. Le mot " r�action ", � travers des d�rivations qui ont pass� par le grec, n�a pas �t� constitu� dans la langue latine ancienne ; il n�existait pas ; oui, la r�pulsion, mais pas la r�action. Comment ce mot s�est-il form� ? Et bien il a fallu, tr�s probablement, qu�� travers des traductions arabes, ou en revenant au texte grec, des savants, th�ologiens, philosophes du Moyen-�ge, comme Albert le Grand, essaient d�adapter certains mots grecs, ou certains mots arabes � la langue latine sp�cialis�e qui �tait la leur. C'est alors qu'on pourra voir le mot " r�action " doubler le mot " passion ". Toute passion est une r�action ; elle est passive. La r�action est con�ue comme quelque chose de passif, mais qui partage quand m�me avec l�action une qualit� dynamique.
"The ancients opposed, authentically, action and passion; action and, translating passion in its quasi synonym, sufferance, to act and to suffer. That sufferance, in the thought of certain ancient philosophers, Aristotle for example, is everywhere, and action is also everywhere. When Aristotle reflects on the diverse types of movement, he envisions a type of movement among others which is movement in space; local movement, that which we observe when we give a blow to a hard body. In the shock, the body resists us. [In the blow] we hold a finger on a stone and we have the sentiment that the stone holds on the finger. The stone is in a certain manner passive when we rest our finger upon it and it exercizes something like an action in return, a repulsion: the ancients spoke of passion. The word, reaction, going through all the derivations that occured in Greek, wasn't constituted in ancient latin. It didn't exist. Yes, repulsion, , but not reaction. How was this word formed. Well, it was necessary, probably, that by way of arabic translation, or in returning to the Greek text, the thinkers, theologians, philosophers of the Middle Ages, like Albert the Great, tried to adapt certain greek words or certain arabic words to the specialized latin peculiar to them. It is thus that one can see the word "reaction" double the word "passion." All passion is a reaction. It is passive. Reaction is conceived as something passive, but which shared, nonetheless, a dynamic quality with action."
Thursday, February 07, 2002
Remora
Tom Powers made the case, years ago, that Heisenberg intentionally monkey-wrenched the Nazi Atom Bomb program. He could make this case because of the curious fact that the German atom bomb team had the resources to make much more progress towards the development of the bomb than they actually did. Richard Rhodes book on the hydrogen bomb, Dark Sun, shows that even the Soviet team was closing in on the bomb in the last years of the war. The Soviets, of course, had the advantages accrued from an espionage system that was delivering primo content about the Americans, yet the Soviet physicists got pretty far along on their own, too.
When Powers' book, Heisenberg's War, was published, it re-opened a debate about Heisenberg's role in the war. Powers thesis has been disputed for a while due to the release of transcripts showing what German physicists, interned in Farm Hall in England, said to each other when they heard the news about Hiroshima. Heisenberg said, "One can say that the first time large funds were made available in Germany was in the spring of 1942, after our meeting with Rust [the education minister] when we convinced him that we had absolutely definite proof that it could be done." There is also this interesting conversation between Heisenberg and Weisaecker:
"HEISENBERG: The point is that the whole structure of the relationship between the scientist and the state in Germany was such that although we were not 100% anxious to do it, on the other hand we were so little trusted by the state that even if we had wanted to do it, it would not have been easy to get it through.
DIEBNER: Because the officials were only interested in immediate results. They didn't want to work on a long-term policy as America did.
WEIZSAECKER: Even if we had gotten everything that we wanted, it is by no means certain whether we would have gotten as far as the Americans and English have now. There is no question that we were very nearly as far as they were, but it is a fact that we were all convinced that the thing could not have been completed during the war.
HEISENBERG: Well, that's not quite right. I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium engine, but I never thought we would make a bomb, and at the bottom of my heart I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a bomb. I must admit that.
What is at the bottom of a man's heart is seen by the Lord alone, as we know here at Limited Inc. And we also know there is no Lord, so it is seen by no-one -- an eminently Heisenbergian problem.
In any case, Heisenberg's enthusiasm has now been decisively clarified with the publication of a letter (subject to this report in the NYT) that Neils Bohr drafted (but never sent) to Heisenberg about a 1942 meeting between the two of them.
"Bohr, who died 40 years ago, said that under his beloved prot�g�, "everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons."
In particular, the documents describe a meeting that Heisenberg initiated between the two men in occupied Denmark in September 1941.
After the war, Heisenberg said he traveled to Copenhagen to share his qualms about nuclear weapons. But the papers, released by the Bohr family and posted on the Niels Bohr Web site, www.nba.nbi.dk, which is maintained by the Niels Bohr Archive, tell a different story."
Powers still claims that Bohr and Heisenberg were talking past each other. But the Farm Hall recording (made without the physicists being aware of it) seems to accord pretty well with Bohr's memory. Of course, Heisenberg wasn't a Nazi. He knew that the Nazi attack on "Jewish science" was utter nonsense. But he was a patriotic German. His stance was shared by much of the German high command, external and damning obedience while sustaining, in the inner exile at the bottom of the heart, his dissent.
Sounds like the way Limited Inc is living through the Bush era.
Tom Powers made the case, years ago, that Heisenberg intentionally monkey-wrenched the Nazi Atom Bomb program. He could make this case because of the curious fact that the German atom bomb team had the resources to make much more progress towards the development of the bomb than they actually did. Richard Rhodes book on the hydrogen bomb, Dark Sun, shows that even the Soviet team was closing in on the bomb in the last years of the war. The Soviets, of course, had the advantages accrued from an espionage system that was delivering primo content about the Americans, yet the Soviet physicists got pretty far along on their own, too.
When Powers' book, Heisenberg's War, was published, it re-opened a debate about Heisenberg's role in the war. Powers thesis has been disputed for a while due to the release of transcripts showing what German physicists, interned in Farm Hall in England, said to each other when they heard the news about Hiroshima. Heisenberg said, "One can say that the first time large funds were made available in Germany was in the spring of 1942, after our meeting with Rust [the education minister] when we convinced him that we had absolutely definite proof that it could be done." There is also this interesting conversation between Heisenberg and Weisaecker:
"HEISENBERG: The point is that the whole structure of the relationship between the scientist and the state in Germany was such that although we were not 100% anxious to do it, on the other hand we were so little trusted by the state that even if we had wanted to do it, it would not have been easy to get it through.
DIEBNER: Because the officials were only interested in immediate results. They didn't want to work on a long-term policy as America did.
WEIZSAECKER: Even if we had gotten everything that we wanted, it is by no means certain whether we would have gotten as far as the Americans and English have now. There is no question that we were very nearly as far as they were, but it is a fact that we were all convinced that the thing could not have been completed during the war.
HEISENBERG: Well, that's not quite right. I would say that I was absolutely convinced of the possibility of our making a uranium engine, but I never thought we would make a bomb, and at the bottom of my heart I was really glad that it was to be an engine and not a bomb. I must admit that.
What is at the bottom of a man's heart is seen by the Lord alone, as we know here at Limited Inc. And we also know there is no Lord, so it is seen by no-one -- an eminently Heisenbergian problem.
In any case, Heisenberg's enthusiasm has now been decisively clarified with the publication of a letter (subject to this report in the NYT) that Neils Bohr drafted (but never sent) to Heisenberg about a 1942 meeting between the two of them.
"Bohr, who died 40 years ago, said that under his beloved prot�g�, "everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons."
In particular, the documents describe a meeting that Heisenberg initiated between the two men in occupied Denmark in September 1941.
After the war, Heisenberg said he traveled to Copenhagen to share his qualms about nuclear weapons. But the papers, released by the Bohr family and posted on the Niels Bohr Web site, www.nba.nbi.dk, which is maintained by the Niels Bohr Archive, tell a different story."
Powers still claims that Bohr and Heisenberg were talking past each other. But the Farm Hall recording (made without the physicists being aware of it) seems to accord pretty well with Bohr's memory. Of course, Heisenberg wasn't a Nazi. He knew that the Nazi attack on "Jewish science" was utter nonsense. But he was a patriotic German. His stance was shared by much of the German high command, external and damning obedience while sustaining, in the inner exile at the bottom of the heart, his dissent.
Sounds like the way Limited Inc is living through the Bush era.
Wednesday, February 06, 2002
Remora
Limited Inc wants to point you, this morning, to this article by Ken Silverstein in the American Prospect.The article is a variation on shooting ducks in a barrel -- Silverstein trolls the American press for its past coverage of various Latin American free marketeers, who have recently been coming to bad ends, along with their countries. The coverage, it turns out (to no one's surprise) was more starry eyed than accurate, reflecting the usual fantasies of the exploiter class. Oh, drat, there's that Marxist vocabulary again! What we meant to say is that it reflected the innovative but sometimes not quite realistic thinking of the entrepeneurial class. Is that better?
Here's a pin-em-to-the-wall graf:
"Among Latin America's "reform-minded leaders," according to a laudatory 1991 article in the Post, were Menem, Carlos Andres Perez in Venezuela, Carlos Salinas in Mexico, Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil, and Alberto Fujimori in Peru. A decade later, one of these five crusading reformers has been impeached, three live abroad in disgrace, and the other, Menem, is widely reviled and suspected of plundering Argentina's state treasury. Had the U.S. press not cavalierly dismissed the "short-term pain of millions," [a phrase used in another Post article] maybe none of this would have come as such a big surprise."
Silverstein flips through the careers of the big five highlighted by the Post. What do we find in the eight years since Latin America discovered the magic of the marketplace? Thuggery, bribetaking, bubble markets, devaluations, suitcase toting exile, police repression, and ineffectual bail-outs. Sound familiar? Sound like the seventies? Sound like the eighties? It should. The same situations get repeated over and over because there is no cool vision about just whose interest is being served in the formation of economic policy. Why, after all, should the US be considered a neutral party when it operates, and has always operated, in its self interest? I've just finished an interesting book about just this subject: Uncommon Grounds, the history of coffee and how it transformed our world, by Mark Pendergrast. Coffee once accounted for up to 40% of Brazil's GDP. It is still a major export. The US is the major consumer of the drink. And the history of the trade between the US and all the coffee producing countries of Central and South America is poisonous, a matter of stolen Indian land, oversupply, and continual pressure by the US to keep coffee prices as low as possible. I think we will have more to say about this book in a later post.
Here's another Silverstein graf. Venezuala is in the news today -- its current honcho, Chavez, apparently thinks Castro's polity is some kind of model to mimic. A back to the future kind of thing. A let's get retro kind of thing. Here's the background.
"Consider Venezuela. After Perez was elected in 1989, its economy was the first in Latin America to be deemed a miracle. The country's gross national product climbed sharply at the start of Perez's tenure, but simultaneous austerity policies caused the real value of salaries to fall by almost half. In 1989 the government decided to triple bus fares. Riots broke out, and the security forces summoned to quell them killed somewhere between 400 and several thousand people, mostly in the poor barrios. Perez's popularity plummeted. For some reason, this baffled The Miami Herald, which reported in 1992 that international economists were "puzzled by Venezuela's generalized malaise because this oil-rich country is the economic star of the Americas."
Implicated in a series of corruption scandals, Perez was forced to resign in 1993. He now resides in the Dominican Republic. Last December a Venezuelan judge announced that his court was considering bringing charges against the former president and that Perez would be placed under house arrest if he returns home."
Limited Inc wants to point you, this morning, to this article by Ken Silverstein in the American Prospect.The article is a variation on shooting ducks in a barrel -- Silverstein trolls the American press for its past coverage of various Latin American free marketeers, who have recently been coming to bad ends, along with their countries. The coverage, it turns out (to no one's surprise) was more starry eyed than accurate, reflecting the usual fantasies of the exploiter class. Oh, drat, there's that Marxist vocabulary again! What we meant to say is that it reflected the innovative but sometimes not quite realistic thinking of the entrepeneurial class. Is that better?
Here's a pin-em-to-the-wall graf:
"Among Latin America's "reform-minded leaders," according to a laudatory 1991 article in the Post, were Menem, Carlos Andres Perez in Venezuela, Carlos Salinas in Mexico, Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil, and Alberto Fujimori in Peru. A decade later, one of these five crusading reformers has been impeached, three live abroad in disgrace, and the other, Menem, is widely reviled and suspected of plundering Argentina's state treasury. Had the U.S. press not cavalierly dismissed the "short-term pain of millions," [a phrase used in another Post article] maybe none of this would have come as such a big surprise."
