A Brief Endorsement
I don’t know about you, but if I lived in the New York metropolitan area, I’d be all over these mariner’s workshops offered by boatbuilder, sailor, and Friend of the Scene David Ryan.
The Trouble with Imagination
Christopher Beam’s glib dismissal of libertarianism has earned replies from all the predictable quarters. The folks at Reason respectfully disagree but still appreciate its mostly sympathetic overview of the libertarian factions and personalities, while conservatives at FrumForum push back against Beam’s false characterization of the Founders as libertarians.
Michael Dougherty, though, makes the most important points about Beam’s essay, especially about the frivolous little thought experiment Beam poses to discredit minarchism. Beam:
Say we started from scratch and created a society in which government covered only the bare essentials of an army, police, and a courts system. I’m a farmer, and I want to sell my crops. In Libertopia, I can sell them in exchange for money. Where does the money come from? Easy, a private bank. Who prints the money? Well, for that we’d need a central bank—otherwise you’d have a thousand banks with a thousand different types of currency. (Some libertarians advocate this.) Okay, fine, we’ll create a central bank. But there’s another problem: Some people don’t have jobs. So we create charities to feed and clothe them. What if there isn’t enough charity money to help them? Well, we don’t want them to start stealing, so we’d better create a welfare system to cover their basic necessities. We’d need education, of course, so a few entrepreneurs would start private schools. Some would be excellent. Others would be mediocre. The poorest students would receive vouchers that allowed them to attend school. Where would those vouchers come from? Charity. Again, what if that doesn’t suffice? Perhaps the government would have to set up a school or two after all.
Michael points out Beam’s status quo bias, and debunks the implicit claim (a conservative one, in some sense) that whatever institutions we have now are both inevitable and essential. If Beam lived in China, his one-paragraph history of human organization might have mentioned the need for population control (pdf) and, of course, a system of residency permits. Because otherwise: Mogadishu! Only crazy uncles and trenchcoat-wearing dice-rollers think you should be able to just have babies and live anywhere!
This unthinking affinity for the status quo is the article’s most salient failure, and is symptomatic of our political culture’s pathologies. Incrementalism is one thing, but it should not require a willful blindness to the fact that our political institutions are historically contingent and haphazard. As Noah Millman says in a different context:
Radical critiques can often be extremely useful, exposing hidden assumptions behind the existing intellectual orthodoxy, posing fundamental questions that, it turns out, that order cannot adequately answer, thereby forcing that order to change or to shore up those shaky foundations.
If nothing else, Beam’s article accidentally highlights those hidden assumptions, and shows how hard some will work to marginalize as “utopian” anyone who points them out.
The Rose in Winter
Friend of the Scene Freddie de Boer has started an online book club around The Name of the Rose. Do check it out: The Rose in Winter.
William Dalrymple on the Heat Death of Culture
Warning: anyone squeamish about the misappropriation of scientific terminology in the service of vague, non-falsifiable cultural gesturing should probably click “Mark as Read” right now.
One of my all-time favorite travel books is William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain, which describes his trip as a skeptical but mostly respectful visitor through what’s left of the Christian Levant. He follows in the footsteps of peripatetic sixth-century monk John Moschos, who wrote his own memoir about the beginning of the end of Byzantine culture in the face of impending Persian and Arab conquest.
Other readers might be more familiar with Dalrymple’s books and article about South Asia, one of which just appeared in The National Interest. This latest essay laments the standardization of Indian and Pakistani devotional practice, and how locally preserved traditions and crafts are being displaced by a macho McHinduism that owes less to globalism than to the (admittedly related) trend of modernization inside India.
All over India, villages were once believed to be host to a numberless pantheon of sprites and godlings, tree spirits and snake gods who were said to guard and regulate the ebb and flow of daily life. They were worshipped and propitiated for they knew the till and soil of the local fields and the sweet water of the wells, even the needs and thirsts of the cattle and the goats of the village. But increasingly in urban India, these small gods and goddesses are falling out of favor as faith becomes more centralized, and as local gods and goddesses give way to the national hyper-masculine hero deities, especially Lord Krishna and Lord Rama, a process scholars call the “Rama-fication” of Hinduism.
