tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36471806783987726742024-03-27T21:46:18.582-07:00Six Foot TurkeyRuffling feathers...Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.comBlogger837125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-78211854015280205552024-03-27T10:32:00.000-07:002024-03-27T10:51:13.079-07:00Bears vs. Serpents<p> It is a trite observation of Donald Trump at this point that he is the quintessential con man. His recent business ventures, such as hawking golden tennis shoes and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/us/politics/trump-bible.html#:~:text=Priced%20at%20%2459.99%2C%20plus%20shipping,and%20the%20Pledge%20of%20Allegiance.">$60 Bibles</a> have only underscored the point. We are used to it by now. It has long been a familiar observation among us that Trump is doing for American politics what generations of hype-men, multi-level marketing scam artists and Ponzi schemers have done for American capitalism. </p><p>But with Trump's latest foray into securities fraud, he seems to be making the analogy obsolete. No longer will we need to argue that Trump's political career is <i>like </i>a financial scam. Because now, Trump is simply perpetrating a classic financial scam in tandem with his political ambitions. The whole plan to take Trump's preposterous media company "Truth Social" public, after all, has been a classic pump-and-dump scheme; except happening candidly, blatantly, out in the open. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>The idea behind running up the stock price of this venture, after all, has transparently been to solve Trump's financial problems caused by the half-billion dollars in liability that he incurred from recent civil damages claims. People on Trump's platform have more or less openly been sold shares of the company on this premise. </p><p>And if the scheme is meant to provide Trump with liquidity, and the surging share price has nothing to do with the company's underlying value or profitability (which it <a href="https://www.wsj.com/finance/truth-social-stock-trades-dwac-trump-18a6cd74?st=h1abutlkfkk4pcd&mod=googlenewsfeed">plainly does not</a>), then the plan is obviously for Trump to cash out his shares at the earliest possible opportunity and pocket the cash. This is how every pyramid scheme operates: feed the irrational enthusiasm for a speculative investment with zero chance of real profit. Then, when the price is high, exit, and leave other investors holding the bag. </p><p>This is what Trump is obviously going to do, as soon as the board allows it. This is baked into the plan. We know he needs to turn at least half a billion dollars of his shares into cash, and soon. So what are people doing investing their money in this scam? Maybe they think that they can pull out early too. They will get the timing right and leave other suckers to bear the loss, as the price inevitably comes cratering down. Or, maybe others are so drunk on the Trump Kool-Aid that they are willing sacrifices. </p><p>This is, after all, what Trump is really offering them: risk your savings to help bail me out of a financial jam created by my own terrible behavior. And, cults of personality being what they are, a lot of his followers seem willing to take the bait. They will hurl themselves gleefully upon the Trump pyre.</p><p>Maybe some of them are simply dazzled (as people always are, in pyramid schemes) by how quickly the price has surged. They think they are getting rich, and will cling to that delusion even as the value of their investment starts to disappear again once Trump pulls up his stakes. They will then hang on, to their own destruction, out of belief in the sunk cost fallacy. And Trump will gladly encourage them in this delusion: "the price is coming back any day now; just have faith!"</p><p>This is the eternal rallying cry of the con artist after all. I was reading Herman Melville's great and deeply strange novel that introduced the term to the American lexicon, <i>The Confidence-Man</i>, and the titular scam artist is forever luring people with this same siren song. "Just trust; have faith." By demanding that they put their "confidence" in him, he is able to exploit their good nature; by invoking the virtues of "faith," he is able to assume the mantle of religion. </p><p>In his financial frauds, Melville's "Confidence-Man" plays on the same belief that undergirds every pyramid scheme. Even if people know, on some level, that their investment is valueless, the scheme still appears to be "working," people still seem to be making money, so long as the irrational faith of others can be sustained. And so, people start to think, if only everyone would <i>believe</i>, if only those whom Melville's character derides as "bears" and "gloomy philosophers" would keep silent, everyone would win. </p><p>But the bears are right. The stock price for Trump's venture will eventually come crashing to Earth. And the most trusting, gullible people—the people who bet everything on the strength of Trump's word—will lose the most. Retirees, disaffected young people—people with the most to lose, who staked their life savings on the silver tongue of a false prophet—will be the ones left impoverished and cheated. (But even then, they might not blame Trump; they might choose instead to blame "the bears.")</p><p>In this way, even as Melville's "Confidence-Man" clothes himself in the rhetoric of religion and faith, he is really more like the serpent in the garden of Eden; and indeed, the imagery of the snake and his temptations appears more than once in Melville's novel. He whispers honeyed words and gets people to part with their hard-earned savings, feeling justified and entitled to it all the while. That is what Trump is doing—and frankly and blatantly so. </p><p>Oh ye investors, beware of false prophets! And false profits too! There is no way to win from sinking money in Trump's Ponzi scheme, unless you cash out with such perfect timing that you abet the ruination of other, even more vulnerable investors. And then Trump will be left with the last laugh, licking his forked tongue and gloating over the parents of humankind he deceived yet again. I quote from the poet Ralph Hodgson's rendition of the tale of the Fall, and endorse his sentiments: </p><i>Oh had our simple Eve <br />Seen through the make-believe! <br />Had she but known the <br />Pretender he was!</i>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-27117759535783322502024-03-26T10:00:00.000-07:002024-03-26T17:39:52.058-07:00The Inverted Moral Universe<p> In a <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2024/02/hawks-and-dreadnaughts.html">recent post on this blog</a>, I was observing how frankly incomprehensible the Republican moral universe is to me—even among the branches of the GOP that are still relatively "mainstream." We had some further illustrations of this over the past week. Take, for instance, the passage of a long-overdue spending package to fund the government. On the one hand, this was great news—the looming government shutdown was averted. This was hailed as a victory for the "normal" branch of the GOP, which ultimately opted to govern rather than to sabotage the state (and for this, they have been pilloried ever since by their own even more radical right-wing flank). </p><p>Yet, if you look at the details of the spending bill, you see how utterly weird even the "normal" side of the party is. After all, they needed to negotiate for a few "wins" for their side, in order to justify their policy compromises to their base. But what were the "wins" of which they were so proud? The <i>New York Times </i>notched the policy victories on both sides, in dispassionate prose. Republican negotiators, they noted, were proud of the fact that they had expanded ICE detention capacity and cut off humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees. Democratic negotiators, meanwhile, were proud that they had funded Alzheimer's research. The contrast could not be more stark. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>Highlighting the Republican "wins" listed in the article, a friend of mine sent me an email. "Wow," he observed, sarcastically: "what great legislative 'achievements' for the Republicans." Apparently, one side wants to fund research into combatting the worst human diseases. The other is crowing about the fact that they cut off humanitarian aid to a civilian population displaced by war. (I get, by the way, that there are valid concerns about the specific UN agency distributing this aid—but in the face of famine, it's not clear that there are any alternatives; and the result of cutting off aid wholesale seems like it can only be even more civilian misery and death in Gaza). </p><p>Looking down the list of other GOP "achievements" in the spending bill, they all have this same character. They are either mean-spirited, or just frankly petty and trivial-minded: or, more often still, a combination of both: in addition to cutting off aid to starving Palestinians in the midst of a looming famine, and expanding the number of beds to detain asylum-seekers in prison-like conditions, after all, Republican negotiators were also apparently crowing about how they had "saved" gas stoves and had secured a prohibition on U.S. embassies flying rainbow flags. These are the top priorities for our "normal" Republicans, ladies and gents. The perfect combination of ludicrous and mean at the same time. </p><p>But what really gets me is the line one keeps hearing about Ukraine aid. Now, one is accustomed, by this point, to the weirdness and creepiness of the pro-Putin GOP "isolationists" who simply oppose all Ukraine aid. They are off on their own ideological planet, and have been for some time now. But what sketches me out even more is how even the GOP "hawks"—the ones who are supposedly more sympathetic to Ukraine—feel the need to clarify that they don't support any merely <i>humanitarian </i>aid to Ukraine's victimized civilian population. I quoted in the earlier post from Sen. Joni Ernst on this topic: "I’m all about weapons, not welfare." That's the positioning of Team Normal in the GOP at this point. </p><p>And now, this week, we've heard more of the same. An article in the <i>New York Times </i>yesterday described Speaker Mike Johnson's efforts to rally support for Ukraine aid in the GOP. He clarifies at one point that he is trying to gain support by drawing a clear distinction between "lethal aid" and other forms of aid. "There is a big distinction in the minds of a lot of people between lethal aid for Ukraine, and the humanitarian component," he is <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/25/us/politics/speaker-mike-johnson-ukraine.html">quoted as saying</a>. </p><p>Now, in a recognizable moral universe, that would mean that people who unreservedly support humanitarian aid to Ukraine had some concerns about spending more money on bombs and missiles that would be used to kill people (even if it were in the service of a just and purely defensive war). But that's not what Johnson means. He's referring to the Joni Ernst-type of talking point quoted above. What he means is that many members of his conference support Ukraine aid, but <i>only </i>if it is provided in the form of "lethal aid," and <i>not </i>if it is in the form of "humanitarian aid." They want bombs, not food. They want "weapons, not welfare," in Ernst's immortal phrase. </p><p>I was reminded of a poem by Robert Lowell, in which he reflects back on his time during the Second World War, when he was imprisoned for being a pacifist and conscientious objector. He recounts meeting another inmate, with whom he has an interchange about what each of them is "in for." The other inmate says that he was imprisoned for "killing." Lowell, as the poem's speaker, observes that he has been imprisoned for "refusing to kill." This sends the other inmate into hysterics. </p><p>Lowell's poem underlines the topsy-turvy moral logic of imprisoning conscientious objectors for refusing to take part in war. But it is the same sort of blatantly inverted moral universe at the heart of current Republican posturing. I could understand if some politicians had reservations about Ukrainian aid on good-faith pacifist grounds, after all. I could understand if they were worried that US taxpayer dollars would be spent on killing people. But that is not even their objection. Their objection is that not <i>all </i>of it might be spent on killing people. Some of it, horror of horrors, might be spent on feeding Ukrainian refugees and repairing the humanitarian damage from Putin's invasion. </p><p>Their objection isn't to killing, in short—it is to refusing to kill. This is the inverted moral universe of the modern GOP, in even its most "moderate" and "mainstream" wing. </p><p>What can the rest of us do, in the face of such unreasoning weirdness; such upside-down moral logic? Shrug, and keep going—and try to keep our feet planted as firmly as we can on this side of the planet Earth.</p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-29032926491393108092024-03-26T08:52:00.000-07:002024-03-27T21:45:46.625-07:00Planet ISIS<p> ISIS's atrocities keep failing to slot into our preferred geopolitical narratives. After mysterious explosions killed almost 100 civilians in Iran at the start of the year, I gritted my teeth for the conspiracy theories to start pouring in. I thought we would hear endless rumor-mongering that Israel and/or the US were somehow behind it. Maybe Seymour Hersh would even write a Substack post declaring that his trademark anonymous "sources" inside the US intelligence services had told him as much; and since no other evidence would ever emerge on either side to confirm or refute it, we would never really know the truth or be able to cast doubt on this narrative. </p><p>But instead of any of that happening, the Islamic State came forward and claimed responsibility. </p><p>Much the same thing happened this past week, following the horrific attack on civilians gathered at a concert hall in Moscow. After this atrocity happened, I thought we would once more be in for an endless merry-go-round of conspiracy theorizing, and would never really know the truth. After all, it would plainly be in the interests of Putin's government to try to attribute the attack to Ukraine—which they immediately proceeded to do. And I confess that this prompted an alternative conspiracy theory in my own mind, which I quietly entertained for the first few hours after the attack—namely, I speculated that Putin planned it in order to make a bogus attribution to Ukraine and anchor support for his war effort. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><span></span><p></p><p>In my defense, Putin has in fact been plausibly linked to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombings">1999 apartment bombings</a> that were used to justify the Second Chechen War. One of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko">most prominent dissidents who accused Putin of staging these bombings</a> as a "false flag" operation was later assassinated under suspicious circumstances—which British authorities linked to Russian state actors. And Masha Gessen raises doubts about the 2002 hostage crisis in Moscow as well, in their book about Putin, <i>The Man Without a Face, </i>which bears a certain superficial resemblance to last week's attack (both occurred in Moscow theaters). </p><p>Then there was the rapidity with which Putin's government pounced on the attack and tried to twist it to their advantage. It all suggested I shouldn't put it past Putin to slaughter his own civilians to score a propaganda victory. </p><p>But then, just as in Iran, along came ISIS and deflated all the conspiracy theorizing. I guess we can be "glad," in a grim sort of way, that ISIS is so proud of their own atrocities. They always seem to trip over themselves in their rush to take credit for their own unprovoked massacres of civilians. "Look at us," they say, "we just gunned down a bunch of defenseless unarmed civilians in a concert hall! Aren't we great?" Plainly, they are off in a different moral universe—one unrecognizable to most of us—and a different geopolitical universe too, which is why it is so hard for both the West and Russia to make any sense of their attacks or attribute the correct motives to them, until ISIS steps forward to overtly claim responsibility. </p><p>It turns out, after all, that ISIS is fighting their own bizarre sectarian war that does not fit into any of the geopolitical conflicts that the Western media tends to write about. The attack on Iran turned out to have nothing to do with the Israel-Hamas conflict—even though everyone in the West assumed it must have something to do with that, at first, seeing as it concerned Iran. Likewise, the attack in Moscow turned out to have nothing to do with the war in Ukraine on either side—even though we all assumed at first that was the most likely connection, even if we disagreed as to which side was most likely responsible and who had the most to gain. </p><p>Instead, it's ISIS off on its own planet, fighting its own strange ideological wars. Far from intervening in Western geopolitical conflicts, the terrorist group seems most focused on attacking <i>other branches </i>of political Islamist extremism. They are outraged with Iran for being a Shiite power; they are attacking Russia because Putin's government has backed Assad's regime in Syria. What we are really witnessing here, then, is a conflict between Sunni and Shia interpretations of political Islamism, having nothing to do with what the West tends to see as the main conflicts on the geopolitical stage (Western democracy vs. Putin's authoritarianism; Western secularism vs. political Islamism, etc.). </p><p>I suppose it's just another appearance of our old friend the "narcissism of minor differences." Extremist movements of all kinds are so deeply embedded in their own limited worldview that they tend to devote their time and energy to attacking other, slightly different sects of their own ideology. The worst foes that they can conceive are the branches of their own movement that are <i>almost </i>exactly like them—but not quite. </p><p>I am reminded of Godard's outstanding film about young Parisian Maoists in the 1960s, <i>La Chinoise</i>. The most morbidly amusing thing about these incompetent young extremists, fed on a fantasy of political violence, is that they spend all of their time trying to assassinate Soviet officials. They are so far down the extremist rabbit-hole, that is to say, that they aren't even bothering to attack the "bourgeois" state around them. They are spending their time and resources instead attacking rival interpretations of Marxism-Leninism, which they have been taught to regard as "revisionist," and thus more evil inherently than even the capitalist imperialist police state itself.</p><p>But even though ISIS's attacks turn out to have nothing to do with our preferred geopolitical narratives, on either side of any of these conflicts, that hasn't stopped interested parties from trying to manipulate them for propagandistic effect. Putin's regime has still tried to warp the interpretation of the Moscow theater attack to its own advantage. While (eventually) acknowledging the attack was the work of Islamist extremists, the Russian government has nonetheless tried to insinuate that Ukraine might be partially responsible; i.e. that they might have somehow facilitated or permitted the attack to occur. </p><p>(Putin's government has also made a deliberate show of gruesomely torturing the people arrested on suspicion of taking part in the attack—seizing another opportunity to normalize the regime's autocratic violence and the breakdown in the rule of law that has occurred on Putin's watch. Take note America—that's what authoritarianism looks like! When Trump says he wants to torture ISIS suspects—guess what; that's what it looks like; it looks like cutting off the ear of a bound and helpless man and forcing him to eat it; that's what you will get, America, if you empower men with the autocratic spirit of Putin and his right-wing U.S. acolytes.)</p><p>And meanwhile, right-wing U.S. politicians are trying to use the attack to harp on their favorite theme of fear-mongering about immigration. Senator Marco Rubio, in another step to divest himself of any lingering shred of credibility, has <a href="https://thehill.com/latino/4553915-rubio-isis-us-border-moscow-attack/">invoked the Moscow attack</a> to try to plant the seed of fear that ISIS might somehow smuggle terrorists through the southern border (though why the extremist group would need to resort to this is left unexplained—since they seem to have had <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2015/06/isis-dialogue.html">little trouble recruiting U.S. citizens in the past</a>). </p><p>In addition to being a blatant attempt to manipulate a horrific tragedy to stoke unrelated fears and stigmatize a vulnerable group, Rubio's comments also happen to fit neatly with the Russian propaganda line—as does an increasing amount of GOP rhetoric these days. How so? Well, because the main Republican talking point against providing more Ukraine aid these days is to say that the U.S. cannot protect Ukraine from Putin's aggression "until we have protected our own southern border" from a group of defenseless asylum-seekers and refugees, who are vaguely analogized on this argument to Putin's invading army. </p><p>So, if the GOP can divert the Moscow concert attack story into yet another reason to prioritize shutting down the border and victimizing asylum-seekers over defending our democratic allies from Putin's aggression, then Ukraine aid becomes even less likely to ever pass Congress. I'm sure Russian state media accounts and hired online trolls are already promoting the same line, for just this reason. I'm sure they are doing all they can to amplify Rubio's remarks. </p><p>And so, even if ISIS is off on their own planet, fighting an incomprehensible sectarian battle, they have nonetheless still managed to provide Putin and his growing coterie of GOP sympathizers with a potent tool: they have stoked primal fears. And fear, as every propagandist knows, can always be manipulated to support authoritarianism. </p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-84096745419969537742024-03-25T17:54:00.000-07:002024-03-25T18:02:52.830-07:00Images<p> Modern poetry has been derided as unintelligible; but there are things that seem incomprehensible because they do not actually have anything to say—like much modern academic writing in the humanities—and then there are things that seem incomprehensible because people expect them to say things that they never had any intention of saying—like much Symbolist and modernist poetry. Would you say that the lush imagery of Rimbaud is incomprehensible, for instance? William S. Burroughs thought not. In one of his interviews in the collection <i>The Job, </i>he offers a series of extracts from the academic and literary intellectual organs of his day, bloated with jargon and empty phraseology. Here, he implies, is the truly incomprehensible. He then contrasts it with a series of words and images quoted from Rimbaud. Here, he says, is lucidity. Even if Rimbaud is not "understandable" in the sense of offering a linear narrative or structured logical argument, nevertheless, at the level of language—in terms of his ability to convey an image to the reader's mind—he was the model of clarity. </p><p>Burroughs could have said the same of Nobel Prize-winning poet St.-John Perse, who also reportedly influenced Burroughs's literary development. I have just been reading Perse's <i>Anabasis—</i>an epic prose-poem set in an aestheticized ancient world reminiscent of Flaubert's <i>Salammbô </i>or the <i>Temptation of Saint Anthony. </i>Here is a work of poetry that is "incomprehensible," if one seeks narrative resolution or strictly rational development. But, in the sense in which Burroughs found Rimbaud to be comprehensible, Perse too is an eminently clear writer. He fulfills the criterion that Burroughs set for all language: it should approximate as closely as possible the technique of the hieroglyphic. It should communicate an image for a concrete thing, not an abstraction; and it should send it straight to the mind, with minimal ideological or conceptual filtration. The more abstract language becomes, Burroughs says, the further away it gets from truth; the more it can deceive and mislead. And there is nothing abstract in Perse's poem. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>Once I had accepted that I was not going to find a linear development in the poem, and that it should be appreciated on the same level at which Burroughs appreciated Rimbaud, I suddenly found Perse a great deal more enchanting. I started to underline certain images that the poet conveyed. Many of them are indeed startling. A child is glimpsed in one scene who is "as sorrowful as the death of apes." Why of apes, specifically? Don't overthink it: the line would not work half as well, nor be so strangely evocative, if it were the death of anything else. There is another passage in which a landscape is described as being "more chaste than death." Here is aesthetic romanticism in the finest Flaubertian sense (the Flaubert of the historical novels, that is; not the Flaubert of the realist works). Here is Flaubert's immense "melancholy of antiquity," translated into poetry. </p><p>Here as in other passages, the poem is intensely visual. It even managed to evoke my surroundings here in Iowa. In one of his poems, John Berryman speaks of Iowa as a "pastless" state "with one great tree in it." I wonder if he had been reading Perse—for here the poet speaks of "a great/ land of grass without memory," and near it is to be found "the Place of the Dry Tree." Berryman (who taught for a time at the University of Iowa, and evidently conceived a distaste for it) wrote of Iowa's "pastlessness" (read: "without memory") with disdain. But Perse, like the Australian novelist Gerald Murnane, is evidently a writer who could appreciate the romance of empty, memory-less grasslands (Murnane returned to the theme in both <i>The Plains </i>and<i> Inland). </i>As Perse writes of the beauty of grasslands—ancestral home of all humanity on the Savannah, after all—"Plough-land of Dream! Who talks of building?—I have seen the Earth parceled out in vast spaces[.]" And I seem to see amber waves of Iowa grain swaying before me. </p><p>I have been quoting, by the way, from the definitive T.S. Eliot translation, which introduced the poem to an English-speaking public. But I am not beholden to Eliot's poetic muse alone for extracting these images from the poem. In fact, reading through the French original—which is helpfully published side-by-side with Eliot's translation—some images struck me much more forcefully in the French version than they had in the English. Partly it's that my French is so terrible and only half-remembered from high school, that the occasional wholly-comprehended phrase had greater impact simply for being interpretable. But there were also places in which the imagery and vocabulary in the original seemed frankly superior to Eliot's rendition—more vivid and direct. Nor was this due exclusively to certain untranslatable felicities that can only be achieved in French. Occasionally, the problem seemed to be more with Eliot's own prudishness. </p><p>There were two places in particular, in which Eliot's delicacy seemed to force him to adopt euphemistic and value-laden terms in place of the raw and concrete image in the original. And what makes this particularly objectionable is that it introduces precisely the element of abstraction that Burroughs regarded as fatal to all language and meaning. It takes what <i>was</i> a concrete image with a clear referent in the original and turns it into a verbal construction, laden with ideas and value-judgments having nothing to do with the pure content. Take, for instance, the passage in which Perse describes "<i>les lois contre le goût des femmes pour les bêtes."</i> In the original, goût could be translated merely as "taste." At a stretch, it could be taken in context to mean "lust" or "desire." But in either case, the term appears value-neutral. Yet Eliot renders it as "depravities," which introduces an aspect of moral condemnation that is not present in the original. Perse's pure image—presented without editorializing or narrative context, in the spirit of the Symbolists of earlier generations—becomes in Eliot's hands something far more abstract. (Then there is Eliot's euphemistic "made water," which delicately translates Perse's much more visceral "<i>urinaient.</i>")</p><p>This is the sense in which the really quite limpid imagery of the Symbolists and the moderns can be made to seem "incomprehensible." People confront these images, and they want to know what the poet thinks about them. They want to know whether he approves. Even Eliot, so often derided as an image-mad incomprehensible modern himself, falls prey to this tendency. He wants to introduce a note of editorial comment. But the poem works much better if we resist this impulse. When reading this sort of poetry, we shouldn't assume it is doing something other than what it is. We should strive to read it in the spirit of hieroglyphics. We should take the Burroughs approach, and see in its words the concrete image of the thing itself—not the thing as processed through human concepts or ideology. We should approach these poems as an opportunity for a direct confrontation. We can escape the urge to ascribe meaning that isn't there; let go our restless craving for "interpretation," and simply let the poem be itself. As Archibald MacLeish put it: "a poem should not mean but be." </p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-27550390512749030812024-03-24T19:29:00.000-07:002024-03-24T19:59:56.548-07:00Wresting Their Neighbor to Their Will <p> A friend of mine gets annoyed with me every time we talk about social media, and the host of related topics that are often linked to it in the zeitgeist: such as the alleged crisis of mental illness and loneliness among teenagers and young adults. He thinks society needs to do a better job of regulating digital media—and no doubt he is right, up to a point. He is persuaded by the studies and whistleblower reports that have mounted up in recent years indicating that excessive use of social media correlates with mental health problems among the young; and he argues that we would be better off limiting or controlling access to these websites rather than allowing them rage like a brush fire through the minds of the impressionable youth. </p><p>Whenever I express my skepticism of these claims, he accuses me of being needlessly contrarian and refusing to follow the evidence. And I admit that I haven't read the studies and reports that undergird the present legislative push to protect young people and teens from social media. All I'm really going on—just as my friend suggests—is a gut instinct. But I insist that there is something to it. As a character in Goethe's <i>Elective Affinities </i>says at one point, intuition is often just a shorthand for the accumulated experience of many prior others placed in similar situations. And so, I insist, my instinctive skepticism toward the alleged "youth mental health crisis" is actually informed by historical experience. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>Mostly, I don't like the current discourse about youth mental health because it sounds like a moral panic. Every few decades, after all, the young people of America are observed to be living their lives differently from how their elders would choose to organize their time. And whatever that difference is, it soon becomes elevated in the public consciousness as the defining social evil of our times. It hardly matters what the behavior is. It could be shopping malls, or hard drugs. In my own generation—that of the Millennials—we even managed to have a moral panic about young people spending too much time revisiting the cartoons of their Nineties childhoods. Yet what could be more non-threatening than that? </p><p>Today's young people, likewise, are getting pregnant and blackout drunk less frequently—and making a point of <a href="https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/early-sleep-bedtime-6ecd1d67">going to sleep at 9 PM every night in order to get enough rest</a>—which you would think would mean they are delivering up less fodder to the panic artists. But this would be to misunderstand the protean nature of panic. For, the young people are still spending their time <i>differently</i> than their elders, so we are managing to have a moral panic about it all the same. </p><p>Apparently, famous social commentator Jonathan Haidt is now piling on too. In a recent <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/24/the-anxious-generation-qa-00147880">interview with <i>Politico</i></a>, based on his latest book, he tells us that smartphones and video games are destroying America's youth. Platforms like Instagram are causing a mental health crisis among girls, he alleges; and meanwhile, boys are simply "dropping out of life" entirely; they're playing too many video games; they're disappearing into virtual environments: "[I]t’s causing them to [...] not cultivate skills, like flirting or courtship or working for pay."</p><p>And here is where we start to give the game away. What we're actually outraged about here is plainly a species of sexual and social nonconformity—not participating in the romance scene or the employment scene as prior generations defined it. The young people are not dating or sleeping with each other enough. Having been condemned for generations for having sex too early and too often, young people are now to be condemned for not having it enough. Here again, we see that the target of the moral panic can shift every few years. All that is required is that the behavior we are panicking about be <i>different </i>from how older generations organized their lives; beyond that it doesn't matter what specifically the point of difference is. So long as it marks a change, we can start to panic. </p><p>You may say that these commentators are merely trying to <i>help </i>the young, not stigmatize them; but this is how it starts with all moral panics. They always masquerade under the guise of "concern." They claim to be trying to protect the young people—mostly from themselves. And protecting them from themselves quickly turns out to require stigmatizing and criminalizing them. The panic artists label the non-conforming behavior they want to stop as criminal, and therefore, it <i>is </i>criminal. As William S. Burroughs talks about in his collection of interviews, <i>The Job, </i>if the U.S. government in his era had actually enforced all the drug laws on its books against every offender, they'd have the entire generation of youth and young adults behind bars. There would be no one left to fight in Vietnam. So they would never arrest everyone: just enough to confer the stigma of criminality; to label the culture of opposition and resistance presumptively criminal. </p><p>They may not be readying laws to ban people from remaining single, to force people to date and get married. But it is a logical progression of the current moral panic about the alleged teen "loneliness" epidemic (do they not know that truth and wisdom flow only from the "lonely"; from those who "stand most alone," as Ibsen put it?—no; how could they know it, <a href="https://www.poetryverse.com/william-butler-yeats-poems/the-leaders-the-crowd">as Yeats asks</a>, those who themselves "have no Solitude"?). How many think-pieces and Surgeon General reports will need to be published, wringing their hands about how the young people are not pairing off and mating in sufficient quantities anymore, before someone starts proposing government marriage incentives as a solution; a points system based on the number of dates attended? And how long before this in turn escalates to compulsory romantic attachments? </p><p>I admit I worry about this because I have a dog in this fight. I have been trying for years to carve out a tiny niche for myself in which I might be permitted to remain single. And look, I agree that other people do not<i> </i>need to live this way, if they don't want to. I guess <i>someone </i>has to participate in the whole loathsome system of sex competition—in the same way that we probably need economic competition for the market to function. But that doesn't mean I have to <i>like </i>either one. And it doesn't mean that <i>everyone </i>has to participate. </p><p>Why can people not be permitted to simply <i>opt out</i> if they so choose? Why can there not be room for a few "conscientious objectors" (as a friend of mine recently called it), who decide that the whole system of dating, romance, sexuality, and reproductive advantage is not for them (maybe because—and I won't press the point, since I am merely pleading here for tolerance—but maybe because they regard that whole system as fundamentally unfair—privileging traits like physical attractiveness that people have no control over and which there is no intrinsic moral basis for favoring—maybe because, that is, it is quite literally social Darwinism, in short) and that they'd rather have nothing to do with it? Why can we not be permitted to renounce? </p><p>If this is the solution that the young people are coming to, I say: more power to them. All they are really asking for, then—all <i>I </i>am really asking for—is the right to be permitted to live life according to one's own idiosyncratic values and preferences in peace. What objection could anyone have to that? I don't see that it concerns them. Why then are the social commentators and the Jonathan Haidts and the panic artists still hounding me? </p><p>And in thinking about this, my gut all in a turmoil, my fear all in a rage, the <a href="https://www.nku.edu/~longa/poems/housman_laws.html">old poem of Housman's</a> came back into my mind. The speaker in that poem, I was reminded all over again—that was me. <i>C'est moi! </i>"If my ways are not as theirs/ Let them mind their own affairs."—Yes, you hear that, Jonathan Haidt?! You hear that, panic artists?! What's it to you? What skin is it off your backs if I reject the sex-marriage-family system? "But no, they will not," Housman knows. The panic artists never quit. They never leave well-enough alone. They never live and let live. "[T]hey must still/ Wrest their neighbor to their will./ And make me dance as they desire/ With jail and gallows and hell-fire." </p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-28091640003004503222024-03-24T12:23:00.000-07:002024-03-24T12:27:41.197-07:00Digital Nomads<p> There was a time not long ago when I had four houses. I don't mean that literally, of course. I am not now and have never been a billionaire. But it was indeed my privilege to have, for a brief point in time, no fewer than four different places in my life where I could crash on any given night and expect to find a welcome. There was my usual place in Boston. There was my sister and brother-in-law's place, where I had mostly been staying since the start of the pandemic lock-down. There was my parent's home. And there was also a family place in Wyoming. And since I was working from home during the pandemic, I could complete my job from anywhere with a WiFi connection. So you better believe I took advantage of my mobility, hopping from one location to another and back again, until I had completed the full circuit multiple times. </p><p>Looking back on it, this sounds awesome and enviable to me, as it does perhaps to you too. I sometimes wonder why I ever gave it up. After all, what I am describing is nothing other than the "digital nomad" lifestyle, which came into vogue during the pandemic and was often depicted as the most desirable of possible existences. After all, since so many of our jobs had gone remote, we could theoretically do them from anywhere. So why not move around? Why not take that next Zoom meeting from Iceland, if we were so inclined? <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>And to be sure, I look back on the period fondly; but, if I am being honest in my recollections, I have to note that I was not actually very happy during that time. The truth was that I felt my career had stagnated. I was not learning anything new; I was repeating myself; and—worst of all—I had no significant future milestone to look forward to. I was pretty content with my work—it suited me well—but for that very reason I had nothing to look forward to. There was no next level to advance to; I had achieved an adequate adult existence, by my own limited standards. </p><p>And so, my constant horizontal mobility between residences became a kind of substitute for my lack of vertical mobility in my career. And as such, it could only prove effective in comforting me for so long. I would stay for a few weeks in one place, but then quickly felt I had to keep moving, because if I remained stationary too long at any one location, the ennui would catch up with me. And this is indeed precisely what happened. I recall one breathtaking trip I took in August of 2021, during which I stayed with a friend in Utah; then rented an Airbnb for two weeks in the same state; then stayed for a time at my family's place in Wyoming, where my dad eventually met up with me and we went to Yellowstone. And I was able to do my job the whole time from my computer. It's hard to beat that for an embodiment of the idyllic digital nomad lifestyle. </p><p>It sounds amazing; and yet, I was miserable. I was literally and figuratively going around in circles; spinning my wheels. And that misery caught up with me royal when I got home to Boston. </p><p>I remember that I had been reading John Williams's revisionist Western <i>Butcher's Crossing </i>on the trip. I had started it, fittingly enough, in Yellowstone, on a late night when I was camped out in an SUV listening to the indescribably eerie lowing of the elks. This would have been perfect enough, since the novel is about hunting in the Wyoming wilderness. But I didn't finish the novel until the afternoon when I finally got home to Boston, and was washing off the accumulated sweat of a day's worth of travel. And, in one of those synchronicities that happen a few precious times in an eclectic reading life, I happened to read that same afternoon the passage where Williams's protagonist returns from his hunt through the wilds of Wyoming, washes off the accumulated grime from his travels—and then is forced to confront that he has returned a changed man to a world that will never be the same. </p><p>"It's not the same, is it." the protagonist asks another character, upon his return. "No, it isn't," she replies—or something to that effect. "But I'm glad you came back." </p><p>Like Williams's character, I was not able from that day on to enjoy being a digital nomad. Trapped back in my Boston condo, I fell into a deep depression. I realized I needed a change—and a bigger change than could be provided by mere horizontal mobility. I needed a vertical dimension to my life again. It was around that time that I began to plot my exit from my full-time job and a return to school. </p><p>I am not the first to find something fundamentally unsatisfying in the life of the digital nomad. In my reading since, indeed, I have found that this dissatisfaction is something of a trope. Even before people could be <i>digital </i>nomads, that is to say, they were already complaining about the ennui that comes from excessive horizontal mobility. </p><p>Of course, before the era of widespread remote work due to the pandemic, this was a problem largely confined to aristocrats who could afford multiple residences and had no day jobs that required them to be reliably in one location all the time. But, those who found themselves in such a privileged position managed to complain about it for exactly the same reason that I discovered from my own experience as a traveler. </p><p>I was reading Thomas Bernhard's novel <i>Wittgenstein's Nephew, </i>for instance (wait, is it a novel? or more of an autobiographical screed? Unclear—maybe both). And while the Bernhard character spends much of his time moving from the city to his second home in the countryside and back again, he notes that he can never stay in one place for long without growing intensely dissatisfied. In describing this condition, Bernhard penned a passage that profoundly resonated with my years of pandemic living as a digital nomad: "Basically [...] I always want to be somewhere else, in the place I have just fled from. [....] The truth is that I am happy <i>only when I am sitting in the car</i>, between the place I have just left and the place I am driving to. [.... W]hen I arrive, I am suddenly the unhappiest person imaginable. Basically, I am one of those people who cannot bear to be anywhere and are happy only in between places." (McLintock trans.)</p><p>And reaching much further back in history, one finds that the ancients were acquainted with the phenomenon of the ennui of the digital nomad as well. I was reading Lucretius the other week, and in one passage, in an attempt to describe the emptiness and vanity of a life lived without the philosophical insights of his master Epicurus, Lucretius describes the characteristic plight of the aristocrats of his time who owned multiple houses—one in Rome and one in the countryside. </p><p>It is the same plight that Thomas Bernhard describes—the plight of the digital nomad: "Often a man leaves his spacious mansion, because he is utterly bored with being at home, and then suddenly returns on finding that he is no better off when he is out. He races out to his country villa [....] But the moment he sets foot on the threshold, he gives a yawn or falls heavily asleep in search of oblivion or even dashes back to the city. In this way people endeavor to run away from themselves." (Ferguson Smith trans.)</p><p>What is it that they are running away from? What was it that I was hoping I could escape—or at least outpace—by traveling from one location to the next in an endless cycle? Maybe fate itself. Mortality. Melancholia. Defeat. Failure. Whatever it was, it was the same spectral pursuer that Stephen Dobyns describes in a poem on this theme, "The Pursuit," from his collection <i>Cemetery Nights. </i>"Each thing I do I rush through," he writes, "so I can do/ something else." Why? Because there is something behind him, he writes. Something breathing down his neck. What is it? Does he know? Did Bernhard? Did Lucretius's aristocrats? Did I? </p><p>And have I escaped it since? Or have I merely outpaced it for a time?</p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-42014359933852790192024-03-22T14:17:00.000-07:002024-03-22T14:20:58.494-07:00No Pasarán Round 3<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBnfqOtBLr_nFK7XUwdlS8jD2kfVXYUNbhPt9Ab35KNv517O11j7fSFnRT7F8HPmOvUSHOFhdd7_LDgKeB-J3hSXBfvbI1JwCucgu_1B9J9I9YKaLlgDezt266ScYVFA68Va8EX1u2x4uEe61y-Izaw0b__XOC0CvfTcUzYud2Jdr7d9t9USywpSxW3fc4/s720/You%20shall%20not%20pass%205.jpg" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="720" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBnfqOtBLr_nFK7XUwdlS8jD2kfVXYUNbhPt9Ab35KNv517O11j7fSFnRT7F8HPmOvUSHOFhdd7_LDgKeB-J3hSXBfvbI1JwCucgu_1B9J9I9YKaLlgDezt266ScYVFA68Va8EX1u2x4uEe61y-Izaw0b__XOC0CvfTcUzYud2Jdr7d9t9USywpSxW3fc4/w640-h360/You%20shall%20not%20pass%205.jpg" width="640" /></a></p><p>I am updating my John Heartfield-inspired photomontage yet again (previous versions available <a href="http://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2023/10/homage-to-john-heartfield.html">here</a> and <a href="http://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2024/02/no-pasaran-round-2.html">here</a>) in order to promote J.D. Vance over Matt Gaetz. Vance has earned his place alongside Tucker and Trump as one of the leading pro-Putin turkey-vultures. The original Heartfield piece I am hearkening back to can be found <a href="https://colorgrammar.