LI is pleased with the outcome today in Germany. The SPD’s eight cabinet posts include the foreign ministry, finance and labor. The “reforms” that are routinely urged on Germany – as if recently handed down on Mount Sinai – will surely be instituted with one eye on the one thing this election made clear: unlike NYT’s reporters, the Germans are not enthusiastic about Hobbesian homeopathy in the economy: make it easy to fire workers, make it harder for them to get unemployment, and let the rich aggrandize a larger share of the economic spoils. Firmly putting the brake on this Thatcherite nonsense is a good thing. A better thing is to take reflationary steps to strengthen the German economy, from loosening the credit markets to adopting Greenspan’s easy money policies. It is nice to read that the government is pledging to radically increase government supported R and D. The Germans are also obviously going to have to put a much larger percentage of it kids through college. Alas. Because the German industrial system hasn’t been pissed away, as it has been in the States and in the U.K., there’s an understandable incentive to trade years of education for well paying factory jobs. But it is hard to invent any scenario that would preserve or expand the manufacturing sector at its current level. We think that stuffing children into a system that is so inefficient at teaching them that it takes 22 years is not a good thing in itself – in fact, it is a standing inducement to educate poorly in elementary and high school – but it brings about good things. Most immediately, it soaks up a population that would inevitably increase the unemployment rolls (another American trick for keeping down employment, sending millions of people to jail for frivolous reasons, is not something we’d urge on the Germans). It also lends itself to making the labor markets more flexible.
Schroeder was by no means my ideal chancellor, but he did manage a difficult period in which the most powerful nation in the world was taken over by madmen. He did better on foreign policy than, say, Tony Blair, who chose the strategy of sympathetic lunacy over that of good natured resistance. However, with the SPD at the foreign ministry, Europe is still well guarded.
Monday, October 10, 2005
notes, four pages from chapter five
1. T Shirts. After starting and stopping this a year ago, I am ready to start again on this project. For every 50 dollar contribution to LI, I'll send you a t shirt that reads Dopamine Cowboy Movement on the back, Limited Inc on the front. I'm gonna put some kind of announcement up in the column on the right later this week.
2. The following is four pages from chapter five. Comments are always welcome.
Joan Malcolm’s first New Yorker article was published in 1979, when she was 20, and a junior at Vassar. When she was twenty one, she took a leave of absence to travel to Europe; in another year she was writing for far too many publications to write an essay comparing and contrasting Hobbes and Locke on Government, or a paper on the influence of Japanese prints on Whistler (use examples), or to memorize the dates of the Jurassic and Mesozoic periods and what plant or animal life flourished within each (name three). Then her book came out, My Circus Animals; then there was a gold ring on her finger from leftist journalist Alex Stitching (a B&W of the couple in NME, an announcement in the Vows section of the NYT, and an announcement in the Houston Chronicle – to say the least, a unique constellation of media); then there wasn’t a gold ring in her nostril (Joan, an early adopter of punk fashion, found that it got in the way when she interviewed people); then the coming back to the States to the mingled culture shocks of Reagan and MTV. She did return to Vassar, in 1990, but it was to teach a course on American non-fiction. This was an appellation, incidentally, that she disliked. On her first day she told the class that she was teaching American fact, which was capacious enough to fit fiction in its back pocket, and tough enough to make the angels weep bloody tears. Non-fiction, she added, dourly, was a term used only by narcissists and those unbearable memoirists of upper class heroin addiction that were all the rage in certain circles.
The germ of Malcolm’s ‘79 article had been planted when she flew down to Houston in ’78 to attend a party for the cast of “Urban Cowboy” at her parents’ River Oaks digs. Dr. Bobbie Malcolm, through one of his multiple connections, had secured the official title of Physical Therapist to the production.
It was one of those Houston spring nights, when the atmosphere gets fat and sweats and pants and drinks. You think, you wish, that any minute it will rain. It merely sprinkles at 2 a.m. The raindrops feel dirty. There was a noisy crowd in the back yard, wolfing canapés, drinking up the wine, smoking joints. A lot of sniffing, too, a sound that had become common at all the parties Joan attended that year. And, for that matter, the year after, and the one after that. The great Age of Snow. Traffic of partygoers coming from the yard back into the house was greeted with formidably polar temperatures insinuated into all corners by the very effective central air, which was guided by a new and very expensive sensor system that monitored for different gradients of temperature across the house. A light suet of sweat would quickly form on skins; damp patches appeared under armpits of 100 % cotton shirts and silk blouses; salty beads would dribble down from foreheads into eyes; contact wearers would blink and squint, images becoming briefly aqueous before them. Those who remained in the back yard listened to a band performing on a stage that had been hastily erected back there by workmen earlier in the day, over the spot where the swimming pool had been filled in two years before when a neighbor’s kid drowned in it. The singer was a short man with a pale face and ink black, curly hair that came to a pointy crest in the front. Whenever he hit a high note, he opened his mouth so wide it threatened to split his face. He threw back his head. He pitched the note out. Then he would return to the song with a little bobbing motion, not missing a beat, flashing a white grin that showed an astonishing number of teeth. This was a game. There was too much money to keep fighting about the songlist, plus there were names here, his girlfriend had particularly underlined the names, she'd particularly hinted about lack of bread, squandered opportunity, self-involved musicians, the law student her mother had dug up just dying to go out with her. Some danced in front of the stage, cheek to cheek. Some waited for the high notes and applauded. Some wanted songs from the movie. The singer had been given a list by the party manager. None of the songs were country. There was Hit the Road, Jack, there was My Funny Valentine. The party manager had emphasized, stick with the song list. Lights spilled out of the big house onto the yard; wild, reeling shadows mixed with swaying clusters of partygoers.
Bobbie and Lettie Malcolm were at the summit of their power couple-dom in the spring of 1978. They had rather shocked Houston’s vieux garcons, the Farish and Hobby crowd, by tearing out a room in their 10,000 square foot Staub mansion and having it redesigned as a “Futurist Fitness space” (blue velour sofas and wall matting; a new thing called a personal computer –Bobbie was always an early adopter! – on a C curve, Vermont maple desk unit; five pieces of excruciating-looking exercise equipment, a study in chrome, silver, rubber, plastic which made the human body itself look like a thing that was both miserably designed and constructed of substandard material). Lettie could be seen, draped in a Versace sarong dress, her exquisite shoulders bare, among murders of de la Renta at the fundraiser for the Museum (or the Republican congressman, or Cambodian refugees in Thailand, or the expansion of the Zoo, or the symphony, the opera, green urban spaces, the summer Olympics in 1984 association, etc. etc.), but Lettie wasn’t dense: she knew that was still the poor girl at St. Katherine’s Episcopal School for Girls to River Oaks gentry. She’d heard the rumor that she was a charity girl. Charity my Texas ass, she would say. Bobbie would just look bemused, his large, assertive face above the chicken Cesar salad. Wilson Scholes paid in full so that his daughter could learn art appreciation, the history of Texas, and Shakespeare’s dramatic art at St. Kath’s. Leticia Scholes never starred in one of the drama club productions, she ran for editor of St. Kath’s Gazetteer and lost by a humiliating hundred votes (out of one hundred twenty cast), and as a lady in waiting to the Queen in her last year she was a good ten girls and who knows how many yards of gauze from the central royal personage; but by that time she’d discovered cigarettes, boys, and fast cars, and had staged her own Queen for a day with two boys the weekend before the prom. That led to a discreet visit to a Matmoras doctor two months later, about which the less said, the better.
