Athens & Jerusalem

Imagination, Science, and Global Warming

2009-12-05T09:20:00.007-05:00

Albert Einstein famously said that "imagination is more important than knowledge." Those words have been appropriated by generations of naive undergraduates who want to exalt their own "creativity" while downplaying the importance of learning facts, but that doesn't mean Einstein wasn't right.

Imagination is vital to the process of scientific discovery. The trickiest and most mysterious part of science is the formulation of hypotheses, which depends mostly on having a vigorous imagination and a willingness to entertain possibilities. Time and again in the history of science, great breakthroughs like Einstein's own theory of relativity, quantum mechanics or the pathogenic theory of disease have required people to accept ideas that violated their firmly-held pictures of reality. Meanwhile, ideas like evolution, heliocentrism, and atomism, supported by overwhelming evidence from normal experience and first proposed by major thinkers in antiquity, languished for centuries because most people's imaginations simply refused to accept them.

If the earth isn't the center of the universe, why do things fall toward it? And how come we don't go flying off the earth, if it's in motion? A heliocentric planetary system just DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!!!

In a comment on a recent post by Withywindle -- part of the ongoing global warming debate here -- Gowanus lays out what I believe to be the best case for global warming, the one that I gather is the bedrock for most AGW proponents: CO2 is a greenhouse gas. How can huge increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations NOT warm the planet?

It is entirely reasonable to point out that anthropogenic changes in the concentration of a greenhouse gas might have an effect on the climate. It's entirely reasonable to keep a weather eye (as it used to be called) on world temperatures and CO2 concentrations. But to assume that we know anywhere near enough about the planet on which we live to declare the science settled and the time for debate over, as many public AGW advocates have, betrays, in my view, a lack of imagination.

I remember reading somewhere that a big-name AGW proponent was asked what it would take for him to be convinced he was wrong. His answer was essentially that he would need to be proven wrong about the absorption and emission spectra of the CO2 molecule. This seemed to me to neglect the incredible complexity of the chaotic system called Earth. As Gowanus acknowledges in his comment, there may be feedback loops. At a minimum, isn't it possible that any greenhouse effects of CO2 could be completely swamped by other factors driving climate change?

Of course, the ability of global warming skeptics to imagine scenarios where greatly increased CO2 concentrations don't result in climatic catastrophe would count for nothing if the AGW proponents had the data to justify their beliefs. But they don't. Their reconstructions of the temperature record are a mess. They've had no luck predicting the future. The only solid evidence they do have -- and even this is shakier than they make it seem -- is that the world seemed to get noticably warmer for a few decades at the end of the twentieth century. But couldn't this easily have occurred for reasons other than increased CO2 concentrations? AGW proponents can't take such a possibility seriously, which is a failure of the scientific imagination. In the end, the vehemence of their position comes back to the unwillingness to envision or admit alternative possibilities. I suspect that the inability to seriously imagine that they're wrong is also what allows them to cherry-pick data or fudge statistical results and computer models in good conscience.

Top Ten Things I Will Not Let Stand in the Way of This Sublime and Funky Love That I Crave!

2009-12-04T04:22:00.007-05:00

10. death
9. taxes
8. middle-class hypocrisy
7. tertiary syphilis
6. bear attacks
5. morbid obesity
4. pepper spray
3. impotence
2. Robert Gibbs
1. the laws of God and man

(Inspired by MSI and Cornel West.)

More on Bureaucracy

2009-12-04T00:32:00.002-05:00

Continuing the conversation from comments ... first thing, the reference toward the relevant part of Habermas: Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Beacon Press: Boston, 1987), pp. 301-331 ["A Backward Glance: Weber's Theory of Modernity"]. The most relevant paragraphs begin with "Weber held that the tendencies toward bureaucratization ... (p. 307) and To the degree that the economic system subjects ... (p. 325). The chapter summarizes Weber's theory of modernization and bureaucracy, which I think underlies what Postman et al are saying.

For myself:

1) I note that bureaucracies are supposed to be defined by efficiency, yet are universally critiqued as being remarkably inefficient in practice. This makes me think there may be something wrong with the first definition.