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/introduzione-alla-grafica/john-heartfield-no-pasaran-1936/">here</a>. </p></div>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-65254711311709105392024-03-22T10:45:00.000-07:002024-03-22T11:08:59.370-07:00J.D., Putin, and Trump <p> Earlier this week, Charles Sykes penned a <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/20/fdr-biden-isolationists-rhyme-00147881#:~:text=Charles%20Sykes%20is%20former%20editor,midst%20of%20a%20presidential%20campaign.">piece in </a><i><a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/20/fdr-biden-isolationists-rhyme-00147881#:~:text=Charles%20Sykes%20is%20former%20editor,midst%20of%20a%20presidential%20campaign.">Politico</a> </i>offering an apt analogy between today's so-called "America First" neo-isolationists and the isolationists of the 1930s. (It's not like they've made it hard to draw the comparison, by the way—they even borrowed the same slogan from their 1930s forebears!). Much as the isolationists back then refused to support efforts to resist Hitler's aggressive ambitions in Europe, today's isolationists want to give Putin free rein to trample over our allies and trigger the next world war. </p><p>In an effort to resist them, Sykes offers a lesson from history. He says that FDR, in a series of speeches leading up to the 1940 election, managed to make the isolationists appear ridiculous by the simple device of rhyming their names. "Martin, Barton, and Fish," he chanted in several speeches—which, as Sykes points out, perhaps lodges in the brain because it subtly evokes the same cadence as the childhood rhyme "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod." He therefore suggests that Biden ought to come up with something similar (while conceding that verbal fluency is not Biden's strong suit). <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>The updated version of the chant Sykes offers is "J.D., Jordan, and Trump," referring to the unholy trinity of Senate, House, and would-be White House officials who seem most primed to sell out our NATO allies in a future term, and bow down to Putin's territorial ambitions. And this proposed chant is a valiant effort, to be sure; but it it lacks the punch of "Martin, Barton, and Fish," in part because the first and second terms in the list do not rhyme. Sykes concedes as much and suggests to readers that they try to come up with their own version that would work better. I have been attempting to do so. </p><p>The best I've got so far is "Tucker, F**ker, and Trump." I've also considered "Putin, Tootin', and Trump." These at least manage to restore the rhyme. But they are still far from perfect, since both require the reader to know that the middle term in both sequences is meant to refer to J.D. Vance. I am hopeful, though, that as the Senator from Ohio's behavior becomes increasingly insufferable over time, this will start to seem as equally self-evident to everyone else as it does to me now. Who else could be meant by the neo-isolationist F-bomb I have in mind for the second proposed term?</p><p>After all, Vance is fast rising to the top of my list of the very worst members of this whole nefarious tribe. He seems possibly worse than all the others, in part because he obviously knows better. He therefore adds hypocrisy to the list of all the other vices of the neo-isolationists (such as cowardice and worship of bullies). Here, after all, is a man who once said in a text message to a friend that he was worried that Trump might turn out to become "America's Hitler." Yet look at him now. </p><p>What changed since that text to make Vance become Trump's number-one Senate lapdog? Maybe, as Vance claimed, he changed his mind about Trump (though the accumulated evidence in the years since—a coup attempt, family separation, worship of Putin, increasingly unhinged rhetoric, etc.—would hardly seem to suggest that Vance's 2016 text message was on the wrong track). Or maybe Vance decided that even if Trump becomes America's Hitler, he cares more about his own power and political future than he does the fate of the country's democracy. </p><p>Or maybe Vance decided that Trump will indeed become America's Hitler, and he thinks that's awesome. Maybe he's decided that a Hitler is exactly what America needs. After all, Vance is already <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/15/mr-maga-goes-to-washington-00147054">openly calling on a future Trump administration to defy Supreme Court orders</a>—openly demanding a constitutional crisis and trying to subvert the rule of law, in short. Vance is also voting to sabotage all efforts to resist Putin's warfare and aggression in Europe, mirroring the appeasement policy of 1930s isolationists who abetted Hitler's rise. (Recall that Hitler used <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2022/01/appeasement.html">very similar arguments to claim the Sudetenland that Putin is using today to try to hive off chunks of Eastern Ukraine</a>.)</p><p>Vance, after all, is the man who <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/15/mr-maga-goes-to-washington-00147054">says</a> he "do[esn't] really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another." Yet, as Ukrainian activists are reminding us, we'll have to start caring eventually. Even if we completely reject the notion of having any moral obligation to allied democracies overseas that are being invaded and butchered by our adversaries—even if we only apply the most crassly self-interested logic to the situation, after all, we'll have to admit eventually that Putin is only so many borders away from us. If we let him gobble up everyone who stands in between, he'll eventually be on our shores too. </p><p><i>Lawfare</i> editor Benjamin Wittes recently published a <a href="https://www.dogshirtdaily.com/p/blood-on-capitol-hill">Substack post</a> that featured photographs of a pro-Ukraine performance artist on Capitol Hill. She had covered her face and shoulders in dripping red paint, evoking blood, and donned a costume that made her the personification of Putin's Russia. She also held up a sign. It read: "Be ready world! If you don't stop me, I will stop you!" </p><p>The line put me in mind of the closing speech of Bertolt Brecht's warning about Hitler's rise to power, <i>The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. </i>In the play's closing monologue, penned for performances after the war, Brecht is in a position to reflect back on Hitler's reign, after his government had finally collapsed under the weight of its own evil, aggression, and hubris. This time, "the world stood up and stopped the bastard," the monologue runs (Tabori trans.), but Brecht warns us that another Arturo Ui could rise in future. </p><p>And that's just the problem we have right now—with Trump, Vance, Putin, and their whole interconnected gang of would-be authoritarians and their boot-licking toadies. The world hasn't heeded Brecht's warnings; and so, it hasn't yet stood up to stop the bastards. And that's what the pro-Ukraine activist's sign on Capitol Hill is warning us too. If we don't stop them, if we keep on failing to stop them, if we don't defeat Putin's friends and apologists in the next election, then our future is all too clear. It will be as blood-soaked as her costume warns. </p><p>And so, as Sykes suggests, let's stop being polite about the matter. Let us not fear to drop the verbal F-bomb if it will save us from the nonverbal A- or H- bombs in the years ahead. If a silly rhyme will help, let us utter it. You have heard my proposed chant. Tucker, F**ker, and Trump. It's time we stopped the bastards. </p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-41556425263693765962024-03-21T08:20:00.000-07:002024-03-21T10:52:01.061-07:00The Circuit Judge<p> I was listening to the oral arguments yesterday in the case to decide the short-term fate of the Texas immigration law SB4: the one that is notoriously designed to empower Texas state law enforcement officials to act as if they were immigration agents, with full powers of removal. The main thing that has emerged from the litigation is how utterly bizarre this statute is. It has layers upon layers of weirdness and illegality to it. </p><p>Perhaps the most stunning thing about SB4 is that it appears to contemplate the existence of a sort of Texas-specific deportation power. It describes Texas state officers removing people to foreign territory in Mexico. And, unlike the federal removal power, this Texas state deportation power has no exception for any humanitarian claim or U.S. treaty obligation, such as asylum or withholding of removal under the Convention Against Torture. How could this possibly be legal? <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>In the oral arguments before a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit, no one seemed able to defend this aspect of the bill. Even the attorney for Texas seemed unable to explain how the state could deport non-citizens from U.S. soil without running afoul of the doctrine of federal preemption and the supremacy of federal statute. The best he was able to do, ultimately, was to point to declarations from state officials attesting that the law would not be enforced that way in practice. </p><p>Another fall-back option he invoked was to say that, if the removal provisions are indeed unlawful, they could perhaps be severed from the bill without striking the rest of it down. The attorney for the people challenging the bill seemed to suggest, meanwhile, that if the court prefers to go that route, they could amend the lower court's preliminary injunction so that it at least kept the removal provisions on hold, even if they allowed parts of the rest of the law to go into effect. </p><p>Here, though, is where one of the judges—a Trump appointee—leapt for the jugular. It was the first time he had spoken during the oral argument, but he scarcely let up after that point. But even he seemed unable to articulate any remotely plausible case for how the Texas deportation provision would be lawful. Instead, he posed a number of hypotheticals in which he kept repeating, arbitrarily, "put the removal provisions aside." Are we putting them aside because we know they are indefensible? </p><p>Ultimately, though, this judge appeared to hide behind a merely procedural point—always the last refuge of judicial scoundrelism. Much as the Supreme Court momentarily allowed SB4 to go into effect earlier this week, without considering any of its glaring flaws, on a theory of deference to the appeals court—so too, this judge argued that the standard practice with over-broad preliminary injunctions was to throw them out entirely, and leave it to the lower courts to amend them. </p><p>In short, he had found the perfect procedural loophole to justify striking down the district court's injunction, without being able at any point to articulate a legal theory for how SB4's removal power provision could possibly survive on the merits. This way, he wouldn't have to defend it. He could effectively concede that it was lawless. But he could allow it to go into effect anyway, and content himself with thinking that he was merely following standard procedure. </p><p>I don't mean to imply that all the judges on the panel were reasoning in this way to a foreordained conclusion. Despite sitting on the notoriously arch-conservative Fifth Circuit, after all, the three judges were actually a fair ideological cross-section of the federal judiciary. There was one Democratic appointee, who didn't say much during the argument. There was one Republican Bush-era appointee, who seemed very even-handed and reasonable in the questions she asked. </p><p>But then there was this one obnoxious hack. And the worst thing about him wasn't even that he was flagrantly partisan, or that his questions revealed he had already made up his mind from the start. It was that he seemed so convinced and self-righteous about it. In his bullying, hectoring tone, he conveyed that he was utterly persuaded of the virtue and justice of his own procedural legerdemain. "I'm not doing this to cheat," he thinks: "I'm doing it because this is the <i>law."</i></p><p>These, surely, are the most dangerous people on the bench: the ones who are partisan hacks without even realizing they are partisan hacks. The ones who are so deep in the waters of their own smug ideology that they can't even see it is an ideology—they just think these are the <i>rules. </i>Listening to this judge, I seemed to hear the voices of generations of kindred pencil-necked fascists before him. This is the same tone of voice that judges must have used as they sent witches to the stake. </p><p>And then I remembered that Edgar Lee Masters—himself a lawyer as well as a poet, who must have argued cases before his share of pettifogging judicial fascists in his career—painted a portrait in verse of a circuit judge exactly like this one. The poem was even called "<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45921/the-circuit-judge">The Circuit Judge</a>." And what did the judge do in this poem? He, like this one, hid behind the skirts of "procedure." He "decid[ed] cases on the points the lawyers scored,/ Not on the right of the matter." </p><p>The result of such procedural sleight-of-hand in this case may well be that innocent people are deported to persecution and torture—if SB4 is allowed to go into effect—just as Masters's Circuit Judge sent people to the gallows on the basis of similar clever lawyering. Is there any justice, then, in this universe? Is there any hope for karma? If there is, Masters suggests, it is to be found in the fact that the lives that such judges lead is its own punishment. </p><p>"For worse than the anger of the wronged," Masters concludes, "The curses of the poor,/ Was to lie speechless, yet with vision clear,/ Seeing that even Hod Putt, the murderer,/ Hanged by my sentence,/ Was innocent in soul compared with me." </p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-8480093429757749642024-03-18T15:00:00.000-07:002024-03-18T15:15:45.198-07:00The Horror in the Heart of Farce<p> Michael Kruse published a great <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/17/how-donald-trump-uses-humor-to-make-the-outrageous-sound-normal-00146119">essay in </a><i><a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/17/how-donald-trump-uses-humor-to-make-the-outrageous-sound-normal-00146119">Politico</a> </i>yesterday, describing how Trump uses humor to make his extreme views and misbehavior more palatable to his audience. Trump has been described many times as more an entertainer than a politician, and it can't be denied that he has the beats and timing of an accomplished comedian. As Kruse's article points out, his rallies often have more the feel of an off-color stand-up routine than a stump speech. And as the piece goes on to observe, Trump is not unique in this regard. It's a tactic that has been deployed by other demagogues before him. </p><p>The strategy has also proved remarkably effective. On paper, after all, Trump's alleged crimes are horrifying (he has conspired to subvert a federal election; he has compromised the nation's security by willfully retaining classified documents, etc.). No less appalling are Trump's openly-avowed plans for the future: his commitment to building new detention camps, his promise of retribution against his political opponents, his pledge to carry out a mass deportation campaign that would rip apart communities. But by making a punchline of it all, it just... doesn't seem real. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>By appearing to invite laughter at these rallies, Kruse says, even while discussing his own crimes, Trump manages to diminish the horror of his past actions and his future plans (even to erase the impact they will have on their intended victims). He manages to make it all seem like a joke. Thus, anyone who doesn't chuckle must be either clueless or a scold. And his followers have run with this dynamic from the start of his first candidacy. "You shouldn't take him so <i>literally</i>," they tell us. "Can't you see he's <i>kidding</i>? If the stakes of all this were really as high as you say, how come we're all laughing?" </p><p>They are like the villagers in Ionesco's satirical play <i>Rhinoceros </i>(intended as a metaphor for the spread of fascism)<i>. </i>Even as all the people around them are falling victim to a mysterious plague that is turning the townspeople into rhinoceroses one by one, they still try nevertheless to convince the protagonist that he shouldn't be concerned. As one of them tells the play's hero—who remains in the final act the last human standing amidst a town that has willingly embraced rhinocerization: "You've no sense of humor, that's your trouble [....] You must learn to see the funny side of things." (Prouse translation). </p><p>The essential thing to stopping the plague of Trumpification, then, is to somehow show people that the humor merely conceals something that is not really funny at all. We have to learn to see "the horror in the heart of farce," as the closing monologue puts it, in Bertolt Brecht's<i> Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui </i>(Tabori trans.)—another play about fascism. We have to see what Trump is trying to obscure with all his wisecracks and ribbing. We have to see that behind the mask of laughter are the tears of the families he has separated and will separate in future; the people whose freedom he is threatening to take away. </p><p>I happened to be reading Gertrude Stein's <i>Tender Buttons </i>this afternoon, not expecting to find anything relevant to this, when I was confronted with a passage that seemed to describe exactly what Kruse is talking about. The passage could not be said to make sense in context—Stein's work is at the outer fringes of modernist literary experimentation, and mostly does not lend itself to interpretation. But its general impenetrability makes those few places where sense and meaning seem to intrude flash out like lightning: "If the persecution is so outrageous that nothing is solemn is there any occasion for persuasion."</p><p>Yes that's a period at the end of that sentence. Stein would not help us out so much or bow to such mere linguistic conventions as to give a sentence with the form of a rhetorical question the appropriate punctuation mark. But if we read it as an interrogative, we can see how it applies to our present. Trump's behavior, words, and campaign promises are so ludicrously awful that people can't even feel solemn about them. It all becomes an exercise in parody. And Trump milks this for all it's worth. He makes jokes, as Kruse points out, about his own criminal charges, minimizing any hope of "solemnity." </p><p>We have to somehow pierce the veil of this humor. We need to see the evil that his gags and pratfalls conceal. We need to learn to see the horror in the heart of Trump's farce. </p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-28494289483445074632024-03-18T07:34:00.000-07:002024-03-18T07:35:03.158-07:00Vladimir Chichikov<p> Over the weekend, Vladimir Putin sailed to victory in yet another "election" with a predetermined outcome. Among the various red flags that this was not in fact what any of us should consider a "free and fair" vote were that the leading opposition figure recently died while serving time on political charges in a Russian prison, most other forms of overt criticism of Putin's regime have been criminalized and silenced, and international observers were not allowed in most locations to monitor the polls. </p><p>Yet, as <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/russian-election-vladimir-putin-fake-legitimacy-moscow-ukraine/">an article in </a><i><a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/russian-election-vladimir-putin-fake-legitimacy-moscow-ukraine/">Politico</a> </i>makes clear, perhaps the most glaring indicator of the bogus nature of this process was the fact that the vote totals in some areas did not match the actual population count. The conclusion was unmistakable: in Putin's Russia, the dead rose up to vote. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>The article refers to this as Putin's "voting army of 'dead souls,'" a sly reference to Gogol's novel of the same name, in which the schemer Pavel Chichikov roams about the Russian countryside buying up the rights to count departed serfs as his own property. This was made possible due to the lag in official state registers, which were not always updated to reflect the real current demographics of an area. </p><p>The allusion is apt on multiple levels. Not only is Putin relying on a similar legal fiction to keep himself in power—pretending that the official counts of the population of a given district are still accurate, even if they include many people who have actually perished or left since the last official census. But Putin is also a kind of Chichikov—the banal dictator, the philistine autocrat. In the languid, complacent way in which he orders murders and assassinations, he is the embodiment of <i>poshlost. </i></p><p>Of course, Putin might have won the election anyways, without relying on such dirty tricks. It is an increasing tendency of our times that people can become autocrats by public acclamation; they can ride to power as "illiberal democrats," winning the approval of the majority of the population through invoking nationalism, xenophobia, cultural populism, and the false proposition that strongman rule will solve the country's problems. But still, Putin perhaps felt that it was better not even to risk it. </p><p>Putin must, after all, have noticed that many of his own citizens are not happy with his war or his decision to imprison or kill so many of his most popular opponents. The extent of this discontent is impossible to measure, since Putin has silenced all vocal dissent and jailed people for protesting his government. But, it is evident in small ways that many people throughout Russia disapprove of his executions and invasions. He would not need to clamp down so viciously on criticism if they did not. </p><p>And so Putin apparently decided that he would rather have the dead vote, in this last election, than take his chances with the living. Unsure of what real people would decide, he preferred to opt for the fictitious. Instead of holding an election to determine the next ruler of Russia, that is, he preferred the topsy-turvy approach that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Lösung">Brecht sardonically attributed to the postwar East German regime</a>: he decided it would be simplest to "dissolve the people and elect another." </p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-6692723367099356762024-03-16T09:47:00.000-07:002024-03-16T11:54:51.570-07:00Fear of Immortality <p> The centerpiece of Lucretius's <i>On the Nature of Things </i>is his extended argument against the possibility of an afterlife. The great expositor of the Epicurean system tells us that much of our misery in life stems from our fear of immortality. If only we would realize that our life spans are necessarily finite, then—he argues—we would appreciate that all suffering must naturally have an end, and that whatever did or did not happen to us while we were alive can have no meaning to us once we are no longer here. It is only theological systems that threaten us with eternal existence that would deny us this comfort, and so—in Lucretius's telling—if we can persuade ourselves that these systems cannot possibly be true, then life (and the afterlife too) would hold no more terror for us. </p><p>In other words, Lucretius holds out the same hope that the poets and novelists have often referred to, when contemplating the suffering of life. Death, more than one has contended, is the ultimate commutation of life's sentence. If existence offers us no other balm, it at least promises this: all suffering must have an ultimate terminus, because all life has a terminus. At some point, as Thomas Hardy puts it, the gods must finish their sport with their victims. "All life death does end," Gerard Manley Hopkins writes—and calls this promise the only "comfort serves in a