Materialism and Teleology

The latest issue of The New York Review of Books has a fascinating article by biologist H. Allen Orr entitled “Awaiting a New Darwin.” The piece is a review of Thomas Nagel’s latest book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, which came out last September. Nagel is as disciplined in philosophy as Orr is in biology. Both have a longstanding reputation for the clear exposition of propositions based strictly on logical reasoning, rather than rhetorical showboating. Orr makes it clear that Nagel’s book should not be casually dismissed, but he makes it equally clear that he does not feel that Nagel’s claims have been adequately warranted.

Nagel’s point of departure is a familiar one, based on the nature of human consciousness. Nagel’s position is that consciousness is too subjective to be reduced to a materialist explanation based on the physical nature of brains and neurons (and, perhaps, matter itself). With this as a premise, he then claims that the current Neo-Darwinist model of natural selection cannot explain how consciousness came to be and offers, as an alternative, an approach he called “natural teleology.” Orr tries to clarify this approach with the following sentence:

Natural teleology doesn’t depend on any agent’s intentions; it’s just the way the world is.

Without going into details, I feel it necessary to recognize that, for many (Jürgen Habermas being a particularly good example), teleology is a highly objective process. From a mathematical point of view, one may think of it as the achievement of some goal, which may be represented as a point in some multidimensional landscape. The “world as it is,” so to speak, is another point in that landscape and teleology is concerned with how those two points are connected by a path and how that path may be found. This boils down to the mathematical problem of optimization, which means that Nagel seems to be advocating an objective technique to explain how we arrive at a subjective phenomenon, a materialist stance if ever there were one.

On the other hand the philosopher Isaiah Berlin has written very critically about the inadequacy of optimization (or, in his terminology, Utopian thinking). Berlin’s basic argument, nicely formulated in his essay “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” is that any Utopia, like that point of optimization on a multidimensional landscape, is static, meaning that, one a society or an individual “gets there,” so to speak, there is nowhere to go! Thus, in the subjective world, the only “static state” is death; and in the broader ecological scope of the natural world, even death is not a static point.

At least some of the materialist Neo-Darwinists are aware of this puzzle. Thus, the traditional Darwinian model of evolution through natural selection has given way to what has come to be called coevolution. The basic idea is that there is still a landscape; but the shape of that landscape changes to reflect what its “inhabitants” are doing. As the landscape changes, the “optimum point” on that landscape also changes. This means that, wherever you happen to be on the landscape, you have to keep rethinking the direction you want to go in order to get closer to your goal. This strikes me as what makes “natural” teleology natural, rather than merely mathematical. Back in October of 2011, I suggested that, because of coevolution, there may never be that “ideal” cure for the common cold. Every time new medication comes along, the landscape changes, and the cold virus follows natural selection according to a change in the criteria for fitness. (In that same post I suggest that the common cold is not that different from malware.)

Nagel never mentions coevolution in his book. However, Orr does not cite it either as a materialist school of thought. Many of its advocates came out of early research in artificial life, although Darwin himself described it in On the Origin of Species. To be fair, however, Nagel’s book is a short one, only 130 pages, which he uses simply to establish his position. Here is hoping that he develops that position in greater depth and that his digging will lead him to coevolution!

Objectivism on the Side of the Angels

After reading Hugo Slim’s review for the London Telegraph of Steven Pinker’s new book The Better Angels of Our Nature:  The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes, I am not sure I really want to slog through all 802 pages of the book itself.  Having read some of Pinker’s work and having heard him lecture (thanks to Book TV), I have a fairly high level of trust when it comes to his techniques for both gathering and analyzing data.  If Pinker can apply statistics to psychology, political science, and cultural history to conclude that we are progressing towards less violent times, then I am willing to respect his opinion.

On the other hand I also feel obliged to respect the opinions of Isaiah Berlin, even if he was never as gifted in mathematics as Pinker is.  In particular I am referring to a remark by Berlin cited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. at the beginning of his essay “Has Democracy a Future?”  In an interview he granted towards the end of his life, Berlin declared the twentieth century to be “the most terrible century in Western history.”  Should Berlin’s assessment be dismissed just because his mathematical skills were not as keen as Pinker’s?

One way to approach this question is to consider Freeman Dyson’s piece in the latest issue of The New York Review on the subject of Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow.  Here is a case where we have one keen mathematical mind assessing the work of another;  and, through Dyson’s account, one cannot avoid gaining considerable respect for just how much the objectivity of properly applied mathematical techniques can tell us about the complexities of human behavior.  Nevertheless, Dyson is reluctant to let Kahneman have the last word on these matters.  While he does not dismiss the value of scientific thinking, he also does not reject contributions from the literary arts.  To this end he reviews two much earlier thinkers, who may have been less gifted in scientific rigor but whose literary gifts cannot be ignored.  One is Sigmund Freud, and the other is William James.  True, both saw themselves pursuing a more scientific approach to psychology;  and, I agree with Dyson that both have gone out of fashion.  However, I also agree that the lack of attention they now receive may stem from the fact that, by today’s standards, they were not particularly good scientists;  but, in spite of that shortcoming, both of them arrived at significant insights.

The fact is that literary thinking often yields results that are orthogonal to scientific analysis, simply because literature is more accommodating to subjective and social factors that do not readily lend themselves to scientific data gathering and analysis.  We thus find ourselves at a dangerous crossing as readers.  Where human nature is concerned, the objective techniques of scientific reasoning seem to be getting progressively better, while, on the other hand, there are too many instances of literary thinking that just seem to be getting worse (with Malcolm Gladwell as my favorite example).

What I like about Dyson is that he does not take a dialectical approach to these opposing points of view.  He does not advocate the quest for some synthesis that will yield some “ultimate truth” about human nature.  Rather, as Leta Miller has done in her recent book Music & Politics in San Francisco:  From the 1906 Quake to the Second World War, he argues that we, as readers, should embrace the dissimilarity of these perspectives, allowing each to inform us in our own way.  This is a perfectly natural approach to take where aesthetic judgment is concerned, but it may be just as important as we try to come to grips with just how we are equipped to get on in the world.

A Cynical Reflection on a Well-Turned Phrase

While reading "The Mission of Father Maciel," Alma Guillermoprieto's no-holds-barred exposition on the scandalous life of Marcial Maciel in the latest New York Review, I came across the following sentence:

Uneducated and mendacious, Maciel nevertheless had a genius for politics, and for personal relations.

Given that, by this point in her text, Guillermoprieto had established those opening adjectives as thoroughly warranted, I could not help but wonder if her use of "nevertheless" was appropriate. Could that "genius" for politics and the broader domain of personal relations have been a product of his mendaciousness and lack of education? Could this be the "dark side" of Isaiah Berlin's "Political Judgement" essay (which, coincidentally, also appeared in the pages of The New York Review)? Berlin's point was, of course, far more innocuous than Maciel's behavior. He argued that the many subtleties of a rich educational background might actually "do more harm than good by interfering with other factors that might contribute to more effective judgment" (my words, not Berlin's). He overlooked the possibility that baser motives could be a dominating factor, turning to figures like Otto von Bismarck for positive models without taking more negative examples (such as, say, Joseph Stalin) into account. Had Berlin lived to read Guillermoprieto's article, what would he have concluded about the "political judgment" of Maciel?

Messy Reality

The title of Benjamin M. Friedman's latest piece for The New York Review, "Two Roads to Our Financial Catastrophe," refers to his examination of two recent books analyzing the economic crisis. One is by John Lanchester, who is not known for his work in economics and is described by Friedman as "a British writer better known for his fiction and criticism;" but that background would justify the rhetorical flair of his book's title: I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. The other is by John Cassidy, a journalist specializing in economics and finance. His title is less flamboyant but more fascinating for its substance: How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities.

