My life has been unbalanced in many ways lately, and although the secular new year is not the right time in my case for resolutions and new resolves, it is a better time than no time––and since Rosh Hashanah 5772 back in September I have not gotten very far. Any pretext will do in an emotional storm.
I used to keep lists. I like making lists, always have, even back in the days when I would sit with my mother on rainy summer days and we together would list my baseball cards by team. Making lists calms my nerves. It enables me to pretend that the world is an orderly place.
Warning: completely random thought ahead. An old neighbor of mine from Bala Cynwyd who teaches at the Annenberg School recently wrote in a note (the context is not important for now) that he doesn't believe in objectivity in the news or anywhere else. It's all constructed, he says. How can such smart people say such stupid things?
Of course it's constructed; everything that passes through human symbol systems is constructed––that's not the point. The point is, is it constructed accurately? And sure, different people are going to have different perceptions even if they bear no intention of mangling the truth, but there is such a thing as common cultural property, so to speak, and there is such a thing as intersubjectivity, so that if, say, there is an auto accident at some intersection, and you ask ten observers who just happened to be standing around to tell you what happened, you are going to get more or less the same answer, unless of course there are lawyers present. That may not be pure objectivity in a philosophical sense, but it is certainly good enough for most purposes. There could not be law or courts otherwise. And of course there could not be history. If there is no possibility of objectivity at all, then how to distinguish, for example, between people who say the Holocaust happened and those who say it did not? I don't know if my friend Joe considers himself a postmodernist, an anti-foundationalist, or not, but whatever he considers himself, on this point he's just being an idiot.
Warning: another random thought. I recently finished a book by Louise Barrett called Beyond the Brain. It is part of my neuroscience reading list, wherein I tried to teach myself something about this very important and burgeoning new field. Anyway, it is not a very good book because it is derivative and repetitious, but it is good enough in some ways. First, the author describes the experiments of many other people, making it a very economical compendium for someone like me who does not follow the subject as a professional. And there are ideas in it that, though repeated too many times, are nonetheless worth some serious thinking and consideration.
Her bias, which I accept, is that our use of language has led us to divide things that are not properly thought of as divisible. Her basic argument is that you cannot understand the behavior of any animal, including human animals, unless you consider three aspects as a codependent whole: the animal's central nervous system, its evolved body shape, and the environment in which it finds itself. Similarly, she insists that the old idea that our senses are passive receptacles of environmental stimuli, which then leads to some sort of cognitive processing, which then leads to the animal's behaving or acting, is wrong. There is no segmentation or serial division in actual behavior. The animal has motives. It moves in the world and seeks perception, so that the process of taking in environmental stimulus is far from passive. And so on, and of course this is correct, even if someone had never encountered phenomenology.
But she takes it a step further, and insists that when animals perceive the world, they do not perceive a filtered cognitive replica or picture of the world, but they perceive it directly. Even though human beings have developed symbolic systems and articulate language, she makes the same argument with respect to humans: most of the time what we do involves a direct perception of the world as it is. Only when we sit back and mess around with our symbolic systems and their potential for abstraction do we do something that other animals apparently cannot do. She ridicules the idea that, for example, our visual system produces inverted images on the back of our retina which our brain "reads" in such a way as to put right side up. There is no one in our brain, no little man, no homunculus, that sees this inverted image and turns it right side up. Her ridicule takes the following logic: If there is a homunculus reading the image, then what is the brain inside the homunculus doing? Who is reading its images? And so she conjures the spectacle of an infinite regress, the point being to show us that the original assumption is illogical to the point of ludicrous.
At times, she shows a little bit too much fondness for B.F. Skinner to suit my tastes, but one can appreciate some things Skinner taught without having to buy the whole behaviorist mindset. When he argued that a human individual is essentially a combination of genetic facts and environmental happenstance, he was more right than wrong, so that what you want to understand is behavior and not the agent of the behavior sealed off from the world, or from his or her own history.
Anyway, the point of this is to imagine a conversation between Louise and Joe. Joe would say there is no such thing as objectivity, and Louise would say the world is as you see it––there are no filters or symbolic processes affecting every sight, smell and sound. You can't get more objective than that.
Now where was I? Oh yes, I was trying to clean my office. But that will have to wait because the last blog entry I started, the one called "Disgruntled", began in my head as wanting to be a very broad, catch-all and miscellaneous post. But I ran out of energy or time, or both––I forget which. But the impulse remains, as you can plainly see. So let me keep on with it. First I will simply make some comforting lists, out of my head. Second, if I have not completely run out of energy by then, I will go through the junk on my desk, processing it as I go in blog comments, so that I can either throw it out or put it someplace (new and better, or different anyway).
Let me list books first. I don't mean books that I would like to read, or we'd be here all day. I just mean books I'd like to write.
I would like to finish my water book. This is a book that I basically wrote in 1992-93 in Israel, when I was a fellow at the Dayan Center, but that I never finished. Things have changed since then, but the history really hasn't, and a lot of the book was history. So my plan is to dictate it into a new and better draft, and fashion some economic ending for it.
