Do Politicians Get a Separate Morality of Their Own?

This interesting question links to a deeper and broader issue: Does the state -- properly -- work by different moral rules from those that apply to people in the private sector?

In his recent defense of Rep. Anthony Weiner's recent notorious behavior (I linked to it here), Matthew Yglesias made this provocative remark:

It has to be the case that the kind of character that matters for a public official isn’t the same as the kind of character that matters to be a good husband and father. After all, you want a responsible public official to neglect his family and friends (“hard-working”), to display a certain kind of ruthlessness and cunning (“negotiation”), to be a bit of a phony in certain situations (“diplomacy”), and all kinds of other things that don’t carry over straightforwardly from personal life to public affairs.

He is saying that Weiner's recent behavior -- lying copiously, naturally, and fluently for ten days until circumstances forced him to reveal the truth -- indicates a trait that, in a politician, is actually a virtue. As a defense of Weiner this is, of course, very lamest Yglesian sophistry, but there is more than a grain of truth in the underlying principle.

The late Jane Jacobs wrote a brilliant little book in which she argued that those who do "commercial work" -- trading and producing for trade -- and those who "guardian work" -- acquiring, exploiting, and policing territories -- properly do work by rules that are different in several important ways. One of the biggest is that while deception undermines the trust on which commercial work is founded, and must be scrupulously avoided in the commercial realm, it is in guardian work just another weapon, and its effective use can be positively virtuous.

As Will Rogers said, "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie!' until you can find a rock." In warfare, disinformation and misdirection can be more important than brute force.

When being interviewed by police who regard you as a suspect, it is well to remember that, not only do these people not have your best interests at heart, but it may even be permissible for them to lie to you -- both legally and morally permissible (it depends on what the lie is).

(Note to anarchists: all state workers are guardians, but guardian work is an incomparably wider category, coextensive with human life. Generally, hunter-gatherer bands are stateless societies, but they are also guardian organizations. If this is not obvious to you, take another look at the definition of guardian work, above. It is a legitimate and honorable sort of work, even if the state is not a morally legitimate institution.)

But the guardian's right to deceive is limited in two ways. First, the deceit must be for the sake of the guardian task, which typically is to fight off the enemies of the group they are guarding. Second, the guardian prerogative to lie, like its powers to maim and kill, must be rigidly controlled, if at all possible, by an array of other guardian traits, including discipline, obedience, honor, and -- perhaps most importantly -- loyalty. This is an emotional bond with colleagues and constituents which is supposed to deter the guardian from killing, maiming, or lying to them.

Weiner's lies, while revealing a stunningly impressive gift for deceit, were obviously not directed toward a legitimate guardian task and represented a breach of loyalty. They are evidence of his unfitness for this sort of work.

Goodbye to Fat City!

I have such warm memories of the Stockton California Public Library. The dingy old building had a separate, gleaming remodeled room for kid's books. In the main library, there was a dim. secluded mezzanine alcove with a whole shelf of scientific books about spiders. Nerd heaven! Sprinkled here and there were old men in trench coats muttering to themselves about how "the CIA did this to me." The building was on Market St., said to be "the longest Skid Row in America." This street was the setting and location of the book and film, Fat City. One of these pathetic souls once waylaid me and warned me that if I did not do my homework I would end up like him. I told him that I did do my homework but thank you sir for your advice.

Well, if the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library is indeed the library of the future, I guess we can say goodbye to all that. No more browsing, and no more muttering freaks. Everything will be done for you by robots and computers in surroundings of wholesome antiseptic sterility!

This rather creepy dystopian setup seems to combine ideas from several different university libraries that I have used over the last 4.5 decades. The Milton Eisenhower Library at The Johns Hopkins University is seven stories -- except that they are negative stories, all but one being below ground. At U. C. Berkeley back in the sixties, undergraduates were already not allowed in the stacks. You requested a book and employees (fellow undergraduates on starvation wages) brought it to you. What's new about this setup is replacing shelves with these "bins," an innovation made possible by the advent of computers and bar codes.

This is one solution to a real problem: the sheer number of books, which, like the size of the national debt, only seems to go in one direction. Unlike the other evils men do, books to not disappear when they have been inflicted on us. They accumulate. Mέγα βιβλίον μέγα κακόν, a big book is a great evil, as Kallimachos said. And so are many books. What to do with them all? Here, I suppose, is one answer.

(Hat-tip to Ray Sawhill for the link.)

Wow! The Nobels Give the Prize to Someone Who Deserves It!

The 2010 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is one of my favorite living authors: Peruvian expat Mario Vargas Llosa. Here is a student at Princeton University, where Vargas Llosa is currently a professor, blogging about his addressing some students about the award:

I just returned from attending the reception in the Chancellor Greene Rotunda honoring Professor Mario Vargas Llosa, this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I am still fighting an overwhelming sense of wooziness from having just observed history in the making. As I stood listening intently to Professor Llosa’s words, I could only marvel at how beneath his humble, sophisticated demeanor, there exists this remarkable internal landscape of profound wisdom, astute intelligence, and unbounded passion. Professor Llosa is the embodiment of an individual who dares to exercise the freedom to think independently and to follow the pathway paved by his ideas, as evidenced in his writings on freedom and his decision to run for the Peruvian presidency in 1990. In witnessing Llosa speak of the importance to read with a voracious appetite, I was moved by the profound power of ideas. Llosa described reading as one of the greatest pleasures life affords us. To carry on the message, propitiously in time for midterms but also for life....

I couldn't have said it better!

I would describe his aesthetic as nineteenth century realism updated with a post-modern sensibility. His works are often big, epic in scope, thematically ambitious, and yet absorbingly narrated. Well-known factoid: about a quarter century ago, he underwent a sort of political conversion, instigated by his young son Alvaro, from collectivism to individualism. Afterward, he had a heated encounter in the Mexico City Opera House with collectivist Gabriel Garcia Marquez which ended with Vargas Llosa punching Marquez in the nose.

Every ten years or so, he publishes a collection of essays that are very much worth reading. One essay I remember especially fondly was written the day he finished reading the complete works of José Ortega y Gasset (and I thought I was a big fan of Ortega!). He says it is a shame the twentieth century did not place him in the position occupied by Jean Paul Sartre. One reason Ortega would have been a better choice: mejor prosa.

Update: I told the above story about the Mexico City Opera House from memory. I've since found out that the incident occurred before V-Ll's conversion. Neither man has ever divulged the cause of their quarrel, which seems to have been personal and not political. Further, the blow was to Marquez's eye, not his nose. We at E pur si muove! are zealous to avoid becoming a source of misinformation, like so much of what you see on the web.

"Common Reading" and Liberal Bias

There used to be a saying in the world of journalism: "Dog Bites Man" is not news. "Man Bites Dog" -- now that's news!

