adam and the law

I’m not one of life’s naysayers. This is funny, because I have a very negative attitude – or at least I often have a negative attitude – but something about the word “no” is difficult for me. This was pointed out  to me in a recent discussion about Adam’s anarchic urge to suck on electric chords and put his mouth up to electric outlets. It is I understand not uncommon in babies. Also, I have a vague memory of how, at one point when I was a small kid, I liked to bite down on a penny because I sort of liked/didn’t like the coppery taste in my mouth – it was the way liking would go to disliking and back, it was an unbalanced taste – and I also liked the way it carried a sort of electric charge to the teeth that made me cringe a bit. However, I don’t think Adam is at that point yet. Still, here he is, our eleven month old, charging at electrical outlets, and what I do is I catch him and say, oh, you thought you were going to pull a fast one. And things like that. Instead of saying no, no, no!

What is it with no? I’d like to think that it is dialectically difficult, but maybe it is that I’m a natural enabler. A weak soul with a wobbly moral code.

A couple of days ago, we were up in Adam’s room and he spotted the electric outlet at the far end of the room and made a fast crawl in its direction, and I tried the no. No, Adam, I said. Unexpectedly, this caused Adam to nearly die with laughter. Nope, Adam, I said, and again the laugh – Adam has a very good laugh, an infectious laugh, he makes you want to make him laugh. He’d laugh, watching me, and then turn back to the electric outlet, and I’d say no, and he’d almost flip with how funny it was that Da was saying no.

Now, perhaps an eleven month old is not an oracle, but there was something here, something happening here, that was … well, a little unheimlich to yours truly. Could I be seen through so easily?

Jesus, of course, issues the classic judgment: “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.” Jesus was not generally close to the Stoics, but here I see their trace. This may be the most un-Socratic of his sayings. On the other hand (the enabler’s great phrase!) one can see the reason for it as a rule of prudence. And yet, the saying comes in the great chapter 5 of Matthew, the chapter of the beatitudes, where the yea and nay logic is, to say the least, strained. On the one hand, there the law and the prophets is to be fulfilled, in the person of the Christ, and on the other hand, various laws, including the most important, the law of talion – eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth – are negated. Jesus seems to duck and weave among the inevitable ironies of rules and language. As who does not? For I say unto you, pulling up my socks and getting on my heels, even yea and nay have their infinite varieties. The rest – that about which we cannot speak – is exactly what we all speak about.

Which may be why Adam found me so hilarious in the role of lawgiver. Wait until I tell him about the law and the prophets!

Nudgery liberalism and its discontents

I read the review of This Town, the supposed expose of D.C.’s indealing establishment, by Michael Tomasky in the New York Review of Books, and I had to laugh. Like Ezra Klein, Tomasky, a “liberal”, is offended that the book ignores, as he puts it in his last graf: “… a city where everything isn’t a game, where everyone isn’t just in it for the money and the parties, and where many thousands of people do interesting work but don’t come within a whisper of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. They shape this town, too.”

In other words, what about the crew of neoliberal policymakers and think tankers and aides who work so hard.

I have to laugh. Granted some of them might not be in it just for the money – but what one really has to ask is why they are such abysmal failures. For the majority of  people in the U.S., life in 2013, in Obama’s second term, is worse on every quality of life category that counts than life was in 2000, or 2005. And life wasn’t so good then to begin with.

The era of the nudgery liberals seals, in a sense, the conservative dominance – the ice age – that has sucked out all our air since Reagan’s time. The trick has not been about the scale of the government – the trick has been about the retreat of the government to a private enterprise heaven of intermediaries, making government ‘more efficient’ with the full approval and seal of the Dems. Having responded to the fall of socialist heaven with the idea that government can play the role of sugar daddy to big business but direct that business, by a whole bag of treats, to give the working class a break has been an outstanding joke. But the D.C. libs don’t get the punch line.

