Jack Shafer, immortal moron, and our last twenty years

 I have a long memory for stupid media. Luckily, in the 2000-2003 period, it was all gathered together in one place: Slate! Today, let us celebrate Jack Shafer. Frankly, Shafer is an idiot and a valient member of the uncancelable media club. He goes from place to place within the DC circuit, always wrong, always smug, always promoted.

In 2003, Shafer presented his own greatest hits as he lambasted a much better reporter, Johnny Apple of the NYT. Johnny Apple had the unpatriotic instinct that the Afghanistan war fought in 2001 was going to lead to quagmire. The heresy! As Shafer unforgettably put it, Apple's view was"

"The United States has bitten off more than it can chew; the allied war effort is underpowered; we’ve underestimated the enemy—again!; air power is overrated; and guerrillas can do U.S. forces great damage as they did in Vietnam."

As Shafer contemptuously showed, what rot!

"Apple’s fear that dropping bombs on civilians wouldn’t “win Afghan ‘hearts and minds’ ” and that the country would prove ungovernable even if the United States won turned out to be unfounded. Two weeks after his comparison of Afghanistan to Vietnam, the allies liberated Kabul, and 16 months later the place is at least as governable as San Francisco.""

Ah, the things they said at the beginning of this century! The things they did! The fan club for the utter shit of the Bush foreign policy, the moronic smugness that would result in a sentence like: "the place is at least as governable as San Francisco." But fear not, failing upwards is the one iron rule of punditry. And when that rule is attacked, letters are written to Harper's magazine about how the entire freedom of expression is under attack!

I laugh until I want to vomit about the waste of the last twenty years.

Think tanker alert

 "Afghanistan’s rapid unraveling is already raising grumblings about American credibility, compounding the wounds of the Trump years and reinforcing the idea that America’s backing for its allies is not unlimited." - NYT

Apparently, this paragraph has spread panic in think tank world. Thousands of boltons and kagans have climbed out high windows and are threatening to jump. There's a neo-con and humanitarian intervention watch on for these poor figures. In other news, Christopher Hitchens is turning in his grave. His friends are perplexed as to whether this is simple contrarianism, or whether he has decided God is Great.

epidemic terror

 

“But though the nation be exempt from real evils, it is not more happy on this account than others. The people are afflicted, it is true, with neither famine nor pestilence; but there is a disorder peculiar to the country, which every season makes strange ravages among them; it spreads with pestilential rapidity, and infects almost every rank of people; what is still more strange, the natives have no name for this peculiar malady, though well known to foreign physicians by the appellation of Epidemic Terror.”

-I cull this quotation from Oliver Goldsmith’s essay, which appeared in his zine, the Citizen of the world, as letter LXIX. Commentators have confessed that the rabies panic Goldsmith described has few other witnesses – and Goldsmith was a bit of a fabulist. One of Goldsmith’s most noted poems was entitled Elegy to a Mad Dog, and perhaps in the fervor of composition he projected a panic.

 

And in that town a dog was found,

As many dogs there be,

Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound,

And curs of low degree.

 

The dog and man at first were friends;

But when a pique began,

The dog, to gain some private ends,

Went mad, and bit the man.

 

According to the sociologists, Stanley Cohen coined the phrase “moral panic”. Cohen studied the media attention that was devoted, in the 1960s, to the Mods and Rockers. His problem was that Mod violence was not, rationally considered, one of Britain’s great problems, or even more than a three day sensation. But it grew with the attention it received.

In a sense, what he was doing, with a different vocabulary, was what Oliver Goldsmith had done two hundred years before, in his essay on Mad Dogs. Since I don’t believe Goldsmith’s essay has ever been referred to by those who have written about the history of moral panic, I thought I’d compare Goldsmith’s Epidemic Terror with Cohen’s moral panic – and in particular, the way in which Goldsmith used the epidemic image to medicalize an older image of rumor.