The National Association of Scholars recently published a report choices made by all of the 290 colleges and universities that have "common reading" programs. That's where someone picks out one book that everyone is supposed to read, so that, in this age on no core curriculum, they have some common topic they can all talk about. The authors of the report find that the book choices reflect the aspirations and world-view of today's academic liberal, and are apt to seem pretty quirky to someone (like me) who does not share this Weltanschauung.

To me, that's a real dog-bites-man story if ever there was. What's amazing to me is that as recounted in this Fox story there seem to be plenty of academics who vehemently, even angrily deny this. (Scroll to the middle of the story.)

It's hard to see your world-view as a view at all: for the most part all we see is -- the world!

You can find the report here and a complete list of all the books assigned here. The report is (surprise!) a lot more nuanced and multi-dimensional than Fox makes it sound. I recommend reading it. The list is especially interesting reading. It is a peek into the claustrophobic world of people who get all their news from NPR, whose idea of an interesting author is Barbara Kingsolver, who are sure that global warming is the most serious emergency we now face, and who don't seem to be aware of the global sovereign debt crisis. That's right. It's the world of the typical humanities professor.

I think some of the urge to deny the NAS charge stems from a failure to understand it. Blogger John Wilson (who I think can fairly be described as a PC denialist) wonders how a list of books can reflect liberal bias when so few of them are political books. As if the NAS complaint is that the list is packed with "liberal books," which ought to be balanced with "conservative books." That's not the point at all. They are saying that the choices reflects what academic liberals think is interesting or important or true, and ignore what the rest of us think is interesting or important or true. Indeed, anyone who is not a PC liberal can immediately detect the PC ethos just by browsing through the assigned book titles. We can smell it, like a choking whiff of sweet incense.

One thing that jumps out at the authors of the report is the enormous emphasis on things non-European. Books on Africa outnumber books on Europe nearly six to one. Frankenstein is the only European literary classic "from Homer to Dostoyevsky" assigned by any of these 290 institutions. (This last is a little misleading, as it might suggest that Dostoyevsky was assigned. He wasn't).

The report interprets this as a sign of a alienation from, perhaps even hostility to, European civilization itself.

I see it somewhat differently. I think there are actually two profoundly different views of what higher education is all about here. In one view, that of the NAS, what we are supposed to be doing in the university is to learn where we come from. The purest expression of this idea is probably Ortega y Gasset's The Mission of the University. What we should be doing is presenting students with an overview of what has been learned so far, an account that is, Ortega tells us, "systematic and synthetic." To introduce the spirit of novelty, of research and criticism, into the process too early is to explode the foundations on which novelty is built.

Of course there is another view, which is just as ancient as the Ortegean/NAS view. This other view holds that what we are supposed to be doing is to explore the new, the different, the other. Admittedly, there's a big difference between Plato's idea that you should think critically in order to get in touch with eternal truth, and the PC view that you should learn about people with a different skin color from your own, but they are members of one family of views.

I think both these views (suitably formulated) are true and the only real issue is about emphasis, ordering, and ranking. What we seem to see in these "common reading" choices is an academic establishment that is tipping over toward one of these views and pretty far away from the other.
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Full disclosure: I am an on-again, off-again member of the NAS, with which I've had a complex relationship for some 16 years. I am currently Vice President of the Wisconsin Association of Scholars.

Who is Sarah Palin?

Like half a million other people, I purchased this book before it was published. There was a glitch in the delivery, though, and I didn't get my copy until it had be reviewed by everybody else.

At this moment, I am only on p. 188, but I thought I might jot down some things I've learned from the book, limiting myself to things that I haven't seen anyone else mention.

(Disclaimer: The first three numbered propositions below should be prefaced with "As she presents herself in this book..." How this image is related to reality is something I can't comment on.)

1. She is strongly pro-free-market. She actually characterizes her position as laissez-faire at one point.

2. She is not, however, pro-giant-corporation. She seems to understand that big business likes big government, and that the feeling is mutual. Early in the first chapter, she presents the big-picture context of her career as governor of her state:

Like most Alaskans, I could see that the votes of many lawmakers lined up conveniently with what was best for Big Oil, sometimes to the detriment of their own constituents.

When oil began flowing from Prudhoe Bay in 1977, billions of dollars flowed into state coffers with it. The state raked in more revenue than anyone could have imagined—billions of dollars almost overnight! And the politicians spent it. Government grew rapidly. One quarter of our workforce was employed by state and local governments, and even more was tied to the state budget through contracts and subsidies. Everyone knew there was a certain amount of back-scratching going on. But an economic crash in the 1980s collapsed the oil boom. Businesses closed and unemployment soared.

During the oil boom, anyone who questioned the government's giving more power to the oil companies was condemned: What are you trying to do, slay the golden goose? But when the boom went bust, the golden goose still ruled the roost. By then, state government was essentially surrendering its ability to act in the best interests of the people. So I ran for governor.

As she sees it, politicians should act "on the side of the people," which means to some extent acting against the interest of the corporate/bureaucratic complex that tends to control things. She might be the only prominent politician, other than Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, who sees it this way. This could explain why some of her bitterest enemies in Alaska are Republicans. Could it also help to explain why some of the nasty comments on her book are by conservatives?

3. Like John Locke, she believes that undeveloped natural resources are the collective property of the people. This, I take it, is why she saw fit to impose a new tax on North Slope oil profits and give a cash rebate to every man, woman, and child in the state. The idea seems to be that extracted materials like raw petroleum are a special case as far as property rights are concerned: the "true owners" (her words) are the people. Obviously, such an argument cannot be made for refined gasoline, which is a human artifact.

4. The final point is an impression I get from the book that Palin obviously does not intend to convey: Being governor of Alaska is not a very good preparation for being president of the US. Alaska is a vast area with an extremely sparse population, including a large number of natives. Towns with no paved roads are very common. Its economy is inordinately dependent on a single industry, which consists of resource extraction and not producing finished materials or goods (such as food). In all these respects it is much like the Mother Lode and Comstock Lode areas of the West in the 1850s and 60s. If Ms. Palin is interested in the highest political office in the world, she needs to first find a national-level daytime job, such as serving in Congress.

For a rather different view, there's this:

A Little Poem About Mass Suicide

When my old friend and teacher Don Emblen died, I figured I should put a couple of his poems on line. Don abhorred almost everything electronic, and it is probably for that reason that there are few traces of him on the web. Such are the wages of Luddism!

The one poem I could find was posted by fellow former student Glenn Ingersoll here. It's a pretty good one, I think. So good, in fact, that I can't seem to find a better one.

Another one I liked, at any rate, is from the same book as the above one, Notes from Travels (Santa Rosa: Engdahl Typography, 1986). It has a pronounced Jeffersian tone:

Back Country

Farther out, there still are caves in the rock
where mountain lions pace
and clean their claws on the granite
before or after the kill.

Later, comes the purity
after leather scuff of pads,
whine of insects at the opening,
owls like velvet gongs haunting the old oaks.

Finally, the canyon night resorbs
the song of gnats;
the night-hunters drown in their own feathers;
the purring seeps surely into stone
and makes a silence
white as bone.