whirlwind." And Algernon Charles Swinburne similarly urged us to take comfort from the fact that the dead "rise up never," and that "even the weariest river/ Winds somewhere safe to sea." <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>As I'd <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2023/12/ultimate-indignities.html">written recently on this topic</a>, however—before I'd read Lucretius or seen his bearing on the subject—the era of generative AI is raising a new specter of the fear of immortality. As in so many domains, the possibility of humankind creating a sort of artificial God—in the form of a super-intelligent AI—is reviving all sorts of old theological terrors, except this time in a pseudo-technological guise. The same has been true of the ancient fears of immortality and punishment after death that Lucretius addressed. </p><p>Some AI companies, for instance, are already advertising their ability to create <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/the-terrifying-ai-scam-that-uses-your-loved-ones-voice">digital avatars of the voices and likenesses of departed loved ones</a>, for the comfort of the bereaved. And while they hope in this way to entice people with the promise of immortality, for others the prospect has awakened old cosmological terrors. Thought experiments have pondered whether or not a future AI super-intelligence might not keep us alive indefinitely for its own sadistic purposes—uploading our intelligences to its hard drive and inflicting endless pain upon them until the end of time (or, at least until the energy reserves of the universe as a whole dry up, which would presumably put an end at some point to even the most powerful AI). </p><p>Do any of Lucretius's arguments against personal immortality provide us reassurance against this new theological terror? Let us consider them. </p><p>The ancient poet's strongest argument against the possibility of a future existence remains perhaps his refutation of mind-body dualism. Here, the arguments that Lucretius marshals are those philosophers still use today to cast doubt on the possibility of a firm distinction between body and spirit. He points out, for instance, all the ways in which physical changes to the body affect the subjective state of the soul: how much the taking of wine alters the condition of one's mind, for instance, or the taking of drugs—or the growth of the body from childhood to adulthood. Bertrand Russell makes much the same arguments against mind-body dualism in passing somewhere. And they are still pretty much irrefutable. </p><p>The implication, then, is that the spirit probably cannot outlast the body, since the two seem indissolubly linked. With the death of the body, therefore, must come the death of the mind. And so, the poets' "comfort serves in a whirlwind" still holds valid: all life must indeed have an end, and even the weariest river will at last empty into the calm sea of permanent nonexistence. </p><p>Besides—Lucretius asks—suppose we were to posit otherwise. Suppose we were to imagine that the spirit exists forever somewhere, separated out from the body. How would the spirit see the world around it?; how would it hear?; how would it speak? We can only imagine it doing so by means of physical organs, and so—Lucretius observes—we have only ever been able to depict or imagine disembodied "spirits" as having a kind of diminished carnal form, even though this is contradicted by the hypothesis's own premises. We know, then, that the spirit cannot exist outside of the body, for the simple reason that we don't seem able to conceive of what such an existence would be like. "Existence," thought, consciousness, experience, etc. all seem tied up with the presence of a physical body and its sensory organs. </p><p>All of this provides a partial answer to the specter of AI immortality, because the idea of having our consciousness uploaded to a computer for all time rests on a similarly suspect notion of a mind-body duality. We are meant to believe that if our thoughts and memories could somehow be encoded on a hard drive, then "we" would exist in that form. But we would do so without a body, without limbs, without eyes, without ears, and therefore would be unable to add to our experience or to accumulate new memories. Such a static and unchanging existence would be incompatible with any definition of life as we know it. And indeed, it sounds indistinguishable from death. It is like dying, but leaving utterly comprehensive notes behind us when we go that transcribed our prior thoughts. If someone left such notes on paper, rather than a hard drive, would anyone confuse such a death with immortality? </p><p>And as for the perpetual torment of our uploaded digital selves, how would we experience pain without nerves and a body? </p><p>But suppose we consider the possibility of reincarnation? Lucretius points out that there may indeed be such a thing, in the limited sense that the elements and primary particles that make up each of us undoubtedly end up being recycled into new life forms. Some of the poet's most moving passages consider precisely this great circle of life, in which we must inevitably weaken and die in order to furnish the materials for those who will come after us, and they for future generations in turn. Yet, Lucretius asks, if this is all we mean by "reincarnation," then in what respect does it differ from death? For the individual retains no personal memory of the prior uses to which its elementary particles were put, and so the individual personality has not really continued across different lives. </p><div>Lucretius considers one final scenario for immortality: the one that in later Christian centuries would be known as the resurrection of the flesh. Suppose, he asks, that someone—a god or a devil—reconstructed our bodies someday from our elementary particles, and breathed life into them again. Would we <i>then </i>have a future existence? Lucretius argues that no, we would still not live after our deaths, even then, because <i>we </i>would not really continue. There had been a break in the chain of consciousness, he says, and therefore the newly resurrected version of us would not really <i>be "</i>us."</div><div><br /></div><div>Here, the poet seems on slightly shakier ground. After all, as Norbert Wiener argues in <i>The Human Use of Human Beings, </i>human consciousness and life can only be described by the continuity of a <i>process, </i>rather than the continuity of certain particles. We are not made up of the same materials at our death as we were at our birth—we are a kind of Ship of Theseus, as we pass through life, replacing pieces as we go so that few if any of the original cells or molecules ultimately remain. </div><div><br /></div><div>And so, if we are to be regarded as continuous entities at all, it can only be because we maintain a certain continuous <i>process</i>. Wiener therefore argues that it would be possible in theory—if no doubt difficult in practice—to achieve the kind of teleportation that would later be depicted in <i>Star Trek. </i>We could be broken down in one location, and reassembled from different particles in a new one—and theoretically, so long as our <i>processes </i>remained the same, we would experience a subjective sense of the continuity of life. </div><div><br /></div><div>Could not something similar be done through a machine? Suppose that not only our thoughts and memories were uploaded to a machine, but something like a physical body were added to it as well. Suppose we were given robot arms and robot legs, robot eyes and robot ears. Would we experience any break in our existence sufficient to eliminate the subjective sense of the continuity of self? Or would we not rather feel that we had merely gone to sleep for a time and been reawakened? </div><div><br /></div><div>And so the age of AI has indeed managed to reawaken the specter of immortality. The ingenuity of the human mind seemingly cannot permit itself to rest in peace. No sooner had we escaped theological terror that we resurrected the same primal fear in the form of technological terror. We keep perversely denying ourselves the ultimate balm of the poets: the promise that life, no matter how much suffering it contains, must finally have an end. </div><div><br /></div><div>And if we do indeed succeed in prolonging existence past the physical destruction of our fleshy bodies, by artificial means, some might welcome it—for a time. But depending how it goes, we may also well have reason to regard life as a curse. We may soon start to agree even more keenly with Heine: "sleep is good; death is better/ But best of all is never to have been born." </div>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-42690879186329749352024-03-15T03:38:00.000-07:002024-03-15T07:31:19.519-07:00Making the Cut<p> The great Benjamin Wittes—of Lawfare and Rational Security 1.0 fame—just put out a Substack post sharing the happy news that he has finally <a href="https://www.dogshirtdaily.com/p/sanctioned-by-russia">made the list of Americans sanctioned by Russia</a> for activities opposing Putin's war. </p><p>Wittes has spent the past two years hoping for just such an honor. He has traveled to capital cities around the globe in order to project messages denouncing Putin's invasion and war crimes onto the walls of various Russian embassies. He had written previously that the highest validation of his efforts he could receive would be for Putin's government to publicly acknowledge in some way that he had at least succeeded in annoying them. Now, by appearing on the list of sanctioned individuals barred from traveling to Russia, he has finally achieved that. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>It is indeed an honor to appear on such a list. Anyone who has made themselves enough of an obstacle to the successful prosecution of Putin's war to be worth sanctioning by name is obviously doing <i>something</i> right. Admittedly, Wittes observes that the Russian authorities managed to spell his surname wrong. But it's unmistakable whom they are talking about nonetheless, when they declare that "Benjamin Witts — journalist," is no longer permitted to enter the country. <span></span></p><p>When one asks what it would take to be added to such a list, one can only conclude that it would be a direct index of the extent to which one had told the truth about the conflict. The more truth one had told, as a journalist, about Putin's invasion, the more likely one is to be sanctioned. This is why Tucker Carlson, say, will never make the cut of this particular honor roll. </p><p>And so the rest of us can only be left wondering: what are <i>we</i> doing wrong that we have not been so honored. Why is <i>my </i>name not on the list? What can <i>I </i>say to be worthy of this reverse honor? What are they trying to say about me, by leaving me off the list? Are they saying I'm no better than Tucker? </p><p>I am reminded of a poem by Brecht. He describes a famous author living in exile from a repressive regime (much like Brecht himself) who reads the newspaper one day to see a list of proscribed writers and their works in the dictatorship he fled. To his dismay, he discovers that his name is not on the list. How could this be? he wonders. What was he doing wrong, to remain un-banned by such a regime? "Have I not always told the truth?" he demands to know—"And here you are, treating me like a liar?" </p><p>So it is with the sanctions list. Anyone writing on this subject in any forum, who has <i>not </i>been banned by Putin's government, ought to feel insulted and aggrieved by that fact. <i>What</i>, they should demand to know—<i>have I not always told the truth about Putin's war? And here they are—treating me like a liar—by leaving me un-sanctioned? </i>The worst insult to a journalist or commentator's honor is to consider them so dishonest that they are not even threatening to a despotic regime. </p><p>And so, Wittes is right to be proud. More power to him. I offer my sincere congratulations for receiving the honor of Putin's displeasure. But now the question remains—why am I not included too? What can <i>I </i>do to get on the list? Have I not always told the truth—and here you are, treating me like a liar? Ban me too!</p><p>So often, writers and journalists who criticize oppressive regimes are left in doubt as to whether their words make the slightest difference. Does the fact that I spoke out on this issue—they wonder—mean anything? Does it reverse a single diktat, call back a single order of execution or assassination? What's the point of even speaking out against an autocrat like Putin—won't he just continue to steamroll his way through history regardless, brushing off the irrelevant stings of so many critics and writers as if they were gadflies? </p><p>The helplessness of the voice of mere protest in the face of social injustice, after all, is an ancient trope. Virgil's <i>Eclogues </i>is, among other things, a cry from the heart against the dispossession of small farmers at the hands of the imperial state; but even the greatest poet of the Latin-speaking peoples had to confess that his words were impotent to resist the policy. The <i>Eclogues </i>themselves show an awareness of this. One of his characters says sarcastically to another—at one point in the poems—something to the effect of: "what do you mean the land confiscations are still going forward? Did not a poet denounce them?" </p><p>Since writers and "speakers-out" have long been rumored to be essentially useless in this way—futile appendages in the fight against dictatorship and oppression—what greater moral vindication could a journalist receive than for a dictatorial regime to find them actually worth banning after all? Here they were, beginning to think that their work might not matter; that their words of protest might be mere drops of water rolling off Putin's back. And just then, when they had almost lost faith, here comes Putin's government to tell them: you are seen; you are heard. You have told the truth about my invasion enough by now that I have bothered to hate you. Truly an honor indeed!</p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-46042098641005513882024-03-14T11:44:00.000-07:002024-03-14T12:01:35.486-07:00Lucretian Physics<p> I've been reading <i>On the Nature of Things </i>this week, and it must be said that Lucretius is hit-or-miss in the extent to which his physical theories have stood the test of time. Some aspects of his physics have not aged well. For instance, he seems to contemplate that the sun may have to be reignited each morning at dawn, in order to complete its heavenly journey before vanishing in the sea (even though other passages refer to the "antipodes," showing that Lucretius was no flat-earther). </p><p>More plausibly, though no more correctly, he believes that sound is produced by emitting particles from the vocal cords that must reach the ears of strangers, in order to be heard, rather than being transmitted by means of a wave. And he seems to entertain, in at least one passage, that darkness may not be merely the absence of light—but the <i>presence</i> of a kind of murky haze or smoke. Something like the <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2022/11/de-selbys-paradox.html">"black air" that figures in the theories of Flann O'Brien's fictional crank scientist De Selby</a>. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>But there are other respects in which Lucretius reads to us now as remarkably prescient. Not only is the atomic theory that he helped to systematize and popularize still the basis for many of our physical models of the universe today; he also seems to have foreseen the principle of the conservation of matter. He knows—more than a millennium before Galileo—that lighter and heavier objects would fall at the same rate in a vacuum, presaging the concept of air resistance. </p><p>Furthermore, in his recently-popularized concept of "the swerve," he makes the case for the idea of a contingent rather than a purely deterministic universe, anticipating (if we are willing to stretch a point) the theory of quantum mechanics. </p><p>Finally, there is one domain of physics in which the current scientific consensus holds him to be wrong—but in which I still think, in my infidel heart, he's right. This is on the question of the extent of the universe. </p><p>In a <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-edge-of-universe.html">recent post on this blog</a>, I quoted from a speculative passage in Xavier de Maistre's <i>Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room, </i>in which he makes a seemingly irrefutable logical argument that the universe cannot have an end, but rather must be infinite. This is so, because any outer boundary or "wall" to the universe could only be identified by marking out the "inside" of the universe from something "outside" it—yet, there can be nothing outside the universe, by definition, because the universe is the sum of everything that is. And so, if we were to travel to the furthest reaches of the universe, we could never find an end of it. </p><p>From my reading this week, I have learned that Lucretius makes a similar argument—and maybe Lucretius even influenced the passage in de Maistre. Lucretius argues, along the same lines, that there can be no limit or outer boundary to the universe. Space, therefore, must spread out infinitely in all directions.</p><p>This is, of course, at odds with the modern scientific consensus. Our current models of the universe posit that spacetime itself was at one point coiled into an infinitely hot, infinitely dense singularity, and has been spiraling out ever since in a vast cosmic expansion. What was once confined in so small a space and is now expanding cannot be infinite. It must have an outer boundary, then, no matter how far removed. </p><p>Yet, Lucretius—like de Maistre—offers an argument against such a theory that is hard to contradict. He asks us where and how we might identify such a limit or wall to the universe. Suppose we were to travel to the outermost edge of the universe, and lob a spear toward that edge. Would the spear keep traveling past it? If so, then we are not truly standing at the edge of the universe. In the alternative, would it halt and ricochet back to us? But, in that case, what is intercepting it? The notion of there being a "wall" at the edge of space itself seems absurd, not to mention self-contradictory, in exactly the way de Maistre found it. </p><p>And so, Lucretius finds, there must be one exception to his general principle—repeated several times in the treatise—that all things must have a limit and their own intrinsic "boundary stone." (Ferguson Smith trans.) The universe does not. The universe—the sum of all possible space—has no boundary. It must be infinite, by definition. </p><p>Now, attempts have of course been made to refute Lucretius, and resolve the paradox he points to in favor of our modern physical theories of a limited and expanding universe. Wikipedia addresses the controversy in its article on the "Javelin argument" (apparently Lucretius's argument about the spear is famous enough to merit its own entry), and the online encyclopedia finds that Lucretius has been refuted on this score. The article complacently <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_argument">declares</a>: "The argument fails in the case that the universe might be shaped like the surface of a hypersphere[.]" And what is a hypersphere? It is defined in turn as a sphere existing in n-dimensions. </p><p>And here is where I feel that modern physical theories are not so much resolving the paradox as restating it. For, the only way they have found to refute Lucretius's argument is to gesture to something that exists in dimensions that the human brain cannot perceive or even <i>con</i>ceive. And since Lucretius's whole case is an argument from conceivability, this response effectively concedes the main point. The notion of a limited, bounded universe is indeed inconceivable, just as Lucretius said. And what is philosophy but an attempt to define the limits of the conceivable? </p><p>Let us clear up at once a common misconception on this score. Philosophy does not say that we are forbidden from invoking inconceivable notions because of some sort of arbitrary law or dogma of its own devising. It says that we are not allowed to appeal to the inconceivable because any such appeal must fail on its own terms. It must fail to articulate a cognizable thought. And so, it is not really saying anything at all. It is not so much a false statement as a non-statement. It is, in the terms of the logical positivists, nonsense. </p><p>But then, as I've also <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2023/05/stella-maris.html">argued at length elsewhere</a>, there are a number of domains in which we appear to be forced to conceive the inconceivable anyways, despite its apparent impermissibility. Maybe the notion of the "hypersphere" enclosing the bounded universe is another one of them. But we shouldn't then pretend that this is all easy, or that we've solved the underlying paradox. All we've really managed to do is to push it back a step. </p><p>We can perhaps concede that the universe may exist in a form impossible for the human mind to conceive, after all: but then the paradox just becomes: how are we able to talk about it? What do we mean by a "hypersphere," when its alleged traits transcend the limits of our categories of perception? </p><p>Perhaps we can borrow from Wittgenstein his <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2024/02/revisiting-tractatus.html">concept of the "bounded whole."</a> We can say that the universe—<i>for us</i>—must be infinite, in the sense of containing everything, just as life, <i>for us</i>, must be endless, since we cannot conceive of our own non-existence. Yet, at the same time, the universe may have an end, just as our lives have an end. </p><p>In order to render this paradox somewhat more conceivable Wittgenstein offers—in the <i>Tractatus</i>—an analogy to the field of vision. We cannot see the "boundary" of our field of vision. There is no way to perceive the edge, for in order to see the edge, we would have to see something beyond it: thus, it would not really be an edge. Perhaps the universe is something like this: a whole, a totality—<i>for us</i>—and yet not <i>the </i>whole, not <i>the </i>entirety, of everything. Perhaps both life and the universe are "bounded wholes." </p><p>But once again—have we solved the paradox? Or merely postponed it? For what is a "bounded whole" but a contradiction in terms? What have we achieved other than to prove that, once again—in even the most elementary matters of space and time and cognition—we are forced very quickly to accept that we don't know what we're talking about. We are forced to explain even the tenets of our own perceived reality by recourse to self-contradictory and inconceivable ideas—to nonsense, in short. </p><p>And so we find, yet again, that philosophy does not so much enlighten us to the truth of the universe as teach us intellectual humility. It reminds us, as Hume put it, of the "whimsical condition" of humankind, in which we "must act and reason and believe," and yet we "are not able, by [the] most diligent enquiry, to satisfy [ourselves] concerning the foundation of these operations, or to remove the objections, which may be raised against them." </p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-11431277698570029302024-03-10T12:37:00.000-07:002024-03-10T12:48:55.180-07:00No Trust<p> The progress of our civilization seems to be inseparable from the parallel growth in the arts of deception. Each new increase in economic efficiency and the speed of communications in our history has brought with it new opportunities for criminals to scam and gull the unwary. We still use the term "wire fraud" to describe the galaxy of interrelated crimes made possible by the growth of new forms of communication in the twentieth century, for instance. </p><p>And even before that, the archetype of the con artist, the grifter, seemed inseparable from the American ideal of social and geographic mobility. I wrote glowingly on this blog, in a <a href="http://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2024/03/first-known-when-lost.html">recent post</a>, about how in America—compared to my recent two-week stint in England—I feel free to "define myself how I choose. Here, my future and destiny are my own to make." But the dark corollary of that same freedom may be an instability of self—an increased capacity for disguise. If people can be whoever they want to be; does that risk turning us into a nation of imposters? <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>The recent growth of generative AI is no exception to the rule of fakery following technology in American life. Like every other advance in information and communications technology before it, it has enabled people to practice ever-more sophisticated varieties of deception. </p><p>We all remember the recent scandal of the fake robocall targeting New Hampshire voters, which falsely claimed to be coming from Joe Biden, and which used deepfake audio recordings to convincingly mimic his voice. And the <i>New Yorker </i>ran a story this week about an <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/the-terrifying-ai-scam-that-uses-your-loved-ones-voice">even more chilling example</a>: cybercriminals are increasingly targeting ordinary families by using deepfake impersonations of their loved ones. The perfectly-lifelike digital clones of their relatives' voices claim to be kidnapped over the phone, then beg and plead for their relatives to wire "ransom" payments to the scammer.