What I'm really trying to do today is get the September post count up to thirty so that my average is one-a-day.
Oh, hey, it looks like I'm done.
30 September 2008
What I'm really trying to do today (Pt. 1)
For the Sake of Prudence
-or-
When the Right Thing To Do Isn't the Right Thing To Do
So what's going on? Populist revolt? Deranged Republicans? Legislative Sartreans?
My personal policy of “wait and see how it all shakes out” is looking all right to me, so I've got no predictions.
But to my friends who want to stand on principle and let the Invisible Hand get rid of the losers...
Many of us have gotten more than we deserve out of the last two decades. A full free market solution would be profoundly painful.
Maybe in a nation of libertarians, we'd have the patience and resolve to wait it out.
But this is not a nation of libertarians. If people get hit by the market, they'll hit back at the polls.
So unless you want to see a New New Deal. . . think prudence.
After all, there's strategy, and there's tactics.
When the Right Thing To Do Isn't the Right Thing To Do
So what's going on? Populist revolt? Deranged Republicans? Legislative Sartreans?
My personal policy of “wait and see how it all shakes out” is looking all right to me, so I've got no predictions.
But to my friends who want to stand on principle and let the Invisible Hand get rid of the losers...
Many of us have gotten more than we deserve out of the last two decades. A full free market solution would be profoundly painful.
Maybe in a nation of libertarians, we'd have the patience and resolve to wait it out.
But this is not a nation of libertarians. If people get hit by the market, they'll hit back at the polls.
So unless you want to see a New New Deal. . . think prudence.
After all, there's strategy, and there's tactics.
Spengler's metaphors get out of hand.
Spengler:
“Total household debt in the US was roughly half of disposable income in 1962, but nearly equal to disposable income in 2004. In proportion to income, the household debt burden nearly doubled. Americans took on more debt, acquired more assets in the form of homes, and watched home prices appreciate on a levered basis. That did the trick. This time, however, the magician really is going to saw the lady in half.”
Umm. Ow.
Oh, and as you might guess, his prognosis is negative.
“Total household debt in the US was roughly half of disposable income in 1962, but nearly equal to disposable income in 2004. In proportion to income, the household debt burden nearly doubled. Americans took on more debt, acquired more assets in the form of homes, and watched home prices appreciate on a levered basis. That did the trick. This time, however, the magician really is going to saw the lady in half.”
Umm. Ow.
Oh, and as you might guess, his prognosis is negative.
I hope the Archbishop doesn't write his own headlines.
The Spectator has an article up by Rowan Williams with the unfortunately confrontational title of “Face It: Marx Was Partly Right About Capitalism,” which is curious in that Williams doesn't invoke Marx until the last paragraph, and then almost as an aside. If I had to re-title the article, I might call it “Don't be an Idolater.”
I'm not turning to Williams for his suggestions about the way forward, which seem to assume that we should keep the structure we have now but regulate it more intensely. But his theological point is a crucial one.
“We find ourselves talking about capital or the market almost as if they were individuals, with purposes and strategies, making choices, deliberating reasonably about how to achieve aims. We lose sight of the fact that they are things that we make. They are sets of practices, habits, agreements which have arisen through a mixture of choice and chance. Once we get used to speaking about any of them as if they had a life independent of actual human practices and relations, we fall into any number of destructive errors. We expect an abstraction called ‘the market’ to produce the common good or to regulate its potential excesses by a sort of natural innate prudence, like a physical organism or ecosystem. We appeal to ‘business’ to acquire public responsibility and moral vision. And so we lose sight of the fact that the market is not like a huge individual consciousness, that business is a practice carried on by persons who have to make decisions about priorities — not a machine governed by inexorable laws.
I'm not turning to Williams for his suggestions about the way forward, which seem to assume that we should keep the structure we have now but regulate it more intensely. But his theological point is a crucial one.