I like the way it ends with two lines in iambic, and a rhyme.

Looking for another one to post here, there was one that instantly riveted my attention. The reasons for that were mainly extra-literary, but I think they are of sufficiently general interest to justify posting it here. It's from Under the Oaks II, the second of three volumes of poems having to do with Santa Rosa Junior College (Santa Rosa: SRJC, 1995). It's dated 1978, and the dedication says: "For Richard Tropp (English Department, 1972-1978) dead in Guyana 1978." Here it is:

The People's Temple

They worked and sought and stared
and thought they say, at last, the Sun.
It was the spy-hole of a furnace
they looked through.

Better that fiery glimpse
than no vision at all,
than dull eyes fastened
on the square end of a tube
and a long safe life in a cold blue haze.

I think this same Richard Tropp was probably the author of a notorious six page long suicide note found at the scene of the Jonestown horrors. People have come up with two possible authors, one being him and the other being Jim Jones' wife. Some favor the latter alternative because there is something about the note that seems "feminine" to them. (I'm not sure what is feminine about it -- the handwriting doesn't particularly seem so to me.) There is a documentary about Jonestown in which excerpts from it are read in voice-over by a woman. I, on the other hand, am impressed by the fact that, as you can see if you read the note, the author thinks he/she should have written a book about the People's Temple community and regrets failing to do so. The sort of person most likely to feel they have a duty to write a book would, I should think, be an author or an English teacher.

Contrary to what you may have heard, academics are generally not a radical lot. They are mostly rather boring, in fact. Think Democrats, not Commies. But every once in a great while you find one who really is radical, if not outright bonkers.

The New Relevance of Atlas Shrugged

Copies of Atlas Shrugged are flying off the shelves. In January its average sales were three times those of a year earlier, and the 52-year-old novel was outselling Obama's latest autobiography. As you can see in this graph, spikes in sales of the book coincide with specific events in the news.

I've been rereading it myself, and keeping a mental list of the points of similarity between the novel and our world, which I'm writing out here. (As more similarities pop up in the news, I will return to add them to the list.)

• Most obviously, government power is growing enormously, while the economic situation grows worse.
• The government is extracting wealth at an accelerating rate, allegedly because it is good for the economy "as a whole," though the biggest beneficiaries seem to be well-placed economic insiders (represented in the novel by the officers of Taggart Transcontinental and Associated Steel).
• Ailing companies deemed too big to fail are propped up at the expense of healthier enterprises.
• Business people who don't knuckle under to the government's plans are intimidated (apparently) with extortionate threats.
  
• After a century of relative security, pirates once again roam the high seas at will.
• Congress passes what in effect are bills of attainder, punishing specific individuals for actions that aren't crimes when done by others (in the book: the Colorado business community for being unfairly prosperous, in our world: the execs at AIG who kept their retention bonuses after the feds had bailed the company out).
• In the book, the feds wreck the resurgent economy of Colorado by declaring a moratorium on the corporate bonds that Colorado business people bought in order to loan money to a troubled railroad. In our world, the president advocated violating in a similar way the rights of bondholders who loaned money to a troubled auto manufacturer.
  
• In the novel, the Community National Bank of Madison makes loans on the basis of need with relatively little concern for ability to pay. When it fails, it takes down the people it was trying to help (pp. 281-2). Similar things happened in our world, except that the problem was nation-wide.
• I also see, in our world, a little bit of the panic that sets in at the end of the novel, as government officials become alarmed about business people leaving their posts. Those AIG bonuses were retention packages, not rewards for past performance. They were given because officers were concerned that these people would leave the company -- and that no doubt is why Geithner approved them. It was a rather desperate measure, it now seems. (Added later: After I wrote this paragraph, this was published. Many in the blogosphere have commented on the obvious similarity to events in Atlas.)
  
• Timothy Geithner, come to think of it, bears a disturbing resemblance to Wesley Mouch, the nebbishy character who eventually becomes economic dictator in the novel. Like Mouch, Geithner is callng for "wider powers" to deal with the economy. To me, he even looks like him.

Of course, there are some huge differences between the situation in the novel and the current one in our world. Our collapse, in my humble opinion, was the result of a previous artificial boom based on credit expansion (which was triggered, indeed deliberately supported, by the government - which now continues to force debt on us when we are already buried under it). In the bust that follows such a boom, many business decisions that were made under the misleading conditions of the boom are now revealed to have been mistakes (AIG's overindulgence in credit default swaps, eg.). Some of the schemes exposed by the bust were downright ciminal (obvious example: Madoff). For this reason, the private sector looks more responsible for the collapse than was the case in the novel, making the government's power-grab look more legitimate.

Clearly, the greatest relevance to events today is in terms of fundamental principles and concepts. Government is viewed as a giant extraction device, in which wealth is taken from those who produce it and given to those who do not. Since the system rests on the backs of people it is sacrificing, it can only exist as long as its victims support it. Perhaps, one fine day, they will have had enough.

Beautiful Mind

I just read Sylvia Nasar's absorbing, novel-like biography of the great mathematician John Nash (A Beautiful Mind: Simon and Schuster, 1998), who eventually won the Nobel for economics. I also finally viewed the 2001 movie based on it. The movie surprised everyone by sweeping the Academy Awards -- how can a movie about a a man of ideas be popular?

Well, as you may know, they did it by cheating: the movie isn't about Nash's ideas at all but about his battle with schizophrenia (among his heroes were Nietzsche and Newton, also men of ideas who went insane).

The one scene in the movie where the screenwriter tries to explain a Nash idea -- the Nash equilibrium, an idea from his dissertation for which he won the Nobel -- is so bad it virtually inverts the meaning of the idea involved. Apparently, there was no math or econ technical advisor on this production at all.

The scene takes place in a bar, where Nash says "If we all go for the blonde and block each other, not a single one of us is going to get her. So then we go for her friends, but they will all give us the cold shoulder because no on likes to be second choice. But what if none of us goes for the blonde? We won't get in each other's way and we won't insult the other girls. It's the only way to win. It's the only way we all get laid. ... Adam Smith said the best result comes from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself, right? Adam Smith was wrong! The message: Sometimes it is better to cooperate!"

Wow. How many things are wrong with that? They begin with the admittedly technical-sounding fact that Nash's idea only concerns non-cooperative games and makes no comment on cooperation.

Here's one thing that I think is fairly important. The writer is obviously thinking of Adam Smith's famous statement: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest. We address ourselves [ie., in trading with them], not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."

Smith is definitely not saying that self-interest somehow generally leads to doing what is in the interest of the other. He is talking about the butcher, the brewer, and the baker. In other words, he is taking about markets. He is not, for instance, talking about warfare, which is a situation where self-interest typically tends to be very detrimental to the other person. The Prisoners' Dilemma, which was first formalized by Nash's dissertation adviser Albert Tucker, is a situation in which uncoordinated self-interest is suboptimal both for the self and the other.

