Postcards from Nixonland

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

For Obama’s first-year anniversary the New York Times rounded up some White House veterans to write about their respective presidents’ first years. This one, especially, surprised me:

It was in many other ways a very good year for President Nixon. He called to congratulate the Apollo 11 astronauts on their moon landing. He initiated a huge expansion of the National Endowment for the Arts and began the processes that led to the desegregation of public schools in the South and a historic reform of the government’s policy toward American Indians. He announced the “Nixon doctrine,” providing aid — but not military forces — to our anticommunist Asian allies. He signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Nixon was a pretty abominable guy. He brought this country to the biggest political and constitutional crisis it’s faced since the Civil War, and he did this riding on the back of racial politicking and fear-mongering, the effects of which still reverberate through our politics today. On the other hand, he did manage do so some good things to advance the causes of American liberalism. He expanded social security benefits, he created the EPA, and he poured a lot of money into our national park system. He also introduced a bill for universal health care, which, according to some historians, he might actually have had the political capital pass.

Now, I personally don’t buy the meme that Obama’s first year has been some sort of unmitigated calamity for American liberalism. But it definitely could have better. There are a lot of issues our country needs to tackle — primary among them is the need to save the middle class, to fix our banking industry, to fix our energy economy, and (yes) to fix our health care system — and the prospect that we’re going to be able to do these things does indeed seem much smaller than did a year ago. Yet that’s less Obama’s fault than it is the fault of the system, than it is a signal of the sclerosis of our governing apparatus. We’re entering into the fourth decade where our country has failed to take on a major domestic project and succeed at fixing it.

Looking back, it’s a scary thing when a conservative a-hole like Dick Nixon can deliver on change, while a guy like Obama, whose mandate is much larger and whose integrity is much, much deeper, has to struggle so hard. The lesson to draw from that, to my mind, is that our current problems — our current inability to solve problems — is less about Obama than it is about us, our country, how we conceives of our national community and how we legislates on our own behalf. Self government involves a great deal more than the nature of the man on top.

Money, Politics, and Citizens United

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

I spent this past week complaining about government dysfunction -- so I'd be remiss not to mention the Citizens United ruling. Of the many bad things that happened last week Citizens United is probably the most significant. The ruling will make our government worse. How much worse? It's not clear -- some argue that risk-averse corporations won't be inclined to amp up political contributions, wasting share-holder money and damaging their brands; some say that the barriers between government and corporations are already so permeable that this ruling amounts to little -- yet the point is, it will make things worse. The gap between legislators and their constituents (and the country they serve) will only widen, and the connection between corporations and the law will tighten.

Who can deny that? That an increase in corporate money means a decrease in legislator independence, in rational legislation, and in citizen trust in the system?

Specifically, I'd say there are two things we're going to see more of: the rich buying elections, i.e. influencing who gets into congress through the link between corporate campaign contributions and voters' opinions, and the rich buying votes, i.e. influencing what those congressmen do once they're there through the link between campaign contributions and the politicians who benefit from receiving them.

Money of course should never be able to buy these things. Money is for buying cars and hotel tickets and (sure) prostitutes -- but it cannot be for buying political power. The two spheres must be separate. That's what equality demands: that a proclivity for making money does not translate into the power to make laws (just like the power to make laws doesn't translate into the power to make money). Yet the merger of these two spheres, the economic and political, is already real. Consider the remarkable graph below, from Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels. He associates the votes of senators with the political opinions of their constituents, separated by income level:

This is a big subject. There are a whole lot of graphs to show and statistics to cite, but the point is commonsensical. There's too much money in politics. It makes our laws worse, it's inimical to justice, and it will, in the long run, undermine the institutional integrity of our legislative branch. Who knows what Citizens United will bring? But like I said: it will only make things worse.

Photo credit: Flickr stream of David Paul Ohmer

Scott Brown Endorses Health Care Reform

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Coakley's loss was a lot of things -- but a repudiation of Obama's health care reform it was not. Massachusetts is an odd state to be signing the death sentence for Obama's health care reform because Massachusetts actually enjoys a universal health care program that's very similar to the one in congress today. And Scott Brown's an odd angel of death here because he actually doesn't reject the plan. No, Scott Brown, like his state, strongly supports universal health care -- but he supports it only at the state level. His campaign line was simple: Why support federal legislation when you're already covered by the state? In other words: Massachusetts already has Obamacare. Why pay for everyone else's?

From the Washington Post:

"We have insurance here in Massachusetts," he said in a campaign debate. "I'm not going to be subsidizing for the next three, five years, pick a number, subsidizing what other states have failed to do."

In a news conference Wednesday, he said, "There are some very good things in the national plan that's being proposed, but if you look at -- and really almost in a parochial manner -- we need to look out for Massachusetts first. . . . The thing I'm hearing all throughout the state is, 'What about us?' "

There's an interesting, wonky point here, which is that any federal entitlement program will always benefit some states more than others. Massachusetts is on the giving end of this entitlements wealth transfer, and some voters clearly didn't like that.* But the irony is bitter. The first state to pass Obamacare ends up dooming it at the federal level precisely because it works so well at the state level. Ted Kennedy, I know it's hard, but try to rest in peace.

How much any of this played a part in the Massachusetts special election we'll never know of course. (Some evidence says: not much.) But clearly this election wasn't a "mandate" against health care. To the extent that it had anything to do with health care at all, the election was more about who already has health care reform and is content with it, than anything else. Massachusetts has theirs. But that alone shouldn't be enough to stop the rest of us from getting ours. We'll see.

*As a side note, can anyone tell me why, on the flipside of Massachusetts, the states with high levels of uninsured citizens don't support the benefits of comprehensive health care reform? Conservative states have the most to gain from health care reform, yet they're the least likely to endorse it. Why is this? Why are so many people so uninterested in fixing an obviously broken health care system...to their own advantage? That's a question that needs a serious answer. Have we lost the ability to govern ourselves?

The Sociology of Mankiw

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

The notion that economics can explain everything about everything (re: Freakonomics) is something that I’ve always regarded as silly and kinda gross. The basic economic model — the super-rational individual relentlessly seeking out his own material self-interest — is almost embarrassingly inadequate. If you want to deal with something like the Global Financial Crisis then, yes, you do have to start by grappling with the discipline of economics. But that’s not enough. Economics as a discipline fails to paint the picture that sociology, history, science and literature, in concert, can about the world generally. And explaining the Financial Crisis specifically is no different. We need more than economics.

