abusing president backbone

An old friend and foil of LI wrote us an email the other day, asking how we were doing and whether we were still lobbing insults at the president.

The question made us hang our head in shame. In fact, a quick survey of LI backpages lately will show an astonishing paucity of commentary about that human equivalent of the green garbage fly, the POTUS. President Backbone. Or, as he was known to the prophet Isaiah, a drunken man who staggereth in his own vomit.

We might as well confess: we’ve reached the limit with the old pissingpost.

The burden of the torchsinger’s song needn’t be some magnificent object, nor does it need to arouse the deepest sentiments. A song I learned as a lad and could still sing for you on a long car trip, as my friend D. can testify, commemorates a bad day at the races for some slack rounder who didn’t bet on Old Stewball, but took the odds on favorites, the gray mare and the bay. Now, this isn’t the kind of news that should lend its impress to the collective memory of all mankind, but – conveyed by Peter Paul and Mary and then distributed a thousandfold by humdrum strummers in every weekend pizza joint in suburban Atlanta, when they weren’t building a staircase to heaven, Old Stewball has refused to be dislodged from my braincells, and will probably still be ghosting me when, in some public charity ward, I’m trying to figure out where my penis is so I can piss out of it or at least know my I still have my valuables about me.

Yet here I am with one of the great subjects. A rich and semi-educated Republic. A population reveling equally in short term memory loss and its dream of f/x military action, with Doby surroundsound. A man whose sum total of talents would gain him only sporadic employment as a second rate golf pro at country clubs in midsized Southern cities, who descends, fortunately enough for him, from one of those families wealthy in exact proportion to their worthlessness. A suspect, not to say sinister elevation; a lack of interest by our crowned golf pro in leadership so incredible that he simply waves away warnings of an attack that does come because they interrupt his cypress trimming and sleep – besides which, they challenge him to do something, and he has never and will never know fuckall about doing anything; a senseless, vain, cruel war, in which gradually every member of the said yo yo Republic becomes complicit – all of these are surely themes for a satiric epic, an unending Dunciad. Yet LI has eaten the ashy fruit of this for six years, and we have finally had enough. What new insults, shocks, jeremiads can one haul out of the cellar? Isaiah only had to do with uncircumsized armies worshipping Baal in the place of the Lord. He never had to confront the deadly horror of modern mediocrity riding in its nasty little triumph (o, the moralizing of the well fed!) over the necks of taste, sense, sensibility, reason, truth, and the hardwon virtues of the little humanity we might have gained to get us through various bilious nights of the soul – if that is we can’t find sleeping tablets.

So LI has broken the covenant of perpetual abuse which we once pledged to our readers. Cursing and shrieking bores the fuck out of us.

The witch of Endor is dead.

The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and
fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish.

The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof;
because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance,
broken the everlasting covenant.

Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that
dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the
earth are burned, and few men left.

Wolfie goes down

Headline in the NYT: Wolfowitz to Leave the World Bank

Come out/Come out
Whereever you are!

holy and unholy fools in the streets

- Sophie Calle, Les dormeurs

Okay. To summarize our last post, Fred Hirsch proposed that, enfolded within the material economy, there is a positional economy, one derived from and dependent on social hierarchy. This is a broader notion than Ann Krueger’s rent-seeking, which was also being floated by the neo-classicals in the 70s, but you can see how they dovetail with one another. While Krueger thinks the extraction of rents is ‘non-productive’, Hirsch is saying, in effect, that Krueger is using the criteria of the material economy to analyze the positional economy, and that won’t do. In fact, there are positional goods and services, and one of the key drivers of the material economy since the dawn of capitalism has been positional competition.

