Michael Lewis's sci fi fantasy

I’m a big fan of Michael Lewis. Coming home on the train from Amboise, I finally got to his article on Californin in Vanity Fair. And that's when I had my fan crash moment. Say it ain't so, Michael!

Business Insider dubbed the article a ‘love letter’ to Arnold Schwarzenegger – and unfortunately, this is true. Lewis’s Schwarzenegger bears an odd relation to the real Schwarzenegger, who, spectators of the first decade of the Bush era will recall, was the man who rode to power against Gray Davis by promising tax cuts for business and a tres Bushian solution to California’s debt problem, which I’ve commented on before:

“And now, of course, the bills for the fun filled political vacation come due. When Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California, the first thing he did was Charge IT! – to a round of cheers from those scrimpin and savin’ burgermen, working all day, thinking of Jesus Christ all night. After all, why pay for the structures you need every day when – as Mr. Magician said in that beautiful Christmas Classic, It’s a Wonderful Reagan-y Kinda Life, – the magic of the marketplace makes lower taxes bring in more revenue! We owe it to ourselves! We can’t surrender to terrorists! We can’t return to the days of tax and spend! Class warfare! As the man says:


Quelli che son dentro la merda fin qui, oh yeah
Quelli che con una bella dormita passa tutto anche il cancro, oh yeah
Quelli che, quelli che non possono crederci anche adesso che la terra e’ rotonda, oh yeah, oh yeah
Quelli che hanno paura del aeroplano, oh yeah
Quelli che non hanno mai avuto un incidente mortale, oh yeah
Quelli che non ci sentiamo
Quelli che a un certo punto della vita ci vorrebbe una arma segreta, ostia, oh yeah”

Or, in plain English, Gray Davis was dumped by voters who couldn’t stand that oatmeal-soul suit, and in his place Schwarzenegger played the part of a muscle toned Father Christmas, as outlined in a NYT article from 2005:

“The governor's budget relies on continued borrowing, using some of the proceeds of a $15 billion bond issue that Mr. Schwarzenegger won voter approval for last year. Although the bond proceeds helped to get the state through a severe fiscal crisis, the borrowing will have long-term consequences, said Fred Silva, a budget expert at the Public Policy Institute of California and a former fiscal aide in the state Legislature.
"The amount of borrowed money is going to be a budget overhang for many years," Mr. Silva said.
In years past, he said, state policy makers tried to keep the cost of debt service below 4 percent of state revenues. "Now it's going to be twice that," Mr. Silva said. "That's real money."

Hmm, a 15 billion dollar bond issue? And to think... the topic never came up in Michael Lewis’ article about our Good Gubernorator fighting the special interests to bring financial sanity to California. the topic of taxes, the taxes to, well, pay for things like increases in the cost of running the state, the taxes that Schwarzenegger ran against – these, too, never came up. The fact that Schwarzenegger was running against the Governor who wanted to actually pay for the goodies with taxes never came up.

Instead, Lewis’s idea is that the people, the grubby vulgarians whose income, over the 2000-2010 period, went down, somehow became addicted to all the good things of life and became… well, irresponsible.Not the good serfs of yore! Because the brain has a reptilian core, apparently, and can’t handle opulence. He's actually serious:

"The road out of Vallejo passes directly through the office of Dr. Peter Whybrow, a British neuroscientist at U.C.L.A. with a theory about American life. He thinks the dysfunction in America’s society is a by-product of America’s success. In academic papers and a popular book, American Mania, Whybrow argues, in effect, that human beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance. “Human beings are wandering around with brains that are fabulously limited,” he says cheerfully. “We’ve got the core of the average lizard.” Wrapped around this reptilian core, he explains, is a mammalian layer (associated with maternal concern and social interaction), and around that is wrapped a third layer, which enables feats of memory and the capacity for abstract thought. “The only problem,” he says, “is our passions are still driven by the lizard core. We are set up to acquire as much as we can of things we perceive as scarce, particularly sex, safety, and food.”

Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him. Every pastry chef in America understands this, and now neuroscience does, too. “When faced with abundance, the brain’s ancient reward pathways are difficult to suppress,” says Whybrow. “In that moment the value of eating the chocolate cake exceeds the value of the diet. We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake.”