What I’d be interested in reading is something on the sociology of the economics discipline. How did people come to believe the cluster of ideas that that got us into the Financial Crisis? That’s an historical and sociological inquiry. What are the social factors that got a whole group of people to believe fraudulent economics? I like John Cassidy’s New Yorker piece “After the Blowup” (gated, Harvard LexisNexis) because he seems to want to start the process of answering this:

In the course of a few days, I talked to economists from various branches of the subject. The over-all reaction I encountered put me in mind of what happened to cosmology after the astronomer Edwin Hubble, in 1929, discovered that the universe was expanding, and was much larger than scientists had believed. The profession fell into turmoil. Some physicists stuck to the existing theories, which posited a stable universe. Others, Albert Einstein included, tried to adapt the old models to Hubble’s data. Still others attempted to come up with a new account of how the galaxies formed; it was this effort that ultimately produced the theory of the big bang.

There’s a whole corpus of zombieconomics out there — ideas like the Efficient Market Hypothesis and the Great Moderation — that needs to be slayed. But old ideas are hard to kill. And the secret is: killing ideas is a social process, with power struggles and true-believers, as much as it’s an academic process.

Krugman wrote in the New York Times Magazine a few months ago that the problem with the economics discipline is that it “mistook beauty for truth” — i.e., it used neat mathematical models to explain extremely complex and irrational stuff. That’s true, but there’s more to it than that. People value things because people and institution around them value those things. So start looking into peer review boards and tenure committees in the academy. How did one generation, through institutions, protect its own? And start looking at the umbilical connection between mathematical modeling and the financial service sector. Our own Larry Summers made about $100,000 a day doing consulting work for D.E. Shaw. Beautiful math isn’t just attractive — it’s also damn profitable. And in a profession that considers money to be the all-important talisman for predicting of human behavior, do connected and well-paid scholars get more academic attention?

There’s a whole field called the history of science that deals with ideas as social facts, as power struggles and generational battles. Are we going to be seeing a paradigm shift in the field of economics? Who’s going to be leading this shift? And where are they bringing us?

My last question is: should some enterprising students be writing their theses on the sociology of Mankiw?

Martha Coakley and the Politics of Despair

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Here’s the deal: if Martha Coakley loses tonight it’s good news for Lloyd Blankfein, who’s worried about financial regulation reform, for the super rich, whose taxes will remain low, and for everyone generally interested in preventing Obama from governing this country. On the other hand, her loss is bad news for those of us who care about adequate health care coverage for all Americans and for those around the world whose cities will be wiped out by the effects of global warming. Coakley’s loss is bad news, basically, for any of us who believe that our country’s problems should be tackled head one. Not because she’s so great, but because she’s pivotal for the system to work. In my last post, “The Pathos of Helplessness,” I wrote about the need to re-assert the prerogative of governing ourselves as country — the need to open up the avenues for making effective policy decisions and for creating a culture of collective self-sacrifice. Scott Brown’s election would be a monumental strike against this.

If you want to understand what the “pathos of helplessness” is all about then look at any given video clip from the 9/12 rallies. See a fearful and angry people. Or review the obstructionism of congressional Republicans. See a group utterly determined to prevent legislative reform. Yet there’s also another side to this, and it comes in the form of despair. Here Andrew Sullivan gives us a beautifully depressing example:

Even if Coakley wins – and my guess is she’ll lose by a double digit margin – the bill is dead. The most Obama can hope for is a minimalist alternative that simply mandates that insurance companies accept people with pre-existing conditions and are barred from ejecting patients when they feel like it. That’s all he can get now – and even that will be a stretch. The uninsured will even probably vote Republican next time in protest at Obama’s failure! That’s how blind the rage is.

Ditto any attempt to grapple with climate change. In fact, any legislative moves with this Democratic party and this Republican party are close to hopeless. The Democrats are a clapped out, gut-free lobbyist machine. The Republicans are insane. The system is therefore paralyzed beyond repair.

Yes, I’m gloomy. Not because I was so wedded to this bill, although I think it’s a decent enough start. But because if America cannot grapple with its deep and real problems after electing a new president with two majorities, then America’s problems are too great for Americans to tackle.

And so one suspects that this is a profound moment in the now accelerating decline of this country. And one of the major parties is ecstatic about it.

Andrew Sullivan is one of our very best intellectuals. (His work on gay marriage, torture, and Iran, and his writings on Obama and Palin and the state of American conservatism, really are high points of internet discourse.) He’s not, in other words, a tea partier. Yet, honestly, his position of despair is exactly theirs. If you really believe in governing, in fixing our problems rather than drifting through them, then you have to believe in fixing the government and revivifying our civic culture. You don’t fix our country without starting there. And you certainly don’t fix it by telling us that the whole thing is helpless and corrupt and cannot be saved. The pathos of helplessness is two-fold: it’s the people who don’t believe in governing and it’s the people who don’t believe that we can if we tried. Both are, to use Sullivan’s word, “nihilism.” And both are part of the problem.

The Pathos of Helplessness

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

James Fallows makes a lot of good points in his long Atlantic article, “How American Can Rise Again.” I’ll highlight just one. Let’s call it “the pathos of helplessness”:

The full details are beyond us here, but the crucial point is that in principle, the United States itself has the power to correct what is wrong in each case. Take jobs, as a very important for-instance: the loss of middle-class jobs is America’s worst economic problem. But that would be so even if China were still as closed as under Mao. According to prevailing economic theory, a country’s job structure and income distribution are determined more by its own domestic policies—education, investment, taxes—plus shifts in technology than by anything its competitors do. That’s especially true of a large economy like America’s. Those policies are ours to change.

My problem with the “America is in decline” narrative is that it’s usually made to imply that China and India’s rise has some of direct barring on America’s problems. When people talk about America’s problems, they’re using talking about things like: a declining middle class, an absurdly inefficient healthcare system, an oil dependency, run-away debt — issues that have only a highly-abstracted relationship to our relative geopolitical power vis a vis China, and a more clear relationship with things like domestic policy decisions and public-private investment choices. Our problems are, quite literally, ours to change.

