November 11, 2006: Why I am not a Positivist

Once again, David Cole has written an excellent book review for The New York Review. The last time he came to my attention, he was writing about terrorism; this time the issue is the constitutional foundation of our legal system. The book under review is Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency, by Richard Posner (pictured above as rendered, with at least two meanings intended, by David Levine). What is at stake is Posner's legal philosophy, which basically reduces judicial ruling to the mechanics of cost-benefit analysis.

While Cole does not mention it explicitly, this kind of positivism-with-a-vengeance actually recalls Bertrand Russell's internationalism, where Russell envisioned a single government for the entire globe that would resolve all disputes by invoking the machinery of an appropriately designed logical calculus. Cole does an excellent job of challenging this vision. For me the most compelling passage of his text is a quotation of a 1961 dissenting opinion by Justice John Marshall Harlan concerning the nature of due process:

Due process has not been reduced to any formula; its content cannot be determined by reference to any code. The best that can be said is that through the course of this Court's decisions it has represented the balance which our Nation, built upon postulates of respect for the liberty of the individual, has struck between that liberty and the demands of organized society. If the supplying of content to this Constitutional concept has of necessity been a rational process, it certainly has not been one where judges have felt free to roam where unguided speculation might take them. The balance of which I speak is the balance struck by this country, having regard to what history teaches are the traditions from which it developed as well as the traditions from which it broke. That tradition is a living thing. A decision of this Court which radically departs from it could not long survive, while a decision which builds on what has survived is likely to be sound. No formula could serve as a substitute, in this area, for judgment and restraint.

While the focus of Posner's book and Cole's challenge involves the relationship between the current executive and judicial branches of the Federal Government, reading about the subtleties of due process reminded of when, about five years ago, John Seely Brown enjoined me to drop everything and read Lawrence Lessig's new book, Code (dragging me to a bookstore on Maui in the process). Revisiting the index of that book, I discovered only one entry for "due process," that being in a paragraph on page 7 that reviews the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. That neglect for one of the most important elements of our Constitutional process can perhaps explain the sort of position that Lessig tried to take in his book:

Government should push the architecture of the Net to facilitate its regulation, or else it will suffer what can only be described as a loss of sovereignty.

This, again, is positivism-with-a-vengeance, guided possibly by a calculus more sophisticated than one Russell could have ever imagined, but (in Harlan's language) a "formula" nonetheless. Today we may be more conscious of the judicial issues that have been arising in the way of American military adventurism. However, those issues are also likely to arise in other more mundane aspects of our lives; so we should all be aware of the cautionary arguments that Cole has articulated so excellently.

November 02, 2006 (1): Validate Your Assumtions!

As if there have not been enough entries today, here is an entry for the commonplace book from the interview that Mohammad Khatami gave to the BBC:

Democracy is not something to get exported.

November 01, 2006 (2): Tell it Like it Is, Matt!

Once again, Rolling Stone has made its mark in quality political journalism, again thanks to the perceptive writing of Matt Taibbi! This time Matt has decided to take on "the Letterman-O'Reilly dust-up last week," where Bill O'Reilly (in Taibbi's usual colorful language) "ended up skewered and turned over the video-spit by the end of the segment, with an apple in his mouth and Sumner Redstone's massive billionaire foot wedged firmly in his ass." The point, however, is that this was the full extent of Taibbi's celebration of this event, because, at the end of the day, there really was not that much to celebrate. His point is that Letterman and others of his ilk (meaning those media "performers" who only recently have begun to reverse their position on the Iraq war) really deserve no praise for what amounts to taking forever to recognize the baldly obvious. Here are Taibbi's words again (in language that, this time, may be too colorful for some readers):

What's dangerous about what's going on right now is that an electoral defeat of the Republicans next week, and perhaps a similar defeat in a presidential race two years from now, might fool some people into thinking that the responsibility for the Iraq war can be sunk forever with George Bush and the Republican politicians who went down with his ship. But in fact the real responsibility for the Iraq war lay not with Bush but with the Lettermans, the Wolf Blitzers, the CNNs, The New York Timeses of the world -- the malleable middle of the American political establishment who three years ago made a conscious moral choice to support a military action that even a three-year-old could have seen made no fucking sense at all.