In the book, Nasar actually says that the connection to Smith here is positive. She contrasts Nash in this respect with the great founder of game theory, John von Neumann. Von Neumann, she claims, tended to think that in order to establish social order "players would have to form coalitions, make explicit agreements, and submit to some higher, centralized authority." To Nash, on the other hand, "individual rationality and self-interest, not common agreement on some collective good, seemed sufficient to create a tolerable order." Thus, she says, he gave "economics an updated, far more sophisticated version of Adam Smith's great metaphor of the Invisible Hand." (pp. 14-15)

Updating is very different from revising.

Human beings tend to find many of the basic ideas of economics deeply counterintuitive. This is very important, as it may mean that no democracy can have an economic policy that makes any sense. One of these troublesome basic ideas is that from the uncoodinated interactions of self-interested individuals social order can emerge. Nash's idea was a contribution to understanding this crucial fact.

The Case of The Jewel of Medina

Philosopher Carlin Romano has an interesting and very sensible discussion of the case of the novel, The Jewel of Medina, which is gaining notoriety even before it is published. (Hat tip to Arts and Letters Daily.) British philosophy blogger Stephen Law has weighed in on it as well.

Briefly, the facts, as they have been reported above and in the opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that originally broke the story, are these. Over a period of about five years, Sherry Jones researched and wrote a historical novel about A'isha, the third wife of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam. This project included, among other things, studying Arabic. Random House signed a contract to publish the book and organized an eight-city book tour.

Meanwhile, they sent the galleys of the book to Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and a specialist in the period in which the novel is set. They asked if she would be willing to write a positive blurb for the book's jacket. Publishers routinely do this as part of their efforts to win favor and sell copies of the book. In this case, it had, to put it mildly, the opposite sort of effect. Spellberg, who later described the novel as "very ugly, stupid piece of work" immediately "warned" (her word, apparently) Random that publishing the book would expose their building and staff to very serious danger, calling it "'a declaration of war … explosive stuff … a national-security issue." At about the same time, she alerted the editor of a Muslim web site about the book and her view that it ""made fun of Muslims and their history." This led eventually to message to an email list and eventually to a wave of angry blogging about this "new attempt to slander the Prophet of Islam."

Random canceled plans to publish the book, apparently breaching their $100,000 contract with Jones.

I see a fascinating ambiguity in the reported facts about Prof. Spellberg's behavior in this case. They seem to be more or less consistent with at least three radically different scenarios:

1. She was genuinely concerned about the danger to Random and was offering them her (unsolicited) professional opinion on this matter in order to be helpful. This would be perfectly unobjectionable, of course. She was not trying to violate another person's freedom of expression, she was only exercising her own. One thing that stands in the way of this interpretation, at least for the moment, is the fact that none of the quotations from the book that have come to light so far seem at all insulting or, to a rational person, morally offensive. From all accounts (except Prof. Spellberg's) it sounds like this book was not meant to be insulting or even critical of Islam or its prophet. We are not talking about The Satanic Verses here. More important, this scenario is not easy to square with the fact that, at the same time that she was helpfully warning Random, she was apparently trying to get that web site editor upset and alarmed about the book. Couldn't she foresee that this could indirectly trigger the very sorts of events that she was supposedly trying to help Random to avoid?

2. Stephen Law suggests that, perhaps, she was fearful of her own safety and made that hard-to-square phone call in order to dissociate herself from the book. Here once again the odd thing is that she seemed to be actively trying to get others upset about the book. That would seem to mean, on this interpretation of the facts, that she was in effect trying to sic the dogs on someone else for the sole purpose of keeping them from biting herself.

3. Yet another possibility is that she detested the book herself and was using the hypothetical violent behavior of others in order to get its publication suppressed. This raises a very interesting ethical issue. We all know what to think of hooligans who break into a newspaper office and destroy its presses because they print things that the hooligans don't like. What, on the other hand, should we think of someone who uses their behavior, and for the very same ends -- to suppress words that they don't like? Suppose that these other people would never do anything violent themselves, and have always deplored such thuggery.

Usually, thugs of this sort don't chop up printing presses with axes simply because they enjoy doing so. Such behavior is a means to an end: they want to silence someone else. If the mere threat of doing this is sufficient to silence these others, so much the better. Thus someone who uses their behavior in order to achieve their ends -- by deliberately communicating and facilitating the threat -- is functioning as an essential working part of the same system of oppression. The fact that they would never dirty their own hands with violence might make their guilt the less, but their shame is more.

In the public controversy about this case, Salman Rushdie deplored the incident as "censorship by fear." On the other hand, Stanley Fish, in his blog, denied that this is censorship at all. Fish holds the theory that the word "censorship" properly speaking can only be applied to governmental suppression. I have never been entirely sure what to think about this sort of issue. But I do know what the present status of Jones' book is: its publication has been picked up by a British publisher, more obscure and with fewer assets than Random, but with much more courage.

Thus the book has been shunted into a more marginal area of the publishing world, where it is apt to get less attention and be less upsetting of the rest of us. This is what usually happens in cases of semi-quasi-censorship. No blood is shed, no property is destroyed, but it is easier to ignore what we don't want to hear.
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Added Later: The offices of the British firm that is publishing this book have been firebombed.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Here is a nice review by David Gordon of a new book that I am in. Here Amazon lets you search inside the book. You can buy it from them at the hair-curling price of $79.95 -- and up! (What is that all about, I wonder?)

My role in this project makes a rather odd story. The editors wanted to have an equal number of defenders of anarchism and minarchism (the state can be a just institution, but only if its powers are seriously limited). Without asking me, they assumed I am a minarchist. When I turned my essay in, they were disappointed. I argue that the justification of the state is a serious problem that must be faced, but proposed no solution to it.

My view is expressed very well by Tom Paine when he says: "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one." I consider this an anarchist view, inasmuch as it means that the state is not a morally legitimate institution, that it is intractably problematic from an ethical point of view. Come to think of it, I will go one step further than Tom, because I am not so sure that this evil is necessary.

Anyway, I said they should put my essay in the anarchist half of the book. They didn't want to do that, because the table of contents would then be lopsided: 4 minarchist to 6 anarchist. They ended up leaving it in the minarchist part, but making it the lead essay, so it would be a sort of introduction to the rest. Not a perfect solution.

I'm sorry to cause all this confusion. I used to be a minarchist, but decades of dealing with real government have convinced me that the dominant characteristic of the state is what Ortega y Gasset called its "harshness."