“We find ourselves talking about capital or the market almost as if they were individuals, with purposes and strategies, making choices, deliberating reasonably about how to achieve aims. We lose sight of the fact that they are things that we make. They are sets of practices, habits, agreements which have arisen through a mixture of choice and chance. Once we get used to speaking about any of them as if they had a life independent of actual human practices and relations, we fall into any number of destructive errors. We expect an abstraction called ‘the market’ to produce the common good or to regulate its potential excesses by a sort of natural innate prudence, like a physical organism or ecosystem. We appeal to ‘business’ to acquire public responsibility and moral vision. And so we lose sight of the fact that the market is not like a huge individual consciousness, that business is a practice carried on by persons who have to make decisions about priorities — not a machine governed by inexorable laws.
“. . . Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else. And ascribing independent reality to what you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian Scriptures call idolatry. What the present anxieties and disasters should be teaching us is to ‘keep ourselves from idols’, in the biblical phrase. The mythologies and abstractions, the pseudo-objects of much modern financial culture, are in urgent need of their own Dawkins or Hitchens. We need to be reacquainted with our own capacity to choose — which means acquiring some skills in discerning true faith from false, and re-learning some of the inescapable face-to-face dimensions of human trust.”
“The Market,” like “a right,” is ultimately a useful abstraction. It is an abstraction that arises from many human communities, and I would not take as skeptical a view of it as Williams does. The evidence as I understand it seems to be in that under certain broad conditions, free markets are the most efficient way to match goods to desires. There is nothing wrong with considering efficiency in the satisfaction of desires as a good among others, particularly when the alternative could place great power in the hands of the few, or, perhaps worse, in the hands of many, many bureaucrats.
But the idolatry of the Market would have us believe that things are should be considered good because they are valued, not valued because they are good. For Christians, at least, it would have us put our trust in capitalism rather than in God. It would have us believe that markets produce right results always and necessarily rather than with in general and with high probability, under the right conditions. It would have us reduce our fellow men to mere economic men.
The distinction here is not really about policy. It is about the reasoning that leads us to policy, and the status of human knowledge and behavior. It's a theological point (or philosophical, if that's your style). I may disagree with Archbishop Williams on the prudent way to achieve social goods, but we both derive our conception of those goods from a standard exterior to the market. And to be fair, I don't think I know many people who intend to slip into pure market standards of the good, a few hardcore economists aside. But sometimes, despite our best intentions, it happens, and we need to remind ourselves to be careful.
29 September 2008
Oh, Roland.
“The distance separating reading from writing is historical. In the times of the greatest social division (before the setting up of democratic cultures), reading and writing were equally privileges of class. Rhetoric, the great literary code of those times, taught one to write (even if what was then normally produced were speeches, not texts). Significantly, the coming of democracy reversed the word of command: what the (secondary) School prides itself on is teaching to read (well) and no longer to write (consciousness of the deficiency is becoming fashionable again today: the teacher is called upon to teach pupils to ‘express themselves’, which is a little like replacing a form of repression with a misconception).”
-Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text.” Image - Music - Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. Hill and Way, 1977. (162)
Well, at least we agree on something.
(I'm still trying to decide what I think of all this discourse about discourse: thinking right now that at some point you just have to come down out of the clouds and use what you've got.)
EDIT: Based on class discussion, I suspect my first reading was a misreading. More later, perhaps.
-Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text.” Image - Music - Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. Hill and Way, 1977. (162)
Well, at least we agree on something.
(I'm still trying to decide what I think of all this discourse about discourse: thinking right now that at some point you just have to come down out of the clouds and use what you've got.)
EDIT: Based on class discussion, I suspect my first reading was a misreading. More later, perhaps.
Peregrination #5
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
. . .
Wait a minute . . .
That wasn't me. Hmm.
. . .
Wait a minute . . .
That wasn't me. Hmm.
28 September 2008
Peregrination #4
Cattle: big, powerful beasts. And they are circling through the campsite, making their way slowly around the mountain lake. These are not like the milk cows back east. They tramp along between our tents, sometimes stopping to graze. Before mid-morning they will have vanished back into the pines.
27 September 2008
The only thing I will say about last night's debate.
I had read that Senator McCain has no respect for Senator Obama, but to see it on the screen was something else. Ezra Klein called it “a nearly uncontrollable contempt.” I was surprised that he didn't lapse into profanity.