I know next to nothing about India’s cultural and religious history, so I’m ill-equipped to assess the content of Dalrymple’s claims. But his affinity for the particular, the local, and the idiosyncratic as such — something he also shows in From the Holy Mountain — is something I’m glad to get behind. Logical depth and systemic diversity are normative principles without the home they deserve in any of your name-brand political taxonomies. Sure, there is some overlap between a certain left-ish bourgeois consensus and Dalrymple’s “Keep India Weird” platform, but Dalrymple defends pluralism as a way of confusing, dissolving, and blurring the fault lines between more brittle identities:
Everywhere in South Asia, the deeply embedded syncretic, pluralistic folk traditions which continue to defy the artificial boundaries of modern political identities are finding it difficult to compete with the homogenizing mainstream. Education and political consciousness are making people more aware of their religious and political identities.
I share Dalrymple’s suspicion of a “homogenizing mainstream,” and consider him an entropologist in this respect. Like Thomas Pynchon or Lévi-Strauss, Dalrymple sees conquest and domination as processes that sap a system of its complexity, whether that system is in Roman Egypt or rural India. Those “syncretic, pluralistic folk traditions” are, according to Dalrymple, means of benign resistance to forces of uniformity and homogenization.
In concluding his article, Dalrymple describes the gentle resistance that Pakistan and Afghanistan’s Sufis have long put up against imported orthodox Muslim chauvinism, and then, in what he describes as “a very hopeful moment,” moves to Bengal where a gathering of tantric mystics, both Hindu and Muslim, proclaim that “He who has self-knowledge / Is open to all religions, / Be it Hindu, Muslim, Jewish or Christian!”
But wait. If Louis Menand, in the above-linked review, is correct — if entropy is a process by which “clarity and mutual understanding” are “purchased by a loss of diversity of opinion” — then this wholesome syncretism can only do so much to prevent the heat death of human civilization. Some degree of exclusivity, some barriers to mutual understanding, are necessary to keep things at a healthy level of weirdness. Despite their shared etymology, syncretism and idiosyncracy can’t correlate forever.
Studies in Declinism, Duck and Cover Edition
“Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home, they say, is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that home is the only place of liberty, the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge a whim.” —G.K. Chesterton
So begins The Black-Out Book, (affiliate link that keeps the TAS lights on, so to speak) a collection of games and puzzles compiled during WWII to help British families endure the togetherness imposed by the threat of air raids. Here is a representative page:
FEMA, meanwhile, has produced the Mountain Lion Family to promote their Ready Kids program, because nothing says “stability in the face of disaster” like an oddly sexy cougar mom who “loves to dance in the mornings to relax” and a (definitely non-gay!) cougar dad who “made his own guitar from a hollow tree.”
By September, I want all American Scene readers to know the National Preparedness Month song.
Air Safety in the Ugly Aggregate
Nobody likes this tantrum of air security theater. The inconvenience and servility that TSA is imposing on the shoeless herds stuck shuffling through all the nation’s airports is an affront to dignity and the republican spirit. Julian Sanchez, characteristically, hits the right notes here, wondering about what this system of discipline will mean, even if it works ‘not just most of the time, but all of the time.’ I also like David Brooks’ take very much.
One popular response that I don’t endorse is that of Nate Silver, who argues that “our” fear of terrorist attack on an airplane is irrational, since the odds of any one of us encountering it are so miniscule.
These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.
…Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade.
Naturally, what follows from this is the comparison to lightning strikes, car accidents, etc., all of which proves that each of us should, with cool rationality, recognize the comparative safety of plane travel and…
And what? Stop taking our shoes off? Vote for candidates who promise to abolish pat-downs while still keeping air travel marginally safer than driving? The risk calculations that drive our air security apparatus are, in their perverse way, rational, because systemic risk has been concentrated, rather than dispersed. We have so thoroughly collectivized the risk of air incidents in our cultural imagination, our financial system, and our bureaucratic institutions that what you think about the risk of terrorism matters not one bit. Air travel as we know it is a brittle matrix of fragile, risk-averse, leveraged systems, and the gentleman with the blue nitrile gloves is there not to protect you, but to protect the matrix.