But you wouldn’t believe it by looking at Congress today. We’ve got one political party that officially refuses to take responsibility for solving these problems, and then we have an antiquated and dysfunctional political system that empowers them. We can solve our own problems — China has little to do with it one way or the other — but, probably, patently, we won’t. It’s remarkable and depressing. Fallows:

That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” When Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, he said again and again that America needed “a government as good as its people.” Knowing Carter’s sometimes acid views on human nature, I thought that was actually a sly barb—and that the imperfect American public had generally ended up with the government we deserve. But now I take his plea at face value. American culture is better than our government. And if we can’t fix what’s broken, we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away.

To me, fixing our government is the issue that needs to be tackled. Unless we fix our government, we can’t fix ourselves. Larry Lessig, who founded Change Congress and came over to the Harvard law school last year to start the Center for Institutional Corruption, uses the analogy of an alcoholic: his job’s in jeopardy, his home life is in shambles, his liver is failing; his drinking, clearly, isn’t his biggest problem, but it is his first problem, the one that precedes all the rest, the one that, until fixed, will continue to enable and exacerbate all the rest.

The positive news to come out of our healthcare reform debates is that all the dysfunction of our political system got brought to the fore in a very big way: the relentless obstructionism, the corrosive influence of money, the absurdly unequal concentrations of political power, the acrid partisanship, and, reflective of all this, the general loss of trust in the governing process writ large.

This isn’t simply an institutional failing. We have a political party that’s taken this generalized sense of political helplessness and turned it into a system of belief. And we’ve had thirty years of theory and politics attempting to legitimize anti-communitarian selfishness and greed. I think it’s fair to say that this is nothing less than a loss of confidence in the American system of self-government — in our specific institutions and also in the idea of a polity that not only goes on and gets on, but one that actively saves itself again and again, and that distributes the responsibility for doing that into the hands of the people. If there’s any truth to the “America is in decline” narrative then it’s in this: this loss of confidence in our own ability to govern ourselves. It has nothing to do with China and it’s up to us to change.

Is Matt Taibbi the Gustave Courbet of Assholes?

Someone needs to curate these gems. I suppose I'll start:

I’m always afraid to write about David Brooks, because I worry that my attitude toward this guy is colored by certain strong feelings I have about his appearance — he just looks like a professional groveler/ass-kisser, and every time I see him in public I have to fight off visions of him home at night in his Versace jammies, feverishly jacking off with one hand while caressing in the other an official invitation to, say, a White House event, or a Harvard Club luncheon.

Brooks is the kind of character who has thrived everywhere he’s lived throughout human history; it’s incredibly easy to imagine the nebbishy, hairy-kneed Gaius Domitus Brooksius strolling through Rome and swelling with pride over his new appointment to the post of Senior Licker of the Caligulan butt crack.

When will white people stop writing articles like this?

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

If you’ve seen Avatar and haven’t yet read Annalee Newitz’s article “When will white people stop making movies like this?” then you’re missing out. Avatar — putatively anti-racist, seemingly simple and beautiful and extraordinarily entertaining — is in fact, she argues, mired with subtle racial biases and white ethnocentrism. She writes:

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color – their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the “alien” cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become “race traitors,” and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare. It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed against people of color; it’s not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.

Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it’s like to be a Na’vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He’s becoming alien and he can’t go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what? He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely because he’s hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a “cure” for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it’s only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.

To me, this is a bit too clever. Let’s remember that Avatar, at its heart, is a story about resisting white cultural dominance. That’s a good story to tell, and from the perspective of the liberal multiculturalist, the fact that we’re telling it shows that at least as a culture we’ve grown up from a time when we were actually, you know, proud of colonialist domination and the marginalization of the other. So in this core sense, Avatar is a victory (not a failure) of cultural liberalism.

Newitz asks us to stop telling stories about white people. But if you take the theoretical grounds of her analysis seriously then it becomes clear that that’s precisely what can’t be done — white people tell the stories they do precisely because they are white. That whiteness, the argument goes, is pervasive. There is no vocabulary outside of our own; there is no vantage point from beyond the world we stand on. And this is why we value ethnic and gender diversity in the first place: not because white, privileged directors like James Cameron refuse to tell racially unbiased stories, but because they can’t. White people are going to be making white movies because, well, they’re white.

And if you look at the story that’s clearly what the “avatar” device is meant to evoke. It’s a tool of transcendence. It’s the white man’s means of peering over the epistemological divide and seeing what the war is to the colonized indigenous. The avatar idea is cool precisely because it is so damn hard for white people to understand what it means not to be white.

So where does that leave us? To my mind, Newitz’s piece tells tells us as much about Avatar as it does about ourselves, or at least about the state of multiculturalist discourse. One of the most remarkable things about the Avatar backlash is that it has transcended ideological divides. On the right we have writers like Reiham Salam coming out with full-throated defenses of American-style capitalism. And on the left we have critics like Annalee Newitz charging racism. But both agree on one thing: let’s just leave the Na’vi marginalized people alone. In other words, both agree, but for entirely different reasons, that we should continue to ignore the ignored, continue to marginalize the marginalized. Odd, right? This is actually typical of the confused leftist position that any attempt by white people to protect or reify marginalized cultures is necessarily an unjust imposition of “white values”: it has this awkward tendency to converge with the rightist position that other cultures have less intrinsic value than our own. Both counsel nonintervention.

In my opinion, we we need to be more willing to tell Avatar-like allegories about the marginalized defending their cultural property. Understand that these stories are limited, sure, but then don’t take those limitations too seriously — or at least not seriously enough to stop telling the stories in the first place. Because otherwise the voices wouldn’t get heard at all. And that would be a shame.

Wall Street, Rhodes Scholars, and the Soul of the University

Crossposted from the Harvard Political Review blog:

Last Saturday the 2010 Rhodes scholars were announced and a full five Harvard students were among them (along with two Yale students and one Princeton student...but, really, who's counting?)

On the same day, Elliot Gerson, the American secretary of the Rhodes Trust, published an op-ed in the Washington Post, pointing out that more and more Rhodes scholars are pursuing careers in business, specifically in finance. He writes:

Only three American Rhodes scholars in the 1970s (out of 320) went directly into business from Oxford; by the late 1980s the number grew to that many in a year. Recently, more than twice as many went into business in just one year than did in the entire 1970s.

