According to the Forth Worth Star Telegram, Ashcroft’s DOJ report on the Patriot Act claims that it "has charged 310 defendants with criminal offenses as a result of terrorism investigations" since 9-11, and that 179 have been convicted.

The thirty five of that number who were charged in Iowa have turned out to be a fiercesome group of dedicated jihadists, according to a story in the Des Moines Register (via Atrios). The story, picked up by the Omaha paper, lists some of the villains:

“Included among the 35 cases were:

• Four American-born laborers who omitted mention of prior drug convictions or other crimes when they were assigned by a contractor to a runway construction project at the Des Moines airport or when they applied for manual-labor jobs there.

• Five Mexican citizens who stole cans of baby formula from store shelves throughout Iowa and sold them to a man of Arab descent for later resale.

• Two Pakistani men who entered into or solicited sham marriages so that they and their friends could continue to live in the Waterloo area and work at convenience stores there.”

Our favorite quote in the article comes from Ashcroft’s prosecutor on the spot, Richard Murphey. Surely Murphey was suckled on J. Edgar Hoover’s You Can Trust the Communists (to be Communist). Tough as nails, the man’s x ray vision saw right through that baby food scam, and what he saw sent shivers through his spine: the attack on Western Civilization:

“Prosecutors stressed that many of the Iowa cases were classic examples of illegal activities that are perpetrated by terrorist groups. And though any evidence of terrorist connections or motives was rarely mentioned in the courtroom, officials implied that some of the suspects might still be under suspicion, even since their release.

"'Bona fide' terrorism is a matter of semantics," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Murphy, who heads the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Cedar Rapids. "I don't think you can draw conclusions based on what a person is convicted of."

Murphy has started a strike force to target jaywalking by anyone with a terrorist sounding last name. There are also the terrorist shop lifters to go after – especially the ones that ‘boost’ gateway products, like lipstick and hair dye. In a memo that LI has obtained from the famed prosecutor’s office, he explains: “Lipstick and hair dye look trivial to the civilian eye. The fellow travelers and soft on crime crowd will yell and whine. But remember: yesterday’s thefts of Maybelline TN-100 lead to tomorrow’s thefts of aluminum tubes and yellowcake uranium. There are no gray areas here. You are with us, or against us.

Just yesterday there was report of an Arab looking fellow cheating a McDonald’s take out cashier of a buck fifty. This guy is loose in America. He could meet your daughter tomorrow. Think about it.”

Bollettino
 
This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead - all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.
– Michel Foucault,  Discipline and Punish 
  
 
There is an aspect of the Bush administration’s conservatism that has not often enough been scrutinized: its attachment to the engineering achievements of the late nineteenth century. Hence its love affair with the internal combustion engine, the coal burning power plant, and the test.
 
Bush naïve fondness for testing is like a man who judges the success of his dentist by the amount of pain the man inflicts.  From what we know of Bush’s academic career, he was never a good taker of tests. He took away from that experience a certain awe of them. Tests, in his mind, are powerful idols that must be placated. If you placate them with enough sacrifice, you receive a good grade. And if you receive a good grade, you must have learned something. Given this chain of reasoning, it is no wonder that his educational initiative is perhaps the most concentrated expression of testmania in American history.
 
LI is, on the contrary, an old skeptic of tests. We have taught classes, given tests, and graded them. Indeed, usually our grades did correspond with our intuitions about the relative merits of our students – their grasp of the subject, their willingness to work, and their acquaintance with the elements of English grammar. However, as an instrument for assessing learning, we find testing highly suspect. Like all assessments of human performance, its advocates like to cast over it the aura of objective measurement. But because assessment is embedded in social activity, the measurement, here, inevitably effects the thing measured. While the cloth is indifferent to the ruler the seamstress lays over it to cut off a given length, humans are not at all indifferent to measurements that will reward or punish them, and will change their behavior accordingly. Teaching the test instead of teaching, the numbers achieved by American kids may go up, but the quality of what they learn will certainly go down. This, we think, makes testmania a disaster for U.S. education.
 
That disaster emerges from two things: the qualitative change brought about in the social nature of knowledge from the quantitative change in knowledge itself, which necessitates that shedding of a context of schooling adapted for the assembly line rather than the network; and the nature of the test itself, as a disciplinary, rather than a learning, tool, as it has developed in the American classroom.
 
More later. 
  
 

Bollettino
 
But I will never believe that all natural Knowledge was shut up in Aristotle's Brain, or that the Heathen only invaded Nature, and found out her Strength. We know that Time and not Reason, Experience and not Art both taught the Causes of such Effects, as that Sowerness doth Co[...]gulate Milk; but ask the Reason why and how it does it, and Vulgar Philosophy cannot satisfie you; nor in many Things of the like Nature, as why Grass is green rather than red. Man hardly discerns the Things on Earth; his Time is but short to learn, and begins no sooner to learn than to dye: Whose Memory has but a borrowed Knowledge; understanding nothing truly, and is ignorant of the Essence of his own Soul; which Aristotle could never define, but by effects, which all Men know as well as he. – Sir Walter Raleigh
 
The prestige of the  experiment
In 1877, John Tyndall gave an address in Belfast that was emblematic of the high and confident positivism of the time. In one passage, he violates one of the canons of Victorian gentility – the Oxford variety – by aligning himself with the gloriously vulgar tradition, going back to Francis Bacon, of using Aristotle, conceived of as the father of  a lot of a priori nonsense, as an all purpose punching bag:  
 
“…in Aristotle, as in Goethe, it was not, I believe, misdirection, but sheer natural incapacity which lay at the root of his mistakes. As a physicist, Aristotle displayed what we should consider some of the worst attributes of a modern physical investigator: indistinctness of ideas, confusion of mind, and a confident use of language, which led to the delusive notion that he had really mastered his subject, while he had as yet failed to grasp even the elements of it. He put words in the place of things, subject in the place of object. He preached Induction without practising it, inverting the true order of inquiry by passing from the general to the particular, instead of from the particular to the general. He made of the universe a closed sphere, in the centre of which he fixed the earth, proving from general principles, to his own satisfaction and to that of the world for near 2,000 years, that no other universe was possible. His notions of motion were entirely unphysical. It was natural or unnatural, better or worse, calm or violentóno real mechanical conception regarding it lying at the bottom of his mind. He affirmed that a vacuum could not exist, and proved that if it did exist motion in it would be impossible. He determined a priori how many species of animals must exist, and shows on general principles why animals must have such and such parts. When an eminent contemporary philosopher, who is far removed from errors of this kind, remembers these abuses of the a priori method, he will be able to make allowance for the jealousy of physicists as to the acceptance of so-called a priori truths. Aristotle's errors of detail, as shown by Eucken and Lange, were grave and numerous. He affirmed that only in man we had the beating of the heart, that the left side of the body was colder than the right, that men have more teeth than women, and that there is an empty space at the back of every man's head.
There is one essential quality in physical conceptions which was entirely wanting in those of Aristotle and his followers. I wish it could be expressed by a word untainted by its associations; it signifies a capability of being placed as a coherent picture before the mind. The Germans express the act of picturing by the word vorstellen, and the picture they call a Vorstellung. We have no word in English which comes nearer to our requirements than Imagination, and, taken with its proper limitations, the word answers very well; but, as just intimated, it is tainted by its associations, and therefore objectionable to some minds.”

Tyndall’s groping attempt to put his chemical stained fingers around a term to distinguish a distinct, yet under-conceptualized  mental act  – and can’t one feel him almost painfully balance just on the edge of the unknown word, like Watson trying to follow one of Holmes’ points – eerily points to the need that was met ten years later, when just the thing emerged under the pen of a German physicist, Ernst Mach. The Gedanken-experiment was born.

Ever since, it has been retrospectively accorded to other times and conceptual schemes, as I’ve tried to point to in previous posts. I’ve also tried to point to the problem in taking the thought experiment seriously as an experiment.

We don’t kid ourselves that our objections will squelch the word. We don’t want to. The relation between the thought experiment and the experiment is like the relation between the red breasted American thrush and the English robin: they look enough alike that English settlers in the New World called the thrush a robin. Lexically, only a pedant would object to that – taxonomically, it is a disaster. 

A common defense of thought experiments, among philosophers, is that thought experiments are a common element of science. In fact,  we have read claims that in certain scientific discourses, they have an essential function. LI doesn’t doubt it. However, the move from saying that that class of things that we call “thought experiments” play a role in science to saying that they are indeed a type of experiment is not dependent on a clear view of experiments, but on the prestige of science, which is considered to be ultimately experimental. In other words, we are eye to eye with a vicious circle. Prestige, here, underwrites this logical leap. What it tells us is two things: we are dealing, first of all, with myth; and secondly, we are dealing with myth in terms of a the archaic system of legitimation that consists in referring to authority, rather than rationality.

Our protest against the prestige of thought experiments in philosophy stems from our sense of what experiment meant in the first place. Tyndall’s cool evaluation of Aristotle might not be textually correct re the man himself, but it is certainly correct about the spirit of Aristotelianism. The introduction of the experimental method in Europe in the seventeenth century was about one thing: the art of discovery. The point was to get outside of your head. That the world outside could be discovered was a tremendously exciting and hazardous thing.

