Max Weber in Bedford Falls

Yesterday afternoon I returned to the War Memorial Opera House to take in the second of the two Thanksgiving weekend performances of Jake Heggie’s It’s a Wonderful Life presented by the San Francisco Opera. This time I could enjoy my subscription vantage point, which allows me to divide my time between the activity on stage and the activity in the orchestra pit. Nevertheless, this turned out to be an occasion when the narrative held the focus of my attention, whether it was being reinforced by Leonard Foglia’s staging or by Heggie’s setting of Gene Scheer’s libretto.

That focus was directed primarily on how the narrative served a socioeconomic precept I had cited at the end of my previous account of the opening-night performance. I considered the possibility that the narrative may be viewed almost like a “lesson play” (in the spirit of Bertolt Brecht) on the opposing views of the banker Mr. Potter (sung by baritone Rod Gilfry) and the protagonist George Bailey (sung by tenor William Burden). As I put it, the lesson goes back to “Max Weber’s contention that any society in which the only value is monetary value is a seriously flawed social institution.” Over the course of his writing, Weber took this principle in two directions, one involved with loss of freedom and the other with loss of meaning. (Jürgen Habermas would subsequently explore these two losses at greater length in his Theory of Communicative Action.)

As the narrative of It’s a Wonderful Life unfolds, there are any number of indicators of how freedom may be in jeopardy. Potter is revealed to be not only a banker but also a slumlord. The Bailey Building and Loan, founded by George’s father and then taken over by George after his father’s death, becomes a symbol of freedom those those less well-off. It manages as an organization in which the community provides money to help the community, using the underlying capital to build affordable houses. When “Angel Second Class” Clara (soprano Golda Schultz) gives George a vision of a world in which he had not yet been born, freedom has fallen victim to that jeopardy. Potter not only owns the town but also its citizens, whom he holds in a “virtual slavery.”

Loss of meaning, on the other hand, has less to do with the narrative itself and how different generations end up reading it. My own thoughts were triggered this morning when I saw a sign in my condominium complex that referred to “our neighbors.” It triggered a sinking feeling that the very meaning of the noun “neighbor” no longer had much currency when confronted with a mentality that is cripplingly limited to Facebook friends.

Those thoughts then turned to the two critical plot-turns in the opera narrative. The first takes place during the crash of 1929, when Bailey and his new wife Mary (soprano Andriana Chuchman) take the money intended for their honeymoon and distribute it among the depositors of the Building and Loan. That act is then reflected with those same townspeople give their money to Bailey upon learning that the Building and Loan had suffered an unexplained loss of $8000.

The Bailey family, Mary (Andriana Chuchman), George (William Burden), and Uncle Billy (Keith Jameson) with the money given my the neighbors to make up for the lost $8000 (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)

This triggered reflection on those currently prevailing mentalities. I realized that there was now a generation that would react to these episodes by asking “Why didn’t they just set up a GoFundMe page?” That struck me as the essence of a mentality of individuals whose focus on Facebook friends had essentially sapped the meaning out of the noun “neighbor.” In our present day loss of meaning is no longer a threat considered by Weber and Habermas; it is a stark reality.

Heggie’s opera, of course, is not a lecture in socioeconomic theory. It is not even a PBS “Socioeconomics for Dummies” television series! Nevertheless, it is a source of reflection on who we are and what we have become; and, through the imaginative uses of abstraction in Foglia’s staging, it is probably an even greater source of reflection than Frank Capra’s film of the same name had been. Sadly, while those of my generation still seem to appreciate and value such opportunities for reflection, there is a younger brave new world out there for which the concept of “reflection” has joined that of “neighbor” in having lost the essence of its meaning.

Opera cannot change the world, but my second viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life left me wishing that it could.

A Fortuitous Coincidence

I hope I am not the only one enjoying how the current episodes of The Newsroom involving whistle-blowing and speaking the truth to and about the rich and mighty should be overlapping so conveniently with the current travails of Edward Snowden.

Hegel's Philosophical View of History and Edward Snowden

Following the adventures of Edward Snowden (apparently secure in the limbo of the transit lounge of Moscow Airport as I write this), my own thoughts turn to The Philosophy of History by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel seemed to view the progress of thinking about government as a "spinal cord" for any account of how history defines a path from past to present. One particular passage seized my attention when I first read it and continues to maintain its grip on my attention:

The History of the World is the discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a Universal principle and conferring subjective freedom. The East knew and to the present day knows only the One is Free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows and All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third Monarchy.