It doesn't take much courage to book the Dixie Chicks when George Bush is sitting at thirty-nine percent in the polls and carrying 3,000 American bodies on his back every time he goes outside. It doesn't take much courage for MSNBC's Countdown to do a segment ripping the "Swift-Boating of Al Gore" in May 2006, or much gumption from Newsweek's Eleanor Clift to say that many people in the media "regret" the way Gore was attacked and ridiculed in 2000. We needed those people to act in the moment, not years later, when it's politically expedient. We needed TV news to reject "swift-boating" during the actual Swift Boat controversy, not two years later; we needed ABC and NBC to stand up to Clear Channel when that whole idiotic Dixie Chicks thing was happening, not years later; we needed the networks and the major dailies to actually cover the half-million-strong protests in Washington and New York before the war, instead of burying them in inside pages or describing the numbers as "thousands" or "at least 30,000," as many news outlets did at the time; and we needed David Letterman to have his war epiphany back when taking on Bill O'Reilly might actually have cost him real market share.

This all reminds me of a lecture I heard John Cage deliver at the Philadelphia Museum of Art some time in the vicinity of 1974. On that occasion Cage chose to read an acceptance speech he delivered for some award he had recently received (which may very well be the first time he had been acknowledged with any such prestigious award). Since those of us who actually knew Cage are declining in our numbers, I have to explain that Cage was probably the closest approximation to a saint I had ever met (although, if one could call him a saint, it would have to be a Buddhist saint). The number of times I ever heard him break with his serene equanimity and voice anything like a complain could be counted on one hand. So it was quite a surprise to discover that the message of this particular lecture (and, for all I know, he delivered it while holding the award just given to him) was, "Where were you when I needed you?" Both John Cage and Merce Cunningham spent more years than any of us would wish to number on the brink of poverty, wondering where the next meal would come from, just because they wanted to be true to their ideas of how music and dance should be made. (Cage even told the story that, when Cunningham received his first serious grant award, someone asked him what he would do with the money; and Merce answered immediately, "Eat.") For all that serene equanimity, Cage could not forget persevering the poverty when finally awarded the fruits of recognition.

Nothing has changed. Attention was not paid to John Cage and Merce Cunningham when they were struggling to make their voices heard. Attention was not paid to those few to dared to speak of the folly of going to war in Iraq when the question was still being debated in the Congress. Today also happens to be the day that Nelson Mandela was capable of offering up a few kind words for P. W. Botha. When will the United States of America come to terms with the concepts of Truth and Reconciliation? When will we accept responsibility for our mistakes of neglect?

October 23, 2006: Population Politics

According to today's Times Online site, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has instructed the population of Iran to produce more babies with the goal of doubling the country's population to ensure its "dominance." However "voices of reason" may react to this with alarm (and however justified the alarm), we probably should recognize that this is not a new strategy. When I was working in Israel (1971-1973), while this was never articulated as government policy, just about anyone I spoke to voiced this strategy as an important element of patriotism. Even in Singapore, which prided itself on the diversity of its population, I encountered tacit injunctions to the Chinese population to make sure that their numbers would not begin to lag in the demographic statistics. Given the resources crises we face, there is, as I suggested, plenty of cause for alarm; but we also need to recognize that this "political weapon" ball has been rolling for some time.

September 28, 2006: Where it all Began

Enough of Generation M and the fictions we are making up to hide behind it! Let us try to remember, for better or worse, that there is a "world of work" out there. This makes it a good time to remember that the same essay that carries Marx' wonderful assessment of religion also signals his discovery of the proletariat. This forms the basis for today's commonplace book entry:

Where, then, the positive possibility of emancipation in Germany? Answer: In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong as such. There must be formed a sphere of society which claims no traditional title but only a human title, which is not partially opposed to the consequences but is totally opposed to the assumptions of the German political system; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all the other spheres of society, and thereby emancipating all of them; a sphere, in short, which is the total loss of humanity and which can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat.

This seems to be where it all began, and one can only wonder if Marx could imagine where it would lead!

September 20, 2006 (1): Ignoring History

It is time to "read into the record" those sentences from Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which always seem to be ignored in spite of their value:

Hegel observes somewhere that all great incidents and individuals of world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Never mind that we have yet to track down the source of Hegel's observation. We can forgive Marx the rhetorical flourish in light of the subsequent insight!

