Tuesday, February 05, 2002

Dope

Limited Inc amused a friend in L.A. a month ago by arguing that the 20th century's greatest scientist, in terms of the impact of his work on human history, was not Albert Einstein, but Fritz Haber. True, if Time Magazine had put Haber's picture on the cover as the greatest person of the century, the iconic resonance would have been somewhat less. As in, people would say, who the hell is Fritz Haber?

Here's what Haber did:



"On July 2, 1909, Haber and a colleague in the laboratory at Karlsruhe produced a continuous flow of liquid ammonia, about a pint in five hours, from hydrogen and nitrogen fed into a hot five-inch iron tube a couple of feet tall, the gases at 200 atmospheres pressure over an osmium metal catalyst."

Sounds, well, boring, right? But before Haber synthesized nitrogen, the world agricultural system depended on either organism induced nitrogen enrichment -- via the humble legume -- or enrichment by way of waste, whether that of birds (guano) or of humans (nightsoil) or of the beasts of the field and the street (which is why the immense amounts of horse shit deposited in cities in the 19th century eventually wound its way back to the field). My friend was amused because this sounds like a curious, but in itself unimportant, fact. It is something only a crank would pounce on. As you know, dear reader, Limited Inc has never been afraid of crankishness. Haber, whose work was put into workable factory order by Bosch (hence the name for the Haber-Bosch process), was not the genius Einstein was -- in fact, he wasn't a genius at all, just an exceptionally clever chemist. Probably someone else would have come along and synthesized nitrogen in the 20th century if Haber hadn't done it -- but the fact is, Haber did do it. As William McNeill wrote in Something New Under the Sun, his environmental history of the 20th century, without synthesized fertilizer, the world could only support its present human population by putting an area of land equal to the size of Latin America under cultivation.

Environmentalists, Limited Inc feels, have never fully confronted this fact. The assumption of those who decry the quantity of environmental harm caused by fertilizers -- and it is immense -- is that if these fertilizers didn't exist, a Malthusian mechanism would have culled the world population, thus maintaining an equilibrium between population and resources. Yet this kind of thinking -- which is based on the classical economic models of the 19th century -- doesn't convince us. Perhaps the one to two billion extra people we can surely attibute to synthesized nitrogen just wouldn't have materialized given the more restrained resources of the pre-Haber world; yet look at the 19th century's patterns of cultivation, the seemingly unstoppable acquisition and use of lands as diverse as the Great Prairies and the pampas, and it is easy to imagine another case, in which even greater swathes of tropical land area would be put to the plow as food needs expand.

The American Scientist review of Vaclav Smil's book on Haber draws the consequences of Haber's work for you, sitting at home with your cornflakes:

"In the year 2000, Haber�Bosch synthesis worldwide produced about 2 million tons of ammonia a week. For the 6 billion of us to be fed now, Haber� Bosch synthesis provides more than
99 percent of all inorganic nitrogen inputs to farms. Synthetic ammonia supplies about the same nitrogen tonnage in fertilizer for our crops as all green nature gains both from its microorganisms and from lightning. The raw materials for Haber�Bosch synthesis are atmospheric N2 and the natural gas that supplies both hydrogen and most of the energy. Haber�Bosch today uses energy quite frugally; only one-sixtieth of commercial fuel worldwide is now used to make ammonia.

The country that now synthesizes most ammonia is neither Germany nor Japan nor the United States, but the land where the most people sit daily to table�China. About one-third of its limited natural gas is used to make fertilizer, and in many older, smaller plants much coal is used as well. Children in the developing world feed on crops grown with fertilizer made from synthetic ammonia, and the 2 or 3 billion more of us who will arrive by mid-century will do the same."

It is hard to imagine the world without synthetic ammonia. Certainly it would be a world much less urbanized than our own. The great fact of the 20th century is that rural society, as the dominant force in culture, disappears, at least in the Western Industrial societies. In fact, it has disappeared so rapidly, and so completely, that few people are aware of the negative space, so to speak, thereby created.