The richest society the world has ever seen has grown rich by devising better and better ways to give people what they want. The effect on the brain of lots of instant gratification is something like the effect on the right hand of cutting off the left: the more the lizard core is used the more dominant it becomes. “What we’re doing is minimizing the use of the part of the brain that lizards don’t have,” says Whybrow. “We’ve created physiological dysfunction. We have lost the ability to self-regulate, at all levels of the society. The $5 million you get paid at Goldman Sachs if you do whatever they ask you to do—that is the chocolate cake upgraded.”

So it goes. It used to be, in the roaring 2000s, that it is your money - and now it turns out that it is your debt, you little rat fuck with the reptilian brain? Oh, and that debt is so tasty!

The idea that the American people went on a terrible shopping spree that ruined the economy has now been so inscribed in the reptilian core of the elite brain that it has erased, well, 2001-2008. Remember remember - but it is so hard to remember! Still, as I dimly recall, we took care of the 2001 recession because householders could be just like big companies and unlock the liquidity in their houses through a variety of new and puppy friendly loans! Of course, remembering the giant sucking sound of a tax cut happy elite going for seconds by getting that little extra helping of interest and then happily slicing, dicing and giving themselves bonuses for securitized debt – why that requires such a big memory capacity that the poor reptilian core of the brain starts to pant and gives up. Instead, it wants to see the giant ex-Governor of California in his latest action epic, Mr. Fiscal Responsibility – you know, the one in which new memory is implanted into the old brain so that a certain history didn’t happen, and a certain governor didn’t solve a certain crisis by going for the 15 billion dollar bond issue.

So alas: although Lewis’s concentration on our pension problem is half right, it is a one-eyed correctness: the pension problem was in the end a tax problem. If you don’t want to tax businesses, which is where the money traditionally is, and the wealthy for your social services, and you hire people to staff things like schools and hospitals with low salaries but high future benefits, eventually, you are so fucked. By nice people in business suits, and by Hollywood stars. …
Incidentally, for those of us old enough to remember the California election, Schwarzenneger’s anti-tax and pro-charge it policy was endorsed by ... Warren Buffett.

ps - what the hell! Might as well stretch this post out. The public pension plans that Lewis is writing about are victims of the same investment strategies by which the upper 1 percent has been looting the bottom 99 for years. This is from that now forgetten decade, the 00s - in fact, I wrote this a tremendous six years ago. Wow, that is way too long to remember anything!

I have seen the future, and it is United
Anyone interested in what Bush’s reformed Social Security would look like should look at the NYT article about United Airline’s pension fund today. It is a fun article. Here's how the movie goes: Wall Street persuades a viable pension fund to redo its safe strategy of investing for a much more groovy strategy of growth growth growth in equities. Big money is made by everybody on the Street as the pension fund shrinks, disappears, goes into a black hole. Everybody is very sorry that the beneficiaries of the fund have nothing left, but everybody also points out – the beneficiaries are scum. Mere workers. Pilots, for god’s sakes. Imagine, some stewardess somewhere is bawling cause her measely 200 thou went to some really nice Manhattan bistros. As if she deserved it. The best and the brightest, in the new Hobbesian Randian world, feast upon such little lambs.

Bush’s plan has those advantages too. By targeting middle America’s vast wealth and accelerating the burgling of it, in a record amount of time the top 10 percent income percentile can capture even more of America’s wealth. This money will be used much more efficiently. For instance, many retiring congressmen will be able to find lobbying jobs that will launch them into the higher regions of financial security when the theft is completed. Meanwhile, in a blow against the French, Americans will work harder. They will have to, as their retirement will be approximately equal, in value, to the price you can get for confetti that’s been cleaned off of streets and sidewalks after the parade is over.

The first three grafs of the article map a strategy that is almost a perfect parallel of the Bush reforms:

“HAD anyone listened to Doug Wilsman, tens of thousands of United Airlines employees would not be facing big cuts in their pensions. And the federal agency that guarantees pensions might not be struggling with its biggest losses ever.

So who is Doug Wilsman? He is a retired pilot and a former fiduciary of United's pension plan for pilots, and in 1987 he discovered that the company had abandoned its older, tried-and-true approach of investing retirees' money in bonds timed to pay when the pensions came due. Instead, it had bought into the promises of Wall Street that it could put less money into the plan - and take out more later - if it just put most of the assets into the stock market.