As for who “won,” I have no opinion, since the contest only ends in November.
As for who “won,” I have no opinion, since the contest only ends in November.
26 September 2008
The Staunch Presbyterian
“Boughton is a staunch Presbyterian—as if there were another kind.”
-From Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
It's my family connection to this old Presbyterianism that has kept me from becoming Catholic. I imagine that if I'd grown up in a non-denominational church, or even in the PCA, I'd have made the jump by now. “Staunch”—it's a good word. It brings to my mind not loud partisanship, nor aggressive evangelism, but the internal commitment of the old everyday saint in the next pew.
The word originally meant “watertight,” then “of firm construction.” The virtue of a staunch believer is a consistency, an integrity rooted in grace, that lets her walk through the world, loving it without fearing it.
-From Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
It's my family connection to this old Presbyterianism that has kept me from becoming Catholic. I imagine that if I'd grown up in a non-denominational church, or even in the PCA, I'd have made the jump by now. “Staunch”—it's a good word. It brings to my mind not loud partisanship, nor aggressive evangelism, but the internal commitment of the old everyday saint in the next pew.
The word originally meant “watertight,” then “of firm construction.” The virtue of a staunch believer is a consistency, an integrity rooted in grace, that lets her walk through the world, loving it without fearing it.
Candy News
Bad news, folks.
When the economic crunch hits, hard choices must be made. And if you're a manufacturer, this usually means a choice between raising prices or reducing quality. I am sad to say that Hershey's appears to be choosing to forgo quality.
“Products such as Whatchamacallit, Milk Duds, Mr. Goodbar and Krackel no longer have milk chocolate coatings, and Hershey’s Kissables are now labeled ‘chocolate candy’ instead of ‘milk chocolate.’
“What’s going on here? On Friday, TODAY consumer correspondent Janice Lieberman reported that Hershey’s has switched to less expensive ingredients in several of its products. In particular, cocoa butter — the ingredient famous for giving chocolate its creamy, melt-in-your-mouth texture — has been replaced with vegetable oil.
“The removal of cocoa butter violates the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s definition of milk chocolate, so subtle changes have appeared on the labels of the Hershey’s products with altered recipes. Products once labeled ‘milk chocolate’ now say ‘chocolate candy,’ ‘made with chocolate’ or ‘chocolatey.’”
Found it here, full story here, more information here, and more information than you require here.
EDIT: The title of this post probably should have been “Economic ‘Crunch.’”
When the economic crunch hits, hard choices must be made. And if you're a manufacturer, this usually means a choice between raising prices or reducing quality. I am sad to say that Hershey's appears to be choosing to forgo quality.
“Products such as Whatchamacallit, Milk Duds, Mr. Goodbar and Krackel no longer have milk chocolate coatings, and Hershey’s Kissables are now labeled ‘chocolate candy’ instead of ‘milk chocolate.’
“What’s going on here? On Friday, TODAY consumer correspondent Janice Lieberman reported that Hershey’s has switched to less expensive ingredients in several of its products. In particular, cocoa butter — the ingredient famous for giving chocolate its creamy, melt-in-your-mouth texture — has been replaced with vegetable oil.
“The removal of cocoa butter violates the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s definition of milk chocolate, so subtle changes have appeared on the labels of the Hershey’s products with altered recipes. Products once labeled ‘milk chocolate’ now say ‘chocolate candy,’ ‘made with chocolate’ or ‘chocolatey.’”
Found it here, full story here, more information here, and more information than you require here.
EDIT: The title of this post probably should have been “Economic ‘Crunch.’”
25 September 2008
Jumping into a good conversation about Damien Hirst.
I'm going to aim at renarrating the dispute between Helen and Freddie on the subject of Damien Hirst, the man who put that poor shark in a tank of formaldehyde, and then got the tank into the contemporary art wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Helen has already responded once; we'll see where it goes from here.
If I'm reading Helen's article correctly, the line that explains her approach is “[e]dgy bobos admit — and real bohemians insist — that art can be both immoral and ugly, as long as it's interesting.” But art doesn't get in a museum at all unless someone out there thinks that it's interesting. The key question is: interesting to whom? And in what way?