Well, LI could spell out the current political implications of Hirsch’s notion – but we’d prefer to apply Hirsch’s notion to the little thread of history that LI has made its little theme over the past six months. If you take the positional economy as the lens through which you view the history of the early modern era, Foucault’s L’age classique, one possible interpretation leaps to mind – or to a mind ready to catch the larger leapers. In the early modern era, the great bourgeois project was to liberate the positional market, as it were. Much of the work of the enlightened philosophers was to that end. At the same time, by one of those fateful pieces of dialectical luck, their identity as philosophers was undermined by their success at this task. In other words, the philosopher as a type was tied to a certain kind of positional market – a highly rigid one. Far into the 18th century, the philosopher as a type really had a strong influence on the real philosopher, be he Locke or Condorcet. This figure was a sage. As a sage, he was bound to the ascetic ethos that developed a sort of hole in the rigid positional economy – proposed a way out of it. Renounced it. And here’s where the dialectical luck comes in – the culminating point for the liberation of the positional market was encoded in Jefferson’s phrase, the pursuit of happiness. Now, as it happens, the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of wisdom had been rivals – well, since Socrates was a pup. As the pursuit of happiness came to dominate the tenor of the positional market, the space in which the sage could exist was squeezed shut. The sage, in that space, took up a relation to the buffoon – his figural other, partner, foe – as well as to a way of thinking of the spacing of human life (how one should age) and practices consonant thereto.

So yeah, ha ha – we’ve come back to sages and buffoons. You didn’t think I was letting them go, did you?
More on this in a later post.

a gloss on the political hocus pocus of our time

Back in the 70s – the era that suckled LI, and that provides the whole framework for Bolano’s great novel, which all should read, The Savage Detectives, and all should talk about, bringing an end of all talking about 300 and Spiderman, enough enough enough! – an economist named Fred Hirsch wrote a tract reflecting the time and the mores entitled The Social Limits of Growth. And then, of course, they came from nowhere – or from Pentagonia – the Reaganauts, and for the past thirty years the only discourse about Growth is how we are blessed its many wonders to behold. Meanwhile, we laid claim to another piece of the atmosphere to store our car exhaust and coal exhaust shit, destroyed the Aral Sea, depleted the Ogallala Acquifer, and etc., etc.

This week, LI is going to say some things about Hirsch’s idea of positional goods. It is an idea that has its ancestry in institutional economics and Veblen, but Hirsch was a post-World War II economist, a quantifier, and he wanted a more specific way to talk about a certain kind of social good and service.

Hirsch distinguishes between between the Material Economy and the Positional economy in order to describe the post WWII economic order in the developed world. The material economy is that one familiar to neo-classicals and Marxists. it is deined “as output amenable to continued increase in productivity per unit of labor input: it is Harrod’s democratic wealth. The material economy embraces production of physical goods as well as such services as are receptive to mechanization or technological innovation without deterioration in quality as it appears to the consumer.” On the other hand, you have Harrod’s “oligarchic wealth”: it “relates to all aspects of goods, services, work positions and other social relationships that are either (1) scarce in some absolute or sically imposed sense or (2) subject to congestion or crowding through extensive use.” The question posed by Hirsch is: “What happens when the material pie grows while the positional economy remains confined to a fixed state?”

In a sense, this problem is all around us now, the effect of the growth plus increase in inequality that describes the Reaganomic era. Hirsch had the foresight to see that the economy in the developed world was tending towards positional competition. On the one hand, unless there was robust economic growth, there would be increasing privation. On the other hand, the concomitant to growth would be increasing inequality, which would re-define the terms of affluence. To give one of a number of examples: take a social good such as education. On the one hand, for a democratic, capitalist society to continue, it must invest in human capital – it must educate. On the other hand, positional competition imposes on that education its logic – in order to be rewarded within the educational system, it isn’t enough that a person actually be educated, but it is also important that others be less certified – that others be excluded from certain institutions of education and the like, what Hirsch calls a “competition by people for place, rather than competition for performance.” Hirsch discusses a number of sectors – real estate, education, jobs – and then makes a fine, although dense, summary:

‘… material growth intensifies what may be termed positional competition. By positional competition is meant competition that is fundamentally for a higher place within some explicit or implicit hierarchy and that thereby yields gains for some only by dint of losses for others. Positional competiton, in the language of game theory, is a zero-sum game: what winners win, losers lose. The contrast is with competition that improves performance or enjoyment all round, so that winners gain more than losers lose, and all may come out winners – the positive sum game.”