The mania for thought experiments cruelly inverts this moment. Reflection, instead of being forced to confront the obdurant outlines of some irrepressible piece of exteriority, contents itself with the soft and pleasing task of creating bad fictions in the image of its desires. The movement from Bacon, whose death as a ‘martyr to experimentation’ is well described by Macaulay – see our little note – to  the spectacle of a Chalmers, doing “consciousness science’ by means of infantile fantasies of zombies, is a painful indicator that civilization ain’t what it used to be.

In  a conference on thought experiments that was published in the 1992 PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Ian Hacking, one of LI’s favorite philosophers, commented on the papers presented that defended the validity of the thought experiment. He conceded the force of many of the arguments for thought experiments, but his emphasis was on the fact that he felt, in the presence of the thought experiment, unmoved. That is, he felt that the experiment was not explicative. Experiments, in Hacking’s account, have a life – thought experiments exist frozen in their pictorial essence. Referring to Thomas Kuhn’s essay on thought experiments, Hacking points to the character of good thought experiments:
 
“… thought experiments are rather fixed, largely immutable. That is yet another respect that thye are like mathematical  proofs, but good proofs have proof ideas that can be used over and over in new contexts – which is not, in general the case with thought experiments. They have just one tension to expose. Of course there are false starts, and the exposition gets neater over time. And here the prescience of Kuhn’s paper comes to the fore. The reason that people wrestle with thought experiments, use thme for exposition and pu-down argument, is that they can reveal tensions between one vision of the world and another. They can dislodge a person from a certain way of describing the worlds. They can replace one picture by another. That is their job, their once and future job.”
 
This is all we really feel like saying about thought experiments. Campers, come home! We’ll talk about something less elevated in our next post. Promise.
 
Note: Macaulay’s description of Bacon’s death:
It had occurred to him that snow might be used with advantage for the purpose of preventing animal substances from putrefying. On a very cold day, early in the spring of the year 1626, he alighted from his coach near Highgate, in order to try the experiment. He went into a cottage, bought a fowl, and with his own hands stuffed it with snow. While thus engaged he felt a sudden chill, and was soon so much indisposed that it was impossible for him to return to Gray's Inn. The Earl of Arundel, with whom he was well acquainted, had a house at Highgate. To that house Bacon was carried. The Earl was absent; but the servants who were in charge of the place showed great respect and attention to the illustrious guest. Here, after an illness of about a week, he expired early on the morning of Easter-day, 1626. His mind appears to have retained its strength and liveliness to the end. He did not forget the fowl which had caused his death. In the last letter that he ever wrote, with fingers which, as he said, could not steadily hold a pen, he did not omit to mention that the experiment of the snow had succeeded "excellently well"   

Bollettino

In his comments to my little note on thought experiments, Paul made two challenges. The second of those challenges is not, I think, a real problem. Paul asks whether my criteria for an experiment – that there be a performative stage in it – wouldn’t be fulfilled in going through a syllogism, thus collapsing the distinction between experiment and logic. There are two things to say here. One is that performance in and of itself isn’t sufficient to make an experiment, even though I maintain that it is necessary condition on any experiment. The second is that the material performance of the experiment must be such that it is somehow connected to the design of the experiment. That connection is what the risk in the experiment is all about. So, to use the example of the experiments made on humans in light deprived environments, the performance of the experiment put at risk a hypothesis about the length of human’s circadian rhythm. This is quite different from positing that all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, or that all dogs are born of bitches, and Lassie is a dog, etc., etc. The inscription of such sentences is not in itself a performance that puts at risk the logical connection between variables and functions one wishes to demonstrate.

It is always possible to transform a thought experiment into some sort of performance. I could easily make a cartoon, for instance, out of Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment. But the making of a cartoon does not fulfill the performative function of the experiment, which is “about” a man matching Chinese symbols with English symbols.

Paul’s first objection seems similar, but it is, I think, a more potent balestra. He asks whether something like proofs in Euclid’s geometry aren’t performative in just the way I’m maintaining. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Paul is echoing a comment of Lakatos, as cited in this excellent overview of thought-experiments by Michael Stoeltzner at the University of Pittsburg’s Philosophy of Science site.

“Interestingly, Mach held that the purest thought experiments occur in mathematics which, on his account, was economically ordered experience. A similar connection was introduced into modern philosophy of mathematics by Imre Lakatos who contraposed the informal mathematical thought experiment to the formal Euclidean proof. “Thought-experiment (deiknymi) was the most ancient pattern of mathematical proofs.” (1976, p. 9 fn.1) The terminological parallel, to be sure, was drawn by Lakatos because the cited book of Árpád Szabó interprets deiknymi as “to make the truth or falsity of a mathematical statement visible in some way;” (1978, p. 189) with the progress of Greek mathematics deiknymi developed into the technical term for formal proof.”

Why does this differ from the syllogism example? I think the Euclidean proof, viewed in this way, could well be the ancestor of the computer simulation. Computer simulations have an uneasy relationship with the experimental tradition. However, I accept the fact that simulations can produce valid results, can be designed, like experiments, and can have a performative term that encodes risk as in experiments. I accept, in other words, that simulations can be a sub-species of experiment. However, my instinct is that the demonstration is not a computer simulation, because the analogy between design, performance, and result is imperfect.

When I say that the performative term is an encounter with risk, I am merely saying, in my own peculiar way, something that is a commonplace of teaching experimental design. If you look at courses in universities where e.d. is taught, you will notice that it is taught in terms of statistics. This was the great 19th century synthesis. While the popular image is still of the one experiment that proves this or that, the laboratory truth is that the results of iterated experiments vary to some extent, and that experiments themselves are usually grouped together by varying certain elements in the e.d. In other words, instead of a singular phenomenon, the experiment is usually part of a collection of experiments, over which one sums using orthodox statistical methods. I have been trying to avoid highlighting observation, the usual key phrase in talking about experiment, because observation tends to obscure both the performative term of the experiment and the risk inherent to that term – its encoding of such form as would make it statistically available. While computer simulations can be analyzed from this perspective, it is hard to see how Euclidian proofs fit this schema.

To return to the estimable Stoeltzner, he cites some considerable philosophic meandering around this very point by those who make the strong case for thought-experiments as experiments:

“… where are thought experiments located on the scale between theory and experiment? On Norton’s account, they are closer to theory, or at least to the argumentative analysis of an experiment, and they can accommodate rather general philosophical principles into a scientific argument. Andrew D. Irvine holds that “the parallel between physical experiments and thought experiments is a strong one.” (1991, p. 150) All assumptions of a thought experiment must be supported by independently confirmed observations and it typically has repercussions on a certain background theory. On Irvine’s account, the fact that “many thought experiments are meant to precede real experiments in which the original thought experiment’s premises are actually instantiated” (Ibid., p. 151) and the fact that some elements of a thought experiment are assumed to be true, proves that it typically contains some but not only counterfactual elements. Ronald Laymon proposes to render benign the counterfactual character of thought experiments involving frictionless surfaces and the like by treating them as “ideal limits of real experimentation.” (1991, p. 167)”

LI’s case against the thought experiment as experiment depends, in part, on showing that thought experiments aren’t very much like experiments. But we are not experts in experimentation. We’ve pointed to obvious problems that would occur to anyone. We are, however, sensitive to status cues in texts, and we are going to turn, in our next post on this topic, to the prestige of the experiment. Our hypothesis is that the pullulation of thought experiments in philosophy has less to do with the epistemological advantages of experimentation and more to do with the prestige accrued by the image of the experiment – what Barthes would call the myth of the experiment.

Bollettino

LI urges our readers to go to James Meek’s article about Siberia and Russia in the LRB, here: He takes down, with exemplary disdain, a Brookings Institute study by two residents, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, of Russia’s climate problem – which problem being the results of two centuries of Russian empire building that has left a considerable portion of the population in a part of the world where temperatures shift from the merely nippy, on the odd June day, to the deeper pockets of the frost-bite zone. Stalin’s mad and cruel relocating of significant masses of Russians to Siberia, in order to hack out the natural wealth of the region, has left Russia as a country that resembles an efficiency apartment connected to an industrial sized freezer.

This, at least, is an observation that binds him to the people in the book he is reviewing. But he is unbound from the book by retaining a humanity that escapes the untrammeled and witless rationality of people in think tanks. We like, for instance, these two grafs:

Hill and Gaddy's conclusion - that the coldest and most remote parts of Russia, as currently developed, are a constraint on the country's prosperity and happiness - is correct. Some of their insights are useful. Yet their tone is condescending, their methodology flawed and their central recommendation to the Russian government smacks of the same callous social engineering that made Siberia such a mess in the first place.

'The government should place a priority on relocating Siberia's youth,' Hill and Gaddy declare. 'While it may seem harsh, the challenge of maintaining the stranded elderly population of Siberia is something of a finite proposition.' Well, it does seem harsh. To subsidise the young to flee Siberia, leaving their parents and grandparents behind to die off in the land of ice and snow? When Hill and Gaddy know perfectly well that the Russian bureaucracy is not yet capable of exercising a proper duty of care to the weakest members of society, and that the elderly are often dependent on their families for support? What if there had been a team from the Brookings Institution on board the Titanic? 'Young, able-bodied males and females first! The rest of you finite propositions, carry on dancing.'