I pulled the same data that Nate did, and get the same aggregate totals for his ten-year period. But dividing those numbers out to the level of the individual passenger makes no sense to the managers responsible for maintaining the system. Nobody cares what your odds of being a victim are. What matters to the security principals is the risk of one catastrophic failure in the entire system during their tenure.
Say you are the Secretary of Homeland Security, and you plan to serve for four years before getting the hell out and working on Wall Street. There will be almost 3 million enplanements during your tenure. Aircraft for which you are nominally responsible will fly almost 30 billion miles. If we must do the Nickelodeon Numerology game, it would take light about 43 hours to go that far in space! Using Nate’s estimate of one terrorist per 11.5 billion miles flown, you can expect about 2 1/2 incidents on your watch. Look busy!
I don’t mean to say that any of us should live in fear, or that we shouldn’t chafe under the indignities and inconvenience of contemporary air travel. But our air travel industry is currently structured such that any incident can be a catastrophic one. We have, as David Brooks shows, collectivized and bureaucratized the risk of dying in a plane crash to an extent that we haven’t yet figured out how to do with cars and lightning bolts. Maybe there’s an institutional or entrepreneurial solution. Maybe Peter Thiel will start Seastead Air and design a risk structure that favors rational choices at the passenger level. Until then, you’re at the mercy of a system that sees you as a threat until it’s seen you naked.
[I’m turning off comments, since I can’t follow a combox over the weekend. But someone please get in touch with me if I’ve gotten the math wrong.]
[updated 1/11 to fix nitrile glove reference ]
Fall of the U.S.A. Concluded: The Big Money
If one uses a generous definition of “fall,” I have squeaked in under the wire, finishing the U.S.A. trilogy just prior to the winter solstice. I hope a few of you are still keeping up, or have at least read enough to find something worthwhile in these bitter, beautiful books.
The tragedy at the heart of U.S.A., the death that gives it its heartbreaking force, is the death of yearning. Remember the introductory passage that Conor cited? The one about a wandering young man with “no job, no woman, no house, no city” but for whom “one bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough?” If you stopped reading, do me a favor and open The Big Money to its final pages and read the section titled “Vag.” See what’s become of that bold, searching hunger. The rest of you, keep reading.
In my first post on the books, I suggested a few topics that I’d keep in mind while I read. I’ll revisit them quickly to get myself caught up, then please carry on in the combox. Over the coming days, I’ll go back through the dogeared pages and see what, if anything, is worth bringing up.
The Law
When and where does the force of law manifest in the action of the novels and in the lives of the characters?
Easy enough: law and justice are distant, corrupt, and serve their paymasters.
Radicalization
We hear about it a lot today, mostly in embarrassingly glib terms. Muslim kids go into one end of a madrassa, and radicals pour out the other end. But what actually happens to make some people and not others receptive to radical solutions and life missions? I’ve always thought that notions of manhood had a lot to do with it, and Dos Passos appears to agree.
Interestingly, the most sympathetic and earnest radical is Mary French. While her male comrades are always shoring up one another’s commitment to the movement, Mary’s sincere humanitarianism keeps her going without any help from others.
What’s the Matter With Kansas?
To what extent do direct economic interests shape political orientation? Should they? The book presents solidarity as something ephemeral that takes constant energy input to avoid dissipation.
Like I mention above, the activists are always trying to instill solidarity among the oppressed, but getting their funds from wealthy liberals like Ada Cohn.
Scale
As we are discovering in the era of “food miles” and “too big to fail,” scale is an under-theorized element of political economy that carries a lot of intuitive weight. To what extent does Dos Passos present scale as a normative dimension?
Meh. Next question.
Media and the Information Economy
Reading this in hindsight, where, if anywhere, do we see hints of the emerging “knowledge economy?”
This is Ivy Ledbetter Lee, the so-called founder of modern public relations and prototype for J. Ward Moorehouse. Like Moorehouse, Lee worked for heavy industry as a publicist and for the Red Cross during World War I.