Unlike Lettie, Doctor Bobbie did not trail family credits and discredits into this or any other Houston party, since Bobbie Malcolm was not from Houston, or New Orleans, or any part of Texas. This fact would be brought up in conversations three weeks from the night of the party, when the newspaper was full of Doctor Bobbie disappearing, a story that receded to the B section three weeks after that when it was reported that he’d fled to Venezuela on a fake passport. Meanwhile, his empire was falling in a ruin of fraudulent accounting and Las Vegas gambling debts around Lettie’s still delectable ears, the whorls of which had first borne the delicate explorations of Bobbie’s tongue so many years ago, and around the 2000 ears of his employees, and, finally, the fifty somewhat hairy and reddish ears of his partners. Once Bobbie reached Latin America he didn’t look back. Joan received five mysterious postcards (Love you, scribbled on the back of a picture of a mountain and a lake, an Indian and his pottery) over the next two years. Lettie claimed to have received a long and involved midnight call, once. Unofficially, the FBI agent on the case in Houston thought this was bullshit. The FBI claimed, two years later, to have tracked the absconding doctor to a small town on the Venezuelan-Colombian border, and to have been shown a badly decaying corpse that had been Gustave William , which was the name on Bobbie’s fake passport. The FBI failed to confirm this ID with extracts of bone, or tooth, or hair, since the body disappeared the next day. Agent L. Howard filed one last report; perhaps the fumbled business with the so called corpus delecti was not unconnected with the Cayman Island bank account Agent Howard opened two months later.
Doctor Bobbie came from the great Midwest, where broad faces and a certain Protestant wryness are dominant traits. The wryness is a bleached, distant remnant of Luther’s doctrine of free will – that torturous negotiation between the all too human heart and God’s insistent omniscience – and it offset, in Bobbie, a surprisingly amoral opportunism, as well as a general happiness in human company. Unlike Lettie, Bobbie was energized by high school – as, in life, he was energized by most things. He was the class president of Herbert Hoover High in Ames, Iowa, and in the speech he gave his fellow graduating seniors he reminded them that the future was before them. It was 1952, and heartland optimism struggled with the general perception that the world would blow up in the next decade. Two of the boys he addressed would go to Korea. One would die there. World events did not interfere with Bobbie, however, who rose, almost effortlessly, upward. As a young man, he inclined to bulkiness. Bulkiness, as every Lutheran knows, leads to fatness, but Bobbie was ahead of the curve on the whole weight issue. He lifted weights, he swam, he ran, he joined the college wrestling team and had his share of victories. No trophies, though. He was a good, reliable brother in his frat, the one who kept the keys at the party and drove the car home at the end of it. His first girlfriend was a banker’s daughter, and with her he experienced the golden delights of sex for the first time. In his junior year, they broke up, and Bobbie spend his golden delight on a series of other fine looking girls. To his credit, he never held the fact that he’d fucked a girl against her. That put him in a distinct psychological minority in his frat house. Bobbie’s idea was simply spread the pleasure. The key to Bobbie’s later exercise empire was that he never regarded exercise as a discipline. He never saw it as a form of punishment. He always saw it as a form of pleasure. He wanted the body to “get off” on it. That was his mantra. Get off on your jogging. Get off on your weights. Get off on the bicycle machine. Bobby never said what “getting off” actually meant, though.
In later years, Bobbie forgot exactly why he chose to pursue medicine at Rice; Rice is located in Houston, and Houston is hot, coastal, touched by Mexico and New Orleans, homicidal, sprawling, greedy. It was not a Herbert Hoover High kind of place, which for urban excitement went to Chicago, and never really ventured below St. Louis on the assumption that the South meant the Negro, and where the Negro agglomerated in too great a number, civilization was impossible. At Rice, Bobbie met an art history student. She wasn’t just Iowa pretty – with that stolid acceptance of the flesh in every working pore, ‘well put together’ as though pretty was just another product of the Protestant work ethic – but sexy. Her dyed blond hair was sexy; the way her miniskirt rode her rump was enough to give a doctor’s stethoscope a hard on; her eyes could suddenly go distant and Hollywood over a steak dinner in the Rice Club; she used her mouth, in their long sessions of lovemaking in Doctor Bobbie’s apartment in the University district, like she immensely enjoyed whatever she put in it; and in short, Lettie Scholes was the best thing since white on rice. Bobbie got a sense that her family was Houston gentry. As he was to learn, however, the doctrine and practice of Houston gentry is a collection of inscrutable clauses almost impossible for the outsider to understand. Bobbie quietly decided it was bullshit. Some nights, he almost convinced Lettie that he was right. It was money that counted, in the end, he told her.
In 1978, Bobbie Malcolm was forty five. His face, arms and legs were well known to that segment of Houston which rose early , due to an exercise show he hosted that came on at 6 a.m on Sundays. He had induced many a fifty year old woman to engage in physical contortions that would, in other circumstances, have given her husband grounds for divorce under Texas State Law, or even a sudden, justifiable blast of buckshot; the Melrose Bid a Wee Home for the aged swore by him, falling into collective frail windmills under his telegenic suggestion. He had a big face, a big neck, a burly chest, admirably solid thighs. His eyebrows were bushy and expressive, his grey eyes bulged slightly, his nose was a thick fleshy foothold, his cheeks were extensive. In season and out, his skin was the rich color of the ripe acorn. His hair was silvering nicely. His company, RYB, Inc., had added two franchises just in the past two months. Since founding the physical therapy service in 1971, Bobbie’s company had jumped from one unit in Houston to twenty, twelve in Houston and the rest across the state. RYB was planning on jumping the border into Louisiana. It was also planning on a unit in Las Vegas and a unit in Los Angeles, for which reason Doctor Bobbie was spending time out there. Lettie and the papers and the police discovered, too late, the gambling debts in Vegas, the phony expenses, the chippy in LA, all set up and (‘classic,” as Lettie liked to say, later) even taking acting classes. Doctor Bobbie was tapping his company, and had been for years. It was almost impossible to understand the accounting. It was almost impossible to track down all the places where the money was hidden. An S & L in Phoenix, a mutual fund out of Montreal, a shell company with headquarters in Panama City, Panama.
2. The following is four pages from chapter five. Comments are always welcome.
Joan Malcolm’s first New Yorker article was published in 1979, when she was 20, and a junior at Vassar. When she was twenty one, she took a leave of absence to travel to Europe; in another year she was writing for far too many publications to write an essay comparing and contrasting Hobbes and Locke on Government, or a paper on the influence of Japanese prints on Whistler (use examples), or to memorize the dates of the Jurassic and Mesozoic periods and what plant or animal life flourished within each (name three). Then her book came out, My Circus Animals; then there was a gold ring on her finger from leftist journalist Alex Stitching (a B&W of the couple in NME, an announcement in the Vows section of the NYT, and an announcement in the Houston Chronicle – to say the least, a unique constellation of media); then there wasn’t a gold ring in her nostril (Joan, an early adopter of punk fashion, found that it got in the way when she interviewed people); then the coming back to the States to the mingled culture shocks of Reagan and MTV. She did return to Vassar, in 1990, but it was to teach a course on American non-fiction. This was an appellation, incidentally, that she disliked. On her first day she told the class that she was teaching American fact, which was capacious enough to fit fiction in its back pocket, and tough enough to make the angels weep bloody tears. Non-fiction, she added, dourly, was a term used only by narcissists and those unbearable memoirists of upper class heroin addiction that were all the rage in certain circles.