As for Fritz Haber, his life could have figured in a play by his contemporary, Georg Kaiser:

"The Haber-Bosch process is generally credited with keeping Germany supplied with fertilizers and munitions during World War I, after the British naval blockade cut off supplies of nitrates from Chile. During the war Haber threw his energies and those of his institute into further support for the German side. He developed a new weapon�poison gas, the first example of which was chlorine gas�and supervised its initial deployment on the Western Front at Ypres, Belgium, in 1915. His promotion of this frightening weapon precipitated the suicide of his wife, who was herself a chemist, and many others condemned him for his wartime role. There was great consternation when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for 1918 for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements.

After World War I, Haber was remarkably successful in building up his institute, but in 1933 the anti-Jewish decrees of the Nazi regime made his position untenable. He retired a broken man, although at the time of his death he was on his way to investigate a possible senior research position at Rehovot in Palestine (now Israel)."



Monday, February 04, 2002

Remora

Our readers are francophiles to a manjack, right? Or if they aren't, what are they doing reading a weblog named for Derrida's famous invective? Well, messieurs et mesdames, you must go to Eric Ormsby's piece on Louis Simpson's Villon translations in the New Criterion. The first couple of paragraphs try to hard to make the case that Villon was, supremely, the poet of farewell -- although there is, certainly, something to that notion, Ormsby is warming to his subject, and isn't quite there yet. We are being tickled with rhetoric, here. Still, it is a useful idea. One is reminded of that Mandelstam verse, "I have studied the science of farewells", in Tristia -- 'farewells' we prefer to goodbys, and surely to parting, as in this translation of Mandelstam's most famous poem in Archipelago:




I have studied the science of parting
In the bareheaded laments of night.

Oxen chew, the waiting drags on

As the vigil stretches the night�s last hour.

I honored the ritual of the crowing night

When I took up the traveler�s heavy grief.

I saw in a woman�s distant eyes

Tears mingling with the muses� song.


Villon, who knew to the intake of smelly breath the stable sounds of chewing oxen, was not burdened with Mandelstam's history. His farewells do not ring out with our knowledge of the slaughtered past and to come. They are, rather, the goodbys launched by men about to be hung for bawdry, theft, murder -- all the ways of the riotous reprobate. Villon, of course, can be made into a sentimental roustabout -- in the same way Rabelais becomes Rabelaisian, an excuse for Victorian scatology. Orwell pointed out how all too embarrassing the term Rabelaisian is in some essay. Ormsby avoids that image in his review, pulling up, instead, those features in Villon that re-emerge in Baudelaire, in Rimbaud, in Celine -- that omni-directional rage, with its curious intervals of complete self-lessness. Here's a beautiful passage on Villon's women:

"Villon clearly loved women, for whom he had a surprisingly subtle and sympathetic regard; they are certainly the dominant figures in his testamentary poetry: not only his own mother or the Virgin Mary, but also the various lovers he alternately excoriates, cajoles, and caresses. His masterpiece in this genre is undoubtedly the long lament usually known as �La Belle Heaulmi�re,� or �The Beautiful Helmet Maker,� after its protagonist. Villon�s poem is an extended illustration, if one were needed, of Baudelaire�s line four-hundred years later that �c�est un dur m�tier d��tre belle femme� (�It�s hard work being a bombshell�). An old woman, la Belle Heaulmi�re, catalogues her charms as they once were and as they are now; like Villon, she grasps herself only in the backward glance. The poem is remarkable in that its compassion is tacit and arises from the unflinching scrutiny of a woman�s body in decline. Unlike other compositions of the time, it is not prompted by malicious delight or the kind of Tartuffian schadenfreude that seems to have motivated so many medieval denunciations of the female form. Instead, pity and terror are aroused.


Pretty shoulders, long and slender
Arms; beautiful hands and wrists,
That my fate seemed to intend for
Heated tourneys in the lists
Of passion � small, tilting breasts,
Rounded thighs, wide loins, and then
The vulva in its little nest
In the middle of the garden.

Horribly, these have now become:

Wrinkled forehead and gray hair,
Sunken eyebrows, and the eyes
Whose laughter drove men to despair,
Clouding � again to itemize.
The nose that was a perfect size,
Hooked. Two hairy ears hang down.
You�d have to look hard to realize
This death�s-head is a face you�ve known.