Aphorisms

I've been reading a delightful book, Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists (Bloomsbury, 2007), by James Geary. It is a great way to meet a wide variety of very interesting writers. Here are some samples from the book, all of which were new to me (except for the one by Whitehead):


"You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred."
--Woody Allen

"He who loves his neighbor as himself either doesn't know his neighbor very well or doesn't love himself enough"
--Roberto Gervaso

"It's going to be fun to watch and see how long the meek can keep the earth after they inherit it."
--Frank McKinney Hubbard

"Politics: a Trojan horse race."
--Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."
--Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

"A state is as easy to ride as a bicycle: handles at the top, chains below..."
--Victor Shendorovich

"If elections changed anything, they would be forbidden."
--Kurt Tucholsky

"The lack of money is the root of all evil."
--Mark Twain

If you don't quite get that one, it is expressed more clearly here:

"Prosperity is the best protector of principle."
--Mark Twain

One more by Mark. I can't resist:

"An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth."
--MT

"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child."
--George Santayana

"A thing moderately good is not as good as it should be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice."
--Tom Paine

I said the same thing, but of course not as well, here.

Old Tom knew a thing or two about principle:

"Want of consistency is a natural consequence of want of principle."
--Tom Paine

"The devil is an angel too."
--Miguel de Unamuno

"A man is a god in ruins."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.
--Oscar Wilde

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."
--Alfred North Whitehead

"Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it."
--Simone Weil

Where Did All the Westerns Go?

Western author and superb blogger Richard S. Wheeler (pictured below) posted today about a very interesting question:

There is a new study by Bowker, quoted on Lee Goldberg’s website, that indicates that mysteries now dominate American publishing, with 17 percent of all trade books sold. Women’s romances, once the most lucrative of all forms of publishing, account for only 11 percent. Science fiction accounts for 5.5 percent. General fiction accounts for 3 percent, and horror, 2 percent. Apparently western fiction is off the charts, to no one’s surprise.

His question: Why on Earth are westerns so unpopular?

I have often wondered about this question myself. According to Wikipedia, in 1959 there were 29 prime-time western series running on American TV. Where did they all go?

The answer Wheeler gives is one I had not thought of at all: namely, that, while mysteries are about getting rid of violence (violence is the enemy) westerns are about using violence (violence is your friend, or can be). This of course clashes with values that are now fashionable.

Maybe the reason I'd never thought of this answer is that I had always thought of the attitude toward violence in the western was more ambivalent than that. Yes, the western hero is typically violent, but that's why he rides off into the sunset in the end. It's why the last shot of The Searchers has Ethan turning away from the family he has just reunited, away from the darkness and security of their home, into the brilliant emptiness of the desert. Having wrested civil society out of the wilderness, his very success has made his virtues into vices. He doesn't belong here. Still, Wheeler does have a point: in a way, westerns accept violence.

Answers to Wheeler's question that I have come up with from time to time are similar to his in one way: like his, they have to do with people's values.

One is that many western plots are about "taming the wilderness" and turning it into ranches and farms. In other words, its about property, the romance of real estate. This presupposes a whole world of ethical and political values and norms, one that may well have crumbled by now. Maybe people don't feel so romantic about property today.

Another is that a major source of the charm of westerns is that they are set in a situation in which the presence of the state is minimal or non-existent. In the wild West, you often have to enforce your own rights. If you wait for civil society to do it, you'll be dead. In a word, westerns are about anarchy. They are fiction's only constitutionally anarchist genre. As such, they represent a wild sort of freedom. Maybe, like the romance of property, that's not such a popular idea any more, either.

Notice that one of the most popular genres nowadays is the police procedural, in which the protagonist is a government employee. Yecch! Is there any way you could get further away from the ethos of the western? (Try to imagine Ethan Edwards even saying the word, "procedural.")

Folks sometimes point out that though TV westerns have gone the way of the T-rex and the dodo bird, there are a few recent western movies that have been popular. There's 3:10 to Yuma. And No Country for Old Men is a sort of modern western. But these examples usually have very pronounced counter-generic qualities when scrutinized. In other words, they are anti-westerns. At the end of 3:10, the hero, instead of riding off into the sunset, is shot and killed by the bad guys. Old Country, as I have said earlier, is completely nihilistic. It ends with the hero letting the bad guys have the world. True westerns affirm a world in which beauty is real and values can be achieved.

Can that be the real reason they are so unpopular?

Damn! Another Hero Bites the Dust!

Alan Dershowitz has said, adapting an old saying, "Don't have heroes, they always disappoint." I've been thinking about this today.

Slavomir Rawicz, with the British journalist Ronald Downing, wrote what has long been one of my favorite books. I was assigned it in an English class I took at Pleasant Hill High School round about 1962. I've read it several times and owned several copies since then.

It tells how Rawicz, a Polish cavalry officer was captured by the Soviets in 1939 (yes, Poland had a cavalry in 1939 -- no wonder they lost) and, after being tortured at Lubyanka, sent to the Gulag. With the help of the commandant's wife, he escapes with six comrades and over a period of eleven months treks from norther Siberia to -- India! That's about 4,000 miles. They pick up one more person, a Polish girl named Kristina, along the way. Three die en route, including Kristina, but Rawicz with four others, makes to freedom. He eventually settles in England.

It is the story of a great walk to freedom, as inspiring a story of the human need for liberty as you could ever hope to read.

But there were always three things in the story that bothered a lot of people. He crosses the Gobi Desert without water. He crosses the Himalayas in the winter. Both of these seem to be physically impossible. He also sees two Yeti in the Himalayas. This as you know is an animal that is still unknown to science. Most seriously, perhaps, none of the other four other survivors has ever surfaced.

The last time I re-read the book, I went online to see if there was anything about the veracity of the book. I found a post on a message board by a daughter of his (he eventually had five children) that I found reassuring.

Now I see from this article, published in connection with a BBC show attacking Rawicz after his death in 2004, that the story may have been a hoax of some sort. The hard evidence: a document in his own hand saying that he was released from the Gulag in October 1942 as part of a general amnesty for Polish prisoners, and that he rejoined the Polish forces in Russia. Not only does the name on the document match his, but the birth date does as well. Although the book also has him rejoining the Polish forces in Russia, it has him escaping from the Gulag in April 1941, reaching India in March of 1942, and rejoining the Polish forces in Russia in July. The military document has him in the Gulag during that entire period.

I find myself wondering whether the military document could be the lie. If that document were written in Russia -- the BBC article doesn't say where it originated -- then he probably could not have said "and by the way, I foolishly escaped from your prison system before this amnesty was offered - maybe you people should arrest me and torture me some more." Better to claim to have gotten out legitimately.

But I know all along that I am resisting the conclusion that the book is somehow a hoax because I don't want to believe it. And of course there are other problems about the book. And now, on this message board there are rumors of an earlier manuscript, written by a person who really did make a similar trip, which Rawicz used to concoct his story.

Still, I can't agree with Alan, that we should not have heroes. We need them. We need people who will be examples of the the good, of the ideal. The reason for this is partly logical. Ideals are -- abstract. Why do you think that religious texts are so often written as stories? Love thy neighbor? What the Hell does that mean? It's concrete narrative details that move people. The Bo Tree. Samson and the Philistines. Golgotha. We need examples in order to know what the good is. Another part of the reason is psychological: we need to know that the good is possible, or why bother to seek it?