The Moorehouse character, like Lee, starts doing publicity for the steel industry, and becomes famous for his efforts at “harmonizing” public opinion with corporate and government policy. As he hits his stride, Moorehouse rhapsodizes over American industry, describing it as:
a highpower locomotive on a great express train charging through the night of old individualistic methods. … What does a steam engine require? Cooperation, coordination of the inventor’s brain, the promoter’s brain that made the development of these highpower products possible … Coordination of capital, the storedup energy of the race in the form of credit intelligently directed … labor, the prosperous contented American working man to whom the unprecedented possibilities of capital collected in great corporations had given the full dinnerpail, cheap motor transport, insurance, short working hours … a measure of comfort and prosperity unequaled before or since in the tragic procession of recorded history or in the known regions of the habitable globe.
By the end of The Big Money, Moorehouse is, quite literally, selling quack medicine and lobbying against its regulation.
The novels track this process of dissolution at both the individual scale and the national, starting with a hungry industrial fervor that seems almost pagan (the Pequod comes to mind a few times), and ending in a sanitized, bureaucratic, alienating, and superficial world of institutions beyond any individual control. “The storedup energy of the race” is squandered, leaving nothing to yearn for, but everything to want.
1919
I’ve finished up 1919, and started on The Big Money.
Anyone who abandoned the project before the end of 1919, go grab your copy, skip to the end of the book, and read “The Body of an American” chapter. It stands alone as a prose poem, a sort of “I Hear America Putrefying.” But it also pulls together Dos Passos’ ambitions and his omnivorous approach to portraying WWI-era Americans. Well, white WWI-era Americans, but that’s another conversation.
The idea of the Unknown Soldier always had an imaginative pull to me: as a kid, I was fascinated by the way indeterminacy could stand for universality. (Uh, spoiler alert: the Unknown Soldier dies near the end.) In this one chapter, Dos Passos does for the dismembered doughboy what he does for all his other characters, but more so. He follows the soldier not just from birth, but from conception, all the way to his confused, shell-splattered demise. Along the way, the soldier’s identity slips from one person to the next, and since Dos Passos’ characters often serve as little more than cameras through which we see places, the soldier stands for the land in all its variety as much as for the American people. Read it.
For those of you still keeping up, here are some topics for consideration.
Sex
What a miserable bunch of sad sacks these characters are, fumbling along in frustration until someone gets pregnant, at which point everything falls apart. The revolutionaries all talk big about freeing themselves from bourgeois notions of sexual propriety, but their revolution never quite arrives. Sexual liberation proves just as elusive — or illusory — as the workers’ uprising, and the two ideals are caustically juxtaposed. The bourgeois characters also dabble in liberated rhetoric when it suits their urges, but always fall back on convention somehow. Pregnancy, in almost every case, sets the rules.
So I keep wondering: if these characters could exercise the autonomy they claim they’d enjoy, what would they do with it? Would they be any happier?
Violence
Dos Passos makes no secret of his sympathies for the Wobblies and other heroes of American socialism, and his account of the Seattle General Strike, and the brutal response of the forces of reaction, makes Howard Zinn’s version seem cool and dispassionate. But there’s nothing about these earnest revolutionaries that suggests they’d be any less eager to employ rifle butts than Ole Hanson was. Just as with sex, none of the characters seem to have what it would take to wisely use the power they’re chasing. A pessimistic read of the series (is there any other kind?) suggests that by WWI, our institutions were already beyond democratic control, even by the well-intended, and that in the U.S., force and only force would dictate peoples’ economic and political lives.
American Immunity
Conspicuously absent in the book is a “war is hell” thread. Dos Passos hints at the horrors of trench combat, but the American characters who volunteer for service in WWI, whether in the military or driving ambulances, spend their time whoring and cafe-hopping. Pregnancy is a bigger threat to their well-being than Zeppelins or mustard gas. Americans are revered by the French not for their heroism, but for the material abundance they represent. I consider this one of the novels’ finest touches.
Along these lines, here’s a picture of an American ambulance driver. The driver’s name is Walt Disney.
Did you know someone made a rock opera about the Seattle General Strike? Now you do.
Cities White People Like
As always, I’m late to the conversation about Aaron Renn’s post at The New Geography, probably because my better judgment tells me that blogging about race is something I should simply avoid. Reihan and Ta-Nehisi Coates have staked out two hermeneutic poles, with Reihan at the wonkier end discussing preferences in housing wealth accumulation and Coates (there’s that damn first name/last name blogger’s conundrum again — having never met nor exchanged tweets with Mr. Coates, I’ll default to the last name but defer to his preference if it matters) steering the debate toward a more personal scale.