One thing about interest—shall we say desire? appeal?—is that, although it is subjective, it's also interpersonal. We're always trying to convince each other that something is interesting or uninteresting. And while it usually works better in the first direction, there have been times that I thought something was absolutely fascinating until someone pointed out to me that it was a bad copy of something better. (Case in point: me, middle school, Christian rock music.)
I mean, I thought the shark tank was interesting on several levels. For one thing, it was big, and you I walked around it, and saw how the light bent through the liquid. The shark itself still had that creepy dead-eye shark-stare. If the tank were just in some natural history museum, I'd find it interesting in the same way. But then there was the next level, which was: “Why is this thing sitting here in the Metropolitan Museum of Art?” On this level, it was interesting in the same way that a well-dressed man on the sidewalk shouting nonsense phrases at the top of his lungs would be interesting, with the difference that the man on the sidewalk interrupts my day, but I walk through the Met to have my day interrupted.
But to live in a world where people found men shouting nonsense consistently more interesting than good conversations, or sermons, or philosophical lectures: that would be strange.
This is where Freddie's historical narrative comes in. The “crisis of representation” that we all know from our “boilerplate undergrad art history” courses really happened. If I may keep extending my metaphor, we miscommunicated so badly with ourselves that we began to suspect that conversation itself was nonsense. And we wanted something that could escape nonsense: authenticity. So the fact of a dead shark in a tank in the museum is partially explained by the story of this crisis, which is in many ways an interesting story. We are all trying to figure out where we go from here.
Helen is basically saying that the “reductive mania for honest communication” is a little bit played out at this point, and she would like to see something else. But she's making a traditionalist argument, which, in this case, is not the same as a strictly conservative argument.
“Art has never really stopped being in crisis,” says Freddie. The conservative wants to end the crisis by going back to some ideal past when men were men and painters could paint some real purty horses: to keep talking about the things we were talking about before we got into this mess. The traditionalist, on the other hand, just wants a good conversation. The traditionalist says: “You can keep talking nonsense, and about nonsense, if you want, but some of us would like to talk about something else.”
Insofar as contemporary art represents what we might playfully call the tradition of no more traditions—and let's go ahead and admit that it would be wrong to claim that all of it does—it's like a group of people who just can't stop talking about something. And insofar as I am a member of a group or two that was not completely embroiled in the crisis of representation, I might be legitimately interested in other things: religious art, for instance.
It seems that Freddie's ultimate problem with art traditionalism is that it “privileges just one damned thing after another.” Well, yes, of course, but so does any good conversation.
If I'm reading Helen's article correctly, the line that explains her approach is “[e]dgy bobos admit — and real bohemians insist — that art can be both immoral and ugly, as long as it's interesting.” But art doesn't get in a museum at all unless someone out there thinks that it's interesting. The key question is: interesting to whom? And in what way?
One thing about interest—shall we say desire? appeal?—is that, although it is subjective, it's also interpersonal. We're always trying to convince each other that something is interesting or uninteresting. And while it usually works better in the first direction, there have been times that I thought something was absolutely fascinating until someone pointed out to me that it was a bad copy of something better. (Case in point: me, middle school, Christian rock music.)
I mean, I thought the shark tank was interesting on several levels. For one thing, it was big, and you I walked around it, and saw how the light bent through the liquid. The shark itself still had that creepy dead-eye shark-stare. If the tank were just in some natural history museum, I'd find it interesting in the same way. But then there was the next level, which was: “Why is this thing sitting here in the Metropolitan Museum of Art?” On this level, it was interesting in the same way that a well-dressed man on the sidewalk shouting nonsense phrases at the top of his lungs would be interesting, with the difference that the man on the sidewalk interrupts my day, but I walk through the Met to have my day interrupted.
But to live in a world where people found men shouting nonsense consistently more interesting than good conversations, or sermons, or philosophical lectures: that would be strange.