To illustrate: There was a post in the Washington Post’s wonkblog the other day showing that, according to a Pew Research poll, the uninsured are about evenly divided in their support for or opposition to  Obamacare. Sarah Kliff, the writer, is concerned that Americans are very very confused about Obamacare. This may be so – it is a massively confusing substitute for single payer state run healthcare, such as Medicare. What else could one expect from a program that had its roots in Romneycare and its design in proposals made by Newt Gingrich in the 90s? But one thing that isn’t touched on in the polls or the article is at the real heart of the uninsured’s unease: you really can’t trust the government. Supposedly, the uninsured are going to be subsidized by the federal government so that they can fulfill the mandatory insurance provision. But the uninsured can read the paper. They can remember things. Things like Obama trying to cut back Social Security and Medicare as part of his grand bargain. Perhaps they can even remember the evisceration of welfare under Clinton. So the question is: if those subsidies are on the chopping block one day, would the Dems protect them? If the answer is no – and there is every reason to think that Obama’s grand bargain is the real Dem template – than what we would be left with is an inadequate subsidy and a real mandate requirement. It is quite easy to envision a Dem congress or president deciding that a little out of pocket money from the working class to keep their nifty hodgepodge of crappy private insurance companies going would be a small sacrifice.

Neoliberals in D.C., in other words, have undermined any confidence one might have in the supposedly liberal programs they support and devise. This is why the plea for the “thousands of people doing interesting work” falls, at least in my case, on deaf ears. Fuck em.

style

We bought a big semi-transparent plastic box in which to stash Adam’s growing stash of toys – his treasures, except that Adam is still too young to have even a glimmering of the meaning of primitive economics and its symbols Although perhaps it is I who am the prisoner of my concepts, here, since Adam thinks through his body as the neurons bloom there way inside, and he immediately knew that this box was itself a toy. It quickly became one of his favorites (besides the quickly snatched away electric chords and the dustpan that he has access to when his parents let down their guard and allows him in the kitchen).Adam uses the sides of the box to pull himself almost all the way to a standing position, and there he will totter for a moment, and then come down with a plop back into sitting position, pulling the box with him. At a tilt, all the objects in the box are accessible to his probing hands, and so the fun begins. Gently burbling to himself – and sometime making loud squawking sounds or ak ak sounds, as if disagreeing with someone – he’ll pull the things out.
The pulling out is what interests him. Once they are out, he has a way of casting them aside with a perfect indifference that would break Melanie Klein’s heart. This is not the angry flinging away of breast substitutes, condemning the male child to futile quests and depression in the life-course. No, this is something else – this is the beginning of style.
Style, after all, is merely the ritualization of selection. The very emblem of style is the way the practiced smoker, having consumed as much as he wants of the cigarette, flicks away the butt. Now, Adam’s way of flinging things shouldn’t be mixed together as though it were one gesture. There is, for instance, the way he will simply drop over his shoulder the things that we thrust upon him that interest him in no way shape or form. Heartbreakingly, the soft animal dolls don't even get tossed over the shoulder, but are dropped immediately on the floor – Adam, from the heights of his baby futurism, has no time for the bourgeois fetishes of his parents. On the other hand, a plastic cap – ah, the functionality of it – will fascinate him. He’ll tenderly turn it around, and then gingerly put it in his mouth, unless his uncomprehending parents snatch it from him first.
The end result of the plastic box game looks, to me, like the pointless strewing of objects across the room. But what exactly is a “point” – and isn’t that suspension of the point what style is all about? The point as I clumsily cling to it is some catch in the structure that entropy has inexorably condemned to dissipation. Or something like that. Adam, however, is unperturbed by the adult panic codified in the purpose. Nor is this strewing a fort/da strewing. Fort/da objects are special things, like the pacifier. He’s simply squandered his treasure and moved on, hunter gatherer style. And what lottery ticket winner among us can blame him?

a stroll through the past...

Finally, in India he had, as he thought, found his ideal realised. There, with whatever shortcomings, there was at least a strong Government; rulers who ruled; capable of doing business; of acting systematically upon their convictions; strenuously employed in working out an effective system; and not trammelled by trimming their sails to catch every [316]temporary gust of sentiment in a half-educated community. His book, he often said, was thus virtually a consideration of the commonplaces of British politics in the light of his Indian experience. He wished, he says in one of his letters, to write about India; but as soon as he began he felt that he would be challenged to give his views upon these preliminary problems: What do you think of liberty, of toleration, of ruling by military force, and so forth? 

At the beginning of our last series of wars, in 2001, I became interested in the interconnected problems of empire and central planning. At the time, I thought of war in the normal way – as derivative of the state. I am now not so sure that war isn’t, as Heraclitus thought, primary, and the state secondary, something dragged behind the one human organization that will always be with us.

