Neurath, Krugman and prediction

“Imagine sailors who, far out at sea, transform the shape of their clumsy vessel from a more circular to a more fishlike one. They make use of some drifting timber, besides the timber of the old structure, to modify the skeleton and the hull of their vessel. But they cannot put the ship in dock in order to start from scratch. During their work they stay on the old structure and deal with heavy gales and thundering waves. In transforming their ship they take care that dangerous leakages do not occur. A new ship grows out of the old one, step by step -- and while they are still building, the sailors may already be thinking of a new structure, and they will not always agree with one another. The whole business will go on in a way we cannot even anticipate today. That is our fate.”

This is a famous passage from Otto Neurath, the socialist and logical positivist. It is grounded in Neurath’s sense that prediction is a network effect – that it exists as a hypothesis in a network of other hypotheses, and that we should judge it in terms of that network.

Because we all possess the future tense, we are all prophets. However,  good prophecy – honest prophecy - requires something more than grammar. It requires a certain predictive integrity. That is, it requires that one not make predictions based on the isolation of one hypothesis as if the others did not exist.

Poor prophecy is the rule in politics. Because prophecy is entangled with the very mechanism of advancing political figures and policies, the best we can expect is that some acknowledgement of Neurath’s raft will trail behind the prophet. Some notion, that is, that for x to become true, not only do we have to be right about current mechanisms that would lead to x, but we have to acknowledge the x effect – the fact that it comes true changes the way things are. We can’t transpose one massive change into a background that we assume stays, otherwise, stable. It is like predicting a large earthquake in a locale and assuming that all the buildings and roads will remain the same.

This is what I felt when I read the recent series of Krugman posts criticizing Bernie Sanders. Leaving aside the economic content of the criticism, it is the political content that seems to ignore utterly the context of the predicted event.

Bernie Sanders becoming the nominee of the Democratic party would be a large earthquake. I don’t expect it to happen. But when I imagine it happening, I know that I have to imagine a lot of unanticipated shifts in circumstance. As well, I would have to re-evaluate the present mechanisms that would lead to that event.

Krugman as an economist knows this. But Krugman as a supporter of Clinton has tossed these variables in the garbage. And that isnt good. It puts him at the level of those people, those multitudes of people, who comment or blog on –line with absolute certainty, and absolute lack of intellectual integrity. This is easy to confuse with stupidity, but it is far from stupidity. It is, rather, a moral blindness – a blindness to the fact that thinking has any integrity.

It is one of the expected casualties, I guess, of an election year. However, it really doesn’t do much for Clinton, much as the serious people think it does. People have very good intuitions about moral blindnesses, whether they suppress them or not.   

the Randian tone of Donald Trump

The National review takedown of trump laid an egg, and reminds us that nowadays, Glenn Beck counts as a rightwing intellectual. In the old days, National Review actually did have some intellectual heft. For instance, it poured scorn on Ayn Rand. Here's Whttacker Chambers review of Atlas Shrugged. Here's the second graf: The news about this book seems to me to be that any ordinarily sensible head could not possibly take it seriously, and that, apparently, a good many do. Somebody has called it: “Excruciatingly awful.” I find it a remarkably silly book. It is certainly a bumptious one. Its story is preposterous. It reports the final stages of a final conflict (locale: chiefly the United States, some indefinite years hence) between the harried ranks of free enterprise and the “looters.” These are proponents of proscriptive taxes, government ownership, labor, etc., etc. The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality. This,” she is saying in effect, “is how things really are. These are the real issues, the real sides. Only your blindness keeps you from seeing it, which, happily, I have come to rescue you from.”

I can't imagine such a graf appearing in today's ever pandering NRO. More's the pity.

 In fact, if the NRO contained any moderately intelligent writers in its stable, they would have gone back to Rand to trace the real geneology of Trumpism. Chambers description of Rand's tone hits, presciently, on Donald Trump's genre of bluster: Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber–go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture-that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.

for the draft

For the draft

One of the great victories of the antiwar movement in the Vietnam era was the abolition of selective service.

In retrospect, this was a victory for the right. For the left, and for the American people, it was a disaster.

The draft, it turns out, is a dialectical instrument – one in which the affordances impinge on each other. As a political tool, it both mobilized the population to do the bidding of the political establishment and spread mass anxiety that the political establishment had to respond to.  Its abolition has contributed to two trends.