Friedman provides an excellent précis of Cassidy's "logical analysis" that bears consideration:

… Cassidy is interested in the people behind what he calls "the triumph of utopian economics," and how their ideas came to be so dominant. As he rightly points out, "the notion of financial markets as rational and self-correcting mechanisms is an invention of the last forty years." Such advocates of market efficiency as the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman, and contemporary economists like Eugene Fama and Robert Lucas (both also at Chicago) all receive careful attention. So do the political figures who championed their ideas, most prominently Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher. Alan Greenspan, with his bizarre devotion to the Russian-born ideologue Ayn Rand, stands out as the chief villain in Cassidy's telling, guilty of not just flawed ideas and sinister influence but "much prevarication" as well.

Cassidy contrasts the "utopian economics" that each of these people helped to propagate with "reality-based economics," which suffers not only from the inevitable intellectual messiness that comes with attempts to analyze the world as it is, but also from failing to line up with the interests of the economy' self-aggrandizing elites. The centerpiece of Cassidy's analysis of the difference between the two economic worldviews is the prevalence and potentially damaging consequences of what he calls "rational irrationality"—a situation in which each influential actor does only what makes perfect sense from an individual perspective, but the combined effect of everyone's acting in this way leads to outcomes that make sense for no one.

Ironically, the logic of rational irrationality can be deduced from the very principles of game theory that lie at the heart of utopian economics; and game theorists are at least willing to acknowledge it as a dilemma, more specifically the "prisoner's dilemma." If utopian economics is all about building the right models against which one seeks to optimize payoff, then the prisoner's dilemma is the classic example in which optimization of the group cannot be achieved by each individual seeking his/her own individual optimization.

Beyond such counterexamples, however, is the question of whether or not reasoning grounded in a philosophy of positivism can deal adequately (never mind effectively) with that "inevitable" messiness of reality. This goes back to whether or not one can build those "right models" in the first place; and I have previous observed that all positivism can tell us is whether or not a model is internally consistent. The problem is that consistency offers nothing when it comes to recognizing that inevitable messiness:

Consistency is thus worse than Ralph Waldo Emerson's "hobgoblin of little minds;" it is a pragmatically unattainable goal that distracts us from more realistic goals concerned with "living with the mess" (otherwise known as being-in-the-world).

This emphasis on verbs like "living" and "being" emphasize a further problem with utopian economics, which is that the mathematics of game theory equates optimization with finding an equilibrium point in a complex multidimensional landscape. In other words game theory is, from a grammatical point of view, noun-based and thus totally at odds with verbs like "living." This, again, is a point I have previously discussed invoking one of my favorite twentieth-century thinkers:

Put another way, the worst thing that can happen to an economy is that it achieves a state of equilibrium, because, in the spirit of Isaiah Berlin's approach to the history of ideas, that "state," by its very name, is fundamentally static; and the only time a "living system" achieves stasis is in death!

I would therefore suggest that what makes "rational irrationality" so irrational is its analytic foundation based on the concept of state. That foundation basically clouds any vision of what we have now come to call "gaming the system," which is basically the search of loopholes through which the system may be abused for the sake of personal gain.

This, in turn, provides a lens through which we can think about getting out of the mess in which we are still bemired. If Greenspan has become "chief villain," then his primary act of villainy has been deregulation, which is why so much of the current talk about economic reform concentrates on establishing a new regulatory system. I do not object to such reform, but I think we need to be careful about where it takes us. By their very nature, regulations can only live in that noun-based world, which, in the spirit of gaming the system, can always be subjected to verb-based abuses. Regulations can be useful, but they can only go so far. We would do better to think of the "health and well-being" of economic activities in terms of "Udi Manber's metaphor for safeguarding against abusive and criminal practices on the Internet as an arms race." As I previously wrote, "the safety of the Internet will never be strictly a matter of technology;" and, by the same reasoning, economic health will never be strictly a matter of establishing and enforcing the right regulations. That is just part of the nature of the messiness of reality, which is why being-in-the-world is ultimately a matter of how we act to live with the mess.

The People Voice from the People's Republic

Yesterday I tried to examine some of the "official" language that had begun to emerge in the wake of the devastating fire in Shanghai, primarily for the sake of comparing it with some of our own "official" language currently being invoked in the search for appropriate prosecution of those responsible for our economic crisis. Today, thanks to a report from Geoff Dyer of the Financial Times, I have discovered another "voice of reaction" from China, which is far more interesting than the "official" one:

Rather than being distressed at the part-destruction of one of Beijing’s landmarks, many young Chinese took pleasure in the humiliation of the national broadcaster. “Self-castration perfectly fits the image of CCTV which is the world’s number one eunuch media,” wrote widely read blogger Han Han.

CCTV is a broadcasting colossus, straddling 16 channels and bringing in over $2bn of revenues a year. Its annual New Year gala programme is watched by nearly 500m people.

Yet among the metropolitan Chinese who contribute to the country’s lively and ribald internet conversations, there is a deep well of disdain for the wooden style and propaganda of CCTV’s news programmes.

“CCTV is very broad-minded. They have focused so much on the fire in Australia that they obviously forget about the fire in their own backyard,” wrote blogger Caii after the incident was barely mentioned on the national broadcaster.

Internet chatrooms have been inundated with cartoons showing alien invaders attacking the CCTV buildings, while T-shirts are now on sale celebrating the blaze.

Wary of the potential backlash against CCTV, many publications were instructed by propaganda officials to use the version of events from the official Xinhua news agency.

Yet even the Xinhua story appeared to relish the travails of its cross-town rival. It quoted a fire official, Luo Yuan, who said that CCTV staff had ignored safety warnings from local police who had inspected the site. “We have video of the scene and remnants of the fireworks, which will serve as strong evidence in the investigation,” he was quoted as saying.

”There is barely anyone in the Chinese media who was not pleased to hear about the CCTV fire,” said one media industry insider who asked not to be named. ”The high-handed way the organisation dominates the media scene has made it universally hated, even by many of its own employees.”

Some of the schadenfreude is also down to the architecture. Made up of two sloping towers bolted together, Mr [Rem] Koolhaas’ design for the main building has won him the tag of genius from some architects but it is not loved by everyone in Beijing, where its many nicknames include “big underpants”.

Even though the larger building was untouched by the fire, some in the profession believe the blaze will become a symbol for the bursting bubble in brand-name architects.

This strikes me as an interesting sample of self-expression from "the people" who are beginning to wonder just what their "people's republic" has become. I have examined this situation in the past. Over a year ago, when the only voices concerned with a possible economic peril were consigned to the loony bin, I wrote a post on the rising trend of consumerism in China, suggesting that the very question of Chinese identity was going through a disruptive change. Let me reproduce a joke I invoked to try to make my point:

There is an old joke about Leonid Brezhnev at the height of his power in the Soviet Union. He invited his mother to visit and show her all the perquisites of his power: the dacha, the fleet of limousines, and all the luxury foods kept in his kitchen. After a few days of this grand tour, he said, "Well, mama, what to you think now of your little boy from Kamenskoe?" She looked back at him and said, "This is all very nice, my son; but what will you do when the Communists take over?"

Those who have "taken over" in China want to maintain all of the Maoist trappings of iron-fisted totalitarian control while enjoying all of the fruits of economic growth promised by the ideology of capitalism. Within this bipolar context, individual Chinese people have tried to celebrate wealth while respecting the "parental authority" of the government hierarchy. Today, however, that capitalist ideology is not cultivating those fruits; and China is feeling the same pinch that is being felt by the leading Western industrialized nations. As a result there is a new effort of people below that government hierarchy trying to make their voices heard; and those voices seem to have bought into my metaphor of the "stately capitalist mansion of Shanghai" in attacking not only CCTV but also the very life style embodied in that "mansion."