I was reminded of this remark while reading Guenther Roth's (necessarily?) massive introduction to Economy and Society, the project to translate all of Max Weber's Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft into English. One particular sentence leapt out at me this morning:

Weber looked more closely at the consequences of the seizure of power than did Marx in spite of the "dictatorship of the proletariat"; he saw that revolutionary domination can survive only when an efficient administration suppresses the expropriated former holders of legitimate power.

Can we read this sentence without thinking about Iraq? Can we think about Iraq without thinking about Marx's two-fold analysis of history: the revolutionary overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy followed by the revolutionary overthrow of Ba'athist rule? There is no doubting the general consensus regarding the tragic nature of the first phase. We have only to read the news every day to complete Marx's couplet. I suppose there is little need to comment on how much thought was given to "efficient administration" before going in with the big guns!

September 19, 2006: Did Kleist Anticipate Sokal?

To call Heinrich von Kleist a strange writer is to mince around with understatement. There are too many examples of his fiction and drama that leave you thinking, "I can't believe I'm reading/seeing this!" So one has to wonder whether or not one should react the same way to some of his essays. He could have perpetrated the sort of hoax that, in our time, Alan Sokal pulled off in publishing "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" in the journal Social Text. As we now know, Sokal tried to "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions" and succeeded. Two hundred years earlier, Kleist published some "learned essays" on topics sufficiently odd for his time to leave the reader wondering whether or not to take him seriously.

My favorite is "On the Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking." The basic thesis is that the thoughts we have "in our head" are, for the most part, vague and ill-formed; and it is only when we try to express them in words that they become concrete enough to be called ideas. (At this point I should not that the fact that Kleist had a thesis at all makes him more credible than Sokal. The editors of Social Text apparently did not require him to have a thesis statement, so he did not provide them with one: He wrote no abstract and avoided anything that looked like a thesis sentence in both his opening and closing paragraphs. Kleist may have decided to explore a weird thesis, but at least he told you where he was going!) After stating this thesis, he backs it up with a series of examples and concludes by reaffirming that thesis. In that respect it is a model essay.

As a matter of fact, I think everyone should read it, not only because it is a model essay but also because I think his examples do support this thesis! Why not? In his "Theaetetus" Plato has Socrates lead Theaetetus to explore the definition of "knowledge." Theaetetus proposes four definitions, each of which is deftly refuted by Socrates, leaving us at the end of the dialog with no definition for knowledge! Perhaps we have such muddled ideas about "thoughts in the head" that Kleist may be right: Those thoughts really are not there and only take shape when we try to express them. In Kleist's own more poetic language, "it is not we who 'know'; it is rather a certain condition, in which we happen to be, that 'knows.'"

So, the next time you encounter an article that does have an authentic thesis, rather than a mere concatenation of meaningless jargon, no matter how absurd it may seem, accord it the respect of a serious claim. Then see if the author can back up the claim with an argument, making sure that the argument is not pulling off any rhetorical sleight-of-hand. If you can drag the claim through that test and it emerges intact on the other side, it may be less absurd than you thought!

September 13, 2006: One More Loss

I have to confess that, since I received all of my "serious" education at MIT, I never learned anything about Max Weber before I received my Ph.D. As a matter of fact, I remained in a state of naive ignorance until, late in my life, I finally decided to tackle Jürgen Habermas' monumental Theory of Communicative Action. What seems to have influenced me the most was a section Habermas wrote on "Weber's Diagnosis of the Times." Here is how Habermas introduced the diagnosis:

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.

This is pretty heavy stuff, even heavier when you think about how things have changed since Weber developed those theses: Under the impact of new technologies, we can hardly say they have changed for the better.

As a matter of fact, having just read Daniel Mendelsohn's review of the new recent 9/11 films, I would say that we can now add a third "thesis of loss" to the list: loss of reality. This cuts deeper than the assault on meaning brought about by the Enlightenment ideals of a world united around universal truth, ideal that Isaiah Berlin attacked so eloquently. Rather, it has to do with the extent to which media have now impacted what we want reality to be. Here are two paragraphs in which Mendelsohn takes on the United 93 film:

The problem with all this realness is that the film itself—like reality—has no structure and without structure, without shaping, the events can have no large meaning [reflecting, probably unintentionally, back on the Weber thesis]. When United 93 first came out, I was struck by one enthusiastic critic's glowing comment, in a review entitled "Brilliant, Brutal and Utterly Real," that Greengrass's movie was "gripping from first to last, partly because, like a Greek tragedy, we are only too aware of where everything is heading …." But what makes Greek tragedy significant as art is precisely the way in which the foreordained trajectory of the events that take place on stage is made to seem part of a larger moral scheme; when (for instance) we see the horrible spectacle of the humbled kind at the end of Persians, we know why he has been humbled (his greedy overreaching) and who has humbled him (the gods, the moral order that obtains in the cosmos).