</p><p>The U.S. is still the world's leader, then, in producing new forms of con artist. The same forces that make us the bleeding edge of every innovation in capitalist development and the growth of technological civilization—our social mobility, our belief in the capacity for self-definition and self-reinvention—have also made us a hotbed for scammers. This is the dark underbelly of the American promise. For every genuine advance in the world's technological and productive capacity that we have helped bring about, we mint an even greater number of counterfeits. </p><p>Is this not evident even in our pop culture and media? Our favorite stories from politics and business are those involving con artists. Elizabeth Holmes and George Santos are the trickster deities of our current pantheon. And maybe part of the reason we like these tales of scammers being unmasked is that they speak to our deepest fears as a culture. We know that we are especially vulnerable as a society to falling victim to con artists and fakes; but we can feel momentarily safer against this omnipresent threat if we can identify one or two examples of them as scapegoats, and gather the community together to denounce and cast them out.</p><p>But then, even after we have pronounced the ritual anathema against the unmasked fraud and deceiver—how much of our politics and business remains dominated by even bigger frauds? Elizabeth Holmes was small potatoes compared to Elon Musk. Yet the latter has been permitted to perform a similar masquerade—promising pie-in-the-sky technological leaps to gullible investors—with perhaps the only difference between them being that Musk is able to hire more and better engineers. And what is Donald Trump but a George Santos that can't be so easily expelled? </p><p>We may feel momentarily safer casting out the scapegoat, then—but the bigger cons are still among us, and pose far more of a threat. </p><p>It's no coincidence, then, that America is both the home to technological innovation—and endlessly proliferating varieties of deception; both social mobility and the concept of the protean self—and the imposter, the social chameleon, who is able to be all things to all people in an effort to steal their money or win their votes. Indeed, there is a reason the United States was home to the first "confidence-man"; for the term was invented here in the mid-nineteenth century. </p><p>I was thinking about all of this because I was reading Herman Melville's <i>The Confidence-Man </i>this week—his deeply strange final novel, often seen as a forerunner of the literary experiments of the twentieth century. The novel was apparently inspired by contemporary newspaper accounts of the original "confidence-man"—a scam artist whose unsophisticated gambit was to approach people, ask them if they had sufficient confidence in him to let him take their watch or wallet for safekeeping, then stroll off. From this one central premise, the novel becomes a complete exploration of the theme of deception and imposture in American life. </p><p>Melville's book—set on a river boat on the Mississippi—is preoccupied throughout with the increased capacity for fraud and chicanery made possible by the social mobility of American life. As westward expansion brought an ever-widening circle of complete strangers into sudden contact with one another, people had to confront the fact that there was no obvious way to tell the difference anymore between the real and the fake. Much like the counterfeit bank notes that serve as a symbol in the novel, it was becoming ever more difficult to discern whether the people one encountered in American life were telling the truth about themselves. When everyone was a stranger, everyone could reinvent themselves with each new encounter; they could inhabit any social role they pleased. </p><p>Such a prospect must have been freeing for many—compared to the stifling fixed hierarchies of the Old World; but it also left open a vast field of play to the mountebanks. The novel follows a series of different con artists—who may in fact all be different guises of the same central "confidence-man"—as they try to trick and gull the other passengers on the boat. </p><p>In so doing, the confidence-man runs through the whole playbook of methods that cybercriminals and con artists still deploy in "social engineering" today. The different personas and alter egos of the confidence-man all vouch for each other, for instance, creating the pretense of a chain of verification. The confidence-man generates a sense of scarcity and urgency as well; after baiting the hook with an apparently tempting offer, he then threatens to withdraw it, so his victims are forced to act before they have time to second-guess his veracity. He also practices the ancient art of "cold reading"—throwing out vague guesses about the personal histories of his interlocutors, until he is able to find one that lands, and which he can then use to convince them he knows them intimately. </p><p>But above all else, the confidence-man is able to succeed in winning the trust of his victims through sheer audacity. In ordinary life, after all, few of the people we meet have the chutzpah to simply come out and ask us for money; few would demand that we show "confidence" in them enough to trust them with our wallets on a first meeting. So, when a stranger does so, we are thrown off balance. </p><p>Not only this, but the confidence-man has the audacity to seem <i>entitled </i>to such implicit trust. He is righteously aggrieved and wounded, when people doubt his sincerity. He invokes the tenets of religion, whenever people ask too many questions about his claims. Is not charity a fundamental precept of Christianity, he asks? And is not trust essential to charity? How can they be so cruel as to doubt him? Is not trust another name for faith—and is it not faith alone that saves? Is doubt in man—one of God's creatures—not a mere step away from doubt in the Creator? Is mistrust of the word of a stranger not a version in microcosm of distrust in divine providence and grace? </p><p>With such honeyed words, Melville's confidence-man is typically able not only to convince his victims to play along—but actually to apologize and ask for forgiveness. The confidence-man then toys for a moment with whether or not they are worthy of his forbearance. He considers whether he should not revoke his original offer (generating scarcity and urgency again). "I know not whether I should accept this slack confidence," says the confidence-man at one point: "but an eleventh-hour confidence, a sick-bed confidence, a distempered, death-bed confidence, after all." To which, one of his victims cries out, in an effort to win him back: "I confide, I confide; help, friend, my distrust!"</p><p>The analogy to religious belief is obvious and intended; and on one level, then, the novel could perhaps be read as a sort of anti-religious polemic. Faith in the church and its promises is presented as the ultimate confidence-game: here, we are asked to have implicit trust in something that is belied by everyday experience. We are told that providence is watching over us, even as we see each day unjustifiable horror and suffering all around us. </p><p>The confidence-man deliberately plays with such resemblances, insinuating doubts about God's justice and the equality of human law, even as he claims to disdain such doubts. When presented with one man's tale of injustice at the hands of the New York police—ultimately, he was imprisoned for a murder than another man committed, after the latter was released due to the influence of his "friends" in high places—the confidence-man slyly observes: </p><p>"It might be injudicious there to lay too much polemic stress upon the doctrine of future retribution as the vindication of present impunity. For though, indeed, to the right-minded that doctrine was true, and of sufficient solace, yet with the perverse the polemic mention of it might but provoke the shallow, though mischievous conceit, that such a doctrine was but tantamount to the one which should affirm that Providence was not now, but was going to be."</p><p>It would be a one-sided reading of the novel, however, to merely equate the confidence-man to the overweening promises of religion and call it the key to Melville's intention. For the novel, despite its extended portrayal of deception and fraud, is not entirely on the side of distrust. </p><p>The book's opening scene contrasts two signs, offering two radically opposing ways of navigating the country's new social world of uncertainty and protean social identity. One sign, in the barber's window, says: "no trust." In a world populated by scammers and con artists, the sign implies, everyone must pay cash. No credit will be given to people who may very well not be who they claim to be, or anything close to it. The other sign, however—held aloft by a "deaf-mute" (who may himself be the confidence-man in yet another disguise)—invokes "charity." And it reminds passers-by of the Gospel's definition of charity, which "believeth all things."</p><p>The cost of adopting the approach of "charity," in navigating American life—Melville implies—is inevitably to get duped. If one trusts and believes the imposters on the other end of the phone, with their AI-generated voices and audio clones—then one will be defrauded. </p><p>But the book holds open the possibility that it is better nonetheless to be the sort of person who is capable of being defrauded than to be someone whom no one can ever fool. The confidence-man in the book, after all—just like the AI deepfake artists and imposters of today—is able to succeed in part through exploiting people's better natures. He obtains money for a benevolent society under false pretenses, because he is able to appeal to people's desire to help a stranger and do right by humanity. Likewise, today's AI imposters succeed because people love their relatives and family members and—when the situation is dire enough—will think nothing of wiring money to a stranger in order to make sure they are safe. </p><p>If people did not have charity in their hearts, no con artist would ever succeed. If people did not care about their friends and loved ones, no one would ever extract cash from them with a fake "kidnapping" story. Is it not better, therefore, to be someone who can be duped, than to be someone who cannot? Is it not better to hold up the sign that reads "charity," rather than the worldly wisdom of the one that reads "no trust"—<i>even if </i>the consequence of obeying the former is to be out a few dollars? </p><p>Well before I read Melville's novel and saw its immediate bearing on this theme, I was <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-con.html">making this same point in a recent blog</a>. I wrote about how I was hit up for cash by a panhandler in London. Even when he was giving me the set up for the ask, as I wrote, I knew he was lying. I knew it was a grift. But I gave him a few bills anyway, because I had bills to spare. And eventually, I decided that, instead of being ashamed of how easy it was to take advantage of me, I would take pride in that fact. </p><p>I quoted on this score a line from Stefan Zweig, with which Melville's novel would appear to be in ultimate sympathy: "that was the kind of person one ought to be [...] a person who'd rather be betrayed than betray." (Blewitt trans.)</p><p>Charity is gullible, because charity is blind. In his beautiful poem about the "blinded bird," Thomas Hardy portrays the cruelly blinded song bird of the title as the embodiment of charity. Here, in the flesh, is the paragon of the gospels. Here is a creature, writes Hardy, that hopeth and endureth all things, just as Paul commanded. The bird is the victim of fraud—both the fraud of the cruel humanity that blinded it, so that it would sing for their amusement amid endless darkness—and the fraud of a divine providence that allowed this to happen ("all this [...] with God's consent, on thee!" as Hardy writes). </p><p>Yet still, the poem suggests, it is better to be the blinded bird than the one who blinded it. It is better to "be betrayed than to betray," as Zweig writes. It is better to be duped than to be the duper; better to be gulled than to be the cunning "confidence-man." For what, after all, is truly divine, Hardy asks? Who is truly acting in the spirit of the Gospels? It is this bird himself. </p><p>This, then, is the other side of our country's vulnerability to con artists: in some fundamental sense, it actually speaks well for us. We are a nation of con-artists because we are also a nation of the gullible. "Confidence-men" proliferate among us because there are so many ripe targets. And we fall victim to these charlatans most of all because of that which is best in us: we are an optimistic people; we are ready to believe that the future will be better than the past. We are willing to put our trust in human nature, no matter how many times that faith is disappointed. Even though we are surrounded by strangers, by people who have reinvented themselves, by people who have started new lives in this country and may claim to be whoever they want to be, our default is still to start by believing them. </p><p>We have confidence, even if unwarranted. We have charity, though blind. We hopeth, endureth all things. What is divine? These Americans. </p><p>The cost of this trust may indeed be that we often get ripped off. We are easy prey to the Musks and the Trumps of the world. But they succeed so well, only because they are able to exploit that which is best in us. And is it not better, at last, that we can be gulled? Is it not better to be the deceived that the deceiver? Is it not better to be the blinded bird, than the one who blinded him? Better to be betrayed than to betray?</p><p>Even after all the tricks of the confidence-man are displayed, Melville seems to suggest—even then, perhaps, we should still opt for the sign that reads "Charity" over that which reads "No Trust." </p>Josh Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06994898585973612023noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-6779558111058643482024-03-09T16:00:00.000-08:002024-03-09T16:56:59.255-08:00Deontological Welfare<p> Earlier this week, the City of San Francisco <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/06/san-francisco-voters-drugs-police-00145288">made headlines nationwide by enacting a series of right-leaning ballot measures</a>. The incongruity made for good copy in newsrooms far removed from the Bay Area: here was the country's most liberal city enacting measures that rolled back welfare protections. A friend of mine who was in a position to actually vote on these measures insisted, however, that some at least of the real policy issues at stake were more complicated than the simplistic headlines would suggest. </p><p>He called me up earlier in the week, while considering these measures, and asked for my opinion on the drug screening one. The measure, in his telling, was designed to identify welfare recipients at risk of substance abuse disorder, and direct them to public services. He felt genuinely torn about whether or not this was a good idea. "What's the confusion?" I asked. "It's some sort of conservative anti-welfare thing. Evil. Bad. Vote no. I don't see the dilemma." <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>He asked me how I could justify this unreflective knee-jerk opposition. How, he asked, did I know that the policy wouldn't "work"? How did I know it wouldn't yield positive results, by directing more people to substance abuse counseling? He insisted that the measure would not necessarily deprive a single low-income person of their cash benefits from the city. All it would do is require them to fill out a questionnaire and—if they were flagged as being at risk of drug abuse or alcohol addiction, attend some meetings. "That's all they have to do," he said—"just attend!"</p><p>I had to admit that I didn't actually know whether the policy would "work" or not. I had no sound empirical or consequentialist reasons to doubt its wisdom. Maybe it would actually reduce the incidence of drug abuse and addiction in the city. "Besides," my friend argued (and I'm collapsing our larger conversation into a few sentences here for the sake of simplicity), "we already criminalize drug possession. If you're worried about this measure being punitive or coercive—it's actually much less punitive or coercive than our current default approach to drug use. This way, we're actually finding and diverting people to services <i>before </i>they are subject to the more coercive approach."</p><p>He had a point here too; still, though, it was just obvious to me that I would never vote for such a ballot measure, were one to come before me. It was icky. As a friend of my friend pointed out in turn, it tied together drug use and welfare use into some kind of stigmatizing discursive knot. It was Republican-y. In short, it couldn't be good. But did I have any better reason for my viewpoint than that? </p><p>Maybe, like so many of us, I am just intellectually lazy. I don't have the time or inclination to digest empirical studies of every local policy initiative that comes before me (let alone those concerning cities where I've never lived). So, I default to certain moral heuristics. Or to a sense of tribal identification. I'm "not the sort of person" who backs restrictions on welfare. Simple as that. </p><p>But, in reflecting upon it further, there seemed to me something more rationally defensible behind my reflexive opposition than that. </p><p>It wasn't, to be sure, that I had a greater understanding of the empirical evidence. My friend and I, when we read some of the available arguments against the policy, both shared a feeling that they were over-confident in their rejection of the possibility that the policy would "work" on empirical grounds. Another friend of his from the area, for instance, argued at length that the policy was not supported by the available data. Neither of us felt such certainty was warranted. </p><p>Now, there are certainly some strong empirical arguments against such welfare restrictions. His friend pointed to the experience of peer nations, indicating that public benefits should generally be made as universal as possible: any changes should be toward broadening, not restricting access to them, therefore, both to increase popular support for the policies and to avoid creating a stigmatized underclass. I've <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2021/02/universal-benefits-please.html">made such arguments myself</a>. </p><p>Still, I know in my heart these arguments are not the real reason I would vote "no" on such a ballot measure. I'm not so confident in empirical studies as that. I've quoted before <a href="http://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2024/02/anticipated-reversals.html">Swift's dictum</a>—and I stand by it—that there are fads and fashions in the empirical sciences, as much as in the humanistic disciplines, and that one is scarcely more entitled in one as in the other to treat a currently ascendent position as the ultimate truth. Empirical studies in the social sciences are hardly immune to the zeitgeist, that is to say—and the things "the studies" all indicate today could be entirely reversed ten years from now. </p><p>Was the real reason for my opinion, then, just a moral heuristic after all? I thought about it some more, and decided not. </p><p>I reminded my friend that, even if I had worked in my previous job as a "policy analyst," we had to keep in mind that I was a "policy analyst" for a human rights organization. And the whole thing with human rights is that they are deontological. They are binding regardless of circumstances or consequences. And so—one seldom has to worry, in that line of work, about whether "the data" or "the studies" support a particular position. </p><p>My friend suggested that this just meant I should therefore keep my nose out of certain kinds of policy issues. Like this ballot measure. The question as to which cash welfare programs were more effective, and how they should be structured to maximize the common good, was a quintessentially consequentialist and empirical one. If my preferred moral approach had no particular bearing on it, that was fine—but I should simply keep out of it, in that case. I should just refrain from expressing an opinion, rather than attempting to wield deontological tools in a task for which they were fundamentally ill-suited. </p><p>I was not content with this, however. Because it seemed to me that there was something <i>deontologically</i> wrong with this particular ballot measure too, even if I could not put my finger on it. </p><p>As the conversation developed, my friend and I both eventually spotted the deontological flaw. In tandem, that is to say, we came to the same realization: the policy was bad, <i>regardless</i> of what the empirical studies might show. (In the end, by the way, my friend didn't vote for it, having come to this conviction, or at least accepted that it planted enough of a seed of reasonable doubt to refrain from backing the measure.)