against debating

Most intellectuals don’t have fans. They are lucky to have respondents to pieces they publish in small academic journals. But there are some intellectuals who do have fans. Especially among rightwing intellectuals who achieve a certain name recognition (Christopher Hitchens, Jordan Peterson, etc.) you will find an odd romanticism about “debate”. The fans are always lauding the debating skills of their idols.

I was a member of the debate club in high school – as I suspect few of the fans were – and the one thing you learn about debate is that it is not an instrument for truth. Rather, it is an instrument for winning an argument. The mark of the good debater is to win both as a supporter of “x” and as an opponent of “x”.

The dispute about the meaning and methods of debate are ancient. Around 500 BC, sophists – to give them a slightly anachronistic name – discovered and developed the techniques of argument and rhetoric. Discovered, here, means simply brought into consciousness styles of argument that no doubt pre-existed the sophists. You can see what argument looks like without these styles, or consciousness of these styles, in the book of Job, where Job’s friends make a mess of his excuses, but without any convention whereby Job would be convinced that his friends were right. In fact, Job’s friends provoke God’s wrath: which shows you how much one needs debating skills.

Plato was worried about the sophist’s art – worried that it was an art that obscured, rather than revealed, the truth. The truth, that is, about being. Plato wrote dialogues, so it wasn’t as if he were worried about argument per se. He was worried that debate was oriented towards winning. The idea that one should win at all costs sacrificed the very goal that the argument was meant to inch us towards.

I suspect that creating a sport out of intellectual work is at the heart of the rare phenomenon of the intellectual with fans. And it is a bit too snooty to think that brainwork and entertainment are separated by rigid ethical and veridical lines. I see no reason to believe that. But I also see no reason to jettison Plato’s worry: that debate debases the very truths it seeks to capture by making them secondary to the impulse to win.

Debates, in other words, are an inferior intellectual tool. And when they take center stage, you know that something shifty is going on.

the lesson of Martin Amis

Martin Amis has led one of the most puzzling careers in the contemporary novel business.

He started out of the gate with some obvious advantages. He had a good ear for speech, and an even better ear for caricaturing speech. He could create recognizable types – especially the aspiring Yob – in the great tradition of English comic novelists. And he had a believable misanthropy going for him – like his Dad, and like Evelyn Waugh.

These are great strengths. I tried to re-read Money a year ago, and didn’t get far, cause I wasn’t in the mood. But I could still see what a piece of work, in the good sense, it was.

With all of these qualities, Amis should have gone from strength to strength in Blairite GB. Instead, he jumped the track, and started producing these novels about Stalin’s Gulag and Hitler's concentration camps.

He came to these subjects with heavy handicaps. Amis’s great strength was, as I have said, aural. You could hear a lot of Money. But he has no sense whatsoever for spoken German or Russian. This immediately carves out about two thirds of what he has to work with. And then, who is the competition, here? Well, Russian and German (and Hungarian and Dutch and French) writers who had a very good sense of what the worlds they described sounded like. The competition, in other words, was already at the finish line while Amis was huffing along, getting all his notes in order. 

The novels become those notes: oh, here’s the part derived from Anthony Beevor. Here’s the Annie Applebaum part. And so on.

I do not understand this jumping of the tracks. Was it because he sought an American market, one that had only a vague idea of yob culture? I think that might be part of it. I remember a howler of a review in the New Republic when the book section was run by Leon Wieseltier that went on and on about Amis achieving true greatness with the novel about the Gulag. It was as if the novel were a surgical bomb that had hit its target. The Wieseltierish crowd was, of course, not going to be so excited about a novel like Money, cause it wasn’t “serious”. Plus, of course, being anti-Stalin was, for this crowd, an act of political courage.

It is a weird crowd.