All that United 93 can tell us, by contrast, is that many people are brave and some people are dastardly. (Well, many American people are brave: we're treated to a scene in which one of the passengers, who has a Central European accent of some kind, urges the others to cooperate with the hijackers.) If United 93 brings to mind any genre, it's not Greek tragedy, with its artfully wrought moral conundrums, but something much tinier: the innumerable made-for-television programs available on cable TV that are dedicated to reenactments of real-life crimes, complete with phony "realism." The stylistic hallmark of these shows is the same jittery hand-held camerawork that Greengrass uses to represent the violence in the cabin of Flight 93.

Unfortunately, phony realism sells soap (and cars and cereal and drugs for everything from allergies to sexual enhancement, not to mention political candidates); so reality has now been consigned to the same ash-heap as freedom and meaning (which, without reality, is even more lost than in Weber's time). So Isaiah Berlin, towards the end of his life, declared the twentieth century to be "the most terrible century in Western history." Perhaps it is just as well that he never had the opportunity to observe its successor.

September 07, 2006 (2): It's Not What you Read but How you Read It!

Harlan Ellison used to go off on these great rants about how important it is that everyone read. He would stress that what you read was less important than the fact that you were reading. (He would say things like, "You can read comic books for all I care!") This made for wonderful rhetoric; but, like all rhetoric, it needs to be put in perspective. The recognition of the need to read with perspective is what stimulated me to begin my day with that quote from Joe Conason.

The fact is that reading, itself, is only a part of the story. Reading is only important to the extent that it cultivates our ability to read critically. So, while I am firmly opposed to censorship, I still recognize that there is a lot of reading matter out there that has been either maliciously designed to shape the reader's opinion or assumes a position of authority that is actually grounded in ignorance. If we lack the ability to read critically, we can be victimized by both classes of text.

I suppose the best example of the former category is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Again, going beyond all the rhetoric that has been spilled over this book, we may never know how many Jews died as a result of its publication and distribution; but, if ever there were a book "maliciously designed to shape the reader's opinion," it was this one! In this respect the Internet has probably served us very well by providing resources that expose this malice for what it is. Those resources include books, the cover of one being the lead illustration for this entry.

The thing about this first category, however, is how blatant is usually is. The second category tends to be more subtle and sometimes more insidious. Let me offer up a few examples:

• In 1959 Oxford University Press published a book by Deryck Cooke entitled The Language of Music. Cooke was a reputable musicologist, if not a heavy hitter in the academic league. He is probably best known today for coming out with the first performing edition of all five movements of Mahler's tenth symphony (which, if nothing else, inspired others to take on this extremely challenging task). His public reputation, however, was primarily as a broadcaster and music critic; so there was no questioning his credentials for writing about music. Unfortunately, his credentials for writing about language, not to mention the more general nature of communication, were not as impressive, if they existed at all! As a result, the book came out with some really astonishing bloopers about language and communication. Now, in fairness to Cooke, linguistics, as we know it today, was somewhere between infancy and adolescence in 1959; but, in spite of the many reprintings of this book, Cooke never seemed to want to go to the trouble of reviewing his initial Preface and bringing into a more contemporary perspective (or, for that matter, explaining why he would not try to realign his position). So the book is still available in its initial form, and Oxford now touts it as "a modern classic!"
• Now, to be fair to Cooke, I do not think that there was any "hidden agenda" behind his book. He wrote about things he knew and extrapolated speculatively from there. We may not even accuse him of being too lazy to subject his speculations to critical review. The very thought of such a review may never have occurred to him. On the other hand I do not feel I can be as generous when I examine Joseph Weizenbaum's 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. Weizenbaum will probably be best known as the author of Eliza, an astonishingly simple piece of software that could carry on a conversation with a human user, pretending to be a Rogerian therapist. (Rogers' approach to psychotherapy was that the therapist should allow the patient to keep talking, contributing as little as possible to the content but just encouraging the patient to say more.) Weizenbaum's reaction to Eliza's success was a horror equal to that of Victor Frankenstein's; and he went on an ethical crusade against writing software that might be dangerously "deceptive." One can even discern in the subtext the implication that some people were too irresponsible to be allowed to write software. Now, in light of some of the software that is out there today, such as viruses, Weizenbaum could have initiated an important conversation; but he was so blinded by what he felt was an affront to his personal ethics that the soundness of his arguments was compromised.
• Roger Penrose, on the other hand, seems to have had a deep appreciation for sound argument, which may be one reason why he was awarded a Wolf Prize in 1988 (which he shared with Stephen Hawking). Unfortunately, Penrose then decided to shift his attention from mathematics to consciousness; and the result, which appeared in 1989, was The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. There was no doubting Penrose's understanding of the laws of physics or the mathematical theory behind the software that computers run. It was "the middle of the sandwich" that posed the problem. Indeed, Penrose's model of consciousness was so well crafted that it took one of the most reputable cognitive scientists (Aaron Sloman) a major exertion of effort to tease out the faulty reasoning in the book. Penrose's response was to write another book (Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness), which acknowledged that the logic of his first book had been challenged but never addressed the challenges!
• This now brings us to the object of one of my own campaigns for critical reading: On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins. This is the first time I decided to compose my text as I read the book, but it was still easy to home in the the heart of the weakness of this book. Since Hawkins tended to substitute anecdote for the logic of argumentation, my task was far easier than Sloman's.
• Now I find myself confronted with Ray Kurzweil and his book The Singularity is Near. In this case I have chosen to focus my critical thinking on the ways in which Kurzweil has chosen to apply his arguments to the nature of education. Nevertheless, this book emphasizes that the need to read critically is as important today as it was in 1959!