I would also like to rewrite my doctoral dissertation on the Jordan crisis of 1970. Again, there is a text and it is a pretty good text, if I do say so myself. But I have learned more about the subject since I finished back in 1978, and I am a much more mature thinker and writer than I was at the time.
I also have a book in me about Alfred the Ant. These are a series of stories I told my kids starting in 1981 or 1982, when Gabriel was old enough to understand stories. The basic setup follows Don Marquis' a character Archie from Archie and Mehitabel. I must have made up two dozen of these stories, only a few of which I can remember. Luckily, Gabriel remembers a few. I have a deal with my brother-in-law who is an artist to illustrate the stories. I just have to take time to write them out.
Then of course there is my novel. I have the title: Sins of the Fathers. I have the dramatis personae. I have the structure. I have a prose style model––Saul Bellow. I have the moral of the story too, which is that between our genetic endowment and our circumstances, we have only slivers of real freedom to decide our fate, the problem being that we never know how to recognize the slivers when they appear. Nevertheless, the decisions we make that have real torque on the future affect not only our future but that of our progeny. When we sin, we contribute to radiating pain 3 to 4 generations down the line. I just need a story, which is why I went to Suwalki––but that doesn't seem to have worked. But then I really haven't put a lot of effort into the thing. I just need to try harder to get up a head of steam, and I think maybe the book-to-be will find emotional fuel sufficient to carry the project through. I have not stoked the engines sufficiently yet.
I also want to write a book one day called the Ecology of Liberty. It's based on, or will be based on if it ever gets written, a very simple idea: We think about abstract matters in ways that are rooted in everyday experience. The idea of liberty cannot possibly mean the same thing to those people who pioneered a land, felling their own trees, hewing their own lumber, driving their own fence posts, raising and slaughtering their own meat, and being generally self-sufficient, on the one hand, and contemporary urbanites who can barely do anything for themselves, on the other. Abstract concepts both do and do not have a life of their own. Explaining this one sentence, and what it means in practical terms socially and politically, is the point of this book. Unfortunately, while the idea is original to me, someone else may have also had it, which is not surprising since it's so obvious. There is a new book out about freedom and technological change; but it is mainly about constitutional law, not broadly about society and politics. So I am safe for now.
I have also been collecting obituaries, mainly of American Jews––either immigrants or the children of immigrants from the great wave of Russian and Polish immigration at the end of the previous century. The whole idea here was to do a kind of snap book, using the obituaries as pocket biographies of interesting and sometimes quite curious people. I was going to simply rewrite the obituaries but also try to get in contact with family members and to conduct interviews about these people to fill out the picture. There was no great meaning involved in my conception. I just wanted to put together a book I thought would sell. I have not been collecting the obituaries as systematically as I once did however, so the whole thing would be a lot more work now if I were ever really to do it. I probably never will.
There is also another project, called the dictionary of strategic culture. I have this in proposal form, but the foundation functionary who told me she would fund subsequently ignored me. I still want to do it some day. It involves taking about 40 key terms about war and peace in English and then doing essentially a Oxford English dictionary job on those same terms in other languages, teasing out the layers of accumulated meaning and connotation. It is selected translation with a real cultural twist. I think it is very much worth doing. It's complicated, of course. You have to find people who are not only native speakers in the languages one wants in the project, but they have to be historical and cultural experts in their own right to do the translations and mini-essays on each term properly.
Every writer should try to write a biography, also. But I haven't hit upon anyone who really stirs my imagination to the extent that I would want to devote such an effort. I can at least cross that off my prospective list.
Even that is not all. I have had still other book ideas, like a book called just 1913. That was a pivotal year in American history, and I think it would make a good platform, just going through the year's events using the New York Times say, and reflecting around on where the stories came from and what their portentous futures turned out to be. It would be a little bit like Jay Winik's April 1865 book.
Since I am making lists, let me make a list of questions that have been bothering me--the kind of questions that buzz around just out of sight, just beyond my peripheral conceptual vision, of the kind I cannot quite articulate unless I really focus down on them.
The one that has really got me going lately is, where do the similarities in the gestures and smiles and laughs of siblings and relatives come from? I mean what are the actual mechanisms that explain this phenomenon? Before they are born babies are listening to the world outside, and we know they recognize the voice of their mother, and respond to the intonations of the language native to the family. This is obviously some kind of imprinting, but how the hell does it work? I learned just yesterday that babies who were in utero during times of starvation in the Netherlands in the winter of 1944 were marked biologically for life by the experience, with many becoming obese and having problems with diabetes. Evidently, their bodies were conditioned even before they were born to behave in certain ways. Again, what exactly defines the mechanics wherein such a thing can happen? This is also, I guess not coincidentally, what my novel is about on one level: how do attitudes, inclinations, biases that are never directly stated, never deliberately communicated in so many words, get passed on, sometimes in spite of efforts to make them go away?