When one listens to "the voice of the people," rather than any government-based "official story," one quickly comes to realize than there is a tight coupling between the security of the economic framework and the effectiveness of governmental authority. This is why any strategy for recovery must not be confined to the "engines of the economy." Rather, it needs to address the broader scope of political economy, whether that scope rests on foundations of Adam Smith or Karl Marx. The neglect of that broader scope may have been a key factor in the tension between John Maynard Keynes and Franklin Roosevelt during the worst days of the Great Depression. When Roosevelt accused Keynes of being more of "a mathematician rather than a political economist," this had less to do with Keynes' understanding of conditions and more to do with his willingness to recognize the context in which those conditions were embedded and the need for the President of the United States to take that context into account in any action he took. As the Greek poet Archilochus (best known today through Isaiah Berlin) would have put it, Keynes was a hedgehog who knew economics very well, while Roosevelt was a fox who knew many things about both government and economics, even if he did not know economics as well as Keynes.

This time around we have Barack Obama as a fox; and, like Roosevelt, his dealings with the hedgehogs have not always been a model of achieving understanding through communication. Nevertheless, he leads an Administration that shows far more appreciation of both communication and understanding than that of his predecessor (even when, where the economy is concerned, achieving understanding is a formidable task). The Chinese government, on the other hand, is based on a tradition that honors authority far more than understanding (or, to invoke the language of Anthony Giddens, prioritizes domination over signification). This is not a particularly healthy environment for either hedgehogs or foxes! Nevertheless, in Dyer's report we encounter both hedgehogs and foxes struggling to be heard; and what will the authoritarians do? In 1989, when China was just beginning to see the benefits from its first steps into a market economy, voices were raised over the more general question of political economy in Tiananmen Square; and the world witnessed the brutal response of authoritarianism. This time the benefits will be harder to find, and authoritarianism still rules. It is hard to imagine that Koolhaas’ "stately mansion" will be the only casualty of a "crisis in communication" that may be more serious for China than the current economic troubles.

Permanence, Change, and the Civil Rights Movement

Much as I tend to enjoy the blogging of Andrew Keen, I was very glad to see that Book TV chose to use this day to provide me with an escape from Keen's recent indulgence in what I can only call "second-rate reading." This has included yesterday's reaction to Fareed Zakaria's recent palaver in Newsweek about Barack Obama as the savior of capitalism and today's attack on Thomas Friedman's laptop metaphor in The New York Times, with a swipe at Malcolm Gladwell's "fascinatingly obvious" Outliers thrown in for good measure. I used to sympathize with Harlan Ellison, who felt that we read was more important than what we read; but he used to make that point before the Internet had opened so many reading possibilities for us. These days I feel that life is too short to waste on rubbish; and, while I do not always agree with their editorial decisions, I find both The New York Review and Book TV to be rather good at helping me steer clear of the sort of rubbish that shows up all to often in Newsweek and The New York Times.

This morning I watched a Book TV video that was recorded last May at the Sunflower County Public Library in Indianola, Mississippi, which had hosted Chris Myers Asch to talk about his book, The Senator & the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland & Fannie Lou Hamer. This was a case in which the audience was as interesting as the author, since both Eastland and Hamer were from Sunflower County and have descendants who are working in the County. However, even more important was the way in which Asch framed the conservative thinking of the segregationists for whom Eastland became a major champion in the Senate, particularly when he became Chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

Asch's critical point was his decision to view Eastland more as a planter than as a politician. From this point of view, plantation life embodied "the natural order of things." As Anthony Giddens would have put it in his more elaborate terminology of social theory, plantation life legitimized a structure of domination, which determined who got to exercise authority over whom and how that authority was exercised. From this point of view, the civil rights movement was less about whether blacks should have the same rights as whites (or, for that matter, whether the abolition of slavery had been a great mistake) and more about how it had challenged that "natural order." The underlying struggle, in the words of Kenneth Burke, was the "challenge of change" imposed by the civil rights movement on the assumed permanence that Eastland and other segregationists were determined to maintain.

Needless to say, the scope of such opposition to permanence by change extends far beyond the history of the civil rights movement. Political conservatism is basically grounded on the virtues of permanence, whether or not that permanence is justified by rhetorical invocations of "natural order." Change is perceived as dangerous; and, to the extent that it entails a volatility that undermines the predictability of "life as we know it," it is dangerous. On the other hand, as Isaiah Berlin would work out for himself about a quarter of a century after the material in Burke's Permanence and Change first appeared, "permanence" is just another word for "stasis;" and stasis is fundamentally opposed to the dynamics of life itself and the social interactions that establish our very humanity (an insight developed by another of Berlin's predecessors, George Herbert Mead, who, in turn, had been preceded by Karl Marx, whose influence is clear in both Burke and Berlin).

I make these points because, as we approach Inauguration Day, it is important to recognize that change is far too complex a matter to be reduced to an election-winning buzz word. My guess is that Obama appreciates this, as he appreciates why the stability of permanence is so important to all of us. What we need is a subtle negotiation of a course between permanence and change; and I fear that the subtlety of that course is too much for consideration by the likes of journalistic hacks like Zakaria and Friedman.

"The Hobgoblin of Little Minds"

To some extent yesterday's polemical attack on logic can be attributed to what we might call the fundamental fallacy of positivism, which is its attempt to equate certainty with consistency. If, as I suggested yesterday, much of the mind-rot of our current "reckless thinking about semantics" can be attributed to computer science education, then the problem with such education is that, where artifacts of both hardware and software are concerned, consistency is the only form of certainty that matters. Thus, if we talk about compiler construction in terms of the formal description of a programming language and an equally formal description of the capabilities of a computer, then the "proof that the compiler works" amounts to establishing the consistency of the programming-language-representation with the compiled internal-machine-representation. Whether or not that former representation has anything to do with what a programmer "intends" (let alone what a client who has hired that programmer "wants") never signifies in establishing such consistency. Consequently, it is no surprise that such a question of "customer satisfaction" should, itself, be reduced to a consistency problem by introducing a discipline called "requirements analysis," through which "what the client wants" could be represented through a formal "specification language." In this positivist framework all that mattered was that the programming-language-representation be consistent with the specification-language-representation.

To some extent we should probably grant that the positivist assumption is correct: Consistency is the only thing of which we can be certain. My point is that we put too much stock in accepting that assumption. Like the World Wide Web, the world itself is too messy for us to expect certainty. Indeed, the whole point of Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is that there is quantifiable uncertainty in any "instruments of measurement" that we apply to observing that world. Consistency is thus worse than Ralph Waldo Emerson's "hobgoblin of little minds;" it is a pragmatically unattainable goal that distracts us from more realistic goals concerned with "living with the mess" (otherwise known as being-in-the-world). This does not mean that we cannot, from time to time, "clean up" some of the mess. This is basically how we deal with what Henry Miller called the "order which is not understood;" and it is our natural capacity to deal with the mess that motivates what I have called the "hermeneutic imperative" of our approach to education. However, the mess will never be entirely eliminated; and we shall never drink from the Holy Grail of certainty. Were we do to so, we would arrive at a utopian state; and, as Isaiah Berlin has observed, the fact that such a utopia is a state means that, once it has been attained, there is no reason for anything else to happen. In other words "living with the mess" turns out to be the fundamental reason for living at all!

Recovery Dreams (3.0?)