Needless to say, this was an "autobiographical" list. For better or worse, age allows you to look back on what you have read and recognize the claptrap in some (much?, most?) of it! Unlike Satie, however, I do not feel I can look back and say that I have seen nothing. Perhaps the problem is that I have seen too much: I may never be able to sort it all out, but I sure hope that I never lose the energy or the will to keep trying!

September 07, 2006 (1): A Quote for Today

It has been a while since I created a "commonplace book" entry; but I could not pass up the opening sentence from a report by Joe Conason that I saw this morning on Truthdig:

To observe the Washington press corps is to wonder why so many people who don’t remember what happened yesterday and can’t master basic logic are expected to analyze politics and policy.

September 02, 2006: Thinking about Subject and Objects in a CRM Society

Two themes seem to be merging together into a common perspective. The more vivid is the impact that When the Levees Broke is having, the more I watch of it. The other is the impact that CRM technology seems to be having on our view of the world, which, in the past, I have considered primarily from the point of view of service. However, what I now have to say applies to all aspects of "customer relationships" purported to be covered by CRM technology. More recently I have also been exploring this theme in my comments on the Confused of Calcutta blog.

Let us begin with one fundamental premise: The name "Customer Relationship Management" is nothing more than (to try to use polite language) a linguistic deception. Anyone who thinks that this technology "manages customer relationships" probably has a thoroughly impoverished view of management, an absolutely distorted conception of the nature of relationships, and nothing less that total ignorance of who the customers are. It is that last point that inspired the title of this entry, because, at the end of the day, all CRM technology is based on the assumption that customers are viewed as objects, rather than subjects who, for one reason or another, have been motivated to engage with the vendor.

Then, while watching When the Levees Broke, it hit me: This is an assumption that has extended beyond the scope of CRM! Listening to a victim's account of the evacuation of the Superdome, the description came to a head when she finally blurted out that the evacuees were being treated like slaves. (Spike Lee may be the only film-maker not afraid to take such racially charged material and put it on the screen rather than bury it in a wastebasket.) To defuse the racial connotations, what she was saying was that the evacuees were being treated as objects. This may have been a matter of expediency or efficiency, but the people managing the evacuation made a calculated decision to deny subjectivity to each evacuee. Where this women invoked the image of the old slave markets, my wife invoked the image of Auschwitz, the other classic example of "mangement by objectification."

Were the victims of Katrina being treated as objects by people hooked on CRM technology? Probably not, but those folks did have the same worldview one finds among CRM promoters and users. Will vendors ever get back to those "good old days" when customer engagement was important? I shall not venture a guess, but I will confess to a strong streak of pessimism!