Of course this ties in with my set of questions about technology, addiction, escapism and all the rest––and why I do not trust in the entirely benign consequences of the cybernetic revolution. But I will say no more about this now, because I have said it already in many places.
Also related, I guess, is the question about the connection between evolutionary biology and culture. This is of course a big topic these days. A lot of people are plying these waters. There is a new book by Robert Bellah that looks at religion in this light. Getting back to the Louise Barrett book, she makes a point that many animals, not just humans, use the environment as ways to offload cognitive burdens. They perceive stable patterns in the environment, and use them as catalysts for certain kinds of behavior, so that they do not need to remember or create mnemonics in their brain for that purpose. In a way, culture can be described as an exteriorization in inter-subjectively available form of what would otherwise be a tremendous burden cognitively on individuals--and it really would be impossible for individuals to encompass what can be learned and stored for future use. Nicholas Wade, in his book The Faith Instinct, trys from a different angle to do more or less the same thing as Bellah. So it will be interesting to see what Bellah has done. I think Wade's argument, to simplify, is that religious culture gave certain groups of people an advantage in morale, and so therefore had survival value. This strikes me as a rather too simple explanation. But I should spend more time with the book before characterizing it.
So much for questions, even though these are only a few out of about a dozen that have been flitting around my head lately. They all have to do with the same thing, really: mind––how it works and with what broad implications. I suppose I should just get in line, right? Isn't that what everybody is perplexed about, and has been for many centuries?
I even ask myself sometimes just who or what is the voice my head, my narrator? Is that me? When I think, that's the voice I hear and use, but which voice is it? I am using it now to ask a question about "it." How weird is that? Am I talking to myself? How many of me are there, therefore? If I talk and listen at the same time, that's at least two. Yikes. If an animal, say a dog, lacks symbolic language, what kind of narrator is in its head? Is there any narrator at all? What must its consciousness be like, then? Elephants and dolphins can remember stuff; how do they do it? With pictures? Probably, just as with some (many, most, all?) autistic humans. But what kind of narration is that? Boy I wish I knew how to answer these questions.
Just the other night I lay awake in bed thinking about the narrator problem. I will not go into all the details, but I concluded that in order for a word symbol to enter the vocabulary of the narrator in the head, the word has first to be actually heard by the ears. That is the way it is most readily imported into our heads. But I then asked myself if it were possible to import a word that one has read but not necessarily heard, or does the reading imply at least a tacit pronunciation, or a virtual hearing? I certainly agree with Maryanne Wolf that reading changes the wiring of the human brain, and that reading allows us to develop sophisticated symbolic and abstract forms of thought unavailable to non-literate or preliterate minds. It therefore seems to follow that one can import words into the narrator from reading.
I asked myself that same night if in addition to a narrator who could speak to us, and that we understand, I wondered whether we could recall tastes, smells, and physical sensations the same way we can "hear" the voice of our narrator. So I tried it. My conclusion was that, yes, you can smell a sizzling steak, or cinnamon, but it is weak compared to the actual sensation. Yes, you can re-create in the virtual reality of your mind what something feels like, too. But again, it seems vastly weak compared to the real thing. Why then does our voice, the voice of the narrator in our head, seemed to lose so little of its verisimilitude? The only answer I can think of is that the symbolic nature of our thinking depends much less on actual tactile or sensory bases. But I would be kidding myself, and certainly anyone reading this, to think that this qualifies as anything like a mature answer. It is rather the question that I am happy to have been able to pose. To myself.
As I lay awake in the dark I also tried to put myself into the position of a pre-literate human, someone may be living ten thousand years ago or so, or even as recently as eight thousand years ago. Many anthropologists have been through this drill, to be sure. But I think everyone needs to go through it themselves––everyone, that is, who is fascinated by the questions raised by the intersection of mind, language and society. What vocabulary would people need? What categories of vocabulary would develop as a result? It seems to me obvious that the two basics would be nouns and verbs, things and movements. I am pretty sure that the earliest nouns were names for things. I am also pretty sure that the earliest verbs tried to capture movement, whether of human beings, animals, plants in the breeze or changing through time, in the clouds, the stars, and so forth. It seemed to me that night––and again sparing you details––that every linguistic concept began as either a noun or a verb, and that it is intuitively obvious always which came first. I thought about hammering and a hammer. It seems to me in this case that the action of hitting something with the rock came first, and only later did the name for the tool developed. On the other hand, the noun tree came before the gerund to tree, as into force in animal into a tree the better two hunt it. I had a little trouble with the word "hide", so that perhaps not every word concept is intuitively obvious in its origin. But it seems to me that the joining together of a name and a motion, a noun and a verb, is ultimately picture–like, and that word symbols developed from much earlier mental activity in which this dyad was the core phenomenon. That is why it is logical to me that when one asks about the character of the narrator in the head of an elephant or a dolphin or a dog or monkey, the answer is most likely a picture that is at base a simple noun + verb combination. This is also why I continue to play around with the idea that the left side, the left hemisphere, of the human brain is mainly about nouns, and the right side is mainly about verbs. When we are sitting still, whether eating or sleeping or resting, I think the left side of our brain in general is dominant, and when we both focus on things that are moving around us, and especially when we get up and begin to walk or run, the right side becomes in general more dominant. I think there is an evolutionary logic to this argument, but I will not spell it out now.