One is the trend to executive office wars. These started out small in the Reagan years, became much bigger under Bush 1, and exploded under Bush 2 and Obama.

The second is the drifting apart of the general population and the guarantor state. That state, built to support the working class, now routinely supports capital against the working class. And it supports war.

If the draft had not been abolished in the seventies, millions of men and women in the fourty years between its abolition and now would have been drafted. They would have been eligible for health benefits across their lifetime. They would have had educational benefits that would have significantly reduced the burden of student debt, perhaps most of it. If the draft had continued, African American men and women, in particular, would have seen their upward social mobility accelerate instead of stagnate and decline. The revenge of Jim Crow, the jailing of the young African American population that is one of the most shameful and horrible things that has happened in my lifetime in this country, would have been halted.

Looking back at the upward social mobility that characterized the post World War two era, it is surprising how much of it was connected to the draft – to the war machine. Millions of Gis received education benefits that landed them in college, the first in their families to ever have that chance. Millions were able to afford housing. Millions, today, rely on medical insurance from the VA.

If you go through the biographies of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, until recently the outstanding data point was how many came from working class families and went through the army or navy or air force, which led them into the path they took upwards.

It was an excellent tactic, in the sixties, to resist the draft. When I call it a dialectical instrument, this is what I mean. The draft personalizes foreign policy. During the sixties, a demonstration had much more symbolic and political power because those demonstrating were potentially draftees – people who had had to deal with the system. Thus, they spread discontent throughout the system.

The demonstration has become a relic precisely to the extent that the establishment no longer needs the population. The million people who came out against the Iraq war weren’t the comrades, or even very connected to, the people who were going to fight it – the mercenaries and volunteers.

As well, the sense of solidarity – the sense that the government is yours, because you have served it – was also a victim of the end of the draft. There is little sense, now, that the taxes taken by the government are more an investment for the vast majority of people. They are, instead, a suck on their marginal existences.

In a stroke, bringing back the draft will make it impossible for the establishment to engage in such things as our endless war in Afghanistan, a sixteen year, trillion and a half dollar enterprise that is being fought to save the establishment’s face. Think, we have spent that money and blood and now Afghanistan is free! Save for the women, the half of the country infested with war lords or the Taliban, and most of the impoverished population.

Don’t you feel the rush?

The draft will also brighten the chances for a less endebted future, and perhaps even a wealthier one, for a whole generation of Americans.  We will once again start asking the question Kennedy got wrong: ask not what you can do for the government, ask what the government can do for you.

Otherwise, you are fucked.

what do you mean we, kemo sabe: the new yorker we

The New Yorker "we"

Renata Adler, in her intemperate book against the new New Yorker of the 90s, Gone, took particular offense at the very person of Adam Gopnik. "I had learned over the course of conversations with Mr. Gopnik that his questions were not questions, or even quite soundings. Their purpose was to maneuver you into advising him to do what he would, in any case, walk over corpses to do." James Wolcott is also a non-fan: “He is avidly talented and spongily absorbent, an earnest little eager beaver whose twitchy aura of neediness makes him hard to dislike until the preciosity simply becomes too much.”

Myself, I have never met the man, and I liked the winsome Paris to the Moon, which was in the fine New Yorker tradition of accounts of an exotic Paris that was at once more civilized and more backwards than the good old USA. I accept the limitations of that vein, and then read Thurber or Flanner or Gopnik (less Flanner, actually – the best Paris correspondent ever) for the humor.
But if the early career of Gopnik seems, at least in the eyes of his colleagues, to have been Gollum-like (I wants the ring, precccioouss!), it is his incarnation as a New Yorker mandarin that bugs me. The pixie dust of the Paris book has fallen away, and the man so revealed does, as Wolcott put it, seem born to annoy me.
Which brings me to his essay about Henry James in the latest New Yorker.