September 01, 2006 (2): Hope Needs More than Help

There was interesting discrepancy today between what one saw on BBC World Service Television News and what appeared on the BBC NEWS Web site. The headline on the Web site was "Donors pledge Palestinians $500m." On the television the story began with a clip of Jan Egeland addressing a gathering of donors in Stockholm, trying eloquently to get across the message that "the Palestinians need hope." The BBC announcer cut it at this point saying, "and they got help" following through with most of the Web site story on the impressive amount of money raised.

With my passion for analyzing text, I found this an interesting shift of priorities that seems to have gotten swept under the carpet. Neither A9 (Microsoft search) nor Google was any help in recovering Egeland's words. I really do not think I imagined them. Quite the contrary, my guess is that Egeland appropriated them from a speech given by the late King Hussein of Jordan in May of 1985:

The Lebanese tragedy has caused both Israelis and Palestinians to reassess the validity of their previous policies. Both are now considering, simultaneously, the need for a negotiated peace. Each is skeptical. The Palestinians need hope. The Israelis need trust. It is important for all of us to provide hope and trust they need. If we fail to do so, hope will surely turn to deeper despair and trust to invincible suspicion. The dangers for all of us, including them, will be much worse than before.

It is, to say the least, to see how little progress has been made in Lebanon since 1985; but it is equally depressing to think that, as far as the news media is concerned, the plight of the Palestinians will be solved by donors from around the world opening their checkbooks. This is not to say that the Palestinians do not need that $500 million (and we have to hope with all sincerity that every donor who made a pledge will make good on that pledge "with all deliberate speed"); but it is still important to recognize that, to paraphrase the Beatles, "money can't buy me hope." In this case the reconstruction of Gaza is ultimately only as good as the hope that it will not get blown up again (a very weak hope to anyone with a historical sense of what has happened in Lebanon).

So whence hope? By coincidence, this morning, while I was doing my weekly backup, I happened to be reading the original Foreign Affairs edition of the essay "Has Democracy a Future?," by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (This essay is now Chapter 6 of Schlesinger's book, War and the American Presidency. That is definitely the right place for it today. The original article was published in 1997, but Schlesinger predicted the unfolding of events in the first five years of the current decade with frightening accuracy.) Schlesinger is perhaps the perfect stick for bashing Thomas Friedman. He takes all of the exuberant cheerleading for globalization that has become Friedman's stock-in-trade and dismantles it down to the claptrap it really is, and does so with an eloquence that is probably far beyond Friedman's capacity to dream. However, the aggravation of global tensions by "unbridled capitalism" is only part of his story; the other key part is the problem of race relations that still lingers on American soil.

Tension will be mitigated even more by intermarriage. Sex—and love—between people of different creeds and colors can probably be counted on to arrest the disuniting of America.

This must have raised eyebrows when it first appears and probably continues to do so. However, Schlesinger may have been thinking about Romeo and Juliet, who united first in marriage and then in death and whose acts ultimately let to the reconciliation of the Montague and Capulet families. Is it such an absurd modest proposal to consider that intermarriage could address the respective needs of Palestinians for hope and Israelis for trust or the irreconcilable differences between Shiite and Sunni or [fill in your own favorite examples here]?

It may not be absurd, but it is pretty damned unlikely. Unfortunately, I would suggest that it is unlikely for a rather depressing reason. It has struck me that one thing that fundamentalists have in common, regardless of what they happen to view so "fundamentally," is a set of extremely strong (violent?) opinions about "correct sex." We see it in the United States, not only over issues such as same-sex marriage but even over contraception. Presumably Islamic fundamentalism is equally rigid over rules that amount to "keeping it in the clan." So, while Schlesinger may have hit on one way to get at hope in the Middle East that goes beyond financial aid, I doubt that he or anyone who sees the point he has been trying to make will get taken very seriously.

August 29, 2006 (1): The Next Economic Bubble?

