vulgar morality

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:43:50 GMT

DEEP THOUGHT: "For an idea, age is beauty . . . Aside from the decorum of ancient thought as opposed to the coarseness of fresh ink, I have spent some time phrasing the idea in the mathematics of evolutionary arguments and conditional probability. For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. Mathematically, progress means that some new information is better than past information, not that the average of new information will supplant past information, which means that it is optimal for someone, when in doubt, to systematically reject the new information, idea, or method." Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:17:51 GMT

MORALITY ON WHEELS: The "vulgar" in vulgar morality stands for "conventional." I believe in conventional morality, because it's the only available kind. Divinely revealed morality works fine so long as everyone sings from the same hymnal; in a liberal democracy, which tolerates many religions and none, the appeal to God for moral justification becomes problematic. Similarly, attempts to anchor morality in reason or an entity called "nature" have reaped nothing but confusion. Such efforts often succeed in undermining our moral traditions, never at replacing them with anything of value.

Because morality consists of learned customary behaviors rather than the application of principles, it must evolve over lifetimes to absorb new situations. When technology and personal freedom generate more situations than morality can account for, we enter the great disruption that goes by the name of modernity. Life moves faster than judgment, and people suffer a kind of moral vertigo, a radical uncertainty about how to behave in certain times and places. The latter become, in effect, demoralized.

The Internet is a good example of technology and freedom outpacing morality. The Web, I have observed before, remains in a state of nature. Accepted behaviors don't get traction there. Pornography is rampant. Politics are conducted at the most vicious, infantile levels. The default is to shout rather than listen.

Another example, which I want to consider here, is driving a car -- an earlier technological breakthrough, which like the Web was responsible for a revolutionary increase in personal freedom.

Between work and chores, I probably spend an hour of every day behind the wheel. Rightly considered, it's a remarkable experience. I speed about in a metal shell which insulates me from thousands of others who are doing the same thing. I listen to Beethoven, or Muddy Waters, or Bob Dylan. Sometimes I reflect about life, the universe, and everything. Other times I'm in a mental daze. Often my life is in danger. Scenery passes by -- captivating, ennervating, rain or shine.

Physically, I'm on a jagged line between two points. Morally, I seem to be in a kind of twilight zone between public scrutiny and private indulgence. I watch other drivers shaking and bouncing and shouting -- but no, they're just into their music, which I can't hear. I see people picking their noses as if they were invisible. Others talk to fellow riders, or to cellphones, or to themselves. Still others turn to look at me with zombie eyes. Convertible owners, in fine weather, exhibit themselves to our envious stares.

Unlike the Web, it isn't the state of nature. Rules of the road exist -- we know what they are, and we abide by them by and large, even if the cops aren't lurking. Americans are famous for stopping at red lights and stop signs when there's nobody around to care. (I have travelled to countries where green means "go," but red means "go much faster.")

Yet even in law-minding Northern Virginia, where I live, the rules get interpreted in the most entitled, self-serving way. Morality demands that we experience the world from outside our own skins. That rarely happens while driving. Instead, I consider myself the standard of righteousness, and divide the rest of the human race among "maniacs" who drive faster than I do and "idiots" who go slower. I become judge, jury, and executioner -- always forgiving my own tresspasses, never those of the jerk in the neighboring lane.

Childish and bizarre competitions are engaged in by putative adults who, bursting with grievance and anger, don't like to be passed, or trapped, or cut off. Road rage stirs in the heart of darkness of normally responsible persons. They exhibit, publicly and in the light of day, behaviors that we associate with sleazy joints at closing time. Traffic always moves from point of origin to a nasty, demoralized place.

I want to make clear: this isn't an anti-car rant. Like any red-blooded American, I would rather see my right hand lose its cunning than give up my SUV. Besides, the same violent demoralization can infect public transit. In The Lotus and the Robot, Arthur Koestler observes that the Japanese have evolved a ceremony to harmonize every aspect of traditional life, yet go berserk commuting in the Tokyo subway.

This isn't about cars, but about driving: and it isn't really about driving, but about situations opened up by technology and freedom into which our traditions of right behavior have failed to penetrate.

One can make the case that time is on our side. When I was young, drunk driving was held to be a kind of temporary insanity, excusing the driver, morally and legally, if he happened to hurt someone in an accident. In 1980, the mother of a 13-year-old girl crushed to death by a hit-and-run drunk driver began a campaign to hold responsible this type of behavior: in effect, to moralize it. Thirty years later, we don't think of drunk drivers as innocents beyond moral judgment. Far more impressive than the toughening of the law on this question has been the change in behavior: the rise of the designated driver, the proliferation of limo services that allow us to imbibe in perfect safety.

But to expect the inevitable conquest of demoralized spaces may be the equivalent of playing the glad game. Counterfactuals can be found. Northern Virginia, for example, used to be very Southern in its driving style: people worked out traffic snarls gracefully, and aggressive behavior like tailgating was frowned upon and rare. Today, our driving habits bring to mind Manhattan more than the Old South. The population has grown tenfold in a generation, and the clogged highways seem filled with desperate characters.

More than 39,000 people died in car crashes in 2008. The good news is, that was a record low. The bad news is, that's more than 39,000 people, enough to fill a medium-sized town. So long as driving is a life-and-death proposition, I suspect that the survival instinct will ride roughshod over moral considerations. The road will remain a place of conflict and competition -- the answer, a Dylan song reminds us, to anyone who asks about how to start the next world war:

Just put some bleachers out in the sun

And have it on Highway 61.

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:47:25 GMT

THE PLATONIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN: Two misconceptions attach themselves to the current regime in Iran. The first -- favored by supporters of the last administration -- considers it a backwards-looking, medievalist enterprise. In fact, its institutions resemble nothing in the history of Iran or Islam. An "Islamic republic" was cobbled together from Western models by Ayatollah Khomeini, longtime exile in Paris. Thus there are no caliphs, sheiks, or shahs, but one will find a president, a prime minister, and a parliament. Elections, as we know from the present turmoil, are regularly held.

Enter the second misconception, apparently entertained by some in President Obama's camp. This is that Iranian elections matter. In fact, candidates for all offices are screened -- pre-selected, really -- by an entity called the Guardian Council, which represents the interests of the clergy. Agreement on principles is pretty universal, as is support for the Islamic Revolution. The purported dissident in Iran's unfolding power struggle, Hossein Mousavi, belongs to the ruling elite and was prime minister during the hard years of the war against Saddam Hussein.

The Guardian Council, apparently alien to modern practice, can trace its origin to the oldest and most influential book of Western political theory: Plato's Republic. In that work, the question is posed: what political system will produce a virtuous citizen? Since, in his view, virtue depended on reason, and the rational life was accessible to very few, Plato comes down in favor of government by an enlightened minority, armed with wide discretionary powers. They were the Guardians, and their job was to make sure the majority, with their addled, consumerist passions, didn't go astray.

To this end, the Guardians assumed control of every aspect of life. In Plato's ideal commonwealth, they forbade emotional music and closed down the theaters, because "dramatic poetry has a most formidable power of corrupting even men of high character." Rationalist zealots, who believe the citizenry are like children to be protected from themselves, have followed this line ever since.

I count the Iranian mullahs in that number. They command a system in which customary authority has been "rationalized," modernized, expanded. They too have banned emotive music. They have tried, without much success, to keep out the formidably corrupting power of Hollywood. They have put women in their place, and treated young men like a herd of sheep. Like Plato's Guardians, they have access to secret wisdom; like pushy parents, they know better.

Iran's political system is illiberal and anti-democratic. But it is a republic on the Platonic model.

I note that our own government has, over the last century, suffered the creep of guardianship. The Federal Reserve has vast authority over banking and the money supply. The Securities and Exchange Commission does the same for the stock markets. The FCC shields us from indecent broadcasting. These entities are unelected and not transparently accountable. They rule and regulate behind closed doors, to ensure that, in their limited fields of purview, we Irrationals don't go astray.