Here’s how Cohen defines his term:  “Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A
condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as athreat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited
experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the object of panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives itself.(1972:9)

The Epidemic Terror of Goldsmith’s essay is exactly of Cohen’s type-of thing-that-suddenly-becomes-visible, even though it has been in existence a long time: mad dogs.

Goldsmith, of course, is writing in a tradition about rumor and ignorance that goes back to Virgil's goddess of Rumor, who perches on the walls of the city. What is interesting about his essay is the direction he takes. It would be easy to employ the old routines that targeted ignorance and the mob. The term “mob” came into existence in the 18th century – it was a shortened form of mobile vulgarum, common people in movement. And Goldsmith, as well as any 18th century intellectual, wasn’t averse to tossing around a little abuse of the mob. However, he is more interested in mechanism than typology – he is after the dynamic of his “epidemic terror”. And to understand that, you have to pose some non-traditional questions that concern the about-ness of ignorance – questions that latter led Freud and Canetti to their (different) conclusions about crowd behavior.

Goldsmith begins with examples to show that epidemic terrors are both chronic and structurally similar:

“One year it issues from a baker’s shop in the form of a sixpenny loaf; the next, it takes the appearance of a comet with a fiery tail; the third, it threatens like a flatbottomed boat; and the fourth, it carries consternation in the bite of a mad dog.”

In all of the cases, the risk is disproportionate to the terror it spreads. However, the element I want to underline is that Goldsmith isn't showing that the disproportion is irrational -- he is trying to show how it is rationalized. Hence, my reference to Freud. The essay was probably penned sometime in the 1750s or 1760s. Goldsmith, as I have said, was himself a purveyor of a rumor about a rumor, in that England was perhaps not so swept with various epidemics of what surgeon John Hunter, who wrote about it in the 1780s, called canine madness, as Goldsmith implies. However that may be – and I trust that there was some objective correlate to Goldsmith’s essay – he intentionally parallels two forms of madness – one is spread by a mad dog’s bite, which has a pathology and a physical cause; while the other is a psychopathology, with lines of infection that are traceable not by the effort of the physiologist but rather by the observer of social mores – the philosophe. In both cases, though, the contagion model applies. The individual madness of the hyrophobe is paralleled by the collective madness of the crowd.

Goldsmith, as a good doctor, describes the outward symptoms of the ‘disease” of fearing mad dogs – people “sally from their houses with that circumspection which is prudent in such as expect a mad dog at every turning;” “a few of unusual bravery arm themselves with boots and buff gloves, in order to face the enemy…” In short, a city operates as though it were suddenly under imminent threat.

And what of that threat? Goldsmith observes how the discovery of whether a dog is mad or not resembles the old trial of dunking witches – if she floats, she’s a witch, if she drowns, she is innocent. Since the symptoms of being a mad dog are biting, or running away, crowds gather around dogs, jab or stone them, and then are either attacked – proof that the dog is mad – or escaped from – proof, again, that the dog is mad. Out comes the halter and the dog is hung. It is an interesting parallel. Myself, I have long felt that the form of trial that the courts used for witches has never really gone away, and is applied now to “drug dealers”, now to “terrorists”. The connection between rumor, panic and the judiciary is close.

“When epidemic terror is once excited, every morning comes loaded with some new disaster.” Goldsmith anticipates Cohen once again. In Cohen’s model, the menace has to be repeated over and over. In the age of the copy machine, tv, and radio (Cohen’s book dealt with the pre-Net age), the vector of transmission runs through these vast news machines. In Goldsmith’s day, the vector of transmission was still as much oral as it was print. What is interesting is that there will suddenly be a wave of information about the menace that runs through oral space – much like today’s “watercooler talk.” ‘As in stories of ghosts, each loves to hear the account, though it only serves to make him uneasy.” Goldsmith imagines a story beginning in some outlying area, where a woman is frightened by a dog. As the story is retold – and as it spreads towards more densely populated areas – the story’s characteristics change, until they assume the shape of the usual terror: a mad dog, a sudden attack, a highly placed woman who is suddenly transformed into a foaming hydrophobic on all fours.