We also were cheered by the scoring off the Yanks that occurs in the last graf. Hmm, we wonder if his conclusions could be transposed to other, um, recend foreign policy disasters?

“Not the least of the attractions of The Siberian Curse is that it shows how little US academia has learned from its clumsy interventions in Russian economic policy in the early 1990s, when a flood of America-knows-best advisers introduced unscrupulous Russians to the Pandora's box of shareholder capitalism without taking any real interest in the checks and balances - trade unions, subsidies, lobby groups, public transport, welfare - which enable the 'free' market to work without complete brutality, even in the US.”

Bollettino
“During one of my visits with Iranian war victims last summer, one veteran -- plastic tubes pumping oxygen into his body through his nostrils -- asked me why there was no international outrage when Iraq used chemical weapons. "Why did the world look the other way?" he asked imploringly. The United States and the international community should urge the Iraqi governing council to "look the other away" no more. All victims of Saddam's foreign wars should be included in the indictment, not just those who happen to be allies of the United States.

All over the world, too many people think of Washington's human rights approach as selective, based on national interest, not moral imperative. Here's an opportunity to prove the naysayers wrong and do what is morally right -- as quaint a notion as that may be in international affairs. Now is the moment when Washington could step forward and urge the Iraqi governing council to include Iran's victims in the criminal docket in Hussein's trial.” – Afshin Molavi Washington Post

LI’s post, July 1: “In the typical hamhanded fashion of the CPA, Hussein is being charged with the crime of invading Kuwait, but not Iran, thereby sending the message that if you are going to wage a war of disastrous aggression and kill 500,000 people, be sure to buy your arms from approved Western dealers.”

Bollettino

Les idées expérimentales, comme nous le verrons plus tard, peuvent naître
soit à propos d'un fait observé par hasard, soit à la suite d'une tentative expérimentale,soit comme corollaires d'une théorie admise. Ce qu'il faut seulement noter pour le moment, c'est que l'idée expérimentale n'est point arbitraire ni purement imaginaire ; elle doit avoir toujours un point d'appui dans la réalité observée, c'est-à-dire dans la nature. L'hypothèse expérimentale, en un mot, doit toujours être fondée sur une observation antérieure. – Claude Bernard

LI has been pondering various ways of approaching the multitudinous subject of the thought experiment, soi disant. We have gotten some mail on this topic. The mail was puzzled – as in, what the hell is our point? So before we trace the geneology back to Socrates (both as mythmaker and myth), and make the usual grand historical tour in a paragraph, perhaps we should hatch an argument out of a diffuse discontent.

Okay. Fair enough. What is the problem, then, with thought experiments?

Here it is: the problem is that thought experiments often seem more like experimental designs than experiments. When Popperians (of the Karl, not the Mary, persuasion) talk of conjecture and refutation, or when Bernard talks of observation, or when we use that experiment on circadian rhythm that we pointed to in our last post, all are trying to indicate that experiment has a middle, material term. That material term – the content of the experimental process itself – is such that it creates a distinct point of reference different from the experimental design. I might say to myself, say, what are the circadian rhythms of human beings like? And I might then devise a way of denying human beings sunlight as a clever way of extracting those rhythms. But until I have done the work of actually plunging the human beings into darkened chambers or subterranean caverns, I haven’t performed the experiment. Whereas performance and experimental design seem to collapse together when, for instance, I want to make the argument that artificial intelligence is impossible to prove, and I come up with a story about a machine, an input of Chinese symbols, a person within the machine, and an output of English words.

My argument, then, is that a thought experiment lacks a performative dimension. And that depends, in turn, on the idea that thought doesn’t perform. I don’t like that supposition, but for the moment, this is the side I’m taking. Until I wiggle out of it.

Now, defenders of the thought experiment often use early ‘thought experiments in science and philosophy to make the point that there has always been something “like” the thought experiment. What they don’t do is ask what these early “thought experiments” were called by their creators. LI suspects that the conjunction of thought and experiment, as a lexical event is part of the prestige accrued by the experiment during the nineteenth century. When Zola, reading Bernard, decides to apply Bernard’s “experimental method” to writing – when he writes the “Roman experimentale” – we are crossing a threshold. It is about that same time that Mach coins the term “Gedanken-experiment.”

Before that moment, there were riddles, problems, demonstrations, etc. etc. Take the the Molyneux problem. When Locke considers it in the Essay on Human Understanding, he doesn’t compare it to an experiment – although Locke was very familiar with experiments, of course. The end of the seventeenth century was a veritable Island of Laputa, filled with experiments and projects.

This is Locke:
“So that from that which is truly variety of shadow or colour, collecting the figure, it makes it pass for a mark of figure, and frames to itself the perception of a convex figure and an uniform colour; when the idea we receive from thence is only a plane variously coloured, as is evident in painting. To which purpose I shall here insert a problem of that very ingenious and studious promoter of real knowledge, the learned and worthy Mr. Molyneux, which he was pleased to send me in a letter some months since; and it is this:- "Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table, and the blind man be made to see: quaere, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?" To which the acute and judicious proposer answers, "Not. For, though he has obtained the experience of how a globe, how a cube affects his touch, yet he has not yet obtained the experience, that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his sight so or so; or that a protuberant angle in the cube, that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye as it does in the cube."- I agree with this thinking gentleman, whom I am proud to call my friend, in his answer to this problem; and am of opinion that the blind man, at first sight, would not be able with certainty to say which was the globe, which the cube, whilst he only saw them; though he could unerringly name them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the difference of their figures felt. This I have set down, and leave with my reader, as an occasion for him to consider how much he may be beholden to experience, improvement, and acquired notions, where he thinks he had not the least use of, or help from them. And the rather, because this observing gentleman further adds, that "having, upon the occasion of my book, proposed this to divers very ingenious men, he hardly ever met with one that at first gave the answer to it which he thinks true, till by hearing his reasons they were convinced.”

This has all the hallmarks of the kind of thought experiments that analytic philosophers go nuts over – in fact, one of those t-e’s, Frank Jackson’s Mary in the black and white room, is a variant. Molyneux was a mathematician, and the terms in which he couches his “problem”, the style, is a peculiar blend of mathematics and casuistry. Molyneux seems convinced that the answer to his problem lies in the reasons he gives for answering the problem. That bears a relationship to experiment, insofar as experimenters have reasons, but those reasons are hypotheses which, at least in the Baconian tradition, are put to some kind of test. That test is the performative dimension. Is the giving of reasons – is argument – the same thing as a test?

The grooviness of the Molyneux problem is that it did achieve performance – that is, there were operations on aveugles de naissance during the 18th century. One of Diderot’s most famous essays, Lettre sur les aveugles, is on just such an operation.

LI should note one amusing result of this notion of performativity. From the perspective of the history of the experimental method, the Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment has a unique place. The experimental design is such that its performance as an experiment would destroy its result as an experiment. Because we have learned to look at these things in terms of observation, we have ignored the performative dimension in which observation is embedded -- we have ignored, in other words, how experiments function. But if we restore the performative dimension to its place in a theory of experiment, then the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment -- and others of its kind meant to show the peculiar qualities of quantum mechanics -- should provide us with limit cases in which the form of experiment generates its own negation qua experiment. This is to be distinguished from thought experiments that are merely physically impossible, or that involve entities like possible worlds. The Schroedinger's cat thought experiment implies a contradiction in the very structure of the experimental method.

And that is all LI will say about that topic -- we've noticed that the amount of bs generated by a lay person speaking of quantum physics is in direct proportion to said lay person's ignorance. This could certainly be, if not a law, at least a rule of thumb.

Bollettino

LI has always been extremely skeptical of the role of thought experiments in philosophy. Or – we have been skeptical that they are experiments. They are many things – imaginary experimental designs; fantasies; myths; and arguments; We’ve been pondering our issue with them since reading a post in Crooked Timber last week. The post responded to another post, one by Brian Leiter, about what is dead and living – in other words, what is faddish and what is uncool – in philosophy. The CT person took the opportunity to sound off about the Twin Earth “thought experiment” – and we thought, hmm, we’ve wanted to say something about the bogusness of thought experiments for some time.

So we went and looked up some of the literature. Since we are going to do this over the next couple of posts – and since our emphasis is going to be, at first, on the experiment part of the thought experiment – we’d like to point to a few links.

Here’s an article, from the Winter 2003 issue of the Journal for General Philosophy
of Science that makes some salient comments on the limits of thought experiments in philosophy and in science.



There’s a famous argument by an Einstein scholar, John D. Norton, that thought experiments are arguments. A paper in which he develops this thesis is here.

Here’s a criticism of thought experiments in moral reasoning –especially Parfit’s moral reasoning – by Jerry Goodenough here .

To understand the difference between the design of an experiment and the experiment, we’d like to instance one experiment that bears some similarities with the kind of human experiments that epistemologists and personal identity people like to make.

In the 1960s, there were several experiments on people that seemed to show that humans have a 25 hour circadian rhythm. These experiments involved plunging people into sunlight deficient environments – deep in caves and such.