This is where Freddie's historical narrative comes in. The “crisis of representation” that we all know from our “boilerplate undergrad art history” courses really happened. If I may keep extending my metaphor, we miscommunicated so badly with ourselves that we began to suspect that conversation itself was nonsense. And we wanted something that could escape nonsense: authenticity. So the fact of a dead shark in a tank in the museum is partially explained by the story of this crisis, which is in many ways an interesting story. We are all trying to figure out where we go from here.
Helen is basically saying that the “reductive mania for honest communication” is a little bit played out at this point, and she would like to see something else. But she's making a traditionalist argument, which, in this case, is not the same as a strictly conservative argument.
“Art has never really stopped being in crisis,” says Freddie. The conservative wants to end the crisis by going back to some ideal past when men were men and painters could paint some real purty horses: to keep talking about the things we were talking about before we got into this mess. The traditionalist, on the other hand, just wants a good conversation. The traditionalist says: “You can keep talking nonsense, and about nonsense, if you want, but some of us would like to talk about something else.”
Insofar as contemporary art represents what we might playfully call the tradition of no more traditions—and let's go ahead and admit that it would be wrong to claim that all of it does—it's like a group of people who just can't stop talking about something. And insofar as I am a member of a group or two that was not completely embroiled in the crisis of representation, I might be legitimately interested in other things: religious art, for instance.
It seems that Freddie's ultimate problem with art traditionalism is that it “privileges just one damned thing after another.” Well, yes, of course, but so does any good conversation.
24 September 2008
How infinite is expression?
It's not hard to say that the possibilities for expression are infinite. But how and why are they infinite? One can imagine some procedure for constructing an infinite sentence: myriad subordinate clauses, labyrinthine conjunctions, burbling streams of adjectives… Of course, such a sentence would be quite literally incomprehensible for finite beings, but if you charged a highly skilled writer with the task of crafting a sentence of n words for some fairly high value of n, she could probably deliver within the basic rules of grammar. (Sometimes I thought David Bentley Hart was taking up such a challenge in certain passages of The Beauty of the Infinite.)
What are the finite materials out of which our utterances are constructed?
For English speakers, there are only twenty-six letters. From these letters, we can create a staggering number of words. Let the set of all these words be called W. (In set theory, the notation for “the size of W” is |W|.) If we want to cast as wide a net as we can for words that can be used, we can use the OED's “over half a million words” to let |W| ≥ 500,000. To exclude some of the most archaic words, we could take the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary count and let |W| ≥ 315,000. You can choose your preferred method for constructing W, but we'll agree that it's large.
Now think of all the possible word orderings that can be created out of W. We will call these “sentences,” even though they could be total gibberish, profoundly insightful, or somewhere in between. It's much more likely that they will be gibberish than not, but the important thing is that every non-gibberish word ordering is contained somewhere in the list. To be sure, there's no infallible way to tell the difference between gibberish and non-gibberish, but let's put that to one side for now.
How many “sentences” of, say, three words are there? If |W| = k, where k is some positive integer, there are k choices for each word, so there are k³ possible “sentences.” The total number of “sentences” up to a certain number (say, n) words is the sum of all the number of “sentences” with lengths less than or equal to n, which is a geometric series.
So we know how we could construct an infinite list of all possible word orderings. Even if we can't specify precisely which sentences are non-gibberish, we know that every word ordering we could make will have some position on this list. So the set of sensible sentences, whatever it may be, is countably infinite.
This is, of course, very near to the problem of Borges' “The Library of Babel.” Since we are finite, we only have time to say so many words. Is everything we say somewhere on the list, so that there is no real possibility of originality?
The answer has to be “no.”
If utterances include all the inflections we use to make our communication meaningful, each word ordering really represents a grouping of possible utterances: what some of use might be inclined to call an “equivalence relation.” Can you place an integer value on emphasis? On context? If “[It is Monday again]” represents all the things I can mean by this sequence of four words, there is simply no way to assign discrete values to the members of the set. So while the set of possible word orderings (given a static number of words) is countably infinite, inflection makes the set of utterances uncountably infinite.