Mr. Wilsman was skeptical of such promises, and soon after learning of the change in strategy, he filed a grievance with his union, the Air Line Pilots Association. "Hey, you guys are really building yourselves a trap," he recalled warning them at the time. "Someday, at the worst possible moment, when the bottom falls out of the stock market, the plan is going to have to come up with new money, and it's going to be enough to kill the company."

Wilsman has got to be a traitor, and one hopes he will be roundly denounced on the rightwing media circuit. More voices like his would blow the perfect caper. He obviously wasn’t clued in that DJ 36,000 was just around the corner.

As even the article admits, the result of the Bush-like investment strategy proved highly satisfactory:

“While the money managers and other pension professionals who ran United's pension plan walked away from the wreck unscathed - indeed, they collected about $125 million in fees over the last five years alone, records show - the ones who will have to pick up the bill for the advisers' collective failure will be the airline's 130,000 employees and pensioners, the federal pension guarantor and probably, someday, the taxpayers.”

Million dollar payouts for high level failure have become America’s secret weapon for achieving true greatness. As for the employees – they merely work for a living. Piss on em, as the old Wall Street saying goes. Also, the federal government has proven that almost any problem can be solved if you have a gigantic enough credit card. Put those pensions on the card and have the Chinese buy more of our dollars, as they say in the corridors of the Treasury department.
Here’s a nice window into what Social Security is gonna look like once we get it all licked into shape:
“United is far from unique. Lifting the lid on how most pension funds are invested might raise an outcry if the 44 million Americans covered by company plans knew these things:
Pension investing is largely unregulated, even though the federal government effectively covers the investment losses when a defined-benefit plan fails. At United, this freewheeling approach gave rise to investments in junk bonds, dot-coms and even what appears to be an energy venture in Albania.
The Securities and Exchange Commission recently said that more than half of the consultants who help pension funds invest their money have outside business relationships that could taint their advice.”
I, for one, am totally psyched.
Three more irresistible grafs. Your congress at work!

"While the federal agency tries to pinpoint its obligations, apparently no one in an official capacity is pausing to ask who the plans' outside investment professionals were, much less how they made their decisions and how they responded as the airline's fortunes faded.

"It's just a nonstarter," said Richard A. Ippolito, the pension agency's former chief economist, who is now retired. A few years ago, he recalled, a director of the federal pension agency appeared before Congress and suggested that if companies wanted to invest their pension funds in stocks, they should pay more for their pension insurance coverage.
"I could politely say that he was vilified," he said. "They basically accused him of being un-American because he was asking companies to pay for the privilege of investing in stocks. He just dropped that idea."

Hume and the political philosopher 1

There is a famous dispute, among the intellectual historians of the early American Republic, about the extent to which Madison borrowed from Hume. The dispute may, on the surface, be about ‘borrowing’ ideas, but underneath it is about the mechanisms by which nations are formed, and the place of ‘ideas’ in history, one of the great arguments in the White Mythology.

It was Douglass Adair who gave the dispute its modern form by emphasizing, against the economicist views of Charles Beard, the effect of intellectual history on the shaping of the Constitution. Adair pointed to the borrowings from Hume in the Federalist 10. Adair pictured Madison with a book of Hume’s essays, opened to “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth”, in which Hume wrote:

“Though it is more difficult to form a republican government in an extensive country than in a city; there is more facility, when once it is formed, of preserving it steady and uniform, without tumult and faction.”

Hume goes on to suggest a two fold process, in which the people, including the lowest, vote, followed by the work of the highest magistrates, presumably the representatives of the people, who then do something like forming a government – which is exactly how the American Senate was first instituted.

Edward Morgan, coming after Adair, admitted the intertext, but debated the inference: to him, Hume’s passage was about a community without faction, whereas Madison, reaching back to his Montesquieu, advocated a community in which party would block party. This, Morgan claimed, was a trope of a different color. [I take this general history from Mark Spencer’s “Madison and Hume on Faction (2002)]

I’m going to leave behind the argument about Hume’s influence on Madison and focus on Hume’s very negative image of the political intellectual. This type seems to function in two incompatible ways in Hume’s thinking – on the one hand, we cannot credit the political theorist with forming the commonwealth – all Platonic Republics are born and die in the heads of their creators – because the commonwealth is the result of the struggles of the interest and passions of different parts of the population. But if the philospher cannot positively shape the commonwealth according to his ideas, he can, on the other hand, introduce factional strife into the commonwealth.