For Gopnik, a book review or essay is not complete if it isn’t also an intellectual fashion report. If it isn’t, that is, aimed at the hip “we” which finds a tight little place in his paragraphs. Thus, the status report on James begins with an implicit we – the we of contemporary readers, a category that Gopnik never quantifies in some dirty way by looking at, say, sales figures or essays in magazines or things like that. Gopnik is his own authority on the contemporary reader, and that reader better be damn proud of it.
“For freshness of voice, firmness of purpose (if a firmness always subject to scruples and second thoughts), and general delight on the page, the memoirs are fully alive to the contemporary reader in a way that James’s late novels may no longer be. Although the sentences are always labyrinthine and sometimes exhausting, the feeling at the end of each chapter is one of clarity rather than of murk: a little piece of memory has been polished bright.”
A little piece of memory? Out of some great gurgling whole of memory? I suppose just saying a memory has been polished bright would expose the dubious, hallmark card proposition in the sentence.
But why have James’s late novels failed our sophisticated contemporary readers? And isn’t there evidence against this? Of the three late masterpieces (Wings of the Dovc, the Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl), the last – GB – was filmed in 2000, and Wings of the Dove in 1995 according to IMBD.. Now, perhaps Gopnik is talking about contemporary readers born in 1995, but I think probably not. Given the regularity with which James is dramatized in tv series and movies, I’m guessing the late novels (besides The Ambassadors, which would be extremely hard to film) will sooner or later be recycled on the wheel, at which point the New Yorker will have some writer on hand to tell us why the late novels are so relevant to the now.
The IMBD list does chart a growth in the industry of bringing James to film, which, I suppose, could probably be used to chart spurts in the buying and reading of his books. Gopnik employs an entirely different method to tell us about James’s relevance – which depends entirely on the New Yorker “we”:

“Certainly, the great cult of the later James, which arose in the propaganda-fearing nineteen-forties and fifties, when he and T. S. Eliot stood above all other writers for sighs and scruples, could use a new infusion of objects. James remains a classic, of course, but a classic is not necessarily a presence. David Foster Wallace, the saint of under-thirty readers, mentions James not at all in his critical writings, and though one might take his qualifications and circlings back as Jamesian, they are employed to discriminate not more finely but to discriminate not at all—to get it in, rather than to pare it down. In a time of linguistic overkill, like the nineteen-forties, we look to literature for a language of emotional caution; in an age of irony, we look for emotional authenticity. Feeling ourselves in a desert of true feeling, we look for a feeling of truth.”

Who, exactly, feels in a desert of true feeling? And, by the way, when did David Foster Wallace become the saint of under-thirty readers? And, third question, how can we expect a new infusion of objects from a dead writer? We might live in the age of raising the level of exploitation, but even capitalism has not yet figured out how to raise the dead. Surely that should be 30-40 year old readers. I am unsure who is the patron saint of under thirty readers, or if they have one, but I do know that the New Yorker we, peering dimly out there towards Dubuque or Brooklyn, probably has decided that it must be DFW, just as they probably decided, in 1978, that all the kids were listening to Bob Dylan. As fashion reports go, the New Yorker is in a position, almost by definition, of being behind the fashions.

Once Gopnik drops his idea that he, we, and the contemporary reader are one and the same, he does same some interesting things about James’s autobiographies. As Wolcott wrote, long ago, Gopnik is decidedly smart – that is, he is smart when he decides to be. I simply wish he would decide to not issue memoranda on what we are reading or thinking or feeling today. The we reminds me of an old children's joke, the one where the lone ranger, holed up in a hut with bad guys outside, tells Tonto that we are in a bad spot, and Tonto says, what do you mean  we, Kemo sabe?

car lots as battlefields, or fair versus market

There are various degrees of hell on earth. One of them, hell-lite, is surely going shopping for a used car. We got an in your face sample of that yesterday from a used car dealership in Inglewood, run on traditional lines: the sleazy boss, the oppressed, near retirement age salesman, the attempt to pump your expressed desire (we'd like a cheap vehicle, please) into their desire (and this nearly new SUV can be yours for 18,000 dollars, cutting the price 30 percent!). And now for the part of the story that I'm not so comfortable with - as I know that those car lots are really parts of a popular culture of haggling that goes back to pre-capitalist days, and intellectually I find them interesting - but then we went to CarMax. Carmax is wonderful, I must say, for the simple reason that they sell cars as though they were commodities no different from aspirin or breakfast cereal, instead of horses being traded between nomadic tribes. So you go in, you say what you want, they show you what is on offer, you go out to see it, and that is that. 21st century, quoi! So, happily, we are replacing our car. Unhappily, the poor Greek salesman with the dyed hair in Inglewood is not getting a commission. We owe him a karmic debt.