I suspect that many, like myself, would puzzle over why democracy is assigned to the "some" category, while only under monarchy are "all" free. However, as one reads further, one discovers that Hegel's view of monarchy is basically an idealized form of the conditions of his own day:

Now Monarchy is that kind of constitution which does indeed unite the members of the body politic in the head of the government as in a point; but regards that head neither as the absolute director not the arbitrary rule, but as a power whose will is regulated by the same principle of law as the obedience of the subject.

In other words Hegel's monarch is sort of an optimal synthesis of Plato's philosopher-king and the emerging monarchs in a constitutional monarchy that were Hegel's contemporaries.

Putting aside the question of whether or not all are free under a constitutional monarchy, Hegel definitely has a point about that fact that only some are free under a democracy. Furthermore, the Occupy movement even went so far as to put a number on how many were in that "some." This was the 1% who, in one way or another, control the wealth of the entire world through the financial sector. In other words, democracy can never be anything other than a different kind of aristocracy. The latter is dominated by a "ruling class" for whom authority is a birthright, while the former achieves domination through technical skills in both analyzing and manipulating the global marketplace. Indeed, the only thing that differentiates the "rule of the 1%" from despotism is that authority is not concentrated in a single individual.

As a skilled intelligence analyst, Snowden could easily have been a member of this latter-day "ruling class." Instead, he chose to stake his future on the proposition that what is good for the "some" of the 1% is not good for all. He is now paying for his choice, although it remains to be seen what the ultimate price will be.

Richard Stallman, Meet Your Worst Nightmare!

Richard Stallman is probably the best-known advocate of the concept of free software, which may be characterized as the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify software, regardless of who provided it and whether or not obtaining it involved a financial transaction. His GNU Project has made a variety of software tools available that are consistent with this policy, one of the best known being the GNU Emacs text editor. It is interesting to study those who passionately embrace Stallman's philosophy. I worked in one laboratory in which one Emacs user had reprogramming the entire interface, making it impossible for anyone else to ever do anything at his workstation. Whether that is a vice or a virtue is in the eye of the beholder.

I would assume that Stallman believes that his philosophy is grounded in the principles of a free and open democratic society. Whether or not that concept is purely theoretical should not cloud the discussion. Nevertheless, it raises the question of what happens when free software finds its way into a repressive society.

This possibility was explored last week by John Hempton on his Bronte Capital blog. The title of his post was "Speculating about the future of Apple in China;" and it is important to note that, through the course of this blog, he emphasizes its speculative nature early and often (although there is a Postscript with a quote from the Wall Street Journal that can be taken to warrant at least some of his claims). The basis for speculation comes from the purchase of an Android phone in eBay that seems to have originated in a Middle Eastern country. It turned out that the functionality of the phone was almost non-existent, presumably because the operating system had been modified to prevent access to "undesirable" data and software.

Even if this is no more than speculation, it makes for an interesting case study in the extent to which the very concept of "freedom" is a double-edged sword, a concept that goes back at least as far as Plato and has been recognized by "enlightened" society as a major reason for a system of governance with the power to regulate. Free software may make for an admirable ideology. The real world, on the other hand, does not take kindly to just about any form of ideology.

The Sadism of the Market Economy

Recently, I used my national site on Examiner.com to comment on a recent article that Daniel Barenboim wrote for The New York Review entitled "Beethoven and the Quality of Courage." One of the instances of that courage involved embracing the concept of freedom while living in Vienna, still very much in the iron grip of a totalitarian empire. I was particularly struck by the following sentence:

Beethoven would have had no sympathy with the now widely held view of freedom as essentially economic, necessary for the workings of the market economy.

Last Tuesday Charles Simic raised the stakes on this observation in his latest post to NYRBlog, entitled "Health Care: The New American Sadism." His basic point was that embracing the position that providing health care should be entrusted to those "working of the market economy" was basically a sadistic act through which those who enabled it took pleasure in the suffering of those too weak or helpless to do anything about it.

I appreciate the hyperbole. Simic is, first and foremost, a poet. His words live by a principle articulated by Wilfred Owen from the trenches of the First World War:

All a poet can do today is warn.

Simic has sounded a warning as stridently as possible; and, of course, that warning extends far beyond health care, since it also includes education and, for that matter, the very question of gainful employment. However, while the idea of the rich and mighty taking pleasure in the suffering they have caused certainly captures the readers attention, I think that Simic has made the classic logic error of mistaking negligence for malice.