For those who haven’t seen it, Renn’s post argues that self-described white urbanists have claimed all the cachet of urban living without any of the social or political challenge by gathering in enclaves like Portland and Minneapolis — places that turn out to have suspiciously small black populations:
This raises troubling questions about these cities. Why is it that progressivism in smaller metros is so often associated with low numbers of African Americans? Can you have a progressive city properly so-called with only a disproportionate handful of African Americans in it? In addition, why has no one called these cities on it?
Renn is using a rhetorically convenient definition of “progressivism” here, since it means a particular combination of fussy transportation policies and land use regulation, not left-leaning politics as generally understood. He has stacked the deck in other ways (whites manage to self-segregate quite well in larger metros, for instance, and how, exactly, would one “call these cities on it?”), but it’s the source of his resentment that I find interesting. At the risk of putting a lot of words into his mouth, I think he’s implicitly claiming that any American cultural experience is inauthentic if it fails to reckon with the presence of African-Americans, not as victims, but as members of a shared history and culture. He’s reminding white Americans to check themselves before settling for any cultural accomplishment that excludes blacks, who, as James mentions in citing Sullivan, are quintessentially American in even the most reactionary sense. You could make the case, for example, that we have seen the Front Porch Republic and it’s full of black people.
I like Coates’ response to Renn, and respect his admonition to resist dragging blacks into what is, at bottom, a political and aesthetic argument among whites. I’d prefer to live in a country that lets Denver be Denver, in his words. But let’s cut Renn some slack. There are still white people out there trying to reckon with America’s racial heritage as a story of black people living as ‘something apart, yet an integral part.’ He’s part of a tradition of well-meaning whites scolding one another for the gaps in their definition of “American.” Sometimes this comes off as tendentious, sanctimonious, and patronizing (remember Sasha Frere-Jones’ idiotic claim that Stephin Merritt was a bigot for not liking Outkast? ). Other times it’s just awkward (see “Mellencamp, John”). But a lot of white guys — especially Southern white guys — who had to read The Invisible Man in high school took it to heart and still feel under its authority. They try to thread the needle between self-segregation and PC condescension, and if they fail, I hope they try again.
So here ends my foray into writing about race. Now go read Renn’s roundup of crazy utopian homesteading in Detroit.
From the American Scene Projectionist's Booth
If you happen to be reading the front page of the site in a web browser rather than an RSS reader, you can bounce from post to post using the j and k keys. As popularized here.
Information Technology and Its Discontents
From Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word:
Reliance on language in its written form was seen as crippling, and not giving true control over linguistic content. Hence this proverb:
[…some Sanskrit here…]
Knowledge in a book — money in another’s hand.
In this ancient India was like many cultures as widely divided as the Druids of Gaul in the first century BC and modern Guatemala (where Mayans remark that outsiders note things down not in order to remember them, but rather so as not to have to remember them). Even Socrates recalled a story that when the god Thoth first offered the craft of writing to the king of Egypt, the king was not impressed: “it will set forgetfulness in the minds of learners for lack of practice in memory”. The doyens of Indian learning took this undeniable side effect of book learning very much to heart.
Even though the language had undergone a full phonological analysis by the fifth century BC, which was even incorporated into the official order of letters in the alphabet, reliance on written texts for important (especially spiritually important) documents was decried. Hence another saying:
[…more Sanskrit here…]
The sellers of the Vedas, the misreaders of the Vedas,
the writers of the Vedas, all go on the path to hell.
Nothing really to add. Just throwing this into the mix of “do computers make us dumb?” arguments.
The Quartet
Thanks to Sanjay, here’s a George Packer review from 2005 about Dos Passos’ onetime preeminence, and his falling-out with Hemingway:
For a brief moment, Dos Passos was as big as the big man of American letters. It’s hard now to remember that, several generations ago, the trio of great novelists born around the turn of the century—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner—was a quartet, with the fourth chair occupied by Dos Passos.
Upward Mobility in the U.S.A.
As the characters in The 42nd Parallel start to converge, every one of them has demonstrated some type of pluck or ambition. The biographical sketches (Thomas Edison, natch) hit the same chord: initiative is everything.