Okay, enough of that; now I'm going to just to pick up scraps of paper, and try to figure out why I saved them––just so that I can throw them away, most of them, anyway. I will indicate which I toss and which I save, and why.
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So here is a book review from the December 26, 2010 New York Times book review. It is by Alan Wolfe, called "Faith and Modernity", and it is about a book by my friend Olivier Roy called Holy Ignorance. I don't know what the original French title was. What is noteworthy about the review, which is about ignorance, is how ignorant it is. Wolfe Says that Roy says that religious fundamentalism is a symptom of, not a reaction against, the secularization of society. So you get the idea that a religious revival is an optical illusion, that religion can be seemingly more visible and at the same time in decline.
Of course this is true, but there is nothing new in it, and it is amazing that Wolfe could think otherwise. It is as though he had never heard of Ernst Gellner or, for that matter, Peter Berger. I do blame the author of the review, but I also blame the editor of the magazine section for asking the wrong kind of person to review this book. It is irritating in the extreme to realize that a lot of younger people will have read this review and not know how ignorant the author is. I was going to write a letter to the editor, but I threw up my hands when I realized that the editor of this thing would never publish it. Okay, now I have said my piece about this review––into the trashcan it goes, ha ha.
I am making progress.
Next, I saved a column from the September 17, 2011 New York Times, from page A19, by Joe Nocera, called "Killing Jobs and Making Us Sick." It is about the food safety law recently passed, and I saved it because of the Carol Tucker Foreman piece we ran on this subject last year. The essence of the article is about how House Republicans gutted the budget to finance the new law. They could not prevent it from becoming law, but they managed to screw the pooch anyway. The article quotes the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture, Jack Kingston of Georgia, who says food safety is nothing to worry about, since about 99.99% of the food is safe. One can only wonder what Mark Twain would've said about such a character. Even Michelle Bachmann voted for this law. Good grief.
Into the trash it goes, ha ha.
Okay, here's a little item from the Washington Post page A7, from September 16. Apple pulled an app called " Jew or not Jew" that enable French readers to look through a database of celebrities and public figures to figure out which ones were Jewish. There is a group in France, called SOS Racisme, that objected to the app. You can still buy it in the US however, for just $1.99. This is obviously material for a second edition of Jewcentricity, which of course will never exist. To the circular file with you!! Ha ha! And that is no hedge.
Now here I have a very important piece of paper, which is been sitting on my desk for I have no idea how long: it is written in Yiddish. I asked a friend who is fluent to write it out for me so I could memorize it, but I have failed to memorize it. It is a phrase that my stepmother, of all people, first taught me. The translation into English goes something like this: Never show a fool a half-finished job. in Yiddish it sounds something like this transliterated: "A naar weizt men nit cayn halbe arbiyt." If I tried to actually say this to someone who understands and speaks the language I would make a fool out of myself, I know. I will keep this.
Here is a telephone message from Kay Hymowitz. I tried to get her to write something for us. Totally pointless; she will never do anything. I will keep the number anyway.
Here is a paper from the Polish Institute of International Affairs, number eighteen dated August 2011. It is basically an attempt to say that Poland's experience in transitioning toward free-market democracy can be useful in the Middle East. This is something I suggested to our Embassy in Warsaw many years ago, specifically that we should use Poland's experts who spent time in the Middle East as a resource, but no one paid any attention. Probably no one will pay any attention to this writer either, Patrycja Sasnal. Into the trash it goes.
Now here is a New York Times column by Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith from September 3 of this past year, and the title is "On Race, the Silence is Bipartisan." I saved it because of our upcoming special issue on this very question, which we are calling After the Wire. So I will save this for whoever turns out to be the author of this important essay. I remember too a review of a book by Randall Kennedy, who is I think at the Harvard Law school, on a somewhat similar subject. I can't find the review. But I can find a piece in the October 21 Washington Post, page A23, by Maya Wiley, called "Obama's Race Problem." It makes essentially the same point.
I now find just a small piece of paper, written on a notepad from the Fraser Suites, which is where we stayed in Sydney this past June. Here is what is written: "mutazilim" and a name--Iraj Bashiri. This refers to an essay in a fairly esoteric magazine about the argument in medieval Islam between those who credited reason and those who did not. I kept the reference to look up later, because this is a subject that interests me a lot. It is a marvelous example of path dependency, in this case path dependency gone wrong. If only Ibn-Rushd had won those arguments seven hundred or eight hundred years ago, we would certainly be in a different space and place now. So it goes.