In 1999, a team at Harvard, led by Howard Czeisler, went over the data from these experiments. And they went over the experiments themselves. This is from the little Harvard news story:



“The experiments suffered from a serious flaw, however. Subjects were allowed to turn on lights, even if they were tucked away in caves or windowless labs. Several years ago, Czeisler and his colleagues discovered that ordinary room light can reset the pacemaker.
To avoid the resetting effects of room light and other cues, Czeisler, professor of medicine; Duffy, research fellow in medicine; and Dijk, assistant professor of medicine; and their colleagues tightly controlled their subjects' environment. For about a month, the 24 subjects—11 young men (mean age 24) and 13 older men and women (mean age 67)—were exposed only to very low levels of light, about one tenth that of ordinary room light. To prevent the pattern of light exposure from affecting the subjects' internal clocks, lights were turned on at progressively earlier or progressively later times of the day, essentially creating 20-hour or 28-hour days.
"The point was to decouple extrinsic cues from the internal pacemaker," says Czeisler. Despite the decoupling, body temperature, cortisol, and melatonin levels cycled on an average of every 24.18 hours. And they did so consistently among all subjects, showing the circadian pacemaker is as tightly controlled in humans as in other animals.”

The moral LI draws out of this is that experimentation does not proceed without observation, except the way a drunk proceeds on an icy road on a windy 3 a.m. It is an old, Victorian moral, such as William Whewell might be happy to adumbrate – but it is nevertheless true enough to make one ask oneself: how is a thought experiment an experiment?

Bollettino

The appearance and expansion of Vampirism in the Democratic Party can be explained by: premature burials following cataleptic phenomena or highly contagious epidemics; folk beliefs and superstitions regarding the spitefulness of the dead; revenge of excommunicated persons; deaths by suicide for which villagers believed themselves responsible; the 'miraculous' preservation of bodies buried in places entirely without air, or in arsenic-rich soil; schizophrenics who fear being confined and become senseless; and porphyria, a hereditary blood disease frequently found in Transylvania...which causes cutaneous anomalies, dental malformations and creates a desire for blood – quote, oh so slightly changed, from “Deadly Fears: Dom Augustin Calmet's Vampires and the Rule Over Death” by Marie-Hélène Huet, Eighteenth-Century Life 21.2 (1997) 222-232

Is the reign of the vampire over? Kerry’s choice of Edwards as his v.p., instead of Gephardt, is a heartening sign. Is it the dawn, or is it some false resolution that, by clever cinematic manipulations, will keep us all in suspense? The idea of Gephardt did leave LI rather sick with dread. One feared the revenge of excommunicated persons; one feared the miraculous preservation of a political body that has led the Democrats to ten years of unparalleled defeat, and that erected itself, on embalming fluid and the most ancient of union bosses, to make various hideous attempts spread the reign of darkness and defeat over the party once again this spring.

Kerry has more than a touch of the vampire himself, and surely there was a struggle in his soul before he was able to chose the light – that is, Edwards. Vampiric Dems have a bond with each other – a bond of empty rhetoric, a bond of spurious virtue – that pulls them together, in a sort of cell. If any man symbolized this cell, it was Gephart; if any act symbolized the complete bankruptcy of the cell, it was the compact with Bush to attack Iraq. Gephart not only made the Iraq war politically possible for Bush, he helped manage the Democratic rout in 2002, gaining zero political credit for handing American security over to the fantasies of D.C.’s best and brightest. John Nichols, in the Nation, pretty much summed up the undead Gephardt:


“The collapse of Richard Gephardt's leadership of the House Democratic Caucus did not occur on November 5, when the party lost seats in an election where history and economic trends suggested that it should have gained them. That result was simply a confirmation of the crisis that had been evident for more than a year. From the first days of George W. Bush's selected-not-elected presidency, it was clear that Gephardt was unprepared to serve as the leader of Congressional opposition to a Republican president. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he simply stopped trying. That doomed Democratic chances of taking over the House in 2002, as Gephardt failed to define an opposition agenda and took positions out of sync with his own caucus.

That was never more evident than on October 10 when, after Gephardt helped craft the resolution authorizing Bush to launch a unilateral attack on Iraq, the majority of House Democrats voted against the plan. In surprising result, 126 House Democrats opposed it with only 81 joining their leader Gephardt in supporting it.”

Edwards, who is not part of the Democratic vampire cell, is an excellent choice. It is what we were hoping for. Kerry, who is being held back, as a presidential candidate, by his extreme tediousness – he seems to model his oratory on Polonius’ – needs a person who can actually order eggs over easy and bacon without telling the waitress how historically important eggs and bacon are, and how he has always been for eggs and bacon in spite of voting against eggs and bacon, which was really a vote for eggs and bacon when looked at from a more elevated eggish point of view.

Bollettino

One of LI’s brothers has always been pretty core pacifist. So we were surprised, talking with him a few days ago, when he said he didn’t understand why they were trying Saddam. “Why din’t they just kill him when they captured him?”

An interesting idea. LI is generally opposed to the death penalty. When the Marquis de Sade was briefly made a judge during the French Revolution, he distinguished himself by opposing all death sentences. This was entirely consonant with Sade’s philosophy, which held that since the state institutionalized joylessness, there could be no pleasure in a state sponsored killing. The Sadeian moralist approves of private homicides because they are pleasurable to the murderer, but disapproves strongly of those killings that result from duty, because – and on this Sade agrees with Kant – it isn’t.

Sade’s too-cruel-to-be-kindness obviously lost the ideological battle during the revolution. New regimes, as de Maistre and Michel Foucault knew, must plant themselves on the murdered corpses of old regimes. Freud might have been wrong, historically, about the primal horde, but he was right to sense that the legitimacy of power depends on the crucial transgression of that moral imperative: thou shalt not kill. The question is, what serves that purpose best – the predetermined trial and execution, or the more summary butchery.

Take the case of the Romanovs. Much cold war weeping was shed over their squalid fates. This weeping had the political motivation of hanging a mark of illegitimacy around the Soviets. It had the more practical effect of disguising the Romanov reign of crime: the massacres of 1905 and the criminal prosecution of the war, for example. If any pair of monarchs deserved the guillotine, it was this terrible twosome. It was telling and typical that one of the books discovered upon Alexandria’s bedroom table after she was shot was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – no doubt this was not her first reading. In her husband’s diary, he records turning to it for solace in the first weeks after his deposing.

Trotsky, apparently, pushed for a trial for the Romanovs, to be broadcast over the radio. Yes, that is right, Trotsky is the godfather of Courtroom TV, Cops, and Judge Judy.

However, as the White Counter-revolution mounted a real threat to the Bolsheviks, the fate of the Romanovs came together out of improvisation, haste, and incompetence.
For all of Trotsky’s attempt to find parallels between the French Revolution and the 1918 revolution, the end of the Romanov family was more like the archly villainous path to power forged by Shakespeare’s Richard III than the people’s theatre he envisioned.

Here’s the account from the regicide who managed the butchery:

“In April of 1918, the family and some of their entourage were moved from Siberia to Ekaterinburg in the Ural mountains. On July 17, after midnight, the family was woken up and led to a basement room along with four aides. Aleksei and Alexandra were given chairs. A group of armed men entered the room, and a local commander announced that, by order of the regional soviet committee, they were all to be shot.

Yakov Yurovsky, the commander, later wrote: "The others then made a few incoherent exclamations.... Then the shooting started." The tsar was killed instantly by the first bullet; Alexandra died next. The rest were shot in the following two or three minutes. Aleksei and three of his sisters were not killed instantly and "had to be shot again." The last daughter was still not dead after the second round of bullets. "When they tried to finish off one of the girls with bayonets, the bayonet could not pierce the corset. Thanks to all this, the entire procedure ... took around 20 minutes."
Apparently, Yurovsky never got over that night. He had the further misfortune of having to supervise the disposal of the bodies himself. The daughters, it turned out, had sewn diamonds into their corsets and had little lockets with Rasputin’s picture around their necks.



Here’s what Trotsky said about Nicholas:

"He did not know how to wish: that was his chief trait of character," says a reactionary French historian of Louis. Those words might have been written of Nicholas: neither of them knew how to wish, but both knew how to not wish. But what really could be "wished" by the last representatives of a hopelessly lost historic cause? " Usually he listened, smiled, and rarely decided upon anything. His first word was usually No.” Of whom is that written? Again of Capet. But if this is so, the manners of Nicholas were an absolute plagiarism. They both go toward the abyss "with the crown pushed down over their eyes.” But would it after all be easier to go to an abyss, which you cannot escape anyway, with your eyes open? What difference would it have made, as a matter of fact, if they had pushed the crown way back on their heads?”

Trotsky’s point is that Russian history had reached a juncture in which the impossibility of cazrist governance was structural, not personal.

In 1998, Yeltsin supervised a farcical ceremony commemorating the reburial of the royal corpses, and wept tears that were some combination of crocodile and vodka before getting back to the serious business of pilfering Russia and massacring Chechnyians.

If there is a lesson in this tale of blood and kitsch, it is that the primal horde best take care to murder the father openly, and with ceremony. The Soviets managed to make a regicide that would have won the hearty approval of Oliver Cromwell into a matter of shame.