Ah, as Limited Inc plummets through middle age like Lucifer thrown out of the American heaven of perpetual adolescence, the death's head is rapidly becoming his own inexcusable, unmitigated face. We must go out and read some Villon today.


Sunday, February 03, 2002

Remora

Limited Inc admits that we were once forced, in a philosophy class, to peruse Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick's masterpiece. We did not come away from the experience with the awe of the convert; we didn't even retain a polemical disdain for the book's sophistries. We simply found the book trite. Nozick's book generated excitement among a generation of philosophers trained in logic chopping and little else. Since logic chopping is a useful but minor instrument, they were left at a loss -- what do you do once you have diagrammed the prisoner's dilemma ten times over? They had no sense of repertoire, which they mistook this gap in their brains for a mission to make philosophy a science. Why read anything that wasn't in English? Why read anything that was written before 1945?

Well, in one sense the logic choppers have a point. The history of philosophy is, in itself, of little importance. Carnap once noted, somewhere, his distress at the philosophy department meetings in the U. of Chicago in the 40s, where collegues would say things like, oh, the important thing about evolution is that Thomas Acquinus refuted it in such and such a tractate. In other words, learned ignorance of the most repellent type.

What reading books, not articles, and books published before 1945, and books published even in French or German, mindboggling as that is, does is, it gives one a repertoire of themes, references, and variations. This, Limited Inc would argue, is an essential feature of the intellectual vocations.

Now, Robert Nozick is dead. The Economist published a review of his new book in order to praise the man. Unfortunately, the Economist reviewer has merely grazed philosophy, no doubt in his pre-law days at some fond U. The reviewer is impressed by Nozick's less than Wildean one-liners ("Yet in the vigour of its arguments, the punch of its formulations (taxation is �on a par with forced labour�; �to each as they choose, from each as they are chosen�) and the breadth of its attack, the book had an impact far beyond the academic world); he is obviously sympathetic with Nozick's conservativism; but he has no idea what philosophers, like, do. Here's a sample graf:

"After his first book, he turned to pure philosophy, joking that he did not want to write "Anarchy, State and Utopia II". In 1981 came "Philosophical Explanations", which contains a famous chapter asking a seemingly bootless question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?", as well as chapters on personal identity and on free will. It is best remembered for an ingenious argument against scepticism, and for a dispositional account of knowledge as true belief that would reliably stick with the truth (or self-correct) as relevant circumstances changed."

Wow. The reviewer has obviously never heard of Leibnitz -- and God knows what he thinks Heidegger did (most likely, he gets his idea of big H from the journals, and so thinks of Heidegger as Hitler's speech writer). The bootless question is also taken up by Shestov, figures in Sartre, and has been trampled on by hundreds of the lesser fry. And as for the Quinean tang of the Nozick's dispositional thesis, forget it. It is way over the reviewer's head.

However, it is the grace note at the end that will make the literate reader wince.

"Philosophy begins in wonder, he writes at the end, with a silent nod to A.N. Whitehead." That silent nod is Nozick snoozing off. We are riffing on a platitude that goes back to Aristotle. And not the Onassis one. The Economist would do well to select its encomiasts for dead philosophers among a pool of writers that has read one or two of them.

Friday, February 01, 2002

Remora

There's a weblog of the plutocrats ball in NYC. It has links to what's going on and how it is reported. The weblogger, Lance Knobel, seems mildly shocked by conspicuous consumption of the type reported by Alex KUCZYNSKI with her typical dry cocktail style -- mix champagne and battery acid, stir. We, of course, love it:

"Heidi Klum, the blond supermodel perhaps best known for her ability to display the charms of the Victoria's Secret Miracle Bra, stood in a crowd of bankers, diplomats, Nobel Prize winners and executives at Brasserie on Wednesday night, marveling at the roster of parties accompanying this year's World Economic Forum, held for the first time in New York.

There are so many, she said, some so exclusive that even she might not be invited, like the private Elton John concert for 200 guests sponsored by Lehman Brothers tonight at the Four Seasons restaurant.

Ms. Klum turned to her publicist, Desiree Gruber, and asked: "Well, are we going or not?"

"No," Ms. Gruber said, her mouth set in grim resignation. "We haven't been invited."