</p><p>I started to think of it this way: the fundamental problem was that the policy failed to respect people's moral equality. It compromised their autonomy, by assuming that they were not fit to make their own decisions. It said, in effect: "okay, you can have this welfare check; but you have to prove to us that you deserve it. You have to jump through our hoops." </p><p>Instead of being a public benefit, a universal moral entitlement that no one should ever fall below a threshold of bare subsistence, then, this turned welfare into a form of charity—and the worst kind of "charity" at that—the kind where, as a <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2013/10/what-safety-net-part-one_7.html">character in the <i>Grapes of Wrath</i></a><i> </i>puts it: they "make you crawl" for it. </p><p>The policy's failure to respect people's moral personhood and equality, moreover, points to a second deontological problem with it: it violates people's right to due process. After all, by tying a drug screening to a cash benefit, the program is implicitly saying that people on welfare are more likely to be addicted to drugs. And let's say for a minute that that's true—and maybe it is, who knows? (I'm not good with empirical knowledge, as I've explained). But suppose it's true—it's still <i>not fair</i>. </p><p>The policy is still <i>stereotyping</i> people, that is to say, and the moral problem with stereotypes has nothing to do with whether or not they are "true" as a matter of probabilities or group averages. The problem with stereotypes, in other words, is not statistics. The problem is that they deprive individual members of the group in question of their right to be treated <i>as</i> individuals. It deprives them of their right to due process in assessing their individual case. </p><p>Take it as a given, then, for purposes of argument, that the majority of people receiving cash benefits have a drug problem; or at least, in the alternative, that the majority of people with a drug problem are on welfare—and that there is therefore some rational statistical connection between these two policy measures. Even then—the point is—if there's still even <i>one </i>person on welfare who does <i>not </i>have a drug problem, then the policy still treats them unfairly. It forces them to take a screening based on no information about who they are <i>individually</i>, but solely based on a stereotype about the group to which they belong. </p><p>The policy is therefore overinclusive, in an equal protection clause sense of the term, and thereby deprives them of due process. </p><p>The policy does though—it has to be said—appeal to a different sense of deontological "fairness." (And no doubt many of its right-leaning proponents actually support it on this basis, rather than on any empirical studies of their own—for who among us, when the chips are down, is <i>really </i>a moral empiricist, I ask?) And this alternative sense of fairness goes something like this: </p><p>"If people are going to get a hand-out from the city, they should have to <i>earn</i> it. It's only <i>fair</i> to ask them to do the bare minimum: which, in this case, just means showing up for a substance abuse meeting. How hard is that?"</p><p>The problem with this line of reasoning, though—or one of the problems with it—is that the people most able to attend the counseling appointment are probably the ones with the least dire need for basic assistance. The policy is thereby restricting cash welfare to the segment of the impoverished who are probably most likely to get their lives together on their own. </p><p>And for some of the policy's proponents, no doubt, this is a point in its favor: something along the lines of: "God helps those who help themselves." Which, as a character puts it in Joseph McElroy's novel <i>Cannonball, "</i>is true[—]except about God helping." And that's the problem. </p><p>The principle of "God helps those who help themselves" (which a different character in the novel misattributes, as many people in our society still do, to the Bible) is true in so far as it is a merely empirical statement that the rich tend to get richer and the poor to get poorer. But if the point of welfare is in part to <i>alter</i> this dynamic, rather than encourage it, then at some point it has to help people who <i>cannot </i>help themselves. </p><p>If we are okay with some members of society simply starving or perishing, because—in our judgment—they deserve it—then this argument will not hold much water. </p><p>But if we regard it, as I think we should, as an element of the social contract that we guarantee that every member of the community will not fall below a certain bare threshold of subsistence—if we say, that in exchange for trading in some of your freedoms by joining a political community, there are certain rights and benefits you can expect to receive in return, and this is one of them—then we shouldn't enact a policy that is most likely to exclude from assistance precisely the people who have the greatest need for it. </p><p>The fact that this is all rooted in moral equality too—as my friend and I discovered in thinking through the deontological reasons for opposing the policy—prompts me to a further reflection: because here, in this core idea, we see the fundamental unity of modern liberalism. </p><p>Many people—particularly of the libertarian or self-described "classical liberal" description—often accuse modern liberals of being inconsistent. How come modern liberals support people's right to individual autonomy and private choice in so many civil liberties and cultural domains, they ask—yet they also favor "big government" when it comes to the welfare state? </p><p>The arguments above suggest why it may in fact be the libertarians who are inconsistent, rather than the welfare state liberals. For the state's obligation both to respect its citizens' private choices and to protect them from falling below a certain threshold of poverty are rooted in the same basic principle: the state's obligation to protect those who can't protect themselves. It means protecting minorities in the exercise of their choices from the retaliation of the majority who disapprove of them. And it means protecting those least able to support themselves from the abyss of sheer destitution. </p><p>Perhaps, then—to channel Thomas Hardy—we can say that the principle of "helping those who help themselves" may be a "morality good enough for a deity"—but here on Earth, among humans, we have created the liberal state in order to achieve the opposite. The whole point of the liberal state is to help those who <i>can't</i> help themselves—and that implies protecting the individual and the minority from the tyranny of the majority—for the individual and the minority are always weak relative to the latter—but also means providing for the basic economic needs of the most vulnerable. </p><p>For all the talk, moreover, about how "classical liberals" were supposedly more consistent on these points than modern welfare state liberals, I note that it was a nineteenth century liberal who prompted this reflection in me in the first place—a Whig in the classical liberal mode—namely, Lord Acton. In a simple, brief, throwaway observation in his <i>Lectures on Modern History, </i>he makes a point that ought to put to rest forever any confusion on the score of why modern liberals care about <i>both</i> individual political and civil rights <i>and </i>economic and social rights (such as the right of the poor to receive cash welfare): </p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>Progress has imposed increasing sacrifices on society, in behalf of those who can make no return[....] This growing dominion of disinterested motive, this liberality towards the weak, in social life, corresponds to that respect for the minority, in political life, which is the essence of freedom. It is an application of the same principle of self–denial, and of the higher law.</i></p></blockquote><p>In both cases, that is to say—political rights and economic rights—the core idea is the same: the protection of the weak from the strong. The protection of those who can't help themselves from those who can.</p><p>It is modern welfare state liberalism, not libertarianism, then, that has the true conceptual unity. The heart of it all is the same: moral equality, which requires the state to undertake obligations precisely to those members who are in no position to rescue themselves. I can think of no better label for such a doctrine than Lord Acton's: "the higher law." </p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-15872061799463541462024-03-08T16:35:00.000-08:002024-03-08T16:39:18.034-08:00The Last Days of D.C.<p> Earlier today, a colleague forwarded me a thread of messages from an email list serving left-wing inside-the-beltway PR professionals. The consensus of the group could be summarized as follows: the Biden campaign is an embarrassment; the president is not paying enough attention to people like themselves and heeding their advice; this is the sole reason his polling numbers are in the dumps; and now, as a result, the entire 2024 campaign is effectively doomed from the start. </p><p>A few of them even said, in effect, "I'm giving up on this round. I assume Trump is going to win; so I'm just going to wait out the next four years and come back when there's a younger, more lefty candidate running in 2028." <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>There were several things annoying about all this at once. First, there was the incredible hubris of their self-satisfied belief that, if only the administration would listen to people like them, their problems would be solved. There was the enormous self-complacency involved in refusing to learn any of the lessons of the past ten years, during which progressive advocacy organizations adopted ever more radical left-wing rhetoric and posturing, and only seemed to alienate the U.S. public <i>more </i>in the process. <span></span></p><p>There is the cowardly type of cynicism involved in predicting doom, and declaring preemptively that no one listens to them, so that when disaster falls they can claim to have been right all along. There is the total obliviousness and unwillingness to even consider the possibility that it may be precisely <i>because </i>Democratic politicians listened to people like them (like me, too, I must add—I have been one of them; was I not a policy and comms strategist for a liberal NGO?) that we are in this mess. </p><p>But the worst—the very most obnoxious thing—about the whole thread was undoubtedly the line about sitting out this election and waiting for a more inspiring progressive candidate in 2028. Because here, the depth of the self-complacency truly emerges. After all—what makes these people think that there will <i>be </i>a 2028 election, if Biden loses? What makes them think that there will be another chance, an opportunity for a do-over, if people "sit out" this election? </p><p>In short: as D.H. Lawrence wrote, "Why should the deluge wait while these young gentry go on eating good dinners for fifty more long years?" Why should they "expect such a long smooth run for their very paltry little bit of money?" </p><p>I'm sorry to keep quoting from this same short poem—but it just keeps coming up. If the world wants me to stop quoting it, they should stop doing things that make it so apropos. It captures and distills so perfectly the eerie obliviousness and complacency with which people—especially people who ought to know better, such as professional activists on the left—keep confronting the Trump era.</p><p>The PR professionals' proposal to "wait out this election" tells us everything we need to know about the world of beltway professionals. They assume that their world is fixed, and unchanging. There will always be new elections; the merry-go-round never stops. There will always be campaigns to work on and jobs to get in the world of political theater. </p><p>Somehow, they have managed not to notice that Trump is planning to staff his campaign with people whose sole mission in life is to hollow out such a world—which, flawed and smug as it may be, is worth preserving as a perhaps inevitable adjunct to democracy. They have not noticed that Trump has no intent to preserve this or any other adjunct to democracy. They have not considered seriously that Trump may actually mean exactly what he says, when he declares that he intends to be a "dictator on day one." </p><p>They have not noticed that Trump is spending his time lately with a literal prison choir of convicted January 6 insurrectionists—the implication being, since they seem to have missed it, that his first plan of action after being re-elected will be to pardon the lot of them, and mobilize them to do his bidding as a sort of army of MAGA brownshirts. </p><p>They say they can "wait out" this election, and back a more "inspiring" candidate in 2028. But why do they think there will be a campaign in 2028? Why do they think we will still have things so quaint as elections—let alone jobs for political consultants and comms strategists—as late as 2028? Do they not understand the nature of the fascist revolution Trump is proclaiming? Do they really think, to echo Lawrence, that the deluge—the looming political apocalypse—will give them fifty more years of good dinners—or even just four more years—before it comes?</p><p>Why do people assume their world is safe? Why do they assume that nothing will change? Why do they take for granted that, undefended, the world they know will keep on guaranteeing them a handsome living—and they don't even have to fight for that world to get it? They can "wait it out"?</p><p>It is hard not to think that we might well look back on that thread, a few years from now—and regard it with something of the same dread with which we view the petrified corpses of Pompeii. Good god, we think: they didn't know what was coming. They took as something permanent what could actually be snatched from them in an instant...</p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-29568070123820628382024-03-06T07:12:00.000-08:002024-03-06T07:28:06.588-08:00Circumscribed Conditions<p> During the past year, much ink has been spilled over the mystery of why Americans seem so down on the economy, despite the many things trending in the right direction. We appear to have staved off a much-anticipated recession, even as the Fed has raised interest rates in an effort to cool the economy; wages have gone up; unemployment is at historic lows; inflation is cooling... So why is everyone still miserable and angry? </p><p>A multitude of theories has been proposed. I've always thought that maybe the fundamental issue is that people hate inflation, and yet the policies that are needed to tame inflation themselves make inflation harder to live with—putting policymakers into an impossible bind. After all, people have been clamoring for the government to do something to lower prices; yet, the only way to do this on a sustainable basis is to loosen the labor market, increase competition for jobs, and otherwise cut down on people's discretionary income—so they can't <i>afford </i>to pay higher prices. And who likes that? <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>Another theory held for a time that the only people benefiting from the surprisingly positive economic news were the relatively wealthy, who had money to invest in stocks; everyone else—so this theory went—was actually worse off, even as wages were climbing and unemployment remained low, because the cost of living was rising faster than their pay. Yet, this has changed in recent months: <i>real</i> wages have started climbing again too. Pay is now outpacing inflation. So that theory doesn't appear to explain what we're seeing now. </p><p>Another theory—more psychologically astute, perhaps—posits that people are unhappy about the current state of the nation, because the positive things that the current economy is delivering are exactly the ones that people tend to attribute to their own efforts and intrinsic merits, whereas the negative things about the current economy are the ones they tend to associate with external forces. (I recall seeing this take in the New York Times somewhere last year, but I can't now track down the reference; I'll try to summarize it here as best I can recall it.)</p><p>After all, this theory goes, the worse thing about the present economy is its elevated prices (and they do remain high, by recent standards, even as the pace of inflation has slowed to more manageable levels). And people tend to blame outside forces for high prices, whereas they applaud <i>themselves</i> for being employed or for getting a raise at work. Most people, when they get promoted or take home extra pay, don't think to themselves—ah, the economy must be looking up; thanks Joe Biden! Instead, they say: well, it's about time! I've always deserved this! Finally, people are seeing my true worth!</p><p>I do wonder, though, if this argument is a bit lacking in empathy. It assumes that other people are being irrational and tries to account for it by psychological factors. I wonder if a more fruitful approach might not be to start with ourselves. Let us look inward, and ask: are <i>we </i>happy with the economy? And in some ways, the answer for me is yes (just as confidence and optimism among other American consumers seem to be gradually improving in recent surveys as well). I've been positioned to benefit from the growth in the stock market, for instance, and in many respects I'm better off now than I was before the pandemic. </p><p>Yet, when I look inside, I too feel that there's something fundamentally worse about the present economy, versus the one we had before the pandemic. Maybe it's just our inveterate tendency to idealize the past—even the recent past. But I feel that there was some complacency that I had in, say, 2019, that I can't recapture now. It's not that my life was easier then: in many respects, it was actually harder. I was traveling nearly every other week for work; I was trying to take care of a condo; my life was in many ways more complicated and hectic than it is today. So it's not that my life got harder. To the contrary. </p><p>What then am I discontented about? Part of the answer seems to be that, hard as my life was before the pandemic, I <i>accepted it. </i>I worked hard, I traveled every other week, because I assumed <i>I had to</i>. This is what adult life was like. It was a series of burdens and responsibilities, which could not be escaped. </p><p>What changed with the pandemic was that, for a few brief months at least, I lost this conviction. It turned out: it didn't <i>have </i>to be that way. For that first period of the pandemic lockdown—we relieved each other and ourselves of the terrible burden of obligations. And we largely did so by lowering our expectations of ourselves and others. We said: you don't have to make a special effort; we're all in the same situation; we're all struggling; we're all in this together. If you can't make this meeting, no problem—we'll catch you up on it afterwards. </p><p>I even showed up to a Zoom room one time, during that era, with my hair sticking up at three ends because I'd literally just rolled out of bed, and I hadn't even bothered to look at myself in a mirror before opening the call. It was embarrassing, to be sure—but mostly just funny. Everyone laughed, but more fundamentally, accepted and forgave it. Because it was the pandemic. </p><p>I wonder then, if part of what Americans are responding to in the current economic malaise, is a sort of collective nostalgia for this brief period of freedom. </p><p>We may know, intellectually, that we can't stay home from work indefinitely. We may know the government can't afford to pay us not to work for the rest of time—at least not without driving up inflation and causing other negative downstream economic and social consequences. But that doesn't mean we are going to be happy about that fact. It doesn't mean we'll be turning cartwheels at the prospect of going back to the office and getting back on a plane every other week—or be expected once again to show up for meetings on time and in a fit condition for society. </p><p>We may realize too that, compared with life in 2019, life in 2024 is actually <i>better</i>. It's easier to find work now that it was then; the labor market is still tight; it's easier to get a raise; real wages are rising. As a whole, we are all more prosperous—the economy has grown since then, in spite of all the predictions to the contrary. But—inwardly—we aren't really comparing our lives now to life in 2019. We are comparing it to March-May 2020, when we all got to work from home and/or receive free stimulus checks and expanded unemployment payments in the mail. </p><p>We are comparing our lives today, that is to say, to that brief period of time when we were free. Why would we celebrate returning to the cage we had lived in before that time—even if, when we come back to the cage, we find that it is slightly more spacious than it was before; slightly better ventilated, with slightly more sunlight? It's still a cage. We still resent having to return to it.</p><p>In one of his many wonderfully wrathful satirical poems, "<a href="https://kalliope.org/en/text/lawrence2001061123">Wages</a>," D.H. Lawrence compares working in the economy to a universal prison; and who does not feel that way about it now—who is excited that we can step back into that prison, even if conditions there have improved since our last visit? All the world's a stage, Shakespeare said; but perhaps it would be better to say—following Lawrence—that all the world's a cage. And who likes a cage? </p><p>But—we always lived in and tolerated that cage before, right? So why should we have such trouble adjusting to it now? Why can't we accept what had always seemed natural and inevitable to us before? Why can't we just fall back into our previous routine—office, commute, travel, repeat? </p><p>The answer is, surely, that it is far harder to return to a prison after one has escaped it, than it is to simply accept a cage that one has never left. In his novel <i>Elective Affinities, </i>Goethe writes of "the delusion you can return to an earlier, more circumscribed condition once you have left it, that the forces you have once set free will let you tie them down again." (Hollingdale trans.) He was talking in that case about marriage—his central couple, Eduard and Charlotte, find they cannot return to the complacency of their prior marital state, after introducing two disruptive new love interests into their midst. But the point surely applies to the economy too.</p><p>If the government thinks we will all be pleased about the fact that we can find jobs again, that we can take home higher wages—they are forgetting that we all hate jobs; and that we wish we didn't have to earn wages in the first place. We resent the good things about the current economy, therefore, above all because they are precisely the type of economic goods that serve to remind us of our servitude. We don't want to have to go back inside the prison walls. We don't want to "return to an earlier, more circumscribed condition," as Goethe puts it. Please, don't make us go back! Let is stay in the lockdown!