And – an important point – positional competition is about scarcity: "… competition in the positional sector serves as a general filtering device through which excessive demand has to be matched to available supply. This aspect – which I seek to isolate by the term positional competition – at best yields no net benefit and usually involves additional resource costs, so that positional competiton itself is liable to be a negative sum game. Competition in the positional sector, however, may still yield net benefits if its contributions to individual efficiency and allocation of resources outweigh additions to resource costs and misallocation. But this cannot be judged from the conventional measures of economic output, since these measures gloss over the negative or deadweight elements of positional competition.”

Well… yeah. That last sentence is a gloss on the political hocus pocus of our time, friends and fiends. About which we will have more to say in another post.

Jerry Fallwell goes to heaven

In other news - Jerry Fallwell did make it to heaven. He was admitted as part of an affirmative action program for the delusional. "We try to encourage diversity among our heavenly hosts," according to Peter, a spokesman for Heaven. "Oftentimes people have the most astonishing preconceptions about our admission system. Jehovah is going to be unveiling an advertising campaign this fall to reinvigorate interest in the Heaven brand. Heaven: it's not just for losers! There's a whole generation out there who think, well, I'm scorin' dope, I'm fucking anything that moves, and I voted for gay marriage. I'm bound to go to hell. Au contraire! If people only knew: our older alum were whacked out on anything from morning glory seeds to starvation in the desert - that's a real high! - and as for sex, well, we've assimilated cultic prostitutes, self castrators and everybody in between! In fact, we are trying to combat the idea that Jehovah is particularly interested in human genitals. As he said only the other day at dinner: "when I designed those things, tell you Jehovah's honest truth, I was not thinking about where they went or what you could do with them. This is a little bogus, but I've had some wine, I'll confess: I was thinking of something else entirely. I was thinking, damn, I should not have signed off on the wisdom tooth design."

According to the Pearly Gates Express, Fallwell was mostly pleased with everything. To get around with the wings, of course, he is going to have lose a few of those earthly pounds. "The diet of rice and seaweed will tone him up nicely," according to Gautama, one of Heaven's premier dieticians. However, Fallwell was reported to have been "astonished" to meet the son of God and discover that the son of God is...



Tinky Winky!

Come back!

If you see any of these little things humming around, tell them how very very very very very grateful you are, and that you want them to come back!

God in the Zoo

At various points in my life, I’ve called myself a Christian, an atheist, an agnostic, and a Spinozan. I have never found God an indifferent proposition in any guise, although I have often thought that the habit of attributing the name God to objects of such vast and conflicting variety must say something about, at the very least, our systems of classification. I won’t get all deconstructive on your ass (as the policeman said to the monkey), but it is no accident that the signifier which floats so freely in a system built, ostensibly, to fix the meanings, is that of the creator of the structure itself. From the speaker of the word comes the word 'confusion'.

As a middle aged man working on being a sage, of course, my meditations naturally turn to the Gods or Goddesses. And being a perennial, low carat, glue sniffing punk, my inclination is to mix and match my divinities, scratching the cosmic record – which is why, lately, I’ve been thinking a lot of the spirits at the portals of each sense.

Which is by way of pointing LI readers to Anthony Gottlieb’s review of the recent spate of atheist books – by Dawkins, Hitchens, and Sam Harris in the New Yorker.

It is much more learned and witty than Terry Eagleton’s mishandling of Richard Dawkins. Gottlieb is less eager to show his cards, or to try to make books on religion automatically into books on theology. Gottlieb’s handle on that contretemps reflects LI’s own attitude:

“For example, when Terry Eagleton, a British critic who has been a professor of English at Oxford, lambasted Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” in the London Review of Books, he wrote that “card-carrying rationalists” like Dawkins “invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” That is unfair, because millions of the faithful around the world believe things that would make a first-year theology student wince. A large survey in 2001 found that more than half of American Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians believed that Jesus sinned—thus rejecting a central dogma of their own churches.”

That is a neat little paragraph, partly because one of the themes of Gottlieb's piece is that you can't trust the polls about people's religious beliefs - while, at the same time, Gottlieb does like to quote polls about people's religious beliefs. There is a slight inconsistency there, but the real point is that religious belief is not about yes and no responses to questions that are formed in order to facilitate quantification. When the questions are left open, the responses then become much more difficult to quantify over. So the contradictory attitude towards polls is - almost- justified.