While scholars used to overwhelmingly choose to go into "scholarship, teaching, writing, medicine, scientific research, law" and so on, now, with increasing frequency, they are choosing to get rich. His theory: financial sector jobs in the past thirty years have become so well-paying that their monetary advantages begins to outweigh the prestige-based rewards that come from being a top professor or doctor or scientist.

Yes, all true. Yet if we zoom out a bit we see that the problem clearly isn't the Rhodes scholars or the pay gap, as such. The problem here is the massive shift in the distribution of talent in this country -- a shift away from everything else and towards Wall Street. Consider Harvard. According to a study published by economists Claudia Gloria and Lawrence Katz, the number of Harvard graduates pursing MBAs has expanded threefold from 1970 to 1990 (from 5% to 15%). And according to the Crimson, last year, a full 39% of Harvard students reported that they were entering to the financial service sector upon graduation, as bankers or consultants -- down from a full 47% of graduate before the crash.

We can speculate about the effects of this talent redistribution all we want: it means more talent going into fields that contribute relatively less social good to the world; it means rapidly rising economic inequality that's underwritten (rather than resolved) by our higher-education system; and it means -- in an odd twist -- a less stable, more bubble-prone financial industry.

Yet it's the universities themselves that are subject to lose the most. It means that elite education is increasingly regarded instrumentally, as a means to an economic ends, rather than a good unto itself. In a editorial she published in the Times in September, Present Drew Faust called this "The University's Crisis of Purpose." Faust writes:

As the world indulged in a bubble of false prosperity and excessive materialism, should universities — in their research, teaching and writing — have made greater efforts to expose the patterns of risk and denial? Should universities have presented a firmer counterweight to economic irresponsibility? Have universities become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve? Has the market model become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education?

Since the 1970s there has been a steep decline in the percentage of students majoring in the liberal arts and sciences, and an accompanying increase in preprofessional undergraduate degrees. Business is now by far the most popular undergraduate major, with twice as many bachelor’s degrees awarded in this area than in any other field of study. In the era of economic constraint before us, the pressure toward vocational pursuits is likely only to intensify.

As a nation, we need to ask more than this from our universities. Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. Human beings need meaning, understanding and perspective as well as jobs. The question should not be whether we can afford to believe in such purposes in these times, but whether we can afford not to.

I'm with President Faust -- my concern here is for the soul of the university. If the main job of the university becomes selecting for and training future bankers -- and I'll reiterate: almost one in two Harvard students went into the financial service sector in 2007 -- then what happens to the the university's other roles as (say) a bastion for dissent and/or as a guardian of art and culture and/or as a training grounds for future world leaders? Do the demands and temptations of one sector crowd out the needs and hopes of all the others?

I'll just say to the 2010 Rhodes scholars: best of luck. But then again, you'll probably need a whole lot more than that!

E Pluribus Pluribus

Public discourse in the age of the Internet. Published in the Harvard Political Review.

Republic.com 2.0
by Cass Sunstein
Princeton University Press, September 2009, $24.95, 272 pp.

Create Your Own Economy
by Tyler Cowen
Dutton Adult, July 2009, $25.95, 272 pp.

Cass Sunstein begins Republic.com 2.0 by asking his readers to imagine a world where their control over the media they consume is total."It is some time in the future," he writes. "Technology has greatly increased people's ability to ‘filter' what they want to read, see, and hear." His vision continues:

You are able to design your own newspapers and magazines. You can choose your own programming, with movies, game shows, sports, shopping and news of your choice... You need not come across topics and views that you have not sought out. Without any difficulty, you are able to see exactly what you want to see, no more and no less...

Of course, this world is already approximated today by the Internet. From the consumer's perspective, the Internet represents the fullest triumph yet of free, individual choice in the marketplace of ideas -- never before, we are so often reminded, have the barriers to getting information been so low, and the choices about where to get it so many. Sunstein's unsettling proposition in Republic.com 2.0 is that this choice might not necessarily be a good thing.

Consider the fact that every choice requires negation -- that every time you say "yes" to one option you are reflexively saying "no" to all the others; that the more choices we have the more stuff we end up having to reject. On the Internet, this is brought to its logical extreme: every time you choose to read one article, you are saying "no," implicitly, to the hundreds of thousands of others available only one click away. Choosing one site -- one blog, one review, one photo -- you reject the vast majority of human knowledge ever produced. It's a heady proposition, to be sure, and it seems to suggest that making choices well about what information we consume is one of our highest responsibilities as individuals. In an infinite marketplace, the individual is solely responsible for his own salvation. And in the infinite library of the Internet, the question of ignorance is not whether the information exists -- it does -- but whether we'll choose to access it. To Cass Sunstein, this is unsettling. Sunstein is a constitutional law professor who believes that individuals have obligations to their communities, and who also believes than a citizenry exposed to the right information is essential to the survival of a republic. To him, the very fact of having these choices about what information we consume means that we cannot, in fact, be prepared to make them well.

Sunstein makes two major arguments in his book. The first argument is a constitutional one: he claims that a republic needs a citizenry that is first, "exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance," and, second, "share a range of common experiences." This is the case, he argues, because a self-governing republic requires a citizenry committed to the process of deliberating on issues of public concern. Without their being exposed to a diverse amount of information, and without having a common basis on which to discourse, the very idea of a "sovereign people" begins to break down. Beyond its ability to satisfy our individual interests, Sunstein says, information exists as the glue that holds our republic together. Sunstein's key contention, then, is that free expression in a republic requires not just freedom but also responsibility -- that each citizen not only can but must access diverse information and deliberate on it critically and respectfully. The very act of flipping through a newspaper, then, is an exercise in civic virtue.

Sunstein's second argument is, in effect, that the Internet is undermining all of this. Because it allows us to filter out materials that we do not want to be exposed to, Sunstein argues, the web creates what he calls "personal information cocoons." As our ability to choose becomes greater, the number and precision of these personal information cocoons proliferates, until each person can live in his own little informational world customized to mirror all his prejudices. In this state, of course, people can't find common ground; they don't operate with the same facts. By avoiding material that unsettles their worldviews, they become radicalized and intolerant.

The problem with choice, for Sunstein, is that it runs contrary to our positive responsibilities as citizens in a republic. Choice isolates us. It dislocates us from the collective. And the problem with the Internet, for Sunstein, is that it is the ultimate choice machine. It's paradoxical, to be sure: the very diversity of information available leads directly to our insularity; its abundance leads to our ignorance. It's our freedom to choose that undermines systematically our freedom to self-govern.