Silverstein flips through the careers of the big five highlighted by the Post. What do we find in the eight years since Latin America discovered the magic of the marketplace? Thuggery, bribetaking, bubble markets, devaluations, suitcase toting exile, police repression, and ineffectual bail-outs. Sound familiar? Sound like the seventies? Sound like the eighties? It should. The same situations get repeated over and over because there is no cool vision about just whose interest is being served in the formation of economic policy. Why, after all, should the US be considered a neutral party when it operates, and has always operated, in its self interest? I've just finished an interesting book about just this subject: Uncommon Grounds, the history of coffee and how it transformed our world, by Mark Pendergrast. Coffee once accounted for up to 40% of Brazil's GDP. It is still a major export. The US is the major consumer of the drink. And the history of the trade between the US and all the coffee producing countries of Central and South America is poisonous, a matter of stolen Indian land, oversupply, and continual pressure by the US to keep coffee prices as low as possible. I think we will have more to say about this book in a later post.
Here's another Silverstein graf. Venezuala is in the news today -- its current honcho, Chavez, apparently thinks Castro's polity is some kind of model to mimic. A back to the future kind of thing. A let's get retro kind of thing. Here's the background.
"Consider Venezuela. After Perez was elected in 1989, its economy was the first in Latin America to be deemed a miracle. The country's gross national product climbed sharply at the start of Perez's tenure, but simultaneous austerity policies caused the real value of salaries to fall by almost half. In 1989 the government decided to triple bus fares. Riots broke out, and the security forces summoned to quell them killed somewhere between 400 and several thousand people, mostly in the poor barrios. Perez's popularity plummeted. For some reason, this baffled The Miami Herald, which reported in 1992 that international economists were "puzzled by Venezuela's generalized malaise because this oil-rich country is the economic star of the Americas."
Implicated in a series of corruption scandals, Perez was forced to resign in 1993. He now resides in the Dominican Republic. Last December a Venezuelan judge announced that his court was considering bringing charges against the former president and that Perez would be placed under house arrest if he returns home."
Tuesday, February 05, 2002
Dope
Limited Inc amused a friend in L.A. a month ago by arguing that the 20th century's greatest scientist, in terms of the impact of his work on human history, was not Albert Einstein, but Fritz Haber. True, if Time Magazine had put Haber's picture on the cover as the greatest person of the century, the iconic resonance would have been somewhat less. As in, people would say, who the hell is Fritz Haber?
Here's what Haber did:
"On July 2, 1909, Haber and a colleague in the laboratory at Karlsruhe produced a continuous flow of liquid ammonia, about a pint in five hours, from hydrogen and nitrogen fed into a hot five-inch iron tube a couple of feet tall, the gases at 200 atmospheres pressure over an osmium metal catalyst."
Sounds, well, boring, right? But before Haber synthesized nitrogen, the world agricultural system depended on either organism induced nitrogen enrichment -- via the humble legume -- or enrichment by way of waste, whether that of birds (guano) or of humans (nightsoil) or of the beasts of the field and the street (which is why the immense amounts of horse shit deposited in cities in the 19th century eventually wound its way back to the field). My friend was amused because this sounds like a curious, but in itself unimportant, fact. It is something only a crank would pounce on. As you know, dear reader, Limited Inc has never been afraid of crankishness. Haber, whose work was put into workable factory order by Bosch (hence the name for the Haber-Bosch process), was not the genius Einstein was -- in fact, he wasn't a genius at all, just an exceptionally clever chemist. Probably someone else would have come along and synthesized nitrogen in the 20th century if Haber hadn't done it -- but the fact is, Haber did do it. As William McNeill wrote in Something New Under the Sun, his environmental history of the 20th century, without synthesized fertilizer, the world could only support its present human population by putting an area of land equal to the size of Latin America under cultivation.
Environmentalists, Limited Inc feels, have never fully confronted this fact. The assumption of those who decry the quantity of environmental harm caused by fertilizers -- and it is immense -- is that if these fertilizers didn't exist, a Malthusian mechanism would have culled the world population, thus maintaining an equilibrium between population and resources. Yet this kind of thinking -- which is based on the classical economic models of the 19th century -- doesn't convince us. Perhaps the one to two billion extra people we can surely attibute to synthesized nitrogen just wouldn't have materialized given the more restrained resources of the pre-Haber world; yet look at the 19th century's patterns of cultivation, the seemingly unstoppable acquisition and use of lands as diverse as the Great Prairies and the pampas, and it is easy to imagine another case, in which even greater swathes of tropical land area would be put to the plow as food needs expand.
The American Scientist review of Vaclav Smil's book on Haber draws the consequences of Haber's work for you, sitting at home with your cornflakes:
"In the year 2000, Haber�Bosch synthesis worldwide produced about 2 million tons of ammonia a week. For the 6 billion of us to be fed now, Haber� Bosch synthesis provides more than
99 percent of all inorganic nitrogen inputs to farms. Synthetic ammonia supplies about the same nitrogen tonnage in fertilizer for our crops as all green nature gains both from its microorganisms and from lightning. The raw materials for Haber�Bosch synthesis are atmospheric N2 and the natural gas that supplies both hydrogen and most of the energy. Haber�Bosch today uses energy quite frugally; only one-sixtieth of commercial fuel worldwide is now used to make ammonia.
The country that now synthesizes most ammonia is neither Germany nor Japan nor the United States, but the land where the most people sit daily to table�China. About one-third of its limited natural gas is used to make fertilizer, and in many older, smaller plants much coal is used as well. Children in the developing world feed on crops grown with fertilizer made from synthetic ammonia, and the 2 or 3 billion more of us who will arrive by mid-century will do the same."
It is hard to imagine the world without synthetic ammonia. Certainly it would be a world much less urbanized than our own. The great fact of the 20th century is that rural society, as the dominant force in culture, disappears, at least in the Western Industrial societies. In fact, it has disappeared so rapidly, and so completely, that few people are aware of the negative space, so to speak, thereby created.
As for Fritz Haber, his life could have figured in a play by his contemporary, Georg Kaiser:
"The Haber-Bosch process is generally credited with keeping Germany supplied with fertilizers and munitions during World War I, after the British naval blockade cut off supplies of nitrates from Chile. During the war Haber threw his energies and those of his institute into further support for the German side. He developed a new weapon�poison gas, the first example of which was chlorine gas�and supervised its initial deployment on the Western Front at Ypres, Belgium, in 1915. His promotion of this frightening weapon precipitated the suicide of his wife, who was herself a chemist, and many others condemned him for his wartime role. There was great consternation when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for 1918 for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements.
After World War I, Haber was remarkably successful in building up his institute, but in 1933 the anti-Jewish decrees of the Nazi regime made his position untenable. He retired a broken man, although at the time of his death he was on his way to investigate a possible senior research position at Rehovot in Palestine (now Israel)."
Limited Inc amused a friend in L.A. a month ago by arguing that the 20th century's greatest scientist, in terms of the impact of his work on human history, was not Albert Einstein, but Fritz Haber. True, if Time Magazine had put Haber's picture on the cover as the greatest person of the century, the iconic resonance would have been somewhat less. As in, people would say, who the hell is Fritz Haber?
Here's what Haber did:
"On July 2, 1909, Haber and a colleague in the laboratory at Karlsruhe produced a continuous flow of liquid ammonia, about a pint in five hours, from hydrogen and nitrogen fed into a hot five-inch iron tube a couple of feet tall, the gases at 200 atmospheres pressure over an osmium metal catalyst."
Sounds, well, boring, right? But before Haber synthesized nitrogen, the world agricultural system depended on either organism induced nitrogen enrichment -- via the humble legume -- or enrichment by way of waste, whether that of birds (guano) or of humans (nightsoil) or of the beasts of the field and the street (which is why the immense amounts of horse shit deposited in cities in the 19th century eventually wound its way back to the field). My friend was amused because this sounds like a curious, but in itself unimportant, fact. It is something only a crank would pounce on. As you know, dear reader, Limited Inc has never been afraid of crankishness. Haber, whose work was put into workable factory order by Bosch (hence the name for the Haber-Bosch process), was not the genius Einstein was -- in fact, he wasn't a genius at all, just an exceptionally clever chemist. Probably someone else would have come along and synthesized nitrogen in the 20th century if Haber hadn't done it -- but the fact is, Haber did do it. As William McNeill wrote in Something New Under the Sun, his environmental history of the 20th century, without synthesized fertilizer, the world could only support its present human population by putting an area of land equal to the size of Latin America under cultivation.
Environmentalists, Limited Inc feels, have never fully confronted this fact. The assumption of those who decry the quantity of environmental harm caused by fertilizers -- and it is immense -- is that if these fertilizers didn't exist, a Malthusian mechanism would have culled the world population, thus maintaining an equilibrium between population and resources. Yet this kind of thinking -- which is based on the classical economic models of the 19th century -- doesn't convince us. Perhaps the one to two billion extra people we can surely attibute to synthesized nitrogen just wouldn't have materialized given the more restrained resources of the pre-Haber world; yet look at the 19th century's patterns of cultivation, the seemingly unstoppable acquisition and use of lands as diverse as the Great Prairies and the pampas, and it is easy to imagine another case, in which even greater swathes of tropical land area would be put to the plow as food needs expand.
The American Scientist review of Vaclav Smil's book on Haber draws the consequences of Haber's work for you, sitting at home with your cornflakes:
"In the year 2000, Haber�Bosch synthesis worldwide produced about 2 million tons of ammonia a week. For the 6 billion of us to be fed now, Haber� Bosch synthesis provides more than
99 percent of all inorganic nitrogen inputs to farms. Synthetic ammonia supplies about the same nitrogen tonnage in fertilizer for our crops as all green nature gains both from its microorganisms and from lightning. The raw materials for Haber�Bosch synthesis are atmospheric N2 and the natural gas that supplies both hydrogen and most of the energy. Haber�Bosch today uses energy quite frugally; only one-sixtieth of commercial fuel worldwide is now used to make ammonia.
The country that now synthesizes most ammonia is neither Germany nor Japan nor the United States, but the land where the most people sit daily to table�China. About one-third of its limited natural gas is used to make fertilizer, and in many older, smaller plants much coal is used as well. Children in the developing world feed on crops grown with fertilizer made from synthetic ammonia, and the 2 or 3 billion more of us who will arrive by mid-century will do the same."
It is hard to imagine the world without synthetic ammonia. Certainly it would be a world much less urbanized than our own. The great fact of the 20th century is that rural society, as the dominant force in culture, disappears, at least in the Western Industrial societies. In fact, it has disappeared so rapidly, and so completely, that few people are aware of the negative space, so to speak, thereby created.
As for Fritz Haber, his life could have figured in a play by his contemporary, Georg Kaiser:
"The Haber-Bosch process is generally credited with keeping Germany supplied with fertilizers and munitions during World War I, after the British naval blockade cut off supplies of nitrates from Chile. During the war Haber threw his energies and those of his institute into further support for the German side. He developed a new weapon�poison gas, the first example of which was chlorine gas�and supervised its initial deployment on the Western Front at Ypres, Belgium, in 1915. His promotion of this frightening weapon precipitated the suicide of his wife, who was herself a chemist, and many others condemned him for his wartime role. There was great consternation when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for 1918 for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements.
After World War I, Haber was remarkably successful in building up his institute, but in 1933 the anti-Jewish decrees of the Nazi regime made his position untenable. He retired a broken man, although at the time of his death he was on his way to investigate a possible senior research position at Rehovot in Palestine (now Israel)."
Monday, February 04, 2002
Remora
Our readers are francophiles to a manjack, right? Or if they aren't, what are they doing reading a weblog named for Derrida's famous invective? Well, messieurs et mesdames, you must go to Eric Ormsby's piece on Louis Simpson's Villon translations in the New Criterion. The first couple of paragraphs try to hard to make the case that Villon was, supremely, the poet of farewell -- although there is, certainly, something to that notion, Ormsby is warming to his subject, and isn't quite there yet. We are being tickled with rhetoric, here. Still, it is a useful idea. One is reminded of that Mandelstam verse, "I have studied the science of farewells", in Tristia -- 'farewells' we prefer to goodbys, and surely to parting, as in this translation of Mandelstam's most famous poem in Archipelago:
I have studied the science of parting
In the bareheaded laments of night.