Here in my hand is a piece of paper with six quotations from Sven Birkets. I looked all this stuff up for several reasons, one of which was to help persuade Maryanne Wolf to write for us. But I did that anyway, and I can always look these quotes up again if I need to––I think. I used one in my political writing book, discovering it rather by accident as appropriate to what I was trying to say. So I guess this document has fulfilled its purpose in the intricate meaning of which cosmic history is composed, and so I can throw it away. No, changed my mind--too good to throw away, and too useful as a reminder.
Next we have a September 2, 2001 David Brooks column––I save many of his–– called "The Vigorous Virtues." This gets back to the ecology of liberty idea. David starts out by crediting the Republicans for having a strong story to tell about American decline. The story is that America grew great because its citizens possessed certain vigorous virtues like self-reliance, personal responsibility, industriousness and a passion for freedom. But over the years government has grown and undermined these virtues, and he gives examples placed in the mouth of Governor Perry and others. But Brooks argues that this line of reasoning is necessary but not sufficient. Brooks reminds readers that there are certain tasks ahead that cannot be addressed by getting government out of our way: certain structural problems in the economy, education, stagnant wages and the problem of the social fabric. He's right, of course. His conclusion is that the Republican policy of negativism––cut, cut, cut––isn't enough. Scale back the nanny state, but build up the instigator state; that's the only way to ward off national decline. This I will save. It may come in handy when I revise my presidential platform, if I ever get around to it. This year it needs a lot of revision.
Now here is a notepad with my own handwriting, on CSBA stationery, but I cannot remember for the life of me what I was taking notes on. But here is what it says––there are seven points. First, don't invent unnecessary enemies, and don't trust friends not tethered to you by interests. Second, know your own blind spots; B-team your ideology. Third, know that domestic vulnerabilities trump everything in terms of great civilizations; hubris about one's domestic qualities is even more dangerous than hubris about foreign relations. Fourth know the difference between need and want, for others experienced hemmed-in empires and had little choice, but we have far more buffer space––yet we often do not see that. Fifth, assume state change, assume parameter surprise. There'll always be structural uncertainty. Sixth, don't exaggerate what government can competently do. Seventh, play to your comparative advantage: hint, that is not counterinsurgency or nation-building.
Again, I don't know what this comes from. It may have been my own notes when Eric Edelman convened that meeting on alliances and strategy. It sounds pretty good, whatever it is. I'll keep it.
Next we have a NYT Magazine from July 3. The cover reads: " Infidelity keeps us together." It's a story about somebody named Mark Oppenheimer, or it is a story about him written by somebody else, and it is completely outrageous. The subject in question is a homosexual giving marriage counseling advice to heterosexuals. I wish I had Joseph Epstein's courage in telling the New York Times to simply go to hell, but I look forward to the new acrostic puzzles every other week. If they want to be the national homosexual magazine, they can do it without me. I don't care what people do with their genitals in the privacy of their own homes. I just object when they insist on telling me all about it.
Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post has become one of my favorite columnists lately, by which I mean over the past few years, since I have recognized how important the basic governance dysfunction of the United States has become. On September 18 of this past year, by which I mean 2011, he noted that a lot of people who could in theory refinance their mortgage at much lower rates cannot do so in fact because Fannie Mae decided in 2008 to increase the fees it charges to guarantee all new loans, including refinancings. The reason they did this was to keep their portfolio flush, but an organization whose purpose in the first place is to help finance mortgages for homeowners should not be acting in ways directly contrary to its purpose. When I read this, I was shocked but not surprised. What Fannie and Freddie do always shocks but never surprises me. I can't believe we allow these monstrosities to persist. On the one hand the Fed had a policy of instituting ultra-low interest rates in order to stimulate the economy, and then another part of the government in effect thwarted the effort. Where is the President, for God's sake, when things like this happen? This President has been missing in action.
David Brooks wrote a very optimistic column on October 18––he said that the great restoration is in progress. Americans understand the need to restore the moral basis of sound economic behavior, and he cited a whole series of polls and data for evidence. I certainly hope he is right. Time will tell. His subject goes to a deeper question. Am I, are you, distressed about the economic meltdown in the United States? Of course, there is good reason to be distressed. People are hurting, families are falling out of the middle class without parachutes. But the excesses and immorality of the consumer society have got to stop somehow, and I don't see how they stop without crisis and pain. So in a way I am sad by what I see, but in a way I am delighted. I am especially delighted if David turns out to be right. As I say, time will tell.
The October 16 New York Times, on page 24, had a kind of graphic illustrating the new political committees and the possible channels for unlimited anonymous donations. All of this comes in the wake of the Citizens United decision, of course, the worst decision since Dred Scott. (I must say, this Dragon program of voice to print has the education of a retarded seventh grader when it comes to history. Certainly, the thing could've been programmed more effectively.) Anyway, back to the graphic, it shows what one may call the entrails of the plutocracy. I will save this. It will come in very handy. The stuff is so complicated that it is impossible to memorize.