2) The question is whether the rational, quantifying procedures of bureaucracy become sovereign procedures that then invade and take over every nook and cranny of the human soul. Weber thought yes. Habermas thinks that communicative rationality (here as elsewhere) provides an antidote.

3) Weber also thinks of capitalism as an inescapable iron cage that confines the soul. Note how he tends to think of human constructs as coming to imprison the human soul, inescapably. Capitalism he also takes to be purposeful-rational - calculative rationalist, seeking only material interest. The critique of bureaucracy and capitalism is aligned.

4) I argue elsewhere that the market (capitalism) is prudential; I have some tentative thoughts that bureaucracy is too - constituted by latter-day epistolary rhetoric (memoranda) and internal dialogue. This would side-step their Weberian association with calculative rationality.

5) Prudence I take to be open to the spiritual, to revelation, but not to require it. A bureaucracy therefore would be open to the spiritual, but not to require it. But I am unconvinced that bureaucracies differ greatly from human beings in concentrating mostly on the material.

6) The Catholic Church, incidentally, has set bureaucratic procedure for making saints, with miracles included in the machinery. What sayeth Postman to that?

7) I do want to emphasize that the increasing complexity of the economy, of jobs, complements and (I rather think) requires bureaucratic coordination. Bureaucracy standardizes with one hand; it makes complex with another.

8) Recollect my previous post on labor and leisure. Weber talks about how bureaucracy creates not just standardized human beings, but ones who seek release from forced rationalization in hedonism (pp. 323-324). But this follows the line of thought that finds individualization in leisure, consumption, etc.; but what if, Withywindlishly, individualization comes from division of labor and office? Then bureaucracy makes individuals that way, and more effectively than by making leisured consumers.

9) I note again "sovereign procedure," and register my disbelief that we are the prisoners of our methods. This makes reason utopia or nightmare, but either way a powerful idol we worship or curse, and toward whom we confess our powerlessness. This is superstition, laziness, or both. Bureaucracy, as much as money, is a tool; we are its masters, not it of us. Or if it does master us, it is because we let it; again, a challenge, not a prison.

10) Likewise the challenge of retaining our spirit. Virtue we always have in us; it is not denatured by exposure to lucre or rationalized routine. The world is sinful; bureaucracy is at worst the world's quintessence. To make too much of bureaucracy, as much for a villain as for a hero, is, I think, a lesson of Screwtape's, and a counsel of despair.

I Just Don't Know What You're Talking About

2009-12-03T09:38:00.002-05:00

From a Washington Times article on Chris Horner's efforts to get NASA to release the data on which its climate change research is based:

Mark Hess, public affairs director for the Goddard Space Flight Center which runs the GISS laboratory, said they are working on Mr. Horner's request, though he couldn't say why they have taken so long [two years].

"We're collecting the information and will respond with all the responsive relevant information to all of his requests," Mr. Hess said. "It's just a process you have to go through where you have to collect data that's responsive."

He said he was unfamiliar with the British controversy and couldn't say whether NASA was susceptible to the same challenges to its data. The White House has dismissed the British e-mails as irrelevant.

Oh, come on!

On Bureaucracy

2009-12-03T00:46:00.002-05:00

FLG quotes Neil Postman on bureaucracy:

bureaucracy has no intellectual, political, or moral theory -- except for its implicit assumption that efficiency is the principle aim of all social institutions and that other goals are essentially less worthy, if not irrelevant. .... Bureaucracy now not only solves problems but creates them. More important, it defines what are problems are -- and they are always, in the bureaucratic view, problems of efficiency.

Now, there is an enormous amount of social/critical theory touching on bureaucracy, from Weber onward, virtually none of which I have read. But plunging boldly ahead anyway: these seem to me at best partial truths. Bureaucracies are about power - and I suppose efficiency is an attribute of power, but to say bureaucracies are about efficiency seems to miss the point. Bureaucracies exert power by co-ordinating different interests, different offices of government and society, and articulating them with unified, and therefore overpowering, effect. Bureaucracies can escape from political control, and become inert masses and/or dysfunctional behemoths - but I'm not at all sure that bureaucracies are essentially so. These are short quotations, but I suspect Postman of theorizing too broadly from the vices of bureaucracies. And what precisely are the alternate virtues that efficiency suppresses? Inefficiency? I suspect fluffery in his alternatives.