But my complaint isn’t political. Amis’s rightwing politics don’t bother me as drivers of fiction – a novel is like a truck, and the drivers are various in their viewpoints, but the point is to drive it well. What I don’t get is the idea that to move into making a SERIOUS novel about ATROCITIES, Amis had to remove himself to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. He could easily have turned to, say, the war in Kenya, or the starvation in Bengal, or Northern Ireland, or any number of theaters where he could both hear the culture and write about it. He could definitely have gotten his anti-Communist jones on by writing about British lefties in the 60s.

It is frustrating to see a good novelist take on subjects that are manifestly not going to pay off, and do it time after time. It reminds me, oddly enough, of the decay of the novel under Stalin, where writers who had avant garde impulses and brilliance were forced to write in a straightjacketed socialist realism mode.

I suppose there is a lesson in here somewhere about one’s convictions and the creation of that enterprise of othering and daydreaming, the novel. Sometimes, you just need to write an essay to give the first driver some road space.

negative externalities, y'all.

It is a semi-holiday here in France. I guess I should include the marker, pre-Uber France. Macronists everywhere despair about these holidays. So it is time to: reference an article by Stefano Bartolini that deals with growth using a Polanyi-style scheme of analysis. Naturally. You know I was a-goin’ there. It bears the rebarbative title (by which I mean a title fit for a cannibal's barbecue) “Beyond Accumulation and Technical Progress: Negative Externalities as an Engine of Economic Growth.”

The abstract, however, hearteningly poses questions that economists have generally ruled out according to the icky rule: if it shows that capitalism is icky, forget it.

“The traditional explanation of growth based on the primum and secundum movens of accumulation and technical progress, faces two major empirical anomalies. Why do people work so much i.e. why do they strive so much for money? The growth literature provides no answer to these question, nor to the further and very important one of why people are so unhappy. Moreover, finding a joint answer to the two questions seems particularly puzzling. Why do people strive so much for money if money cannot buy happiness? I argue that the solution to this 'paradox of happiness' can be provided by including in the theory a tertium movens of growth: negative externalities. These externalities can be of two kinds. The first are positional externalities, i.e. those due the fact that individuals may be interested in relative not absolute position. The second kind of negative externalities are those which reduce free goods. Some recent models, both evolutionary or with optimising agents, show the role of these externalities as an engine of growth. This approach emphasises that the growth process generates extensive negative externalities which reduce the capacity of the social and natural environment to furnish free goods. In these models individuals have increasingly to rely on private goods in order to prevent a reduction in their well-being or in their productive capacity due to decline in social and natural capital. This generates an increase in output which feeds back into the negative externalities, giving rise to a self-reinforcing mechanism whereby growth generates negative externalities and negative externalities generate growth. According to these models, growth appears to be a substitution process whereby free final (or intermediate) goods are progressively replaced with costly goods in the consumption (or production) patterns of individuals. From the point of view of this GASP (Growth As Substitution Process) models the two anomalies of growth theory are two sides of the same coin. People strive so much for money because they have to defend themselves against negative externalities: they work so much in order to substitute free goods with costly ones. But an increase in income does not improve their happiness because it involves a process of substitution of free goods costly ones. Some implications for environmental economics are drawn.”

Perhaps the implications don’t leap out at you. But they do in their way in everyday life. Moving to L.A.? Well, you best get you a car. Why? Cause the town is criss crossed with insurmountable barriers to walking or biking through it. And the mass transit system is slow, and subject to the massive traffic slowdown that provide the punctuation to the rhythm of the place. And those traffic slowdowns penetrate your sleep, because you best get used to getting up early in order to, perhaps, miss the traffic in the morning going to work. And if you have kids, you best have either a partner who can take them to school, a babysitter, or a relative on whom you can throw off the problem of what to do with them. Of course, having kids means you need more money, so put in that overtime, or lengthen that commute. You can play with them on the weekend!

On and on the merry-go-round goes, and luckily, we have wonderful anti-depressants for you!

One more quote.