The germ of Malcolm’s ‘79 article had been planted when she flew down to Houston in ’78 to attend a party for the cast of “Urban Cowboy” at her parents’ River Oaks digs. Dr. Bobbie Malcolm, through one of his multiple connections, had secured the official title of Physical Therapist to the production.
It was one of those Houston spring nights, when the atmosphere gets fat and sweats and pants and drinks. You think, you wish, that any minute it will rain. It merely sprinkles at 2 a.m. The raindrops feel dirty. There was a noisy crowd in the back yard, wolfing canapés, drinking up the wine, smoking joints. A lot of sniffing, too, a sound that had become common at all the parties Joan attended that year. And, for that matter, the year after, and the one after that. The great Age of Snow. Traffic of partygoers coming from the yard back into the house was greeted with formidably polar temperatures insinuated into all corners by the very effective central air, which was guided by a new and very expensive sensor system that monitored for different gradients of temperature across the house. A light suet of sweat would quickly form on skins; damp patches appeared under armpits of 100 % cotton shirts and silk blouses; salty beads would dribble down from foreheads into eyes; contact wearers would blink and squint, images becoming briefly aqueous before them. Those who remained in the back yard listened to a band performing on a stage that had been hastily erected back there by workmen earlier in the day, over the spot where the swimming pool had been filled in two years before when a neighbor’s kid drowned in it. The singer was a short man with a pale face and ink black, curly hair that came to a pointy crest in the front. Whenever he hit a high note, he opened his mouth so wide it threatened to split his face. He threw back his head. He pitched the note out. Then he would return to the song with a little bobbing motion, not missing a beat, flashing a white grin that showed an astonishing number of teeth. This was a game. There was too much money to keep fighting about the songlist, plus there were names here, his girlfriend had particularly underlined the names, she'd particularly hinted about lack of bread, squandered opportunity, self-involved musicians, the law student her mother had dug up just dying to go out with her. Some danced in front of the stage, cheek to cheek. Some waited for the high notes and applauded. Some wanted songs from the movie. The singer had been given a list by the party manager. None of the songs were country. There was Hit the Road, Jack, there was My Funny Valentine. The party manager had emphasized, stick with the song list. Lights spilled out of the big house onto the yard; wild, reeling shadows mixed with swaying clusters of partygoers.
Bobbie and Lettie Malcolm were at the summit of their power couple-dom in the spring of 1978. They had rather shocked Houston’s vieux garcons, the Farish and Hobby crowd, by tearing out a room in their 10,000 square foot Staub mansion and having it redesigned as a “Futurist Fitness space” (blue velour sofas and wall matting; a new thing called a personal computer –Bobbie was always an early adopter! – on a C curve, Vermont maple desk unit; five pieces of excruciating-looking exercise equipment, a study in chrome, silver, rubber, plastic which made the human body itself look like a thing that was both miserably designed and constructed of substandard material). Lettie could be seen, draped in a Versace sarong dress, her exquisite shoulders bare, among murders of de la Renta at the fundraiser for the Museum (or the Republican congressman, or Cambodian refugees in Thailand, or the expansion of the Zoo, or the symphony, the opera, green urban spaces, the summer Olympics in 1984 association, etc. etc.), but Lettie wasn’t dense: she knew that was still the poor girl at St. Katherine’s Episcopal School for Girls to River Oaks gentry. She’d heard the rumor that she was a charity girl. Charity my Texas ass, she would say. Bobbie would just look bemused, his large, assertive face above the chicken Cesar salad. Wilson Scholes paid in full so that his daughter could learn art appreciation, the history of Texas, and Shakespeare’s dramatic art at St. Kath’s. Leticia Scholes never starred in one of the drama club productions, she ran for editor of St. Kath’s Gazetteer and lost by a humiliating hundred votes (out of one hundred twenty cast), and as a lady in waiting to the Queen in her last year she was a good ten girls and who knows how many yards of gauze from the central royal personage; but by that time she’d discovered cigarettes, boys, and fast cars, and had staged her own Queen for a day with two boys the weekend before the prom. That led to a discreet visit to a Matmoras doctor two months later, about which the less said, the better.
Unlike Lettie, Doctor Bobbie did not trail family credits and discredits into this or any other Houston party, since Bobbie Malcolm was not from Houston, or New Orleans, or any part of Texas. This fact would be brought up in conversations three weeks from the night of the party, when the newspaper was full of Doctor Bobbie disappearing, a story that receded to the B section three weeks after that when it was reported that he’d fled to Venezuela on a fake passport. Meanwhile, his empire was falling in a ruin of fraudulent accounting and Las Vegas gambling debts around Lettie’s still delectable ears, the whorls of which had first borne the delicate explorations of Bobbie’s tongue so many years ago, and around the 2000 ears of his employees, and, finally, the fifty somewhat hairy and reddish ears of his partners. Once Bobbie reached Latin America he didn’t look back. Joan received five mysterious postcards (Love you, scribbled on the back of a picture of a mountain and a lake, an Indian and his pottery) over the next two years. Lettie claimed to have received a long and involved midnight call, once. Unofficially, the FBI agent on the case in Houston thought this was bullshit. The FBI claimed, two years later, to have tracked the absconding doctor to a small town on the Venezuelan-Colombian border, and to have been shown a badly decaying corpse that had been Gustave William , which was the name on Bobbie’s fake passport. The FBI failed to confirm this ID with extracts of bone, or tooth, or hair, since the body disappeared the next day. Agent L. Howard filed one last report; perhaps the fumbled business with the so called corpus delecti was not unconnected with the Cayman Island bank account Agent Howard opened two months later.
Doctor Bobbie came from the great Midwest, where broad faces and a certain Protestant wryness are dominant traits. The wryness is a bleached, distant remnant of Luther’s doctrine of free will – that torturous negotiation between the all too human heart and God’s insistent omniscience – and it offset, in Bobbie, a surprisingly amoral opportunism, as well as a general happiness in human company. Unlike Lettie, Bobbie was energized by high school – as, in life, he was energized by most things. He was the class president of Herbert Hoover High in Ames, Iowa, and in the speech he gave his fellow graduating seniors he reminded them that the future was before them. It was 1952, and heartland optimism struggled with the general perception that the world would blow up in the next decade. Two of the boys he addressed would go to Korea. One would die there. World events did not interfere with Bobbie, however, who rose, almost effortlessly, upward. As a young man, he inclined to bulkiness. Bulkiness, as every Lutheran knows, leads to fatness, but Bobbie was ahead of the curve on the whole weight issue. He lifted weights, he swam, he ran, he joined the college wrestling team and had his share of victories. No trophies, though. He was a good, reliable brother in his frat, the one who kept the keys at the party and drove the car home at the end of it. His first girlfriend was a banker’s daughter, and with her he experienced the golden delights of sex for the first time. In his junior year, they broke up, and Bobbie spend his golden delight on a series of other fine looking girls. To his credit, he never held the fact that he’d fucked a girl against her. That put him in a distinct psychological minority in his frat house. Bobbie’s idea was simply spread the pleasure. The key to Bobbie’s later exercise empire was that he never regarded exercise as a discipline. He never saw it as a form of punishment. He always saw it as a form of pleasure. He wanted the body to “get off” on it. That was his mantra. Get off on your jogging. Get off on your weights. Get off on the bicycle machine. Bobby never said what “getting off” actually meant, though.