And then FLG says in comments:

It's really about forms for me. You know, the kind you fill out. It standardizes and reduces your life simply to the information needed to process whatever it is the bureaucracy is processing efficiently. Bureaucracies are terrible at interpreting and adapting to mitigating circumstances because those exceptions create inefficiencies that the bureaucracy doesn't want to incur.

This is warmed-over Weber, methinks - the rationalization and disenchantment of life as twinned processes, where bureaucracy is the motor of this process. Very broadly, I'm suspicious of this line of argument because it assumes that rationalism is all-powerful in the modern world, whereas I think that prudentialism has great power, even in the bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are ways for different interests to talk to one another; the co-ordinating of disparate interests strikes me as at least as important in bureaucracy as standardization. Or put another way: bureaucracy is another one of those challenges in life, not an iron cage. If it treats you in a standard-issue matter, maybe it's not the deadening effect of bureaucracy, but a truthful mirror, showing you just how unimportant you are - certainly when going to get your driver's license renewed. If you master bureaucracy - acquire officium, become an individual by virtue of your power, your position - than you are not standardized, but using bureaucracy as a tool.

There's more to say about standardization, but maybe another time.

Eviscerating Cornel West

2009-12-02T08:05:00.001-05:00

This is an entertaining skewering.

Hat-tip Cliopatria.

And By Special Request Up The Khyber Pass

2009-12-02T00:15:00.002-05:00

Withywindle wemains ambivawent. Afghanistan still doesn't matter worth a damn in itself, and we're still committed to the idiocy of drug war over there, so I'm not overwhelmed with our chances of success. A public deadline is stupid, but a private deadline would have made sense. (So would greenlighting an immediate Israeli bombing run on Iran, and an American commando raid to seize Pakistani nukes, and then getting the hell out of everywhere between Basra and Okinawa. But this departs from the bipartisan consensus.) And while cheapskate with only 30K troops is probably a mistake - hell, 10K more Americans who don't have to worry about getting shot at. Upside! And much as I enjoy the schadenfreude of watching Obama getting mugged by reality, I sympathize with his difficulty in choosing between unpleasant alternatives. I hope it works out, but I wouldn't place bets.

Help! Mom! These Pictures are Scaring Me!

2009-12-01T15:51:00.013-05:00

I thought creepy partisan children's books was a phenomenon of the left. I guess not. And for good measure, the art in Help! Mom! The Radicals are Ruining my Country! is extra-mega-super-creepy. Glenn Beck looks like a child molester. (Can't they even draw the stripes right on the American flag, by the way?) Sarah Palin, the book's heroine, looks...off-putting.

Did they hire some Ralph Steadman protegé as an illustrator, or what? These illustrations are even worse than the ones Amy Carter did for her father's book The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer. Each picture in this book is worth a thousand words, and every one of those words is "creepy."

Politics and childhood should never mix. (Just for the record, this is what children's book illustrations should look like.)

Yet One More For Gowanus

2009-12-01T09:08:00.003-05:00

I've gone through your points tit-for-tat at great length, largely to do you the courtesy. I'm not sure how much is gained by further back and forth on them, although you can reply if you like. I think it would be more to the point for you to reply to a summary of the critiques, as provided here.

On Rereading Saki

2009-11-30T21:33:00.002-05:00

Drawing-room comedy written by a sociopath. It speaks well of our civilization that he has fallen somewhat from the canon.

A Longish Reply to Gowanus

2009-11-30T11:40:00.004-05:00

[UPDATE added at bottom.]

(Alpheus beat me to the punch; ah well.)

1. I am, of course, generically skeptical about the sovereign power of scientific reason. Also about memory and our ability to perceive the universe. I have no trouble with Theos Autokrator, who makes the earth to stand still when He will. Science is a bubble of foolish man, forsooth.

2. This clearly irks you at least as much as my particular doubts about global warming. You do seem emotionally invested (as the modern jargon goes) in the reliability of science, and are quite annoyed that I do not assent to the scientific catechism. I think you're likely wrong to be so faithful, but it doesn't particularly bother me that you are; you seem to me far more the dogmatic one who compels belief.