This sums up a sense of the intellectual that is very much part of the Anglo culture.

James Buchan, in Crowded with Genius, summed up Hume’s dissent from Whig historiography as follows:

“In essays such as ‘Of the Liberty of the Press’, he portrayed Britain as a precarious equilibrium of often disreputable forces – Court patronage, parliamentary corruption, a free press,commercial competition – that were the residue of the violent political conflicts of the seventeenth century. For all his Scottish origins and friendships, he had no time for Whig or indeed any ideology: there was rarely, he later wrote, any ‘philosophical origin to government’.3 The British constitution was for Hume the
product of violence, and its form was both unintended and precarious.It was also, as might have been expected, civilian: a creation, as he also later wrote, of ‘that middling rank of men, who are the best and firmest basis of public liberty’.(86)

Hume anticipates Burke’s acidic view of the ‘theory men’ who, in his view, were dissolving the organic order of France in order to institute a structure unfounded in custom or piety – one that could only legitimate itself by the appeal to raw economic self-interest. But Hume moves in a different direction than Burke later did, and his eyes were on a story that Burke would have preferred be shrouded in reverent obscurity: that of the rise of Christianity and the fall of Rome.

The Lockian subject in Lilliput

I'm recycling this post from 2005. It is certainly pertinent to my character under capitalism theme.
...

There’s a tradition in the literature about Gulliver’s Travel that extracts the Lockean Gull in Gulliver. The argument goes back to a very fine essay by W. B. Carnochan entitled, Gulliver’s Travels: An Essay on the Human Understanding?

Carnochan’s argument is straightforward: “Lemuel Gulliver, like the mad projector of the Modest Proposal, appears to be a version of the Lockean man.” Carnochan is probably on solid ground in thinking that the perceptual changes on which Swift plays like a jazz xylophonist are suggested by Locke’s theory that the human mind is shaped by sensation – ideas themselves being the end product of an experience that begins
externally (mysterious as that beginning may be) with the encounter of a sense instrument and an object. As is well known, this theory leads elsewhere in the empirical tradition – that moment of non-experience hardening into a thing that can’t be, logically, experienced, meaning that the perceived object must be usurped by the philosopher and put in the mind – some mind. Berkeley suggested God’s. This is a theory that a writer like Swift is bound to squeeze all the absurdities out of. Which is why Denis Donoghue takes the Lockean suggestion one step further,
and claims that what we are seeing, in Gulliver’s Travels, is how easily the Lockean subject falls prey to the Stockholm syndrome. He is continually captured, and continually acclimated so to the point of view of his captors that he begins to adopt it. Historically, there's also warrant for this -
Swift lived in a time when English men and women were always getting captured, by Moors, Indians and other heathen, and were continually shocking their countrymen by converting to pagan or Islamic ways.
In other words, Gulliver’s typical peripeteia is that of a man who goes from one ‘brainwashing” to another – and he gets to it by going through funk, animal fear, and his own tradesman’s capacity for fawning, with the power of the mind, here, being wholly in the power of the powers that be.

Donoghue’s thesis seems to explain a larger pattern in Gulliver’s Travels, until one notices that Gulliver seems much too aware of his brainwashing to be merely one of the brainwashed. At least in the Lilliput section, where Gulliver is critical enough of thread dancing and the like. He is not, however, critical of titles – and no matter how small the Liliputians are, the emperor carries a title as big as Louis XIV’s.

To my mind, the way to get a-hold of Gulliver is to see him as the double of M.B. Drapier.

In the first Drapier letter, the narrator (who is, after all, a fiction) says this:

“I will therefore first tell you the plain story of the fact; and then I will lay before you how you ought to act in common prudence, and according to the laws of your country.”

This is in the clear as water style of Gulliver himself. And yet, Drapier’s
letters are all warnings, and the satire runs to that point. Whereas what is
Gulliver writing for? In the letter from Captain Gulliver that prefaces the
book, he does claim that the book is intended as a warning:

“I do in the next Place complain of my own great Want of Judgment, in being prevailed upon by the Intreaties and false Reasonings of you and some others, very much against mine own Opinion, to suffer my Travels to be published.