Sunstein's argument is insightful; yet is strikes me as only half-right. The fragmentation of our culture is a vitally important concern, and it's unequivocally real. Sociologists show that American community has been in decline for over fifty years. People are less connected to their fellow citizens; they are less likely to feel trust or affection toward their elected officials; and they are less likely to join organization and more likely to -- as famously put by sociologist Robert Putnam -- "bowl alone." Yet one wonders, can a trend that has been proceeding for nearly fifty years have anything to do with the Internet?

Consider this summer's healthcare debates. Few things in recent cultural memory have epitomized as clearly what it means to be "uncivic" in a self-governing republic. Numerous much-touted town hall meetings approached open violence. And rallies were filled with apoplectic, openly-racist sloganeering. It's easy to see in these events exactly the sort of fragmentation that Sunstein warns about: our culture fracturing into information cocoons, where lies like "death panels" gain wide currency; a citizenry that can't enter into a space of public discourse without, quite literally, bringing its guns; the impossibility of legislating in these conditions of self-government. All this was brought to bear as Sunstein predicted. Yet the Internet seems not to have been the cause at all. The causes of a radicalized right wing are many. They are sociological: questions of ethnicity, income, and religion all come into play. And there's a case to be made that there are relevant wider cultural phenomena as well: a general drift, pervasive in all aspects of American society, away from priority of community and civic virtue generally.

Yet whatever the causes of the splenetic right wing, the Internet is not among them. To paraphrase a review of the first addition of Sunstein's book: you could un-invent the Internet and you'd still have each and every picketer on the national mall with a swastika painted onto President Obama's forehead. If the Internet's to be blamed at all, then, it's for reflecting cultural predispositions, not creating them. The question we have to ask ourselves is not where the Internet went wrong -- but where did we?

Depending on your point of view, however, maybe even that judgment is premature. While Sunstein fears for the break down of the collective, there are some who openly embrace it. Fragmentation, they say, is another word for individualization, and individualism is the essence of freedom. In Create Your Own Economy, libertarian economist Tyler Cowen proceeds from just this perspective, and ends with conclusions stunning in their contrast to Sunstein's. Cowen hails the Internet on the exactly the grounds that Sunstein fears it: the power that it gives the individual to construct his own informational world. "The notion of ‘ordering information' may sound a little dry," Cowen writes, "but it is a joy in our everyday lives."

We are entering a world where the collection and ordering of information has reached baroque, extravagant extremes, and this is (mostly) good thing. It is a path toward many of the best rewards in life and a path toward creating our own economy and taking control of your own education and entertainment.

The "path to prosperity in a disordered world," as the subtitle of the book reads, is nothing less, Cowen says, than learning to actively create our own consciousness through the Internet. "At its core it is all about you," he writes. "Now, more than ever, you can assemble and manipulate bits of information from the outside world and relate them back to your personal concerns." Cowen takes this notion alarmingly far. About a third of the book is dedicated to reconceiving "autism" as a virtue in a world that demands consciousness-creating: "In essence we are using tools and capital goods-computers and the web-to replicate or mimic some of the information-absorbing, information-processing, and mental-ordering abilities of autistics." At another point, he tells the individual to step into Robert Nozick's "Experience Machine," saying that our problems are not an over-willingness to delude ourselves but an under-willingness. "Isn't our general tendency to clutch at the thought of reality just one more instance of the illusion that we are always in control? I say let's put down our polemic against living in our heads and let's put down our bias against interiority."

If we want to understand our own cultural fragmentation then we might be served well by reflecting not only on these arguments, but on the assumptions that underpin them. Cowen not only speaks about the positive effects of fragmentation; he also, in his way, symbolizes their cause. His entire argument depends on his readers accepting that individualism is the highest goal of freedom, and that the problem with our society is that we're not willing enough to work only for ourselves as we assemble the information around us. This idea, of course, is nothing new. Since at least the 19th century in America -- which witnessed the advent of the "Darwinian" rationale for industrial competition and the expansion of the frontier out west -- the myth of the self-creating individual has been a mainstay in our cultural discourse. And by all accounts, this myth has only gained in stature in the wake of the Reagan-Goldwater conservative movement. Cowen's argument is novel, then, because he applies the ideas of consumer sovereignty to the Internet space. His ideal of an "autistic mental type," who weaves stories for himself from the tidbits he glean from the blogs in his RSS reader, and of whom nothing is asked other than to "create his own economy" -- this is the cowboy individualist of the technological world. Cowen's book thus serves as a double indicator for the fragmentation of our culture: not only does he explain the fragmentation potentials of the Internet, he applauds them. Not only does his book tell us about the effects of the Internet on the fragmentation of our culture, but it also serves to symbolize the intellectual movement that seeks to sustain and legitimize that fragmentation.

Both of these books, then, are tracts of unlikely cultural warfare. The rift between them is between two notions of freedom and citizenship. Yet if both books are, in effect, cultural polemics, then neither of them admits it. And thus both miss the point: this is not about the Internet. The question of what it means to be a free citizen in a republic cannot be contained in an analysis of a tool, no matter how powerful or catalyzing. The Internet, after all, is only a framework for gathering existing cultural assumptions and social values. Whether choices exist is not nearly as important as both Sunstein and Cowen believe; the real question is how as citizens we make these choices, what we feel our responsibilities are, and what we feel entitled to. In short: unless we as a culture re-adopt a vocabulary of civic virtuousness -- and can ask of ourselves to think less like consumers and more like citizens -- than it doesn't matter one bit whether it's from the Internet or the newspaper that we're getting our news.

In 1996, the writer Jonathan Franzen published an essay Harper's Magazine entitled Perchance to Dream. In one line he captured this feeling of cultural anomie: "Human existence," he wrote, "is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe." Market capitalism, he argued, has thus been successful precisely because it compounded the delusion that we are, each of us, at the center of the universe. The problem with the Internet, then, is that it takes this delusion one step forward. The traditional role of reading, Franzen claims in his essay, was to help us overcome the limitations of ourselves: it forces us to experience other's thoughts; to enter into dialogue with another's consciousness; to deliberate on issues of public importance. The essence of reading, in some sense, is that we don't have a choice about the thoughts to which we are exposed, or about the nature of the cultural dialogue we enter. To the extent that the Internet places individual choice at the center of its paradigm, it undermines the traditional role that information plays in teaching us to think beyond ourselves. It reinforces the delusion that our own individual choice and our own immediate gratification are the central matters of a well-lived life.