Moralistic as it may sound, I continue to believe that our current economic crisis needs to be examined not under the lens of economic theory but as a consequence of a predominant cultural Weltanschauung, which encompasses not only an addiction to consumerism but also the faith-based conviction (most popular among those who consume and those who feed their habit) that innovation solves all problems. I am thus more than a little concerned that Andrew Keen, in the latest post to his Great Seduction blog, seems to be looking seriously towards Silicon Valley for those who will pave the road to economic recovery:

In some garage or dorm-room, some smart kids are figuring out the future of media and technology. Global financial meltdown or not, Silicon Valley’s creative destruction – its law of motion -- is unstoppable. My own sense is that we need software and services that resynthesize the digital and real worlds. As NYU sociologist Dalton Conley suggests in his 2009 book Elsewhere, USA, technology has unmoored us from our real lives:

Our daily lives have changed, slowly but radically, over the past three decades. The division between work and home has been all but demolished; our weightless, wireless economy encourages us to work 24/7; marketing has invaded the most intimate aspects of our lives; leisure has become a lost art.

Silicon Valley thus needs to work on reuniting work with home. Having destroyed leisure with their always-on media, the smart technologists needs to reinvent it. The digital economy now must figure out ways to speed up the analog world. Silicon Valley's laws of motion must become America's laws of motion.

This may ultimately be little more than a convenient misreading of history, which attributed the economic crisis that began to emerge at the end of the twentieth century with the irrational exuberance of Web 1.0 thinking and now lays the current catastrophe at the feet of Web 2.0. In his quest for "a consummation/Devoutly to be wished," Keen may have come up with little more than a candidate recipe for the next boom-and-bust cycle. Nevertheless, Conley's source text may be of some use if we are still interested in the question of how we got into our current mess.

While I think Conley may have a point with his punch line, it is more important to recognize that leisure most likely constitutes only a sliver of the "necessary arts" we have lost. I continue to hold to the belief that our very "sense of reality" (that oft-used phrase that I cribbed from Isaiah Berlin) has been significantly eroded, rather than enhanced, by recent technologies; and those "social software" Web 2.0 technologies are among the most corrosive. At the risk of going all Heideggerian, I wish to suggest that the fundamental art we have lost is the art of "being in the world;" and we have lost it because Silicon Valley has been such a successful breeding ground of positivist junkies who cannot see beyond the boundaries of the objective world. Can we seriously expect that the guys (and gals) who destroyed leisure are capable of reinventing it? At best, they will invent new ways for us to amuse ourselves to death (with apologies to the memory of Neil Postman).

Trying to Recover a "Real Economy"

Marie Cocco's column for today's Washington Post, reproduced, as usual, on Truthdig, has the great title, "It’s the Jobs, Stupid;" and that is exactly how she begins her text:

The last thing we need is another “economic stimulus” package. What we need is a jobs package. And we ought to start calling it that.

The argument that she develops around this precept is laudable, but I think she has missed out on the extent to which that argument has to be embedded in a bigger picture. That bigger picture involves the more general question of what Japanese broker Masatoshi Sato, whom I cited yesterday, referred to as "the real economy." As I tried to argue yesterday, this "is the economy where 'real people' (rather than the once and future 'Masters of the Universe' in the financial sector) have to make basic purchases for food, clothing, and shelter." Needless to say, you could have flunked Economics 101 and still come away realizing that you need an income source in order to make those purchases, which is where Cocco's arguments about jobs come into the picture. What concerns me is that we may have become too far gone in the confidence games played by those "Masters of the Universe" to regain our footing in such a "real economy."

Consider the argument I first floated at the end of last week: On a global scale the bank that may well have suffered the LEAST from the current crisis may well be Grameen Bank. The reason for this (at the risk of sounding too reductive) is that Grameen is still based (as I put it in my argument) on "an exchange system that is still grounded in the more concrete realities of cows and chickens." The economic engine of the United States is no longer grounded in manufacturing or agriculture. Indeed, it is no longer grounded in anything that Economics 101 would call "goods." Worse yet, most of the "services" that have displaced the position of those "goods" have either been shipped overseas (as in call centers) or subjected to devastating cuts in resources (whether we are talking about librarians or bank tellers). This leaves the United States with a very narrow band of service providers in the financial sector who do little more than manipulate people's belief systems over the value of "fictions of convenience," such as currencies, stock futures, and commoditized packages of debt. Our economy is so far from reality that, were it being analyzed by a psychiatrist, it would be deemed psychotic without a moment's thought!

Thus, while Cocco's call for a jobs package is admirable, there is a serious underlying question: "Jobs for what?" The fact is that we need to rethink the very nature of our political economy beginning with its very foundations. I say this knowing full well that talking about a critique of political economy is sure to get many of our "true patriots" foaming at the mouth, since it invokes Karl Marx, that boogie man who probably continues to terrorize them even more than Osama bin Laden. Nevertheless, if we are going to try to restore that "sense of reality" to the foundations of our economy, we would do far worse than to revisit the "Critique of the Gotha Program" and consider what its famous motto ("From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.") is really trying to say. Grameen Bank knows how to think in terms of needs and abilities and still make a profit. Can our country think in similar terms and find its way back to living under a "real economy?"

Why Grameen Bank Can Continue Through the Crisis

Today's SPIEGEL ONLINE has an interview with Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, founder of the microcredit institution, Grameen Bank. Yunus received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts on behalf of a financial system that placed its highest priority on "providing the greatest benefit possible for human kind," rather than the usual priorities of "the maximization of profits and rapid growth." At the present time Grameen appears to be maintaining its stability, while just about every major bank around the world has at least one cause for significant distress. Is this just because Grameen is small?

The SPIEGEL ONLINE interviewer (Hasnain Kazim, translated from the German by Charles Hawley) framed the question in terms of whether there were lessons that "the entire finance world" could learn from the Grameen model. Here is Yunus' reply:

The fundamental difference is that our business is very connected to the real economy. When we provide a loan of $200, that money will go to buy a cow somewhere. If we lend $100, someone will maybe buy some chickens. In other words, the money goes to something with concrete value. Finance and the real economy have to be connected. In the US, the financial system has completely split off from the real economy. Castles were built in the sky, and suddenly people realized that these castles don't exist at all. That was the point at which the financial system collapsed.

Given my own preoccupation (thanks to Isaiah Berlin) with the need for a "sense of reality," particularly when the World Economic Forum meetings continue to remind me how much of that sense has been lost, these are refreshing words. In a financial system where debt itself became a commodity that could be traded (and thus inflated to unrealistic prices), there is something comforting about an exchange system that is still grounded in the more concrete realities of cows and chickens. Yunus hit on just the right metaphor: It is almost as if the entire vocabulary of current financial practices provided the building blocks for those castles in the sky; and, since the words had concrete semantics (even if they were understood by only a very elite few), the world at large took it for granted that the castles were just as concrete, so to speak.

When you think about it, this economic crisis is a postmodern malady for postmodern times. If the very "possibility of attaining truth" can be questioned as being nothing more than idea represented by some configuration of significant symbols, then why should the concept of price (continuing to cleave to Robert Solow's preference for talking about economics in concrete language) be any less vulnerable to questioning? What is debt-as-commodity other than such a configuration of significant symbols that became endowed with semantics more on the basis of rhetoric than on the foundation of any concrete logic? Cows and chickens, on the other hand, are not significant symbols; they are objects through which one can obtain food, clothing, and possibly even shelter. Grameen Bank thus confines itself to exchanges grounded in such objects, rather than those fictions of convenience that would change the rules of the game for those playing for "the maximization of profits and rapid growth." The problem is that the new rules were the rules of a confidence game; and Grameen, with its unconventional system of priorities, knew enough to stay out of that game.