Simic's would-be sadists do not enjoy the suffering of others. They just do not care about it. They are so focused on "wealth creation" that their thoughts have no room for any other factors. It is not that they delight in the horrors of reality but that they no longer perceive them. Thus, Simic's warnings will go unheeded, just as Owen's did as more and more lives were lost (including his own) in the collective idiocy of World War One.

Commoditizing Dreams

One particular passage leapt out at me while I was reading Geoffrey O’Brien’s NYRBlog post about Beasts of the Southern Wild:

In movies the imaginary tends to be expensive, so independent live-action films generally work with what is already in place and steer clear of the realms of large-scale fantasy. Our dream worlds are elaborated for us by corporate entities with the necessary means. Beasts of the Southern Wild represents a kind of protest against this state of affairs, an assertion of the right to build one’s own make-believe world, with available tools however rudimentary, rather than submitting to the pre-imagined products of Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and the rest.

It struck me that there were more meanings to that “dream factory” epithet assigned to Hollywood than I had initially imagined. Presumably the epithet emerged from the ways in which Hollywood took a mass-production approach to entertainment, putting out entertainment the way Henry Ford’s assembly line put out cars. However, there is a corollary to this interpretation, which is that Hollywood tapped into a means of production through which our very dreams would become commoditized.

Through this corollary, we see one way in which Walter Benjamin’s claim that “the art of storytelling is coming to an end” may be achieving validity. Storytelling (note the italics) is not so much about the story as it is about the subjective and social elements that a storyteller brings to that story. A “dream factory,” on the other hand, dispenses with such complications from the subjective and social worlds and is concerned only with efficient manufacture (and resulting return on investment) of the dream-as-product. Through commoditization, we have lost what O’Brien calls “the right to build one’s own make-believe world.” Indeed, we have become so addicted to the commodity that most of us probably do not even recognize that loss for what it is.

If we then return to my earlier discussion of Tim Parks’ NYRBlog post, “Do We Need Stories?,” we see that Parks put forth the proposition that “the self requires a story.” One may then view O’Brien’s statement as an assertion that, through commoditization, the self has lost the right to tell its own story. Max Weber may have only scratched the surface in warning that commodity-based capitalism could lead to the loss of both meaning and freedom. More serious than either of these losses is the very loss of self. Take away self and the question of whether or not freedom has been lost becomes irrelevant. Man is no longer a slave but simply an automaton that happens to have been constructed out of biological components.

The Triumph of Fear

I never had a chance to hear Mort Sahl perform until my wife and I moved to Los Angeles in the Eighties.  By that time his Kennedy-era wit had long gone out of fashion;  but there was still a sharp edge to just about everything he said.  I particularly remember his conjuring up an image of Charlton Heston stretched out in his hammock behind his house in Topanga Canyon “dreaming of military takeover.”  Then, allowing only the slightest pause, Sahl hit his punch line, “Son of a bitch doesn’t realize it has already happened.”

That memory came to mind while reading Howard W. French’s “Looking for Hope in Burma” in the latest issue of The New York Review.  The primary book being reviewed by French is Than Shwe:  Unmasking Burma’s Tyrant by Benedict Rogers.  Burma is such a closed society that I was more than a little surprised that French managed to get both into and out of the country, let alone conduct a series of interviews (all conditioned on the anonymity of his subjects) about the future of the country after the release of Aung San Suu Kyi.  If anyone was qualified to review a new 256-page book about Than Shwe, it was definitely French;  and his article is a highly informative interleaving of Rogers’ account with French’s personal experiences.

What interested me most from French’s side of the story was the narrative of his attempt to get into Naypyidaw, the new capital city of the country, two hundred miles north of Rangoon and accessible only by a single superhighway.  The official policy is that foreigners cannot visit this city without a formal invitation.  (As one travel agent put it, casual tourist visits are “not convenient.”)  French took the risk of hiring a car and driver to go up the superhighway to get at least a glimpse of this secretive site.  He discovered that the “virtual barriers” around the city served not only to keep out the tourists but also to confine the bureaucrats.  French quoted what one relief worker said about those government workers:

They are trapped there, and can’t leave the city without authorization.  What you have basically are lots of unhappy people in an enterprise sustained by fear.