I kept a Washington Post front section from October 23, 2011, because of the headline above the fold on the right, " In Libya, rough justice at work." I kept it just as evidence of my prediction back in March that even with the fall of the dictator establishing anything remotely like a civilized polity in Libya would not be easy. I predicted revenge killings, and I was right. That's why I saved the front section from August 27, which has the headline on the left above the fold, page 1 ,"Revenge killings mount in Libya." This is the article in which the term extrajudicial killings was used, a truly Orwellian remark, since the opposite of an extrajudicial killing is a judicial killing, which presumes that the courts are working properly, which has never been the case in Libya since September 1969.
The killings and the abuses did not end when the shooting stopped. But what has been going on since it is not very telegenic, so Western media is generally not interested. The article describes more than 7,000 detained without charges by the new government. If you could call it a government. These 7,000 are in real trouble.
I am very satisfied with the three pieces I wrote about Libya. I don't think I got anything significant wrong. I missed some details concerning timing, but the basic themes I got right. I have never regretted my initial conclusion that we should have stayed far away from this mess. It could have turned out worse, and I am thankful it did not. During the long time when Qaddafi was wounded but not dead he was very dangerous. His followers are much less dangerous now, but still worth paying attention to quietly. If they can find a way to take revenge, they will.
In this regard I note a column in the October 21 Washington Post by David Ignatius, who, under the title "A Moment to Savor", claims that Obama's cautious strategy work out as planned. This man does the best he can, but it is not very good. It is striking how popular mediocre thinkers can become in this political culture. I know that sounds very nasty, snide and boastful. But I still think it's true.
On the same front page there is an article about the fold, left, observing some similarities between those of the Tea Party persuasion and those of the Occupy Wall Street persuasion. This just serves as further evidence of my horseshoe theory of the political spectrum––that the extremes share several commonalities. This is why the spectrum should never be imagined to be a straight line, but an arc or a horseshoe, with synapses possible between the ends.
The business Day section from October 22, New York Times, featured a fascinating piece by James B. Stewart on the progress, I use the word sarcastically, of the Volcker rule. The article title was, "Volcker rule, once simple, now boggles." It relates the tale of how a memo that began as a three-page letter to the president turned into a ten page proposition as part of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It then goes on to show what the Wall Street lobbyists have since done to it: the text has swelled to 298 pages accompanied by more than 1,300 questions about 400 topics. The beast has become so bloated that even its creator no longer loves it. The lobbyists have really done a number on this. First they screwed the pooch by creating as many exclusions and exceptions as possible, and then, having created such an ugly beast, now argue that it must be put to death because it cannot possibly function. If the word chutzpah had not already been invented, this behavior would justify it.
Well, I think that's enough for now. My desk is much cleaner. Wow. Probably I just should've thrown all the stuff away and spent time reading instead. Another mistake, no doubt.
Okay, enough of that; now I'm going to just to pick up scraps of paper, and try to figure out why I saved them––just so that I can throw them away, most of them, anyway. I will indicate which I toss and which I save, and why.
.
So here is a book review from the December 26, 2010 New York Times book review. It is by Alan Wolfe, called "Faith and Modernity", and it is about a book by my friend Olivier Roy called Holy Ignorance. I don't know what the original French title was. What is noteworthy about the review, which is about ignorance, is how ignorant it is. Wolfe Says that Roy says that religious fundamentalism is a symptom of, not a reaction against, the secularization of society. So you get the idea that a religious revival is an optical illusion, that religion can be seemingly more visible and at the same time in decline.
Of course this is true, but there is nothing new in it, and it is amazing that Wolfe could think otherwise. It is as though he had never heard of Ernst Gellner or, for that matter, Peter Berger. I do blame the author of the review, but I also blame the editor of the magazine section for asking the wrong kind of person to review this book. It is irritating in the extreme to realize that a lot of younger people will have read this review and not know how ignorant the author is. I was going to write a letter to the editor, but I threw up my hands when I realized that the editor of this thing would never publish it. Okay, now I have said my piece about this review––into the trashcan it goes, ha ha.
I am making progress.
Next, I saved a column from the September 17, 2011 New York Times, from page A19, by Joe Nocera, called "Killing Jobs and Making Us Sick." It is about the food safety law recently passed, and I saved it because of the Carol Tucker Foreman piece we ran on this subject last year. The essence of the article is about how House Republicans gutted the budget to finance the new law. They could not prevent it from becoming law, but they managed to screw the pooch anyway. The article quotes the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture, Jack Kingston of Georgia, who says food safety is nothing to worry about, since about 99.99% of the food is safe. One can only wonder what Mark Twain would've said about such a character. Even Michelle Bachmann voted for this law. Good grief.
Into the trash it goes, ha ha.
Okay, here's a little item from the Washington Post page A7, from September 16. Apple pulled an app called " Jew or not Jew" that enable French readers to look through a database of celebrities and public figures to figure out which ones were Jewish. There is a group in France, called SOS Racisme, that objected to the app. You can still buy it in the US however, for just $1.99. This is obviously material for a second edition of Jewcentricity, which of course will never exist. To the circular file with you!! Ha ha! And that is no hedge.