The Iranian regime, with its Vice Police and prurient dress codes, might be likened to the FCC on crack cocaine. They will protect the errant citizen, mostly by beating him senseless.

This brings us to the crisis of legitimacy playing out in the streets of Teheran. The election results, declaring the sitting president the winner, have been called into question. Whether fraud was committed or not is by now besides the point. Whether Mousavi becomes president or not is also besides the point. The mobilization of huge crowds, the confrontations with regime thugs, the anger and the excitement visible in the photos and videos from Teheran, are not aimed at installing one elite figure over another.

Quite literally, the Iranians marching in the streets want regime change. They chant, "Death to the Taliban, in Kabul and Teheran." Their manifesto calls for the "dissolution of all organizations -- both secret and public -- designed for the oppression of the Iranian people." They are sick of being treated like children. They demand the overthrow of guardianship, so they can become, at long last, moral and political adults, and guardians of their own lives.

This is a pre-revolutionary moment. Half measures appear unlikely to settle anything. Either the regime will end the protest in blood and iron, Tiananmen-style, or it will find itself exiled right out of Plato's republic.

The President, I observe, has been criticized for his reticence on the matter. Certainly, we should maintain our moral compass, and proclaim, loud and clear, that Americans consider those men and women struggling to break the grip of self-anointed guardians to be kindred souls. But we should hold no illusions about our power or influence. The final act of the Iranian drama will be decided in a clash of irreconcilable ideals, and there's a vast disproportion in the brute power available to the two sides.

Usually, the people with the guns win. But not always.

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:57:30 GMT

SELF-LOATHING COMES IN FROM THE COLD: Behold Kendall Myers, child of privilege. Born into a prominent Washington family -- his great-grandfather was Alexander Graham Bell -- he attended prep school, grew up to become a State Department guru on European affairs, and retired to a life of leisure in his exclusive Northwest Washington condo and 37-foot sailing yatch. One would expect Myers to look back on his life with a certain contentment, and much gratitude.

Not quite.

Myers disliked the world as he found it. He was angry. Specifically, he raged against the country that had condemned him to such a privileged existence. He became one of those deranged individuals who curse and scream at the TV screen.

"I have become so bitter these past few months," he wrote in 1978. "Watching the evening news is a radicalizing experience." Why so? Because of greedy U.S. oil companies, inadequate health care, and America's "utter complacency about the oppressed."

Standard fare in European conversation ("Problem 35: No universal health care. Problem 36: No metric system! What is this! The time of Charlemagne?") For Myers, a radicalizing experience. He became a spy on behalf of Cuba's ramshackle totalitarian regime. His entire State Department career was a scripted play, reportedly masterminded by his Cuban handlers. Given an opportunity to serve his country, he betrayed it to its enemies.

Why the extreme reaction? Remember the anger. The bitterness. Myers was filled with loathing, and while he raged at the U.S. most of it was aimed at himself. He looked for the most anti-Myers cause going, and joined it as an act of self-flagellation. Cuba's Yankee-hating maximum leader put him in his proper place. Both shared a contempt and revulsion for the kind of person that was Kendall Myers.

He and his wife were arrested on espionage charges last week. The mortal husk of Fidel Castro, still able to communicate from the twilight zone between life and death, praised the couple for their "disinterested and courageous conduct." This is utter nonsense, as even in semi-death that old fox Castro knows. Disinterested means acting against one's desires, on behalf of a higher cause. Myers, consumed by self-loathing, desired the abasement and moral inversion the dictator offered him. He called Cuba "home," though nobody can remember whether he spoke Spanish. He planned, in the vague future, to sail to the revolution in his teak-decked ship.

Myers, it appears, had solid grounds for despising himself. He ran over and killed a teenage girl in 1975. His first marriage fell apart two years later. Imagine his bitterness, not only having to live in the land of complacency but partaking in the feast, enlarging the number of the oppressed by one dead girl.

On the vice of self-loathing, I have little to add to what I have already posted. It begins with the urge to smash the face in the mirror and ends with a universalizing revulsion and a craving to smash the faces of one's neighbors. Because it hates and demeans the dignity of others, it is, if acted on, destructive of freedom. Consider Noam Chomsky, global self-loather-in-chief, who forgave the Khmer Rouge their holocausts, but has yet to tolerate a single triumph by the United States or Israel.

Clearly Kendall Myers was molded of the same clay. Cuba is a dismal place. The writings of Cuban bloggers like Yoani (in Spanish) fill the heart with sadness. Every few years her friends vanish, and before escaping the island they utter the same words: "I can't take this any more." Myers will buy none of it. "Have the Cubans given up their personal freedom?" he asked. "Nothing I have seen suggests that. . . I see nothing of value that has been lost by the revolution. . ." Fidel Castro, he added, "has helped the Cubans save their own souls."

If Myers knew about Yoani, no doubt he -- like the ex-ruler of his peaceable kingdom -- considered her a weapon in the bloody hand of "imperialism."

That would be us. America, red in tooth and claw, stood for the original sin of being Kendall Myers -- and about his country, his government, or his people he had nothing good to say. Despite his secret treason, he allowed his anger to burst out loud. In a public setting, he derided Tony Blair for his close alliance to the U.S. There's no indication Myers was reprimanded for this tirade, or that anyone found it unusual in any way. He railed openly against American policies and actions, "but to his liberal neighbors in Northwest DC it was nothing out of the ordinary. 'We were all appalled by the Bush years,' one said."

Whether self-loathing is particularly acute in Washington I leave an open question. But even to liberals in Northwest DC, the difference between political opposition and treason is large, not subtle. Kendall Myers wasn't radicalized by the policies of the Great Satan Bush, but those of the born-again Jimmy Carter. The demons driving him cared little for political change. Their goal, and his, was moral self-immolation.

In this, at least, he appears to have succeeded.

UPDATE: On the subject of self-loathing in the city of Washington, add another one to the list. Bad week in town.

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 02:43:23 GMT

LIVING WITH THE POWER LAW: Suppose a mathematical formula was discovered that explained the necessary outcomes for all complex systems -- including human actions. Suppose, further, these outcomes were found to be deeply unequal and apparently unfair. Our ideals would collide with our understanding of reality. How would we respond?

In fact, such a formula has been discovered, and we have responded by ignoring it.

It's called the power law, and it accounts for the distribution of wealth, property, productivity, audiences, sales of competitive commodities, the movement of financial markets, scientific citations, contributions to wikipedia, frequency of appearance of words in English, rates of adaptability and experimental success, and many, many more outcomes of complex social systems -- including, alas, the number of hits and links to blogs such as this one.

I have remarked on the power law before, when arguing against the idea of an Internet-driven "daily me" of cocooned, self-validating information. But I just finished Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, a brilliant book about social networks in which the formula reappears constantly to describe a vast range of outcomes. The Web is indeed ruled by the power law, but so, it seems, is every other large-scale human interaction.

The key feature of the power law is disproportion. The top best-selling book sells twice as many copies as the second, which sells twice again as many as the next, and so on down the list. A few big sellers thus inhabit the head of the power law chart, which spikes dramatically upward. Most books hardly sell at all, and are represented by the chart's "long tail."

Few winners, many losers. And according to Shirky, the larger the system, the greater the disproportion: the rich get richer, blockbusters sell more, Instapundit receives a larger share of the Internet audience than Vulgar Morality. Power law outcomes trample on our sense of normality.

In a liberal democracy, we tend to assume that people are roughly equal, which means no individual can fall too far from the average. The bell curve, we imagine, applies to every significant description of human affairs. This is true of human height -- the tallest person won't be 1,000 times taller than the average. Also true of human intelligence. But complex social systems, Shirky writes, achieve highly skewed imbalances, and "cannot be understood as a simple aggregation of some nonexistent 'average' user."