“In short, the result of perpetual growth seems rather vulnerable to inclusion of a work/leisure choice in models. The plausible mechanisms emphasised by endogenous growth models which ensure a non-decreasing marginal productivity of capital over the long period are insufficient to generate perpetual growth. In order to generate it, individuals must work and accumulate i. e. must be interested in money, more than endogenous growth models predict. According to these models, in fact, individuals react to a long-period increase in labor productivity by enjoying life more than is necessary to ensure perpetual growth. This is as regards the theoretical problems.”

let Dimitrios Pagourtzis go

The NYT has an editorial headlined, Congress has dithered on gun control. That isn't right. The correct headline should be: congress has abetted the mass killers of children. And they are proud of it.
Cause of course that it what the "failure" to enact gun control comes down to. We all know the consequences by now. Gun control advocates, who are often Dems, have become crackers of jokes and rather cynical users of the gun issue, when it is hot, to accuse the GOP - while of course abetting centrist Dem candidates who, we are assured, are winning back white voters by opposing gun control laws. Like, in fact, the current Democrat running for Ohio governorship.
And then there is the Governor of Texas, the lieutenant governor, the senators, the representatives, who were as much a part of Pagourtzis squeezing the trigger as he was. He killed ten. They've killed hundreds. And they will keep on doing so.
So, if the decision is the blood of school children is no big deal, something we will headline about for a day and forget, let's let Pagourtzis go. He only did what Americans apparently don't mind him doing.
Can a country come down with a sickness unto death? I guess that is the question we are all wrestling with every day.

The Dem legitimacy problem

I feel that there is an important aspect of the Obama era that is slipping away, being forgotten; and in so being, laying the groundwork for a similar mistake.

Let’s go back to the year 2009, when the O. administration decided to go with the most conservative plan for national healthcare, the one made up by the Heritage Foundation and promoted by Newt Gingrich in the 90s.

Much infighting on various progressive blogs ensued. The progressive blog conclusion – expressed most forcefully, I believe, by Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein – was that those who wanted a more radical form of healthcare were politically unrealistic. By this phrase, “politically unrealistic,” they meant – well, they seemed to mean that other legislation couldn’t get passed.

As we now know, if you are in majority, you can change the rules and pass what you like. The GOP suffers from no problems with political realism in that sense. Back in 2009, there was many a valiant single-payer who dashed up to the walls with the same slogan: abolish filibuster, abolish the barriers to passing progressive legislation! And was forced back, as such was the horror of our great institutions that no majority would dare, would ever dare, to touch the sacrosanct rules, which had lent a bipartisan aura to everything from the Fugitive Slave Act to the Great War on Terror.

I sensed, then, and still sense that there was something more behind the political realism slogan. That more was, I felt, a sort of shared but unspoken mood, among both Republicans and Democrats, that Democratic politicians were, to an extent, illegitimate. The legitimate ruling party of the U.S.A. was the GOP. Hence, to legitimate any piece of legislation, you had to get Daddy GOP to sign up for it, or at least one of the “stars” of the party.

This sense of legitimacy is one of the great inheritances of the Reagan era. It haunts Dems. The so-called moderate wing of the Democratic party does pretty much buy the neo-liberal ideal – the era of big gov being over, you gots to pay for your college education, boys and girls, we can’t afford Medicare for all, everything can’t be free free free – but I think that they have been sold this bill of goods under the soothing notion that the old, McGovernite Dems were the ruin of everything, and that we all have to adopt to the idea that the Republicans really represent the establishment, and we want to be part of the establishment in the end, don't we?

If we keep an eye on this sense of latent illegitimacy, we can sort of see what was going on in that fight in 2009. Two politically realistic dimensions seemed, then, to have quite disappeared. The one is that the most politically unrealistic thing you can do is deflate your followers with half-hearted results after promising them something as absolute and sexy as Hope. From birthday parties to elections, this is the recipe for a downer. And if you lose the election, your calculations about political realism go out the door: you will just spend your time in a defensive crouch.

The other dimension concerns acceptance. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid continue to exist because, although they came out of the Democratic Party, they so quickly became part of the social knitting that the GOP couldn’t get rid of them. Political realism, then, consists of making policy that similarly becomes the new normal.