One wonders where the balance of shame will be in the trial of Hussein. It is bad news that the IGC, in one of its last paroxysms of bad policy, left the direction of the trial to Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew. The NYT reports that the Bush administration views the trial as a possible model for developing some other than international system of jurisprudence to try crimes against humanity. In the typical hamhanded fashion of the CPA, Hussein is being charged with the crime of invading Kuwait, but not Iran, thereby sending the message that if you are going to wage a war of disastrous aggression and kill 500,000 people, be sure to buy your arms from approved Western dealers.

It is the Kuwait charge that makes us think that the trial of Saddam is supposed to be doubly legitimizing. But there is an inherent contradiction between the needs of the Americans to once again point to Kuwait and the need of the Iraqis for a universal condemnation of the total sum of Hussein’s acts. Given the intransigence of the Kuwaitis and the Saudis, lately, about the war reparations they want to extract from the current government, we think that this might be yet another major CPA misjudgment. Out of such cultural clashes grow the armed variety.

Bollettino

The last issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy contained a number of articles about democratic theory and pragmatism. John Dryzek, who has written extensively about what he calls, after Habermas, the ‘deliberative public’ – of which such things as the blogosphere would be subsets – poses an interesting question in his article, Pragmatism and Democracy:


“On one interpretation of pragmatism, which can appeal to Dewey as well as to Peirce, the idea would be to make the public as it confronts social problems much more like a scientific community in terms of its commitment to the pursuit of truth. The real world of politics does of course feature plenty in the way of partisanship, inequality, self-interest, ideology, strategizing, deceit, and the raw exercise of power. So would a pragmatist program for public deliberation have to involve an attack on these pervasive yet deeply problematic aspects of politics?”

Dryzek’s article is couched as a reply to another article in the journal by Cheryl Misak, who “believes that truth in the sense of indefeasible collective judgments is a proper aspiration in politics, such that there are right answers if only we deliberate long enough and well enough about a particular problem.”

Dryzek has a deep objection to this way of thinking:

“Without the preparedness to give up a belief in the face of decisive counterarguments, Misak says we will get "the degradation of belief to mere opinion." But in politics, opinion is not mere. What we mean by "public opinion" can be more or less distorted, more or less defensible. But do we really want to convert "public opinion" into "public belief"? The problem is that under any realistic time constraints, opinion cannot be eliminated. But even without such constraints, there would, as Hannah Arendt (1958) has argued, be something very peculiar about a politics that sought to exchange opinion for truth. Implicit in a situation where moral truth is sought is an incipient danger of the eventual silencing of the differing opinions that are the very grist of politics, especially if, as Misak puts it, "disagreement implies a mistake on somebody's part." A pragmatic defense against silencing here would be that all individuals should accept that they are as likely to be in error as their opponent in an argument. But opinions are not like truth claims in science, and here the pragmatist's view of continuity between science and democratic politics starts to look suspect. Opinions differ in large part because experiences and thus identities differ, and experiences may never be fully accessible to those who have not shared them. Such a view can find support in Rorty's pluralistic interpretation of pragmatism, which highlights linguistically-constituted variety. Asking an identity to be provisional and capable of being discarded if an argument is lost means the identity is not a core part of being—it is not an identity at all.”

LI thinks that Dryzek instinct is correct, here, but his analysis is deficient. His instinct is that opinion must be defended against the old Platonic ideal of the Republic. However screwed up Popper’s analysis of Hegel and Marx is, Popper was right to see a common thread in all political theories that seek to create a polity that emulates some kind of scientific, or truth-centric, ideal. Silencing the false, under this perspective, is the very goal of the policy maker. Dryzek is also right, to an extent, to see that the problem with this goal is that it conflicts with identity – with the heterogenous array of positions over social space. The social is the anti-universal, to put it in the briefest possible space. But his analysis falls short when it comes to living fact of identity, insofar as he emphasizes identity as a given, rather than as a struggle over time. In this way he makes identity into an untouchable – it becomes a Disneyland of difference. This, we think, expresses the deep desire of a certain form of East Coast liberalism, which is the latest stage in an ideology that goes back in American history to the early nineteenth century, and the establishment of a certain sense of decorum as a means by which the elite preserved their status positions both economically and culturally. This liberalism has a horror of depth, because depth is where the struggle goes on. Although we don’t, in the end, think Melville was fair to Emerson, we think that he sensed, in the Emerson of cliché, something of this same horror, and this same ossificiation of the plural. Here is a passage from one of the great letters:


“I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr Emerson. I had heard of him as full of transcendentalisms, myths & oracular gibberish; I had only glanced at a book of his once in Putnam's store -- that was all I knew of him, till I heard him lecture. -- To my surprise, I found him quite intelligible, tho' to say truth, they told me that that night he was unusually plain. -- Now, there is a something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is, for the most part, instinctuly perceptible. This I see in Mr Emerson. And, frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool; -- then had I rather be a fool than a wise man. -- I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plumet that will. I'm not talking of Mr Emerson now -- but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.”

Bollettino

My friend S., who turned me on to Complex Adaptive Systems theory, is presently bringing to a close her magnum opus and dissertation in one last pageheavy burst of scribbling. Although I know she will never read these words – S. has better things to do than look at the sad evidences of my graphomania – still, I dedicate this post to her.

Salut, S.!!!

In the last post, LI laid out the problems, as we see them, with consequences, and consequently with consequentialism. If you will remember, we wrote that the problem, as we saw it, started with counting over the consequences of actions. This is the robust, quantitative approach to the problem, approved of by all analytic philosophers. We further said that the problem had a superficial aspect – that of giving good reasons for containing consequences – and a deeper, structural aspect – that of giving an account of actions such that consequences are considered a necessary effect of actions.

The example we gave, here, to illustrate what we meant by the containment problem derives from Morehead’s book on the Gallipoli campaign. In that book, we are told that Churchill, on August 3, 1914, decided to impound two Turkish battleships that were being built in British shipyards. We traced a plausible chain of consequences from this action to the events of October, 1914, when the Allies delivered an ultimatum to the Turks, which was refused. That refusal effectively aligned the Turks with the Germans.

Our chain included some peculiar items. For instance, the Germans supplied the Turks with two ships and crews immediately after Churchill announced his decision. Was this really a consequence of Churchill’s decision? Isn’t it possible that the Germans would have acted in the same way even if Churchill hadn’t made this decision? And finally, a question that always pops up in these kinds of discussions, how could Churchill know that the Germans would act as they did once he had acted as he did?

I’m afraid we haven’t done with the superficial problem of containment. As is hinted at by my last question, we like to divide consequences into intended and unintended. This division implies that there exists some rough means that justifies attaching the two labels to consequences of, at times, the same act.

I am not going to claim that the label has no usefulness in certain situations. But there is a limit to its meaningfulness. Take, for instance, our second question. The Germans “saw” what Churchill did. Social action is rarely such that it occurs only between a Crusoe agent and some indigenous Friday singelton. Rather, the social matrix within which actions occur is such that the consequences of the action, insofar as those consequences are attendant upon the perception of the action, can ramify rapidly. The social agent knows this – in fact, we often consider that, in certain situations, part of his responsibility is communicative. Every lovers quarrel eventually hinges on such things. In Churchill’s case, he certainly knew that the Germans were perceiving his act. Their subsequent actions in response to that act, then, must be prefigured in the motives for the act, to some degree. That prefiguring is, largely, guesswork. The intention that an act have a certain consequence, which seems so clear, gets muddier as we seek to embed the action in the social matrix. The edge between intention and the unintended is not, really, a clear and distinct thing at all times. And, in principle, this lack of clarity is possible for any act. Intentions can always be argued about. Although there “must have been a mistake,” Joseph K. can be arrested at any time, because no Joseph K. can ever give an account of his actions such that we know precisely the limits of his intention.

The moral fact that the containment of consequences is indeterminable forms the basis for one of the principle themes of the mystic. When Blake says that the hot needle that pokes out the eye of the songbird darkens the stars, he is merely alluding to the infinite ramification of consequences that, in a drier tone, is considered by Donald Davidson in the Essays on Actions and Events. When Jesus of Nazareth claims that God knows even the fall of the smallest sparrow, he is saying either: a, that all events in one unified throb surge up against the divine, or, b., that all events are distributed to their place and function by the infinitely fine consciousness of our Heavenly Father.

Counting consequences, a dry topic for analytic philosophers to rattle about in their small journals, is also the cry of the messiahs and the lyric poets. LI might be a dry rattler, but at least this topic puts us in good company.

Next post – or some post next week – we will return to the deeper structural problems, and try to show how the original, petty stimulus for this wildly expanding topic – Hitchens supposition that he can strip consequences from acts as he goes backwards to make pronouncements about the moral/political errors of Michael Moore – shows that Hitchens has abandoned one view of history, that of struggle, associated with Marxism, for a very vulgar Whig view. And, in so showing, points out certain questions about democracy itself. Fun, fun, fun.

Bollettino

My friend T. wants to know why I keep going on and on about Christopher Hitchens, who he thinks is an unworthy Moby Dick to my Ahab.