Any system described by a power law . . . has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average. This sounds strange to many ears, as we are used to a world in where average means middle, which is to say where the average is the same as the median. You can see this "below average" phenomenon at work in the economist's joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar, and suddenly everyone inside becomes a millionaire, on average. The corollary is that everyone else in the bar also acquires a below-average income.

What accounts for the general disproportion in outcomes? In an earlier article, Shirky makes this extraordinary statement: "Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality." He adds: "The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution."

Diversity and choice are core liberal democratic ideals. Yet, if Shirky is correct, their consequences appear disastrous for liberal democracy: massive structural inequality in every aspect of social life. Few writers seem interested in taking on this paradox. One who did is the author of the Econophysics blog, who worries about "potential misuse of the power law" leading to an "unhealthy concentration of political and social power." He continues:

If the power law is misapplied in this way -- so as to reinforce unmeritocratic privilege -- then society could suffer dire consequences. We will have leaders -- in what are suppose to be democratic societies -- that will be out of touch with their people. Rather than being public servants, politicians and policy makers will become callous and self-serving. Entrepreneurs that are from the 'long tail' rather than at the top of the power law may find themselves unable to find suitable business opportunities regardless of the merit and objective worth of their ideas. Otherwise intelligent and deserving people may be shut out of educational opportunities largely because they 'chose' the wrong parents.

More insidious than even those worrisome scenarios is the possibility that those who have the most power and influence in society will have too much in common with each other and too little in common with the masses down the long tail. This sort of cookie-cutter conformity will lead to a tacit lack of diversity and may even create an atmosphere of thinly disguised discrimination and bigotry.

On the face of it, these are reasonable concerns. The power law seems superficially to describe an aristocracy ruling over a human herd. However, pursuing this line of thought raises more questions than it answers. One might invoke conspiracies by blue-bloods, capitalists, or Jews to account for inequalities in wealth or property. But how to explain the disproportion in contributions to wikipedia -- or blog links -- or productivity -- or scientific citations? Skew relations rule inputs to social systems, not just outcomes.

To decry a "tacit lack of diversity" in outcomes ignores the troubling paradox that, according to Shirky, diversity is a necessary condition to power law arrays. To equate the long tail with impotence disregards the findings of Chris Anderson and of Shirky himself.

More fundamentally, to fear like the Econophysics blogger does a "tyranny of the power law" makes no more sense than to condemn our involuntary servitude to gravity or the monopoly of atomic structure. The power law is a description of reality. It isn't a moral or political principle. If I were an absolute monarch and decided that the people should only read the 100 best books, each published in equal numbers, the human behaviors described by the power law would still assert themselves. A few books would be hugely popular, and thus in short supply, while most would go unread. That, in a nutshell, was the fate of the Soviet Union.

If the power law accurately describes large system interactions, it is incumbent on advocates of liberal democracy to reflect on the meaning and impact of these interactions: to square reality, as best we can, with our ideals. Other than the work of authors on social networks, like Shirky and Yochai Benkler, I've seen little in the way of such reflection. The debate on inequality, for example, generally fixates on disparities among income "quintiles" -- even though in a highly skewed distribution, this category carries little in the way of descriptive or analytical punch.

What follows, then, is a brief attempt to understand some of the the moral and political implications of the power law, written in the hope that brighter minds will follow.

For a start, a power law distribution is one description of reality. It shouldn't be confused with reality itself. People aren't isolated points on a chart. Rather, we cluster in relatively small communities of interest -- where, Benkler has found, an individual voice is more likely to be heard. Those communities often represent our wishes to the larger population. If I belong to the local chapter of the Democratic Party, I may feel personally validated by Barrack Obama's victory, even though my own part in it was negligible.

In terms of outcomes, if we are doomed to power law distributions a key requirement of liberal democracy becomes the dynamism of the head of the chart, and the conditions of the long tail.

Free markets ensure dynamism in the creation and loss of wealth. That's the idea behind Schumpeter's "creative destruction." Winners win big, but nobody wins for long. In The New Industrial State, John Galbraith argued that the government needed to become a sort of referee between a monolithic Big Labor and a monopolistic Big Industry. Most of the companies he thought too big to allow meaningful competition have gone the way of the dodo. Creative destruction also applies to household income, which oscillates significantly even within a lifetime.

In politics, the power law may be a persuasive argument for term limits such as we have imposed on the presidency.

By definition, most of us live in the long tail, and the conditions there will determine the possibility of freedom for the nation as a whole. Let me offer three examples of the right conditions. First, the flip side of the dynamism of great wealth and power is their accessibility to those with less of either. Second, the difference between head and tail must be of quantity, not of kind. The rich aren't really different -- in education, information, leisure, travel, manners -- they're just richer. Third, the floor of affluence must be high: the long tail must represent a good life, not an impoverished or marginal existence. From the perspective of freedom, it matters less that a few are wildly rich if most are financially independent.

There remains the question of fairness. The answer may depend on the domain. Shirky, for example, argues that the disproportion of traffic in the blogosphere is the result of a fair and equitable process. Less can be said with certainty about imbalances of wealth and power. With regard to inputs, fairness becomes undesirable. The few who contribute disproportionately "drive" social systems. The great saints and benefactors, the ultimate achievers in morality, politics, science, and industry -- they push the human race upward without asking for fairness or help, while the rest of us ride their wake. From this perspective, the skewed spike of the chart's head may well stand for the progress of human genius.

COMMENT: Interesting observations from Peter V:

From an amoral analysis the distribution is and will always be the norm as you said.

From a moral analysis, I think anyone who finds themselves in the top 10% because of just actions (not a position of eminence achieved by force or arbitrary privilege) is entitled to that position. This is essentially Robert Nozick's entitlement theory.

Trouble is, if you find yourself in that 10% and wish to avoid the destruction in Schumpeter's "creative destruction" you may turn to coercive force or arbitrary favor to maintain your eminence. There are myriad examples of this throughout history. A once successful but now struggling industry that lobbies the government for help (or for harm to their competitors) is a prime example from our times.

Not only does this put an end to the Nozickian morality described earlier, it also puts a stop to what you called the dynamism of the top, because the efforts of the entity are being utilized to lobby a second coercive entity (or to become that coercive entity itself) rather than being utilized to legitimately maintain power in a market. In this sense the opportunity cost of privilege is utility. The more common way of describing this unfortunate situation is "moral hazard."

If we could imagine a world without coercive entities and with low or no transaction costs (not so ridiculous actually, the world of the internet is essentially that world) we would see at any given moment 10% of the individuals with 90% of the influence. But, because the landscape is fluid and volatile the turn over from that group is fast (people in that 10% are not golden gods...they're just enjoying their fifteen minutes of fame). I suspect then that the power law does weaken for samples taken from a wider time dimension. This is merely my suspicion. A good question to ask would be: How many top websites from 1999 are still top websites in 2009?

Trouble is that (outside of fantasy internet-land) coercion offers a nefarious way of staying on top well past your fifteen minutes. This is why we still have GM even while they can't turn a profit and make desirable products. This is why there were dynasties in china that lasted centuries even while they destroyed the societies they ruled.

This is, I imagine, the tyranny that the Econophysics blogger fears. He's wrong however to claim that the nature of the power law is the cause of said tyranny. It is caused by the use of coercive force to artificially maintain power. In our modern world (GM again) it is caused by liberal democracy. The power law is freedom. Liberal democracy is tyranny.

THE VULGAR MORALIST RESPONDS: Wow, Peter, I think we almost agree. But. . .

Liberal democracy is political jiujitsu: it uses one power law distribution against another. Executive against legislative, judicial against both, state versus federal, local versus both, economic power against political influence, regulation versus free markets, law on top of custom, high producers slugging it out with silver-tongued salesmen, fine quality against big volume, tree huggers against tree cutters, big media against loud blogosphere, and so on, in a system so complex I doubt anyone's smart enough to manipulate it systemically (but bits and pieces of it -- sure).