This is not to deny that objects cannot have their own problems. Cows may not give enough milk; and, as a result of their diet, the milk they give may be sour. Chickens may not lay enough eggs, and the chickens they then breed may be too scrawny to eat. Nevertheless, these are problems of resource management; and those who know about farming are likely to be better equipped to deal with them than with problems of debt management. I suppose that the basic Grameen principle is that the customer should worry about sensible resource management and let the bank worry about responsible debt management. Somehow I just cannot imagine Wells Fargo thinking in those terms (although they may well have done so in their earliest days)!

New Old Mills

Regular readers of this blog may have become familiar with the name of C. Wright Mills from my occasional references to his 1956 book, The Power Elite. Actually, my first encounter with Mills was through my mother, who had decided that she would finally get a college education after both of her sons left the nest. I came back from MIT during one of my breaks and first saw the book From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, which Mills had collected and edited with Hans Gerth. For many this was the first exposure to Weber, and it was not a bad place to begin. Personally, I actually started in the middle with Weber's classic analysis of bureaucracy on page 196; and, like many, my whole thinking about politics was seriously influenced by the text of his "Politics as a Vocation" speech. Not too later on, my personal book collection also came to include the primary collection of Mills' own essays, Power, Politics and People. This was at a time when much of Silicon Valley was abuzz with talk of "situated cognition" (not to mention "situated action" and "situated learning"); so I was a bit surprised when I discovered that the very terminology could actually be traced back to a paper that Mills published in the 1940 Volume of the American Sociological Review under the title "Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive." As a result of reading this paper, I developed an appreciation for the value of both George Herbert Mead and John Dewey in my own efforts to make sense of both the social world and those "situated actions" involved in artistic (particularly musical) performance.

Power, Politics and People was edited by Irving Louis Horowitz, who would later come under considerable attack for muddying the waters of those interested in pursuing scholarly research on Mills' life and works. One of Horowitz' fiercest attackers was John Summers, who has now compiled his own collection, The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills. Alan Wolfe has reviewed this new book for The New Republic, providing an excellent introduction to the good, the bad, and the ugly of Mills' career in the process. Here are a couple of paragraphs from Wolfe's article that provide an excellent sense of the whole:

Mills was attracted to the theme of responsibility because his style of social criticism ranked hypocrisy among the most serious of vices: you, the protectors of power and privilege, claim to be acting as responsible managers of the national interest, but in reality you are oblivious to the havoc produced by your decisions. Many of the terms that made Mills famous--"crackpot realism," "the American celebration," "the military metaphysic"--were pithy expressions of the failure of America's leaders to live up to the ideals that they espoused. The role of the social critic was not to posit unrealizable utopias. It was to hold people accountable for their decisions.

If you are not going to be responsible, Mills went on to say to the powers of his day, intellectuals will have to do it for you. "The intellectual ought to be the moral conscience of his society, at least with reference to the value of truth," he wrote in Dissent in 1955, "for in the defining instance, that is his politics." Unlike businessmen or military officers, intellectuals need not say one thing and do another--not as long as they adhere to their proper calling. "The work of any man of knowledge, if he is the genuine article," Mills continued, supplying the words that give this book its title, "does have a distinct kind of political relevance: his politics, in the first instance, is the politics of truth, for his job is the maintenance of an adequate definition of reality." Mills was not given to underplaying the importance of the kind of intellectual work in which he was engaged. "Since we belong among those who ask serious questions and try to answer them," he told a group of Canadian educators in 1954, "we also belong--whether or not we know it--to that minority which has carried on the big discourse of the rational mind, the big discourse that has been going on, or off and on, since western society began some two thousand years ago in the small communities of Athens and Jerusalem."

I realize that this perspective of the intellectual-as-conscience must seem outmoded to many today. Indeed, there seems to be a general tendency towards disdain of the very concept of intellectualism, scorned on the one hand for its skeptical attitude towards faith and derided on the other for offering little more than abstruse talk in trying to oppose those faith-based fanatics. As a result, about the only time we encounter "intellectual" as an adjective is in that ne plus ultra of linguistic barbarisms, "intellectual property." Thus, one of the few bloggers who is willing to recognize that the word "intellectual" can be used in any other context is Andrew Keen (who seems to be having a field day with it right now in the matter of Sarah Palin).

Are the intellectuals a dying breed not even worthy of the attention we give to endangered zoological species? There are certainly some that seemed to like nothing better than to revel in their own opacity, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault; and what does it mean that the first examples that immediately leapt to my own mind were French? Then there is Jürgen Habermas (German this time), whose texts need to be carefully teased out, sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, and eventually essay-by-essay, but who has a reputation for speaking to the public about public issues (such as the European Union) in language far more direct than that of any politician. (In this respect he has been appropriately compared to John Dewey.) Then there is one of my personal favorites, Isaiah Berlin, who is almost always up there with Marcel Proust when it comes to sentence lengths; but, as they lead you down many paths at once, those sentences always seem to end with you staring directly in the face something both startling and evident.

Perhaps my Berlin experience best illustrates the real value of the intellectual. The intellectual provides us with text that may not be that all easy to read but which can be unimaginably rewarding if we take the trouble to honor it with serious reading. In other words we are back on the turf that Nicholas Carr was exploring in his Atlantic Monthly article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The question is not whether the intellectuals are dying out because they are not worth reading but whether we are (at least metaphorically) killing them off as a consequence of the deterioration of our own reading habits along the sorts of lines that Carr had suggested. Perhaps that old saw about people getting the government they deserve covers only part of the story. Because people shape their own culture through those "situated actions" and "vocabularies of motive" that Mills had studied so attentively, they get the very culture they deserve, leaving those of us outside the boundaries of that culture in danger of the "persecution of the other."

Partisan Bipartisanship

There is much in the text of John McCain's speech last night at the Republican National Convention to persuade us that "government of the people, by the people, for the people" is far more important than political parties or perhaps even what Isaiah Berlin has called "political judgement." In many ways I agree with him. If we look back at the worst examples of political judgment (to dispense with Berlin's British spelling) over the last eight years, we see far more depersonalization than the likes of an Abraham Lincoln would have found tolerable, usually because those judgments were products of the mentalities of chief executive officers and chief financial officers, rather than the sort of executives that our Constitution had in mind. As to political parties, one of the most important lessons we learned from watching John Adams was the intensity of our second President's aversion to the very concept when it emerged in full force in 1800 (although Adams' ghost probably winced when Edward Larson chose to title his book about that election A Magnificent Catastrophe).

It is, however, one thing to embrace the letter of a text and quite another to embrace the spirit of the narrator of that text. After all the text is just a text, a string of words that only comes to life when subject to interpretation, an interpretation that may not be a reflection of the intentions of the author. A narrator, on the other hand, is a human agent carrying a full portfolio of motives. The vote each of us casts in November will be for some motive-driven agent, rather than any text invoked by that agent on his behalf. Thus, while McCain's text may have invoked the spirit of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, when we think about motives, it is hard to escape the memory of our current President, who entered the White House with words of "being a uniter, not a divider" and then subjected us to eight years of those "divisive, partisan attacks," which Associated Press writers Tom Raum and Liz Sidoti attributed to the text that Matthew Scully had prepared for Sarah Palin.

Thus, as Captain Edward Fairfax Vere sings in the Prologue to Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd, whatever manifestation of goodness confronts us, "There is always some flaw in it;" and, as both Herman Melville and Britten demonstrated, each in his own way, that flaw usually leads to destruction. So we need to look for such flaws, however insignificant they may initially seem, lest they become triggers for larger consequences. In McCain's case these are the words that set my "flaw feelers" twitching:

Finally, a word to Senator Obama and his supporters. We'll go at it over the next two months. That's the nature of these contests, and there are big differences between us. But you have my respect and admiration. Despite our differences, much more unites us than divides us. We are fellow Americans, an association that means more to me than any other. We're dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal and endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights. No country ever had a greater cause than that. And I wouldn't be an American worthy of the name if I didn't honor Senator Obama and his supporters for their achievement.