Oxen chew, the waiting drags on
As the vigil stretches the night�s last hour.
I honored the ritual of the crowing night
When I took up the traveler�s heavy grief.
I saw in a woman�s distant eyes
Tears mingling with the muses� song.
Villon, who knew to the intake of smelly breath the stable sounds of chewing oxen, was not burdened with Mandelstam's history. His farewells do not ring out with our knowledge of the slaughtered past and to come. They are, rather, the goodbys launched by men about to be hung for bawdry, theft, murder -- all the ways of the riotous reprobate. Villon, of course, can be made into a sentimental roustabout -- in the same way Rabelais becomes Rabelaisian, an excuse for Victorian scatology. Orwell pointed out how all too embarrassing the term Rabelaisian is in some essay. Ormsby avoids that image in his review, pulling up, instead, those features in Villon that re-emerge in Baudelaire, in Rimbaud, in Celine -- that omni-directional rage, with its curious intervals of complete self-lessness. Here's a beautiful passage on Villon's women:
"Villon clearly loved women, for whom he had a surprisingly subtle and sympathetic regard; they are certainly the dominant figures in his testamentary poetry: not only his own mother or the Virgin Mary, but also the various lovers he alternately excoriates, cajoles, and caresses. His masterpiece in this genre is undoubtedly the long lament usually known as �La Belle Heaulmi�re,� or �The Beautiful Helmet Maker,� after its protagonist. Villon�s poem is an extended illustration, if one were needed, of Baudelaire�s line four-hundred years later that �c�est un dur m�tier d��tre belle femme� (�It�s hard work being a bombshell�). An old woman, la Belle Heaulmi�re, catalogues her charms as they once were and as they are now; like Villon, she grasps herself only in the backward glance. The poem is remarkable in that its compassion is tacit and arises from the unflinching scrutiny of a woman�s body in decline. Unlike other compositions of the time, it is not prompted by malicious delight or the kind of Tartuffian schadenfreude that seems to have motivated so many medieval denunciations of the female form. Instead, pity and terror are aroused.
Pretty shoulders, long and slender
Arms; beautiful hands and wrists,
That my fate seemed to intend for
Heated tourneys in the lists
Of passion � small, tilting breasts,
Rounded thighs, wide loins, and then
The vulva in its little nest
In the middle of the garden.
Horribly, these have now become:
Wrinkled forehead and gray hair,
Sunken eyebrows, and the eyes
Whose laughter drove men to despair,
Clouding � again to itemize.
The nose that was a perfect size,
Hooked. Two hairy ears hang down.
You�d have to look hard to realize
This death�s-head is a face you�ve known.
Ah, as Limited Inc plummets through middle age like Lucifer thrown out of the American heaven of perpetual adolescence, the death's head is rapidly becoming his own inexcusable, unmitigated face. We must go out and read some Villon today.
Our readers are francophiles to a manjack, right? Or if they aren't, what are they doing reading a weblog named for Derrida's famous invective? Well, messieurs et mesdames, you must go to Eric Ormsby's piece on Louis Simpson's Villon translations in the New Criterion. The first couple of paragraphs try to hard to make the case that Villon was, supremely, the poet of farewell -- although there is, certainly, something to that notion, Ormsby is warming to his subject, and isn't quite there yet. We are being tickled with rhetoric, here. Still, it is a useful idea. One is reminded of that Mandelstam verse, "I have studied the science of farewells", in Tristia -- 'farewells' we prefer to goodbys, and surely to parting, as in this translation of Mandelstam's most famous poem in Archipelago:
I have studied the science of parting
In the bareheaded laments of night.
Oxen chew, the waiting drags on
As the vigil stretches the night�s last hour.
I honored the ritual of the crowing night
When I took up the traveler�s heavy grief.
I saw in a woman�s distant eyes
Tears mingling with the muses� song.
Villon, who knew to the intake of smelly breath the stable sounds of chewing oxen, was not burdened with Mandelstam's history. His farewells do not ring out with our knowledge of the slaughtered past and to come. They are, rather, the goodbys launched by men about to be hung for bawdry, theft, murder -- all the ways of the riotous reprobate. Villon, of course, can be made into a sentimental roustabout -- in the same way Rabelais becomes Rabelaisian, an excuse for Victorian scatology. Orwell pointed out how all too embarrassing the term Rabelaisian is in some essay. Ormsby avoids that image in his review, pulling up, instead, those features in Villon that re-emerge in Baudelaire, in Rimbaud, in Celine -- that omni-directional rage, with its curious intervals of complete self-lessness. Here's a beautiful passage on Villon's women:
"Villon clearly loved women, for whom he had a surprisingly subtle and sympathetic regard; they are certainly the dominant figures in his testamentary poetry: not only his own mother or the Virgin Mary, but also the various lovers he alternately excoriates, cajoles, and caresses. His masterpiece in this genre is undoubtedly the long lament usually known as �La Belle Heaulmi�re,� or �The Beautiful Helmet Maker,� after its protagonist. Villon�s poem is an extended illustration, if one were needed, of Baudelaire�s line four-hundred years later that �c�est un dur m�tier d��tre belle femme� (�It�s hard work being a bombshell�). An old woman, la Belle Heaulmi�re, catalogues her charms as they once were and as they are now; like Villon, she grasps herself only in the backward glance. The poem is remarkable in that its compassion is tacit and arises from the unflinching scrutiny of a woman�s body in decline. Unlike other compositions of the time, it is not prompted by malicious delight or the kind of Tartuffian schadenfreude that seems to have motivated so many medieval denunciations of the female form. Instead, pity and terror are aroused.
Pretty shoulders, long and slender
Arms; beautiful hands and wrists,
That my fate seemed to intend for
Heated tourneys in the lists
Of passion � small, tilting breasts,
Rounded thighs, wide loins, and then
The vulva in its little nest
In the middle of the garden.
Horribly, these have now become:
Wrinkled forehead and gray hair,
Sunken eyebrows, and the eyes
Whose laughter drove men to despair,
Clouding � again to itemize.
The nose that was a perfect size,
Hooked. Two hairy ears hang down.
You�d have to look hard to realize
This death�s-head is a face you�ve known.
Ah, as Limited Inc plummets through middle age like Lucifer thrown out of the American heaven of perpetual adolescence, the death's head is rapidly becoming his own inexcusable, unmitigated face. We must go out and read some Villon today.
Sunday, February 03, 2002
Remora
Limited Inc admits that we were once forced, in a philosophy class, to peruse Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick's masterpiece. We did not come away from the experience with the awe of the convert; we didn't even retain a polemical disdain for the book's sophistries. We simply found the book trite. Nozick's book generated excitement among a generation of philosophers trained in logic chopping and little else. Since logic chopping is a useful but minor instrument, they were left at a loss -- what do you do once you have diagrammed the prisoner's dilemma ten times over? They had no sense of repertoire, which they mistook this gap in their brains for a mission to make philosophy a science. Why read anything that wasn't in English? Why read anything that was written before 1945?
Well, in one sense the logic choppers have a point. The history of philosophy is, in itself, of little importance. Carnap once noted, somewhere, his distress at the philosophy department meetings in the U. of Chicago in the 40s, where collegues would say things like, oh, the important thing about evolution is that Thomas Acquinus refuted it in such and such a tractate. In other words, learned ignorance of the most repellent type.
What reading books, not articles, and books published before 1945, and books published even in French or German, mindboggling as that is, does is, it gives one a repertoire of themes, references, and variations. This, Limited Inc would argue, is an essential feature of the intellectual vocations.
Now, Robert Nozick is dead. The Economist published a review of his new book in order to praise the man. Unfortunately, the Economist reviewer has merely grazed philosophy, no doubt in his pre-law days at some fond U. The reviewer is impressed by Nozick's less than Wildean one-liners ("Yet in the vigour of its arguments, the punch of its formulations (taxation is �on a par with forced labour�; �to each as they choose, from each as they are chosen�) and the breadth of its attack, the book had an impact far beyond the academic world); he is obviously sympathetic with Nozick's conservativism; but he has no idea what philosophers, like, do. Here's a sample graf:
"After his first book, he turned to pure philosophy, joking that he did not want to write "Anarchy, State and Utopia II". In 1981 came "Philosophical Explanations", which contains a famous chapter asking a seemingly bootless question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?", as well as chapters on personal identity and on free will. It is best remembered for an ingenious argument against scepticism, and for a dispositional account of knowledge as true belief that would reliably stick with the truth (or self-correct) as relevant circumstances changed."
Wow. The reviewer has obviously never heard of Leibnitz -- and God knows what he thinks Heidegger did (most likely, he gets his idea of big H from the journals, and so thinks of Heidegger as Hitler's speech writer). The bootless question is also taken up by Shestov, figures in Sartre, and has been trampled on by hundreds of the lesser fry. And as for the Quinean tang of the Nozick's dispositional thesis, forget it. It is way over the reviewer's head.
However, it is the grace note at the end that will make the literate reader wince.
"Philosophy begins in wonder, he writes at the end, with a silent nod to A.N. Whitehead." That silent nod is Nozick snoozing off. We are riffing on a platitude that goes back to Aristotle. And not the Onassis one. The Economist would do well to select its encomiasts for dead philosophers among a pool of writers that has read one or two of them.
Limited Inc admits that we were once forced, in a philosophy class, to peruse Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick's masterpiece. We did not come away from the experience with the awe of the convert; we didn't even retain a polemical disdain for the book's sophistries. We simply found the book trite. Nozick's book generated excitement among a generation of philosophers trained in logic chopping and little else. Since logic chopping is a useful but minor instrument, they were left at a loss -- what do you do once you have diagrammed the prisoner's dilemma ten times over? They had no sense of repertoire, which they mistook this gap in their brains for a mission to make philosophy a science. Why read anything that wasn't in English? Why read anything that was written before 1945?
Well, in one sense the logic choppers have a point. The history of philosophy is, in itself, of little importance. Carnap once noted, somewhere, his distress at the philosophy department meetings in the U. of Chicago in the 40s, where collegues would say things like, oh, the important thing about evolution is that Thomas Acquinus refuted it in such and such a tractate. In other words, learned ignorance of the most repellent type.
What reading books, not articles, and books published before 1945, and books published even in French or German, mindboggling as that is, does is, it gives one a repertoire of themes, references, and variations. This, Limited Inc would argue, is an essential feature of the intellectual vocations.
Now, Robert Nozick is dead. The Economist published a review of his new book in order to praise the man. Unfortunately, the Economist reviewer has merely grazed philosophy, no doubt in his pre-law days at some fond U. The reviewer is impressed by Nozick's less than Wildean one-liners ("Yet in the vigour of its arguments, the punch of its formulations (taxation is �on a par with forced labour�; �to each as they choose, from each as they are chosen�) and the breadth of its attack, the book had an impact far beyond the academic world); he is obviously sympathetic with Nozick's conservativism; but he has no idea what philosophers, like, do. Here's a sample graf:
"After his first book, he turned to pure philosophy, joking that he did not want to write "Anarchy, State and Utopia II". In 1981 came "Philosophical Explanations", which contains a famous chapter asking a seemingly bootless question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?", as well as chapters on personal identity and on free will. It is best remembered for an ingenious argument against scepticism, and for a dispositional account of knowledge as true belief that would reliably stick with the truth (or self-correct) as relevant circumstances changed."
Wow. The reviewer has obviously never heard of Leibnitz -- and God knows what he thinks Heidegger did (most likely, he gets his idea of big H from the journals, and so thinks of Heidegger as Hitler's speech writer). The bootless question is also taken up by Shestov, figures in Sartre, and has been trampled on by hundreds of the lesser fry. And as for the Quinean tang of the Nozick's dispositional thesis, forget it. It is way over the reviewer's head.
However, it is the grace note at the end that will make the literate reader wince.
"Philosophy begins in wonder, he writes at the end, with a silent nod to A.N. Whitehead." That silent nod is Nozick snoozing off. We are riffing on a platitude that goes back to Aristotle. And not the Onassis one. The Economist would do well to select its encomiasts for dead philosophers among a pool of writers that has read one or two of them.