Pray bring to your Mind how often I desired you to consider, when you
insisted on the Motive of publick good; that the Yahoos were a species
of Animals utterly incapable of Amendment by Precepts or Examples: And so it hath proved; for instead of seeing a full Stop put to all Abuses and
Corruptions, at least in this little Island, as I had Reason to expect:
Behold, after above six Months Warning, I cannot learn that my Book hath
produced one single Effect according to mine Intentions: I desired you
would let me know by a Letter, when Party and Faction were extinguished;
Judges learned and upright; Pleaders honest and modest, with some Tincture of common Sense; and Smithfield blazing with Pyramids of Law-Books; the young Nobility's Education entirely changed; the Physicians banished; the female Yahoos abounding in Virtue, Honour, Truth and good Sense; Courts and Levees of great Ministers thoroughly weeded and swept; Wit, Merit and Learning rewarded; all Disgracers of the Press in Prose and Verse condemned to eat nothing but their own Cotten, and quench their Thirst with their own Ink. These, and a Thousand other Reformations, I firmly counted upon by your Encouragement; as indeed they were plainly deducible from the Precepts delivered in my Book.”

This is a mixture of the satirist’s targets since Aristophanes and Swift’s
fictitious creatures, the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms, who are very close to making any system of virtue and vice absurd by embodying it in impossible extremities of the disgusting and ... well, it is hard to find one term to describe the Houyhnhnms, although the idea of these equine stoics is both alarming and funny. It is like the most impossibly inbred English aristocracy. And Swift adds a sentence that seems pointed at his own self: “And, it must be owned that seven Months were a sufficient Time to correct every Vice and Folly to which Yahoos are subject, if their Natures had been capable of the least Disposition to Virtue or Wisdom.”

Is this Gulliver sticking out his tongue at Mr. Drapier?
And is Mr. Drapier Jonathan Swift as tradesman?

The satirist needs a preliminary sketch, acquaintance with the primogenitive caricature. And that caricature happens to be the self.

But Mr. Drapier, too, exists – in fact, his fictiveness is oddly blurred by his entrance into the all too real exploitation of Ireland, which is forever locked in Swift’s unwavering field of vision, a thing to see, a raree show of instituted vice. He feels about it … well, as LI feels about Bush’s America. Bush’s America degrades my mockery by casting itself into forms of such pitiful tastelessness, hypocrisies that have been exposed for so long that the exposures are growing moss, bluster that wouldn’t frighten a sheep, that mockery has to seek restraint – has to seek other tangents to make indignation feel-able. If not to reform the Yahoos, at least to relieve the writer's own spleen.


Mr. Drapier’s way is simply to tell the plain story of fact.
The meta-story is that the British Prime Minister, out of every venal motive, conspires to allow William Wood the right to coin money for use
in Ireland. The contract costs Wood money, and he proposes to make up
that money and make a profit by chiseling on the composition of the coin
– in other words, creating half pence on the cheap, which could be exchanged for good coin. This was at a time when the matter of the coin
was important – a penny should contain a penny’s worth of metal. A gold coin should contain an amount of gold equal to the worth of the coin.
Of course, the coins were routinely shaved, by everybody. But to coin them
pre-shaved, so to speak, was to go one step beyond. The intro to the edition of the Drapier’s Letters on the Gutenberg site says this:

“The patent was really granted to the King's mistress, the Duchess of Kendal, who sold it to William Wood for the sum of £10,000, and (as it was reported with, probably, much truth) for a share in the profits of the coining. The job was alluded to by Swift when he wrote:

"When late a feminine magician,
Join'd with a brazen politician,
Expos'd, to blind a nation's eyes,
A parchment of prodigious size."

Coxe [a Swift commentator] endeavors to exonerate Walpole from the disgrace attached to this business, by expatiating on Carteret's opposition to Walpole, an opposition which went so far as to attempt to injure the financial minister's reputation by fomenting jealousies and using the Wood patent agitation to arouse against him the popular indignation; but this does not explain away the fact itself. He lays some blame for the agitation on Wood's indiscretion in flaunting his rights and publicly boasting of what the great minister would do for him. At the same time he takes care to censure the government for its misconduct in not consulting with the Lord Lieutenant and his Privy Council before granting the patent. His censure, however, is founded on the consideration that this want of attention was injudicious and was the cause of the spread of exaggerated rumours of the patent's evil tendency. He has nothing to say of the rights and liberties of a people which had thereby been infringed and ignored.”