Now here I have a very important piece of paper, which is been sitting on my desk for I have no idea how long: it is written in Yiddish. I asked a friend who is fluent to write it out for me so I could memorize it, but I have failed to memorize it. It is a phrase that my stepmother, of all people, first taught me. The translation into English goes something like this: Never show a fool a half-finished job. in Yiddish it sounds something like this transliterated: "A naar weizt men nit cayn halbe arbiyt." If I tried to actually say this to someone who understands and speaks the language I would make a fool out of myself, I know. I will keep this.
Here is a telephone message from Kay Hymowitz. I tried to get her to write something for us. Totally pointless; she will never do anything. I will keep the number anyway.
Here is a paper from the Polish Institute of International Affairs, number eighteen dated August 2011. It is basically an attempt to say that Poland's experience in transitioning toward free-market democracy can be useful in the Middle East. This is something I suggested to our Embassy in Warsaw many years ago, specifically that we should use Poland's experts who spent time in the Middle East as a resource, but no one paid any attention. Probably no one will pay any attention to this writer either, Patrycja Sasnal. Into the trash it goes.
Now here is a New York Times column by Desmond S. King and Rogers M. Smith from September 3 of this past year, and the title is "On Race, the Silence is Bipartisan." I saved it because of our upcoming special issue on this very question, which we are calling After the Wire. So I will save this for whoever turns out to be the author of this important essay. I remember too a review of a book by Randall Kennedy, who is I think at the Harvard Law school, on a somewhat similar subject. I can't find the review. But I can find a piece in the October 21 Washington Post, page A23, by Maya Wiley, called "Obama's Race Problem." It makes essentially the same point.
I now find just a small piece of paper, written on a notepad from the Fraser Suites, which is where we stayed in Sydney this past June. Here is what is written: "mutazilim" and a name--Iraj Bashiri. This refers to an essay in a fairly esoteric magazine about the argument in medieval Islam between those who credited reason and those who did not. I kept the reference to look up later, because this is a subject that interests me a lot. It is a marvelous example of path dependency, in this case path dependency gone wrong. If only Ibn-Rushd had won those arguments seven hundred or eight hundred years ago, we would certainly be in a different space and place now. So it goes.
Here in my hand is a piece of paper with six quotations from Sven Birkets. I looked all this stuff up for several reasons, one of which was to help persuade Maryanne Wolf to write for us. But I did that anyway, and I can always look these quotes up again if I need to––I think. I used one in my political writing book, discovering it rather by accident as appropriate to what I was trying to say. So I guess this document has fulfilled its purpose in the intricate meaning of which cosmic history is composed, and so I can throw it away. No, changed my mind--too good to throw away, and too useful as a reminder.
Next we have a September 2, 2001 David Brooks column––I save many of his–– called "The Vigorous Virtues." This gets back to the ecology of liberty idea. David starts out by crediting the Republicans for having a strong story to tell about American decline. The story is that America grew great because its citizens possessed certain vigorous virtues like self-reliance, personal responsibility, industriousness and a passion for freedom. But over the years government has grown and undermined these virtues, and he gives examples placed in the mouth of Governor Perry and others. But Brooks argues that this line of reasoning is necessary but not sufficient. Brooks reminds readers that there are certain tasks ahead that cannot be addressed by getting government out of our way: certain structural problems in the economy, education, stagnant wages and the problem of the social fabric. He's right, of course. His conclusion is that the Republican policy of negativism––cut, cut, cut––isn't enough. Scale back the nanny state, but build up the instigator state; that's the only way to ward off national decline. This I will save. It may come in handy when I revise my presidential platform, if I ever get around to it. This year it needs a lot of revision.
Now here is a notepad with my own handwriting, on CSBA stationery, but I cannot remember for the life of me what I was taking notes on. But here is what it says––there are seven points. First, don't invent unnecessary enemies, and don't trust friends not tethered to you by interests. Second, know your own blind spots; B-team your ideology. Third, know that domestic vulnerabilities trump everything in terms of great civilizations; hubris about one's domestic qualities is even more dangerous than hubris about foreign relations. Fourth know the difference between need and want, for others experienced hemmed-in empires and had little choice, but we have far more buffer space––yet we often do not see that. Fifth, assume state change, assume parameter surprise. There'll always be structural uncertainty. Sixth, don't exaggerate what government can competently do. Seventh, play to your comparative advantage: hint, that is not counterinsurgency or nation-building.
Again, I don't know what this comes from. It may have been my own notes when Eric Edelman convened that meeting on alliances and strategy. It sounds pretty good, whatever it is. I'll keep it.
Next we have a NYT Magazine from July 3. The cover reads: " Infidelity keeps us together." It's a story about somebody named Mark Oppenheimer, or it is a story about him written by somebody else, and it is completely outrageous. The subject in question is a homosexual giving marriage counseling advice to heterosexuals. I wish I had Joseph Epstein's courage in telling the New York Times to simply go to hell, but I look forward to the new acrostic puzzles every other week. If they want to be the national homosexual magazine, they can do it without me. I don't care what people do with their genitals in the privacy of their own homes. I just object when they insist on telling me all about it.
Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post has become one of my favorite columnists lately, by which I mean over the past few years, since I have recognized how important the basic governance dysfunction of the United States has become. On September 18 of this past year, by which I mean 2011, he noted that a lot of people who could in theory refinance their mortgage at much lower rates cannot do so in fact because Fannie Mae decided in 2008 to increase the fees it charges to guarantee all new loans, including refinancings. The reason they did this was to keep their portfolio flush, but an organization whose purpose in the first place is to help finance mortgages for homeowners should not be acting in ways directly contrary to its purpose. When I read this, I was shocked but not surprised. What Fannie and Freddie do always shocks but never surprises me. I can't believe we allow these monstrosities to persist. On the one hand the Fed had a policy of instituting ultra-low interest rates in order to stimulate the economy, and then another part of the government in effect thwarted the effort. Where is the President, for God's sake, when things like this happen? This President has been missing in action.
David Brooks wrote a very optimistic column on October 18––he said that the great restoration is in progress. Americans understand the need to restore the moral basis of sound economic behavior, and he cited a whole series of polls and data for evidence. I certainly hope he is right. Time will tell. His subject goes to a deeper question. Am I, are you, distressed about the economic meltdown in the United States? Of course, there is good reason to be distressed. People are hurting, families are falling out of the middle class without parachutes. But the excesses and immorality of the consumer society have got to stop somehow, and I don't see how they stop without crisis and pain. So in a way I am sad by what I see, but in a way I am delighted. I am especially delighted if David turns out to be right. As I say, time will tell.
The October 16 New York Times, on page 24, had a kind of graphic illustrating the new political committees and the possible channels for unlimited anonymous donations. All of this comes in the wake of the Citizens United decision, of course, the worst decision since Dred Scott. (I must say, this Dragon program of voice to print has the education of a retarded seventh grader when it comes to history. Certainly, the thing could've been programmed more effectively.) Anyway, back to the graphic, it shows what one may call the entrails of the plutocracy. I will save this. It will come in very handy. The stuff is so complicated that it is impossible to memorize.
I kept a Washington Post front section from October 23, 2011, because of the headline above the fold on the right, " In Libya, rough justice at work." I kept it just as evidence of my prediction back in March that even with the fall of the dictator establishing anything remotely like a civilized polity in Libya would not be easy. I predicted revenge killings, and I was right. That's why I saved the front section from August 27, which has the headline on the left above the fold, page 1 ,"Revenge killings mount in Libya." This is the article in which the term extrajudicial killings was used, a truly Orwellian remark, since the opposite of an extrajudicial killing is a judicial killing, which presumes that the courts are working properly, which has never been the case in Libya since September 1969.
The killings and the abuses did not end when the shooting stopped. But what has been going on since it is not very telegenic, so Western media is generally not interested. The article describes more than 7,000 detained without charges by the new government. If you could call it a government. These 7,000 are in real trouble.
I am very satisfied with the three pieces I wrote about Libya. I don't think I got anything significant wrong. I missed some details concerning timing, but the basic themes I got right. I have never regretted my initial conclusion that we should have stayed far away from this mess. It could have turned out worse, and I am thankful it did not. During the long time when Qaddafi was wounded but not dead he was very dangerous. His followers are much less dangerous now, but still worth paying attention to quietly. If they can find a way to take revenge, they will.
In this regard I note a column in the October 21 Washington Post by David Ignatius, who, under the title "A Moment to Savor", claims that Obama's cautious strategy work out as planned. This man does the best he can, but it is not very good. It is striking how popular mediocre thinkers can become in this political culture. I know that sounds very nasty, snide and boastful. But I still think it's true.
On the same front page there is an article about the fold, left, observing some similarities between those of the Tea Party persuasion and those of the Occupy Wall Street persuasion. This just serves as further evidence of my horseshoe theory of the political spectrum––that the extremes share several commonalities. This is why the spectrum should never be imagined to be a straight line, but an arc or a horseshoe, with synapses possible between the ends.
The business Day section from October 22, New York Times, featured a fascinating piece by James B. Stewart on the progress, I use the word sarcastically, of the Volcker rule. The article title was, "Volcker rule, once simple, now boggles." It relates the tale of how a memo that began as a three-page letter to the president turned into a ten page proposition as part of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It then goes on to show what the Wall Street lobbyists have since done to it: the text has swelled to 298 pages accompanied by more than 1,300 questions about 400 topics. The beast has become so bloated that even its creator no longer loves it. The lobbyists have really done a number on this. First they screwed the pooch by creating as many exclusions and exceptions as possible, and then, having created such an ugly beast, now argue that it must be put to death because it cannot possibly function. If the word chutzpah had not already been invented, this behavior would justify it.
Well, I think that's enough for now. My desk is much cleaner. Wow. Probably I just should've thrown all the stuff away and spent time reading instead. Another mistake, no doubt.