Industry, as seen through the eyes of his characters in 1915-1916, isn’t a dehumanizing System, but a vital force that can be harnessed by men and women of ambition and the right kind of zeal. I suspect that as time goes on, it’s this temptation that lures the radicals away from their principles, but I’m not sure yet.
Minor Keith Didn't Die
Why that uneasy look under the eyes, in the picture of Minor C. Keith the pioneer of the fruit trade, the railroad builder, in all the pictures the newspapers carried of him when he died?
Fall of the U.S.A.
At some point in our recent talk of books and the literary canon, commenter Sanjay mentioned in passing the epic U.S.A. Trilogy of John Dos Passos. It reminded me that back when I was a teenager burning through the interwar classics, I kept running across references to Dos Passos as a sort of invisible patron to writers like Hemingway or Fitzgerald. “I’ll read that eventually,” I thought. Sanjay’s comment brought those old intentions to mind, and it seems that I’m not alone.
What We’re Doing
This fall, we will use The American Scene as a platform for the collective reading and discussion of U.S.A. Labor Day seems a politically and seasonally appropriate time to begin what we’re calling, in a tip of the hat to the Infinite Summer Project, the Fall of the U.S.A. There will be no explicit deadlines, but we will also brook no acrimony over “spoilers.” Comment as you progress through the books, and follow along at your own risk. You will see some contributions from friends of the Scene, some of whom you might already know from elsewhere.
This being The American Scene, we encourage a generous hermeneutic toward the books. They are obviously ambitious, and might fall short on certain counts. Let’s think first about what works, and then consider whatever flaws afflict them.
We live in the era of survival analysis, so we welcome any readers who want to participate without committing to the whole trilogy. Reality intrudes sometimes. Even if you might not make it the whole way, give it a try.
I hope to collect reference materials online somewhere (the Sanborn fire insurance maps, for instance, would be a great resource). Any readers who’d like to help are encouraged to do so once we decide on a framework. Maybe we’ll serve as a slow-burning flashmob on the wikipedia entry.
Themes for Consideration
I’ve only started the first book, so I’d make a lousy guide, but already a few themes are apparent. Here are some ideas to keep in mind as you read, and I’d love to see some other ideas in the comments thread (again, we might decide on a new technical approach to this in time).
The Law
When and where does the force of law manifest in the action of the novels and in the lives of the characters?
Media and the Information Economy
Reading this in hindsight, where, if anywhere, do we see hints of the emerging “knowledge economy?”
Radicalization
We hear about it a lot today, mostly in embarrassingly glib terms. Muslim kids go into one end of a madrassa, and radicals pour out the other end. But what actually happens to make some people and not others receptive to radical solutions and life missions? I’ve always thought that notions of manhood had a lot to do with it, and Dos Passos appears to agree.
What’s the Matter with Kansas?
To what extent do direct economic interests shape political orientation? Should they? The book presents solidarity as something ephemeral that takes constant energy input to avoid dissipation.
Scale
As we are discovering in the era of “food miles” and “too big to fail,” scale is an under-theorized element of political economy that carries a lot of intuitive weight. To what extent does Dos Passos present scale as a normative dimension?
I hope this proves worthwhile, and that everybody gets something out of the books, if not the discussion. Good luck and Godspeed.
UPDATE: Posts will be collected here: http://theamericanscene.com/category/FOTUSA/
"Please Eliminate Three."
James Surowieki has stumbled upon the secret flaw in our nation’s fiscal structure:
But here are fifty culprits you might not have thought of: the states. Federalism, often described as one of the great strengths of the American system, has become a serious impediment to reversing the downturn.
He complains that states are lousy at coordinated action, like building national railroads and the magical “smart grid” that will solve our energy problems, and that the “disproportionate” influence of rural constituents on state governments will divert resources from productive urban centers, but here’s his curious insight:
[Fiscal stimulus is] built on the idea that during serious economic downturns the government can use spending increases and tax cuts to counteract the effects of consumers who are cutting back on spending and businesses that are cutting back on investment. So fiscal policy at the national level is countercyclical: as the economy shrinks, government expands. At the state level, though, the opposite is happening. Nearly every state government is required to balance its budget. When times are bad, jobs vanish, sales plummet, investment declines, and tax revenues fall precipitously—in New York, for instance, state revenues in April and May were down thirty-six per cent from a year earlier. So states have to raise taxes or cut spending, or both, and that’s precisely what they’re doing: states from New Jersey to Oregon have raised taxes in the past year, while significant budget cuts have become routine and are likely to get only deeper in the year ahead. The states’ fiscal policy, then, is procyclical: it’s amplifying the effects of the downturn, instead of mitigating them. Even as the federal government is pouring money into the economy, state governments are effectively taking it out. It’s a push-me, pull-you approach to fighting the recession.