If you have not read the Drapier’s letter, go to the intro to get some sense of the controversy, and then go to the fourth letter. That’s the hair-raising letter – a blow against the colonial system, a cry against the infamy, a rush at the system that’s truly in rare company. I suppose Martin Luther King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail is the American counterpart, except that King is never bitter. Swift’s letter begins like this:

“Having already written three letters upon so disagreeable a subject as
Mr. Wood and his halfpence; I conceived my task was at an end: But I
find, that cordials must be frequently applied to weak constitutions,
political as well as natural. A people long used to hardships, lose by
degrees the very notions of liberty, they look upon themselves as
creatures at mercy, and that all impositions laid on them by a stronger
hand, are, in the phrase of the Report, legal and obligatory. Hence
proceeds that poverty and lowness of spirit, to which a kingdom may
be subject as well as a particular person. And when Esau came fainting from the field at the point to die, it is no wonder that he sold his
birthright for a mess of pottage.”

Every blow in this letter lands. Gulliver’s Travels – with its Gull for a mockery – plays a double game with its moral points, making them and denying them in the same gesture. One remembers that the point is the wholesale reformation of Yahoo nature in seven months time. This is Jonah waiting for the fire to consume Ninevah, and being bitterly disappointed that it never comes. Or rather, this is taking that spirit of Jonah and both inhabiting the prophet’s disgust and taking up a position outside it to observe with clinical precision the prophet’s vanity. But Drapier is a character who has been transported beyond vanity. In a passage that was considered treasonable, Swift considers that Ireland is no ‘depending kingdom’ with England, but equal in its freedoms. This casts doubt on the charnel foundation of colonialism, which is currently being implemented in Iraq on just the ground that the Iraqis are incorrigible children and the Americans are paragons to be mimicked. Ireland, after all, was the template for all English colonial ventures to follow. This is the Drapier at his most intense. One wants to say that this is the crescendo of the letter, but the rhythm, here, disallows crescendos:

“For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the
very definition of slavery: But in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly
subdue one single man in his shirt. But I have done. For those who have used power to cramp liberty have gone so far as to resent even the liberty
of complaining, although a man upon the rack was never known to be refused the liberty of roaring as loud as he thought fit.”

Ladies and gentlemen, a round of applause for the Holocene!

In his nobel prize speech, Faulkner, at his most Polonian, said that man will ‘not only endure. He will prevail…” This may have made some sense at the dawn of the nuclear bomb age, and perhaps these words have to be set as a sort of defiant humanism against a global war that killed 50 million people.

However, the hope of man prevailing has steadily lost altitude over the last couple of decades, and will, I think, continue to seem more and more the long shot. Man prevailing has meant man creating a treadmill of production and a treadmill of consumption that now seems both unstoppable and disastrous. Parents, today, calmly expect the fish to disappear from the oceans by the time their children have achieved middle age. The elephant, the tiger, and the rain forest are all marked down to be remembered as theme park accessories.

As man prevails, he destroys the Holocene in which he was born, nourished and flourished, and he does this with the calm lack of attention with which a person, say, cleans the lint and old tickets out of his coat pocket. After all, the Holocene might go, but at least BP is back and ready for business – and has purchased its first new lease in the Gulf, thanks to the anti-Holocene Obama administration. Which, as we know, will be succeeded by the anti-Holocene Romney administration, which will basically pursue the same policies.

Thoughts of the Holocene have been with me since last night, when A. and I traveled up to the Cinema St. Michel by bus, forked over an amazing 10.5 Euros each, picked up two clunky dark glasses, and plunged, 3-d-ily, into the depths of the Chauvet cave. I’ve been looking forward to seeing the Herzog film since I first read about it, since I am a big fan of caves. One of my favorite interviews, when I still interviewed – ever since interviewing Gregory Curtis, the ex editor of Texas Monthly who wrote a fascinating book on the subject after having immersed himself in the literature (which is, by all accounts, oddly polemical – every generation seems to have a dominant theories about the Paleolithic people that are then overturned, with maximum contempt, by the next generation) and gone and visited the caves, or those he could. Oh, to go from cave to cave! What a blissful idea.