There’s more to say about our little adventure from the Marxist point of view.  In the eighteenth century, the physiocrats and economists, as they were newly named, campaigned against the older form of market society centered on the fair – against which they proposed the market. In the fair, the exchanges were defined not simply by barter or the exchange of money for products, but by other social forces as well – tests of masculinity, alliance makinng, sexual adventure, and various non-economic pleasures. A simple way of speaking about this is to say that the products in the fair weren’t fully commoditized. In the ideal market, the products were. Transactions came down to the calculus between the utility of the consumer and the utility of the seller. In a sense, the objects were stripped of everything alien to their exchange nature.

Marx, of course, saw this logic as a social force  that would eventually sweep away all remnants of the older market society – the pre-capitalist society. As it happens, the pre-capitalist world is still all around us, even in the most capitalist of countries. Commodification meets its limits in the very nature of the nexus upon which it depends – that is, in the irresistable sociability that attends all human encouters.

Car sales in the US are strongly fair-like. Updike was shrewd, in his four Rabbit novels, to move his protagonist from a factory figure to a car salesman. Rabbit’s idea of the car lot as a place of seduction and masculine competition plugs into every car lot I’ve ever gone to. A. finds it almost unbearable, the simultaneous brazen pressure to buy and the pressure to prove one’s manhood – as she said about one of the guys we dealt with, he practically pulled down his pants and showed us his big balls. In this forum, the customer who is best adapted to haggle, to negotiate, must know about cars and must exhibit that knowledge in its ideolect. The car lot is a place for victory and defeat, not a market for economically rational transactions.

This is where Carmax is so brilliant and, from a certain perspective, so oppressive. Here, the whole culture of sociability and masculinity assembled around automobiles is calmly tossed into the garbage. There are no negotiations here, there’s no haggling, there are no victories. Just as when I buy an aspirin at the grocery store, a transaction that requires minimum knowledge of chemistry on my part and on the part of the clerk who checks me out, at CarMax, the fair like aspects of the transaction have been minimized. Interestingly, the decorations, size and layout of the place denies this simple, inhuman fact – the car lot looks much more utilitarian, with its assembled jam of cars. As the fair is condemned to death, its emblems are stolen and employed to disguise the death.    

entertainment and art - to be or not to be

Although it is usually the end of the eighteenth century that monopolizes the discussion of aesthetics in philosophy, it is a book from the beginning of the century – Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, etc. – that shaped the terms in which art was discussed by Enlightenment philosophes. In the same sense in which an allergen shapes a sneeze, it is also these terms that shaped the massive rejection under which we still live – that reaction we call modernism, romanticism, postmodernism, etc.

Shaftesbury did not directly talk about entertainment and art, because the concepts and their hostility one to the other had not crystallized in his time. But he does give us some notion about what art was about. Or, rather, he constructs two points of view by which to look at it.

From the first point of view, art is thoroughly social.  Shaftesbury writes of how the poet’s work is an “entertainment for himself and others.” The possibility that it could only be for himself is cast into doubt, however, by the whole structure of his theory of taste.

Our … endeavor, therefore, must appear this: to show that nothing is found charming or delightful in the polite world, nothing which is adopted as pleasure or entertainment of whatever kind can any way be accounted for, supported or established wiouth the pre-establishment or supposition a a certain taste.”

The separation between pleasures and entertainment is about Shaftesbury’s recognition that much of entertainment is about the “foils and contraries” that befall human actors, whether in poetry, or theater, or song, or visuall depiction. However, for Shaftesbury, the moments of degredation, pain, grief and defeat – of, in fact, ugliness, the lineaments of unhappiness - are moments in a larger scheme to depict, in full, the “beauties of the inward soul.”

This gives us our second point of view. Shaftesbury is not a puritan by any means, but he still harks after, or at least is haunted by, the old distinction between the sacred and the profane – which is now transferred to a the duality between outward show and inward beauty. If the artist is always working with the materials of outward show, he is always motivated by the impulse of inward beauty.

The model for inward beauty comes not from art: it comes from the beauty of the human form. And not any human form – rather, the paradigm is the beautiful woman. That beauty, Shaftesbury claims, is always a symbol of inward beauty. Subtract the latter, make the woman an idiot, and the outward beauty flees.