Rafe Needleman came up with a great title for his Web 2.0 blog yesterday: "Are there any Web 2.0 businesses in the real world?" After reading his argument, which involved a critical reading of the values of the Cluetrain Manifesto, I decided to follow up with my own TalkBack entry. I called it "Bubble 2.0," because I am always on the lookout for the inflation of the next economic bubble. As I put it, I wanted to argue that "the primary source of gas" for the current inflation is Web 2.0. Here is an edited version of my reasoning:

We should have learned from the last bubble that sobering concepts such as "the real world" just do not signify during bubble inflation, probably because the very act of inflation in grounded in an arrogant utopianism. ("Don't worry about the real world--or the 'old economy' or whatever--because after the changes you won't recognize it any more!") Consider Needleman's account of the Cluetrain Manifesto and its "shiny new values competing with reasonable but conservative older values:"

• Simplicity over Completeness
• Long tail over Mass Audience
• Share over Protect
• Advertise over Subscribe
• Syndication over Stickiness
• Early Availability over Correctness
• Select by Crowd over Editor
• Honest voice over Corporate Speak
• Participation over Publishing
• Community over Product

There is (at least) one entry missing from this list. It's absence discloses the dirty secret of the whole story. The entry I have in mind is:

• Confidence over credibility

Bubbles are inflated by claims that, when viewed in retrospect have little, if any, credibility; but enthusiasm over the inflation dismisses any reasoned attempts to warrant those claims. Rather than reading The Cluetrain Manifesto, folks should be reading Mark Taylor's Confidence Games and its attempt to argue that our daily life, particularly as shaped by advanced technology, now plays out as one confidence game after another.

This not to say that we should hurl our wooden shoes into the works of the new engines of these confidence games. However, the Internet can help us to be more critical readers, rather than just more "clued-in" ones. If we read those ten enumerated value shifts more critically, we shall probably be less enthusiastic about embracing them. Some of us might even think our way through to dialectical syntheses that might play out in the real world!

August 25, 2006: Another Lesson from Isaiah Berlin

It looks like it is again necessary to revisit what Isaiah Berlin had tried to say in his study of the history of ideas. This time the occasion is a comment about the current situation in the Middle East that appeared on The Blotter, a Web site maintained by ABC News. The comment was posted by Adrian Reyes. Here are the first three sentences:

It's a good thing that Gaza, Iraq, Iran, the West Bank, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and Hezbollah have nothing to do with each other. Once again, terrorists are bad people. They can not be reasoned with and want nothing more than the destruction of Israel and the collapse of the West.

Now I have found the comments on this site to be a bit more reasoned than those I have encountered elsewhere (which may be either damning with faint praise or feinting with damned praise); but, given my interests in text analysis, I was fascinated with the way in which the third of these sentences appears to refute the first! Perhaps that is why so many (all?) attempts at discourse about the Middle East seem to come to an impasse. What Gaza, Iraq, Iran, the West Bank, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, and Hezbollah have to do with each other is a shared animosity towards the state of Israel, which they perceive as a colonial imposition of Western values on Islamic cultures. If we do not recognize that this is, at the very least, a point of view that needs to be tested by validity claims (in the spirit of Jürgen Habermas' noble, if idealistic, attempts to characterize the processes by which differing parties can arrive at a mutual understanding), then the bloodshed will continue and, in the language of another comment on The Blotter, enough will never be enough! More than ever we need to honor the teachings of Isaiah Berlin, who passionately (if verbosely) argued that the "Western intellectual tradition" was not the only source of ideas or values. As John Gray put it in a recent review, "In opposition to this view Berlin maintained that conflicts of values are real and inescapable, with some of them having no satisfactory solution. He advanced this view not as a form of skepticism but as a universal truth: conflicts of value go with being human." If Berlin never prescribed how, as humans, we could live with these conflicts of value, then Habermas has tried to pick up that gauntlet; and we should all put our best efforts towards translating his idealistic theories into practices for a better world.

August 05, 2006 (1): "Reasoning between Informed Participants"

Truthdig has initiated an interesting discussion on a column about the approach the press has been taking to reporting the role of fundamentalism in Bush's policies. This discussion included, among other items, a comment by Hilding Lindquist that "voting is the packaging that comes with the gift of reasoning between informed participants." I voiced a slightly contrary opinion that I would like to elaborate on here.

My own position is that the best packaging for the "reasoning between informed participants" is consensus. It is through consensus that we recognize the need to both make a decision and honor the differences of opinion behind that decision. The extent to which Americans still believe that consensus is more important than voting results is reflected in the study conducted by Pew Forum study on Religion & Public Life, recently reported in "The Raw Story." Here is the important quote from that study:

Abortion continues to split the country nearly down the middle. But the large majority in favor of finding 'a middle ground' on the issue extends broadly across the political and religious spectrum. Only one group expressed unwillingness to find a middle way. Two-thirds (66%) of those who support an outright ban on abortion say there should be no compromise. In contrast, two-thirds of those who want abortion to be generally available are ready to seek a compromise.