Unfortunately, the Dem strategy from 2009-2016 was based on bipartisanship and executive action. Since there was no bipartisanship, after 2010, Obama’s politics were peculiarly top down. But the major act of the administration, Obamacare, had huge problems politically. It depended for its continuance on a complex mechanism that required legislative input. Social security didn’t fundamentally change until the 1980s – it had a good forty year run – and it changed much for the worse in the 80s, but it is still there. Obamacare, though, unlike, say, Medicare for all, is very much subject to malign neglect. If the Congress can’t get rid of it, they can quickly make it odious to the people it is meant to help by simply not repairing it – and this is what is happening. So, not only did the call for political realism in 2009 not result in a bipartisan vote for the ACA – it resulted in a wounded half system that is very vulnerable to GOP shutdown, in ways that Medicare and the Social Security system is not.

What is funny about the whole 2009 debate is that the “political realist” commentariat were very very smug about what was “realistic” and what was not. It was like they knew all the answers. In fact, they generated that odor of certainty that hung around the Bushites in 2003 about the Iraq invasion – you’d have to be crazy to oppose a cakewalk and the obvious competence of an occupying force directed by the likes of Rumsfeld – who at the time was feted as a reforming genius at the Pentagon. Similarly, Obama’s administration was playing multi-dimensional chess on the ACA thing, and us carping mortals just didn’t understand.

Well, we understood. And if, as might happen, the Dems take over the House, I hope they understand that political realism is not pre-compromising your campaign promises – it is making the other side swallow them. The Ds of 1940, 1950 and 1965 understood this very well.

Overthrowing the CEO mystique: the robot boss

I’m a strong believer that the CEO space – that expensive, padded space that costs fortune 500 companies hundreds of millions per year – could be radically altered and made much less expensive by replacing CEOs with expert systems.

However, my faith in this program isn’t just based on the fact that generally, CEOs don’t provide much of an advantage to the firm – research consistently shows that CEOs who outperform do so in ways that undermine long term performance, and that the company often experiences crises and shock in the wake of CEO hotdogging, as the president of the company leaps to another post in another company. My faith is based in the improvement of expert systems.

A good study of the history of expert systems in law was published last year by Phillip Leith, who in the 90s was a strong critic of basing legal expert systems on Logical programming, under the ideological influence of Hart’s notion that the law can be reduced to rule-based behavior. It is a fascinating read. (The Rise and Fall of the Legal Expert System, in International Review of Law, Computers & Technology, 2016 Vol. 30, No. 3 – for those who want to look it up), and not just because Hart’s theories were put to an unexpected empirical test – not something that often happens in philosophy. It is also because the problem in setting up an expert system in law – how to represent “contextual” knowledge – is also at stake in building a management expert system.

Leith has a nice ability to compress an argument down to its essentials. His summary of what was happening in the 80s and 90s in AI is very deft:

“A relatively simple idea underpins the notion of a legal expert system: that one can take rules of law, mould them into a computer-based formal system, and advice will come out the other end. It was not uncommon to hear funders of research projects in the 1980s assert that to build a legal expert system, one had two basic and essentially simple options:

translate legislation (‘the law’) into some formalism and add a software interpreting mechanism as a front end for the user;

take a group of experts off for a few days and get them to lay out the relevant rules of law which can then be moulded into a formalism by a non-expert and, once again, add the interpreting user interface.

It is as if Occam’s Razor has been applied to the whole confusing business of ‘what is law’ and we are left with an elegant core notion which can be implemented by technicians. The model is thus of a core of rules, and a logical interpreter which parallels legal advice giving. This, I argue, was partly hubristic but is also a relatively accurate description of the non-critical perspectives around law schools during that decade. In fact, such a perspective still demonstrates its attraction to the technician and research funder (The European JURIX community has continued to publish in this research spirit). The promise being made in the 1980s was that cheap, good quality advice would allow us to discard the need for expensive experts or leverage their productivity further than could the traditional ‘fee earner’ basis.”