I am confident the result of this chaos is still another power law distribution. I think, with far less confidence, that the head of the chart remains a dynamic place. I am utterly uncertain about the moral disposition of this power law of power laws.

Sat, 30 May 2009 21:33:25 GMT

THE NATIONALS LOSE FOR MY SINS: Whoever said suffering is good for the soul never rooted for the Washington Nationals. The team is a punishment, a tribulation. It is the Attila the Hun of sports organizations -- a scourge of God.

Five years ago, when baseball returned to the nation's capital after 35 years in the wilderness, the fans were treated to a mediocrity playing in a stadium that looked like the set for a zombie movie. Good enough. The crowds were large. The place was rocking. It was fun.

Then the happy monopolists of Major League Baseball sold the team to a local family, who wouldn't stand for a half-bad team. They insisted on the whole thing. They probably felt we fans deserved it, for our sins. And who knows? Maybe we did. After all, we had been foolishly thrilled by mediocrity, misled by the illusion of an American Dream in which things could only get better. We needed to be taught a lesson.

Now, I love baseball. When the old Washington Senators -- who gave mediocrity a bad name -- left town, I decided God must be dead. It happened around the time the vice-president quit and left the city after praying (or was it pleading?) nolo contendere, and the president had also quit and departed even though he said he wasn't a crook, but I took those losses pretty calmly. When they took away Frank Howard, however, they destroyed the very fabric and logic of my universe.

Conversely, my most sublime spiritual experience was to watch Ryan Zimmerman hit a walk-off home run off the Yankees' Chien Ming Wang in a packed RFK Stadium on Father's Day. There was a moment -- after the hordes of Yankee fans had been stunned into silence, before the Nationals' fans could rise in loud and universal cheer -- which contained, in its deep silence, the riddle of life, and seemed to say, "Look on my works, ye Yankees, and despair."

The Nats are still here physically. But last year, in an almost biblical way, they transcended the game of baseball and played in a different realm, one in which score is kept in units of horror, pity, penance, and despair. Inaugurating a beautiful new stadium, the team lost 102 games. They couldn't pitch, hit, or field the ball. The crowds dwindled, but those of us who remained still thought things could only get better.

We hadn't learned our lesson. We still swelled with arrogance and false pride. Like sinners in the hands of an angry Commissioner, we were hurled to the nethermost circle of baseball hell, otherwise known as the Nats' 2009 season. Words fail in the face of such awful punishment: the misery of April and May would make the greatest poets of the English tongue choke to speechlessness.

Baseball knows two poles of performance. The pole of excellence is represented by the 1927 Yankees. That of wretchedness is awarded to the 1962 Mets, who lost 120 games -- an almost impossible feat. Of this team, the manager, Casey Stengel, uttered the prophetic words, "Can't anyone here play this game?"

The 2009 Washington Nationals are on a pace to match the 1962 Mets. With a little luck, they will become the historical byword for badness in their sport.

By now, the stands at Nats Park are empty except for a Remnant. How should this group behave? What should it do or say? Confronting the abomination of desolation, baseballwise, what's the proper attitude for a fan?

Since this is a blog about morality, the proper answer should be that we fans must display strength of character. We should look on triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same. Unfortunately, that's nuts. The word "fan" comes from "fanatic." There's a really good reason for that. We want to win. We can stand mediocrity. But when matters reach apocalyptic levels of pain and humiliation, we start to go a little haywire.

Nats bloggers give their blogs names like Fire Jim Bowden and NationalsFanboyLooser. The message boards follow a predictable pattern: someone says "they stink" or "rock bottom" or "fire Manny Acta," then someone else writes, "you're an idiot" or "I wanna drink beer." Mayhem ensues. Members of the tormented Remnant haunt Nats Park with a dazed, angry look in their eyes. Strangers gaze on one another with disgust and mutter a single word: "Brutal."

I too have failed the character test. Let this stand for a confession, my own nolo contendere. I know the Nats will lose, yet every night I rage when they do. I shout obscenities at the TV. My family tiptoes around me, worried and afraid.

I even booed the team at the ballpark once. A friend told me this was acceptable behavior, but afterwards I felt dirty and revolted with myself. I knew where this was headed. There is a hell beyond hell, a baseball place where friend and foe alike are punished viciously regardless of merit or guilt.

Some small, defiant shred of hope clings to my unrepentant soul -- and for this violation of the divine order, I will be forced to watch in horror as I metamorphose into a Philadelphia Phillies fan.

Fri, 29 May 2009 01:26:47 GMT

EVOLUTION OF THE ECONOMIC DANCE: In my last post I wondered how the debate surrounding economic freedom could have gone so far off the rails among professional economists. The answer, it turns out, was spelled out before I had asked the question, in this historical fable by Sophistpundit explaining the evolution of economic thought.

The first economists were Scottish moral philosophers. As such, they understood that the goods of this world were infinite in number, but that seeking after some would make it impossible to attain others. Tradeoffs defined human existence. The problem of considerations for selecting among possible goods therefore lay at the heart of morality, of which economics was but a branch.

Let Sophispundit tell the story:

Looking at the role of money helps simplify things a bit. We know that people buy things with and sell things for money, whether it's things like food and tools, or services that people provide with their skills, time, and effort. The use of money is a pretty clear case of trade-offs; the money you use to buy something is money you will not be able to use to buy anything else.

The Scotsmen understood that the things people bought and sold with money only accounted for one part of what makes up the whole of personal wealth. However, it is the part that is much easier to observe and quantify than the rest. So they drew largely on the goods and services bought and sold with money when building their theories, and were able to make great progress in the direction of answering the initial question.

The economists who followed the Scottish school, while forging ahead with technical advancements explaining monetary tradeoffs, lost sight of the fundamental fact that "focusing on a model of trade-offs between goods and services purchased with money was itself a trade-off, one that sacrificed all of those things that people value and methods they have for obtaining them that are more difficult to quantify than those which are purchased with and sold for money." In other words, they raised money matters above morality, the branch above the tree.

As criticism from outside the field began to mount, the scholars responded by creating fictional units that people maximize across all decisions; the thing that is maximized whether it is through buying what they want or by making a new friend or any number of activity. This unit was called Utility, and for a time, the scholars believed they could measure this thing.

They admitted that the old model of people as monetary wealth maximizers only captured one piece of the picture. The new model of people as Utility maximizers, however, surely included the full package. Thus contented with their response to the critics, the scholars turned around and in practice changed nothing about the nature of their analysis. Utility in place of money was just a cosmetic alteration; in the end they still believed that they could or had reduced trade-offs to something entirely quantifiable and predictable.

In fact, maximizing Utility became such a dominant feature of the theory of wealth, that trade-offs began to take second saddle. Sure, there were limits to how much you could increase your Utility at a given moment. But people would work to reduce those limits. Scholars built up theories of how they could reduce those limits not only in particular circumstances but even over time. They spoke of people having Rational expectations about the circumstances of the future, and making Rational choices to maximize their Utility.

In the present day the discussion has devolved into a debate about whether or not people are really Rational or not. Some people came in and argued that people were not Rational all the times, or at all; that they often consistently failed to maximize their Utility. Defenders of rationality crafted "best of all possible world" arguments that would have better suited Dr. Pangloss than true scholars.

There's the rub. Economic debates sound dry and academic, but this one touches a foundational principle of liberal democracy.

Should I choose my own tradeoffs in life, or should some wise, concerned institution -- say, the government -- make most of the choices for me? That question seemed answered two decades ago by the fall of Soviet Union.

Today, our own government behaves as if it is uncertain of the right answer.

The old Scottish philophers knew that the individual's freedom to decide his own tradeoffs rested on his dignity as a person, that is, his moral standing: the very reason we allow citizens to choose their own representatives, and limit the reach and authority of government. Under our Constitution, the individual owns a substantial portion of his life. Whether he administers this rationally is neither here nor there. The government, which is composed of individuals, lacks the moral justification to intervene.