Well -- I happen to think that Hitchens is a writer. As opposed to the usual buffoon. That's about it, for a reason. Reason not the obsession -- if the sun itself reached out a hand and struck me on my face, I would strike back -- to answer in the most Ahab-like way.

But also, also ... this isn't heading towards a tit for tat thing about C.H. I'm after an even bigger whale -- how we argue about politics.

Now, to continue. Let me take off the Ahab mask and put on the T.A. mask.

No moral theory can ground itself absolutely on consequences, since there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about a consequence; no moral theory can entirely ignore consequences, since absolutely separating moral categories from actions is like absolutely separating words from meaning.

Kant, who comes closest to the absolute anti-consequentialist position, summed that position up in the phrase, “the moral worth of an action does not lie in the effect expected from it, nor in any principle of action which requires to borrow its motive from this expected effect.” However, in order to make this proposition plausible, Kant trumps consequences with a notion of the universal that encodes a timeless schema of consequences. The famous example of the lie is the place where Kant makes his stand:

“The shortest way, however, and an unerring one, to discover the answer to this question whether a lying promise is consistent with duty, is to ask myself, "Should I be content that my maxim (to extricate myself from difficulty by a false promise) should hold good as a universal law, for myself as well as for others? and should I be able to say to myself, "Every one may make a deceitful promise when he finds himself in a difficulty from which he cannot otherwise extricate himself?" Then I presently become aware that while I can will the lie, I can by no means will that lying should be a universal law. For with such a law there would be no promises at all, since it would be in vain to allege my intention in regard to my future actions to those who would not believe this allegation, or if they over hastily did so would pay me back in my own coin. Hence my maxim, as soon as it should be made a universal law, would necessarily destroy itself. “

The idea that one’s act “should be a universal law” is a long, pious way around consequences, but it amounts to elevating a model taken from a particular realm of consequence – the model developed in law from precedent – and purifying it of the contingent character of consequence to reach its logical core.

In our own view, there are other problems with consequences from a moral view that lie in the nature of social action itself. The problem is: how are we supposed to “count over” consequences, as the analytic philosophers would put it?

This is a technical problem that goes back, historically, to the Stoic protest against Aristotelian logic, and the connection of paradox to ethics (which is rather puzzling to the modern sensibility – that is why Cicero’s Paradoxes is such a weird text to read). At the beginning of the twentieth century, as it became evident that logic could be completely redone and its power extended by using Cantor’s set theory, the stage was set for rediscovering the force of the scattered ethical insights of the Stoics. Deleuze, in the Logique du sens, realized this in the sixties. It is still LI’s favorite among Deleuze’s books.

The technical problem has a superficial aspect and a deep, structural essence. The superficial aspect is: how to count consequences. Here is an example, from Alan Moorehead’s book, Gallipoli. On August 3, 1914, Winston Churchill informed the Turkish government that the two battleships that the Turks had ordered from the British, which were so close to the point of completion that the Turks had already sent crews to England, were being impounded. As Europe teetered on the brink of war, Churchill was afraid of the use the Turks could make of those battleships. However, Turkey was allied neither with the British nor the Germans.

On of the consequences of that act was that the Germans had a chance to move in with two of their own battleships, which they ‘ceded’ – along with the crews – to the Turks. One of the commanders of one of those ships then took it upon himself, unilaterally, to put a blockade across the Bosphorus, thus preventing Russian ships from supplying Russia with grain, armaments, and other stuffs. In consequence, the government of Turkey had to either identify with that act or renege on it. In consequence of being forced to choose, the Turks chose to identify with the act, and so allied themselves, in Allied eyes, and then officially, with the Axis.

How many of these ‘consequences” are really the consequence of Winston Churchill’s act? The superficial problem, here, is that, depending on how one construes the world, it is difficult to disinter all the consequences of any act – as difficult as it is to pick out snowflakes from an avalanche. Nevertheless, we do it all the time – in trials, in domestic life, at work. We use conventions, and we think in terms of short ranges of time, etc. Yet no sane person, looking back over his life, trusts those conventions absolutely. We all feel like there are consequences of certain things we’ve done or had done to us that we didn’t understand at the time. We all think effects are, in reality, very hard to peg to a timeline.

So much for the superficial counting over of consequences. In the next post, I want to approach the deeper problem – which is the problem of complexity itself. But I thought I’d end this post with a translation, from the French, of a couple of grafs from Cicero’s third paradox, Les fautes ont toutes la même valeur, comme les bonnes actions – “Faults all have the same value, just like good actions” – to show that the Stoics were alive to the quantitative problem in ethics. They were interested in what we now call the problem of the continuous and the discrete:

The thing is without gravity, they say. But the culpability (culpa) is great; for the faults (peccata) ought to be evaluated not according to events, but according to the defaults (vitiis) of the persons. What makes for the commission of a fault can be more or less important: however one approaches the problem, the committed fault is one. That a pilot navigates a shipload of gold or straw into a shipwreck makes for a large enough difference between the facts, but none in the incompetence of the pilot. That someone violently mistreats a plebian woman: our emotional response to this is much less than if someone struck a woman from a respectable and noble family, but the agent has not less committed a fault, since to commit a fault reduces, essentially, to going over a limit (transire lineas): when one takes a step across it, the fault is established; it doesn’t matter how far one then advances in the fault, nothing contributes more to aggravate the transgressed interdiction. It isn’t permitted to anyone, certainly, to commit a fault (peccare). Thus, what isn’t permitted holds itself in a single block (in hoc uno), if it is proven that it isn’t permitted. If the interdiction cannot exist in terms of more or less gravity, or greater or lesser – since, if the interdiction has been pronounced, the fault (peccatum) resides in the fact that it is always one and identical – then it is necessary that the faults issuing from that interdiction must be equal (aequalia) to it.”

I’d urge anyone interested to read Cicero’s crazy little treatise, which is pretty short.

Bollettino

The importance of being wrong

Christopher Hitchens’ mission, in his article in Slate on the “Lies of Michael Moore”, is as delicate a one as, say, the work of a police snitch. Hitchens shuffled off his leftist convictions and became a firm Bush supporter over the last couple of years, which some might call a conversion, and some might call a flip flop. But while he will allow himself the freedom of gaily adapting his opinions to suit his view of circumstances, he isn’t so tender minded about Moore – hence, the heavy sarcasm about Moore’s changing beliefs about the war in Afghanistan.

After demonstrating, to his own satisfaction, that if Moore’s pacifism is over-ridden by an unexpected hostility to Al Qaeda and Bush’s decision not to make a major effort to destroy it in the spring of 2002, then the change of heart must be prompted more by the vicious desire to hit out at Bush rather than any nobler motive, Hitchens gets down to what he takes to be lies in Moore’s film.

LI hasn’t seen the film, and doesn’t have a large stake in it. Hitchens thinks that it is proven that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD in 2002, that he was allied to Al Qaeda, and that the Bush administration’s interest in democracy has guided the entire American occupation. This is, nowadays, a pretty lonely position, and if the Lies of Michael Moore depend on the Truths of George Bush, I don’t think Hitchens is going to win the debate. But that isn’t our point. What interests us is a larger question brought up by his last paragraph:

“If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq.”

We will overlook – except for this catty aside – that Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq if Christopher Hitchens had had his way in 1991, since he, too, opposed the first Gulf War. So did LI. What is more interesting to us is whether we are supposed to judge someone’s belief’s by matching them, point by point, with their consequences. There are two themes here, actually. One is: how well does consequentialism work as an ethical – or, as Derrida would say, an ethico-political - theory? The other theme is more dialectical: is there a value in having and expressing an erroneous opinion?

We are gonna talk about that in the next post.

Bollettino

In order to judge whether Iraq stood out as some heinous partner of Al Qaeda, we need to have some metrics.

Let's use money and Logistic support as our measures.

Let’s compare what we know about the Iraqi funding of Al Qaeda to the funding it received from other states.

Saudi Arabia

We have, according to a cache of docs recovered from the Taliban government, a money trail that leads to the Saudis.
Newsweek reported that there is documentation, for instance, of a bin Laden associate,
Jon Juma Namagani, receiving two million dollars in Saudi “aids” on Nov. 21, 1999.


According to testimony before the house by Matthew Epstein and Stephen Kohlman, the flow of funds to Al Qaeda went through many channels that have been associated, in the past, with Saudi Arabia. One should remember that charities, in Saudi Arabia, have traditionally had a strong government direction. It would be unlikely, for instance, that a charity directed at helping Israeli victims of suicide bombings would endure the House of Saud's disapproval. In an authoritarian theocracy that has officially embraced an interpretation of Islam as its doctrine, the distinction between private religious charities and public expenditures is narrowed. Often the distinction exists in order to establish deniability rather than as an expression of the origin of the charitable impulse. The U.S. government has used that distinction itself, running money to the anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan through the jihadi networks in the eighties, and then -- after the defeat of the jihad -- leaving those networks be. However, we feel comfortable in supposing that if there were charities headquartered in Baghdad in 1999 running money to bin Laden, it would have provoked massive U.S. directed uproar.