Friday, February 01, 2002
Remora
There's a weblog of the plutocrats ball in NYC. It has links to what's going on and how it is reported. The weblogger, Lance Knobel, seems mildly shocked by conspicuous consumption of the type reported by Alex KUCZYNSKI with her typical dry cocktail style -- mix champagne and battery acid, stir. We, of course, love it:
"Heidi Klum, the blond supermodel perhaps best known for her ability to display the charms of the Victoria's Secret Miracle Bra, stood in a crowd of bankers, diplomats, Nobel Prize winners and executives at Brasserie on Wednesday night, marveling at the roster of parties accompanying this year's World Economic Forum, held for the first time in New York.
There are so many, she said, some so exclusive that even she might not be invited, like the private Elton John concert for 200 guests sponsored by Lehman Brothers tonight at the Four Seasons restaurant.
Ms. Klum turned to her publicist, Desiree Gruber, and asked: "Well, are we going or not?"
"No," Ms. Gruber said, her mouth set in grim resignation. "We haven't been invited."
Ms. Kuczynski goes on to reveal that Sir Elton is playing his cheese for a cool million dished out by Lehman brothers. And you thought there was no reason for those mass layoffs on Wall Street, didn't you?
There's a weblog of the plutocrats ball in NYC. It has links to what's going on and how it is reported. The weblogger, Lance Knobel, seems mildly shocked by conspicuous consumption of the type reported by Alex KUCZYNSKI with her typical dry cocktail style -- mix champagne and battery acid, stir. We, of course, love it:
"Heidi Klum, the blond supermodel perhaps best known for her ability to display the charms of the Victoria's Secret Miracle Bra, stood in a crowd of bankers, diplomats, Nobel Prize winners and executives at Brasserie on Wednesday night, marveling at the roster of parties accompanying this year's World Economic Forum, held for the first time in New York.
There are so many, she said, some so exclusive that even she might not be invited, like the private Elton John concert for 200 guests sponsored by Lehman Brothers tonight at the Four Seasons restaurant.
Ms. Klum turned to her publicist, Desiree Gruber, and asked: "Well, are we going or not?"
"No," Ms. Gruber said, her mouth set in grim resignation. "We haven't been invited."
Ms. Kuczynski goes on to reveal that Sir Elton is playing his cheese for a cool million dished out by Lehman brothers. And you thought there was no reason for those mass layoffs on Wall Street, didn't you?
Dope
We put up our hot little relativism post [1/30/02] in much the same spirit that the Duke nailed up his posters for the Royal Nonesuch, with its final line: LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED: "if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!" Alas, our line didn't fetch em. Lately there has been a royal falling off of site hits. Proof, perhaps, that our obsessions are not those of the zeitgeist. Or proof that Limited Inc. should sprinkle our posts with "girles" or "tits" to fetch that crowd (peculiarly concentrated in Saudi Arabia for some reason) looking for a combo of both. But no, no, this is how far our head is up our ass: we figure to draw the multitudes with relativism.
So we wrote to one of our readers, Alan, who has previously figured on this site before as our in-house critic. We asked why our post didn't fetch him. Here's his reply:
One reason I didn't respond was I wasn't real sure what you were trying to
say, and so my response would have taken the form of indefinite expansion
("Your claim could be interpreted as A, B, or C. If A, then ...; if B, then
...,). But, since you goad me, I guess I'll have to jump into this one, so
here goes with an analytic-philosopher type question:
You say that
(1)Cultural diversity is unavoidable; cultures arise and form themselves
with regard to their differences.
I have a problem here; I don't see that there is anything conceptually
impossible about the notion of a hermetically sealed and isolated culture.
Can't we imagine a group of people who have, in the robust sense, a "way of
life", with religious and political institutions etc., while being
completely unaware of the existence of any other human groups. Empirically,
we don't find any such groups in the world, but that's another matter.
You say later on that
(2)[My relativism comes out of the idea that] Any point of view is formed by
struggle against other points of view -- it isn't given to us, ab nihilo.
Could we cite as an example here the Freudian view that the ego arises out
the conflict between the desires and mental representations of parental
authority? (Eschewing Teutonic jargon. If so, I see what you're getting at,
but then I don't see how anything about specifically cultural diversity
follows from it.
So . . . could you elaborate (1) in sufficiently determinate form so that I
can see how (2) is supposed to be a consequence thereof?
a.
And here is our reply:
Cool, I got you to bite.
Anyway, I would say that the crucial point is whether your idea of the hermetically sealed and isolated culture could be true. Your point is that one can imagine such a culture. But I don't really think one can imagine such a culture. That doesn't mean that there aren't Pitcairn islands where maroons, whether voluntary or not, do make themselves into a "culture," but even there they start to evolve. And of course they come from elsewhere -- not Adam and Eve, and but other cultures. To my mind, imagining a sealed and hermetic culture is like imagining a sealed and hermetic species -- this isn't just empirically non-existent, it couldn't be existent if evolutionary theory makes a true claim about speciation. Reversing your empirical/theoretical split, I'd say that no culture would long remain sealed and hermetic without producing cultural variants that would, in the long run, turn it into 2+ cultures.
That is my strong claim. Now, the question is, how can I back it up. And this would involve claiming a dialectical view of culture -- that the thing we call a culture, with its indistinct boundaries, is not just peripherally engaged in struggles with other cultures, but that struggle is how it builds as a culture. In other words, I hold to a thoroughly dialectical view of how cultures are.
Now if this dialectical view is right, a mono-culture, so to speak, will suffer a fall into diversity as surely as a mono-language will evolve dialects, because no culture has the instruments to arrest variation. I suppose I can imagine a culture of clones, but there is a rate of mutation in copying that simply can't be gotten around.
So, now: let's say cultural relativism makes some sense. It would seem that, to get off the ground, it has to claim that there are always going to be more than one cultures. Now this claim doesn't mean that there is more than one valuable culture, but I'd like to make that claim for the variant of relativism I am after -- one that actually can explain why cultural diversity is good. The difficulty here is much like the difficulty laissez faire people have with competition -- if you claim that competition is good, and you spot a tendency to monopoly, what do you do about it? I'd claim that human rights principles are going to function as a sort of anti-trust law, limiting the encroachment of mono-culture.
So there you have it: sizzling discussion, man. Is this a get down site or what? And remember: LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED.
We put up our hot little relativism post [1/30/02] in much the same spirit that the Duke nailed up his posters for the Royal Nonesuch, with its final line: LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED: "if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!" Alas, our line didn't fetch em. Lately there has been a royal falling off of site hits. Proof, perhaps, that our obsessions are not those of the zeitgeist. Or proof that Limited Inc. should sprinkle our posts with "girles" or "tits" to fetch that crowd (peculiarly concentrated in Saudi Arabia for some reason) looking for a combo of both. But no, no, this is how far our head is up our ass: we figure to draw the multitudes with relativism.
So we wrote to one of our readers, Alan, who has previously figured on this site before as our in-house critic. We asked why our post didn't fetch him. Here's his reply:
One reason I didn't respond was I wasn't real sure what you were trying to
say, and so my response would have taken the form of indefinite expansion
("Your claim could be interpreted as A, B, or C. If A, then ...; if B, then
...,). But, since you goad me, I guess I'll have to jump into this one, so
here goes with an analytic-philosopher type question:
You say that
(1)Cultural diversity is unavoidable; cultures arise and form themselves
with regard to their differences.
I have a problem here; I don't see that there is anything conceptually
impossible about the notion of a hermetically sealed and isolated culture.
Can't we imagine a group of people who have, in the robust sense, a "way of
life", with religious and political institutions etc., while being
completely unaware of the existence of any other human groups. Empirically,
we don't find any such groups in the world, but that's another matter.
You say later on that
(2)[My relativism comes out of the idea that] Any point of view is formed by
struggle against other points of view -- it isn't given to us, ab nihilo.
Could we cite as an example here the Freudian view that the ego arises out
the conflict between the desires and mental representations of parental
authority? (Eschewing Teutonic jargon. If so, I see what you're getting at,
but then I don't see how anything about specifically cultural diversity
follows from it.
So . . . could you elaborate (1) in sufficiently determinate form so that I
can see how (2) is supposed to be a consequence thereof?
a.
And here is our reply:
Cool, I got you to bite.
Anyway, I would say that the crucial point is whether your idea of the hermetically sealed and isolated culture could be true. Your point is that one can imagine such a culture. But I don't really think one can imagine such a culture. That doesn't mean that there aren't Pitcairn islands where maroons, whether voluntary or not, do make themselves into a "culture," but even there they start to evolve. And of course they come from elsewhere -- not Adam and Eve, and but other cultures. To my mind, imagining a sealed and hermetic culture is like imagining a sealed and hermetic species -- this isn't just empirically non-existent, it couldn't be existent if evolutionary theory makes a true claim about speciation. Reversing your empirical/theoretical split, I'd say that no culture would long remain sealed and hermetic without producing cultural variants that would, in the long run, turn it into 2+ cultures.
That is my strong claim. Now, the question is, how can I back it up. And this would involve claiming a dialectical view of culture -- that the thing we call a culture, with its indistinct boundaries, is not just peripherally engaged in struggles with other cultures, but that struggle is how it builds as a culture. In other words, I hold to a thoroughly dialectical view of how cultures are.
Now if this dialectical view is right, a mono-culture, so to speak, will suffer a fall into diversity as surely as a mono-language will evolve dialects, because no culture has the instruments to arrest variation. I suppose I can imagine a culture of clones, but there is a rate of mutation in copying that simply can't be gotten around.
So, now: let's say cultural relativism makes some sense. It would seem that, to get off the ground, it has to claim that there are always going to be more than one cultures. Now this claim doesn't mean that there is more than one valuable culture, but I'd like to make that claim for the variant of relativism I am after -- one that actually can explain why cultural diversity is good. The difficulty here is much like the difficulty laissez faire people have with competition -- if you claim that competition is good, and you spot a tendency to monopoly, what do you do about it? I'd claim that human rights principles are going to function as a sort of anti-trust law, limiting the encroachment of mono-culture.
So there you have it: sizzling discussion, man. Is this a get down site or what? And remember: LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED.
Thursday, January 31, 2002
Remora
The terrorists are the ones eating mango mousse.
Two reports in the Village Voice today on the plutocrat's ball, otherwise known as the World Economic Forum. Usually this enclave of the disgustingly wealthy and unintelligently powerful meets at Davos. Unfortunately, we live in a world where loopholes in environmental regulations sometimes allow the importation of alien species -- the tiger mussel has invaded the Great Lakes Ecosystem, and the WEF has migrated to NYC. Anarcho protesters are going to try to make the place hot for them -- mais alors, there is the problem that in the USA, right now, dissent is automatically equated to terrorism. Prepare to read about anarchos vandalizing Starbucks and such; the word vandalize won't be used about the police use of water cannons and nightsticks on the fragile skeletal structure of protestors, since presumably one skeletal structure can be replaced with another, while the destruction of a Starbucks is an attack on a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
An article entitled, appropriately, Schmooze operator, contains a report by one Sasha Frere-Jones about attending the Davos confab, and fab it was to the participants:
"Accompanying my wife (invited by the WEF to attend because of her work to level the playing field for women in corporate America), I attended Davos in January of 2001. For a week, the approximately 2000 assembled players participated in panel discussions and schmoozed over mango mousse. Attendees were issued "smart" name tags and wireless iPaq computers. African nationals often outnumbered Americans in the conference hall lobby, English was not the default language for small talk, and people were unfailingly warm.
The point of being there, if you average out the participant testimonials and official press releases, is to be Somebody With a Good Idea for the World, Somebody With Money, or both."
It must be nice to be leveling the playing field and playing in a field so manifestly unlevel -- but of course, you have to be inside the establishment to change it, as the Clinton era liberal would say. But Limited Inc locks onto the mango mousse. Yes indeed, reader, here, here we surely have stumbled upon the master-sign, much as jungle explorers, in some old Tarzan flick, immediately recognize the shed panties on the forest floor and look up in anguish, exclaiming Jane!. Coding third world fruit and first world cuisine, but hedging against a too exotic third world culinary vernacular (termite mousse would have been, I suppose, outre, and Sperm Whale mousse would have given away, well, the fact that these are the inheritors of the biggest killers on the planet... and they still are) and, at the same time, against anything too, well, ancien regime for the American pups -- this is where the anarcho element really starts. People throwing mango mousse have bankrupted Argentina, contrived a system of derivatives trading that will eventually blow up national economies, as it is now blowing up corporations, and systematically promote an economic system in which they are awarded in such disproportion as to make the slave owners of the ancient world blush.