This gets me back to my current inclination to bash mass media. The mass media are not interested in consensus, because consensus does not sell stuff. Ultimately, the marketplace is all about voting--choosing one product over another. So it is only natural that the media are going to report in a way that encourages a mind-set that favors electoral choice (voting with your pocketbook, as it were) over consensus. Folks of my age were probably first aware of this during the Kennedy-Nixon debates; but I am sure that the influence of the market mentality on the reporting of political matters goes back much further than that.

This takes us back to the hypothesis that our problem is not that America is not a population of "informed participants" but that the mass media are doing everything they can to keep them from being "informed participants!"

July 28, 2006: Who's in Charge Here?

Now that Molly Ivins has made her attempt to take the media to task for its shoddy excuses for "reporting the news" (if ever there were a need to take the phrase "scare quotes" literally!), I thought I would weigh in with one of my favorite sides of the story. This is what I like to call "the AIPAC factor," which has probably been best presented and analyzed by Michael Massing in the June 8 issue of The New York Review. This article grew out of the controversy over the publication of "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy," by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, in the March 23 issue of the London Review of Books. (One quickly begins to form a picture of why this essay did not appear in an American publication!) The bottom line of the discussion (and the controversy) concerns the high degree of influence that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee has over (at least) the executive and legislative branches of the United States government. It is an influence that shows no preference for any political party (or any other form of blue-red coloration); but, like any other lobbying organization, it just wants to make sure it has sympathetic ears in the right places and that, when necessary, sympathy can be converted into action. (The above photograph appeared in Massing's article. I got it from the Web site for the August 2005 issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, from which I appropriated their caption.)

I encourage anyone interested in how decisions are likely to be made at this time of crisis in the Middle East to read this article in full. However, we have to remember Joe Kennedy's three rules of politics:

1. Get elected
2. Stay elected
3. Don't get mad, get even

With those as context the following excerpt should give a good foretaste of what the entire article has to offer:

Emphasizing that Israel "is never the sole thing" that causes a defeat, he [Adlai Stevenson III] proceeded to give a list of several politicians who had suffered because they had offended AIPAC. They include Tony Beilenson in Los Angeles (because he had wanted to divert one percent of all US foreign aid—including aid to Israel—to help drought victims in sub-Saharan Africa); John Bryant of Texas (for seeking to withhold funds in order to protest Isreal's settlements policy); and James Moran of Virginia, who found that his anticipated election funds dropped several tens of thousands of dollars after he said at a town meeting in 2003 that the Iraq war would not have been fought had it not been for the strong support of the Jewish community. (Both Bryant and Moran won anyway.)

June 22, 2006: Faith and Interpretation

It occurred to me this morning that one of the reasons I have been investing so much energy in this blog is that I feel a very strong personal commitment to the practice of interpretation, and I can probably trace that commitment back to the first time I encountered a copy of the Bible that included commentary on the text. In retrospect (although I did not know it at the time) this was most likely my first exposure to hermeneutics, since, while I made no mention of this in my "Hermeneutics 101" entry, the practice of hermeneutics originated in problems concerned with the interpretation of Biblical texts. This raises an interesting irony, which I would like to explore briefly.

It goes back to a throw-away line delivered during last summer's San Francisco Mime Troupe production, Doing Good. One of the characters is a retired CIA agent who had considered going back to his old job but decided that "faith-based intelligence is not for me." As you might imagine, this got a good laugh from the audience; but, as I think back on it, it feels as if there is now a sense of opposition between interpretation (which is the primary work of intelligence analysts and hopefully is also a required skill for field agents) and faith. The age in which an appreciation of a religious text comes from the scrupulous examination of all the different things it might mean seems to have given way, in many circles, to the conviction that interpretation is irrelevant because the text has only a single, absolute meaning; and that meaning is given to you by some authority or, in a clutch, by your own devout sense of right and wrong.

Thus, I am confronted with evidence of a vociferous (if not strong) body of opinion that has written off one of the intellectual skills I most value as irrelevant! How seriously should I take this judgment? I would still prefer to subscribe to the more liberal attitude that reasonable people may differ and continue to explore the nooks and crannies of this deep-felt passion; but, as this note has probably demonstrated, I now seem to be exercising that skill in the interpretation of the actions and events I observe in the world at large, rather than confining myself to texts!