And yet heroes do tend to disappoint. How many heroes stay heroes? Not many. What should I do about it? The best I can come up with might sound cynical: If you can, try to have heroes who have been dead at least ten years, so every attempt to find the dirt on them (and if they are heroes there will be) has been tried, and has failed.
________________________________________________
Added Later: I'm still working on reasons to reject the hoax theory. I just reread Downing's intro to the book, telling how it came to be written. It's not easy to square his story with the idea that it was all Rawicz's scam. Downing came to him, because he was doing research on Yettis and heard that there was this Polish man in the Midlands who claimed to have seen something similar. Downing found that Rawicz had been talking about these experiences of his for years. His wife said he talked about them in his sleep. The book was Downing's idea, and it took some persuading to get Rawicz to go along with it. The conversations that produced the book lasted over a year, and Rawicz broke down in tears on three occasions as they talked of his travails. Of course, all this would be possible for a brilliant con man. Don't the great ones manipulate you into conning yourself? But no one is saying that's the sort of person Rawicz was. As far as I know, he is not accused of being a crook in any other matter. On the other hand, Downing himself is a mystery. No one seems to have any idea what became of him. He seems to have appeared one fine day to ghost-write this book, but then disappeared from history and never wrote anything again. It really is an enigma. Someone should write a book about that!

No Country for Old Men

I feel funny about not having written about this movie. I am something of a Coen brothers fan. Blood Simple is one of the greatest first-films ever (therefore in the same club as Citizen Kane), and Fargo is, rather obviously, a masterpiece.

Even with this movie, I go way back. I bought the Cormack McCarthy book on which it is based while it was only available in hardbound (something I never do with books I read for entertainment -- I'm too cheap!). I started reading it at Borders and couldn't put the damn thing down. I read it compulsively to the end. But once I had read it, I was not glad I had. I'm still not completely sure why I read it.

I guess I felt the same way about the movie, which is as faithful to the book as it could possibly be.

The movie is superbly well-made in every way. My problem is with the content. Both film and book are extremely dark. They have a superabundance of the noir in film noir. That darkness is really a feature of the world depicted in the noir work: it consists in the fact that the world the characters must navigate is unaccommodating to human wishes, that it tends to be evil or unjust.

In general I love this genre. There are Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett. Then there's the riveting James M. Cain, who was obviously the inspiration for the Coens' The Man Who Wasn't There. And the horrific Jim Thomson, whose The Killer Inside Me is one of the most disturbing books I've read.

Why do we, or at least I, tend to like such works? For me, I think the answer is that the difficulty of the obstacles that the characters must overcome makes their struggles more interesting -- in several different ways. More suspenseful, for one thing. It also enhances their achievement, and that, for me is the main thing. The worst the world in what the hero succeeds, the more heroic that success becomes. The superb noir author Dan Mainwaring (Geoffrey Homes) once told an interviewer that The Fountainhead was a very dark book: the architect-hero blows up his own building. That's dark! But it is very closely linked to the character's heroic stature.

The trouble with "No Country" is that both book and movie push this darkness all the way into the territory of nihilism. The villain, Chigurh, is a heartless and sometimes utterly pointless killer -- yet no attempt is made to explain why he is the way he is. As his name suggests, he's just a blood-sucking arachnid. He does this because such is his nature. You get the feeling that what needs to be explained is not why someone is so evil, but why the good ever succeeds.

"You can't stop what's coming," one of the characters says. What is coming is some kind of tidal wave of moral sewage, rolling over us. "It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners" is a line that, I think, occurs bot in the book and the movie. Civilization is about to collapse, to be replaced by a Hobbesian jungle in which life is nasty, brutish, and short. The good sheriff, Tom Bell, retires [SPOILER ALERT!! PLOT DETAILS GIVEN AWAY IN WHAT FOLLOWS!] without ever catching the bad guy, who literally walks away at the end, a free man. Bell figures that the country will soon belong to guys like him (hence the title, I guess).

The trouble is, once the evil of the noir world becomes so total and insurmountable, that ruins the artistic point of it, at least for me. Once you realize that survival is impossible, suspense dies, replaced by its creepy cousin, dread. Suspense and dread, very different things!

Also, if the world is so evil that the hero cannot succeed, it no longer magnifies achievement, but prevents it. The young protagonist of the "No Country" film is killed, off-screen, while we are paying attention to someone else, as if to say, "what did you think was going to happen?"

Ultimately, I find McCarthy's nihilism to be not very gripping. His work is so self-consciously literary that it comes off, for me, as a mere aesthetic effect. Or maybe something of a macho pose. In a perhaps less offensive way, the movie strikes me the same way. Its unrelenting grimness is an artistic effect, very well brought off, but no more than that.

Robinson Jeffers, d. January 20 1962

Yesterday was the anniversary of the death of one of my favorite poets, Robinson Jeffers (picture from Palouse Diary blog, hat-tip to Prof. Peter Quigley for pointing this anniversary out).

After decades of teaching a course in "philosophical ideas in literature," I finally assigned Jeffers in that class. We read "Give Your Heart to the Hawks" and "Apology for Bad Dreams". I was amazed to see how much the students like him. Why did I wait so long to assign his stuff? It certainly is philosophical enough! I guess its because my connection to him is so personal. I seem to assume that things that I love will be matters of complete indifference to just about everyone else. But what those kids saw in Jeffers was just what I had seen in him.

Here is one of the poems I of his I read the earliest and remembered longest. Along with Shelly, whom he admired, RJ was one of the most consistently pro-freedom and anti-imperalist writers ever. You get a glimpse of that here that here (note that it is written as a speech to his sons, Garth and Donnan):

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening
to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the
mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence;
and home to the mother.

You making haste, haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it
stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the
thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there
are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught -- they say --
God, when he walked on earth.

In the 'thirties Jeffers' point of view was that of the current peace movement (dubbed "isolationist" by its enemies). After World War II, ten poems in his book The Double Axe (1948) were suppressed at the request of the New Dealers at Random House, doubtless because of the political heresies they contained. His correspondence with his editors, Saxe Commins and Bennet Cerf, makes very interesting reading today. You can see much of it in In this Wild Water: The Suppressed Poems of Robinson Jeffers, by James Shebl (Pasadena: Ward Ritchie Press, 1976).

At one point, Commins objects to "the frequent, damning references to President Roosevelt" on the absurd grounds that "he cannot defend himself and on that score there arises the question of fairness and good taste." (This was two and a half years after the sainted Delano's death.) At another point, Commins complains that Jeffers' comments on Roosevelt and Churchill are more critical than those on Hitler. Jeffers responded "I do agree that Hitler deserves worse than he gets but the whole world is full of people cursing Hitler." He wasn't the sort of guy who would say something because everyone else was. In fact he would avoid saying it, because everyone else was.

Even though Jeffers graciously agreed to suppress the ten most "objectionable" poems, Random inserted into the printed book an unprecedented "Publishers' Note," in which they expressed their disagreement with "some of the political views expressed by the poet in this volume," while deceitfully hypocritically claiming to support "the writer's freedom to express his convictions boldly and forthrightly."