So, who do you think we are going to arrest? Well, another VV article reports on the expected cop crackdown on the protestors:
"In the post-9-11 world of law enforcement, cops see these brick throwers and car burners as almost Al Qaeda-like, down to their transnational wandering, their leaders' wealthy backgrounds, and their fundamentalist message. The anti-globalization movement objects to the unfettered migration of capital in search of the best deal on labor, and holds the not-unreasonable paranoia of a global corporate oligarchy.
Of course, that same migrating capital�as with arms maker Krupp, explosives king Nobel, and yellow-journalism baron Hearst�is what fuels its yang. By 1996, one of the movement's funding organizations had banked more than $34 million to fuel its agenda, according to Internet versions of a Left Business Observer essay. The publication goes on to report that the founder of this group has an Ivy League M.B.A., a track record at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and money provided by well-heeled parents from the retail trade. "
Life, baby. Sometimes I can't stand it.
The terrorists are the ones eating mango mousse.
Two reports in the Village Voice today on the plutocrat's ball, otherwise known as the World Economic Forum. Usually this enclave of the disgustingly wealthy and unintelligently powerful meets at Davos. Unfortunately, we live in a world where loopholes in environmental regulations sometimes allow the importation of alien species -- the tiger mussel has invaded the Great Lakes Ecosystem, and the WEF has migrated to NYC. Anarcho protesters are going to try to make the place hot for them -- mais alors, there is the problem that in the USA, right now, dissent is automatically equated to terrorism. Prepare to read about anarchos vandalizing Starbucks and such; the word vandalize won't be used about the police use of water cannons and nightsticks on the fragile skeletal structure of protestors, since presumably one skeletal structure can be replaced with another, while the destruction of a Starbucks is an attack on a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
An article entitled, appropriately, Schmooze operator, contains a report by one Sasha Frere-Jones about attending the Davos confab, and fab it was to the participants:
"Accompanying my wife (invited by the WEF to attend because of her work to level the playing field for women in corporate America), I attended Davos in January of 2001. For a week, the approximately 2000 assembled players participated in panel discussions and schmoozed over mango mousse. Attendees were issued "smart" name tags and wireless iPaq computers. African nationals often outnumbered Americans in the conference hall lobby, English was not the default language for small talk, and people were unfailingly warm.
The point of being there, if you average out the participant testimonials and official press releases, is to be Somebody With a Good Idea for the World, Somebody With Money, or both."
It must be nice to be leveling the playing field and playing in a field so manifestly unlevel -- but of course, you have to be inside the establishment to change it, as the Clinton era liberal would say. But Limited Inc locks onto the mango mousse. Yes indeed, reader, here, here we surely have stumbled upon the master-sign, much as jungle explorers, in some old Tarzan flick, immediately recognize the shed panties on the forest floor and look up in anguish, exclaiming Jane!. Coding third world fruit and first world cuisine, but hedging against a too exotic third world culinary vernacular (termite mousse would have been, I suppose, outre, and Sperm Whale mousse would have given away, well, the fact that these are the inheritors of the biggest killers on the planet... and they still are) and, at the same time, against anything too, well, ancien regime for the American pups -- this is where the anarcho element really starts. People throwing mango mousse have bankrupted Argentina, contrived a system of derivatives trading that will eventually blow up national economies, as it is now blowing up corporations, and systematically promote an economic system in which they are awarded in such disproportion as to make the slave owners of the ancient world blush.
So, who do you think we are going to arrest? Well, another VV article reports on the expected cop crackdown on the protestors:
"In the post-9-11 world of law enforcement, cops see these brick throwers and car burners as almost Al Qaeda-like, down to their transnational wandering, their leaders' wealthy backgrounds, and their fundamentalist message. The anti-globalization movement objects to the unfettered migration of capital in search of the best deal on labor, and holds the not-unreasonable paranoia of a global corporate oligarchy.
Of course, that same migrating capital�as with arms maker Krupp, explosives king Nobel, and yellow-journalism baron Hearst�is what fuels its yang. By 1996, one of the movement's funding organizations had banked more than $34 million to fuel its agenda, according to Internet versions of a Left Business Observer essay. The publication goes on to report that the founder of this group has an Ivy League M.B.A., a track record at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and money provided by well-heeled parents from the retail trade. "
Life, baby. Sometimes I can't stand it.
Dope
My friend was, indeed, dissatisfied with yesterday's post (and if you don't know what I mean, lunkhead, see yesterday's post). Limited Inc, like Coolidge's secretary of state, Henry Stimson, believes that gentlemen don't open other gentleman's mail -- so we aren't going to quote our friend's animadversions about our post, except to sum them up as the observation that we ramble on entertainingly, but to little point. However, we we will quote our own email reply:
"... I have a pretty straightforward view that the Middle East is not that exotic, or incomprehensible, vis a vis the West; and that the necessary framework for a civil society is missing in most Middle Eastern countries because of the convergence of two seemingly opposing interests: on the one hand, the theocratic, and on the other hand, the Western. While the theocratic impulse gets its strength, I think, from a false sense of nostalgia that becomes politically powerful when both the rural class and the educated, urban middle feel disempowered, the Western influence is directed, pretty consistently, at one goal: keep the oil flowing cheaply. This simple rule entails a complex politics, because sometimes it seems like the West is willing to forego cheap oil -- such as the petro from Iraq -- for more urgent political reasons. But I think the Iraq business basically stems from a fear that the Saudis will be displaced by an expansionist state, not by any feeling for the oppression of the Iraqis by the mad megalo Hussein. So that the pretence, which was floating about when the Gulf War was fought, that the Western alliance wanted democracy was a surface excuse that lost its force when the West achieved its real objective of making Iraq less threatening.
Does this mean I think the West is evil? No. The West is composed of opposing forces, too, temporary alliances, ephemeral idealisms. Certainly I hope I am a small part of the force that is secular, democratic, egalitarian, liberty loving. And that force basically thinks that a just society requires that the force of the rulers be modified by the power of the ruled to replace them; that minorities be protected systematically -- which means guaranteeing rights, and generating an independent judiciary to enforce those rights; that the political economy not be wholly controlled by an elite. Etc. These are pretty simple things to me. The logical mistake, I think, that is often made by Westerners is to think, okay, we encourage the secular, humanist state and then all of our interests are coordinated. That's simply false. If the Sauds, or the Iraqis, became democratic in the deep sense tomorrow, their interests would still not correspond to the interests of, say, America. Some of the interests would be similar, some dissimilar. I think the advantage of civil society is that, in the end, diverging interests don't require mortal hostility. In that sense, American idealists, since Wilson (who opposed the French and British plan to carve up the Middle East into protectorates with odd, stupid territories with absurd names like Iraq) are almost always right in the long run."
Now, those who know and love Limited Inc (alas, how few!) know that we are ultra relativists. And so they may want to know how we reconcile our relativism with the seemingly universal claims we are making here for human rights.
This doesn't really seem problematic to me. It is simply a part of saying, if there is a state, there needs to be human rights in order to limit that state. If there is governance of another sort, such as tribal governance, that, too, produces limits. Those limits will be attached weakly to the rights accorded to all. You have no right to say what you will in your average Pentecostal church -- meaning that you can kicked out of that church without recourse. Limiting the ability of the church, or the state, to punish you is allowing the process of relativism to work -- because relativism necessarily needs differences to relativize. Does this mean that human rights discourse is universal? No, it means that a progressive politics attachs it to cultures and states, if and when they exist. In fact, if relativism has anything substantial to say about culture and human beings, it consists in this: 1. that cultural diversity is unavoidable, an essential part of what culture is -- cultures arise and form themselves with regard to their differences; 2. the value of culture, and of the human beings who become bearers of culture, can't be abstracted from the formation of culture and human beings as culture bearers. 3. These insights are bound to perspectives that we have in this age and space and culture. This doesn't mean that we have to respect other perspectives in this age and culture -- such as one that would say there is no human right to speech attaching to state dominance. Relativism isn't the same as tolerance for any position. It is odd that this jump is commonly made, as if that were self-evident. Relativisms can come in different types, from those that counsel tolerance like some Buddhist monk sunk in an ultimate trance to those that promote a robust struggle for survival among different points of view, like some Nietzsche freak. Count me among the Nietzsche freaks. My relativism comes out of the idea that any point of view is formed by struggle against other points of view -- it isn't given to us, ab nihilo.
There will be those who do not recognize, in what I'm saying, the relativism they heard attacked in Philosophy 101. Sorry. Limited Inc.'s relativism can accomodate Lord Acton's definition:
"By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty, against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion. The state is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its own immediate sphere." The question of whether this liberty is too individualistic doesn't seem sociologically relevant to us. Most men and women will only do their duty as custom and opinion, authority and majorities, defines it. To form other authorities, majorities, customs and opinions -- to have, in other words, an openess to difference - is the very use and function of human rights. And this is where we stand, so help us deity - or non-deity, or nature, or as you like it.
My friend was, indeed, dissatisfied with yesterday's post (and if you don't know what I mean, lunkhead, see yesterday's post). Limited Inc, like Coolidge's secretary of state, Henry Stimson, believes that gentlemen don't open other gentleman's mail -- so we aren't going to quote our friend's animadversions about our post, except to sum them up as the observation that we ramble on entertainingly, but to little point. However, we we will quote our own email reply:
"... I have a pretty straightforward view that the Middle East is not that exotic, or incomprehensible, vis a vis the West; and that the necessary framework for a civil society is missing in most Middle Eastern countries because of the convergence of two seemingly opposing interests: on the one hand, the theocratic, and on the other hand, the Western. While the theocratic impulse gets its strength, I think, from a false sense of nostalgia that becomes politically powerful when both the rural class and the educated, urban middle feel disempowered, the Western influence is directed, pretty consistently, at one goal: keep the oil flowing cheaply. This simple rule entails a complex politics, because sometimes it seems like the West is willing to forego cheap oil -- such as the petro from Iraq -- for more urgent political reasons. But I think the Iraq business basically stems from a fear that the Saudis will be displaced by an expansionist state, not by any feeling for the oppression of the Iraqis by the mad megalo Hussein. So that the pretence, which was floating about when the Gulf War was fought, that the Western alliance wanted democracy was a surface excuse that lost its force when the West achieved its real objective of making Iraq less threatening.
Does this mean I think the West is evil? No. The West is composed of opposing forces, too, temporary alliances, ephemeral idealisms. Certainly I hope I am a small part of the force that is secular, democratic, egalitarian, liberty loving. And that force basically thinks that a just society requires that the force of the rulers be modified by the power of the ruled to replace them; that minorities be protected systematically -- which means guaranteeing rights, and generating an independent judiciary to enforce those rights; that the political economy not be wholly controlled by an elite. Etc. These are pretty simple things to me. The logical mistake, I think, that is often made by Westerners is to think, okay, we encourage the secular, humanist state and then all of our interests are coordinated. That's simply false. If the Sauds, or the Iraqis, became democratic in the deep sense tomorrow, their interests would still not correspond to the interests of, say, America. Some of the interests would be similar, some dissimilar. I think the advantage of civil society is that, in the end, diverging interests don't require mortal hostility. In that sense, American idealists, since Wilson (who opposed the French and British plan to carve up the Middle East into protectorates with odd, stupid territories with absurd names like Iraq) are almost always right in the long run."
Now, those who know and love Limited Inc (alas, how few!) know that we are ultra relativists. And so they may want to know how we reconcile our relativism with the seemingly universal claims we are making here for human rights.