But let there be no doubt, my friends, we're going to win this election. And after we've won, we're going to reach out our hand to any willing patriot, make this government start working for you again, and get this country back on the road to prosperity and peace.

Clearly that juxtaposition of "unites" and "divides" was the first alerting signal: Whether or not George W. Bush was only present at this Convention as a video image, he was clearly present in the subtext of McCain's words. This particular gesture, however, was only a storm cloud forming. The lightning bolt struck in the following paragraph with that "any willing patriot" phrase. This was pure Bush at his most those-not-for-us-are-against-us aggressive: One hand welcomes while the other is raised in a defiant fist. The welcoming hand is for the willing patriots, and the fist is for everyone else.

Who, then, decides who are the "willing patriots." Ambrose Bierce would have us believe that this is the domain of scoundrels; and, almost a year ago, we saw such a scoundrel in the person of House Minority Leader John Boehner in words that are presumably now documented in the Congressional Record. Presumably Boehner was there in the audience last night, relishing McCain's decision to invoke this particular phrase; and, for all we know, he will be out there on McCain's campaign trail, continuing to warp the semantics of love of country (or, if you prefer, "Country First") to the benefit of his senatorial colleague. McCain may have tried to assume the mantle of the "good cop," particularly in contrast with his running mate's decision to present herself as the pit bull of the team (the basis for an impromptu, and successful, joke that was not in the initially prepared text). However, he does not want us to forget that he still knows how to make a fist and deliver a wallop with it.

This brings us, once again, to the pseudo-science of the AT&T Yahoo! poll.

I have to say that, for all of my own observations about differentiation (not to mention McCain's affirmation of those observations), my own "vote" for this speech was a "solid so-so," a rather middling affair, particularly in the context of all the other performances being polled. I was thus not surprised to see that the McCain poll had attracted over 8000 votes fewer than the Palin poll received at the time that I case my own vote (and, for that matter, over 1000 votes fewer than the Obama poll had attracted). I was also interested to see that the distribution of the votes was closer to that of Obama, as opposed to the sharper differentiation that Palin had aroused. Bearing in mind how risky it is to read anything into these numbers, they may be a sign of an electorate that is close to as evenly divided as it had been in 2000 and 2004. If this is, indeed, the case, then we shall experience another election being fought over electoral votes rather than the vox of the popular vote; and such a fight may well leave the entire country with the same sense of malaise over detachment, if not alienation, that has been growing for eight years. In other words we may discover on Election Day that vox populi can say little more than, "Who cares?" That would be the strongest sign that the damage wrought by the current Administration has been done so well that the next Administration will not have much hope of undoing it.

Strife as Economic Incentive

Once again I find myself turning to SPIEGEL ONLINE for a timely extended discussion of a complex global problem. The problem in this case (given that there are so many these days) is the current standoff between Georgia and Russia and the question of whether or not the Cold War is "heating up" again, "a proposition devoutly to be wished" by many strident American (Republican?) voices. However, I am less interested in the skillful analytical work that Ralf Beste, Susanne Koelbl and Dirk Kurbjuweit have applied to all of this complexity. Rather, I want to call attention to one paragraph, which is actually highly incidental to their analysis, that calls attention to a piece of context that probably should not be ignored:

Currently, the entire world is sending its emissaries to the Caucasus, transforming Tbilisi into the global capital of international politics. Over the past two weeks, prices at the five-star hotels of Tbilisi have soared, and yet these luxury establishments are still nearly fully booked.

At a time when it seems as if the entire world is suffering an economic crisis (much of which, unfortunately, can be traced back to greed-based poor decisions originating in the United States), here is an (albeit small) economic sector that is doing well: the hotel sector of the travel business (and probably at least one small set of airline routes). This has less to do with whether or not the beneficiary is in the luxury sector than it has to do with the role of crisis as economic stimulus. I am a product of history teachers who believed that it was the Second World War, rather than the New Deal, that pulled the United States out of the Great Depression, basically because the War created an unprecedented demand for manufacturing that revived our key industrial operations in a way that the New Deal never could. However, are we to conclude that war (or at least the threat of war, which is, for all intents and purposes, what the Cold War was) is the only effective way to stimulate a deeply depressed economy?

One answer may be to consider an economic system as if it were a metabolic system, somewhat in the spirit of the approach that James Grier Miller took in his book, Living Systems. (Miller actually viewed "The Society" as a living system in Chapter 11 of his book and addressed economics in terms of regulating production within that system.) Thus, if stress "is an unavoidable effect of living" (as is stated in the Britannica Online Encyclopedia) to which the body responds "with a combination of psychic and physiological defenses," then economic systems, if they are to survive, must have their own "defenses," which have more to do with (not necessarily rational) agent behavior than with psychology or physiology. Put another way, the worst thing that can happen to an economy is that it achieves a state of equilibrium, because, in the spirit of Isaiah Berlin's approach to the history of ideas, that "state," by its very name, is fundamentally static; and the only time a "living system" achieves stasis is in death! Thus, it is the forces that "stress" an economy (such as social crisis) that ultimately keep the economy "alive" and functioning in the best interests of all, rather than languishing in a condition of depression, which, while not strictly static, is not particularly dynamic.

Berlin's arguments against stasis grew out of his critical analysis of utopianism and his conclusion that any utopia must necessarily be static. Thus, if stress keeps the body going (as long as it is at a level that can be managed by the body's copying skills), then social crisis may, indeed, be the most effective economic stimulus. The only problem with this theory is that, in the wrong hands, it may be applied as an excuse for inducing crisis as an economic solution. Sadly, this may explain the motives behind Tom Hayden's analysis of the current Georgian crisis as a product of neoconservative thinking trying, once again, to gain the upper hand. Having bankrupted the American economy with excessive an ineffective spending in the name of the "War on Terror," the agents responsible for this folly would now attempt damage control by seeking economic incentives through a revival of the Cold War. Once again we seem to be experiencing an attempt to repeat history without, as I have previously called it, "any Marxian overtones of farce" (unless one has a really sick sense of farce)!

On the Value of ANY "Encyclopedic" Reference

It has been some time since I have dwelled on the significant distinctions between the world of nouns and the world of verbs, but I am beginning to realize, in the context of my recent experiences, that these distinctions may be relevant to how one approaches this question of "encyclopedic" references. I would like to consider two perspectives that may highlight these distinctions. One concerns the "inertia" of reference sources; and the other deals with what to do about "volatile" content.

Through our "cultural memory," we have come to view an encyclopedia as a relatively static reference. True, the Britannica publishers have long issued their Book of the Year "addenda;" but we tend to consult an encyclopedia for things that don't change, rather than for "keeping up with the latest." Put another way, the world of the encyclopedia is a world of noun phrases, based on objects and their attributes (and, therefore, not unlike most of the databases upon which we all now depend so heavily). However, as Isaiah Berlin kept trying to remind us through our his study of the history of ideas, there is a "tragic flaw" in any worldview that is fundamentally static, even when it involves the objects and attributes described in an encyclopedia. What we learn when we study the history of ideas is that just about any subject area is always changing due to advanced scholarship. This can occur on the micro level (a cantata attributed to Bach later found to have been composed by Telemann) or the macro level (as in scientific theories that assign to information the same fundamental priority assigned to matter and energy). When the macro level involves a major shift in worldview (akin to Kuhn's paradigm shift), that would entail more than "surface-level" emendations in an encyclopedia, which is why there have been essays and books about "the encyclopedia problem" for at least the last fifty years. If Berlin has left us more comfortable with the fluidity of such worldviews, then it is easy to recognize that any reference source that is, by nature, static will never have more than limited value.