The states, according to Surowieki, are working against federal stimulus by raising taxes and spending less, a combination that he refers to as “taking money out” of the economy. As if this is by choice, he complains that they’re “doing precisely the wrong thing.”
I’m no financial columnist, but when I last checked, states were still constrained not only by their various commitments to balanced budgets, but by things like Baa1 bond ratings. Then there’s the trifling detail that to keep the lights on and repay their bonds, state governments need real money. California, for instance, can’t pull the red lever labeled “Quantitative Easing” and start cutting payroll checks. So I’m not sure how Surowieki wants the states to help with fiscal stimulus, other than by ceasing to exist, admittedly an increasingly popular solution in certain quarters.
UPDATE: Over at Free Exchange, the point is made that being tied to the fiscal mast is California’s political choice, and the decision to run balanced budgets is what keeps those bond ratings low and prevents big deficits in lean times:
California had a gross state product in 2008 of nearly $2 trillion—larger than Russia, Spain, Brazil, or Canada. All of those countries carry significant public debt; Canada has debt equal to about 60% of GDP, for instance. If California could borrow, it could borrow.
This is true, and it’s fun to imagine the macroeconomics of a counterfactual California with both fiscal and monetary autonomy.
A Continuation of Management by Other Means
On Reihan’s recommendation, I read Stephen Biddle’s tentative, diffident, hedged defense of the war in Afghanistan, in which he admits that continuing our counterinsurgency campaign in the Hindu Kush is not an easy case to make (hence the old “title phrased as a question” cop-out). Biddle, senior fellow for defense policy at the CFR, says “the war is a close call on the merits,” but follows that with perhaps the least stirring call to arms in recorded history: “failure is not inevitable.”
I’m willing to accept that we need a class of civilian military analysts along with our political leaders (to whom we assign moral responsibility for the exercise of power) and our military (whom we expect, rightly, to complete the mission they are given). I’ll accept for the moment that the complexity of modern security demands a special technocratic layer between warriors and their political leaders. Even so, is it too much to ask the academics of war to pay lip service to the unique moral burden of military decisions? To regard casualties as more than a political obstacle?
If arguing for your war of choice involves all of the following: describing it as “costly, risky and worth waging—but only barely so;” calculating “a net cost-benefit calculus perilously close to a wash;” resigning yourself to “a war whose merits skirt the margin of being worthwhile;” eschewing “clarion calls to great sacrifice for transcendent purpose;” you do not actually have a case for war. You have a policy proposal. I hope that our politicians and our generals alike can tell the difference.
Rulers, Masses, and Elites
Reihan says in his latest column for The Daily Beast: “The great danger of Obama’s response to the street protests in Iran has been that he’d choose Iran’s thuggish ruling class over Iran’s masses on the grounds that Serious People don’t fret about human rights when grand strategy is at stake.”
“Choosing Iran’s masses” sounds to me just as bad as tacitly supporting the “thuggish ruling class.” Our solidarity with the Iranian protesters is, necessarily, a snub to “Iran’s masses,” many of whom make up the basiji milita and Ahmadinejad’s constituency. If Reihan wants Obama to support a particular Iranian faction and their goals of liberalization and reform, he’s welcome to argue so, but he ought not demand that the US president become the advocate for an imagined Iranian polity.
We like and we admire the minority of relatively liberal, cosmopolitan Iranians protesting against their odious president and his supporters. To deserve our sympathy and support, the protesters need not be disenfranchised stewards of the Iranian popular will; our affinities need not extend to the broader Iranian population, a large portion of which probably relishes the spectacle of protesters being beaten by basiji. On the other hand, we don’t need to make some considered judgment as to the relative merits of Mousavi before expressing solidarity with the protesters. It should be enough to say, “here is a group of people with whom I share political and cultural sensibilities, and regardless of the poor choices available to them at the ballot box, I’d like to see them prevail against their cruel political rivals.” There’s no shame in choosing a team — especially an underdog — and rooting for it.