This doesn't really seem problematic to me. It is simply a part of saying, if there is a state, there needs to be human rights in order to limit that state. If there is governance of another sort, such as tribal governance, that, too, produces limits. Those limits will be attached weakly to the rights accorded to all. You have no right to say what you will in your average Pentecostal church -- meaning that you can kicked out of that church without recourse. Limiting the ability of the church, or the state, to punish you is allowing the process of relativism to work -- because relativism necessarily needs differences to relativize. Does this mean that human rights discourse is universal? No, it means that a progressive politics attachs it to cultures and states, if and when they exist. In fact, if relativism has anything substantial to say about culture and human beings, it consists in this: 1. that cultural diversity is unavoidable, an essential part of what culture is -- cultures arise and form themselves with regard to their differences; 2. the value of culture, and of the human beings who become bearers of culture, can't be abstracted from the formation of culture and human beings as culture bearers. 3. These insights are bound to perspectives that we have in this age and space and culture. This doesn't mean that we have to respect other perspectives in this age and culture -- such as one that would say there is no human right to speech attaching to state dominance. Relativism isn't the same as tolerance for any position. It is odd that this jump is commonly made, as if that were self-evident. Relativisms can come in different types, from those that counsel tolerance like some Buddhist monk sunk in an ultimate trance to those that promote a robust struggle for survival among different points of view, like some Nietzsche freak. Count me among the Nietzsche freaks. My relativism comes out of the idea that any point of view is formed by struggle against other points of view -- it isn't given to us, ab nihilo.
There will be those who do not recognize, in what I'm saying, the relativism they heard attacked in Philosophy 101. Sorry. Limited Inc.'s relativism can accomodate Lord Acton's definition:
"By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty, against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion. The state is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its own immediate sphere." The question of whether this liberty is too individualistic doesn't seem sociologically relevant to us. Most men and women will only do their duty as custom and opinion, authority and majorities, defines it. To form other authorities, majorities, customs and opinions -- to have, in other words, an openess to difference - is the very use and function of human rights. And this is where we stand, so help us deity - or non-deity, or nature, or as you like it.
Wednesday, January 30, 2002
Remora
Unwisely, Limited Inc pledged to write about Bernard Lewis yesterday. A friend sent us a Paul Kennedy's review of B.L.'s latest book. This friend remarked on the last graf of that review, which reads:
"What, then, is to be done? At the end of the day, Lewis
argues, the answer lies within the Muslim world itself.
Either its societies, especially those in the Middle East,
will continue in ''a downward spiral of hate and spite,
rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression,'' with all that
implies for a horrible and troubled future; or ''they can
abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences
and join their talents, energies and resources in a common
creative endeavor'' to the benefit of themselves and the
rest of our planet. Perhaps the outside world can help a
bit, though probably not much. ''For the time being, the
choice is their own.'' With this final sentence, and all
that precedes it, Lewis has done us all -- Muslim and
non-Muslim alike -- a remarkable service."
Well, there seems to be two choices outlined here -- things can get worse, or things can get better. To which Limited Inc would add, things can stay the same. This pretty much completes the futures open to all God's creatures. What is interesting is the crash of all that nineties globalization confidence. Remember, the end of history, and the iron path to capitalist nirvana? Seemingly, that has hit the dustbin. Now we have whole regions that can only influence themselves. Still, Limited Inc, with our youthful infatuation with Marxist internationalism, thinks that the globalist slant shouldn't be thrown out entirely. Surely the idea that the outside world can "help a bit" significantly underplays the position of the "outside world" -- which is the world, presumably, that uses oil and is lubricated regularly with Arabic money, invested in the intricate business of equities, bonds and derivatives. Where else are Pakistani generals going to hide their mega-bucks? Mr. Kennedy's seems to think that the Middle East can be wholly disconnected from the outside world -- but if the last two centuries have shown us anything, they've shown us that the outside world definitely wants things from the Middle East, and means to get them come hell or high water.
Okay, okay, Kennedy's teeter-totter ending is not Lewis' fault. Hell, Limited Inc has ended many a review in a platitudinous antithesis -- it is a remarkable fact about reviewing that one almost invariably runs out of things to say at the end of a review. Or, to put it more truthfully, things to say that sound like closure -- usually, there are plenty of things to say that would overleap the bounds of the review, but inspiration has to be reigned in if you are going to get a check in the mail from your publication.
So here is a better example of Lewis's over-generalizing. It comes from a New Yorker article entitled, typically, the Rage of Islam. In Lewis' world, Islam is a uniform thing that is always as splenetic as a crack addled gangbuster. The essay lifts off with this analysis of one of bin Laden's Unplugged vids:
"In his pronouncements, bin Laden makes frequent references to history. One of the most dramatic was his mention, in the October 7th videotape, of the "humiliation and disgrace" that Islam has suffered for "more than eighty years." Most American�and, no doubt, European�observers of the Middle Eastern scene began an anxious search for something that had happened "more than eighty years" ago, and came up with various answers. We can be fairly sure that bin Laden's Muslim listeners�the people he was addressing�picked up the allusion immediately and appreciated its significance. In 1918, the Ottoman sultanate, the last of the great Muslim empires, was finally defeated�its capital, Constantinople, occupied, its sovereign held captive, and much of its territory partitioned between the victorious British and French Empires. The Turks eventually succeeded in liberating their homeland, but they did so not in the name of Islam but through a secular nationalist movement."
Lewis' confidence that Pakistani and Egyptian and Iraqi listeners were signifying along with bin L. is odd. Personally, I doubt that there is a lot of moping in Pakistan about the fate of Mehmet VI. And there is something really wierd about the phrase "bin Laden's Muslim listeners" -- so odd that Lewis adds the opaque modifier, the people he was addressing. Because the implication, one congenial to Lewis' mindset, is that all Muslims were grooving on this kind of message. Lewis, however, knows he would be in trouble if he let that cat out of the bag. That bin L.'s intended audience was Muslim, as opposed to Buddhist, Hindu, or Satanist seems certain. Jim Jones' audience, in long ago Guyana, was Christian. Point is, the difference between set and subset, here, is considerable. Now, one might make the argument that it is in the extremes that we see the hidden essence. Sometimes Limited Inc is up for that kind of argument. But it has to be made in order to be made plausible. It is never made by Bernard L.
It is this kind of sloppy extapolating, this hanky panky with generalizations, that drives Bernard L.'s opponent (in heaven and hell and the New York Review of Books), Edward Said, fairly batty. Said counters with a sometimes ineffectual nominalism, saying that Islam isn't one thing. That seems obvious. The deeper problem is that Bernard L.'s generalizations seem to go down so well with his Christian/neo-liberal listeners -- the people he is addressing. So they tranquilly swallow things like this:
"In current American usage, the phrase "that's history" is commonly used to dismiss something as unimportant, of no relevance to current concerns, and, despite an immense investment in the teaching and writing of history, the general level of historical knowledge in our society is abysmally low. The Muslim peoples, like everyone else in the world, are shaped by their history, but, unlike some others, they are keenly aware of it. In the nineteen-eighties, during the Iran-Iraq war, for instance, both sides waged massive propaganda campaigns that frequently evoked events and personalities dating back as far as the seventh century. These were not detailed narratives but rapid, incomplete allusions, and yet both sides employed them in the secure knowledge that they would be understood by their target audiences�even by the large proportion of that audience that was illiterate. Middle Easterners' perception of history is nourished from the pulpit, by the schools, and by the media, and, although it may be�indeed, often is�slanted and inaccurate, it is nevertheless vivid and powerfully resonant."
Now, Bernie L. might be so far out of the petit bourgeois lifestyle (the one in which Limited Inc was nourished) that he's never gone to church, but if he had, he'd be amazed that Americans are continually refering to things that happened 2000 years ago. Worse, the one trope that Americans recognize from history, that can be used by every evangelist with confidence, has to do with the fall of the Roman empire -- which happened before the seventh century. It is referred to in rapid, incomplete allusions, but the empire is always thought to have fallen because of some special depravity of the Romans that the Americans are repeating. You don't, however, hear a lot of American commentators making much of our vivid and revanchist sense of this history, and what it says about our culture. In the same way that these thinkers don't often allude to the anti-scientific attitude that consistently shows up in polls -- only a minority of Americans believe in evolution, and stadiums full of them believe we all arrived on this planet six thousand years ago. If we took our survey of what America was like from your average AM radio sunday sermon, it would be a misconceived image indeed. Cultures contain contradictions. Lewis, however, thrives off describing Islam as if it were all one thing -- one horrid consistency, slice through it how you will. And this is what makes me rather avoid the man.
Well, I imagine the friend who asked for this post will not be happy with it. Limited Inc does try to please, but so often we simply... fail.
Unwisely, Limited Inc pledged to write about Bernard Lewis yesterday. A friend sent us a Paul Kennedy's review of B.L.'s latest book. This friend remarked on the last graf of that review, which reads:
"What, then, is to be done? At the end of the day, Lewis
argues, the answer lies within the Muslim world itself.
Either its societies, especially those in the Middle East,
will continue in ''a downward spiral of hate and spite,
rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression,'' with all that
implies for a horrible and troubled future; or ''they can
abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences
and join their talents, energies and resources in a common
creative endeavor'' to the benefit of themselves and the
rest of our planet. Perhaps the outside world can help a
bit, though probably not much. ''For the time being, the
choice is their own.'' With this final sentence, and all
that precedes it, Lewis has done us all -- Muslim and
non-Muslim alike -- a remarkable service."
Well, there seems to be two choices outlined here -- things can get worse, or things can get better. To which Limited Inc would add, things can stay the same. This pretty much completes the futures open to all God's creatures. What is interesting is the crash of all that nineties globalization confidence. Remember, the end of history, and the iron path to capitalist nirvana? Seemingly, that has hit the dustbin. Now we have whole regions that can only influence themselves. Still, Limited Inc, with our youthful infatuation with Marxist internationalism, thinks that the globalist slant shouldn't be thrown out entirely. Surely the idea that the outside world can "help a bit" significantly underplays the position of the "outside world" -- which is the world, presumably, that uses oil and is lubricated regularly with Arabic money, invested in the intricate business of equities, bonds and derivatives. Where else are Pakistani generals going to hide their mega-bucks? Mr. Kennedy's seems to think that the Middle East can be wholly disconnected from the outside world -- but if the last two centuries have shown us anything, they've shown us that the outside world definitely wants things from the Middle East, and means to get them come hell or high water.
Okay, okay, Kennedy's teeter-totter ending is not Lewis' fault. Hell, Limited Inc has ended many a review in a platitudinous antithesis -- it is a remarkable fact about reviewing that one almost invariably runs out of things to say at the end of a review. Or, to put it more truthfully, things to say that sound like closure -- usually, there are plenty of things to say that would overleap the bounds of the review, but inspiration has to be reigned in if you are going to get a check in the mail from your publication.
So here is a better example of Lewis's over-generalizing. It comes from a New Yorker article entitled, typically, the Rage of Islam. In Lewis' world, Islam is a uniform thing that is always as splenetic as a crack addled gangbuster. The essay lifts off with this analysis of one of bin Laden's Unplugged vids:
"In his pronouncements, bin Laden makes frequent references to history. One of the most dramatic was his mention, in the October 7th videotape, of the "humiliation and disgrace" that Islam has suffered for "more than eighty years." Most American�and, no doubt, European�observers of the Middle Eastern scene began an anxious search for something that had happened "more than eighty years" ago, and came up with various answers. We can be fairly sure that bin Laden's Muslim listeners�the people he was addressing�picked up the allusion immediately and appreciated its significance. In 1918, the Ottoman sultanate, the last of the great Muslim empires, was finally defeated�its capital, Constantinople, occupied, its sovereign held captive, and much of its territory partitioned between the victorious British and French Empires. The Turks eventually succeeded in liberating their homeland, but they did so not in the name of Islam but through a secular nationalist movement."
Lewis' confidence that Pakistani and Egyptian and Iraqi listeners were signifying along with bin L. is odd. Personally, I doubt that there is a lot of moping in Pakistan about the fate of Mehmet VI. And there is something really wierd about the phrase "bin Laden's Muslim listeners" -- so odd that Lewis adds the opaque modifier, the people he was addressing. Because the implication, one congenial to Lewis' mindset, is that all Muslims were grooving on this kind of message. Lewis, however, knows he would be in trouble if he let that cat out of the bag. That bin L.'s intended audience was Muslim, as opposed to Buddhist, Hindu, or Satanist seems certain. Jim Jones' audience, in long ago Guyana, was Christian. Point is, the difference between set and subset, here, is considerable. Now, one might make the argument that it is in the extremes that we see the hidden essence. Sometimes Limited Inc is up for that kind of argument. But it has to be made in order to be made plausible. It is never made by Bernard L.