If we can accept fluidity, then we should also be able to accept volatility. At the very least we can use the Internet to make sure that we never have to be informed by a single source (at least when the information is critical to some aspect of our lives). However, if we accept that volatility, then we must also live by the caveat lector precept, which has been a recurring theme on this blog. There is a much greater risk in being a "casual reader" than there used to be; but we are well-equipped to deal with that risk. The good news is that on Wikipedia a reader can consult the discussion tab to get some sense as to how volatile the content is and adopt appropriate reading habits accordingly. Thus, the very premises behind the design and implementation of Wikipedia may allow it to sustain the nature of a fluid and volatile world, in which the verb phrases that capture the very nature of that fluidity and volatility engage in a Hegelian synthesis with the noun phrases of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, perhaps even to the point of prevailing over the recent Britannica "confrontation."

Presidential Qualities

This seems to be the year in which we weigh a variety of personal attributes in terms of whether or not they are suitably "presidential." To some extent it began with Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope book, which engendered a fixation on not just change but audacious change. On the other hand it took some of the commentary from Europe to remind us that lack of ruthlessness can be a major shortcoming in a leader, particularly the leader of a superpower. In a similar vein yesterday I suggested that lack of chutzpah may be just as great a shortcoming. Today is seems as if all eyes (including those of the BBC) were fixed on Hillary Clinton appearing on The Daily Show last night, with particular emphasis on an exchange reported by the Associated Press as follows:

"This election is about judgment," Stewart said to her. "Yet tomorrow is perhaps one of the most important days of your life and you've chosen to spend the night before talking to me. Senator, as a host I'm delighted. As a citizen, I'm frightened."

Responded Clinton: "It is pretty pathetic."

Clinton has always had a good sense of humor, but she did well to let Jon Stewart to set her up with an opportunity to exhibit it. This is not to say that Obama lacks a sense of humor. I actually felt that one of his finer moments on the campaign trail was when he applied the fundamental principles of standup comedy to make his points in Las Vegas.

The point is that there is more to being presidential than, for example, the abstract qualities that Isaiah Berlin called "Political Judgement" or that Obama tried to contrast in terms of the corporate labels of Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer. There are also more concrete qualities of personality and sociability. These are particularly relevant in light of the study published in 1986 by Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries and Danny Miller, which observed the parallels between the pathology of a corporate organization and the neurotic behavior of top management. If we are to try to view the country under the same lens that we view business organizations, then such parallels are likely to be relevant. From such a point of view, that sense of humor says a lot about being presidential. Our current President only seems to smirk and very rarely indulges in humor at his own expense. This is a sharp contrast with Clinton, Obama, and even McCain (who could do with some help from Stewart on his delivery). Another way of putting it is that humor may be like that proverbial velvet glove, which often does a good job of concealing whether or not the fist it encloses is really iron. This may turn out to be an extremely important quality when a state of crisis is at its worst; and, regardless of our cultural fear of thinking that way, this particular election is going to demand that we view our candidates in the light of how they are likely to behave in the setting of a worst-case scenario.

Propaganda and Experience

Once again my reading of John Dewey's Art as Experience has confronted me with an alternative perspective on one of my own reflections. This time the reflection had to do with my view of the New York Philharmonic's visit to North Korea in terms of what I called a positive connotation of "propaganda." The word "propaganda" does not show up in the index of Dewey's book (and I probably would have been surprised had I found it there). However, having labored over setting my own thoughts into writing, I felt as if the final sentence of his chapter on "The Expressive Object" had an I-told-you-so ring to it:

In the end, works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered communication between man and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience.

In How to Read a Book Mortimer Adler (along with Charles van Doren in later editions) wrote about "active reading" in the sense of the reader conducting a conversation with the author; and I found myself vain enough to think that, were Dewey still alive, he would have enjoyed having such a conversation over the significance of the concert the Philharmonic gave in Pyongyang. Still, the activity of conversation is not required to unpack many of the lovely details in this single sentence.

We begin with that phrase "complete and unhindered communication between man and man," which seems particularly important at a time when President George W. Bush is grandstanding against Barak Obama's statements about wanting to meet with the leaders of countries that he have declared to be our enemies. In the terminology of Anthony Giddens, Bush is more concerned with domination than with signification. This is what I was getting at when, in assessing the significance of the Philharmonic concert, I wrote:

Nevertheless, a paraphrase of Georges Clemenceau may be in order if we are to recognize that mutual understanding between radically different cultures is far too serious to be entrusted to political leaders, most of whom would prefer to think of leadership in terms of domination rather than understanding.

Recasting this from Dewey's point of view, one of the greatest hindrances of "communication between man and man" is the compulsion that one man has to dominate the other, regardless of what the reason for that compulsion may be. The unfortunate corollary is that a strategy intended for "enemies" finds itself being applied to everyone else. The most memorable legacy of the Bush Administration may be one of eight years of communication between the White House and the general public that was hindered at every turn and avoided completeness at all costs. The result is that we have become a culture of "gulfs and walls," some of which, like the fence along the Mexican border, have crossed the boundary from the figurative to the literal. By allowing domination to reduce Giddens' dimension of signification to virtual irrelevance, we have become a culture that has devalued the very concept of communication, thus reducing, in one violent stroke, all of the optimistic theories of Isaiah Berlin, Anthony Appiah, and Jürgen Habermas about effective cross-cultural communication to little more than a pile of rubble.

Are we then really so obsessed with being top dog at the expense of all the other qualities that make us human? Is this really what Bush I meant in his "new world order" rhetoric? If so, then I fear we have little to hope for in any new Executive Administration, regardless of who the President may be. The very competition for that position through the mechanics of our electoral process is just another instance of that top-dog thinking that creates more "gulfs and walls," whatever the rhetoric of bringing together a country that has torn itself apart with its differences may be. Perhaps the problem arises from a political system that does not really allow for coalitions. All that really matters is that "somebody wins," even if that "somebody" turns out to represent approximately half the country's population (which is, statistically, what the numbers from the last two Presidential elections were telling us). We take great satisfaction in reading about a disputed election in Kenya being resolved by building a coalition, yet this has never happened in our own history of Presidential elections, several of which were pretty contentiously disputed.

Yes, it is vain to speculate on what sorts of conversations I could have with Dewey were he alive today. With his attention to the role of education in a democratic society and his view of art as a reflection of our human experiences, the current state of affairs could well throw him into a deep depression. Under that dark cloud I doubt that he would be interested in having any conversations.

I Might Have Known

I just got done watching the BBC News on KQED World. Why was I not surprised to see Condoleeza Rice addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, as the opening speaker, no less? Ironically, as I am writing this, I could not find a summary of her remarks on the BBC Web site. However, it is tomorrow morning in Sydney; and The Sydney Morning Herald is there with the Associate Press account. Here is the core of her remarks:

"I know that many are concerned by the recent fluctuations in US financial markets, and by concerns about the US economy," she said. "President Bush has announced an outline of a meaningful fiscal growth package that will boost consumer spending and support business investment this year."

She said US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who cancelled his own visit to the World Economic Forum annual meeting at the last minute, was "leading our administration's efforts and working closely with the leaders of both parties in Congress to agree on a stimulus package that is swift, robust, broad-based, and temporary."

She touted the US economy as "resilient, its structure sound, and its long term economic fundamentals are healthy."

Rice also said the US would welcome foreign investment and free trade.