Gottlieb is an editor at the Economist, a magazine that likes to think that it is still plugged into the Edinburgh enlightenment. The tone he strikes is Humean – that is, Gottlieb is repelled by zealotry more than he is attracted to advocating one or another belief about God’s existence. He approves of Hume’s openendedness about the whole God question – although of course that openendedness is derived, partly, from a justified fear of legal and professional prosecution on Hume’s part. After all, in his youth a man was actually executed for disbelief, a fact given great play in James Buchan’s excellent book on the Edinburgh enlightenment. Here’s Gottlieb’s Hume:

“Voltaire, like many others before and after him, was awed by the order and the beauty of the universe, which he thought pointed to a supreme designer, just as a watch points to a watchmaker. In 1779, a year after Voltaire died, that idea was attacked by David Hume, a cheerful Scottish historian and philosopher, whose way of undermining religion was as arresting for its strategy as it was for its detail. Hume couldn’t have been more different from today’s militant atheists.

In his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” which was published posthumously, and reports imaginary discussions among three men, Hume prized apart the supposed analogy between the natural world and a designed artifact. Even if the analogy were apt, he pointed out, the most one could infer from it would be a superior craftsman, not an omnipotent and perfect deity. And, he argued, if it is necessary to ask who made the world it must also be necessary to ask who, or what, made that maker. In other words, God is merely the answer that you get if you do not ask enough questions. From the accounts of his friends, his letters, and some posthumous essays, it is clear that Hume had no trace of religion, did not believe in an afterlife, and was particularly disdainful of Christianity. He had a horror of zealotry. Yet his many writings on religion have a genial and even superficially pious tone. He wanted to convince his religious readers, and recognized that only gentle and reassuring persuasion would work. In a telling passage in the “Dialogues,” Hume has one of his characters remark that a person who openly proclaimed atheism, being guilty of “indiscretion and imprudence,” would not be very formidable.

Hume sprinkled his gunpowder through the pages of the “Dialogues” and left the book primed so that its arguments would, with luck, ignite in his readers’ own minds. And he always offered a way out. In “The Natural History of Religion,” he undermined the idea that there are moral reasons to be religious, but made it sound as if it were still all right to believe in proofs of God’s existence. In an essay about miracles, he undermined the idea that it is ever rational to accept an apparent revelation from God, but made it sound as if it were still all right to have faith. And in the “Dialogues” he undermined proofs of God’s existence, but made it sound as if it were all right to believe on the basis of revelation. As the Cambridge philosopher Edward Craig has put it, Hume never tried to topple all the supporting pillars of religion at once.”

Gottlieb’s taste is towards just such ‘cheerfulness’ – but one man’s jovial Hume is another man’s lukewarm countenancer of religion’s many and varied oppressions. And those oppressions, in turn, are about the class composition of society. There is a cheerfulness that comes with eating well and disbelieving the credo that supports the social order one both benefits from and defends, and that cheerfulness can turn vinegary and cynical if the order is shook the least bit. Oddly, Gottlieb doesn’t mention Paine. Hitchens has to be understood, or at least, I suspect, understands himself, as working in the tradition of Paine – and definitely Paine dispensed with the elite culture and cheerfulness of Hume and the discussions of the philosophe and spread light as he saw it in vulgar language among the vulgar. But Paine was never an atheist, and was offended by the term. Of course, the Age of Reason was used to batter his reputation into dust in America, which was just starting to flirt with one of cycles of panic revivalism. On the other hand, The Age of Reason sold astonishingly well. It competed with the Bible in the first decades of the 19th century – and of course, the Bible is always being given away, so it has an unfair advantage. The notion that churches, mosques and temples – and the whole order of clerisy – are oppressors whose very bread and butter depends on imposture is something that Paine, more than any other historical figure, spread abroad. Of course, anti-clericalism was a standard tenent of the philosophes, and it became a mark of ‘liberalism’ in Spain, Italy and France in the 19th century, but it was Paine who gave it the vernacular it had in working class culture.