It is this kind of sloppy extapolating, this hanky panky with generalizations, that drives Bernard L.'s opponent (in heaven and hell and the New York Review of Books), Edward Said, fairly batty. Said counters with a sometimes ineffectual nominalism, saying that Islam isn't one thing. That seems obvious. The deeper problem is that Bernard L.'s generalizations seem to go down so well with his Christian/neo-liberal listeners -- the people he is addressing. So they tranquilly swallow things like this:
"In current American usage, the phrase "that's history" is commonly used to dismiss something as unimportant, of no relevance to current concerns, and, despite an immense investment in the teaching and writing of history, the general level of historical knowledge in our society is abysmally low. The Muslim peoples, like everyone else in the world, are shaped by their history, but, unlike some others, they are keenly aware of it. In the nineteen-eighties, during the Iran-Iraq war, for instance, both sides waged massive propaganda campaigns that frequently evoked events and personalities dating back as far as the seventh century. These were not detailed narratives but rapid, incomplete allusions, and yet both sides employed them in the secure knowledge that they would be understood by their target audiences�even by the large proportion of that audience that was illiterate. Middle Easterners' perception of history is nourished from the pulpit, by the schools, and by the media, and, although it may be�indeed, often is�slanted and inaccurate, it is nevertheless vivid and powerfully resonant."
Now, Bernie L. might be so far out of the petit bourgeois lifestyle (the one in which Limited Inc was nourished) that he's never gone to church, but if he had, he'd be amazed that Americans are continually refering to things that happened 2000 years ago. Worse, the one trope that Americans recognize from history, that can be used by every evangelist with confidence, has to do with the fall of the Roman empire -- which happened before the seventh century. It is referred to in rapid, incomplete allusions, but the empire is always thought to have fallen because of some special depravity of the Romans that the Americans are repeating. You don't, however, hear a lot of American commentators making much of our vivid and revanchist sense of this history, and what it says about our culture. In the same way that these thinkers don't often allude to the anti-scientific attitude that consistently shows up in polls -- only a minority of Americans believe in evolution, and stadiums full of them believe we all arrived on this planet six thousand years ago. If we took our survey of what America was like from your average AM radio sunday sermon, it would be a misconceived image indeed. Cultures contain contradictions. Lewis, however, thrives off describing Islam as if it were all one thing -- one horrid consistency, slice through it how you will. And this is what makes me rather avoid the man.
Well, I imagine the friend who asked for this post will not be happy with it. Limited Inc does try to please, but so often we simply... fail.
Tuesday, January 29, 2002
Remora
Fame and consequences
Limited Inc doesn't understand celebrity, but we suspect that celebrity culture and modern forms of tyranny -- the personality cult, the panopticon corporation, the junta with the franchise torture chambers -- are related to each other in numerous unmentionable ways, joined in dark hallways and needle strewn toilet stalls. Obviously, at this site we are doing our best to remain obscure, so that we don't have this problem.
The Observer, Sunday, had a series of articles about modern celebrity. Some were trite -- for instance, this idea that Lord Byron was the first modern celebrity, which gets bandied about like a truism, just doesn't seem to be true. Marie Antoinette, who figured as a woman of capacious orifices and voracious sexual appetite in innumerable little street pamphlets in the 1780s, was a celebrity of the Britney Spears type. And what about Werther? Although a fictional character, he was a celebrity of the Harry Potter type -- that is, becoming known for being known. I've never read, and will never read, a Harry Potter book, yet I recognize the little boy face and the glasses instantly.
But to get to the dirty, Stalinistic heart of the star maker machinery, read this piece in the Observer by Lynn Barber.
Here are a couple grafs:
"The commonest demand is for copy approval - which means they want to see the article before publication and delete anything they don't like. In other words, power of censorship. Then there is picture approval - same idea, where the celebs get to choose which photos can be published and which can't. Robert Redford's press office used to put out 'instructions to picture editors' about where his photographs should be retouched - 'the wrinkled area between his lower lip and chin', 'the veins on his nose', 'the area around the throat and neck'.
Then there is 'writer approval' - the chosen weapon of top Hollywood PR Pat Kingsley. She simply bans any writers who ever write anything nasty about one of her clients from ever interviewing any of her clients again. I got the black spot from Kingsley years ago when I interviewed Nick Nolte for Vanity Fair. He didn't like the tone of my questions and Kingsley pulled the plug, before I'd even written a word. Of course, Vanity Fair could have defied her and published my interview anyway - but then where would it have got its future cover stars? (Kingsley's power increased further still last year when her company PMK merged with Huvane Baum Halls, previously a rival outfit in entertainment publicity. The resulting merger now means that one firm controls access to many of the A-list in Hollywood and Britain, including Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law.)"
Of course, this is all silly, right, mein Herr? Except that if you look around you, you will find that newspapers and magazines are full of this stuff -- these celeb stories -- which are admittedly censored. And this censoring is one small part of the culture machinery. To find out why movies mostly stink, check out how they are publicized, and who owns the media of publicity. Check out how Time advertises -- by "reporting' -- entertainment that AOL-Time-Warner-Godzilla owns. Monopoly debases, PR cretinizes. The implication for the way we live our lives is dire. Every time Gwyneth Paltrow is interviewed in Vanity Fair, every time Tom Hanks pronounces mindlessly on World War II for an HBO behind the scenes special, a little part of all of us dies. Our only hope is in stalkers and madmen.
Fame and consequences
Limited Inc doesn't understand celebrity, but we suspect that celebrity culture and modern forms of tyranny -- the personality cult, the panopticon corporation, the junta with the franchise torture chambers -- are related to each other in numerous unmentionable ways, joined in dark hallways and needle strewn toilet stalls. Obviously, at this site we are doing our best to remain obscure, so that we don't have this problem.
The Observer, Sunday, had a series of articles about modern celebrity. Some were trite -- for instance, this idea that Lord Byron was the first modern celebrity, which gets bandied about like a truism, just doesn't seem to be true. Marie Antoinette, who figured as a woman of capacious orifices and voracious sexual appetite in innumerable little street pamphlets in the 1780s, was a celebrity of the Britney Spears type. And what about Werther? Although a fictional character, he was a celebrity of the Harry Potter type -- that is, becoming known for being known. I've never read, and will never read, a Harry Potter book, yet I recognize the little boy face and the glasses instantly.
But to get to the dirty, Stalinistic heart of the star maker machinery, read this piece in the Observer by Lynn Barber.
Here are a couple grafs:
"The commonest demand is for copy approval - which means they want to see the article before publication and delete anything they don't like. In other words, power of censorship. Then there is picture approval - same idea, where the celebs get to choose which photos can be published and which can't. Robert Redford's press office used to put out 'instructions to picture editors' about where his photographs should be retouched - 'the wrinkled area between his lower lip and chin', 'the veins on his nose', 'the area around the throat and neck'.
Then there is 'writer approval' - the chosen weapon of top Hollywood PR Pat Kingsley. She simply bans any writers who ever write anything nasty about one of her clients from ever interviewing any of her clients again. I got the black spot from Kingsley years ago when I interviewed Nick Nolte for Vanity Fair. He didn't like the tone of my questions and Kingsley pulled the plug, before I'd even written a word. Of course, Vanity Fair could have defied her and published my interview anyway - but then where would it have got its future cover stars? (Kingsley's power increased further still last year when her company PMK merged with Huvane Baum Halls, previously a rival outfit in entertainment publicity. The resulting merger now means that one firm controls access to many of the A-list in Hollywood and Britain, including Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law.)"
Of course, this is all silly, right, mein Herr? Except that if you look around you, you will find that newspapers and magazines are full of this stuff -- these celeb stories -- which are admittedly censored. And this censoring is one small part of the culture machinery. To find out why movies mostly stink, check out how they are publicized, and who owns the media of publicity. Check out how Time advertises -- by "reporting' -- entertainment that AOL-Time-Warner-Godzilla owns. Monopoly debases, PR cretinizes. The implication for the way we live our lives is dire. Every time Gwyneth Paltrow is interviewed in Vanity Fair, every time Tom Hanks pronounces mindlessly on World War II for an HBO behind the scenes special, a little part of all of us dies. Our only hope is in stalkers and madmen.
Monday, January 28, 2002
Remora
According to a NYT article today, Cayman Island hosts more than 400 banks and 47,000 partnerships.
Not to fear, however, upscale reader. The NYT is infinitely understanding of the necessity, in the hot to trot global economy, of such multitudinous activity:
"Although Enron's multitude of partnerships have raised suspicions, officials and executives here said such companies are legitimately used by major corporations to defer taxes, maximize profits or provide a tax-neutral setting for deals involving businesses in two countries with different tax rates. Aircraft deals have become popular here, for example, because the island's stability is acceptable to manufacturers and insurers who worry about the political climate or legal protections of some Third World clients."
Ah, we understand now. If it is about Maximizing profits -- words that issue in thunder from the American exec's lips -- and we must, as the Nine Inch Nails song advises, bow down. One imagines the NYT about building the pyramids: Although Pharaoh Khufu's importation of slaves has raised suspicions of depopulating the Sudan, officials and executives here said that the Sudan was legitimately resourced in order to defer divine wrath, maximize the ruler's ability to proceed efficiently into the afterlife, and provide a working force capability for dangerous tasks unsuited to the court's own, more highly trained servants.
As though to emphasize the essential toothlessness of the criticism of Enron (mustn't let this spill over into criticizing deregulation itself, my god. The mantra must be defended), there's a story on the business page in which many a former consultant for Enron is quoted as to the essential soundness of the Enron business model
"According to experts who consulted for Enron in the field of finance, the company did not necessarily come up with a lot of powerful new ideas. Its strength was in synthesizing existing ideas, which sometimes led to innovative methods.
"They took a lot of finance theory and applied it in the context of their business," said Ramesh K. S. Rao, a professor of finance at the University of Texas who once consulted for Enron. "There was no magic to what they were doing."
Robert L. McDonald, a professor of finance at Northwestern, advised Enron on the use of derivatives from 1993 to 1995. He said the company needed advanced financial tools to price its derivatives, which specified energy products to be delivered at various times and sites while demand was uncertain. "That's a hard problem, so they were probably breaking some new ground trying to deal with that," he said. "It's the kind of thing that's easy to describe and may be hard to do."
Now, Limited Inc is a simple yokel, but isn't the question of expertise rather begged, here? Perhaps the experts that consulted for Enron displayed, in their spectacular bad judgment about what constitutes a good corporation, something like, well, in-expertise. It is a little like quoting professors of Marxist-Leninism who 'consulted' for the Soviet Union. And perhaps the interest of this group in maintaining an unregulated derivatives market should, uh, make us wonder whether this is the group of experts we want to turn to about Enron. The old excuse for the absense of oversight with regard to derivatives, hedge funds, and the like, is that these are games played by the rich exclusively for the rich. Why regulate, the story goes, when we are talking about multi-millionaires, who can take care of themselves? The problem with that argument is that it makes a bogus assumption: the money of the super-rich does not effect the rest of us. Well, it does. When the hedge fund of the super-rich borrows money from a bank, it automatically effects the clientele of the bank. When a trading company engages in rash energy derivatives trading that, for a brief time, brings about sharp increases in energy prices (California), it effects all the end users of energy. The excuse that somehow, high risk derivatives are separate from the rest of the economy, is threadbare. My brother told me that he listened to some Frontline last year, in which Kenny Boy Lay was interviewed, and that his impression was that Enron was pure evil. Limited Inc mentions this because we've talked to a person who works in the business school at UT who essentially said the same thing about listening to a talk given by some Enron exec about 'commodifying' water. These visceral responses register something important about the violation of a communal sense of decency -- a violation that expert consultants encourage, numb to this communal sense, which they dismiss as Luddite, or as out-group primitivism. Well, Limited Inc takes its stand with the hold-outs, the last adapters, the ones who resist. So there.
According to a NYT article today, Cayman Island hosts more than 400 banks and 47,000 partnerships.
Not to fear, however, upscale reader. The NYT is infinitely understanding of the necessity, in the hot to trot global economy, of such multitudinous activity:
"Although Enron's multitude of partnerships have raised suspicions, officials and executives here said such companies are legitimately used by major corporations to defer taxes, maximize profits or provide a tax-neutral setting for deals involving businesses in two countries with different tax rates. Aircraft deals have become popular here, for example, because the island's stability is acceptable to manufacturers and insurers who worry about the political climate or legal protections of some Third World clients."