Yet to say that the Internet created this delusion is disingenuous and wrong. The problem is deeper. The problem of the Internet, in fact, is that it is just one more step, on more tax -- like the car over the bus; like the suburb over the city; like the iPod over the concert hall -- on our abilities as citizens to relate to one another in a self-governing community. To blame the Internet alone is beside the point. It's like blaming the mirror for its reflection of ourselves.

Hertzberg on Bloomberg

Hendrik Hertzeberg's column on Bloomberg's third term is exceptionally good. Hertzberg is a master of the form --

In broad outline, New Yorkers know all this. We know that we’re bought and paid for. We know that there is something unseemly, even humiliating, about submitting ourselves to be ruled by the richest man in town. We know that the muscling aside of term limits, whatever the law’s merits, was a travesty. We know that the Mayor’s campaign this time has been puzzlingly, pettily negative. Yet we will, most of us, troop to the polls on Tuesday and pull the lever for Mayor Mike. The truth is that Michael Bloomberg has been a very good mayor. The record is mixed, of course, but the mixture is largely positive....

The Mayor has ruled us well, but he has infantilized us. We are a little too much like the passive Romans of Crassus’ day, when the institutions of the old republic were giving way to a despotic (and competent) imperium. “People got used to the idea of them,” Edith Hamilton wrote of Crassus and his fellow-triumvirs, Pompey and Caesar, “and when four years later their powerful organization was completed and they began to act openly, honored and honorable patriots could find excellent reasons for acquiescing in their running the city. Indeed, it seemed exceedingly probable that if they did not do so there would be nobody to run it.” If Bloomberg had been satisfied with two terms, he would be leaving office a beloved legend, a municipal god. He’ll get his third, but we’ll give it to him sullenly, knowing that while it probably won’t measure up to his first two—times are hard, huge budget gaps are at hand—it’ll probably be good enough. The Pax Bloombergiana will endure a while longer. But then what? Will we have forgotten how to govern ourselves?

The Greek Tragedy point is well taken. A lot of New York politics has those undertones -- there's hubris and justice; the king and the polis; the chorus and the audience. But it's the New Yorkers themselves who in this election are facing the tragic dilemma: they want a new Major, yet it's Bloomberg who's the best man for the job.

Slave/Master Paradox

This from Robert Kagan, Introduction to Ancient Greek History:

I remember my old colleague who taught history of American slavery and so on, John Blassingame, said to me at one point, he said when the emancipation came, the slaves were freed and so were the masters...

He explains: as long as there were slaves in the antebellum South, there would also be riots and homicides, and no master could ever live entirely without fear of revolt. So owning slaves was like living in a tinder box. It was the sort of contingent life -- though you have something now, at any moment it could be taken away -- that characterizes slavery in the first place.

According to Kagan, this paradox helps us to understand the city-state of Sparta --that for Sparta, colonialism had the ironic effect of creating more fear, not less. As they conquered and enslaved the Mycenaeans to the West, they spread their military thin and at the same time multiplied their points of vulnerability. They internalized their enemy. So acute was their fear of Mycenaean revolt, Kagan says, that had to transform their society into a control apparatus, until it finally became the Rousseauian totalitariat we know Sparta as today. I'm sure there's a lot more here, but the point is this: their security apparatus, designed to enslave the Mycenaeans, was so total that they ended up enslaving themselves.

So the parable goes. I'll venture to say that I think something similar happens whenever we buy things or otherwise take control of material objects: a transaction of control happens, where we gain a lot of control, but forfeit some of it too. A petty example is my cellphone, which allows me to make calls when and where I want, but at the same time "tells me" when to charge it and "makes me" put in my pocket every morning and of course takes up a bit of space on my nightstand. This isn't existential stuff (it's the not Mycenaeans descending from the hills!), but it's a modern analogue. When we buy things, we're still in some way accepting the unfreedom of their proper stewardship. And these myriad forfeits of control, I think, ultimately speak to the persistent difficulties of life despite material abundance (speak to the fact that that perhaps it's not "despite" but "because of" abundance that some people drown).

A Value Prop for the Music Industry

Comment: "Oy Tenenbaum! RIAA wins $675,000, or $22,500 per song" by Ben Shefner at Ars Technica; "The New Economics of Music: File-Sharing and Double Moral Hazard" by Umair Haque at Bubble Generation; "New Danger Mouse CD Released As A Blank CD-R Due To Legal Fight With EMI" by Tech Dirt

I'll start with a paradox: while the costs of distributing information are dropping, asymptotically, to zero, the value embedded within the information (its "meaning") persists.¹

This paradox of low costs and high value plays a large and unstated role in our debates about music piracy. Sure, data distribution costs have dropped so low that might as well round down to zero -- and economic theory predicts that prices will drop to marginal cost -- but has the "value" of music dropped that low (to zero), and if not, why shouldn't we be paying for it? While it might cost us almost nothing today to store and transmit the data stuff of (say) the Don Giovanni opera, the value that the opera inflicts on our soul has not changed much, if at all, for nearly two hundred years.²

So pricing is difficult. It's definitely true that distribution costs affects the value of music -- but it's not clear in which direction, up or down. As the digital shelf space reaches towards infinity, the supply of music available to us increases. This of course lowers, marginally, the value of any one song relative to all the others. Yet at the same time, as the self space expands, so does the chances that you'll find music that you really like. And so does the chances that the market will compete upward and outward, improving quality. Thus with increased supply, the value of each song declines, but the value of the set of available songs itself rises. And, further down the line, I'd argue, the more access to music we have, the more we can produce it, for information is both an output and an input: more music means more creativity, creative resynthesis, mushups, GirlTalk and DangerMouse. Value rises.

My point is that it's not altogether clear that the easy distribution of music lowers its value to us, and for that reason, I see no clear economic or "market morality" case for why we should all be getting our music for free, even if we can. To the contrary, I'd say there are a lot of good reasons why we should be paying for music. We need to create "incentives" for music production, sure; But more than that, I'd like to live in a society that values art -- the creation of art -- at least as much as it does trading derivatives or other forms of bean counting.