</p><p>"But," society replies—"how can you want to return to the pandemic lockdown? Was that not the most unfree era of them all? Are you not glad to be able to earn your living again; to find a job; to go to the office; to travel all over the country again?" And society has a point. To be free to earn a wage is a whole lot better than the known alternatives. But that doesn't mean we'll actually be glad about that fact. </p><p>As Lawrence sardonically ends his poem, after summing up the prison condition of the global economy: "This is called universal freedom." </p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-89789659475695552692024-03-04T10:21:00.000-08:002024-03-04T12:48:37.284-08:00First Known When Lost I had to go to England to realize I was an American. This statement of mine is "paradoxical" only in the sense in which Cleanth Brooks used the term, in the context of poetry: namely, in the sense of "compression." For, expounded at greater length, my point becomes much more banal. All I really mean to say, after all, is that, prior to my recent stay in London, I had always idealized the UK from afar as a kind of ancestral homeland. I had thought: <i>there</i> is the true mother country; and if ever I were to live there, it would feel like a homecoming. Yet, once I actually spent more than a week or two in the UK, I found it inordinately stifling. Only once I came back to the U.S. did I again feel free. <div><br /></div><div>One of the first things I realized, after coming to the UK, after all, is that British society is a vast apparatus for sorting people; and, what is worse, I had no place within it. Or, if I did have a place, it was among the lowest of the low. My ancestry is Welsh and Scottish, after all. <span><a name='more'></a></span></div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, all the people you meet in the UK these days are cool and sophisticated enough, at least in lefty circles, to claim that they don't believe in the class system. But, despite their protestations, they are plainly still competing for position within it. They are still scrambling for a place within the country's elaborate and overlapping prestige hierarchies (if you aren't born into the aristocracy, you're out of luck in that regard, but you can make up for it partially by attending the right university, becoming a barrister, being admitted to the bench, joining the right Inn of Court, being promoted to King's Counsel, getting to wear the silk leggings, getting to wear the big wig, getting to carry the red bag instead of the blue bag, etc.) </div><div><br /></div><div>This spectacle—everyone fighting for a spot in the hierarchy while purporting to disdain it—makes the stock lefty claim to find the whole British class system rather "silly" sound like little more than an elaborate humblebrag. One is reminded of the character in Whit Stillman's film <i>Metropolitan, </i>who clarifies to his listeners that he is a titled member of the nobility—a baron, to be precise—but who then adds, with a self-complacent chuckle, "not that I take that sort of thing seriously." </div><div><br /></div><div>I realized for the first time in my life that my ancestors were all refugees from the English class system. This is what we came to America to escape. And as soon as I'd had this moment of enlightenment—gone forever was any lingering nostalgia I might have felt for the monarchy; gone was any catch in my throat at the thought of raising a toast to the King, long may he reign, and thinking wistfully—if only we had never left; if only the U.S. were still a commonwealth nation... Wouldn't our unruly democracy be just a little bit more restrained? Doesn't tradition provide at times a valuable check on the excesses of republican governance? Couldn't the king and the aristocracy be defended on Burkean grounds? </div><div><br /></div><div>All of that was banished from my mind. As terrible as American democracy is, I realized, it's better than all the alternatives. The United States is the worst country that there is, except for all the other countries, to modify a well-worn line. This is what I realized, upon coming home from the UK. Here, in this land, I am relatively free. Here, I can define myself how I choose. Here, my future and destiny are my own to make. Subject to limits, of course. We are far from having achieved the fully just society we ought to have. But still—all that rhetoric and windbaggery that one hears about American freedom, it turns out, is not entirely based on nothing. </div><div><br /></div><div>I know, because I have seen the alternative: the world of the class system. It now can only bring to mind for me the same mental image that a character's father conjures up, whenever he thinks about Europe, in a novel by Gerald Murnane. The book, <i>Inland, </i>is set partly in Australia (and the Australians are, in many respects, refugees from the English class system too). When he is told about the noble heroes of the past from Europe, he retorts, "Such countries had no heroes [....] if he and I had been born in any such country [...] we would have to bow and scrape and doff our caps right and left." No doubt this is painting with too broad a brush. But, I'm telling you—after my short time in the UK, I can see exactly what he's talking about. I could feel it there; it's true!</div><div><br /></div><div>And so I came back to the United States like a repentant ex-lover, seeking forgiveness—I was wrong before; I've seen the error of my ways; I've seen what life is like without you now, and it is terrible; it stinks! Oh, take me back, America, please! </div><div><br /></div><div>And yet, I am realizing all of this—I am realizing just how much better and freer life is in this country—at the <i>very moment </i>in our history when we are about to throw all that in the toilet, by installing Donald Trump as our dictator-for-life. I have realized at last the inestimable virtues of American democracy, at the <i>very moment </i>when everyone else has started to take these things for granted, and to consider frittering them away. </div><div><br /></div><div>At the very moment that I have realized how much better life is without a king, Donald Trump is starting to install his family members in key roles within the GOP party infrastructure, setting up a kind of hereditary dynasty and personalistic rule. At the very moment I am realizing how good it is not to have an emperor, even the more reputable Republican senators are starting to adopt the s<a href="http://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2024/02/if-only-little-father-knew.html">ame strategies of rhetorical deference toward Trump that people in less democratic countries typically adopt only toward czars</a> and other autocrats. </div><div><br /></div><div>I came back to America to <i>escape </i>the autocrats; I realized about America what the father in Murnane's novel realized about Australia—that here, in this country, I don't have to "bow and scrape and doff my cap" to anyone, and that is exactly what makes it so free and wonderful. And yet, I come back to find all of these fools already bowing and scraping and doffing their caps to Lord Trump—as if democracy were not a thing worth defending—as if it were not a fragile jewel, almost unique upon the earth, that we must cherish and watch over as is it were the most precious cargo imaginable!</div><div><br /></div><div>I was explaining the irony of my situation to a friend—how I only realized at last the beauty of American political institutions at the very moment when they seemed most threatened, when they appeared to be tottering on their last legs—and he sang the words of the Joni Mitchell song back to me—of which he remembers more lines than I do. "Don't it always seem to go," he quoted, "you don't know what you've got till it's gone." They paved over American democracy, you might say, and put up a Trump tower in its place. </div><div><br /></div><div>As soon as he said it, it occurred to me that this was the same message contained in a poem by Edward Thomas: "First Known When Lost," which I had read while I was in England (I do appreciate the second-hand bookshops in London—that part of the country, at least, won my approval). Thomas is reflecting on a small hedge that he had always passed on the road, and which represented to him—without his being conscious of it—the life of wild green things that still existed in the English countryside. It was only when it was cleared, to make way for further development, that he became cognizant of what he had lost. "I never had noticed it until/ 'Twas gone," he writes—presaging Joni Mitchell. </div><div><br /></div><div>And yet, for Thomas the image represented the England he had lost—the England he had learned to appreciate only when it was too late to retrieve it. Whereas for me, it represents the America I've lost—the country that I only realized was exceptional in the world at the moment when its institutions and future seemed most endangered. You don't know what you've got till it's gone, Mitchell sang. American democracy was, for me, first known when lost. </div><div><br /></div><div>I never had noticed how good we had it in this country—what a bright idea it was to grant no titles, to have no king, to make no formal legal distinctions between human beings—until the very moment when the Republican Party seemed most inclined to install a new king (and the worst one imaginable, at that—a "rat king," as Lars von Trier once aptly called him). I never had noticed the worth of American democracy "until 'twas gone," to echo Thomas. </div><div><br /></div><div>"Oh come back," I call out to American democracy, as a character says in a W.S. Merwin poem. The piece conjures the haunting image of a house filled with people, who are strangely able to witness the return of a lost loved one, but who for some reason cannot open their mouths to cry out to her until she has left again. </div><div><br /></div><div>That's what it was like with me—"Oh come back"—as I watch American democracy departing from these shores. It can't be that I missed my chance! It can't be that I finally learned the error of my ways, finally repented, finally understood how great this country's promise is and how worthy its political institutions are of protection, only to see them sauntering away at the last minute. It can't be that I was ready to open my mouth to summon them only after they had already left—perhaps forever. </div><div><br /></div><div>And there we will be, bereft, having to learn how to doff our caps again, and mouth the insincere words "yes, of course, Your Majesty." </div>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-4713065365757389872024-03-03T12:59:00.000-08:002024-03-03T13:47:38.423-08:00Genghis Khan Revisionism<p> Listening to the beloved <i>Omnibus Project </i>podcast today, I overheard one of the co-hosts observe in passing that "It turns out: Genghis Khan was actually good." This was presented—only half-seriously—as the emerging new consensus among historians; the trendy revisionist take on Genghis Khan that has now hardened into a new orthodoxy. And while I get that the point was made somewhat jokingly, this is still one of those historical takes that annoys me terribly. If there's anything we should agree upon, it is that Genghis Khan was in fact bad—bad enough to deserve his place in that <a href="https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Savage_Curtain_(episode)"><i>Star Trek </i>TOS episode</a>, where he appeared as one of three holographic reconstructions of the worst specimens of human depravity in history. </p><p>What was so bad about him? Mostly that he killed inordinate numbers of innocent men, women, and children. By some counts, he and his soldiers killed so many people that it caused a cognizable dip in the globe's total human population—something on the order of several percentage points. And even if these estimates are half-way exaggerated, and some of the contemporaneous tales of his atrocities inflated for effect—that's still a huge number of people. If Genghis Khan had killed all these civilians yesterday, or even twenty years ago, we would have no trouble condemning it. Does the fact that it happened in the distant past at this point make it much better? <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>There is a certain knee-jerk relativism that kicks in once we start to think about events that happened several hundred years ago or more. Yet, my favorite part in Lord Acton's<a href="https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/acton-s-inaugural-lecture-on-history"> lecture on "The Study of History"</a> is when he tells us: don't do that. Lord Acton's moral passion as a historian may seem quaint and very nineteenth century to us now; but I find it immensely endearing and refreshing. The best moment in the lecture comes when he pauses to consider the medieval crusaders, for instance. Actually, Lord Acton reminds us, we don't need to idealize them or make any special excuses for them. They were ignorant and barbarous men who mostly seem to have spent their time committing antisemitic atrocities. </p><p>Can't we just agree the crusaders were bad, Lord Acton asks, without making any special apologia for them on relativistic grounds? As he wryly puts it, in protesting against the tendency of the historical profession to plead extenuating circumstances on behalf of the past: "The mission" of the moral relativist type of historian, he writes, "was to make distant times, and especially the Middle Ages [...] intelligible and acceptable[.] There were difficulties in the way; and among others this, that, in the first fervour of the Crusades, the men who took the Cross, after receiving communion, heartily devoted the day to the extermination of Jews."</p><p>I get that people, and especially historians, like to be contrarian. It's a way to distinguish oneself, and thereby feel superior. It is fun to spin out seemingly implausible ideas: such as that maybe Genghis Khan was actually a net benefit to civilization. Maybe, through all his conquests and bloodshed, he actually promoted the spread of cultural ideas and syncretism? Maybe he was actually better than some of his contemporaries, when it came to issues like religious toleration (and I'm sure he was—what is more tolerant than the mass grave?; what is less discriminatory than indiscriminate slaughter?) Sure, he killed a lot of people. But then, who didn't? </p><p>So goes the contrarian, revisionist take on Genghis Khan, at any rate. Contemporary historians seem drawn to it, and perhaps we should not be surprised that this is the direction the profession would take. As Elias Canetti observes at one point, in his magisterial <i>Crowds and Power, </i>of another historical mass murderer: "Power has never lacked eulogists, and historians, who are professionally obsessed with it, can explain anything, either by the <i>times </i>(disguising their adulation as scholarship), or by <i>necessity, </i>which, in their hands, can assume any and every shape." (Carol Stewart trans.) This seems to be what is happening with today's generation of Genghis scholars. </p><p>The answer to these apologetics, though, seems to be the same that Hugh MacDiarmid gave, in one of his poems. Reading A.E. Housman's "<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57275/epitaph-on-an-army-of-mercenaries">Epitaph for an Army of Mercenaries</a>," MacDiarmid seems to have choked especially on the line: "They [...] saved the sum of things for pay." The Scottish modernist poet was appalled and disgusted. "It is a God-damned lie," he thundered, in a <a href="https://war-poetry.livejournal.com/270657.html">powerful rejoinder</a>, "to say that these/ Saved, or knew, anything worth a man's pride./ They were professional murderers and they took/ Their blood money and impious risks and died." </p><p>So it is with Genghis Khan and his marauding horde. They were professional murderers. The fact that there have been plenty of other, and possibly even worse, professional murderers before them and since does not argue anything in their favor. They took their impious risks by starting wars and should suffer whatever reputational damage in the eyes of posterity might provide some infinitely inadequate recompense for the thousands if not millions of people who suffered innocently at their hands. </p><p>And, to the extent that modern revisionist historians wish to tell us otherwise—to the extent they would try to persuade us that no, actually, Genghis promoted civilization; he was a great patron of the arts—we reply: "it is a god-damned lie," and that the Great Khan never knew or accomplished "anything worth a man's pride." </p><p>As MacDiarmid said of such men in conclusion—and we can do no better: "In spite of all their kind some elements of worth/ With difficulty persist here and there on Earth." </p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-52828223242156364682024-03-03T11:36:00.000-08:002024-03-03T11:59:29.059-08:00Confessional Blogging<p> A friend was asking me yesterday how I have the confidence to blog about a topic that might already have been covered in the same vein by someone else. Am I not worried, every time I start writing, that I may have already been preempted in whatever I wanted to say by another blogger or Reddit poster writing elsewhere? </p><p>The honest answer is that if I have been scooped, I take pains not to know about it. As soon as I get an idea for a post, I rush to put it down on this blog and send it off into the universe. I never check beforehand to see if someone else has already written about or had the same idea—mostly because I figure that someone else almost surely has. Better, therefore, just not to ever know about it. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>The criminal law does not accept willful blindness as a defense; but I am hopeful that in the domain of plagiarizing ideas, the standard is more forgiving. There is simply so much written on the internet and other fora now, one almost takes for granted that <i>any</i> idea one might have cannot be truly original, in the strictest sense. And so, one just chooses not to know about what others are saying, and plunges ahead. </p><p>At times, this approach has produced the magical and gratifying effect of actually being ahead of my time. Because I rush these ideas into print, I actually do get there before other people. For some reason, though, this only happens with regard to Eugène Ionesco's play <i>Rhinoceros. </i>Maybe it's just that this play lends itself particularly well to political analogies in our time. </p><p>Whatever the reason, though—twice now I have referenced <i>Rhinoceros </i>in a particular connection, only to see someone else make the same point months after I had done so. </p><p>Someone on Twitter made the point that the public's strangely blasé attitude to the risks of COVID infection resembled the townspeople's complacency toward the rhinocerization epidemic raging in their midst, in Ionesco's play. To my lonely satisfaction, I was able to point (internally at least) to a <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2022/03/mask-up.html">time-stamped blog post of my own</a>, making the same point, and published before this Tweet. </p><p>Likewise, there was a Substack column recently from the great Benjamin Wittes, of Rational Security 1.0 fame, talking about how he had recently re-read Ionesco's play and found in it an uncanny resemblance between the contagion of "rhinocerization," as the playwright depicts it, and the spread of MAGA ideology among erstwhile Never Trump Republicans. </p><p>Here again, I could honestly say that I had been on this beat much earlier. A <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2021/07/rhinocerization.html">2021 post on this blog</a> stands as confirmation that I was already thinking of Ionesco's rhinos and the newly-converted MAGA Republicans as two birds of a feather. </p><p>There have been times, however, when the opposite has occurred. Despite my best efforts to screen myself off, before the post gets written, from any outside evidence that I have already long since been scooped, I somehow discover that my idea is actually not original. The most prominent example came after January 6, when it occurred to me to read and write about the ancient Roman conspiracy of Catiline, and its resemblance to Trump's coup attempt. </p><p>In this case, I made it all the way through Sallust, before somehow a column by Ross Douthat came to my attention. Here Douthat was, already talking about the comparison of Trump to Catiline, and then dismissing the idea as overwrought and exaggerated (though Douthat was writing on this point long before January 6 put to rest any lingering doubts as to whether Trump did indeed harbor genuinely antidemocratic intentions). </p><p>So—my friend asked me—what do you do when that happens to you? Well, the answer is: I tell the truth. I just explain the way things went down, in exactly the order that they occurred. I explain that I had the idea first, but then afterward I found it reflected elsewhere. Why not? As Robert Lowell once queried, in a <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47693/epilogue-56d22853c55c0">confessional apologia for the practice of confessional poetry</a>—"Why not say what happened?" I take those words to heart. </p><p>So I just say: <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2021/01/against-trumpius.html">I had this idea; I was going to write about it; but then I saw this other column by Ross Douthat making a similar point, so I feel the need to mention that as well</a>. When in doubt—just say what happened!</p><p>Of course, this then leaves me vulnerable to the charge of being excessively autobiographical. The same charge was leveled against the confessional poets. And the response to it can only be: no one is obliged to read this blog anyway. If people don't want to hear about my thought process, and the precise chronology according to which I had ideas and later discovered they had been scooped by others, they can choose to read no further. </p><p>And so far, most of humanity seems to have availed itself of that option. </p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-86255292744319457682024-02-29T11:09:00.000-08:002024-02-29T11:13:06.289-08:00To Hang a Man <p> The <i>New York Times</i> published an article yesterday about yet another <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/us/idaho-death-penalty-thomas-creech.html">botched execution</a> in the United States—this time in Idaho. The officials administering the lethal injection apparently tried and failed several times to find a vein, eventually jabbing the prisoner in all four limbs, before giving up for the day. A line in the article stands out. The head of Idaho's prisons was quoted as saying, of the attempt: "Our first objective is to carry this out with dignity, professionalism and respect."</p><p>Dignity? Respect? What dignity and respect is there in trying to inject a person with lethal chemicals? What respect can there be in taking a breathing person, who wants to live, and forcing death upon them against their will. Respect? What about respecting a person's will to live? To be sure, if executions there must be, one would rather have them conducted with as much decorum as possible; but to characterize this as respecting the "dignity" of the prisoner seems an abuse of language. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>Almost inevitably, though, when debates about the death penalty come up, people will respond: but look what he did! Doesn't he deserve it? And whatever the prisoner did in this case, one can no doubt imagine a scenario sufficiently heinous that one might conclude that death seems warranted. We each of us draw a line somewhere. We can probably come up with some sequence of events that, if they really did happen, would make it hard to maintain that the person who committed them still deserves life. </p><p>But, as Bryan Stevenson has always argued, the real question about the death penalty is not—should this person live?—but rather: should the state kill? And those are two very different questions. The spectacle of the state taking a living body and trying to turn it into a corpse—hunting for veins in a person's body, with however much "dignity" and "respect" they can muster—in order to inject fatal poison into them—is a sufficient answer in itself. The state does not have a moral right to kill. </p><p>As my previous post mentioned, I was reading Ralph Hodgson's poetry earlier this week; and I found there a poem that makes this point more eloquently than I can. Hodgson often writes with something of the same moral earnestness and pastoral setting as A.E. Housman—and, in this poem, he tackles the same theme—namely, capital punishment by hanging—that Housman addressed in some of his most powerful verses of social protest, which I've quoted before, from <i>A Shropshire Lad. </i></p><p>Hodgson's poem on the subject is simple and direct. It rehearses the few steps necessary to ready a person for the gallows. "To fit the cap,/ and fix the rope"... Hodgson then concedes whatever point the defenders of capital punishment may wish to make about how horrible the condemned may be; however much he may "deserve" death. "I know, I know," says Hodgson, "What can you do [...] a man like that?" But then he leaves us with the lingering doubt: "But Oh it seems—/I don't know what—/To hang a man!"