That was the text that triggered my flashback to Sahl, except that I was not thinking about Heston;  I was thinking about Dick Cheney.  More specifically I realized that our own country had become one of “lots of unhappy people in an enterprise sustained by fear.”  That enterprise had been engineered by the Bush Administration through cultivating the fear of terrorism in the wake of 9/11.  It is now less than a year until the tenth anniversary of that catastrophe, and electing a new President has not made much difference.  Fear of terrorism may have abated to some extent, but irrational suspicion of Muslims is still with us.  Meanwhile, our “unhappy people” have had to face a new crop if fears due to a damaged economy that has not yet been adequately repaired.  Why worry about terrorists when you have to face the more immediate worry that your house will be foreclosed or that the job you have may no longer exist next week?

Granted, things are much worse in Burma than they have ever been here.  Nevertheless, it is hard to resist associating those in our “ruling class” with those fleeting visions of Than Shwe.  Like Heston they have long dreamed of an authoritarian takeover that would obliterate the visions of our Founding Fathers from our national consciousness.  Unlike Heston, they probably are well aware that their dream has come true.

Asking the Wrong Question

The title of Michael Tomasky’s piece for the new (December 9) issue of The New York Review of Books is “Can Obama Rise Again?”  His analysis of the decline of Barack Obama’s popularity and effectiveness is cast in a critical examination of two recent books, Herding Donkeys:  The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics by Ari Berman and The Mendacity of Hope:  Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism by Roger D. Hodge.  At the very least Tomasky provides a lot of valuable context for any reader interested in approaching either of these books.  From my point of view, however, the greatest value in his context is the implication that he is probably asking the wrong question in his title.

What is at stake is neither Obama’s popularity nor the strength of the Democratic Party.  The real question is whether those Americans desperately seeking reform in a country that has undermined any sense of security in day-to-day life, whether it involves health care, education, or even fear of inadequate “homeland security,” will have a candidate in any future election for whom they are willing to vote.  By its very nature progressivism has always been anathema to established power, and the Supreme Court has now allowed that established power unbridled use of financial resources to demonize both the ideas of progressivism and the candidates who embrace those ideas.  In other words, the punch line of The American Ruling Class, both Lewis Lapham’s book and John Kirby’s documentary (“Why change City Hall when you can buy it?”), has become more significant in the domain of national politics.

Our country has had a legacy of political parties whose name began with the adjective “progressive.”  One of the earliest even had the backing of a former Republican President, who basically became fed up with what his party was doing.  Unfortunately, our electoral process has deteriorated to a stage in which third-party interests seem to function only as spoilers, rather than as coalition-builders.  This, itself, is part of that status quo that “the American Ruling Class” wishes to preserve, often by spending massive funds that might otherwise benefit the public welfare.

Hodge’s point is that the real “hope” that Obama evoked was that, in the midst of so much adversity, progressivism could still find a voice.  The tragedy is that this hope was held out only to attract voters and was dashed in the earliest months of the new Administration.  That adversity is now stronger than ever, and Max Weber’s risks of loss of meaning and loss of freedom are no longer potential.  They have become the “new reality;”  and any talk of “hope” towards changing that reality is just another casualty in that pile of lost meanings.

When Conservatives Made Sense

Having written yesterday about my rules of thumb for deciding what I read from the screen and what I read as marks on paper, I though I would reflect on a reading experience from the latter category that I just completed. This was Alan Wolfe's online review of the new edition of Robert Nisbet's The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom, which was published on the Web site for The New Republic. I am not shy in confessing that I am very selective in reading anything that The New Republic publishes, but I was drawn to both Nisbet's title and my respect for Wolfe as a writer. After all it was only last July that I was writing about the extent to which the sense of community identity had come under siege in the wake of the rising obsession with "social networks;" so this seemed to be a good time to bone up on some of the more traditional thoughts about community that the world the Internet has made was willing to consign to the dustbin of history.

I quickly discovered that there was more in this particular dustbin than the book itself. There was also an academic practice that would probably be dismissed as unforgiveable heresy today. Having acknowledged that The Quest for Community was "one of the major works of American conservatism" in the Fifties, Wolfe reflected on the quotation with which he began his review:

The uneasiness, the malaise of our time, is due to this root fact: in our politics and economy, in family life and religion—in practically every sphere of our existence—the certainties of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have disintegrated or been destroyed and, at the same time, no new sanctions or justifications for the new routines we live, and must live, have taken hold.