Most everyone seems to understand this intuitively. Americans are very used to exchanging money for value, and to suspend that enterprise when it comes to music feels odd, and immoral.

But if we accept this premise, then we've got to look at piracy as something other than just a breach of the law -- we've got to think of it as an economic transaction, as exchanging costs -- costs of our time, of risk to our computers, of ristk to our consciences -- for value. Apparently, a large amount of people are more willing to bear those costs and the prices assigned by the recording industy. And this is my point: Piracy is an essential statement about the value of the music.

To understand this, think about the music industry according to Haque's contract theory: listeners (the principles) contract out the the function of finding good artists and producing good music (the product) to the recording industry (the agents) for the purpose of performing a function that they cannot perform. In exchange for this service, the industry charges a premium on top of the retail price of the music

The crux of the piracy issue, I believe, is that the recording industry has failed in its function as an agent between listener and music. People don't want to pay for services unrendered.

As the music market has gotten more competitive -- with new bands getting new access to fans -- the recording industry has failed to compete. I has buckled down with a business model based on fixing prices and pumping out generically commercial music. By doing this, the industry has prevented the sort of rich, dynamic feedback on price and quality that's necessary to compete in lively markets.

Piracy has to be understood as a response to an industy that has neglected its core business function of creating value for its consumers. The industy has been too busy pumping out hot dog music -- "thick, pink, synthetic, inert" -- and suing its consumers (!) to bother with finding and creating art.

These are my opinions. Apparently, the RIAA is totally unaware that Joel Tenebaum's actions might be directly related to their own actions. And furthermore, they seems totally unaware that in an age of unlimited shelf space, of social media and of instantaneous search, their monopoly on the function of agent between musician and listener may soon break down -- that we'll see music distribution models that cut the recording industry out of the loop entirely. And that a growing group of good musicians already have.

So yes, we should pay artists for the music they create. But not more than we actually value it. And the money should go to those who are creating the value, not subtracting from it.

--

[1] The famous Stewart Brand about information "wanting to be free" actually has two parts. "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." back

[2]It really is a mystery why music affects us the way it does, why certain tones arrayed in certain ways, elicit so much joy. I'll note tangentially that I heard Steve Pinker describe our affinity for as a product of our language capacities; he said that so long as we can talk and think in word syllables, we cannot help but be "supernormally stimulated" by music...this suggest that the "value" of music is more a biological fact than an economic one. back

"I felt curiously aloof from my own self. No temptations maddened me. The plump, glossy little Eskimo girls with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and guinea pig faces, evoked less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had. Nymphets do not occur in polar regions" - Lolita (where else?)

"After the 1850s, thanks in part to Franklin's influence, American became the land of ingenuity" - Maria Kalman, in her excellent And In Pursuit of Happiness

"The proper use of entertainment and education has become the most fundamental social enterprise" - Tyler Cowen in Create Your Own Economy

Chomsky's New Socialism

Just to make this clear, I didn't mean for my last post to turn into an encomium for "Chomsky's American sensibilities." In fact, I find a lot of his foreign policy writing to be distasteful, and for exactly the opposite reasons I was praising him for below. I find that his is a basically simplistic worldview: Everything that the U.S. does is necessarily expansionistic; nothing that those who are "oppressed" by our policies themselves do has a baring on their status as the categorically oppressed. And his written tone, in contrast to the 1971 debate, is usually embittered, caustic, meandering and belittling to those who disagree. So if you were to confront my previous post and say his foreign policy work undermined his authority as a "pragmatist" in the sense described below, I'd say "well, maybe that's the what you've got to do as a dissenter. Maybe pragmatism is an untenable position to take as an advocate." And I'd also say, "Yeah, unfortunately, you're probably right."

That said, I did want to point to this gem from the debate, which I didn't have a chance to bring up in the last post. This, at least, he got exactly right:

As to the idea, which was perhaps lurking in your question anyway-it's an idea that's often expressed-that there is some technical imperative, some property of advanced technological society that requires centralised power and decision-making-and a lot of people say that, from Robert McNamara on down-as far as I can see it's perfect nonsense, I've never seen any argument in favour of it.

It seems to me that modern technology, like the technology of data-processing, or communication and so on, has precisely the opposite implications. It implies that relevant information and relevant understanding can be brought to everyone quickly. It doesn't have to be concentrated in the hands of a small group of managers who control all knowledge, all information and all decision-making. So technology, I think, can be liberating, it has the property of being possibly liberating; it's converted, like everything else, like the system of justice, into an instrument of oppression because of the fact that power is badly distributed.

The question posed to him was whether socialism demanded centralized power, and, if it did, how this could be reconciled with his belief in the priority of individual freedom. His choice of answers, really, was remarkably prescient. Information technology, in fact, has distributed a great deal of power from the hands of "a small group of managers who control all knowledge, all information and all decision-making" -- and that Chomsky could predict this, while framing it as an affront to traditional notions of socialism, is goddamn impressive for a debate in 1971. And it's even more impressive because guys like Kevin Kelly are today publishing articles in Wired Magazine saying the very same thing:

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

Chomsky's Pragmatism

Review: Chomsky-Foucault Debate "Human Nature: Justice versus Power"

The Chomsky-Foucault debate "Human Nature: Justice versus Power" (original) is a supremely interesting exchange, definitely worthwhile on its merits. But what's particularly interesting to me is hearing Chomsky discuss questions that are conceptually prior to those I normally hear him lecture one -- rather than linguistics or politics per se, you get serious reflection on the enterprise of being a scholar and activist...how thinking occurs and why we ought to do it, according to a young Chomsky at the height of the Vietnam War.

What's striking in this debate is something that's rarely commented on: how pragmatic Noam Chomsky is. The question of why and how to think naturally lend itself to dogmatism. But here you see Chomsky extremely articulate about the limitations of his own mind, yet also steady about his need to move it forward. It's a remarkable posture. When I call it "pragmatic" I don't mean in the everyday sense (ie, someone whose ideas are "viable") but rather in the philosophical sense. The habits of mind that commit oneself to a certain method of truth, and yet aware of the intrinsic limitations of this method.

(Reading the debate, one's even reminded a little of Obama, who once said: "Part of it is psychological...I'm still wrapping my head around doing this in a way that I think the other candidates just aren't. There's a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It's part of what makes me a good writer, you know? It's not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign.")