It is the custom among blogger to say, when linking, "read the whole thing." In this case, it's more than worthwhile: a brilliant exposition by Sophistpundit. So do it. You have no choice.

Fri, 22 May 2009 18:17:51 GMT

JUSTIFYING ECONOMIC FREEDOM: The Great Depression that began with the stock market crash of 1929 eroded whatever faith the West's articulate classes had in free enterprise. Capitalism was seen to be an immoral failure: greedy, exploitive, and wasteful. The application of reason and justice to economics called for government control. The debate was between democratic socialism and Marxist-Leninist planned economies. Individual choice appeared indistinguisheable from selfishness.

The best minds of the twentieth century succumbed to the illusion that governments could organize the creation of wealth and distribute it fairly. This wasn't an academic proposition. Political elites around the world converted to socialism, and two generations of the human race paid a terrible material cost.

India's "license raj" strangled at birth the entrepeneurial class of that country, freezing poverty in place. Newly independent African countries fell under one-party regimes, which ranged from the paternalistic to the vicious but, in economic terms, coincided in the manufacture of ruin. Ghana had a higher per capita income than South Korea in 1962; by 2000, Ghana's income had tumbled to 4 percent of South Korea's.

The swinish government flu subsided in the 1980's, but never completely lost its infectious power. Today the fighting faith of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and the Kirchners in Argentina -- all democratically elected -- is that wealth must be snatched back from the rich, who are thieves, by masterful governments, which are rational and just.

The current recession born of the collapse of the financial markets has reignited the chattering classes' contempt for economic freedom. If, for this group, Iraq was Vietnam, the recession has become a throwback to the 1930's: the last nail in the coffin of capitalism, an empirical refutation of the "American model." Examples are everywhere, but I will cite only this rambling New Yorker article, which proclaims that while the full story of the decline and fall of the American economy deserves a modern Gibbon, "a few familiar words will do: debt, greed, hubris."

Why those words? Why not "ignorance, error, mistaken hope"? Such hair-trigger moralizing will emerge as the theme of this post.

We know where the articulate classes stand. They share a beatific vision, and believe that only government power can impose it on the economy. My question concerns the other side of the argument. Who has taken up the cause of economic freedom today, and on what grounds?

When I read this review of Richard Posner's new book on the financial crisis, I was struck by the characterization of the pro- and anti-interventionist schools in economics. (The book itself is titled A Failure of Capitalism -- and in case we somehow miss the point, subtitled The Crisis of '08 and the Descent Into Depression.)

According to the reviewer, the contending schools base their arguments on radically different models of human behavior. The rational-action theorists, as their name implies, believe individuals on the whole make correct economic choices, and should be left undisturbed. The behaviorists, on the other hand, finds the individual to be hopelessly and self-destructively irrational, in need of protection from his own hard-wired behavior by government-mandated regulations and limits on freedom of action.

Both arguments feel like a wrong turn has been taken somewhere: my son the aspiring economist calls them "theology." I think it's important to see them clearly, to discern that neither is what, on the surface, they appear to be.

Are human beings rational? Not by any meaning usually ascribed to this word. I'm astonished anyone, at this late date, would seriously argue otherwise.

Rational-action economists, it turns out, identify rationality with the maximization of wealth. That is not an observable fact, or even an agreed-upon description. It's a value judgment. A moral choice. People often wish to maximize family time, or spiritual experiences, or encounters with the opposite sex: such economic decisions are rejected by these theorists for no reason other than they don't fit the theory.

On the flip side of the debate, behaviorists rest their conclusions on experiments (expounded here) which ignore the influence of context, culture, and family on our actions. That human behavior is driven by emotions rather than mathematical cost-benefit calculations appears indisputable. Such irrationality, on the evidence, might well be an adaptation to a world of real-time decisions, in which getting it roughly right fast is far more practical than engaging in a Socratic dialogue to identify the perfect action.

But let's grant the point. Assume that subjectivity -- our private cravings and loathings -- fatally warps the individual's economic judgment. How do those individuals in government, who design and implement regulations, escape this tragic flaw? Increasing government power over the economy would multiply and magnify the irrational effects observed by the behaviorists.

Of course, one could argue that some group or class -- the educated elite, say -- is in fact rational, and that members of this group should therefore be awarded regulatory power. Yet even if such magnificent beings existed, it's hard to see how a community of irrational individuals, fatally flawed in decision-making, can identify and empower the rational minority in its midst. The Leninist "vanguard of the proletariat," which tried the trick, once in power degenerated into a typically self-righteous and self-serving oligarchy.

Again, government intervention might be justified if irrational economic behavior was shown to be a brute fact in the world, like a slipped disk between vertebras or a malfuctioning valve in the heart. But by heading down this path, the behaviorists wander into the same moralizing bog which swallowed their oponents whole.

They can claim, if they wish, that foreclosures are the consequence of predatory lending practices, or that credit card debt results from fraudulent manipulations by the credit card companies. Others can reasonably reach different conclusions: that the blame lies with irresponsible borrowing and spending, for example. In either case, we are discussing value judgments, moral propositions -- not indisputable facts.

We don't know enough about cause and effect in complex systems to regulate the economy with predictable results. Those, like the behaviorists, who insist on regulation, merely have visions about what ought to be. Moral passion simplifies the intellectual landscape, and failure to achieve the ought -- the beatific vision -- justifies, to the theological mind, ever greater applications of the lash of government to the back of an unruly economy.

Here we approach the world described in Hayek's Road to Serfdom. There's an infinite number of good things, which are possible to achieve yet left unfulfilled. That is a source of discontent: in the vision, all the good is realized. Against the chaos and conflict of the marketplace, the interventionists demand the best of all possible worlds. Government planners, however, soon discover that their aims are mutually exclusive: they can get low costs or high wages, productivity or equality, freedom or obedience -- but never both.

If choices are to be made, arbitrary power must be granted to one set of values to trump all others. Everyone else must bend a knee or pay the price. The moralistic attempt to achieve all the good in the world, if pursued without compromise, must lead to moral inquisitions and political despotism.

Human irrationality doesn't justify government regulation. Moral arrogance does. Nor can a naïve faith in our ability to work cost-benefit calculations somehow make the case for economic freedom. This too is a form of arrogance, a blanket moral judgment used to conceal the way the world actually works.

Economic freedom springs from the humility of collective power in the face of individual decision-making, a fundamental principle of liberal democracy. In his economic choices, the individual may appear irrational or even self-destructive, but he must be allowed, within broad margins, his own path to salvation. It happens that, when individual aspirations are unleashed on the marketplace, great prosperity has resulted. That is not an argument for freedom, just a side effect.

The justification of economic freedom rests entirely on moral grounds. These grounds, however, lie at the antipodes of the rarefied debate between rational-action and behaviorist economists. The morality of freedom rejects the top-down, categorical commandments of specialists, and celebrates the triumph of the ordinary person, who is a specialist only in the content of his own life.

The web of individual choices sometimes achieves the wisdom of crowds, and sometimes, in the words of the New Yorker, appears like a carnival of "debt, greed, hubris." We are imperfect creatures. But this is true of everyone: the President, congressmen, Warren Buffett, the guy who runs the corner wine and beer shop, the single mother on welfare, you, and me. For this reason, the alternative to freedom isn't rationality, but infantilism in the citizen and a tyrannical arrogance in the use of government power.

Sat, 16 May 2009 16:45:15 GMT

FOREVER WRONG: My grandfather was the gloomiest man I ever knew. When he imagined the future, it was rife with loss and want. When he looked on his grandchildren playing in the yard, he pictured them brain-damaged after falling and cracking their heads on the ground. None of these things happened. My grandfather lived to a ripe old age, had four healthy sons and many happy grandchildren, and remained financially independent to his last day.