Jeffers' popularity and his critical reputation were probably at their height in April 1932, when he was featured on the cover of Time magazine. After that, both began to decline, and have been sliding ever since. To me, he is more alive and important today than ever, with his utter lack of political illusions and his refusal to say anything but the truth as he saw it. One truth he saw with burning brilliance was that the glories of war and empire are illusions. Jeffers! Thou shouldst be living at this hour!

Happy Birthday Józef!

Darn! Yesterday, December 3, was the 150th birthday of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, aka Joseph Conrad, and I missed it. Well, here is his Wikipedia picture and a belated birthday greeting, shouted across the abyss.

In a commemorative piece, Giles Foden (The Last King of Scotland) repeatedly characterizes Conrad as a Modernist. He seems to mean this as a compliment. I think he is twice wrong.

Perhaps the greatest single era in the arts in the West began in the late eighteenth century and culminated in the early twentieth century. Then some vicious idiot shot the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and it all came crashing to a gruesome, brain-splattering end. After the war, Modernism spread like the Great Influenza Pandemic. Eventually, it turned art, once the breath of life, into a pointless game for over-educated snobs. (With all due respect, I think this is what James Joyce, the greatest Modernist of them all, accomplished.)

There are of course connections, both artistic and personal, between Conrad and Modernism, but he really belonged to the last generation of the great epoch that Modernism destroyed. Modern without being Modernist, ironic without being cold or nihilistic, romantic without being sentimental or confused, complex, subtle, and profound, his greatness is a chilling measure of that vast waste of time in the arts, the twentieth century. How he dwarfs them all! Now that we are waking up from the long, international nightmare of Modernism, it is time to start creating real art again!

(Hat-tip for these links to Arts and Letters Daily.)

Does Religion "Poison Everything"?

I've been reading God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by the the always-amusing Christopher Hitchens.

His ornery sub-title raises a question that, believe it or not, I find myself taking seriously. Does it?

You know, of course, what prompted the "new atheism," the surge of books by Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennet, as well as lesser luminaries, some of whom burn hotter if not as brilliantly. It's because of 9/11, the day that changed everything.

That morning I rose late, about ten o'clock or so, and began what I expected would be a slow day. At noon my friend Don Downs of the Poli Sci Department was going to bring over some documents about a professor who had been de-tenured and fired by the Board of Regents, a case that we though raised some serious due process issues. We were thinking of trying to get the faculty senate to take a position on the case.

Quite unexpectedly, the front door bell rang. It was Don. I opened the door and looked at him sourly. "You're early," I said.

He looked at my bathrobe. "You haven't turned your TV on yet, have you?" he asked.

"Why? What happened?"

"Somebody flew a passenger plane into one of the towers of the World Trade Center and knocked it down."

"O my God," I said stupidly, "that must have killed hundreds of people."

"Oh, thousands," he corrected me.

The next thing I said was an angry outburst: "Do you see how wonderful religion is!? How it helps everyone to live together in peace?" Don looked startled.

How did I know, instantly, that this was a religious act? I don't think I was even sure right away which religion was involved, but that religion was at to bottom of this seemed beyond doubt. You have to admit that, wherever there is widespread and persistent violence in the world, especially irrational vioulence -- whether it is on Ireland, Lebanon, Israel, Aghanistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka -- it is usually caused by religious differences. Hitchens argues convincingly that the last European war, the civil war in Yugoslavia, was really about religion as much as anything else. "Ethnic cleansing" was really religious cleansing. It was Christians killing Muslims, and doing so because the Muslims were Muslims and, most particularly, because the Christians were Christians.

Years later, it occurred to me that there was a simpler explanation of how I knew that this was a religious act. The clue lay in the fact that the violence on 9/11 was obviously suicidal. The pilots of those planes must have died together with their innocent victims. When we secular humanists commit an atrocity to make the world a better place, it is because we selfishly want to live in that better world. If the atrocity can't possibly have that motive, one knows at once the motive was religious. The statement an Islamist once made to a reporter, "We will win because we love death as much as you love life," surely is a profoundly religious statement.

Hitchens would quickly point out, and he would be right, that this does not really undermine his thesis. After all, the very worldliness of the secular is a constraint. If I want to live here with you, that is a tie between us. My selfish desire to live is something you can appeal to when I grow too indifferent or hostile to your interests. In the gravest extremity, when all else has failed, it makes possible the ultima ratio, the last of all reasons, the threat of death. Religious fanatics, with their "self-sacrificing," "altruistic" behavior (which incidentally are a fake self-sacrifice and spurious altruism in people who think that they will be rewarded with eternal bliss) cannot be appealed to in this way.

In view of this, why do we persist in associating religion with peace and public order? I do it myself! To some extent I think it is a sort of illusion of perspective. We in the liberal West have a distorted view of what religion is really like. Our religions have been corrupted by two centuries of contact with peaceful secular humanists. The idea that peace and public order are good things is by no means a product of religion: the three great monotheistic religions resisted it quite violently for many centuries. It arises from the sort of thinking that secularists have been doing all along: naturalistic thinking about life on earth.

Ortega Still Matters

What follows is based on part of an article on José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) I am writing for the Cato Institute's Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Actually, I am co-authoring it with the muy estimado y distinguido Dario Fernández-Morera. I've written a couple of other articles for the project, but it's been a while and I don't remember what they were about. Ortega writes with great charm, but reading him can be very disturbing, and I've been wondering how much of what he says is true. In particular, he liked to predict the future, and to analyze the present in ways that would indicate which way things would be going. By now, half a century after his death, one of the biggest questions about Ortega is: How close to being right was he? We know a thing or two about how things would go!

Ortega’s best-known work by far is The Revolt of the Masses, published in 1930. In it, he describes a new sort of human being, which he calls the Mass Man. The Mass Man is the product of the unprecedented material abundance that European civilization achieved during the nineteenth century. This prosperity brought with it sudden increase in the size of the population, which in turn produced two effects which, combined, brought about devastating results. The new people inevitably have attained considerable political and social power. At the same time, it has proved impossible to educate them in the traditional manner, to subject their minds to the discipline of abstract standards, including those of tradition, logic, facts, or science. The mind of the Mass Man does not measure its internal experiences by any standard superior to the self. In politics, this unconstrained frame of mind expresses itself in the form of “direct action.” Its characteristic literary expression is the insult. Above all, the Mass Man has a powerful affinity for the state, as the state promises to provide two things on which the new human type places great value: security, and results without effort. The Mass Man treats the material abundance that created him as if it were the fruit of an Edenic tree, his for the plucking. He neither knows nor cares about the institutional framework that makes this abundance possible. Eventually, his indifference will kill this abundance off at its root.

Another persistent Ortegean theme is his fascination with “liberalism,” by which he meant the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century, an idea that he both admired and criticized. One of the most distinctive ideas in his critique of is his conviction that this sort of liberalism, even in this relatively freedom-friendly variety, has always been too indulgent and optimistic in its view of the state.