Goldsmith’s epidemic terror includes all three elements of Cohen’s moral panic: exaggeration, the prediction that such things are inevitable, and symbolization. In Cohen’s case, the symbolization congealed around the image of the “Mod;” in Goldsmith’s case, around the image of the dog. The dog isn’t simply diseased, but mad – a disturbance of the rational faculties, a lowering of the censure between the Id and the ego – to use an anachronistic vocabulary to poke at what Goldsmith is describing.

We especially like the end of Goldsmith’s essay, because he goes to the heart of the terror – to the dog itself – and makes a little plaidoyer for the dog: “in him alone, fawning is not flattery. …  “How unkind then to torture this animal that has left the forest to claim the protection of man! How ungrateful a return to the trusty animal for all its services!”

It is interesting that the moral panics of our day have a certain inverted nature – they are moral panics of claiming that real diseases don’t exist, or exist but are harmless, or were invented in a lab and spread by devils – and of course the panic is of a similar nature with regard to the vaccine. That the formerly “free world” is so subject to these panics and inverted panics should tell us a lot about the way the “free world” fought the Cold War.  

 

The worst president - envelope please

 

I’m a structure man, not an agent man. I’m instinctively suspicious of lists – the most overrated movies, the hundred best novels, etc. Of course, I’m a sucker, like any good American, for such lists, and the arguments that result in comparing one’s opinion. But I argue in some bad faith.

That said – shoving aside my theoretical objections – I do have an opinion on the perennially sweet topic of bad presidents, as in, was Trump the worst?

This summer’s news is more proof that the answer is no. The answer is George W. Bush.

There are a heap of bad, criminal, insane things the Bush administration did. The retreat from Afghanistan recognizes, distantly, one of them. But one must judge in a harder category: what didn’t the president do? Negligence is an easy thing to overlook, except when, as in the case of Trump’s response to covid, it is an aggressive negligence. Thus, that Bush neglected to heed the numerous warnings in the summer of 2001 of an upcoming attack has always been pushed to the rear of our historical consciousness – because it wasn’t known except to a few for years after that attack happened. If Bush had called a news conference in August, 2001, and said the CIA was trying to protect its ass by predicting an attack by this guy, Omama bin Sodom, we would have as strong a sense of incompetence before disaster as we have from Trump’s “joke” about inoculating yourself with detergent.

But the most massive negligence, which now looms like a giant tsunami over the world, is the eight years, during a crucial climate window, of doing nothing about climate change. Of doubting it, encouraging the ever higher level of exhaust, of cementing into the twentieth century system the nineteenth century dependence on carbon based energy. That, more than “democracy”, might become America’s real contribution to world history.

It didn’t have to be like this. George H.W. Bush, accepting the science, led the effort to close the ozone hole with a series of international accords and model like domestic policies. If he’d been like his son, we would be in a very perilous position today. George W. Bush is merely a name for a whole host of interests and agents, but – I can’t kick against the naming convention.

So, I say again: George W. Bush was the worst president America has ever birthed. Lord, have mercy on our souls.

inverted envy - from A.O. Hirschman to twitter billionaire stans

Whenever I go on twitter and read the twits from stans of Elon Musk or Bebeeyed Bezos, I think of this post of mine.

In 1973, A.O. Hirschman, with his characteristic, concealing modesty (it covered up the fact that he was touching on big themes that economists liked to avoid), wrote an essay about envy and the egalitarian impulse in developing economies. For two decades, Hirschman had been at work as an economist and policy maker dealing with foreign aid and plans to elevate the poorer national economies into the league of the developed nations, as they were called back then. This was the era of multi-year plans and the fad for shrinking agriculture and favoring export industries, which often, paradoxically, called for putting barriers on imports. All of this, by now, has been swept away by the Washington Consensus and the aggressive syndicate of international institutions, multinationals, and neo-liberals.