In the end, of course, he died. Only in this cosmic sense was his dismal outlook proven true.

Lester Brown appears to be the food policy equivalent of my grandfather. Brown's recent Scientific American piece, "Could food shortages bring down civilization?", caught my attention for a couple of reasons. First, the author betrayed a surprising but absolute ignorance of the marketplace. Second, he was no scientist. He was a missionary preaching a cause. His appearance in Scientific American reflected a new tendency among scientists and scientific journals to tell the rest of us how to behave.

Like my poor grandfather, Brown is forever predicting the worst, and has been proven forever wrong. Or, as Ronald Bailey puts it in this Reason article, "Brown has been a prominent and perennial predictor of global famine for more than 45 years. Why should we believe him now?"

For instance, back in 1965, when Brown was a young bureaucrat in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he declared, "the food problem emerging in the less-developing regions may be one of the most nearly insoluble problems facing man over the next few decades." In 1974, Brown maintained that farmers "can no longer keep up with rising demand; thus the outlook is for chronic scarcities and rising prices." In 1981, Brown stated that "global food insecurity is increasing," and further claimed that "the slim excess of growth in food production over population is narrowing." In 1989, Brown contended that "population growth is exceeding the farmer's ability to keep up," concluding that, "our oldest enemy, hunger, is again at the door." In 1995, Brown starkly warned, "Humanity's greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest." In 1997, Brown again proclaimed, "Food scarcity will be the defining issue of the new era now unfolding."

But this time it's different, right? After all, Brown claims that "when the 2008 harvest began, world carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) were at 62 days of consumption, a near record low." But Brown has played this game before with world grain stocks. As the folks at the pro-life Population Research Institute (PRI) report, Brown claimed in 1974 that there were only 26 days of grain reserves left, but later he upped that number to 61 days. In 1976, reserves were supposed to have fallen to just 31 days, but again Brown raised that number in 1988 to 79 days. In 1980, only a 40-day supply was allegedly on hand, but a few years later he changed that estimate to 71 days. The PRI analysts noted that Brown has repeatedly issued differing figures for 1974: 26 or 27 days (1974); 33 days (1975); 40 days (1981); 43 days (1987); and 61 days (1988). In 2004, Brown claimed that the world's grain reserves had fallen to only 59 days of consumption, the lowest level in 30 years.

In any case, Brown must know that the world's farmers produced a bumper crop last year. Stocks of wheat are at a six-year high and increases in other stocks of grains are not far off. This jump in reserves is not at all surprising considering the steep run-up in grain prices last year, which encouraged farmers around the world to plant more crops. By citing pre-2008 harvest reserves, Brown evidently hopes to frighten gullible Scientific American readers into thinking that the world's food situation is really desperate this time.

Just like my grandfather, Brown will be confirmed in his gloomy outlook at the end of days. The sun will grow to gobble up the earth, and food growing, not to mention human life, will become untenable. That will occur, according to one estimate, in 7.6 billion years.

In the non-apocalyptic present, the burden of shame falls less on Brown than on Scientific American. The former is, in Bailey's words, an "old charlatan." That the journal chose to open its pages to someone of that ilk should tell us a lot about the moral and political aspirations of its editors.

Sun, 10 May 2009 17:35:14 GMT

DEEP THOUGHT: "For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market. This debate was based on the universal and unspoken supposition that people couldn't simply self-assemble; the choice between markets and managed effort assumed that there was no third alternative. Now there is. Our electronic networks are enabling novel forms of collective action, enabling the creation of collaborative groups that are larger and more distributed than at any other time in history. The scope of the work that can be done by noninstitutional groups is a profound challenge to the status quo." Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

Fri, 08 May 2009 21:41:36 GMT

THE CRISIS CRISIS: Every day I wake up in the happy expectation that some cosmic threat will anihilate our species. I'm never disappointed. On TV, in the news, in government pronouncements and presidential speeches, in the movies, everywhere I turn -- catastrophes of epic magnitude rain down on me, disasters of biblical proportion, and in the background of these catastrophes-disasters -- catasters? disastrophes? -- I hear loud authoritative voices shouting "Step aside, you useless gnat, we're in control here" -- and my day is made.

I need a giant crisis every day. People tell me it's an addiction, but what do they know? I could quit if I wanted to. Any time.

But that would be irresponsible. There can be no drama without an audience, and that's my job. Without me, global crises would fizzle. If a disastrophe befalls in the forest and nobody notices, it's as if it never was.

That, I say, is the road to a pointless, self-centered existence. Without my fix of crises, what on earth would I worry about -- rail about -- opine and pontificate about? My friends? My family? Too horrible to contemplate.

The American way of life has been established so that such a dearth of catasters will never torment the citizens of this great country. I'm man enough to confess I get misty-eyed thinking about it. When it comes to the industrial production of doomsday scenarios, we are Number One. If you crave a cosmic crisis every day, this land is your land. The rest of the world believes you can't flog a dead horse, but in America we ride tall in that dead horse's saddle.

Multiple institutions work hard to satisfy my need to believe something horrible is around the corner. Newspapers may be losing their readers, but that doesn't mean they can't scream a recession into a Worst Ever, Back-to-the-Stone-Ages, Greatest of the Great Depressions. The President may regret being thrust into the limelight and forced to give yet another round of speeches, but he will do his duty. "Sure, I have thrown trillions at this Black Hole of an economy," he will say, "but believe me, everything will get worse anyhow."

At this point, multiple banks, corporations, labor unions, and the usual hangers-on will, out of respect for Old Glory and our Founding Fathers, begin to rend their garments and gnash their artificially whitened teeth. "Hey, we need some of those trillions," they will moan in front of TV cameras, journalists, politicians, and anyone else willing to listen. "Face it, we have pretty much piddled away quadrillions making stuff nobody wants, so now you owe us."

Otherwise, no Chrysler. No Lehman Brothers. The collapse of civilization, as I understand it. The triumph of the post-vehicular, non-hedge fund creatures of the night.

For months, the recession provided many happy occasions to panic, with an abandon the likes of which I have never seen before and scarcely dream to see again. On this issue, the Obama administration has rejected the false counsels of hope and change. Whereas his predecessor was deliciously alarmist about our economic future, President Obama unleashed a veritable Rocky Horror Show of doomsday visions, which no doubt explains his popularity. During his brief tenure, he has met President Bush's Bailout and doubled it with his own Stimulus, while reassuring the American people, like a good Keynesian, that in the long term we're all dead.

Such a bounty of horrors could not last forever -- politicians and journalists, after all, are mostly human, and their imagination, while fertile, isn't inexhaustible. In recent weeks, the thunderclouds of gloom have attenuated to a mere fog of discomfort, and I have heard sinister voices express confusion and even good cheer. The stock market has enjoyed a healthy rebound. (One may wonder why the President hasn't intervened to reverse this non-alarming trend.) The housing market may even be on the mend.

The last blow came from Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, who now foresees an end to this Worst-of-All-Possible-Depressions. In 2009. What's he thinking? Once we think the future might be better, how on earth can we project (and enjoy) the End of Days onto the present?

None of this backsliding about the recession bothered me much, though, because I had moved on to a new cosmic cataclysm: the swine flu pandemic.

Everything about the disease positively shimmered with hideous possibilities. It had the word "swine" in it. (One imagines the infected, like the inhabitants of Circe's island, using their snouts to root for truffles in the forest.) It started in a country where people go to get diarrhea. It's spread by aliens and globalization, our most beloved villains -- and though the Pentagon wasn't initially implicated, how long could it be before someone made the connection?

The news media jumped on the story with its usual elephantine grace. This, they saw, went far beyond mere economic meltdown. This was existential. "Is this 1976, when we had a small, contained outbreak, or is this 1918, when 20 million people died world wide?" A purely rhetorical device. We knew the answer.