Liberalism [he says in the essay “Concord and Liberty”] has never been quite capable of grasping the significance of the fierce nature of the state. ... Let us admit that societies cannot exist without government and state authority; that government implies force (and other things, more objectionable but which it would take too long to enumerate); and that for this reason “participation in government is fundamentally degrading,” as Auguste Comte whose political theory was authoritarian, said...

Fundamentally, in Ortega’s view, the state is necessary, but it is a necessary evil. He held a similar view of society itself.

... What should we make of this? For the moment, I just want to make two comments, one on his gloomy analysis of the Mass Man, and the other about his comments on liberalism and the state.

Surely, the biggest single question is this: By now, we have long lived under the rule of the Mass Man. Is it turning out as he thought it would?

Here is one reason for thinking he was basically right, at least on one point. Most Americans reject in any form the idea that human beings evolved from other life forms. They must be dimly aware on some level that evolution is the basis of the biological sciences that have prolonged their lives, enhanced their comfort, and banished many of the terrors of the past, but they simply don't care. Scientists! What do they know? Polls show that this vertical invasion of barbarians is advancing year by year.

This is exactly the sort of mental "indocility" that Ortega complained of. You might wish to say that, in a way, things were no better in the past, and you would surely be right. Medieval peasants were no paragons of rationality, and were no doubt worse in this respect than the products of today's "public" education system. But Ortega would point out that the peasant was used to submitting his judgment to human authority, to the judgment of people he was convinced were his betters. He had no idea by what standards these mysterious people regulated their thoughts, but he did know that disciplined minds exist and that he could indirectly share in them by accepting their judgment. Today, this constraint has been removed. Well, good riddance to it! The alarming thing is that it has been replaced by -- nothing.

Ortega was very worried that science would not survive in this sort of environment. It the past, it would get along in European society with only the support of a determined minority of adepts, but minorities don't run things any longer. He may have been right about this.

At least that's how it looks to me right now. But maybe I'm just being momentarily overcome by the Ortegean gloom.

On the other point, I am more sure that Ortega has hit close to the mark. Liberalism, even in its more libertarian version, has always been under the spell of the notion that the state is some sort of club (social contract theory), that it is no more ethically problematic than any private association, such as a charitable foundation or a business corporation. This idea, so strange when you stop to think of it, is one for which we have already paid a terrible price, and will continue to do so. Reading Ortega is a healthy antidote. Who knows? Maybe there is a chance he will save us yet!

Why are Prize Committees So Laughable?

Yes yes yes, I know. The Nobel Peace Prize is now impossible to take seriously. But hasn't this been true for a long time? After all, it's been awarded to not only Al Gore but to Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter - and other people whose contributions to peace were negligible or on balance negative. And then there was Rigoberta Menchu, who got the prize for a book that was later shown to contain a significant quantity of deliberate lies. And for her "work" as a Marxist revolutionary.

There's a phenomenon here that is much larger than this one prize.

Consider the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here is a list of some of the people who did not get that one, but could have, because they were very much alive when the award was being given: Leo Tolstoy, George Meredith, Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, August Strindberg, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Georg Trakl, Guillaume Apollinaire, Sigmund Freud, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Miguel de Unamuno, Constantine P. Cavafy, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stefan Zweig, Luigi Pirandello, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Robert Musil, W. H. Auden, George Orwell, Hermann Broch, André Gide, Ludwig Wittgenstein, E. M. Forster, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov... Well, it goes on and on. [These names are from a highly entertaining article in which Ted Gioia imagines a parallel universe in which the prize goes to people who actually deserve it.]

Then, perhaps most disgracefully inept of them all, there are the Academy Awards. Here are some directors who never won an award for best director, and who could have, because each one made several (at least!) pictures in this country: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Charles Chaplin, Fritz Lang, Josef von Sternberg, Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, Nicholas Ray, Stanley Kubrick, Max Ophuls, Jean Renoir.

Why are these prizes so absurd, so easy to ridicule and laugh at?

Here is one partial explanation. Judging who is "the best" in one of these fields involves weighing and deciding between incommensurable factors, in the sense that we cannot find one candidate better than another simply on the grounds that they possess more of some specific quality than another. It is not like judging which horse crossed the finish line first. "Competitions are for horses, not artists," said Bela Bartok (who as far as I know never won a prize for anything). He was right.

We do make judgments like these, but we do so by sorting imponderable factors on the basis of moral, philosophical, or ideological principles. Why do you suppose that the pro-Communist Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel, while the libertarian Mario Vargas Llosa (who once punched Marquez in the face) did not? Isn't it pretty obvious?

All such judgments are necessarily ideological or, in this sense, biased.

The trouble with the above awards is that they are ideological and pretend not to be: they are just prizes for "the best" in a whole vast field of endeavor. As a result, they are dishonestly and inconsistently biased. The prizes that are not ridiculous, that make perfect sense, are the ones that are openly ideological, like the Prometheus Awards.

I am not saying that the other sort of list have no value. They are, more than anything else, entertaining. They are also fun ways to raise issues and start discussions, like the tempting project of drawing up one's own "top ten" lists. But they are only fun if not taken too seriously.

What I personally do take seriously, I have to admit, is five Norwegian politicians trying to use the Peace Prize to influence who the outcome of the next American Presidential election. If that is what they were trying to do. But I won't get started on that here.

Happy Birthday, Atlas!

This week marked the fiftieth anniversary of Atlas Shrugged, a huge novel everyone should read -- preferably while they are still young enough to appreciate its boundless idealism. In that way it is like reading Shelly's Prometheus Unbound, or indeed anything by Shelly. Or Hugo or Schiller (Rand's own youthful favorites). I first read it in the summer after my senior year in high school, and it's by now safe to say that it was an experience I'll never forget. I did nothing else for three or four days, immersing myself in the 1084 pages of the 1963 Signet paperback edition. It put me in a near-hallucinated state of mind, surrounded by railroad tracks, smoky tunnels, a dystopia ruled by demented intellectuals, and a shining utopia in the sky, gloriously ruled by -- no one. When I went away to college, my best buddy gave me a copy of the original Random House hardbound edition, which I still have. ... I couldn't let the anniversary slip by without mentioning it, though for the moment I'm sort of written out on this subject. I recently wrote an essay on its structural aspects that expresses about everything I have to say about it that I haven't said before, for now at least. I will mention one remarkable feature of the book that I discuss there: what I call its "meaning-saturation." Before you've read very far, you know that everything in it means something, often several mutually consistent things at once. Rand once said of her favorite movie, Fritz Lang's Siegfrieds Tod, that while it was in production Lang had a sign in his office, "Nothing in this film is accidental." The same seems to be true of this book. It is a very intentional book. That I think is one thing that makes it so re-readable, even beyond the age when most of us are able to share fully and heedlessly in its glowing spirit.