Leith’s story is, in part, the story of the hyped futurism of the 90s. However, artificial intelligence and expert systems have certainly moved on, tackling just the procedural and representational problems he is talking about. No rule based computer system will take over the upper management position. The recent speech by the head of Alibabi in China, Jack Ma, who predicted that robots would take over from CEOs because they have no emotions, is precisely wrong. Jack Ma’s speech is, in fact, a back to the future creed that must have made AI folks groan.

In fact, unemotional robots would make suck CEOs. That is because emotions are not separate from intelligence, but integral to it – which is the reason that context based AI no longer seeks a Spock like program that “sees through” emotion. Let’s not go into the ethnography of emotions right now – that is a whole other chapter. The fact is that computers are very good at storing cases, segmenting case units according to some principle, surveying large numbers of cases, and establishing patterns. This is essential to representing context – which is not a matter of “logic” so much as a matter of structure. Emotion is great at structure. Realizing that the firm is a unit in which exchanges have to do with status seeking, emotional gratification or its delay, etc., is the necessary preliminary to replacing the CEO with the expert system.

There are a lot of researchers out there working on this. Yet, you read very few academic business profs writing about it. I wonder why? Could it be, uh, $$$$? The inflated status of the CEO was due to many things – the usual Marxist predicted decline of profit in the 70s, the new de-regulating atmosphere of the 80s, the success in overthrowing standards that had been built around the principle-agent problem, etc. But in order to gain public acceptance, business profs played an essential role in shilling for upper management, down to shilling for the absurd takeoff of upper management salaries. The justifications were byzantine, baroque, and resistant to reality. And the culture that this left behind, among economists and business profs, still remains with us, with the incentives really piling up for apologetic academic work – post facto justifications for enormous rent-seeking activities.

Thus, don’t expect IBM to put on-line some CEO Big Blue any time soon. But the theoretical ability to do so is already out there.

The birth of public opinion out of the death of the Little Tradition

In Engel’s introduction to his The Situation of Labor in England, he gives a brief history of the displacement of the old, ‘detached’ rural farming and artisan system brought about by the new system of industrial production:

“The felt comfortable in their quiet plant life, and would never, save for the Industrial revolution, have been taken out of this clearly very romantic-cosy, but yet, for humans, unworthy existence. They were not humans, but simply working machines in the service of the few aristocrats, which up until now have lead history. The Industrial Revolution has thus only carried through the consequence of this when it made the laborers completely into a mere machines and took away the last remnant of independent activity from under their hands; but in doing so drove them to thinking and to the claims of a human situation. What politics effected in France, in England was effected by industry and the movement of bourgeois society overall; it pulled the last classes to be mired in the apathy against universal human interests into the vortex of history.”

Engels had already explained to his readers in the foreword what he means by the bourgeois: 

“…I always used the word Middle Class in the sense of the English middle-class (or as it is almost always said, middle classes) where it means the same as with the French bourgeoisie the possessing class – the class, which in France and England directly, and in Germany as “public opinion” indirectly is in possession of state power.” 

That is a pretty fascinating definition of class, linking it both to economic power and the power of the state even if – in backwards Germany – that power is possessed not by representatives, but by ‘public opinion’. The latter – the power of public opinion – is what fascinates me about the conflicts between ‘freedom’ and ‘the emancipation of the working class’. What, after all, does it mean for the workers to be uprooted from shameful apathy and thrown into the ‘vortex of history’ where they could think about the claims of the human situation except that the working class would have, among other things, an opinion? 