For example, look at Chomsky's argument for the existence of human nature (it's so elegant that it's worth quoting in full):

Now, the person who has acquired this intricate and highly articulated and organised collection of abilities-the collection of abilities that we call knowing a language-has been exposed to a certain experience; he has been presented in the course of his lifetime with a certain amount of data, of direct experience with a language.

We can investigate the data that's available to this person; having done so, in principle, we're faced with a reasonably clear and well-delineated scientific problem, namely that of accounting for the gap between the really quite small quantity of data, small and rather degenerate in quality, that's presented to the child, and the very highly articulated, highly systematic, profoundly organised resulting knowledge that he somehow derives from these data.

Furthermore we notice that varying individuals with very varied experience in a particular language nevertheless arrive at systems which are very much congruent to one another. The systems that two speakers of English arrive at on the basis of their very different experiences are congruent in the sense that, over an overwhelming range, what one of them says, the other can understand.

Furthermore, even more remarkable, we notice that in a wide range of languages, in fact all that have been studied seriously, there are remarkable limitations on the kind of systems that emerge from the very different kinds of experiences to which people are exposed.

There is only one possible explanation, which I have to give in a rather schematic fashion, for this remarkable phenomenon, namely the assumption that the individual himself contributes a good deal, an overwhelming part in fact, of the general schematic structure and perhaps even of the specific content of the knowledge that he ultimately derives from this very scattered and limited experience...

I would claim then that this instinctive knowledge, if you like, this schematism that makes it possible to derive complex and intricate knowledge on the basis of very partial data, is one fundamental constituent of human nature. In this case I think a fundamental constituent because of the role that language plays, not merely in communication, but also in expression of thought and interaction between persons; and I assume that in other domains of human intelligence, in other domains of human cognition and behaviour, something of the same sort must be true. Well, this collection, this mass of schematisms, innate organising principles, which guides our social and intellectual and individual behaviour, that's what I mean to refer to by the concept of human nature.

He's purporting to have discovered a "fundamental constituent of human nature." But his method for doing so was strictly empirical. And the discovery is itself highly contained. We have a human nature, but for what use is it? Where does it steer us? If human nature exists then, conceivably, so too does the Good Society. But Chomsky's statements about human nature was too conservative for an answer about what that would look like: just because human nature is there, doesn't mean we can claim any privileged access to it, and it especially doesn't mean that we can assert by fiat moral judgments on its basis (or ask people to sacrifice on its behalf).

Foucault is a great foil for Chomsky on this point. For him, the uncertainty inherent in the value "justice" renders the whole process of social change invalid. If we cannot establish justice for certain, than we cannot dignify our attempts to make change as anything but power plays. These are his premises: Justice itself is not objectively existent. Rather, like other social notions, it is a construct. And constructs are formulated by those who control institutions of power and by those who are victims of them. All of our mental life (including concepts like "justice" "science" "insanity") fit within the "grille" of cultural rules at play. This set of rules is contingent and changeable.

And contrary to what you think, you can't prevent me from believing that these notions of human nature, of justice, of the realisation of the essence of human beings, are all notions and concepts which have been formed within our civilisation, within our type of knowledge and our form of philosophy, and that as a result form part of our class system; and one can't, however regrettable it may be, put forward these notions to describe or justify a fight which should-and shall in principle--overthrow the very fundaments of our society. This is an extrapolation for which I can't find the historical justification. That's the point.

I'm actually pretty sympathetic to Foucault's point about the ways that individuals fit within the totality of the social rules that govern them. But it's not clear how seriously we can take this -- life, after all, would hardly be worth living if we had to ditch all the things that were contingent/constructed. Too much of the stuff of living would be rendered unusable: our identities are products of chance, so those are constructs, and so are our conceptions of "love" and "suffering," our families we've been born into, not to mention any conception of a good society towards which we could struggle. The great irony of the postmodernist's project is that as they've attempted to reject socially constructed "systems of knowledge," they've managed to create there own system -- and one just as untenable as any its replacing. But in some ways worse. Foucault's thought denies the very act of thinking.

Where does Chomsky stand on this? Well, he affirms that justice may not exist, but we still must progress according to the believe that it does. If social change cannot ever have a demonstrative, absolute moral basis (and I think it cannot), then we can either deny the act of progress all together, or retain that notion and attempt to guide ourselves by our moral intuitions alone. Social changes would then revolve on the empirical process of finding the conditions that tend to make people thrive, and that reduce their oppression, a process that concedes from the beginning that the idealism is bracketed by epistemological uncertainty.

For example, to be quite concrete, a lot of my own activity really has to do with the Vietnam War, and some of my own energy goes into civil disobedience. Well, civil disobedience in the U.S. is an action undertaken in the face of considerable uncertainties about its effects. For example, it threatens the social order in ways which might, one might argue, bring about fascism; and that would be a very bad thing for America, for Vietnam, for Holland and for everyone else. You know, if a great Leviathan like the United States were really to become fascist, a lot of problems would result; so that is one danger in undertaking this concrete act.

On the other hand there is a great danger in not undertaking it, namely, if you don't undertake it, the society of Indo-China will be torn to shreds by American power. In the face of these uncertainties one has to choose a course of action.

Well, similarly in the intellectual domain, one is faced with the uncertainties that you correctly pose. Our concept of human nature is certainly limited; it's partially socially conditioned, constrained by our own character defects and the limitations of the intellectual culture in which we exist. Yet at the same time it is of critical importance that we know what impossible goals we're trying to achieve, if we hope to achieve some of the possible goals. And that means that we have to be bold enough to speculate and create social theories on the basis of partial knowledge, while remaining very open to the strong possibility, and in fact overwhelming probability, that at least in some respects we're very far off the mark.

I really admire this mixture of uncertainty and progress. I think it's the correct posture intellecutally and, also, that it's a particularly American one. (See Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club for a review of the American invention of philosophical pragmatism during the reconstruction of the Union after the Civil War). I imagine Chomsky would disagree with this -- but maybe not. After all, Chomsky is one of Foucault's exceptions, someone who's militated against the contingencies of his culture (he was born into a country that he's spent his career criticizing; he was born as a Jew, and has become one of Israel's greatest critic), yet owes much of his life to the freedoms and institutions of American society. So maybe it's this: American sensibilities. But with reservations.