At a presidential news conference, the first question wasn't about Afghanistan or North Korea. It was about swine flu. The President was ready, and declared his "deep concern." In fact, all the authorities were ready. They were in control. No doubt they hesitated to tell us everything, because they realized it would lead to mass panic. On the other hand, they could then yell, "Stay home and wear a mask, you coughing, sneezing dweebs. The big boys are taking over" -- and that was too much fun to resist.

Besides, panic was the whole point of the exercise.

The World Health Organization issued a level 5 pandemic alert. Level 5 -- it sounded bad, very bad, much worse than, say, four other levels. Everyone with an officious-sounding title held press conferences to show they were in charge: the mayor of New York, the governor of California, the director of the Centers for Disease Control, and -- this was bad, really bad -- the secretary of Homeland Defense. The country, I suspected, was facing extinction.

The Vice President spoke. I don't recall his words exactly, but I think he said something along these lines: "Listen, this is worse than the bubonic plague. Much, much worse. But don't panic! We can probably save a third of the population -- and with the proper breeding techniques, and a ratio of, say, ten females to each male, we can work our way back to the present gross national product within 20 years . . ."

Naturally, panic struck. Schools shut down, on the principle that ignorance was preferable to swinishness. The school system of Fairfax County, where I live, sent the parents a daily dose of panicky reassurances. They said they faced a "rapidly evolving situation." They planned to evolve right with it. Every confirmed swine flu case in the state of Virginia, they said, had been tracked down and written up, and they were sending us this grim statistic as often as we needed a reminder of our mortal flesh.

That's when things began to unravel. The total number of swine flu cases in Virginia, according to Fairfax County Schools, was zero. How could this be? Trembling with trepidation, I did some research. The total number of deaths in the U.S. from this devastating plague, so far, is two. The total number of cases in the world is 2,000. The average number of deaths from boring old non-porcine influenza in this country is 20,000 every year.

Suddenly, the mood turned. The CDC downgraded the horribleness of the swine flu strain. For all his concern, President Obama allocated $1.5 billion to the prevention of the disease -- not even chump change in Washington. Faced with a savage onslaught of encouraging news, the media deserted the pulpit of the gospel of doom, and began criticizing itself.

Game over. Due to a combination of failed leadership and bad luck, the country appeared to be muddling through.

This should not be tolerated. I am declaring an official crisis crisis. How can we survive, without a credible apocalypse looming in the near distance? This has nothing to do with me -- I happen to be one of those privileged people who experience cosmic failures every day by rooting for the Washington Nationals. But what of Red Sox fans? And where will we turn, when baseball season is over?

There must be a meteor about to hit our planet, or a lizard 100 feet tall gazing hungrily on Manhattan, or a rain of frogs predicted for the metropolitan area, or plague, or famine, or something. Find it. I appeal to the President, the media, and all the institutions of this great country to restore our Constitutional right to a terrifying future.

Sun, 03 May 2009 15:42:54 GMT

WHEN SCIENTISTS GO MAD: From Dr. Frankenstein, through Captain Nemo, to Dr. Strangelove, the West has told and re-told a story about scientists gone mad. The theme is simple: you can be a genius in molecular structure or solar plasma flows, yet a dunce of the human heart. Ignorance acts with the arrogance of great authority. That's the horror of the thing. In the dark chasm between material knowledge and morality, monsters lie in wait, which when aroused will wreak bloodshed and chaos.

Mad scientists exist. In real life, they have better hair than in Hollywood, and are likely to be ferocious bureaucratic warriors. The monsters they let loose serve ideological imperatives rather than personal obsessions.

Trofim Lysenko was the most notorious member of Stalin's scientific establishment. He concocted biological theories that flattered the Marxist faith in the power of the environment over genetics. Lysenko set back Russian biological research by a generation; sane scientists who disagreed with him ended in prison camps or worse.

Wernher von Braun was the original rocket scientist. He invented the V-2 missile used by Nazi Germany to bomb Britain. The V-2 was built by slave labor; nearly 20,000 died in the process. Around 3,000, nearly all civilians, died in London during the missile attacks. Yet, after the defeat of the Nazis, von Braun was brought to the U.S., where he became the scientific star of NASA's journey to the moon. He turned into an American hero, and the model for Stanley Kubrik's Dr. Strangelove -- who lumbers out of his wheelchair and exults to the American president, "Mein Fuehrer! I can walk!"

Science lacks an intrinsic morality. Even characterizing its method is problematic, because science is above all a matter of practice, a tradition of trial and error, not the implementation of a formula or an abstract principle. In this regard, President Obama's statement on stem cell research -- that we should "make scientific decisions based on fact, not ideology" -- is either naïve or disingenuous. It assumes that scientists tower morally over the human herd, being able to convert "facts" into right action in the search for knowledge by accessing esoteric "scientific" wisdom.

Scientists are just people in prestigious jobs. Like all people, they can be prey to ambition. Unlike most people, they know a lot about one thing, and are highly respected for that one thing; we shouldn't be surprised, therefore, if they tend to be opinionated about everything.

Those who go mad may just dash past some tipping point of zealotry as true believers, or of ruthlessness as bureaucratic climbers, or of self-love as brilliant specialists, or some combination of these motives. In all cases, the result is the same. A hectoring, dogmatic tone is assumed. The famous scientific modesty disappears. Differences of opinion are treated like outbursts of moral depravity. Dissenters must be silenced. The moral and material facts on which the President places so much weight are thus invariably arranged to fit the mad scientist's ruling orthodoxy.

I sometimes worry our scientific establishment may be developing an incipient case of madness.

The most obvious symptom is the attitude towards global warming, with many scientists conceiving of themselves as prophets of future reality and judges of what we must do about it. Those who reject their vision become targets of outrage -- for example, they are often called "deniers," a moral parallel to those who reject the truth of the slaughter of Jews under the Nazi regime. It's difficult to believe any interpretation which challenges the climate science orthodoxy can get much of a hearing in such an ideologically-charged environment.

Then there's the Union of Concerned Scientists' claim that modern crop biotechnology should be abandoned because "No currently available transgenic varieties enhance the intrinsic yield of any crop." Farmers, in the U.S. and in developing countries, would of course argue otherwise -- and they would have "facts" on their side.

a 2006 study found that biotech insect resistant cotton varieties boosted the yields for India's cotton farmers by 45 to 63 percent. Amusingly, some anti-biotech activists counter that these are not really yield increases, merely the prevention of crop losses. Of course, another way to look at it is that these are increases in operational yields. Whether due to yield increase or crop loss prevention, in 2008 this success led to nearly 70 percent of India's cotton fields being planted with biotech varieties.

The ideological rage against bioengineered crops, like the earlier panic against nuclear power, appears to be largely a matter of fashionable phobias affordable only to the rich.

Equally worrisome is the creep of missionary zeal in scientific publications. A special issue of Discover was dedicated to "How science will heal the earth." The Scientific American, highly respected and once rather dry-and-musty, now feels the urge to publish scientifically soft but ideologically pointed pieces. I offer a sampler from the May issue:

An article that asks whether food shortages will bring down civilization. The author, Lester Brown, is described as "one of the world's most influential thinkers." His last book is titled Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. Brown, no scientist, seems stuck in the missionary position. He believes civilization will be destroyed by "failed states" which can't feed their people. His solutions convey the impression that he has never heard of the marketplace. He wants to cut carbon emission 80 percent in 10 years. He expects to "stabilize" the world's population at 8 billion, never mind how. He plans to eradicate poverty and change the world's diet (to save water).

Like the climate advocates, Brown is seized by the immensity and immediacy of a catastrophe only he can foresee: "It is hard to overstate the urgency of our predicament," he writes. "Every day counts." In fact, the whole article shows how easy such overstatement can be, given the proper mix of ideology and zeal.