In later years, Bobbie forgot exactly why he chose to pursue medicine at Rice; Rice is located in Houston, and Houston is hot, coastal, touched by Mexico and New Orleans, homicidal, sprawling, greedy. It was not a Herbert Hoover High kind of place, which for urban excitement went to Chicago, and never really ventured below St. Louis on the assumption that the South meant the Negro, and where the Negro agglomerated in too great a number, civilization was impossible. At Rice, Bobbie met an art history student. She wasn’t just Iowa pretty – with that stolid acceptance of the flesh in every working pore, ‘well put together’ as though pretty was just another product of the Protestant work ethic – but sexy. Her dyed blond hair was sexy; the way her miniskirt rode her rump was enough to give a doctor’s stethoscope a hard on; her eyes could suddenly go distant and Hollywood over a steak dinner in the Rice Club; she used her mouth, in their long sessions of lovemaking in Doctor Bobbie’s apartment in the University district, like she immensely enjoyed whatever she put in it; and in short, Lettie Scholes was the best thing since white on rice. Bobbie got a sense that her family was Houston gentry. As he was to learn, however, the doctrine and practice of Houston gentry is a collection of inscrutable clauses almost impossible for the outsider to understand. Bobbie quietly decided it was bullshit. Some nights, he almost convinced Lettie that he was right. It was money that counted, in the end, he told her.
In 1978, Bobbie Malcolm was forty five. His face, arms and legs were well known to that segment of Houston which rose early , due to an exercise show he hosted that came on at 6 a.m on Sundays. He had induced many a fifty year old woman to engage in physical contortions that would, in other circumstances, have given her husband grounds for divorce under Texas State Law, or even a sudden, justifiable blast of buckshot; the Melrose Bid a Wee Home for the aged swore by him, falling into collective frail windmills under his telegenic suggestion. He had a big face, a big neck, a burly chest, admirably solid thighs. His eyebrows were bushy and expressive, his grey eyes bulged slightly, his nose was a thick fleshy foothold, his cheeks were extensive. In season and out, his skin was the rich color of the ripe acorn. His hair was silvering nicely. His company, RYB, Inc., had added two franchises just in the past two months. Since founding the physical therapy service in 1971, Bobbie’s company had jumped from one unit in Houston to twenty, twelve in Houston and the rest across the state. RYB was planning on jumping the border into Louisiana. It was also planning on a unit in Las Vegas and a unit in Los Angeles, for which reason Doctor Bobbie was spending time out there. Lettie and the papers and the police discovered, too late, the gambling debts in Vegas, the phony expenses, the chippy in LA, all set up and (‘classic,” as Lettie liked to say, later) even taking acting classes. Doctor Bobbie was tapping his company, and had been for years. It was almost impossible to understand the accounting. It was almost impossible to track down all the places where the money was hidden. An S & L in Phoenix, a mutual fund out of Montreal, a shell company with headquarters in Panama City, Panama.
Saturday, October 08, 2005
perverse sibyl
“One is left with unappeased curiosity about the Sibyl. Wood says the Sibyl in Virgil's Aeneid is "perfectly clear," but that is hardly the case. The Sibyl tells Aeneas that the way down into the underworld is easy and that the hard thing is to get back. In the ensuing narrative Aeneas has great difficulty finding his way down and flits out with the greatest of ease—through the gate
of false dreams (!). The reader is left thinking, "What can she have meant?”
The quote above is from A.D. Nuttall’s review of Michael Wood’s book on oracles, The Road to Delphi.
Over at The Valve they had a discussion, earlier this week, about novels. The discussion attached to Ben Marcus’ attack on Jonathan Franzen’s line about novels – that the types of novels can be divided between contract and status, with contract being those novels that imply a contract with the reader – this is something you will like to read and feel entertained by -- and status being those that are written to make a place in the world of the novel. Franzen’s has pushed his case by making an argument that is, oddly enough, from status – that the novel will retain its status in it fight against other forms of entertainment by fulfilling its contract.
Myself, I think that Franzen is wrong to think that novels are competing with tv or paintball or movies. Cars don’t compete with airplanes, although cars and airplanes are in the same business of transporting people around. I much prefer the novelist as Virgil’s Sibyl, to whom we go for predictions of a sort.
To change the image: I’ve been reading a terrifically depressing memoir of a life among the death camps by Bela Zsolt, Nine Suitcases. Zsolt was caught up in the increasingly mortal sweeps of Hungarian Jews, but escaped death himself. The memoir is collected from notes he wrote. One of those notes recalls a scene in a synagogue, grotesquely crowded with dead and dying Jews awaiting transport to the camps. Zsolt is approached by a girl who has been told she has a chance of stopping the guard from beating her father to death if she will fuck him. She wants Zsolt’s advice. Ultimately, he doesn’t give her any, but it opens up a memory from 1942. He’s been sent out on a detail to the Russian front. The Hungarian government condemned certain Hungarian Jews to do crushing, menial tasks on the front. So Zsolt is in a battalion in the town of Skarzysko in Poland, and he passes by a lot of shacks in which Jewish women intended to service German soldiers were kept. One of the woman rushes to the fence:
“Another girl, in the last stages of pregnancy who was carrying some moldy bread in a music case, asked us: “Have you got any German books? I’ve just finished what I had today. I have a few days left to read a new one if it isn’t too long.” “Why have you only got a few days?” “Because then I’m going to die. Wait a moment…” and she counted on her fingers. “Seventeen or eighteen days. Then I’ll be in labor. Then they are going to take me behind the bushes and… bang. Dort is der Hurenfriedhof.”
That was where they killed and buried the girls, behind the bushes, because they didn’t want them to give birth to mongrels, and also simply because they were Jews. The girls didn’t mind becoming pregnant; they didn’t have the strength to commit suicide and this was the certain death they longed for. Meanwhile, they still enjoyed life, even their helpless bodies were forced to enjoy it – and they hated themselves for it. And sometimes they would even sing, if the soldiers made them drunk. They got the novels from the soldiers. These novels were about blonde German women and U-Boot sailors. They read them avidly, with the unlucky ones being taken away mid-novel and never knowing what happened next to the blonde and the captain. They would snatch a glance at the very end, however, before being loaded into the NSKK truck that disappeared with them behind the bushes.”
Those novels certainly fulfilled the contract to the very end. And War and Peace would certainly have been too long for the death wait. The novelist has a chance to be literally a sibyl, here, since the underworld is tangibly close – it is just in back, in fact, in the bushes. But I can’t help thinking that these sibyls were responsible for fulfilling their contract, and that the antics of the blonde girls and the U-Boat sailors might have been written into the history, the whole jigsaw puzzle of events, that placed the Jewish girls in the camp in Skarzysko. This is why I don’t think you can sign any contract whatsoever with the reader, that Franzen is promoting a false hope and a false dichotomy. Novelists are perverse sibyls, whose predictions, although immediately falsified, eventually take their revenge on life by gradually altering the conditions by which we judge the lifelike and the artificial.
of false dreams (!). The reader is left thinking, "What can she have meant?”
The quote above is from A.D. Nuttall’s review of Michael Wood’s book on oracles, The Road to Delphi.