Wolfe observed that these were not Nisbet's words but a citation from the writings of C. Wright Mills, who was as much a representative of left-wing thinking in the United States as Nisbet represented the right. Here is how Wolfe described this particular meeting of minds:

As hard as it might be to imagine in our wildly polarizing times, thinkers from both the right and the left once found themselves intellectually linked. What joined them together was something called the theory of mass society. Flabbergasted by the seeming success of totalitarianism, and worried that its effects lingered on in the form of overweening state power, corporatist private institutions, and popular susceptibility to advertising and image-manipulation, writers such as Nisbet and Mills were among the many, including Hannah Arendt, Edward Shils, Joseph Schumpeter, Dwight Macdonald, and Richard Hofstadter, who put mass irrationality ahead of class interest in their understanding of their society, and turned to European thinkers such as José Ortega y Gasset and Emil Lederer for such an analysis.

That is quite a laundry list of social theorists, and it is more than a little disconcerting to realize that their very conception of mass irrationality has become rather feeble in the context of the world the Internet has made.

This brings us to what I felt was the key paragraph in Wolfe's account of Nisbet's thinking:

Nisbet can be understood as a conservative communitarian. Although he was more concerned with oppressive state power than he was with corporate dominance of society, he recognized that bigness in any form was alien to his vision of a good society. “Not all the asserted advantages of mass production and corporate bigness,” he wrote, “will save capitalism if its purposes become impersonal and remote, separated from the symbols and relationships that have meaning in human lives.” One can only imagine Nisbet’s reaction to corporations that treat human communities as ruthlessly as the natural environment. I cannot see this man as an apologist for BP or as a fan of globalization.

Indeed, one cannot imagine a better example of that alienating "bigness" than Tom Friedman's vision of globalization, which has enabled that "corporate dominance of society" on a scale far broader than Nisbet could have ever dreamed. How has that dominance (which I have preferred to call "the war against the poor") been achieved; and why do I associate it with the world the Internet has made? The reason is that focus on technology begets a focus on the objective world to the exclusion of the influences of the subjective and social worlds. Back in 2007 I summarized that focus as follows:

It is the ultimate objectification of the subject, which is to say, the reduction of anyone not in that ruling class to slavery (or, if you prefer Hayek's terminology, serfdom).

In Wolfe's language a world without subjects is a world without "the symbols and relationships that have meaning in human lives," which takes us back to those two major social risks that Jürgen Habermas identified in the writings of Max Weber: the risks of loss of meaning and loss of freedom. Unfortunately, things do not look any better today than they did when Habermas wrote about Weber in his Theory of Communicative Action. Indeed, if all those thinkers from the Fifties could not dig us out of the dark pit of mass irrationality, is there any reason to believe that current thinkers can do a better job?

"Computer Literacy" and Education

The following rather disquieting report showed up on the BBC News Web site last night:

Information technology lessons in UK schools are so dull they are putting pupils off the subject and careers in computing, top scientists warn.

The Royal Society said the situation would lead to an unskilled workforce and threaten the UK's economy.

Launching a study of how lessons might be improved, the society said the number of pupils in England doing ICT GCSE had fallen 33% over three years.

And there was a 33% fall, between 2003 and 2009, in ICT A-level candidates.

Now the Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science, is embarking on a new study: Computing in schools and its importance and implications for the economic and scientific well-being of the UK.

Researchers will look at curricula for ICT and computer science in schools, current exams and assessment processes, training for teachers, as well as the facilities and resources available in schools and colleges.

The study will report back in the autumn next year.

The study will be chaired by Professor Steve Furber, whom the report quoted as follows:

The UK has a proud history of leading the way in the field of computer science and associated disciplines, from the development of the world's first stored-program computers to more recent innovations such as the invention of the world-wide web.

However, from this bright start, we are now watching the enthusiasm of the next generation waste away through poorly conceived courses and syllabuses.

If we cannot address the problem of how to educate our young people in inspirational and appropriate ways, we risk a future workforce that is totally unskilled and unsuited to tomorrow's job market.

I used to have a dog in this particular hunt, at least on the American side of the pond; but that was a long time ago when I was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Association for Computer Machinery's Special Interest Group in Education. That particular SIG was a rather motley crew, many of whose members were simply there to apply lobbying techniques to make sure that the material they knew had a secure place in the "approved" computer science curriculum. As a whole the group had little interest in broader questions of education, such as methodology or, for that matter, the contributions that an education in computer science would make to society at large. As a result, my experiences with this group were so unpleasant that, even from a distance of many decades, they may jaundice my perceptions of the effort now being undertaken in the United Kingdom.