Ms. Kuczynski goes on to reveal that Sir Elton is playing his cheese for a cool million dished out by Lehman brothers. And you thought there was no reason for those mass layoffs on Wall Street, didn't you?
Dope

We put up our hot little relativism post [1/30/02] in much the same spirit that the Duke nailed up his posters for the Royal Nonesuch, with its final line: LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED: "if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!" Alas, our line didn't fetch em. Lately there has been a royal falling off of site hits. Proof, perhaps, that our obsessions are not those of the zeitgeist. Or proof that Limited Inc. should sprinkle our posts with "girles" or "tits" to fetch that crowd (peculiarly concentrated in Saudi Arabia for some reason) looking for a combo of both. But no, no, this is how far our head is up our ass: we figure to draw the multitudes with relativism.

So we wrote to one of our readers, Alan, who has previously figured on this site before as our in-house critic. We asked why our post didn't fetch him. Here's his reply:

One reason I didn't respond was I wasn't real sure what you were trying to
say, and so my response would have taken the form of indefinite expansion
("Your claim could be interpreted as A, B, or C. If A, then ...; if B, then
...,). But, since you goad me, I guess I'll have to jump into this one, so
here goes with an analytic-philosopher type question:

You say that

(1)Cultural diversity is unavoidable; cultures arise and form themselves
with regard to their differences.

I have a problem here; I don't see that there is anything conceptually
impossible about the notion of a hermetically sealed and isolated culture.
Can't we imagine a group of people who have, in the robust sense, a "way of
life", with religious and political institutions etc., while being
completely unaware of the existence of any other human groups. Empirically,
we don't find any such groups in the world, but that's another matter.

You say later on that

(2)[My relativism comes out of the idea that] Any point of view is formed by
struggle against other points of view -- it isn't given to us, ab nihilo.

Could we cite as an example here the Freudian view that the ego arises out
the conflict between the desires and mental representations of parental
authority? (Eschewing Teutonic jargon. If so, I see what you're getting at,
but then I don't see how anything about specifically cultural diversity
follows from it.

So . . . could you elaborate (1) in sufficiently determinate form so that I
can see how (2) is supposed to be a consequence thereof?

a.

And here is our reply:

Cool, I got you to bite.

Anyway, I would say that the crucial point is whether your idea of the hermetically sealed and isolated culture could be true. Your point is that one can imagine such a culture. But I don't really think one can imagine such a culture. That doesn't mean that there aren't Pitcairn islands where maroons, whether voluntary or not, do make themselves into a "culture," but even there they start to evolve. And of course they come from elsewhere -- not Adam and Eve, and but other cultures. To my mind, imagining a sealed and hermetic culture is like imagining a sealed and hermetic species -- this isn't just empirically non-existent, it couldn't be existent if evolutionary theory makes a true claim about speciation. Reversing your empirical/theoretical split, I'd say that no culture would long remain sealed and hermetic without producing cultural variants that would, in the long run, turn it into 2+ cultures.

That is my strong claim. Now, the question is, how can I back it up. And this would involve claiming a dialectical view of culture -- that the thing we call a culture, with its indistinct boundaries, is not just peripherally engaged in struggles with other cultures, but that struggle is how it builds as a culture. In other words, I hold to a thoroughly dialectical view of how cultures are.

Now if this dialectical view is right, a mono-culture, so to speak, will suffer a fall into diversity as surely as a mono-language will evolve dialects, because no culture has the instruments to arrest variation. I suppose I can imagine a culture of clones, but there is a rate of mutation in copying that simply can't be gotten around.

So, now: let's say cultural relativism makes some sense. It would seem that, to get off the ground, it has to claim that there are always going to be more than one cultures. Now this claim doesn't mean that there is more than one valuable culture, but I'd like to make that claim for the variant of relativism I am after -- one that actually can explain why cultural diversity is good. The difficulty here is much like the difficulty laissez faire people have with competition -- if you claim that competition is good, and you spot a tendency to monopoly, what do you do about it? I'd claim that human rights principles are going to function as a sort of anti-trust law, limiting the encroachment of mono-culture.

So there you have it: sizzling discussion, man. Is this a get down site or what? And remember: LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED.