Over at The Valve they had a discussion, earlier this week, about novels. The discussion attached to Ben Marcus’ attack on Jonathan Franzen’s line about novels – that the types of novels can be divided between contract and status, with contract being those novels that imply a contract with the reader – this is something you will like to read and feel entertained by -- and status being those that are written to make a place in the world of the novel. Franzen’s has pushed his case by making an argument that is, oddly enough, from status – that the novel will retain its status in it fight against other forms of entertainment by fulfilling its contract.
Myself, I think that Franzen is wrong to think that novels are competing with tv or paintball or movies. Cars don’t compete with airplanes, although cars and airplanes are in the same business of transporting people around. I much prefer the novelist as Virgil’s Sibyl, to whom we go for predictions of a sort.
To change the image: I’ve been reading a terrifically depressing memoir of a life among the death camps by Bela Zsolt, Nine Suitcases. Zsolt was caught up in the increasingly mortal sweeps of Hungarian Jews, but escaped death himself. The memoir is collected from notes he wrote. One of those notes recalls a scene in a synagogue, grotesquely crowded with dead and dying Jews awaiting transport to the camps. Zsolt is approached by a girl who has been told she has a chance of stopping the guard from beating her father to death if she will fuck him. She wants Zsolt’s advice. Ultimately, he doesn’t give her any, but it opens up a memory from 1942. He’s been sent out on a detail to the Russian front. The Hungarian government condemned certain Hungarian Jews to do crushing, menial tasks on the front. So Zsolt is in a battalion in the town of Skarzysko in Poland, and he passes by a lot of shacks in which Jewish women intended to service German soldiers were kept. One of the woman rushes to the fence:
“Another girl, in the last stages of pregnancy who was carrying some moldy bread in a music case, asked us: “Have you got any German books? I’ve just finished what I had today. I have a few days left to read a new one if it isn’t too long.” “Why have you only got a few days?” “Because then I’m going to die. Wait a moment…” and she counted on her fingers. “Seventeen or eighteen days. Then I’ll be in labor. Then they are going to take me behind the bushes and… bang. Dort is der Hurenfriedhof.”
That was where they killed and buried the girls, behind the bushes, because they didn’t want them to give birth to mongrels, and also simply because they were Jews. The girls didn’t mind becoming pregnant; they didn’t have the strength to commit suicide and this was the certain death they longed for. Meanwhile, they still enjoyed life, even their helpless bodies were forced to enjoy it – and they hated themselves for it. And sometimes they would even sing, if the soldiers made them drunk. They got the novels from the soldiers. These novels were about blonde German women and U-Boot sailors. They read them avidly, with the unlucky ones being taken away mid-novel and never knowing what happened next to the blonde and the captain. They would snatch a glance at the very end, however, before being loaded into the NSKK truck that disappeared with them behind the bushes.”
Those novels certainly fulfilled the contract to the very end. And War and Peace would certainly have been too long for the death wait. The novelist has a chance to be literally a sibyl, here, since the underworld is tangibly close – it is just in back, in fact, in the bushes. But I can’t help thinking that these sibyls were responsible for fulfilling their contract, and that the antics of the blonde girls and the U-Boat sailors might have been written into the history, the whole jigsaw puzzle of events, that placed the Jewish girls in the camp in Skarzysko. This is why I don’t think you can sign any contract whatsoever with the reader, that Franzen is promoting a false hope and a false dichotomy. Novelists are perverse sibyls, whose predictions, although immediately falsified, eventually take their revenge on life by gradually altering the conditions by which we judge the lifelike and the artificial.
Friday, October 07, 2005
Terrorist plots and me
This is a week the angels unseal the seals, rolls are put into the mouths of prophets, and Bush reveals the terrorist plots that his administration has cleverly foiled. In that spirit, we thought we might list a few terrorist plots LI has foiled:
1. The Little Rock airliner plot: In mid-2003 LI and a partner disrupted a plot to spread airplane glue all over the tarmac of the Little Rock airport, which would not only have stuck aircraft to the ground but given Little Rockians those terrific glue sniffing headaches.
2. The 2003 Karachi plot: In the spring of 2003 LI. and a partner disrupted a plot to draw horns on posters depicting Pakistans biggest patron of democracy and president for life, your friend and mine, runner up for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Medicine, and Peace, General Musharraf in Karachi, Pakistan.
3. The 2004 Oz plot. In the fall of 2004, LI and a scarecrow and a cowardly lion disrupted a plot by a witch to overthrow the president for life of Oz and our very good friend, the Wizard. Mission also saved dog, Toto, from said terrorist witch.
Now, I know many readers wonder whether LI, like our President, gets regular messages from God telling us where the terrorists are hiding and what they are going to do next. But this is a big misunderstanding. According to Scott McClellan, it is absurd to say that God talks to the President. Or, rather, this happened:
“In [a] BBC film, a former Palestinian foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, says that Mr Bush told a Palestinian delegation in 2003 that God spoke to him and said: "George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan" and also "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq".
During a White House press briefing, Mr McClellan said: "No, that's absurd. He's never made such comments."
Mr McClellan admitted he was not at the Israeli-Palestinian summit at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in June 2003 when Mr Bush supposedly revealed the extent of his religious fervour.
However, he said he had checked into the claims and "I stand by what I just said".
McClellan didn’t elaborate, but our sources say that he ran into God at a Heritage Foundation meeting on Averting Terrorist Plots for Fun and Profit. God said that, as far as he remembered, he only told the President that joke about the woman with the pegleg who got married to the one eyed man. God then asked if Mr. McClellan had heard the one about the terrorist who came home and found his wife in bed with the milkman. This is why McClellan hates running into God – he not only looks like LBJ, but he has a pottymouth like LBJ.
In any case … LI urges our readers to reveal to loved ones and strangers, using our comments section if necessary, terrorist plots that you have averted. The president is right: this is no time for modesty or shyness.
1. The Little Rock airliner plot: In mid-2003 LI and a partner disrupted a plot to spread airplane glue all over the tarmac of the Little Rock airport, which would not only have stuck aircraft to the ground but given Little Rockians those terrific glue sniffing headaches.
2. The 2003 Karachi plot: In the spring of 2003 LI. and a partner disrupted a plot to draw horns on posters depicting Pakistans biggest patron of democracy and president for life, your friend and mine, runner up for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Medicine, and Peace, General Musharraf in Karachi, Pakistan.
3. The 2004 Oz plot. In the fall of 2004, LI and a scarecrow and a cowardly lion disrupted a plot by a witch to overthrow the president for life of Oz and our very good friend, the Wizard. Mission also saved dog, Toto, from said terrorist witch.
Now, I know many readers wonder whether LI, like our President, gets regular messages from God telling us where the terrorists are hiding and what they are going to do next. But this is a big misunderstanding. According to Scott McClellan, it is absurd to say that God talks to the President. Or, rather, this happened:
“In [a] BBC film, a former Palestinian foreign minister, Nabil Shaath, says that Mr Bush told a Palestinian delegation in 2003 that God spoke to him and said: "George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan" and also "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq".
During a White House press briefing, Mr McClellan said: "No, that's absurd. He's never made such comments."
Mr McClellan admitted he was not at the Israeli-Palestinian summit at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in June 2003 when Mr Bush supposedly revealed the extent of his religious fervour.
However, he said he had checked into the claims and "I stand by what I just said".
McClellan didn’t elaborate, but our sources say that he ran into God at a Heritage Foundation meeting on Averting Terrorist Plots for Fun and Profit. God said that, as far as he remembered, he only told the President that joke about the woman with the pegleg who got married to the one eyed man. God then asked if Mr. McClellan had heard the one about the terrorist who came home and found his wife in bed with the milkman. This is why McClellan hates running into God – he not only looks like LBJ, but he has a pottymouth like LBJ.