</p><p>So it is with Idaho's botched execution; or the <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2024/02/poison-gas.html">recent execution by nitrogen gas in Alabama</a>. One can look into the details of the cases. The condemned in both did terrible things. Maybe some would conclude that their lives are not worth preserving. <i>But</i>, to echo Hodgson—<i>to actually ready the needle; to strap down the victim; to hunt for the vein; to pump in the gas—still it just seems... to kill a man</i>. Perhaps the sheer mechanics of that process—the actual sight of what it entails—is argument against it enough. </p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-16739164120064638532024-02-27T17:11:00.000-08:002024-02-27T17:52:00.230-08:00Hodgson's Prophecy<p> The last few days brought <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/us/chicago-winter-warm-weather.html">unseasonably warm weather to the Midwest</a>. I found myself yesterday morning wandering through the streets in disbelief, allowing the sunlight and warm air to seep into my skin as if I had to stock up on both before they ran out. "It feels too good to be true, for February," I told my sister. "Well," she said, "climate change." "Ah," I said. "So it <i>is</i> too good to be true." "Well," she replied, "it is true; but it's not good." "Oh right," I concluded. "It's too true to be good." </p><p>Indeed, the unusual warmth and spring-like weather of the last month has been eerie. I've enjoyed it, to be sure; but it gives one the feeling of living on a precipice. This may feel good in February, one thinks—but what will this mean for summer? Will we be roasted once again in record heat waves? Will there be catastrophic flooding? Rampant wildfires? The answer to all those things—and it is sad to realize in saying it how much we have come to regard all this as normal—is almost certainly yes. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>Of course, climate change is only part of the explanation for this most-atypical Midwestern February. It's also El Niño. But the two forces are working together in a way that feels very destabilizing. And lo and behold, scientists are indeed upping the ante on their warnings about the risk of potentially catastrophic climate disruption. One attention-grabbing report recently indicated that a <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/25/world/gulf-stream-atlantic-current-collapse-climate-scn-intl/index.html">crucial oceanic current may be nearing collapse</a>, all much sooner than previously anticipated. </p><p>The image that comes into one's head is dramatic, but not necessarily exaggerated: Western Europe suddenly plunged into Arctic winters; large parts of the low-lying U.S. coast inundated with water. The largest contributing factor to the current's collapse would be the massive inflows of fresh water expected from melting polar sea-ice and the Greenland ice sheet. What we're really looking at, then, is a deluge of near-Biblical proportions. </p><p>I am not generally drawn to the metaphor of climate change as Nature's divine punishment. I don't believe in collective punishment, for one thing. (Or in divinities, for another.) Visiting the sins of the fathers on the children—such as by drowning future generations for the fossil fuel use of prior ones—"may be a morality good enough for divinities, [but] it is scorned by average human nature," as Thomas Hardy once wrote. Besides, most of those prior generations could not have foreseen the consequences of their actions. </p><p>Still, though, it's hard not to think of Genesis when contemplating the decades ahead. And reading <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Hodgson">Ralph Hodgson's</a> poems yesterday, I came across one that seemed eerily prescient on this subject of divine fury. His proto-environmentalist verse, "The Last Blackbird," imagines the poet conversing with an outraged Nature, who descends to Earth and is appalled to discover the hash her one-time creation Man has made of the planet: polluting the Earth's natural landscapes and slaughtering its other inhabitants.</p><p>When Nature asks the poet what forces still stand in the path of humankind's destructive avarice, he observes in passing that <i>the sea</i> seems the only force that our species has never fully managed to tame. This gives Nature an idea. In plotting a fit punishment for humankind, at the end of the piece—to retrieve Nature's honor in the face of all this despoliation and massacring of animals—she contrives a second Flood. "How say'st thou, poet, to a wider sea? [...] To wash my world, a deeper, wider sea." </p><p>The poem ends with the poet casting his eyes to heaven and seeing ominous clouds overhead. The outraged deity's punishment seems about to be fulfilled. Likewise with us: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/us/chicago-winter-warm-weather.html">ominous storm clouds are now coming into the Midwest</a>, on the heels of this unnaturally pleasant weather. And so too, on a larger, planetary scale, it's hard not to feel—as the news mounts of the looming climate catastrophe due to disrupted oceanic currents—that Hodgson's prophecy is about to be fulfilled in an ever bigger way. </p><p>Hodgson could not have known, at the time he wrote the poem, about the looming threat of climate change. But in some inchoate way, he sensed that our abuse of the planet would eventually redound to our own harm. For our wasteful mishandling of our natural environment, there is a price to be exacted: and judging from the recent news about the ocean current collapse, it sounds increasingly like it will take exactly the form Hodgson's "Nature" prescribed for us: "a wider sea."</p><p>Many of us, myself included, are likely to shudder at this prospect briefly—but then return to our normal lives. It's not happening <i>yet, </i>we think. It's something to think about later. Yet, the reports warn that the starkest changes of climate change are not actually all that far in the future. 2050 is not as distant as it once was. And the article linked above says that major disruptions to this crucial system of ocean currents may come as soon as 2025. Which—and I blinked over this for a moment—is <i>next year. </i></p><p>So many of us are inclined to think, in some shameful corner of our hearts: "Après moi, le déluge." We think: so what if the deluge comes? We'll be long gone by then. But, if it's 2025... we <i>won't</i> be long gone. We'll still be here. We won't have gone anywhere, when the "deeper, wider sea" appears. As D.H. Lawrence <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2016/06/while-rome-berns.html">once asked in a poem</a>, it's all well and good to say "après moi, le déluge"—but what if the deluge doesn't wait for you to be gone, but "come[s] along and hits you on the head"?</p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-80858125557526093862024-02-26T07:45:00.000-08:002024-02-26T07:45:53.683-08:00Anticipated Reversals<p> The most recent episode of the <i>Omnibus Project </i>podcast—of which I've been a devoted listener since its inception—focused on the shifting fortunes of the "Food Pyramid." Remember that thing? Those of us who went to school in the '90s no doubt have some memory of this fictional edifice. We surely recall that the base of the image was always a hefty block of grain, flour, and starch; and that, higher up—as the shape narrowed—one could find smaller helpings of meat, poultry, dairy, fruits and vegetables. </p><p>The evolution of nutrition science in the years since has not been kind to the Food Pyramid. Most of us have probably noted that today's dietary advice is almost the exact inverse of the pyramid's implied recommendations. Instead of loading up on carbohydrates—we now are told—one ought to consume proteins. Far from being the bedrock of any healthy diet, sugar-rich bread products are now seen as the cause of all our problems. The pyramid has been flipped on its head!<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>The "Food Pyramid" episode of the Omnibus thus forms a sort of trilogy with two earlier episodes of the podcast—"Olestra" and "A Glass of Red Wine With Dinner"—that similarly explored areas of health science that have pulled a complete 180-degree turn in the course of our lifetimes. We used to be told that eating fatty foods was the cause of obesity, and that we would lose weight if we substituted these with fat-free (but sugary) alternatives. Now, we are told the opposite. </p><p>Likewise with alcohol. An emerging consensus among researchers these days holds that alcohol is even worse for one's health than previously believed. Yet I grew up in a world in which moderate drinking was encouraged as a health benefit<i>. </i>A "glass of red wine with dinner" was prescribed as the key to heart health. And, like so much dietary advice, it even had a veneer of homeopathic pseudo-plausibility to recommend it: wine looked like blood, after all, and—after drinking it—one could feel one's heart racing faster. </p><p>The lesson from such examples surely should not be to disregard the medical consensus of the age. One hopes that, in the course of these pendulum swings, the weight of scientific opinion is eventually converging toward an equilibrium point, located somewhere proximate to the truth. There are oscillations in scientific opinion, then—and still more in popular science, as it is digested and packaged for us, oftentimes by interested parties—but the arcs hopefully become smaller over time. </p><p>Still, these examples do underscore the vanity of taking any one current health bromide as a fixed and final truth. As Jonathan Swift observed,<i> </i>there are modes and styles in the natural sciences that shift as quickly in that cultural domain as do they in any other. "[N]ew systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every age," as a character observes in <i>Gulliver's Travels. </i>Alcohol was in; now it is out. Grains and starches were in; now they are on the index of prohibited foods. </p><p>Alfred Jarry's 1902 satirical novel <i>The Supermale </i>even manages to forecast such a fate for alcohol. The turn of the twentieth century, much like our own age, was after all a time of various health fads. One of the most powerful lobbying and advocacy groups of the era was the temperance movement—the teetotalers and prohibitionists. Jarry, however, predicted that the then-consensus on the evils of alcohol would be as short-lived as every other dietary fashion. Indeed, he forecasts it would eventually be inverted. </p><p>Speaking from the imaginary standpoint of 1920—still two decades in the future, at the time Jarry was writing, he says: "by an anticipated reversal of scientific fashion, it was proclaimed that the only hygienic beverage was pure alcohol" (Wright/Gladstone trans.) And indeed, we lived to see it. It was many decades after Jarry's time, but scientists eventually declared that moderate drinking was in fact good for the heart. And we have seen since yet another "anticipated reversal of scientific fashion" in turn. </p><p>Jarry's novel—like his other, even stranger work, <i>The Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll</i>—fits broadly into the category of the Menippean satire, within Northrop Frye's typology of literary genres. That is to say, these books' chief object of ridicule is the pretension of the crank scientist and the quack physician. <i>Gulliver's Travels, </i>not coincidentally, is another canonical example of the type. Each book derives its richest comedy from displaying the vanity of the human sciences. </p><p>And indeed, the rate at which the "scientific" advice we are given on healthy living alters—not only to the point that previous recommendations are eventually superseded, but to such an extent that they routinely pull a complete volte-face—does lend itself to satire. </p><p>Worse than provoking laughter, however, such overweening pride in the consensus of the moment can do actual harm. In Jarry's novel, the doctors and public health experts go so far as to pipe undrinkable water into people's homes, in order to force them to consume more alcohol, in line with shifting recommendations. So too, in real life, the "fat-free" dietary craze may have perversely <i>caused, </i>rather than ameliorated, the country's obesity epidemic, by leading people to replace fat with sugar. </p><p>And so the pendulum keeps swinging—hopefully converging toward some center; the natural equilibrium that oscillates around the line of truth. But its wider swings can cause grave damage to people standing by in the meantime. Perhaps, then, we should beware the pious certainties of the advisors. Perhaps, we should answer the vaunted bromides of the health experts and the dietary gurus with some advice of our own—an ancient adage: physician, heal thyself!</p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3647180678398772674.post-61580559674256511562024-02-25T11:01:00.000-08:002024-02-25T12:22:30.729-08:00Jarry's Scientific Romance <p> Our present cultural moment, as we confront the rise of AI, bears more than one feature in common with the European <i>belle époque </i>of the turn of the twentieth century. Back then, as people adjusted to the appearance of electricity and new forms of communication, it seemed that the old limits of what was possible were breaking down. If <i>this </i>could be achieved, what <i>else</i> might be achieved? We seem to be facing a similar question today. We have pushed past the limits, in at least one regard, of what might have been regarded just a few years ago as science fiction. We now have machines that can convincingly speak and interact with us. And if <i>this </i>has become possible, <i>what else </i>might soon be possible? Teleportation? Intergalactic travel? What can still be safely confined to the realm of the impossible, if this feat now cannot? </p><p>In that spirit, it is worth revisiting one of the less-acknowledged classics of the <i>belle époque</i>: Alfred Jarry's <i>The Supermale. </i>This 1902 work is a quintessential avant-garde novel, beloved by Gore Vidal and others; a work of proto-surrealist turn-of-the-century absurdism that, along with the rest of Jarry's output, inspired future generations of dadaists and researchers into the realm of the unexpected and the preposterous. Reading the novel today, however—in the Wright/Gladstone translation published by Exact Change—it comes across less as a milestone in the development of the experimental novel, and more as a characteristic product of its era of technological optimism and wonder. Whatever else it might be, <i>The Supermale</i> is also a quintessentially <i>belle-époque </i>novel, complete with bicycles, electromagnetic experiments, and other Wellsian touches. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>Indeed, the book is in many respects a parody of the turn-of-the-century Wellsian scientific romance. It opens with the stock conversation that begins every such novel of proto–science fiction from the era. The visionary innovator, who has just crossed some previously-insurmountable threshold in the realm of scientific achievement, and is about to reveal it to the world, must first tease hints of his discoveries to the Doubting Thomases of the scientific establishment. The innovator's standard foil, the learned men of science—engineers and doctors, e.g.—scoff at the rumors he lets slip of his achievements. "Impossible!" they cry. Yet the innovator in Jarry's novel, Marcueil, manages to demonstrate the impossible under controlled scientific conditions. He therefore invites the doubting scientists to assume what they previously claimed did not exist: a "chair in the department of the impossible."</p><p>So far, so Wellsian. Except here, the impossible technological achievement in question is Marcueil's thesis that the human body is capable of performing the sexual act an unlimited number of times within a twenty-four hour period. The established men of science denounce this as an absurdity. Hedging the topic round with various Latin phrases, their objection amounts to the fact that no known erection could be maintained for that long; no member aroused to tumescence so many times in such a short span. "It is the very absence of this indispensable phenomenon that will always prevent man from exceeding numerically what is in fact human capacity," they declare. To this, Marcueil retorts that a certain threshold might be breached, beyond which an over-utilized tissue becomes permanently rigid: "sclerotic," in his term—and that precisely the existence of such a phenomenon is reported among the ancients. </p><p>The book is a parody, of course (Jarry was the inventor of the tongue-in-cheek branch of pseudo-science, <a href="https://sixfootturkey.blogspot.com/2023/01/a-science-for-our-times.html">'pataphysics</a>—and the book is imbued with the 'pataphysical spirit)—and so, Jarry's hypotheses are always a touch more ludicrous than those of the true Wellsian scientific romance. And yet, he always includes just enough reasoning and erudition to evoke something of the same wonder that Wells's speculations inspire. Jarry's characters do not defend their belief in the "Supermale," capable of astounding feats of sexual endurance (and who turns out of course to be Marcueil himself) in any but the most learned terms. The woman who ultimately joins the Supermale in his implausible experiment, and with whom he falls in love, is the first to put her faith in the innovator's vision—and she does so by articulating a kind of ontological argument for the Supermale's existence. Her reasoning in this regard is as impeccable as that of any scholastic theologian: "The Absolute Lover must exist, since woman can conceive of him[.]"</p><p>Part of what continues to delight one about the novel, then, is that—in addition to its humor and absurdism—it also still conjures something of the same optimism with which the other, more serious, scientific romances of the era were imbued: a belief in the possibility of limitless human progress; the unbounded potential of the species. The novel, then, is—among other things—part of a much longer tradition of progressive and optimistic literature. Indeed, Marcueil's contention that the human body is capable of performing an infinity of sexual labors within a single day reminds one of the words of an earlier generation's quintessential optimist and believer in human progress, writing almost a century before. </p><p>Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his notes to "Queen Mab," suggests that human beings might obtain a kind of temporal immortality—an eternal existence within the limits of this life and this world—purely through the development of their intellectual capacities. If the subjective experience of the passage of time is not absolute, Shelley writes, but rather varies with the number of thoughts that pass through one's brain during a fixed period, then it stands to reason that, as the human intellect becomes ever more sophisticated, and as universal education fills each mind with more and greater thoughts, then—he reasons—eventually each of us will subjectively experience immortality within our lifespans. If the capacity of the human mind for thought is indeed unlimited, then there is no ultimate cap on the number of thoughts we each can think, and therefore no upper bound on the amount of subjective time we can experience. </p><p>Marcueil's belief in the possibility of unlimited numbers of sexual encounters within a day's span is another version of the same optimistic thesis. He even defends it against his scientific doubters by a process of reasoning similar to Shelley's. Over the course of the human lifespan, he contends, the heart muscle alone performs a near-infinite amount of work: "The number of diastoles and systoles in a human lifetime, or even in a single day, surpasses all imaginary figures." Why could not other organs of the body reach a similar potential? (Does not the bicycle—he reasons—tying in another of Jarry's obsessions—offer a similar model for how one part of the body can be resting and the other at work at the same time, each taking turns with the other, such that a greater net propulsion is possible than if both were exerted at once? And does this not in turn prove the possibility of a form of perpetual motion?)</p><p>Here, Jarry's visionary protagonist might invoke Zeno's shade for assistance. For, if we take the paradox of the continuum seriously, we have to concede that any human body in motion—if movement is possible at all—must pass, in traversing even the smallest distance, through an infinite number of points in space. This seems to be part of what Marcueil is getting at, in his example of the heart. We know already that human muscular movement is achieving the impossible—it is traversing the infinite. Why, then, could there not be <i>other</i> infinities that the human body and brain might yet achieve? If enough thoughts packed into one brain could yield a subjective experience of immortality; if enough muscular spasms approach an infinity of movement; why could not the same occur in the sexual domain? </p><p>Of course, the Supermale's experiment ultimately ends in tragedy—he is electromagnetically crucified by the same scientific pharisees who had doubted his work. Jarry's parodistic account, therefore—if we choose to read it as saying anything at all—can be interpreted as much as a Frankenstein-style warning against scientific hubris as a work of techno-optimism about the limitless potential for human progress (it may at last be more Mary Shelley, that is to say, than Percy Bysshe Shelley). The Supermale's experiment is Icarian in its daring, after all—and, like Icarus, he ends up getting fried. </p><p>But every age of scientific and technological progress contains this same fundamental ambivalence. The boundaries of what is possible have shifted. Who knows, we start to think—maybe humankind <i>can</i> achieve immortality? Maybe we <i>can </i>transcend our own fixed boundaries. And yet, as we test these limits, we fear the wrath of the gods. We fear that fate may punish us for our excess. </p><p>Certainly, it is hard to take seriously Percy Shelley's contention today that universal education would eventually make us all universally wise. The human brain's capacity does not in fact appear to be infinite—even if that capacity was undoubtedly far more expansive than the narrow limits in which the premodern class system tried to confine it, and which Shelley rightly protested against. Likewise with the Supermale's experiment. Just as there is an upper limit to thought, there is probably some upper limit to human muscular athleticism (even if we have not yet reached it decisively). The novel's love interest is right then, to opt in the end for returning to a lover who is "capable of containing his love within the prudent bounds of human capacities." </p><p>So too, in our present era, we find it hard to be purely optimistic about the unprecedented technological changes happening around us. As much as the new technology seems destined to expand our potential as a species—we also fear it will underline our limits. We worry that the creations of humankind—our machine inventions—will prove more powerful and capable than ourselves—that, rather than exulting ourselves through our technology, we will cede what limited power we had to our machine creations. We fear we will be <i>replaced</i>; rendered otiose. </p><p>The strain of techno-optimism running through Jarry's book, then—as through the more famous (and serious-minded) scientific romances of the era—is therefore a refreshing counterweight to our sense of dread and futility. As much as we fear the changes ahead, it is worth holding out some hope that they might ultimately be for the good. They may yet increase the potential of human beings, and not just of the machines we have made in our image. "In these days when metal and machines are all-powerful," as one of Jarry's characters proclaims, "man, if he is to survive, must become stronger than the machines, just as he became stronger than the beasts." One is reminded of the stirring cry that André Gide's protagonist utters in <i>The Immoralist—</i>a more serious exploration of the "superman" theme that was published in the same year—1902—as Jarry's novel: <i>What more can man do, what else can man be? </i>(Alpin trans.)</p><p>Such is the question, and the promise, of our era too. Our moment of technological change is another <i>belle époque. </i>The first led into an age of war and fascism. The new machines that had unlocked human potential became used primarily for killing people. Our era contains some of the same seeds of destruction. But maybe—we should at least allow ourselves to entertain the possibility—seeds of progress too? </p>Joshua Leachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04786588059362202964noreply@blogger.com0