As you can probably tell, I've never so much as looked at a book on linguistics. This is just the working out of an idle thought that popped into my head yesterday. So while the whole experiment is absurd, there are at least a few interesting questions that come up. Primarily: would the distribution of “sensible sentences” be anything like the distribution of prime numbers, especially as sentence length grows? Is there an analogy here?
What are the finite materials out of which our utterances are constructed?
For English speakers, there are only twenty-six letters. From these letters, we can create a staggering number of words. Let the set of all these words be called W. (In set theory, the notation for “the size of W” is |W|.) If we want to cast as wide a net as we can for words that can be used, we can use the OED's “over half a million words” to let |W| ≥ 500,000. To exclude some of the most archaic words, we could take the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary count and let |W| ≥ 315,000. You can choose your preferred method for constructing W, but we'll agree that it's large.
Now think of all the possible word orderings that can be created out of W. We will call these “sentences,” even though they could be total gibberish, profoundly insightful, or somewhere in between. It's much more likely that they will be gibberish than not, but the important thing is that every non-gibberish word ordering is contained somewhere in the list. To be sure, there's no infallible way to tell the difference between gibberish and non-gibberish, but let's put that to one side for now.
How many “sentences” of, say, three words are there? If |W| = k, where k is some positive integer, there are k choices for each word, so there are k³ possible “sentences.” The total number of “sentences” up to a certain number (say, n) words is the sum of all the number of “sentences” with lengths less than or equal to n, which is a geometric series.
So we know how we could construct an infinite list of all possible word orderings. Even if we can't specify precisely which sentences are non-gibberish, we know that every word ordering we could make will have some position on this list. So the set of sensible sentences, whatever it may be, is countably infinite.
This is, of course, very near to the problem of Borges' “The Library of Babel.” Since we are finite, we only have time to say so many words. Is everything we say somewhere on the list, so that there is no real possibility of originality?
The answer has to be “no.”
If utterances include all the inflections we use to make our communication meaningful, each word ordering really represents a grouping of possible utterances: what some of use might be inclined to call an “equivalence relation.” Can you place an integer value on emphasis? On context? If “[It is Monday again]” represents all the things I can mean by this sequence of four words, there is simply no way to assign discrete values to the members of the set. So while the set of possible word orderings (given a static number of words) is countably infinite, inflection makes the set of utterances uncountably infinite.
As you can probably tell, I've never so much as looked at a book on linguistics. This is just the working out of an idle thought that popped into my head yesterday. So while the whole experiment is absurd, there are at least a few interesting questions that come up. Primarily: would the distribution of “sensible sentences” be anything like the distribution of prime numbers, especially as sentence length grows? Is there an analogy here?
22 September 2008
Don't ask why.
Five points to anyone who can come up with a good pun combining “allergy,” ”meta-allergy,” and ”metallurgy.”
20 September 2008
A concession to libertarians...
I'm not usually a fan of libertarians. Objectivists are my least favorite: what started as a mild irritation with Ayn Rand grew over the years into a full-blown allergy. I also have significant problems with the kind of Christian libertarianism that attempts to find libertarian principles somewhere in the Bible; in general, it seems that, for those types, “Christian” is just a belief that finds its place within a larger hardcore libertarian framework. (Normally, I'd provide direct links, but I'm not sure I want to name names in this case.)
The mainstream of libertarianism has always seemed several degrees better than these two branches. Say what you will, at least it's an ethos.
Then John Schwenkler, who may or may not be a libertarian, comes along and makes it sound pretty good. Almost good enough to make me forget my bad experiences with libertarians I have known...
“The crucial impulse that motivates the libertarian is one that aims for what could be called a political modesty: an insistence on allowing the state to infringe on personal liberty only when it is absolutely necessary, with the understanding that the consequences of governmental action can often be more severe than those of the actions of individuals. This is not a view that denies the importance of virtue or treats liberty as an end in itself; it is, rather, simply a view that insists that the ultimate arbiter of a person’s actions should usually be that person him or herself.”