In Hirschman’s time, third world countries were experiencing unprecedented growth. He observed that the profit from that growth largely accrued to the wealthy. What puzzled him was that this did not stimulate the kind of envy that was feared by the anti-communist establishment everywhere. Instead of revolution, for the most part, third world populations seemed patiently to be waiting. Hirschman devised a model to capture what one might call the dynamics of social envy. In this model, growth and the enrichment of the richest was tolerable as long as the larger population believed that the growth would eventually make themselves and their children richer. In other words, Hirschman believed that there was a larger tolerance for inequality than was reckoned with by the leftist agitator. This was puzzling if one took into account the work of George Foster, whose studies of peasant society in Mexico convinced him that traditional society is penetrated by what he called the “image of the limited good”. This means that the peasant views goods in terms of a zero-sum game, in which x’s possessions are viewed by y from the standpoint of scarcity – what x possesses, y does not possess. Like people in a lifeboat with limited rations, a careful watch is placed on the village populaton to make visible who has what. This is a situation in which savings is hidden, rather than invested.

What Foster calls the limited good, I would call nemesis. In my opinion, the great effect of the enlightenment and of the growing economies of the 19th century was to suppress nemesis – the social and human limit which demands respect in societies in which growth is sporadic and subject to decay. In such societies, time is cyclical; the myth of progress has no footing here.

I think Hirschman was right to tackle the theme of envy, but his model, it seems to me, lacks an important feature that one finds in success societies – societies, that is, where an ethos of success replaces the ethos of sacrifice. In the former, envy inevitably increases as the success of the wealthiest creates a larger and larger positional gap between the top and the rest. Here, however, an interesting, unconscious mechanism intervenes to protect the wealthiest. This mechanism inverts the direction of envy, the direction of the evil eye. Instead of the wealthiest being subject to the violence of envy, the poorest are subject to it.

This inversion of envy at first seems incredible. How could the poorest be an object of envy? However, anyone with ears to hear in America’s dining and living rooms, or in American work places, will here the tale of the high living poor. The poor don’t work. They luxuriate on welfare payments. The government only works for the poor. The Great slump was caused by the poor cheating the naïve banks who were forced by the government to give them mortgages they couldn’t pay. This story and variations of it are told over and over. We sometimes wonder over some savage custom, thinking, how could it be believed that, say, a woman who has a miscarriage causes drought – one of the thousands of such beliefs recorded in the Golden Bough? But the inversion of envy in success societies, the most pure of which is the US, should teach us that the unlikelihood of a belief, its grossly ridiculous nature when laid out in cold logic, is no bar to its being held true. Although newspaper sociologists like to insist on the hopeful, aspirational beliefs of Americans as the sort of national glue that keeps down radicalism, I would say that, more powerfully, it is the inverted envy, its manipulation and thousand and one uses (inverted envy is deeply associated with racism in America, for instance) that makes it very hard to achieve any kind of lasting social justice in the US

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Heidi-land

Life… makes nothing happen.

I, too, heard the cowbells Mom

Crossing the border into Switzerland

And of course I thought of you.

I thought of Heidi, and then of you

And then of you and me

Watching Heidi, was it in color or b&w?

When you had the power to make me watch

Movies. A coercible five.

You “loved this movie” when you were a girl.

Me, Heidi’s hair bun repulsed me

And the uterine pull

Of the cornsilk blond’s family

In a Nazi dream of the Alps

Lent its props

To various of my nightmares.

If I let go

Of my mudwrestler’s grip on you, Mom

Will I plunge in my worst dream

down some Heidi cursed cliff?

- Karen Chamisso

Coincidence and science - when Laplace isn't enough

 

In Mill’s Logic, that grand old lumber room, in Chapter 18 of Book three, a principle is spelled out that, in our day, has been shorthanded into the sometimes tendentious phrase, correlation does not prove causation:

“Although two or more cases in which the phenomenon a has been met with may have no common antecedent except A, this does not prove that there is any connection between a and A, since a may have many causes, and may have been produced, in these different instances, not by any thing which the instances had in common, but by some of those elements in them which were different.”