However, more recent events also make me skeptical of just where these good British intentions may lead. Most importantly may be the extent to which computer technology (and probably also "information technology," presumably the source of the "I" in "ICT") are contributing to an overall deskilling of workforces that may be a greater threat to national economies than uninspiring curricula. To put the matter in the bluntest of terms, just about anyone who works behind a keyboard connected to a computer these days is acting as a mindless drone, no matter how hard the consciousness industry tries to conceal this ugly truth by invoking phrases such as "knowledge worker." Basically, this is an affirmation of the risks that Jürgen Habermas identified in the writings of Max Weber: the risks of loss of meaning and loss of freedom. That the semantics of a phrase like "knowledge worker" has been ravaged to a level of meaninglessness speaks for itself; but it entails the corollary that workers who are skilled in name only have become the basis for a new supply of slave labor, the second of Habermas' risks, which Karl Marx characterized as "wage slavery."

One consequence of this dual loss of meaning and freedom is that, beyond the shallowness of propagandizing cant, we have lost touch with any meaningful semantics for the very concept of "skill." By the end of the seventeenth century, skill was important enough to identify a "third estate" of society, clearly distinguished from both nobility and peasantry. In our current reworking of the concept of a "ruling class," we seem to have regressed to two estates in a world where the "new nobility" feels that skills can be assumed by technology, manipulated by the "new peasantry" without any knowledge that might impede the efforts of the rich to get richer.

From this point of view, the undertaking of the Royal Society may be futilely short-sighted. The question is not whether today's young people can be educated about computers "in inspirational and appropriate ways." The question is whether our prevailing ruling classes (be they explicit or implicit in our social orders) want young people to be educated at all or whether they want nothing more than a "new peasantry" ("serfs" in the language of Friedrich Hayek) that will follow orders without question in return for which a "new paternalism" will see to their daily needs.

Yesterday in Lake Tahoe, Google CEO Eric Schmidt issued the proclamation that "society is not fundamentally ready" for the next round of technology innovations. This seems like a rather naive way to posit a not-our-fault argument to defend those responsible for what is now the world the Internet has made. The sad truth, however, is that those who have dedicated themselves to technology innovation with little regard to the insights of social theory are now reaping a whirlwind in which the very nature of work has been devolved into wage slavery. It is not that "society is not fundamentally ready" for powerful technologies but that those who promote new technologies are not now (nor have they ever been) "fundamentally ready" to mess (when Book TV recorded Ken Auletta's talk about his Googled book at the Googleplex, he used a stronger word knowing that the talk would be aired on cable) with the workings of society. Unfortunately, society has now become so dependent on what those technology promoters have provided that it is unlikely that the genie will ever be put back in the bottle; and it is just as unlikely that either Schmidt or any others of his ilk will ever be held responsible for the consequences of the impact of such technologies on the social world.

Negligence Begets Arrogance

This month began with a report from our Government Accountability Office (GAO) that basically took the Treasury Department to task for failing to monitor just how funds from the $700 billion bailout package would be spent. So, if the Treasury Department is not interested in following the money and if our Congressional representatives are not doing anything because they are on vacation, does that mean that we, as the public, have no right to know what is happening to our money? Associated Press Writer Matt Apuzzo decided to take on the role of concerned citizen and address that question by going directly to banks that had received bailout money. He filed his story last night, and it is not particularly pleasant reading.

The bottom line is that, when asked to give an account of what they were doing with the government support money they received, the banks chose to pull a Bartleby and reply that they would prefer not to do so:

After receiving billions in aid from U.S. taxpayers, the nation's largest banks say they can't track exactly how they're spending it. Some won't even talk about it.

"We're choosing not to disclose that," said Kevin Heine, spokesman for Bank of New York Mellon, which received about $3 billion.

Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money, said that while some of the money was lent, some was not, and the bank has not given any accounting of exactly how the money is being used.

"We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to," Kelly said.

The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings, and what's the plan for the rest?

None of the banks provided specific answers.

"We're not providing dollar-in, dollar-out tracking," said Barry Koling, a spokesman for Atlanta, Ga.-based SunTrust Banks Inc., which got $3.5 billion in taxpayer dollars.

Some banks said they simply didn't know where the money was going.