This is the question that became very real to the generation of 1848 after the revolution failed. Herzen’s whole life has often been seen from the perspective of a before and after 1848 – he himself often wrote in those terms. Isaiah Berlin has noted that Herzen’s skepticism – about the people, and especially about progress – preceded the events of 1848. It is a shame that Berlin never really grappled with Lenin’s essay on Herzen, because Lenin makes an acute historical point:

Herzen's spiritual shipwreck, the profound scepticism and pessimism to which he fell prey after 1848, was the shipwreck of the bourgeois illusions of socialism. Herzen's spiritual drama was a product and reflection of that epoch in world history when the revolutionariness of the bourgeois democracy was already passing away (in Europe), and the revolutionariness of the socialist proletariat had not yet ripened. This is something the Russian liberal knights of verbal incontinence, who are now trying to cover up their own counter-revolutionariness by florid phrases about Herzen's scepticism, have not understood and cannot understand. With these knights, who betrayed the Russian Revolution of 1905, and have even forgotten to think of the great calling of a revolutionary, scepticism is a form of transition from democracy to liberalism to that servile, vile, infamous and brutal liberalism which shot down the workers in 1848, restored shattered thrones, applauded Napoleon III and which Herzen cursed, unable to understand its class nature.

Lenin’s notion was that bourgeois skepticism targeted the supposed incapacity of the working class to enjoy the cultural gains of progress. Ripped from their apathy, as Engels puts it, their minds were concentrated by their conditions on the material facts of life, making them great sniffers out of the web of self interest that underlies the industrial system, but contemptuous of the culture of the rentiers of that system. In Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia, this is exactly how Herzen is portrayed:

“Being proved wrong has made them [the revolutionaries] cocky. They’re more certain than ever that the people are natural republicans waiting to be lead out of bondage. But the people are more interested in potatoes than freedom. The people think equality means everyone should be oppressed equally. They love authority. They’re suspicious of talent. They want a government to govern for them and not against them. To govern themselves doesn’t enter their heads. We thought we could educate the people like a horse doctor blowing a pill into a horse. We thought we could set the pace for social change. The emperors did more than keep their thrones, they pushed our faces into the wreck of our belief in the revolutionary instincts of the people.”

The luster and luxury of disillusionment – it has a standing, in the cold war mythology, with the metanoia of Saul in sacred history, except that it is conversion to the God that failed. There is an impulse in Herzen, embodied especially in the middle dialog in From the other shore, between a doctor and his lady companion before the house in which Rousseau wrote... something, which is full of phrases about the precarious civilization of people such as him and her, in the face of the inscrutable masses. Yet Stoppard, oddly for a dramatist, misses the form that Herzen has chosen - dialogue. Of course, there are dialogues in which one viewpoint is clearly the right one, dialogues in which the other is a projection of an obstacle more than a point of view. But Herzen didn't write one of those. He wrote dialog not because he wanted to represent himself in one speaker who cleverly undoes another, but because he felt the clash in himself of views. This, actually, is the liberal intellectual’s highest form of skepticism – the refusal to pretend that the clash has an easy resolution. Like Engels and Marx, Herzen was definitely one of the Ultras in 1848 – and like those two, he wasn’t stupid about it. But he didn’t quite have Marx’s moderation – for Marx was strongly of the opinion that the task at hand was democratic government, at least in Germany and Austria. 

Stoppard’s picture of Herzen the sceptic is, as has been mentioned in many reviews, a bit too reliant on Berlin's picture of Herzen as the disenchanted liberal, kin to John Stuart Mill. Herzen doesn't see some elite, some cultured margin, as separate from and higher than the people and their potatoes. In reality, he was shrewder than this. In his letters to an old comrade [Bakunin] which have been used to make the case that Herzen turned to the right at the end - they were written in the late 1860s - he writes this:

“It is this pattern that the past, which we want now to leave behind, has followed. The forms, aspects, and rites have changed but the essence has remained the same. He who bowed his head before a Capuchin friar bearing a cross is no different from the man who bows his head to a court decision no matter how absurd it is.”

The man who bows his head to the court decision is, of course, the establishment liberal par excellence. He is bowing his head to his own system. It is only in seeing Herzen’s criticisms as total, directed not just at the people but at European society in general, that one understands how the sceptic and the revolutionary were joined.