Here’s what I wrote after reading Curtis, back in 2006:

Reading it, we were struck like by 100 000 volts that during the Upper Paleolithic – that wonderful time when there were, max, 150 000 people in Europe, and life was good for around twenty thousand years - the cave artists generally didn’t draw or paint or engrave people. There were your stray vulvas, the masked bird man, many hand prints, but generally – no people. Instead, there were mammoths. There were lions. There were rhinos and horses. Oddly, much fewer reindeer, even though reindeer meat was the spam of the Paleolithic – it was always poached reindeer for breakfast, fricasseed reindeer for lunch, and reindeer pudding for dinner. We are often told how to evolution stories about this or that human habit, but in reality, the way those how to stories are formed is that evo psychologists extrapolate back from ‘primitive people’ of today to those wandering around 200,000 years ago. However, this habit is in serious disconnect from archeologists, who have long held that ethnography of people today, in no matter what state of society they live in, is essentially unhelpful when trying to reconstruct the way the inhabits of the Eurasia 30,000 years ago lived. It is impossible not to imagine back using our PBS/National Geographic images, but what tribe do we know of that doesn’t draw people? Deleuze and Guattari talk of the special faciality of the West – this seems right, on all accounts – but to show so little interest in people when one has mastered perspective, and the expressive character of animals? That seems quite significant. But of what? Well, this is where speculation is dumb, but irresistible.”

My speculative position is that the cave art of 30,000 years ago, with its absence of the human, marks the time when – just perhaps – humans did not assume they would prevail. They did not even assume they were superior, since of course they knew – the horse was superior for speed, the lion and tiger and bear was superior for strength, the bird for flight, and so on.
There wasn’t - I would speculate, in this scene still dotted with other hominid candidates for most likely to survive - the sense that homo sapiens was superior in any department at all.

Given this sense of an overwhelmingly un-human world, the Chauvet paintings are all the more incredible. But I watched not just for the painting, but for something Curtis’s book had mentioned, which is also mentioned in Judith Thurman’s account of Chauvet:
“Twenty-six thousand years ago (six millennia after the first paintings were created), a lone adolescent left his footprints and torch swipes in the furthest reaches of the western horn, the Gallery of the Crosshatching.”

I don’t know why this stray detail effects me so much, but it does. When Herzog finally showed the footprints, I got dreadfully tearful.

notes on the treason of the clerks

Let’s make a square:

Eternal ---------- Partial


Contemporary-------- Universal


These are the parameters of Benda’s conception of the clerk, or the intellectual, in the 20th century. They also fit, to a degree, Gramsci’s reflection on organic intellectuals – which runs counter to Benda’s notion of the clerk - and Mann’s 1919 idea of the Non-political intellectual.

Mann’s non-political intellectual is the most complex case, because Mann’s irony creates odd combinations, linking the partial (German values) to the eternal (transcendent cultural values), which is an inherently unstable pairing – irony, here, is not simply a rhetorical trope, but a shy conceptual synthesis, one that never quite gets made.

In fact, from the point of view of the contemporary (say, the engaged Intellectual against which Benda fought), it is rather easy to ‘unmask’ the eternal and the universal. After all, these two categories are identified, in the end, very much with a locale and a history. They are identified with the “West”, that semi-region that really designates the continual process of Westernization – a process that operates on the agricultural populations of France as well as on the Nahuatl speaking populations of Mexico.

And yet, when the contemporary critique has done its unmasking, one can, from the point of view of the eternal, unmask the unmasker – for what is this unmasking done in the name of? It is not made outside of universal history- it is, on the contrary, an event within universal history, within modernism, and is inseperable from the development of the world market. It, too, is a carrier of Westernization.

From the Marxist point of view, the contemporary develops its sense of the eternal in the concept of revolution, which is paired with a new universal – one that is made after the World market has created, indeed, a world. This would be the universal working class, which is the only class with a real interest in abolishing class – in, that is, the revolution. Again, these are uneasy pairings.

I don’t mean to imprison the topic of the ‘intellectual’ or clerk in a structural cage: but rather to show the broad semantic elements of the narrative of the intellectual as it was put together in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and its disappointments.

insurance for the wealthy, bandaids for the rest

Over at Crooked Timber, there is a short but clarifying post about the cause of the 2008 crash, put in the form of a reply to Brad Delong, who has maintained that what I will call the inequality view of the crash is not true - that is, it isn't true that “we are in a recession basically because of the disppearance of a huge amount of household sector wealth”.