Ah, we understand now. If it is about Maximizing profits -- words that issue in thunder from the American exec's lips -- and we must, as the Nine Inch Nails song advises, bow down. One imagines the NYT about building the pyramids: Although Pharaoh Khufu's importation of slaves has raised suspicions of depopulating the Sudan, officials and executives here said that the Sudan was legitimately resourced in order to defer divine wrath, maximize the ruler's ability to proceed efficiently into the afterlife, and provide a working force capability for dangerous tasks unsuited to the court's own, more highly trained servants.
As though to emphasize the essential toothlessness of the criticism of Enron (mustn't let this spill over into criticizing deregulation itself, my god. The mantra must be defended), there's a story on the business page in which many a former consultant for Enron is quoted as to the essential soundness of the Enron business model
"According to experts who consulted for Enron in the field of finance, the company did not necessarily come up with a lot of powerful new ideas. Its strength was in synthesizing existing ideas, which sometimes led to innovative methods.
"They took a lot of finance theory and applied it in the context of their business," said Ramesh K. S. Rao, a professor of finance at the University of Texas who once consulted for Enron. "There was no magic to what they were doing."
Robert L. McDonald, a professor of finance at Northwestern, advised Enron on the use of derivatives from 1993 to 1995. He said the company needed advanced financial tools to price its derivatives, which specified energy products to be delivered at various times and sites while demand was uncertain. "That's a hard problem, so they were probably breaking some new ground trying to deal with that," he said. "It's the kind of thing that's easy to describe and may be hard to do."
Now, Limited Inc is a simple yokel, but isn't the question of expertise rather begged, here? Perhaps the experts that consulted for Enron displayed, in their spectacular bad judgment about what constitutes a good corporation, something like, well, in-expertise. It is a little like quoting professors of Marxist-Leninism who 'consulted' for the Soviet Union. And perhaps the interest of this group in maintaining an unregulated derivatives market should, uh, make us wonder whether this is the group of experts we want to turn to about Enron. The old excuse for the absense of oversight with regard to derivatives, hedge funds, and the like, is that these are games played by the rich exclusively for the rich. Why regulate, the story goes, when we are talking about multi-millionaires, who can take care of themselves? The problem with that argument is that it makes a bogus assumption: the money of the super-rich does not effect the rest of us. Well, it does. When the hedge fund of the super-rich borrows money from a bank, it automatically effects the clientele of the bank. When a trading company engages in rash energy derivatives trading that, for a brief time, brings about sharp increases in energy prices (California), it effects all the end users of energy. The excuse that somehow, high risk derivatives are separate from the rest of the economy, is threadbare. My brother told me that he listened to some Frontline last year, in which Kenny Boy Lay was interviewed, and that his impression was that Enron was pure evil. Limited Inc mentions this because we've talked to a person who works in the business school at UT who essentially said the same thing about listening to a talk given by some Enron exec about 'commodifying' water. These visceral responses register something important about the violation of a communal sense of decency -- a violation that expert consultants encourage, numb to this communal sense, which they dismiss as Luddite, or as out-group primitivism. Well, Limited Inc takes its stand with the hold-outs, the last adapters, the ones who resist. So there.
Remora
"There is a sense in which, if you chafe at the present complacently 'liberal' consensus, the reputation of Isaiah Berlin stands like a lion in your path," wrote Christopher Hitchens in an almost perfect takedown of that reputation a couple of years ago in The London Review. Sadly, the essay is unavailable on the Net, so I am quoting from Ignatieff's refutation in the Guardian. There's a recent demonstration of Berlin's general mediocrity in the New Republic -- a letter to George Kennan, no less, mandarin to mandarin communication, which we acolytes and students tremble in our boots to hear. Words of the mighty, man. Shall I excerpt, reader? Here is an example of country and western music masquerading as philosophy:
"...you say (and I am not quoting) that every man possesses a point of weakness, an Achilles' heel, and by exploiting this a man may be made a hero or a martyr or a rag. Again, if I understand you correctly, you think that Western civilisation has rested upon the principle that, whatever else was permitted or forbidden, the one heinous act which would destroy the world was to do precisely this--the deliberate act of tampering with human beings so as to make them behave in a way which, if they knew what they were doing, or what its consequences were likely to be, would make them recoil with horror and disgust. The whole of the Kantian morality (and I don't know about Catholics, but Protestants, Jews, Muslims and high-minded atheists believe it) lies in this; the mysterious phrase about men being "ends in themselves," to which much lip-service has been paid, with not much attempt to explain it, seems to lie in this: that every human being is assumed to possess the capacity to choose what to do, and what to be, however narrow the limits within which his choice may lie, however hemmed in by circumstances beyond his control; that all human love and respect rests upon the attribution of conscious motives in this sense; that all the categories, the concepts, in terms of which we think about and act towards one another--goodness, badness, integrity and lack of it, the attribution of dignity or honour to others which we must not insult or exploit, the entire cluster of ideas such as honesty, purity of motive, courage, sense of truth, sensibility, compassion, justice; and, on the other side, brutality, falseness, wickedness, ruthlessness, lack of scruple, corruption, lack of feelings, emptiness--all these notions in terms of which we think of others and ourselves, in terms of which conduct is assessed, purposes adopted--all this becomes meaningless unless we think of human beings as capable of pursuing ends for their own sakes by deliberate acts of choice--which alone makes nobility noble and sacrifices sacrifices. "
This sounds better on the jukebox than as an argument. The capacity to choose what to do, followed by the modifying "however narrow the limits within which his choice may lie," has that nice yodeling affect, like the honking of a truck going down the foggy road, leaving a diner. But if you are the coldhearted type (stick a thermometer in Limited Inc's heart and register that 32 degrees fahrenheit, baby), you might wonder what on earth this is supposed to mean. Where are those limits coming from, for one thing? Other choices? and the phrase about all human love and respect -- really? Love seems to me to be, to say the least, a problematic emotion to link to the capacity for choice -- are determinists really bad lovers? in fact, in the vocabulary of love, fate has featured for a long time, at least since the Troubadors, as a figure, an intensifier appropriate to the headiness of the sensual flow. Love obviously has a broader definition than is encompassed by describing Abelard's passion for Heloise - there's love of country, there's love of one's kids, etc. Still, Berlin's phrase has that coercive aura -- not a truth, but whatever it is, don't disagree with it, at the risk of being considered a bastard.
But Berlin gets more lachrymose, and more incoherent, as he goes on. Here he is commenting on Hegel and Marx:
"All this [the praise of our choicemaking volk] may seem an enormous platitude, but, if it is true, this is, of course, what ultimately refutes utilitarianism and what makes Hegel and Marx such monstrous traitors to our civilisation. When, in the famous passage, Ivan Karamazov rejects the worlds upon worlds of happiness which may be bought at the price of the torture to death of one innocent child, what can utilitarians, even the most civilised and humane, say to him? After all, it is in a sense unreasonable to throw away so much human bliss purchased at so small a price as one--only one--innocent victim, done to death however horribly--what after all is one soul against the happiness of so many? Nevertheless, when Ivan says he would rather return the ticket, no reader of Dostoevsky thinks this cold-hearted or mad or irresponsible; and although a long course of Bentham or Hegel might turn one into a supporter of the Grand Inquisitor, qualms remain."
This reading of Hegel is ludicrous, and derives more from Bertrand Russell's caricature of the guy in his History of Philosophy than any coming to grips with the passages re Antigone in the Phenomenology of Mind. And a closer reading of Ivan would rather complicate Berlin's scenario, since Ivan in the end simply holds the ticket, so to speak, chosing not to act when Karamazov pere is murdered. Of course, the father is no innocent, and that for the Berlin type, always transmitting sentimentality into necessity and the law of human nature, makes all the difference. It shouldn't for grown-ups.
"There is a sense in which, if you chafe at the present complacently 'liberal' consensus, the reputation of Isaiah Berlin stands like a lion in your path," wrote Christopher Hitchens in an almost perfect takedown of that reputation a couple of years ago in The London Review. Sadly, the essay is unavailable on the Net, so I am quoting from Ignatieff's refutation in the Guardian. There's a recent demonstration of Berlin's general mediocrity in the New Republic -- a letter to George Kennan, no less, mandarin to mandarin communication, which we acolytes and students tremble in our boots to hear. Words of the mighty, man. Shall I excerpt, reader? Here is an example of country and western music masquerading as philosophy:
"...you say (and I am not quoting) that every man possesses a point of weakness, an Achilles' heel, and by exploiting this a man may be made a hero or a martyr or a rag. Again, if I understand you correctly, you think that Western civilisation has rested upon the principle that, whatever else was permitted or forbidden, the one heinous act which would destroy the world was to do precisely this--the deliberate act of tampering with human beings so as to make them behave in a way which, if they knew what they were doing, or what its consequences were likely to be, would make them recoil with horror and disgust. The whole of the Kantian morality (and I don't know about Catholics, but Protestants, Jews, Muslims and high-minded atheists believe it) lies in this; the mysterious phrase about men being "ends in themselves," to which much lip-service has been paid, with not much attempt to explain it, seems to lie in this: that every human being is assumed to possess the capacity to choose what to do, and what to be, however narrow the limits within which his choice may lie, however hemmed in by circumstances beyond his control; that all human love and respect rests upon the attribution of conscious motives in this sense; that all the categories, the concepts, in terms of which we think about and act towards one another--goodness, badness, integrity and lack of it, the attribution of dignity or honour to others which we must not insult or exploit, the entire cluster of ideas such as honesty, purity of motive, courage, sense of truth, sensibility, compassion, justice; and, on the other side, brutality, falseness, wickedness, ruthlessness, lack of scruple, corruption, lack of feelings, emptiness--all these notions in terms of which we think of others and ourselves, in terms of which conduct is assessed, purposes adopted--all this becomes meaningless unless we think of human beings as capable of pursuing ends for their own sakes by deliberate acts of choice--which alone makes nobility noble and sacrifices sacrifices. "
This sounds better on the jukebox than as an argument. The capacity to choose what to do, followed by the modifying "however narrow the limits within which his choice may lie," has that nice yodeling affect, like the honking of a truck going down the foggy road, leaving a diner. But if you are the coldhearted type (stick a thermometer in Limited Inc's heart and register that 32 degrees fahrenheit, baby), you might wonder what on earth this is supposed to mean. Where are those limits coming from, for one thing? Other choices? and the phrase about all human love and respect -- really? Love seems to me to be, to say the least, a problematic emotion to link to the capacity for choice -- are determinists really bad lovers? in fact, in the vocabulary of love, fate has featured for a long time, at least since the Troubadors, as a figure, an intensifier appropriate to the headiness of the sensual flow. Love obviously has a broader definition than is encompassed by describing Abelard's passion for Heloise - there's love of country, there's love of one's kids, etc. Still, Berlin's phrase has that coercive aura -- not a truth, but whatever it is, don't disagree with it, at the risk of being considered a bastard.
But Berlin gets more lachrymose, and more incoherent, as he goes on. Here he is commenting on Hegel and Marx:
"All this [the praise of our choicemaking volk] may seem an enormous platitude, but, if it is true, this is, of course, what ultimately refutes utilitarianism and what makes Hegel and Marx such monstrous traitors to our civilisation. When, in the famous passage, Ivan Karamazov rejects the worlds upon worlds of happiness which may be bought at the price of the torture to death of one innocent child, what can utilitarians, even the most civilised and humane, say to him? After all, it is in a sense unreasonable to throw away so much human bliss purchased at so small a price as one--only one--innocent victim, done to death however horribly--what after all is one soul against the happiness of so many? Nevertheless, when Ivan says he would rather return the ticket, no reader of Dostoevsky thinks this cold-hearted or mad or irresponsible; and although a long course of Bentham or Hegel might turn one into a supporter of the Grand Inquisitor, qualms remain."
This reading of Hegel is ludicrous, and derives more from Bertrand Russell's caricature of the guy in his History of Philosophy than any coming to grips with the passages re Antigone in the Phenomenology of Mind. And a closer reading of Ivan would rather complicate Berlin's scenario, since Ivan in the end simply holds the ticket, so to speak, chosing not to act when Karamazov pere is murdered. Of course, the father is no innocent, and that for the Berlin type, always transmitting sentimentality into necessity and the law of human nature, makes all the difference. It shouldn't for grown-ups.
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