We know how this play of comparisons arises. We’ve seen this number dialed before, over and over again.  Bit by bit, entertainment – like the beauty of women – becomes a threat if it is not moralized, or held to some standard. But for Shaftesbury, entertainment is still, in the end, the kind of outward show that art does not transcend so much as use for a transcendence beyond art – into being a wholly fit member of society.

Shaftesbury’s aesthetics of taste made a good target for those who reject the surrender to taste as an ultimately servile gesture, a relic of the system of patronage. Those, that is, who were contemporary with or came after the French revolution.

It is at this point that the plot thickens; the divide, such as it is, between entertainment and art becomes a modern project. 

entertainment and art

It was in the late sixties, I think, that most American newspapers began hosting a “business” section. Of course, most of the readers of newspapers back then were laborers, but there was never a labor section. Now business sections are universal, and the last surviving labor unions are about to get a stake through their heart as the Supreme Court, that bastion of reaction, prongs them. Those Business sections were, literally, a sign of the Times.

I am not sure when I first noticed that newspapers were putting their movie, book and music reviews in a section called Arts and Entertainment. It is now a pretty standard section heading. It begs the question, or at least I am going to beg the question, of what is meant by that conjunction. What is supposed to be the difference between art on the one side and entertainment on the other?

In the seventeenth century, entertainment was a term that possessed a lot of semantic scope. It held onto its French roots in “tenir”, to hold, and meant hosting, or supporting, or amusing. In John Donne’s sermons, one can see examples of all these things. For instance, in interpreting the passage in Genesis in which Abraham feeds some strangers who turn out to be angels, Donne writes: … the angels of the Gospel come within their distance, but if you will not receive them, they can break open no doors, nor save you against your wil: the angel does, as he that sends him. Stand at the door and knock, if the door be open, he comes in, and sups with him; What gets he by that? This; he brings his dish with him; he  feeds his host, more than his host him. This is true hospitality, and entertaiment of angels, both when thou feedest Christ , in his poor members abroad, or when thouh feedest thine own soul at hom, with the company and conversation of ture and religious Christians at thy table, for these are angels.” “Entertainment” here is not only the provision of food and drink, but also of conversation – l’entretien. It is something more than providing the bare necessities.

On the other hand, Donne can also pluck amusement out of the word. In a Lent Sermon, Donne speaks of the function of the sermon and, in general, of the service. There’s an implicit self reference here, for Donne’s own sermons were pretty well wrought – were, in a word that would not have been used in his time, artistic. He speaks here of “Gods ablest Ministers, indued with the best parts, to be but as music, as a jest, as a song, as an entertainment.”

Now, a sermon is not a secular prose piece. In this respect, the binary is between the sacred and the profane, not art and entertainment. But Donne was, of course, well aware of the fact that poetry could straddle the divide between sacred and profane. Still, he does not insert, after “song”, as poetry. Entertainment, here, is something different from the entertainment of angels. It is already show business.

Is it possible, though, that all of art is show business? Or, less pejoratively, that entertainment is art and art entertainment? And that the journalistic conjunction caters to a popular misconception, an ill-made middle or high brow hierarchy?

This question is, I think, mixed up to an extent with the old division between the sacred and the profane. In particular, the exclusion of some from the Protestant and Catholic notion of the sacred.

An act of 1572, in England, proscribed "common players in interludes and minstrils." Players had to belong to the household of a baron or an honorable personage - hence Shakespeare's membership in the "Queens men." The punishment for being a wandering player ranged from whipping, to having your ears lopped off, to being shipped out of the district.

Entertainers, like Jews and slaves, were outside the bounds of the Holy City - Augustine's City of God, Christian Europe’s millennial long dream. They were, one way or another, under the ban of social death. It wasn’t only the Puritans who objected to the actor. Here’s Bossuet, a French bishop, commenting about Moliere, who - according to legend - died right after acting in La Malade imaginaire: he "passed from the pleasantries of theater, among which he practically drew his last breath, to the judgment seat of him who said: cursed be those who laugh now, for you shall cry." 

I’ve been thinking about these things since the death of David Bowie, wondering about how to characterize him: Entertainer? Artist? Or is there a difference? Does the and stand?