Mill, in keeping with his practical bent, distills from this a question: “After how many and what sort of instances may it be concluded that an observed coincidence between two phenomena is not the effect of chance?”

Another way of putting this question is: when is a coincidence really a coincidence?

As Francois Mentre has pointed out, the French mathematician and scientist, Cournot, was also intested in this question, or at least in one of its guises: the reality of probability. Cournot worked in the shadow of Laplace; but where Laplace, finally, came down on the side of a universal determinism, Cournot was sure that this move was not justified by Laplace’s mathematics. “He could not admit that chance was nothing but a “vain sound, flatus vocis, which we use, as Laplace said, to disguise our ignorance of true causes.” For him [Cournot], chance had an objective reality independent of our knowledge.” (144) Cournot spelled out his ontological conviction by way of a critique of Laplace. Laplace wrote that Nature obeys “a small number of immutable laws.” Cournot’s disproof of Laplace’s determinism moves from this idea: “it suffices, said Cournot, that there be only two, perfectly independent one from the other, in order that we must make a place for the fortuitous in the government of the world. Whether or not we do or do not know the literal law for each of the independent two series, as soon as they intersect, there is chance. Chance thus does not derive from our ignorance of the laws of the universe, no more than it diminishes as the measure of our knowledge extends. It subsists in the eyes of the expert as well as those of the ignoramus. It is necessary to accept it as an irreducible, sui generis fact that has a notable part in the government of the world.” (209)

This, though, is hard to accept, either for the expert or the ignoramus or that hybrid of the two, the modern mystic, either in the guise of a policeman, an economist, or a conspiracy theorist

One can see that Cournot’s observation blocks two popular explanations of coincidence (or chance – in fact, I am using coincidence here as a proxy for a semantic family that includes the French hasard and the German Zufall. True coincidence can neither be purely the effect of human ignorance of the causes in place, nor can itself be characteristic of some autonomous law – a law of synchronicity or seriality. For Cournot, coincidence can be described but not understood, in as much as understanding has to do with cause. The same reasoning Cournot applies to other laws would apply in this case, so that any law of synchronicity would inevitably generate coincidences that would fall outside its domain as it intersected with other universal laws, creating, if you will, hypercoincidences.

One way of looking at physics in the 20th century is that the physicists were both moved by the fact that the world given by a structure that was governed by two or more irreducible laws would have to accord a large place to chance – such that probability was no longer a way of mathematically stylizing elements that were, to an all powerful intelligence, always certain – and a movement to unify the laws of physics, to reduce them to some grand single principle, which would drive out coincidence.

The famous paper by Eugene Wigner, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences (1963), that questions what can reasonably be called a hypercoincidence: namely, that using mathematics, we can make predictions about nature. By nature, I mean the object of the sciences, be they biology, physics, chemistry, etc. Is there a hyper-law connecting mathematics to these phenomena? And if there is, how would we explore it? With another form of mathematics? Do we need a “higher numerology”?

In the margins, meanwhile, there was also a tradition, a fringe tradition, that rejected the whole idea that coincidence wasn’t subject to its own proper law. Instead, it sought that law. This was an especially popular theme in Germany in the 20s, coexisting with a faddish interest in psychoanalysis, physiognomics, graphology, paranormal psychology, etc. Arthur Koestler, who grew from pup to dog during this era, was infected with this idea. When he abandoned militant anti-communism he plunged into the world of cosmic coincidences, and never came back.

Psychoanalysis had a tentative relationship with these things, which fascinated Freud, but which, finally, he diagnosed as cultural symptoms of a mass psychopathology. However, I find one of the best descriptions of coincidence from the “subjective” side – to use the totally inadequate vocabulary that philosophy seemingly cannot get rid of – is in Freud’s The Uncanny. There is a kind of setting in our consciousness that goes off when it meets an excess of accident. Perhaps this is the origin of the spirit of science – not in rationality, but in superstitious dread.