The great danger of Obama’s response is not, as Reihan suggests, that he would express too much support for an illegitimate clique of rulers. It’s that he would, like Reihan does, transfer our sympathy for the protesters onto an imagined version of Iran, one in which the population suffers together beneath an oppressive “ruling class.”
Wall·E Closing Credits, Revisited
This time last year, the Scene was lousy with posts about WALL·E, my favorite of which was James’ note about the closing title sequence. Now, via kottke.org, comes an interesting interview with the director and animator.
Quotes of particular relevance to the post linked above:
We landed early on with Van Gogh, Kevin had put WALL·E and EVE in this lush feeling Van Gogh and it felt to both Andrew and I that that was were we should end with the cards. It was a good depiction of the Earth’s vegetation fully back. We then worked backwards.
We didn’t want earth 2.0 to follow the same destructive path that forced the humans to leave the planet in the first place. We ultimately decided that we would stop our depiction of the re-civilization process somewhere before the industrial revolution. I think the last thing we depict is the discovery of electricity.
Originally we were talking about carrying the art history into the crawl with 20th century art – cubism, Pollock, etc. but then Alex and Scott Morse had the idea to design the crawl as 8-bit.
[Updated to include the first link.]
Burkean Conspiracy Theories: Scatological Edition
Now, I’m not suggesting that anyone without an infant should go out and buy Dr. Jill M. Lekovic’s Diaper-Free Before 3: The Healthier Way to Toilet Train and Help Your Child Out of Diapers Sooner. That would be weird. But if you just have a fondness for cultural history, I recommend you stand around in the Barnes & Noble aisle (“Hey, ladies!”) and read Chapter 2, in which Dr. Lekovic traces the provenance of the contemporary American potty training regime. It’s a remarkable walk through the history of our relationship with our babies’ waste.
Our current practice of keeping kids in disposable diapers well past their toddler years, Lekovic argues, is a historical anomaly that emerged from the undue influence given to a few articles in the postwar era. Psychoanalysts, in reaction to the severity of their behaviorist predecessors (some might call it Oedipal…), invested potty training with a fanciful but plausible-sounding psychic dimension, and declared that it isn’t a humane option until, to cite the American Academy of Pediatrics, “Your child asks to wear grown-up underwear.” Our grocery store shelves are stocked with enormous diaper sizes all because a few psychotherapist manqués found themselves in the pediatric profession and had the perfect jargon to surf the gestalt. Dr. Lekovic hints at the disposable diaper industry’s obvious material interest in keeping kids wearing their products as long as possible, but her Dr. Evil is the perfectly cast (ageless, shiny, tanned to the color of a watchband) T. Berry Brazelton, whose 1962 article set the stage for regarding excretion as a psychically fraught developmental milestone. Even in 2004, Brazelton was still touting his original article, squeezing the last bits of credibility from its Freudian overtones:
At this age, children never know where their bowel movements have gone. This question may haunt them afterward. “Where is my poop? Why have they taken it away from me?”
Why, indeed? Maybe it’s to propitiate the ghosts!
Ghosts in parent’s nurseries — for example, parents’ bad memories of their own toilet training — are likely to make them anxious about their child’s training. Many of the parents in my study were ready to admit that the fear of reproducing their own traumatic experience prevented them from introducing each step to the child without anxiety. I wish that all parents like this could recognize and accept their need for help to sort through their own past experiences.
While our culture is busy redefining psychological states in physical terms (via James ), toilet training retains all the mystification and obscurantism of popular psychoanalysis, circa 1962.
I find Dr. Lekovic’s thesis pretty convincing, and wish I’d read her book a decade ago. Whether or not it will work under our, er, strenuous laboratory conditions remains to be seen. But efficacy aside, its ideological appeal is enough to get me to suspend my critical faculties. You mean I can observe some pre-modern folk wisdom, my kids will be out of diapers sooner, and I can stick it to the Boomers and the Freudian poseurs? Where do I sign?