An article on "Taming the Urge to War," by John Horgan, a science journalist who cites the findings of a conference led by renowned chimpanzee researcher Frans de Waal. The news here is that war is everywhere, yet "much can be done to reduce lethal conflict in the world today." Here's how. First, "foster economic interdependence through alliances such as the European Union." Second, reduce the "imbalance of power between nations," again never mind how. Third, birth control. Fourth, stop climate change, which has "also driven conflict."

Horgan's piece reads like a lost addendum to the EU Constitution. That most of its proposals coincide with Brown's is, in truth, no coincidence. A rationalist ideology, ignorant of the markeplace and contemptuous of the messiness of human existence, fairly shouts its message of salvation from both articles. Consider. An "influential thinker" and a chimpanzee expert demand, in a science journal, the gutting of the world's economy and a transformation of our moral standards: here we touch the edge of madness.

An article by economist Jeffrey Sachs on how "Obama's expansion of the government's economic role is vital -- and we will have to pay for it." Once again, Europe is the hero, by having its governments consume a larger chunk of GDP than we have dared to do, until the present golden moment. I can dispute or agree: but how is this science?

An article by "skeptic" Michael Shermer skewering creationism. In effect, an attack on non-science by a non-scientist. I really don't like either side of the culture wars, and I find it depressing that the Scientific American has stooped to enter the fray. It places the journal on a par with those screaming people who turn up on CNN and Fox.

Not one of these articles is about science. All appear driven by the need to save the common rabble from itself. While not an unworthy goal, it places the scientist in a false position relative to his fellow citizens. He's hardly a messianic figure -- a savior. He is really just them. No more, no less. As the scientist would consider it a sign of derangement if he heard his plumber or mechanic offer proposals to save the human race, so the rest of us worry when we read, in a science journal, calls to revolution and moral reformation from people who make a living studying chimpanzees or atomic particles.

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:23:04 GMT

THOSE DAMNED DIRTY TWEETS: Back in the Fifties, people thought rock and roll would send their kids to hell. Adults just knew when hips shake that much, your morals fall out. In the Nineties, after the horror at Columbine, a new generation decided that computer games caused teenage violence, on the rather advanced grounds that digital entities were the moral equivalent of actual human beings.

Today we have this: according the the usual "researchers" who conducted a "study," Twitter and Facebook can erode moral values.

The reason? Compassion takes time to activate. Those crazy kids tweet way too fast to feel each other's pain.

"If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality," said Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, from the University of Southern California, and one of the researchers.

In other words -- actually, I don't have any other words. I have no idea what Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, from the University of Southern California, meant. What is "too fast"? At what point does one "fully experience" other people's "psychological states"? What in life doesn't have implications for "your morality"?

I'm pretty sure Mary Helen Immordino-Yang is over 30 (it might have taken that long to grow her name). I'll bet money she doesn't tweet. And although she speaks in riddles, I'm pretty sure that, if she did tweet, she would be heard praising this activity as an ethical and salutary form of ultra-physical communications.

The problem here isn't research, or a study, or moral decline: it's fear of obsolesence. For Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, those damned kids are dancing too fast to what can only be devil music. "Too fast," by the way, probably means: I can't keep up with you -- I don't get it -- I'm a researcher from the University of Southern California, for God's sakes, and you must be sick or immoral to make me feel so old.

I do not wish to pick on Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. Or maybe I do: but I also mean to excuse her somewhat. The modern world is defined by a titanic transformation. It makes us all socially obsolete. It throws out new fashions and technologies that appear, to those too old to participate, morally sinister and harmful to one's health. I can only imagine what went through my parents' mind when they first saw teenagers dancing to rock and roll. I remember well watching my prudent, peaceful first-born wreak bloody hell on a monitor. It made me wonder.

But the rock and rollers grew up to worry about their 401ks. The gamers got jobs and are, no doubt, happy to be taxed trillions of dollars to preserve the rockers' future. As for the tweeters -- please. Nobody has demonstrated that they read less, think less, or feel less, than those of us whose history may be longer than our future. There's not a shred of evidence showing that digital media drives the Millennials "away from traditional avenues for learning about humanity such as literature or face-to-face social interactions."

That's just Mary Helen Immordino-Yang talking. Like the Daily Me -- the charge that online information-gathering cocoons users in smug, self-ratifying bubbles -- her speculations characterize the author far more than the subject.

The true moral of the story can be obtained from an ancient (but not quite yet dead) rock band: "What a drag it is getting old."

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 16:22:18 GMT

A DEATH IN THE LIFE: On workdays I wake up at 6:30 in the morning, my mind a dull jumble of impressions. I never think, "I lived through another night." (Dying in one's sleep is often praised as the ideal way to leave this world, but I have my doubts. What if I were to wake up Elsewhere, and suffer an everlasting fit of anxiety: "Oh no, I left the coffee maker on.")

By the time I start my 15-minute commute, I'm awake, my brain is buzzing with ideas, but these are focused totally on work or on books I happen to be reading. I never think, "I'm one flat tire away from extinction." An accident passed on the road is an annoyance rather than warning.

A few days ago, after I had been at the office for a couple of hours, someone told me a fellow-worker had been run over in the garage where I park. He died. That was the news. The dead man was younger than me -- a condition occurring to an ever-larger swath of the world's population. He had awakened early, as I had. He had commuted to work like me.

Now he was dead. He had left behind an inbox full of unfinished business. Also a wife and children: an unfinished life.

When told about it, I felt horrified -- a foolish reaction. My life has been blissfully spared many losses, but I know history. In every period but the last two generations, death has been a hovering, intimate presence, like a friend.

Read Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals. At 44, Salmon Chase had lost three wives and two daughters. Lincoln himself lost his mother, sister, and sweetheart by the time he was 26. Read the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. He ran away from Florence when a young teenager, and returned a few years later to find his entire family wiped out by the plague. These men loved as powerfully as we do today. Their losses were wounds that never healed.

That my co-worker had died before his time seemed unnatural, almost unjust, to me. I could still send an email to him on the network, and not get an out of office message back. He was there, but he was gone. People spoke of him in the present tense, but he existed only in the past.

The poor man should have lived to see his children grow up, as I have. But on what grounds did I make that demand? What is the span of a life? Who is the judge to whom we can appeal?

Since then I have wondered: why him, and not me?

I have said before that the purpose of morality, from a certain perspective, is to teach us how to die. But I don't wish to moralize here. I only offer my perplexity about the human condition, which is so transient, so ephemeral. So brief. If I live to a hundred, I'll still be like one of those soap bubbles kids blow into the air: bright, light, gone.

Why don't I worry much about it? That seems foolish too -- but maybe not. The flavor of life would turn bitter with constant fear and anticipation of the end. My son the proto-economist tells me that value is defined in terms of scarcity, and the value of life, its dramatic significance, flows from its brevity. A play that went on forever would be a painful bore. No danger of that, when it comes to human life.

I spend the workweek using my skills to earn a living. I use my free time to enjoy my family and indulge in a number of pleasant pursuits. Is this a form of blindness? If someone were to tell me, "You will follow your friend at work to that undiscovered kingdom -- tomorrow", would I do anything differently?

We cling to our habits because they impose order on chaos, a theme on our contradictory thoughts and desires, and a chosen direction, an inching toward some ideal, on a pilgrim body that will never attain much beyond hope and doubt before returning to dust.

Everyday life transcends the fear of anihilation. My 6:30 a.m. alarm and 15-minute commute conquer, in an illogical but satisfying way, an eternity of death.

My co-worker, they said, had died in a "true accident." By that they meant no one was to blame. But the phrase was ill chosen, I think. Our species came to life and self-awareness in an irrational universe, perplexing to our feeble human reason. Most of this space is emptiness; of the rest, the dead and inert vastly outnumber the quick and awake. Life, from this perspective, is a lucky accident -- for which those of us on whom it has been bestowed should feel thankful, while our brief candle still burns.