In any case … LI urges our readers to reveal to loved ones and strangers, using our comments section if necessary, terrorist plots that you have averted. The president is right: this is no time for modesty or shyness.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
ps
ps -- we wrote the last post before we went to the Dailywarnews and found the Iraqi PM's response to Blair's tinny warmongering:
"BAGHDAD: Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari has denied British claims Iran has been assisting insurgents in Iraq and meddling in its politics.
"Such accusations are baseless and we do not agree with them at all," Jaafari said on Iranian state television Thursday. "Relations between Iran and Iraq are currently very friendly and strong and expanding. We are proud of the situation."
My guess is that this item from the Kerala news will appear in the Washington Post, if at all, on page A16. The truth about our "allies" in Iraq is systematically censored in the press, who are, after all, loyal members of the oligarchy.
PPS -- well, I'm a hundred percent today. The WP story on the incident doesn't mention Jaafari's denial once. The good thing about having a press run as a propaganda machine for the imperialist ambitions of low rent D.C. jingoists is that it is so predictable.
"BAGHDAD: Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari has denied British claims Iran has been assisting insurgents in Iraq and meddling in its politics.
"Such accusations are baseless and we do not agree with them at all," Jaafari said on Iranian state television Thursday. "Relations between Iran and Iraq are currently very friendly and strong and expanding. We are proud of the situation."
My guess is that this item from the Kerala news will appear in the Washington Post, if at all, on page A16. The truth about our "allies" in Iraq is systematically censored in the press, who are, after all, loyal members of the oligarchy.
PPS -- well, I'm a hundred percent today. The WP story on the incident doesn't mention Jaafari's denial once. The good thing about having a press run as a propaganda machine for the imperialist ambitions of low rent D.C. jingoists is that it is so predictable.
an evening redness in Iraq
Following up on LI’s last post, about miracles, there is a story in the Guardian today that begins with a sentence that could have been ripped from the Victorian book of prejudices:
“Italy remains a profoundly superstitious country and there was uproar recently when a group of scientists queried a religious rite in Naples in which the dried blood of a saint beheaded in AD305 "miraculously" liquefies.”
Ah, those superstitious Italians, always being fooled by the priestly caste. The superstition in question is the famous transformation of a liquid in two vials in Naples into blood on the Feast of San Gennaro:
“This time, members of the Italian Committee for the Investigation of the Paranormal (Cicap) have said the red-coloured contents are a thixotropic substance, based on iron chloride. This means that it liquefies when stirred or vibrated and returns to solid form when left to stand. According to Cicap, the substance was probably stumbled upon by an alchemist or a painter in medieval times.
Attempts to explode the myth about Naples' much-loved patron saint has however, reignited the debate about science versus faith in Italy.
Members of Cicap, who include Umberto Eco and two winners of the Nobel Prize, have been accused of trying to undermine the religious beliefs of the dwindling numbers of the faithful. They have also been called spoilsports and compared to magicians who reveal their tricks.”
Compare this story (funny foreigners will believe anything!) with the headline story, in which the funny, credulous PM proclaims that Iran is importing weapons into Iraq. Of course, this isn’t superstition – this is merely lying to buttress a shabby imperial venture that is falling apart. The PM’s proclamation comes after a meeting with the favorite Iraqi government official, Jalal Talabani, the for show liberal secularist for foreign consumption. Far more interesting would have been a meeting with Iraq’s PM, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, whose first act was to go to Teheran and apologize profusely for the Iraq-Iranian war.
The deep level of the press’s complicity and ignorance regarding the Iraqi debacle is shown by the way in which stories like this are simply shoved down the chute, instead of provoking the question: why would Iran try to destabilize a state headed by a group Iran nurtured for twenty years? Hasn’t the very government that British soldiers are fighting to protect, the “democratically elected” Iraqi government, said over and over again that it wants a military alliance with Iran? What part of that doesn’t the PM get?
As we have repeated ad nauseam, the policy of Double Containment was one of the chief causes that Saddam Hussein retained power in Iraq during the nineties. The policy is being retained by the ever superstitious British, who obviously believe in miracles much more harmful than a little redness showing up in two vials on San Gennaro’s feast day. There’s a whole lotta redness showing up on the streets and fields of Iraq, and no magic wand will transform it into the blood of liberation.
“Italy remains a profoundly superstitious country and there was uproar recently when a group of scientists queried a religious rite in Naples in which the dried blood of a saint beheaded in AD305 "miraculously" liquefies.”
Ah, those superstitious Italians, always being fooled by the priestly caste. The superstition in question is the famous transformation of a liquid in two vials in Naples into blood on the Feast of San Gennaro:
“This time, members of the Italian Committee for the Investigation of the Paranormal (Cicap) have said the red-coloured contents are a thixotropic substance, based on iron chloride. This means that it liquefies when stirred or vibrated and returns to solid form when left to stand. According to Cicap, the substance was probably stumbled upon by an alchemist or a painter in medieval times.
Attempts to explode the myth about Naples' much-loved patron saint has however, reignited the debate about science versus faith in Italy.
Members of Cicap, who include Umberto Eco and two winners of the Nobel Prize, have been accused of trying to undermine the religious beliefs of the dwindling numbers of the faithful. They have also been called spoilsports and compared to magicians who reveal their tricks.”
Compare this story (funny foreigners will believe anything!) with the headline story, in which the funny, credulous PM proclaims that Iran is importing weapons into Iraq. Of course, this isn’t superstition – this is merely lying to buttress a shabby imperial venture that is falling apart. The PM’s proclamation comes after a meeting with the favorite Iraqi government official, Jalal Talabani, the for show liberal secularist for foreign consumption. Far more interesting would have been a meeting with Iraq’s PM, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, whose first act was to go to Teheran and apologize profusely for the Iraq-Iranian war.
The deep level of the press’s complicity and ignorance regarding the Iraqi debacle is shown by the way in which stories like this are simply shoved down the chute, instead of provoking the question: why would Iran try to destabilize a state headed by a group Iran nurtured for twenty years? Hasn’t the very government that British soldiers are fighting to protect, the “democratically elected” Iraqi government, said over and over again that it wants a military alliance with Iran? What part of that doesn’t the PM get?
As we have repeated ad nauseam, the policy of Double Containment was one of the chief causes that Saddam Hussein retained power in Iraq during the nineties. The policy is being retained by the ever superstitious British, who obviously believe in miracles much more harmful than a little redness showing up in two vials on San Gennaro’s feast day. There’s a whole lotta redness showing up on the streets and fields of Iraq, and no magic wand will transform it into the blood of liberation.
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
suspensio legis naturae
Notes
a. We haven’t thanked the people who have been sending us money for this site. Recently, two readers shuffled LI two hundred and fifteen bucks, which is the equivalent of four NYT special services fees. We are touched. Sorry we took so long to acknowledge your generosity.
b. On the editing front, we’d also like to thank readers who emailed us with suggestions about improving our site. A couple have told us that they will use send our letter to people they know who require editing/writing/translating, etc. We are going to insert that letter, in its various forms, every week on LI, to keep it visual.
c. Finally, a correction. Our last post incorrectly implied that I was the only member of the dopamine cowboy movement. Our correspondent, T., in NYC reminded us he is a dopamine cowboy. Actually, we meant to say that the whole LI collective, with branches in Washoogle,Washington and New York City and Barcelona, are members of the dopamine cowboy movement.