Thursday, January 31, 2002

Remora

The terrorists are the ones eating mango mousse.

Two reports in the Village Voice today on the plutocrat's ball, otherwise known as the World Economic Forum. Usually this enclave of the disgustingly wealthy and unintelligently powerful meets at Davos. Unfortunately, we live in a world where loopholes in environmental regulations sometimes allow the importation of alien species -- the tiger mussel has invaded the Great Lakes Ecosystem, and the WEF has migrated to NYC. Anarcho protesters are going to try to make the place hot for them -- mais alors, there is the problem that in the USA, right now, dissent is automatically equated to terrorism. Prepare to read about anarchos vandalizing Starbucks and such; the word vandalize won't be used about the police use of water cannons and nightsticks on the fragile skeletal structure of protestors, since presumably one skeletal structure can be replaced with another, while the destruction of a Starbucks is an attack on a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

An article entitled, appropriately, Schmooze operator, contains a report by one Sasha Frere-Jones about attending the Davos confab, and fab it was to the participants:

"Accompanying my wife (invited by the WEF to attend because of her work to level the playing field for women in corporate America), I attended Davos in January of 2001. For a week, the approximately 2000 assembled players participated in panel discussions and schmoozed over mango mousse. Attendees were issued "smart" name tags and wireless iPaq computers. African nationals often outnumbered Americans in the conference hall lobby, English was not the default language for small talk, and people were unfailingly warm.

The point of being there, if you average out the participant testimonials and official press releases, is to be Somebody With a Good Idea for the World, Somebody With Money, or both."


It must be nice to be leveling the playing field and playing in a field so manifestly unlevel -- but of course, you have to be inside the establishment to change it, as the Clinton era liberal would say. But Limited Inc locks onto the mango mousse. Yes indeed, reader, here, here we surely have stumbled upon the master-sign, much as jungle explorers, in some old Tarzan flick, immediately recognize the shed panties on the forest floor and look up in anguish, exclaiming Jane!. Coding third world fruit and first world cuisine, but hedging against a too exotic third world culinary vernacular (termite mousse would have been, I suppose, outre, and Sperm Whale mousse would have given away, well, the fact that these are the inheritors of the biggest killers on the planet... and they still are) and, at the same time, against anything too, well, ancien regime for the American pups -- this is where the anarcho element really starts. People throwing mango mousse have bankrupted Argentina, contrived a system of derivatives trading that will eventually blow up national economies, as it is now blowing up corporations, and systematically promote an economic system in which they are awarded in such disproportion as to make the slave owners of the ancient world blush.

So, who do you think we are going to arrest? Well, another VV article reports on the expected cop crackdown on the protestors:

"In the post-9-11 world of law enforcement, cops see these brick throwers and car burners as almost Al Qaeda-like, down to their transnational wandering, their leaders' wealthy backgrounds, and their fundamentalist message. The anti-globalization movement objects to the unfettered migration of capital in search of the best deal on labor, and holds the not-unreasonable paranoia of a global corporate oligarchy.

Of course, that same migrating capital�as with arms maker Krupp, explosives king Nobel, and yellow-journalism baron Hearst�is what fuels its yang. By 1996, one of the movement's funding organizations had banked more than $34 million to fuel its agenda, according to Internet versions of a Left Business Observer essay. The publication goes on to report that the founder of this group has an Ivy League M.B.A., a track record at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and money provided by well-heeled parents from the retail trade. "

Life, baby. Sometimes I can't stand it.


Dope

My friend was, indeed, dissatisfied with yesterday's post (and if you don't know what I mean, lunkhead, see yesterday's post). Limited Inc, like Coolidge's secretary of state, Henry Stimson, believes that gentlemen don't open other gentleman's mail -- so we aren't going to quote our friend's animadversions about our post, except to sum them up as the observation that we ramble on entertainingly, but to little point. However, we we will quote our own email reply:

"... I have a pretty straightforward view that the Middle East is not that exotic, or incomprehensible, vis a vis the West; and that the necessary framework for a civil society is missing in most Middle Eastern countries because of the convergence of two seemingly opposing interests: on the one hand, the theocratic, and on the other hand, the Western. While the theocratic impulse gets its strength, I think, from a false sense of nostalgia that becomes politically powerful when both the rural class and the educated, urban middle feel disempowered, the Western influence is directed, pretty consistently, at one goal: keep the oil flowing cheaply. This simple rule entails a complex politics, because sometimes it seems like the West is willing to forego cheap oil -- such as the petro from Iraq -- for more urgent political reasons. But I think the Iraq business basically stems from a fear that the Saudis will be displaced by an expansionist state, not by any feeling for the oppression of the Iraqis by the mad megalo Hussein. So that the pretence, which was floating about when the Gulf War was fought, that the Western alliance wanted democracy was a surface excuse that lost its force when the West achieved its real objective of making Iraq less threatening.
Does this mean I think the West is evil? No. The West is composed of opposing forces, too, temporary alliances, ephemeral idealisms. Certainly I hope I am a small part of the force that is secular, democratic, egalitarian, liberty loving. And that force basically thinks that a just society requires that the force of the rulers be modified by the power of the ruled to replace them; that minorities be protected systematically -- which means guaranteeing rights, and generating an independent judiciary to enforce those rights; that the political economy not be wholly controlled by an elite. Etc. These are pretty simple things to me. The logical mistake, I think, that is often made by Westerners is to think, okay, we encourage the secular, humanist state and then all of our interests are coordinated. That's simply false. If the Sauds, or the Iraqis, became democratic in the deep sense tomorrow, their interests would still not correspond to the interests of, say, America. Some of the interests would be similar, some dissimilar. I think the advantage of civil society is that, in the end, diverging interests don't require mortal hostility. In that sense, American idealists, since Wilson (who opposed the French and British plan to carve up the Middle East into protectorates with odd, stupid territories with absurd names like Iraq) are almost always right in the long run."

Now, those who know and love Limited Inc (alas, how few!) know that we are ultra relativists. And so they may want to know how we reconcile our relativism with the seemingly universal claims we are making here for human rights.

This doesn't really seem problematic to me. It is simply a part of saying, if there is a state, there needs to be human rights in order to limit that state. If there is governance of another sort, such as tribal governance, that, too, produces limits. Those limits will be attached weakly to the rights accorded to all. You have no right to say what you will in your average Pentecostal church -- meaning that you can kicked out of that church without recourse. Limiting the ability of the church, or the state, to punish you is allowing the process of relativism to work -- because relativism necessarily needs differences to relativize. Does this mean that human rights discourse is universal? No, it means that a progressive politics attachs it to cultures and states, if and when they exist. In fact, if relativism has anything substantial to say about culture and human beings, it consists in this: 1. that cultural diversity is unavoidable, an essential part of what culture is -- cultures arise and form themselves with regard to their differences; 2. the value of culture, and of the human beings who become bearers of culture, can't be abstracted from the formation of culture and human beings as culture bearers. 3. These insights are bound to perspectives that we have in this age and space and culture. This doesn't mean that we have to respect other perspectives in this age and culture -- such as one that would say there is no human right to speech attaching to state dominance. Relativism isn't the same as tolerance for any position. It is odd that this jump is commonly made, as if that were self-evident. Relativisms can come in different types, from those that counsel tolerance like some Buddhist monk sunk in an ultimate trance to those that promote a robust struggle for survival among different points of view, like some Nietzsche freak. Count me among the Nietzsche freaks. My relativism comes out of the idea that any point of view is formed by struggle against other points of view -- it isn't given to us, ab nihilo.

There will be those who do not recognize, in what I'm saying, the relativism they heard attacked in Philosophy 101. Sorry. Limited Inc.'s relativism can accomodate Lord Acton's definition:

"By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty, against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion. The state is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its own immediate sphere." The question of whether this liberty is too individualistic doesn't seem sociologically relevant to us. Most men and women will only do their duty as custom and opinion, authority and majorities, defines it. To form other authorities, majorities, customs and opinions -- to have, in other words, an openess to difference - is the very use and function of human rights. And this is where we stand, so help us deity - or non-deity, or nature, or as you like it.

A vanishing act: repressive desublimation and the NYT

  We are in the depths of the era of “repressive desublimation” – Angela Carter’s genius tossoff of a phrase – and Trump’s shit video is a m...