"And our economy will remain a leading engine of global economic growth," she said. "So we should have confidence in the underlying strength of the global economy - and act with confidence on the basis of the principles that lead to success in today's world."

Any sermon based on this text should touch on two key topics: credibility and growth.

Rice's name will never fit into the sort of neat little rhymed couplet that Grover Cleveland made up about James G. Blaine, but the credibility problems she faces are probably more suitable for the blank verse of Christopher Marlowe. (I have to wonder if she took in the performance of Tamburlaine by the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington!) Her ideological passions have always enabled her to take even the most far-fetched propositions to come out of the White House and make them sound plausible. Even when hard data points come to light that bring the chickens home to roost, she always seems to find just the right rhetorical constructs (not to mention chutzpah) to spin things in the President's favor. Given her facility in these matters over such issues as the "success" of our military activities in Iraq, just how are we to take her assertions about the state of our economy; and, more importantly, how will representatives of other countries take them when she declares them in a public forum of global experts, many of whom do not seem to have as much trouble talking about recession?

However, rather than labor the point of how credibility can get strained in the face of ideology, I would like to explore a deeper question, which may very well raise some eyebrows: What is so important about growth that it should be the only criteria invoked for assessing economic health? Granted, I have supported Isaiah Berlin's position that the "tragic flaw" of any utopia is that it is fundamentally static; but such a proposition does not logically imply that the only good dynamic system is one that is always growing. The problem is that we try to evaluate the quality of our economy on the basis of a number (such as the Gross Domestic Product); and then we assume that this number is only "good" if it grows at some rate (cooked up by economic theorists) from one year to the next. Does this number say anything about our quality of life? Does it say anything about the literal semantics of "social security," which, put in the bluntest of terms, is the risk that we may face having to go without food, clothing, and/or shelter? You do not have to be an economist to recognize that a Gross Domestic Product number says nothing about an overall quality of life, no more than the level of the Dow Jones Industrial Average does.

At the risk of sounding too didactic, let me propose that we, once again, go back to the text of the Constitution. The last time I did this was in search of the "job description" for the Presidency. This time, however, I would like to turn to the Preamble as a statement of why we need a government in the first place:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

What I am really asking is whether or not the growth of the Gross Domestic Product is an effective way to "insure domestic Tranquility" and/or "promote the general Welfare." If you look at the extent to which current White House policies have made our country "a leading engine of global economic growth" and the price those policies have paid in terms of their impact on domestic working conditions and global environmental conditions, then I do not think it is much of a stretch to conclude that those policies have not done squat for either "domestic Tranquility" or "general Welfare."

Now this should not be taken as a call to hurl our wooden shoes into the works of those engines of economic growth. It is only an argument that those engines should not be set up on some pedestal above all other priorities, such as the fact that every American citizen needs quality health care as much as every member of Congress does. Only misers evaluate their well-being in terms of how their economic resources grow. The rest of us think in terms of how those resources may be wisely applied to such things as feeding our families and sending our kids off to college. At least we want to think that way; but, as we saw in The Pursuit of Happyness, it is kind of hard to think that way when your highest priority is to get in line early enough to get a bed for the night at Glide Memorial Church.

Of course when Rice preaches the gospel of economic growth in Davos, she is, as they say, preaching to the choir. The problem is that most of us do not worship in that church. Indeed, most of us are probably not even allowed through the doors of that church, from which we should conclude that we should simply reject that church in favor of another one. We should reject the gospel of economic growth in favor of national goals that are more consistent with the Preamble of our own Constitution. If there are enough of us who do this during the Primaries, we may yet get back to having a President that can not only get us out of the many messes we are now in but also return our eyes to the prize of that government that our Constitution initially envisaged.

"You don't want me as the chief operating officer."

Quite a lot has been made of this remark that Barak Obama made at the beginning of this week while campaigning in Carson City, Nevada. It even made its way into last night's debate. However, this is the sort of one-liner that deserves not to be pulled out of context. Fortunately, John McCormick has given us what appears to be the full context on his The Swap blog for the Baltimore Sun:

You know what you can't do? You can't put me in charge of some paper. I will lose it. You don't want me as the chief operating officer. But that's not my job. I'm not a systems guy. I'm not somebody who could make sure that, you know, everything is running on time.

To add to the context, let me also offer Tim Dickinson's reading of this remark, which he posted on his National Affairs blog for Rolling Stone as part of his debate wrap-up:

I fear we’re in for a more of this Chief Operating Officer discussion. It was an odd, unforced error for Obama to admit earlier this week that he wouldn’t make a good COO. He played it off tonight as if that job were no more than paper pushing, but I don’t think most Americans really have any nuanced appreciation of the distinction between a COO and a CEO. It’s all the boss, and Obama kinda said he wasn’t all that good at boss stuff.

Those nuances that distinguish the COO from the CEO have a lot to do with the specifics of the organization being run, as does the influence of the Board of Directors. When you think about that, it is not that different from the ways in which the power structure changes from one administration to the next in the Federal government. The real issue is whether or not Obama really feels (or meant to say) that he is not "all that good at boss stuff." Whether we like it or not, our government is constituted around the exercise of authority; and, as Truman reminded us, the authority buck stops at the desk in the Oval Office. If Obama is not into the authority dimension of governance, then is the Executive branch the best place for him?

For all of my dedication to our Constitution, I am not sure it would be a good idea to view it (particularly Sections 2 and 3 of Article II) as a job description for the office of the Presidency. Even an originalist would probably admit that nature of the job itself has evolved since the Constitution was ratified. So, while Article II should still be honored, it really does not "define the job" that a President ought to be doing. Nevertheless, Section 2 invokes the noun "Power" (capitalized as quoted) in all three of its paragraphs; so, even if it does not cover all the details, the language strikes me as pretty clear that much of what a President does is exercise authority.

This takes us back to the full context for Obama's remark. He is not shying away from exercising authority, which reveals a misreading on Dickinson's part: He did not "kinda" say that "he wasn’t all that good at boss stuff." He did say he was "not a systems guy;" but, in spite of the number of business schools that still believe that management can only be taught and practiced within the domain of systems theory, this is not the same thing as "boss stuff." Indeed, the reason I keep hauling out Isaiah Berlin's "Political Judgement" essay is because of the strong case it makes that not only are "academic" perspectives such as systems theory not necessary in the effective exercise of authority but also they may do more harm than good by interfering with other factors that might contribute to more effective judgment. Furthermore, if you do not want to wade through Berlin's admittedly dense prose, consider the case of Robert McNamara, who, in many respects, may be viewed as the first "systems guy" to serve in a position of authority in the Executive branch of our government; and consider how much of what he discusses in The Fog of War can be traced back to bad decisions made under the influence of systems theory!

So, whatever Dickinson may think about "boss stuff," the fact that Obama has declared that he is "not a systems guy" may be more of an asset than a liability. The factor that will determine whether that "may" can be converted to an "is," however, lies in whether or not Obama will be able to talk to systems guys, because, these days, it is impossible to run any organization without running into them; and, having spent some time "on the inside," I know just how good these guys can be at turning "objective data and analyses" into blue smoke and mirrors. If Obama is the sort whose eyes glaze over in the presence of a graph or a mathematical formula, he may be too susceptible to the influence of the systems guys. He may not be able to respond with the critical questions that can poke holes in their over-inflated balloons; and, as a result, he will run the risk of caving in to their influence, thus going down the same tragic path that McNamara was fated to tread. In other words whether or not Obama is really suitable to exercise the authority of the Presidency really comes down to how he will be able to deal with those who try to influence him with language and methods that he may not understand very well. If he can deal with them, then my knowing that he has that capability may be a factor in my deciding to vote form him when I get my turn here in California!