….
The Welt article we wrote about yesterday cited some figure for the revenues of the gambling industry in the U.S.A that was supposed to show that gambling is bigger than the entertainment industry and – I forget, three other sectors. There was no source for the figures, although since they are the same as those in a Time Magazine article this summer (which is similarly unsourced), we presume that they were quietly lifted from the latter.
LI finds it a very ponderable fact that, in the same nation where an arguable majority rejects the idea of Darwinian evolution, so much is spent on games of chance. The argument against Darwinian evolution almost invariably proceeds from the idea that chance can’t explain life. But since this antipathy to chance coexists with the compulsion to stake sums upon it, one wonders how the two impulses are intellectually reconciled.
Which, of course, brings us to Aviezer Tucker’s article, MIRACLES, HISTORICAL TESTIMONIES, AND PROBABILITIES in this season’s History and Memory. Tucker’s thesis is that Hume’s famous essay on miracles, which is usually read in terms of Hume’s philosophy, should be read in terms of Hume’s historiography. Tucker contends that Hume’s essay makes two blunders:
a. Hume gives an anachronistic definition of “miracle.” According to Hume, a miracle is an event that violates physical law. According to Tucker, however, the ancient Greek and Hebrew idea of miracle is something on the order of divine weightlifting.
“Given the absence of a concept of universal law of nature prior to the seventeenth century, Hume’s definition of miracles is clearly anachronistic, ahistorical. A cursory search in the library of rabbinical literature does not divulge any conceptual connection between miracles and scientific laws prior to the twentieth century. A similarly cursory examination of Catholic theology reveals the consideration of miracles as suspensio legis naturae, but only in the twentieth century.
It is extremely unlikely that anybody could have associated miracles with scientific laws prior to the seventeenth century. Perhaps Hume and his eighteenthcentury contemporaries on either side of the debate wanted to say that the world is governed either by God or by natural laws, but not by both, as a metaphysical reflection of the Enlightenment political conflict between religion and science. So if miracles are not divinely produced violations of the laws of nature, what are they? A definition of miracles that fits all the paradigmatic cases mentioned above and the Bible would be something along the line of “divine feats of strength.””
b. Given this idea of the miracle, those miracles in the Bible that Hume examines should not be considered in the light of violations of the laws discovered by the physicists, but rather, in light of the sources of historical fact. What are we to make of testimonies to divine feats of strength (making the sun stand still, for instance, over a battlefield)? Tucker’s example is a little less cosmologically complex:
“Philosophers have been trying to assess the posterior probability of concrete miracle hypotheses, for example, that Moses parted the Red Sea (actually this should be the “Reed Sea,” as the original King James translation had it correctly before a fateful typographical mistake “miraculously” transmuted the shallow Bamboo Sea into a deep Red Sea). Hume and his Bayesian explicators 10 examine the posterior probability of a miracle hypothesis, given the evidence (most notably testimonies), background knowledge, and theories in isolation from alternative competing hypotheses that explain the same scope of evidence.”
Tucker’s program, in this article, is to claim that miracles have a place in historiography insofar as they are attested to by witnesses. But it is here that something goes a little wrong with his argument:
"Likewise, it is not reasonable for people to relinquish their faith in particular miracle hypotheses until better explanations of the evidence are proposed. As Salmon and Sober have argued, it is neither realistic nor interesting to examine one isolated hypothesis, in our case the literal truth of the evidence for a miracle, without comparing it with its alternatives.14
It has been recognized at least since Roman law that multiple independent witnesses increase the posterior probability of what they agree on: testis unis, testis nullus. The reason is the low likelihood of agreement between false independent testimonies. To borrow Laplace’s example, if one number is randomly drawn in
a lottery from the first one hundred numbers, the likelihood of any given number being reported falsely by a deceptive witness is 1:99. If two independent witnesses report the same number, the likelihood of this coincidence given deception is (1:99)2; if three witnesses agree, the probability of deception is (1:99)3;
and so on.”
The problem with this argument, to LI’s mind, is that it turns, below the surface, his argument that miracles are intensional – dependent on a belief of the testifiers – rather than extensional, as Hume mistakenly believed, back to Hume’s own interpretation of miracles. If one clears the space by claiming that miracles are only feats of divine strength, then the historical interest in the claim that a miracle has occurred is what would make the witnesses move to the intensional stance of calling event X a miracle. The probabilities, here, shift to the beliefs of the testifiers (given a random set of Egytians and Hebrews, for instance, how many would be inclined to call the parting of the Reed sea a miracle) rather than the factuality of the thing testified to. In fact, by pursuing the question as though it were a question about the event X rather than belief about the event X, Tucker undermines his notion that Hume’s anachronism consisted in seeing event X as a violation of natural law. Granted, physical law in the Newtonian sense didn’t exist for the ancient Greeks and Romans. However, the idea that a miracle requires many witnesses seems to indicate that the belief about the test of divine strength is itself dependent on beliefs about how events occur.
“The case for multiple independent witnesses of miracles was articulated philosophically by the Spanish-Jewish philosopher Judah Halevi in his twelfth-century, Arabic-language, Platonic-style dialogue The Kuzari. In this dialogue Halevi listed the criteria for independence of evidence for belief in miracles: Miracles, intercourse between God and humans, must take place “in the presence of great multitudes, who saw it distinctly, and did not learn it from reports and traditions. Even then they must examine the matter carefully and repeatedly, so that no suspicion of imagination or magic can enter their minds.”17 Halevi presented the revelation on Mount Sinai as fitting these criteria.”
Now, in one way Tucker’s idea fits in quite nicely with the idea that the revelation at Mount Sinai is evidence of divine strength in competition with other gods. That would explain the first commandment, and Moses’ problem with the dancing about the golden calf. But Tucker can’t help but continue to pick at the idea that a miracle is about the probability of the event. Tucker seems a little blind to the contradiction in his own account, with his ultimate point (that historians operate rationally by including miraculous events in a true historical account, contra Hume) begs the question of his dependent point (showing that miracles are possible, thus acceding to the general lines of the argument as Hume has shaped it). Our point is not to harp on the antinomies in Tucker’s article, but to get back to the beliefs of the set of people who describe certain events as miracles. I imagine that this set of people, in America, would include both those people who subscribe to the divine design theory of the earth and life upon it, and those people who think that certain lottery numbers are lucky, or that they have developed a system for betting at roulette. Luck, in this belief system, can be good or bad. It can also be earned.
From this perspective, Darwinian evolution is extremely anxiety making. The luck of the survivor isn’t ultimately earned – but is a new piece of the old luck, the mutation that simply happens to be advantageous given the circumstances of a certain ecological niche. The luck of the human and the luck of the dodo are the same kinds of luck. One is merely not presently extinct. Living beyond Good and Evil is relatively easy, compared to living beyond good and bad luck.
a. We haven’t thanked the people who have been sending us money for this site. Recently, two readers shuffled LI two hundred and fifteen bucks, which is the equivalent of four NYT special services fees. We are touched. Sorry we took so long to acknowledge your generosity.
b. On the editing front, we’d also like to thank readers who emailed us with suggestions about improving our site. A couple have told us that they will use send our letter to people they know who require editing/writing/translating, etc. We are going to insert that letter, in its various forms, every week on LI, to keep it visual.
c. Finally, a correction. Our last post incorrectly implied that I was the only member of the dopamine cowboy movement. Our correspondent, T., in NYC reminded us he is a dopamine cowboy. Actually, we meant to say that the whole LI collective, with branches in Washoogle,Washington and New York City and Barcelona, are members of the dopamine cowboy movement.