The Crooked Timber post arms itself with an arresting statistic from, I suppose, the Census, recycled through Nate Silver's column in the NYT: "The median American’s non-household wealth declined by 14% between 2001 and 2007. So when household wealth evaporated, guess what happened?"

Although Brian doesn't go into it in depth, he does use this statistic to point out that the 'boom' in the 2000s covered a bust - the bust in income. Which should lead us to some reflection about the policies that were and are being pursued that contributed to that bust.

I have urged the view that it is wrong to view the housing bubble solely as an accident or a disaster - a point of view fatally colored by the bubble's bust. The housing bubble, far from being an accident, was a necessity – that is, if we were to pursue the remedies to the solution to the recession of 2000-2001 suggested by Bush, and that are being recycled, in a more pernicious form, by both Obama and the Republicans in this round. The tax cuts – the most important of which may well have been the cut to capital gains taxes – and the deficit financial policy that was enacted via war spending, an enormous increase in Medicare due to the new drug supplement package, are important factors here. The third leg of the political economy of the 2000s was Fed policy. Famously, the interest rate was used by the Fed not as an index reflecting the real state of the American economy, but increasingly as a tool to maintain financial security wealth - in fact, Bernanke became so obsessed with trying to maintain stock market values, as we saw in 2007, that he pursued an utterly bizarre policy, dictated solely by an attempt to keep the stock market from sliding. All three parts of this policy were responses to the long range crisis, which was squarely and simply one of wealth inequality. That is at the very basis of these crises, and that will continue to be at the basis of the crises as the Reps and the Dems do everything they can to ignore it. Unfortunately, this inequality crisis can only be solved politically – and no political player on the horizon even sees it.

Thus, to understand the recession of 2008, you have to understand the effects of the solution to the recession of 2001. I don’t think the name for the sum of those solutions is “Bush” – the Democrats made no attempt to make inequality an issue, because they had neutered themselves on that front in the 90s. Let’s call it, instead, neo-liberalism. The neo-liberal model is always going to lead, is structurally dedicated to, increasing wealth inequality – for which it uses the government as a backstop, as we saw in the Treasury-Fed program of feeding trillions of dollars to Wall Street in the form of 1 percent or below loans, and as a dispensor of band-aids, as we saw with the marginal increases in EITC.
French political scientists around Foucault liked to talk about l’etat providence – the welfare state, if you like. Neoliberalism does not, as its proponents like to say, break with l’etat providence – they simply change its focus. The state now operates as a Wallfare state – redistributing upwards.

Are the clerks on the barricades this time?

One day Tolstoy, who was at that time an officer in the army, confronted a fellow officer who he had seen whipping a peasant and asked him: Have you never read the New Testament? The officer replied with a question of his own: ‘have you never read the army’s rules and regulations? Julien Benda put this story as an emblem at the beginning of La Trahison des Clercs, a pamphlet that became famous in the late twenties, because to Benda, Tolstoy’s question was central to what it used to mean to be a clerk – that is, an educated person who defends humanistic values. And the nameless officer’s reply, Benda thought, was what it meant to be a clerk, as the intellectuals abandoned the side of the eternal for the side of pure doxa. The clerk now serves a political passion, and speaks for the interests of a temporal and limited group, whether economic, national, or party. The clerk now sides with the army’s rules and regulations.

I, too, am interested in the clerk as a figure, although I betray humanity, in Benda’s eyes, by thinking of the clerk as, primordially, in the Great Transformation to an industrial and market economy, an agent of circulation. On the other hand, the clerk is dialectically riven – both the promoter of those routines that, in the countryside, the factory, and the store, generated a capitalist mentality, and the first responders to the elevation of the level of alienation this entailed. The clerks are the poets of the routinized world.

It is in this sense that Benda’s fight for eternal and against the engaged ‘intellectual’ is not, as it would seem to be at first glance, simply a reactionary gesture, a Christian nostalgia.

Benda started writing for the dreyfusard part of the press – he was published in Peguy’s Cahiers – and his career lasted well into the era of the existentialists, against which he took aim with furious quotations in his long second preface to The Betrayal of the Clerks, when it was reissued after WWII.

So: I want to look at Benda, Thomas Mann’s Reflections of an Non-political Man, and Russell Jacoby’s book on the last intellectuals – all in the light of the Occupy Wall Street movement – in some upcoming posts.