Which serves as a reminder of how traditionalists got hooked up with libertarians in the first place. What self-respecting trad-con could resist political modesty? But then one remembers that libertarians usually hold to a very specific ideal of “personal liberty,” one that should properly be moderated by an acknowledgment of the very real aspects of human dependence. There are many people—old people, sick people, handicapped people—who cannot ultimately arbitrate their own actions, and almost all of us will join the first of those groups some day. (I suspect that this acknowledgment is one of the things that makes Mr. Schwenkler a semi-libertarian.) Perhaps it's my more-or-less steady diet of MacIntyre over the last few years, but I'm not willing to grant that the libertarian view of human independence holds generally. And as for the Ron Paul economic program, well, I'm pretty sure that you can't get there from here.
(Of course, it may be applicable in a number of special cases, e.g., marijuana, trans-fat, tobacco, and libertarians can offer a few insights into the process of government more generally. I'm thinking here of strong views of federalism, or perhaps the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, rather than the Rothbardian or Austrian approach.)
~~~~~
On a related note, I've traded Andrew Sullivan out for John Schwenkler's Upturned Earth on the blog roll; I'm just not interested in reading Sullivan's histrionic rants right now. Seeing him wax sanctimonious on Bill Maher was just depressing.
The mainstream of libertarianism has always seemed several degrees better than these two branches. Say what you will, at least it's an ethos.
Then John Schwenkler, who may or may not be a libertarian, comes along and makes it sound pretty good. Almost good enough to make me forget my bad experiences with libertarians I have known...
“The crucial impulse that motivates the libertarian is one that aims for what could be called a political modesty: an insistence on allowing the state to infringe on personal liberty only when it is absolutely necessary, with the understanding that the consequences of governmental action can often be more severe than those of the actions of individuals. This is not a view that denies the importance of virtue or treats liberty as an end in itself; it is, rather, simply a view that insists that the ultimate arbiter of a person’s actions should usually be that person him or herself.”
Which serves as a reminder of how traditionalists got hooked up with libertarians in the first place. What self-respecting trad-con could resist political modesty? But then one remembers that libertarians usually hold to a very specific ideal of “personal liberty,” one that should properly be moderated by an acknowledgment of the very real aspects of human dependence. There are many people—old people, sick people, handicapped people—who cannot ultimately arbitrate their own actions, and almost all of us will join the first of those groups some day. (I suspect that this acknowledgment is one of the things that makes Mr. Schwenkler a semi-libertarian.) Perhaps it's my more-or-less steady diet of MacIntyre over the last few years, but I'm not willing to grant that the libertarian view of human independence holds generally. And as for the Ron Paul economic program, well, I'm pretty sure that you can't get there from here.
(Of course, it may be applicable in a number of special cases, e.g., marijuana, trans-fat, tobacco, and libertarians can offer a few insights into the process of government more generally. I'm thinking here of strong views of federalism, or perhaps the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, rather than the Rothbardian or Austrian approach.)
~~~~~
On a related note, I've traded Andrew Sullivan out for John Schwenkler's Upturned Earth on the blog roll; I'm just not interested in reading Sullivan's histrionic rants right now. Seeing him wax sanctimonious on Bill Maher was just depressing.
On the economy, briefly.
I think I understood this post by Jim Manzi (on The American Scene, posted last Thursday). Does that mean it's too simple?
Though school has gobbled up most of my time this week, I've gotten the distinct impression that what's going on in the wider world is pretty wild: some sort of high-stakes wire-walk at the highest levels of the economy. Manzi sums up several reasons why the government's current maneuvers are dangerous, and then offers the counterbalance:
“Against all of this we have one huge consideration. If investors lose confidence in the safety of money market funds, mutual funds, demand deposit accounts and the other storehouses of value in the modern economy, we would have a problem that would make somewhat higher taxes and moral hazard seem like child’s play. Trust me – you do not want to experience a full-scale bank run in contemporary America. I’m not sure how many people realize how close we were to the wheels coming off at about noon yesterday, as major commercial-paper processing banks like State Street lost 30% – 60% of their value in about 2 hours. Want evidence: When was the last time you heard of the U.S. government identifying a problem, developing a multi-hundred-billion-dollar program and announcing it within about 48 hours?”
Yikes.