….
The Welt article we wrote about yesterday cited some figure for the revenues of the gambling industry in the U.S.A that was supposed to show that gambling is bigger than the entertainment industry and – I forget, three other sectors. There was no source for the figures, although since they are the same as those in a Time Magazine article this summer (which is similarly unsourced), we presume that they were quietly lifted from the latter.
LI finds it a very ponderable fact that, in the same nation where an arguable majority rejects the idea of Darwinian evolution, so much is spent on games of chance. The argument against Darwinian evolution almost invariably proceeds from the idea that chance can’t explain life. But since this antipathy to chance coexists with the compulsion to stake sums upon it, one wonders how the two impulses are intellectually reconciled.
Which, of course, brings us to Aviezer Tucker’s article, MIRACLES, HISTORICAL TESTIMONIES, AND PROBABILITIES in this season’s History and Memory. Tucker’s thesis is that Hume’s famous essay on miracles, which is usually read in terms of Hume’s philosophy, should be read in terms of Hume’s historiography. Tucker contends that Hume’s essay makes two blunders:
a. Hume gives an anachronistic definition of “miracle.” According to Hume, a miracle is an event that violates physical law. According to Tucker, however, the ancient Greek and Hebrew idea of miracle is something on the order of divine weightlifting.
“Given the absence of a concept of universal law of nature prior to the seventeenth century, Hume’s definition of miracles is clearly anachronistic, ahistorical. A cursory search in the library of rabbinical literature does not divulge any conceptual connection between miracles and scientific laws prior to the twentieth century. A similarly cursory examination of Catholic theology reveals the consideration of miracles as suspensio legis naturae, but only in the twentieth century.
It is extremely unlikely that anybody could have associated miracles with scientific laws prior to the seventeenth century. Perhaps Hume and his eighteenthcentury contemporaries on either side of the debate wanted to say that the world is governed either by God or by natural laws, but not by both, as a metaphysical reflection of the Enlightenment political conflict between religion and science. So if miracles are not divinely produced violations of the laws of nature, what are they? A definition of miracles that fits all the paradigmatic cases mentioned above and the Bible would be something along the line of “divine feats of strength.””
b. Given this idea of the miracle, those miracles in the Bible that Hume examines should not be considered in the light of violations of the laws discovered by the physicists, but rather, in light of the sources of historical fact. What are we to make of testimonies to divine feats of strength (making the sun stand still, for instance, over a battlefield)? Tucker’s example is a little less cosmologically complex:
“Philosophers have been trying to assess the posterior probability of concrete miracle hypotheses, for example, that Moses parted the Red Sea (actually this should be the “Reed Sea,” as the original King James translation had it correctly before a fateful typographical mistake “miraculously” transmuted the shallow Bamboo Sea into a deep Red Sea). Hume and his Bayesian explicators 10 examine the posterior probability of a miracle hypothesis, given the evidence (most notably testimonies), background knowledge, and theories in isolation from alternative competing hypotheses that explain the same scope of evidence.”
Tucker’s program, in this article, is to claim that miracles have a place in historiography insofar as they are attested to by witnesses. But it is here that something goes a little wrong with his argument:
"Likewise, it is not reasonable for people to relinquish their faith in particular miracle hypotheses until better explanations of the evidence are proposed. As Salmon and Sober have argued, it is neither realistic nor interesting to examine one isolated hypothesis, in our case the literal truth of the evidence for a miracle, without comparing it with its alternatives.14
It has been recognized at least since Roman law that multiple independent witnesses increase the posterior probability of what they agree on: testis unis, testis nullus. The reason is the low likelihood of agreement between false independent testimonies. To borrow Laplace’s example, if one number is randomly drawn in
a lottery from the first one hundred numbers, the likelihood of any given number being reported falsely by a deceptive witness is 1:99. If two independent witnesses report the same number, the likelihood of this coincidence given deception is (1:99)2; if three witnesses agree, the probability of deception is (1:99)3;
and so on.”
The problem with this argument, to LI’s mind, is that it turns, below the surface, his argument that miracles are intensional – dependent on a belief of the testifiers – rather than extensional, as Hume mistakenly believed, back to Hume’s own interpretation of miracles. If one clears the space by claiming that miracles are only feats of divine strength, then the historical interest in the claim that a miracle has occurred is what would make the witnesses move to the intensional stance of calling event X a miracle. The probabilities, here, shift to the beliefs of the testifiers (given a random set of Egytians and Hebrews, for instance, how many would be inclined to call the parting of the Reed sea a miracle) rather than the factuality of the thing testified to. In fact, by pursuing the question as though it were a question about the event X rather than belief about the event X, Tucker undermines his notion that Hume’s anachronism consisted in seeing event X as a violation of natural law. Granted, physical law in the Newtonian sense didn’t exist for the ancient Greeks and Romans. However, the idea that a miracle requires many witnesses seems to indicate that the belief about the test of divine strength is itself dependent on beliefs about how events occur.
“The case for multiple independent witnesses of miracles was articulated philosophically by the Spanish-Jewish philosopher Judah Halevi in his twelfth-century, Arabic-language, Platonic-style dialogue The Kuzari. In this dialogue Halevi listed the criteria for independence of evidence for belief in miracles: Miracles, intercourse between God and humans, must take place “in the presence of great multitudes, who saw it distinctly, and did not learn it from reports and traditions. Even then they must examine the matter carefully and repeatedly, so that no suspicion of imagination or magic can enter their minds.”17 Halevi presented the revelation on Mount Sinai as fitting these criteria.”
Now, in one way Tucker’s idea fits in quite nicely with the idea that the revelation at Mount Sinai is evidence of divine strength in competition with other gods. That would explain the first commandment, and Moses’ problem with the dancing about the golden calf. But Tucker can’t help but continue to pick at the idea that a miracle is about the probability of the event. Tucker seems a little blind to the contradiction in his own account, with his ultimate point (that historians operate rationally by including miraculous events in a true historical account, contra Hume) begs the question of his dependent point (showing that miracles are possible, thus acceding to the general lines of the argument as Hume has shaped it). Our point is not to harp on the antinomies in Tucker’s article, but to get back to the beliefs of the set of people who describe certain events as miracles. I imagine that this set of people, in America, would include both those people who subscribe to the divine design theory of the earth and life upon it, and those people who think that certain lottery numbers are lucky, or that they have developed a system for betting at roulette. Luck, in this belief system, can be good or bad. It can also be earned.
From this perspective, Darwinian evolution is extremely anxiety making. The luck of the survivor isn’t ultimately earned – but is a new piece of the old luck, the mutation that simply happens to be advantageous given the circumstances of a certain ecological niche. The luck of the human and the luck of the dodo are the same kinds of luck. One is merely not presently extinct. Living beyond Good and Evil is relatively easy, compared to living beyond good and bad luck.
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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...
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You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t... -
Ladies and Gentlemen... the moment you have all been waiting for! An adventure beyond your wildest dreams! An adrenaline rush from start to... -
LI feels like a little note on politics is called for. The comments thread following the dialectics of diddling post made me realize that, ...