Depressing as this may be, it is hardly surprising. If our current Administration has turned laissez-faire policy into "a failure to govern at all," why should the public assume that their representatives through the press will be any more effective than their representatives in the Congress? We are back on the turf that Jürgen Habermas tried the chart in The Theory of Communicative Action in his examination of Max Weber's "Diagnosis of the Times." I examined this diagnosis on my old blog, and this seems like a good time to review it. Here is how Habermas introduced his findings:

In his diagnosis of the times Weber keeps closer than usual to the theoretical perspective in which modernization is represented as a continuation of the world-historical process of disenchantment. The differentiation of independent cultural value spheres that is important for the phase of capitalism's emergence, and the growing autonomy of subsystems of purposive-rational action that is characteristic of the development of capitalist society since the late eighteenth century, are the two trends that Weber combines into an existential-individualistic critique of the present age. The first component is represented in the thesis of a loss of meaning, the second in the thesis of a loss of freedom.

If we do not believe we are suffering from a loss of meaning, then consider the basic concept of banking in terms of the models of operation initially conceived, the motives for those models, the disconnect between those models and the practices that brought about economic collapse, and now what appears to be the willful disregard of that disconnect. Were we to reduce it all to a question of "production," then our banks are no better at putting out beneficial products that the public wants than General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler are. By placing the needs of the customer below the needs of the shareholders (whose latter needs have never amounted to anything more than greed-satisfaction), every bank now on the Government dole has basically sacrificed the very meaning of banking; and, as always seems to be the case, we get stuck paying for that sacrifice. That, of course, is Weber's second loss: Because our collective voice, even when we vote, is ultimately drowned out by the more powerful voices of those who deal in the exchange of shares, the concept of banking may have lost its meaning; but we have lost our freedom (perhaps best illustrated in my recent attempt to describe our "hostage situation") through "collateral damage."

Both Weber and Habermas chose to attribute these losses to the underlying nature of capitalism itself, and I think there are some valid grounds for doing so. However, I am optimistic enough to believe that these losses can be regained not through the abandonment of capitalism but through a rejection of faith in "free markets" in favor of an ongoing regulatory framework that provides a cushion against the greatest hazards of poorly calculated risk. As I previously suggested, the danger of "serfdom" that so concerned Friedrich Hayek does not necessarily come from the control of fascist authority; it can also come from a willingness to accept the control of instruments we do not really understand, such as those instruments used in the exchange of "shares of debt" as if they were shares of a corporation, which played such a major role in debilitating our economy. More important, however, is that, as is the case with addiction, we seem to be either unwilling or unable to acknowledge our losses; and we shall not regain them until we are willing to recognize that they have been lost. In the wake of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt was remembered by history as our "recovery president." Will Barack Obama summon the necessary leadership to be remembered as our "rehabilitation president?"

Superstitious about Language

Paul Reynolds, world affairs correspondent for the BBC, has written a useful think piece for the BBC News Web site on the role of foreign policy in the coming Presidential election, contrasting the current position statements being delivered by John McCain and Barack Obama. He structured the piece in terms of McCain speeches directed to attack Obama and Obama responses that, in turn, attack McCain. Unfortunately, one of the Obama quotes invoked a haunting memory from my high school history days:

The American people are going to look at the evidence. We don't get a sense that this has been a wise foreign policy or a smart foreign policy or a tough foreign policy.

The memory was of a Democratic candidate who lost a Presidential election. The candidate was Al Smith; and he gave a famous (at least still in my high school days) speech attacking the policy of Prohibition. He is best known for the first sentence of that speech (to the extent that more people remember the sentence than remember that the speech was about Prohibition):

Let's look at the record.

He then confronted the American people with evidence (choosing my words from Obama's text) to demonstrate that a Constitutional Amendment that had been motivated by what may be called a "War Against Sin" had actually led to a significant increase in violent crime, much of which was directly related to the trafficking of goods that had been declared constitutionally illegal.

My point is that, compelling as Smith's speech was, the American people didn't look at the evidence. They were more preoccupied with fear. Prohibition was escalated to Constitutional authority through the zealous efforts of Protestant evangelists, who knew precisely how to cultivate fears, not only of sin and hell-fire but also of those who did not embrace their particular breed of Christianity. Smith was victimized by those fears not only by opposing Prohibition but by being Catholic. (In 1884, long before Prohibition became a Constitutional Amendment, the Republicans had already classified the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.")