Though school has gobbled up most of my time this week, I've gotten the distinct impression that what's going on in the wider world is pretty wild: some sort of high-stakes wire-walk at the highest levels of the economy. Manzi sums up several reasons why the government's current maneuvers are dangerous, and then offers the counterbalance:
“Against all of this we have one huge consideration. If investors lose confidence in the safety of money market funds, mutual funds, demand deposit accounts and the other storehouses of value in the modern economy, we would have a problem that would make somewhat higher taxes and moral hazard seem like child’s play. Trust me – you do not want to experience a full-scale bank run in contemporary America. I’m not sure how many people realize how close we were to the wheels coming off at about noon yesterday, as major commercial-paper processing banks like State Street lost 30% – 60% of their value in about 2 hours. Want evidence: When was the last time you heard of the U.S. government identifying a problem, developing a multi-hundred-billion-dollar program and announcing it within about 48 hours?”
Yikes.
“Hell is the Absence of God”
What would ordinarily be a a hat tip becomes instead sweeping removal of said hat, combined with a grateful bow, to the Cigarette Smoking Blogger (i.e., “hats off” to CSB!).
She posted on a short story called “Hell is the Absence of God” that I very much enjoyed. Her thoughts are interesting; I'm just passing it along.
I do wonder: do some people see themselves as living in the world that Ted Chiang describes? I've known folks who seemed to see willful divine action in just about everything. By temperament, I can't count myself among their number.
She posted on a short story called “Hell is the Absence of God” that I very much enjoyed. Her thoughts are interesting; I'm just passing it along.
I do wonder: do some people see themselves as living in the world that Ted Chiang describes? I've known folks who seemed to see willful divine action in just about everything. By temperament, I can't count myself among their number.
16 September 2008
A Delightful Sentence
Read this just before bed yesterday in a book I got from a dollar shelf. It struck me strange, as it begins in abstraction, then descends rapidly into a doubtful representation of history, then into Americana that is simultaneously wistful and condescending.
"If one may use the ridiculous to accentuate the sublime, one may say that the Greek delight in numbers was the rational counterpart of the hysteria which many young and old Americans experience when they encounter numbers in the form of baseball scores and batting averages."
-Morris Kline, Mathematics for Liberal Arts. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1967. (58)
(My mental response: No, Professor Kline, you may not use the ridiculous to accentuate the sublime.)
"If one may use the ridiculous to accentuate the sublime, one may say that the Greek delight in numbers was the rational counterpart of the hysteria which many young and old Americans experience when they encounter numbers in the form of baseball scores and batting averages."
-Morris Kline, Mathematics for Liberal Arts. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1967. (58)
(My mental response: No, Professor Kline, you may not use the ridiculous to accentuate the sublime.)
15 September 2008
What a state campaign is like.
Today I asked a college student with a Kay Hagan sign to tell me a little bit about what North Carolina's Democratic candidate for Senate stands for. She didn't know much, which is all right: she wasn't from North Carolina originally, and, as far as I can tell, the state races are really only starting to take shape right about now. But I find them more interesting than the national races precisely because there's not a deadly crushing flood of what purports to be information about them pouring out of every pale glowing television screen I see.
One of my favorite blogs is Talking About Politics, and I've been meaning to mention it. It's two longtime insiders from North Carolina politics, Carter Wrenn and Gary Pearce, blogging across the aisle. There is some talk about the national election, but it seems to balance out with all sorts of things I didn't know about the races for NC Senate and NC Governor. Pearce and Wrenn manage to keep their posts short and sweet, with very few clunkers. Today is as good as any to visit: Gary Pearce has an interesting post about what state campaigns are going through right now.
One of my favorite blogs is Talking About Politics, and I've been meaning to mention it. It's two longtime insiders from North Carolina politics, Carter Wrenn and Gary Pearce, blogging across the aisle. There is some talk about the national election, but it seems to balance out with all sorts of things I didn't know about the races for NC Senate and NC Governor. Pearce and Wrenn manage to keep their posts short and sweet, with very few clunkers. Today is as good as any to visit: Gary Pearce has an interesting post about what state campaigns are going through right now.
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