Epstein’s list includes the Muslim league and The BIF. I urge the reader to take these testimonies with some caution – terrorism “experts” rely on facts that often reduce into assertions from unnamed sources in newspaper stories which often suffer the further diminishment of having been propounded, in the first place, by the terrorism experts themselves. It is that vicious circle in which proof is replaced by punditry, and proof by the journalistic version of “truth” - a hook or a scoop. Given their prejudices, the testimony seems pretty unexaggerated. The Muslim League, according to Epstein and Kohlman, opened a branch in Peshawar, Pakistan, in the eighties to support the jihadis in Afghanistan. The office was subsidized by Usama bin. The Muslim League evolved something called the Rabita Trust in Pakistan. According to the U.S. Government post 9/11, it provided financial and logistic support for bin Laden and was designated as an illegal corporation.

Another organization, hq-ed in Jeddah, the International Islamic Relief Organization, maintained a military training camp in Afghanistan in 2000.

Yemen

The Jamestown Foundation, which has shined the kind of unblinking eye on Putin’s insalubrious record in Chechnya that, in another context, would drive a typical Poe character to murder, has a nice interview with Jonathan Winer on the situation in Yemen. Winer mentions that the Afghanistan vets embedded themselves in the Yemen security
force. This is interesting in itself, since it shows us the vehicle by which Al Qaeda sympathizers can escape surveillance.

TM: Could you comment on terrorist financing as it relates specifically to Yemen, including any links with government officials?

JW: There are three or four main strands when it comes to this subject. One is the honey trade, with Abu Zubaidah and Khalil al Deek - both al-Qaeda members - who have been linked to the honey business. This is one sector.

The second sector involves the entities Osama bin Laden got going a decade ago in Yemen, including companies dealing with electrical appliances, ceramics, and publishing. These were operated through middle men and were linked to certain tribes: the Sana'a, the Sa'dah, and the Abayan. It is difficult to know a decade later to what extent these operations still exist.

There is also a huge amount of activity related to the Palestinians, especially Hamas, with the president of the country openly encouraging Yemenis to send arms and money to that group as recently as 2003. Charities and religious institutions have also been linked to support for terrorism. [...] Another aspect of the problem is the hawala dars [informal network for money transfer], who are tied to narcotics traffickers. They also have links to money launderers in the US, especially in New York.

TM: Were there strong ties to Afghanistan prior to September 11?

JW: Yes, with the most prominent and important links being those involving Sheikh Abdul Majid al-Zindani, who has been very close to Osama bin Laden. Zindani is a major player in Yemeni politics and has likely been as significant a threat as has existed to Salih's control of the country. He was the central figure sending Yemenis to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban and the central figure training and recruiting them as well. Zindani was designated as a global terrorist by the U.S. Treasury this February, and Yemen was asked to freeze all of his assets. Treasury has charged him with actively recruiting for al-Qaeda training camps and purchasing weapons on behalf of al-Qaeda and other terrorists. He was a leader of the Islamic Front, formed to channel Yemeni volunteers to the Afghan Jihad while enhancing Riyadh's influence in Yemen. The Islamic Front in turn evolved into the Islah party. Although Islah is part of the current government, it and Zindani also represent a major source of covert and overt opposition to Salih's government .

TM: Were there strong ties between members of the Yemeni government and Al Qaeda prior to September 11?

JW: Yemen was a prime location for the building of al-Qaeda in the early 1990's with Zindani and his Al-Iman University playing a substantial role in recruitment. Yemen also housed a number of Osama bin Laden's business interests. It's difficult to determine from the outside how governmental and private business interests relating to al-Qaeda were intertwined in Yemen prior to September 11. The government of Yemen has been largely run by and for a small group close to the president of the country. Corruption is rampant in the private and public sector, extending to the higher levels and exemplified by government conferred monopolies and contracting and licensing abuses. So to the extent that bin Laden had businesses in Yemen, senior officials or friends of the government of Yemen likely played some facilitation role at least. Separately, it is also pretty clear that there was senior support for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda in Yemen's police, security and military services prior to September 11.”

Dubai

Douglas Farah, the Washington Post reporter whose book on the Blood Diamonds is sitting on my desk, the victim of an interview project that never got off the ground, had this to say about the intermediaries between the money al q.’s auxiliaries were making in Africa and the use of that money by Al Qaeda:

"Since it is exempt from international reporting requirements for financial transactions, gold is a favored commodity in laundering money from drug trafficking, organized crime and terrorist activities, U.S. officials said. In addition, Dubai, one of seven sheikhdoms that make up the United Arab Emirates, has one of the world's largest and least regulated gold markets, making it an ideal place to hide.

"Dubai is also one of the region's most open banking centers and is the commercial capital of the United Arab Emirates, one of three countries that maintained diplomatic relations with the Taliban until shortly after Sept. 11. Sitting at a strategic crossroad of the Gulf, South Asia and Africa, Dubai has long been a financial hub for Islamic militant groups. Much of the $500,000 used to fund the Sept. 11 attacks came through Dubai, investigators believe.

' "All roads lead to Dubai when it comes to money," said Patrick Jost, who until last year was a senior financial enforcement officer in the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. "Everyone did business there." When the U.S. bombs began pounding Taliban and Al Qaeda targets last autumn, the rush of gold and money out of Afghanistan intensified.
The Pakistani financial authorities said that $2 million to $3 million a day is usually hand-carried by couriers from Karachi to Dubai, mostly to buy gold. Late last year that amount increased significantly as money was moved out of Afghanistan, they said."

Iraq

Let’s do this Donald Rumsfeld style.

Were there any charities in Iraq funneling money to Al Qaeda? No. No charities have popped up equivalent to the Muslim League, et al, which functioned in Saudi Arabia.

Did the government of Iraq send money or arms to Al Qaeda? Here is a nice line from the 9/11 commission : “The September 11th commission report said that a senior Iraqi intelligence official reportedly met with bin Laden in 1994 in Sudan, and bin Laden "is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded."

Have any news reporters asked this simple question of Dick Cheney? No.
Will any news reporters ask this question of Cheney or Bush? No.
Why? Reporters have one parameter above all others: never embarrass the powerful unless you are sure they are absolutely unable to get revenge. There is a pretence in the press that there is a difference between celebrity journalism and hard journalism. There isn't.

Logistics

Support for Al Qaeda can be financial, moral, or logistical. Logistical support is rather mixed with financial support – the two can’t be completely separated. But for LI’s purposes, we will take logistics to be about training or any kind of military or intelligence cooperation with Al Qaeda.

Pakistan

Since so much has been made of the supposed contact between some Iraqi official and Mohammed Atta, a contact that the FBI has pretty much scotched – to believe it, one has to believe that Atta somehow had such foreknowledge of his posthumous reputation that he deliberately seeded a cut out in the U.S. to cover his connection to the Iraqis, which is standard logical procedure for Kennedy assassination conspiracy freaks – lets look at a connection for which the administration has supplied much less publicity – that between the chief of the Pakistan ISI, Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad, who by coincidence was in the U.S. on 9/11, and Atta, who was also, as we know, in the U.S. that day – no cutouts need apply.
Here’s the story that the Times of India broke in the wake of 9/11:

“NEW DELHI: While the Pakistani Inter Services Public Relations claimed that former ISI director-general Lt-Gen Mahmud Ahmad sought retirement after being superseded on Monday, the truth is more shocking.
Top sources confirmed here on Tuesday, that the general lost his job because of the "evidence" India produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the World Trade Centre. The US authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 were wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan by Ahmad Umar Sheikh at the instance of Gen Mahumd.”

This is aid with a vengeance. Ahmad Umar Sheikh at that time was pretty much unknown to Americans. However, he’s become known since, as the organizer of the murder of Daniel Pearl. In fact, he is in captivity in Pakistan. Apparently, the U.S. government is superbly uninterested in whether the Indian secret service story is correct. One would think that the war on terrorism, or the 9/11 commission, or someone might be interested in a man who, it is claimed, sent money to Atta in the pre 9/11 period. Especially as we are willing to go to war on the claim that Atta might have met an Iraqi agent, if he had the power of supernatural co-location and could have existed in Virginia and Prague at the same time.

Here’s a recent story about the Sheikh:


“ISLAMABAD, January 19 (Online): Authorities plan to interrogate a convicted man in the murder plot of US journalist Daniel Pearl over his group’s possible involvement in an assassination attempt on President General Pervez Musharraf, security officials said on Sunday.
The British-born, Ahmad Saeed Umar Sheikh is to be shifted to Rawalpindi "soon", the official said on condition of anonymity. Investigators probing the Christmas day attempt on Musharraf’s life believe one of the suicide bombers identified as Muhammad Jamil, from Rawlakot in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, belonged to the Harkat Jihad-e-Islami, which is blamed in Pearl’s murder, he added.”

The connection between the Pearl murder and 9/11 is Bernard Henri-Levy’s obsession – which is perhaps why the assertion is better known in France than in the U.S.

The question is, what would give that accusation credibility? And, more importantly, if the Iraq connection to Al Qaeda turns out to be much less significant than the Pakistan connection – down to a possible financing of the feat – why don’t we ask questions of the Cheney’s and Bush’s about the matter?

We will do another post soon on the ISI.