One lesson from Reynolds' analysis is that things have not changed very much. The Republicans still know how to cultivate fear of rebellion and have reaped considerable political gain from transforming their predecessors' "War Against Sin" into a "War Against Terror." Romanism, on the other hand, has been replaced by Islam, particularly as embodied by the new linguistic barbarism of our culture, "Islamofacism." (Invoking The New Oxford American Dictionary, Wikipedia uses a less extreme characterization than I do, calling the word a "controversial neologism!") Thus, Reynolds offers a simple example of McCain's skill at fear-mongering:

The McCain campaign circulated this comment: "We need change in America, but not the kind of change that wins kind words from Hamas, surrenders in Iraq and will hold unconditional talks with Iranian President Ahmadinejad."

In one sentence, John McCain linked three American foreign policy fears - Hamas, Iraq and Iran - and tried to isolate Mr Obama as unreliable on all three.

However, if good slogans come in threes, then the Republicans have been very careful about manipulating the third element. I would suggest that the issue of rum has now evolved into the issue of race. This is particularly evident in a post written last week by Doug Feaver for his dot.comments blog for The Washington Post. The post is a reflection on a report that had recently appeared on the front page of the Post's print edition, summarized by Feaver in his first paragraph:

Kevin Merida wrote a front-page story earlier this week reporting that Sen. Barack Obama's "phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president."

The Web version of that story accumulated 3300 comments in the time between its appearance (last Monday) and the time of Feaver's post (last Thursday). Feaver used his post to reproduce what he felt was a representative sample, neither offering any critical observations nor trying to draw any conclusions.

Reading his selection reminded me of the sorts of calls placed to C-SPAN's Washington Journal (which I listen to on XM, rather than watch on television). While this program gets its share of "oddball calls," it has a high proportion of listeners who deserve attention; but, what I like most is that C-SPAN provides separate call-in numbers for Democrats, Republicans, and independents. This provides an approximation (which, of course may be disguised) of the background of any caller who chooses to make a comment about race, whether it involves Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, or racially divisive language in political advertising. The Washington Post made no effort to identify the backgrounds or persuasions of the authors of all those comments it received; but we have already been exposed to accusations (which may or may not be valid) of Republican involvement in cultivating fear of race.

My point is that the Republican rallying standard of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" may now very well have been transformed into "Race, Islamofacism, and Terrorism" (even if it is no longer alliterative); and this new standard draws just as much strength from cultivating fear as the old one did in 1884. If Obama really believes that this standard can be pulled down because "The American people are going to look at the evidence," then he may be lacking sufficient respect for how formidable the force of well-cultivated fear can be. I would suggest that he and his strategists set aside some time to examine what were the most critical factors in Smith's loss to Herbert Hoover in 1928 and make sure that they do not find themselves bitten once again by those same factors.

Arbitrary Boundaries of Time

Associated Press Writer Malden Read seems to have joined most of the financial reporters by dwelling on the "somber mood" with which Wall Street ended 2007. Needless to say, there is nothing particularly magic about December 31, 2007. Yes, the Dow fell 101 points yesterday; but Malden's phrase, "the latest in a string of triple-digit moves," omits the fact that those "moves" have been in both directions! Similarly, Malden attributes the "respectable increase of 6.43 percent" over the entire year to "a big first-half advance," thereby implying that the second half of the year has been one big catastrophe. However, if we look at a five-year plot that occupies the same horizontal extent as a one-year summary (which we can do with the Yahoo! Finance Charts display), we see a smoothing of the data that indicates a slowing of growth around the middle of the year but hardly a reversal of the trend.

The lesson here is that financial reporting thrives on the same fear factor that drives any other form of news reporting. We are conditioned to believe that every day on the Dow is a matter of the life and death of our portfolio. However, as I have discovered, it is not that hard to come up with a properly balanced portfolio that can ride through the eccentricities of just about any given day. This gives us the liberty to think in longer terms than the ones dished out to us. We can look over longer windows to get some sense of the "smoother" behavior of trends and the factors that might change them. Unfortunately, this kind of thinking is not sensational enough to land a spot on the evening news; so our thoughts about well being based on our portfolio get jerked around the same way as our thoughts about terrorist threats. None of this benefits what Isaiah Berlin has called our "sense of reality;" but that sense of reality does not sell advertising slots on television. Indeed, most of the advertising has been designed to subvert our sense of reality by creating desires for things we neither need nor particularly want. So it is that we all become victims of what Max Weber called the "loss of meaning," as well as the mechanisms through which the loss of meaning carries along the "loss of freedom" in its wake.