At the time, there was a spate of essays in the thumbsucking journals assuring us that America was an empire and it was time to get with the white man’s burden. It was spring time for Niall Ferguson, in other words.

I noticed that one emblematic figure from history was sometimes mentioned in these Imperialist pep rallies – Pilate. Tony Blair, perhaps the most unctuous figure in recent history, had mentioned Pilate with some sympathy in a speech lauding “humanitarian intervention” – a beautiful phrase that was as meaningless as, say, loving rape, or charitable robbery. A conman’s phrase, in other words. Conman’s phrases go through the thumbsucking journals like berries through the belly of a goose – they come in all sweet and gooey, and they come out shit.

I found, I thought, the definitive topos on the Pilate as tragic colonial governor – or tragic humanitarian intervenor – in an obscure Victorian book, Liberty Equality Fraternity, by Virginia Woolf’s uncle, Fitzjames Stephen. The more I learned about Stephen, who is mentioned by a lot of late nineteenth century worthies – for instance, William James – the more I thought he was the kind of marginal figure through which major currents of history flowed in an exemplary fashion.

Well, my essay on Pilate, and on the imperialist effect on politics in the twentieth century, fell by the wayside. But I remembered it recently when I saw an allusion in the TLS to Leslie Stephen’s biography of his brother, and looked up the chapter on the book. I was impressed – the chapter is a minor classic in sorting out various currents in the philosophy of law and politics which we have all but forgotten, having decided, by warrant of the 101 class, that utilitarianism runs straight through John Stuart Mill and then gets taken up by various analytic ethicists in the 1950s and 60s, thus missing its whole historical effect.

To which I have to return…

placebo

In his book, Bad Medicine, David Wootton makes an interesting remark about the symbolism of the stethoscope. It was invented in 1816 by René Laennec out of a problem in gender politics: the norm for female patients of the all male doctor fraternity was to be examined with their clothes on. Thus, the doctor could not lay his head against the chest of the patient and listen to the sound of what was going on inside. Laennec was concerned with phthisis, a nosological category that has now been subsumed as tuberculosis. The stethoscope was a true advance: doctors became much better at diagnosing phthisis. But therein lies the historical burden of Wootton’s book:

“Phthisis no longer exists as a disease: we now call it tuberculosis because we think of it as an infectious

disease caused by a specific micro-organism. The same sounds in  a stethoscope that would once have led to a diagnosis of phthisis now leads to tests to confirm tuberculosis. But there is an important difference between our diagnosis of tuberculosis and Laennec’s diagnosis of phthisis: we can cure tuberculosis (most of the time), while his patients died of phthisis––he died of it himself. Until 1865 (when

Lister introduced antiseptic surgery) virtually all medical progress was of this sort. It enabled doctors to get better and better at prognosis, at predicting who would die, but it made no difference at all to

therapeutics. It was a progress in science but not in technology.”     

The gap between the ability to diagnose and the ability to cure, or even to understand the cause of a disease, or its etiology, is easy to forget. I often edit articles about medicine, or public health, in the pre-twentieth century period. Some of these articles concern the medical culture of native peoples. And even with the best anti-colonialist will in the world, often the authors simply assume that there is a contrast between a rational and curative Western medicine and a ritualistic and non-curative folk medicine. In fact, folk medicine was medicine up into the twentieth century, and often continues to be today. Western medicine as therapy was largely either fraudulent or depended on the placebo effect. The latter is a real effect, of course.

“But the fact that there was no progress––far too little to have any systematic impact on life expectancy––and the fact that medical intervention did more harm than good, does not mean that doctors

did not cure patients. Modern studies of the placebo effect show that it is a mistake to think that there are some therapies that are effective and others which though ineffective work on those who respond

to the placebo effect. Even effective medicine works partly by mobilizing the body’s own resources, by invoking the placebo effect: one estimate is that a third of the good done by modern medicine is

attributable to the placebo effect.

When patients believe that a therapy will work, their belief is capable of rendering it surprisingly efficacious; when doctors believe a therapy will work their confidence is consistently transferred

to the patient. There are all sorts of studies that show this in practice. Thus if a new and better drug comes out, the drug it replaces begins to perform consistently less well in tests, merely

because doctors have lost confidence in it.”

Ah, transference! Surely this is a fact about human nature that goes beyond pharmacopeia.