Bollettino

The Bush administration’s spin on the absence of any evidence of alliance between Al Qaeda and Iraq has been covered by the word “relationship” in the normal, deceitful way in which the Bush administration has chosen to talk about all foreign policy matters in the last three years. A point amply made by Fred Kaplan in Slate, who is repenting for his support for the war not by engaging in the Newspeak of such as the New York Times, retreating glacially from their record of misreporting while supporting ardently their misreporters, but by acts of real contrition. Making him almost unique in the press.

Why, however, don’t reporters uncover the meaning of the word “relationship” by asking simple comparative questions? As for instance – who was closer to al qaeda in 2001 – the government of Pakistan or the government of Iraq?

Who supplied al qaeda with more money – Saudi Arabia or Iraq?

Who supplied al qaeda with more weapons – the Pakistan Secret Service or Iraq?

Simple questions. Which, of course, will never be asked.

Bollettino

One of LI’s favorite of all passages in English literature is that ending of Sir Thomas Browne’s Gardens of Cyprus:

“Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rouse up Agamemnon, I find no such effects in the drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.”

LI found his intellectual antipodes, Matthew Arnold, yesterday. We were mulling another shot at this interminable discussion of elitism. So far, LI had been concerned with elitism from the constructive perspective of the artist. But how about the perspective of the critic? Since Arnold famously thought that ‘all the best that has been thought and said” should be the standard of art, we decided to dip into the Works. Dipping, here, it turns out, should be done with one's bowler hat on.

Now, we have always liked Dover Beach. But Arnold’s prose is a rather unpleasant chore. One vibrates from a choking dislike of the man whose tone is so pervasively Pecksniffian. Arnold strangled the artist within him in favor of a critic who is, above every other consideration, desperately respectable. Not only that -- Arnold is an expert practitioner of what I call Kaelism – Kael-ism avant le Kael. Kaelism, as Pauline Kael, the movie critic, practiced it, is a critical form that concentrates firstly on the audience that one imagines is being enticed to a movie, or enjoys it; secondly, on what other critics have said about the movie; and only thirdly on the thing itself. It is envious of those pleasures it cannot participate in. It is exclusive about those pleasures it does experience. It is an amalgam of uninformed sociology and prejudice, and at its best creating negative images of what it dislikes.

It is also perhaps the dominant reviewing style of our time. It has never been the case that the critic can ignore the audience – and guilt by association is sometimes too irresistible not to indulge in. But it is a weakness, not a strength. Kaelism is particularly good at creating and maintaining cliques. This – end excursus – is why reviews are so often the most boring part of a magazine or newspaper.

Arnold’s clique was, of course, the Victorian professional class. A good example of Arnold at his dimmest is his essay, On Translating Homer, in which he considers criteria for good translation – should the translation mirror the original, or should it transpose the original so into the English language as to make the work seem native? He dismisses both of those goals in favor of another one: a translation should please those who can read in both languages. In other words, it should please the scholars – or the scholars of Oxford and Cambridge:


“Let not the translator, then, trust to his notions of what the ancient Greeks would have thought of him; he will lose himself in the vague. Let him not trust to what the ordinary English reader thinks of him; he will be taking the blind for his guide. Let him not trust to his own judgment of his own work; he may be misled by individual caprices. Let him ask how his work affects those who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry; whether to read it gives the Provost of Eton, or Professor Thompson at Cambridge, or Professor Jowett here in Oxford, at all the same feeling which to read the original gives them. I consider that when Bentley said of Pope’s translation, “it was a pretty poem, but must not be called Homer,” the work, in spite of all its power and attractiveness, was judged.”

In other words – let the mortician tell you the cause of death.

Luckily, the deathly hand of Jowett – that mummified respectability – does not lie upon the great Victorian and Edwardian translations – Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat, Burton’s Arabian Nights, Garnett’s Dostoevsky. Actually, I rather like Jowett’s translations of Plato, but the idea that success in translation depends upon the judgment of “experts” is just the type of thing that LI blindly dislikes.

The mass of Arnold’s criticism is a continual attempt to clean the sink – getting rid of the vulgar wherever it showed itself. Unfortunately, literature has an unfortunate addiction to vulgarity. Only sieved through the proper filters, those scholars at Oxford who, by the sympathetic magic of contact with the wealthy and aristocratic, are themselves respectable, can such things be enjoyed. This is how Arnold starts off his essay on Keats. It is an essay that almost makes one wish old Matt was still alive – so he could take a good punch in the nose. I am going to quote four grafs:
Poetry, according to Milton's famous saying, should be 'simple, sensuous, impassioned.' No one can question the eminency, in Keats's poetry, of the quality of sensuousness. Keats as a poet is abundantly and enchantingly sensuous; the question with some people will be, whether he is anything else. Many things may be brought forward which seem to show him as under the fascination and sole dominion of sense, and desiring nothing better. There is the exclamation in one of his letters: 'O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!' There is the thesis, in another, 'that with a great Poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.' There is Haydon's story of him, how 'he once covered his tongue and throat as far as he could reach with Cayenne pepper, in order to appreciate the delicious coldness of claret in all its glory---his own expression.' One is not much surprised when Haydon further tells us, of the hero of such a story, that once for six weeks together he was hardly ever sober. 'He had no decision of character,' Haydon adds; 'no object upon which to direct his great powers.'
Character and self-control, the virtus verusque labor so necessary for every kind of greatness, and for the great artist, too, indispensable, appear to be wanting, certainly, to this Keats of Haydon's portraiture. They are wanting also to the Keats of the Letters to Fanny Brawne. These letters make as unpleasing an impression as Haydon's anecdotes. The editor of Haydon's journals could not well omit what Haydon said of his friend, but for the publication of the Letters to Fanny Brawne I can see no good reason whatever. Their publication appears to me, I confess, inexcusable; they ought never to have been published. But published they are, and we have to take notice of them. Letters written when Keats was near his end, under the throttling and unmanning grasp of mortal disease, we will not judge. But here is a letter written some months before he was taken ill. It is printed just as Keats wrote it.
'You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving---I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you. I should be afraid to separate myself far from you. My sweet Fanny, will your heart never change? My love, will it? I have no limit now to my love. ... Your note came in just here. I cannot be happier away from you. 'Tis richer than an Argosy of Pearles. Do not threat me even in jest. I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion---I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more---I could be martyred for my Religion---Love is my religion---I could die for that. I could die for you. My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet. You have ravished me away by a Power I cannot resist; and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often "to reason against the reasons of my Love" I can do that no more---the pain would be too great. My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.'
A man who writes love-letters in this strain is probably predestined, one may observe, to misfortune in his love-affairs; but that is nothing. The complete enervation of the writer is the real point for remark. We have the tone, or rather the entire want of tone, the abandonment of all reticence and all dignity, of the merely sensuous man, of the man who 'is passion's slave.' Nay, we have them in such wise that one is tempted to speak even as Blackwood or the Quarterly were in the old days wont to speak; one is tempted to say that Keats's love-letter is the love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice. It has in its relaxed self-abandonment something underbred and ignoble, as of a youth ill brought up, without the training which teaches us that we must put some constraint upon our feelings and upon the expression of them. It is the sort of love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice which one might hear read out in a breach of promise case, or in the Divorce Court.”

LI can find nothing to mock in this passage, so superbly does it mock itself – from the Miltonic flourish of earnestness with which Arnold falsely associates himself – Milton himself, with his most vulgar whooping it up for the death of Charles I, would certain have met with the schoomaster’s frown – to that final ending up in the Divorce Court. To write your love letter with an eye to posterity seems to be Arnold’s ideal. It is the ideal of a Gentleman’s tailor – if we are going to exchange status jabs – who takes his bride out to meet his clients. It is Arnold to the t.

Interestingly, the way in which Arnold rescues Keats’ seriousness is by showing that Keats could insult women. Misogyny is, in Arnold’s view, a step in the right direction. No underbreeding here.
“It is curious to observe how this severe addiction of his to the best sort of poetry affects him with a certain coldness, as if the addiction had been to mathematics, towards those prime objects of a sensuous and passionate poet's regard, love and women. He speaks of 'the opinion I have formed of the generality of women, who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar-plum than my time.' He confesses 'a tendency to class women in my books with roses and sweetmeats---they never see themselves dominant'; and he can understand how the unpopularity of his poems may be in part due to 'the offence which the ladies,' not unnaturally 'take at him' from this cause. Even to Fanny Brawne he can write 'a flint-worded letter,' when his 'mind is heaped to the full' with poetry:--- 'I know the generality of women would hate me for this; that I should have so unsoftened, so hard a mind as to forget them; forget the brightest realities for the dull imaginations of my own brain. ... My heart seems now made of iron---I could not write a proper answer to an invitation to Idalia.'
The truth is that 'the yearning passion for the Beautiful,' which was with Keats, as he himself truly says, the master-passion, is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental man, is not a passion of the sensuous or sentimental poet. It is an intellectual and spiritual passion. It is 'connected and made one,' as Keats declares that in his case
it was, 'with the ambition of the intellect.'”

Arnold’s gross and naked transposition of his status anxieties into a criteria for knowledge, or into a standard of judgment on art, makes it a puzzle, to LI, how he ever acquired the reputation that he undoubtedly has. I suppose one of these days we will have to read Trilling’s study of the guy.