3. And, yes, I do think it partakes of dogma on your part. You don't have a PhD in climatology, and intimate knowledge at a professional level of the entire literature on climate change. Nor for that matter a PhD in astrophysics, chemistry, biology, geology, or any of a wide variety of sciences, in all of which you repose great trust in the Scientific Process and the Scientific Approach to Truth and what not. I don't doubt that you have greater ability than I do to understand the scientific details of climate science; my scientific grasp is so weak that the same may be said of the ape creatures of the Indus. But it seems to me that both of us, fundamentally, must believe or disbelieve various experts; your scientific knowledge is greater than mine, but still insufficient in itself.

4. Your use of the word 'denier', that useful rhetorical trick by which to assimilate climate change skepticism with Holocaust denial, does really emphasize the dogmatic character of climate change in particular. To label a skeptic a 'denier' is a remarkably Inquistorial turn of phrase, and turn of mind.

5. But let us assume for the moment that I have some willingness to believe in science writ large - and admittedly I do bumble through life presuming gravity, photosynthesis, and whatnot. What then of global warming as compared to the other sciences? I have strong general reservations before we get to the particulars of this Climategate brou-ha-ha. To wit:

6. The previous errors of climatologists make for skepticism about their current convictions. The Ice Age is coming! Global Warming will kill us all by 2000! - um, no. Their self-assurance was equally great before; telling me that their science has improved since then lends me no greater conviction. See Boy, Crying Wolf.

7. The very nature of climate "science" makes it far less certain than other varieties of science. You cannot make repeated independent experiments on the climate - there is only the one sequence of earthly weather, never repeating precisely, and the use of statistics to assemble patterns from non-repeating data. The attempt at historical data, furthermore, is sketchy in the extreme - a series of disconnected patches of data, which can only be integrated with one another by the use of yet more statistical operations - whose accuracy is inescapably uncertain.

(Doubtless I am too inclined to perceive the familiar, but climate science seems to me far more like economic history than like (say) inorganic chemistry. You try to piece together an economic history of (say) early modern England from twenty years of tariff records in one port, from wool prices in another city for an overlapping thirteen years, from a yeoman's account book - yes, cumulatively you get quite a lot of information, but the responsible historian is still very cautious about how much weight to place on this tracery that pretends to be economic history. The irresponsible Marxist historian, seeking to forward modern-day revolution, will create a picture of class struggle in seventeenth century England, explaining the Civil War - and, oops, discover the economic data doesn't support that picture at all. Global warming seems awfully like that picture of class struggle - a presumptuous attempt to piece together limited data, falling apart after a second look at the data.)

8. That there is only one experiment, one set of data, is compounded by what we have discovered from these e-mails - that the various experimenters talk with one another before publication, thus contaminating the independence of their experimental procedures. The e-mails also reveal that they value such independence: the reason given for not providing the code for their statistical transformations is that they want to make sure they aren't replicating each other's procedures too closely. Admirable - but vitiated by the endless communication that, as I said earlier, makes this one distributed experiment rather than multiple experiments. One massive research project on one series of data on one irreproducible experiment - while this isn't without value, this ought to make for grave reservations about the reliability of the conclusions produced.

9. And then we discover there are endless bits of data which can't be shared (except when they are) for commercial reasons! Several decades of climate science that proceeded knowing that the data could not be made available freely to the scrutiny of a universal public! You can provide endless reasons - but this is proceeding while knowing no one could provide a full check on your work. This is a questionable procedure at best - certainly one that warrants yet further skepticism of the results.

10. Critiquing the motives of scientists is usually an unpleasant way to avoid confronting their results. But if we must consider such possibilities, I take the self-interest of the global-warmers - gaining employment, endless money for their research, enormous prestige - to be at least as weighty as the self-interest of the critics - money and employment from various corporations. That gain in prestige I weigh most heavily; I doubt most scientists are obviously venal, but I think they are susceptible to self-importance.

11. And of course the global warming tale is part of the Just-So tales of scientists - Noble Scientist Saves World from Short-Sighted Ordinary Folks! They keep looking for some way to make this tale reality, and global warming fits the tropes remarkably well. Not a disproof in itself, but I am more than usually skeptical when I see Scientists Errant off to Save the World.

12. As for the substance of Climategate, everything Alpheus and David Foster said. To which I will add:

13. Data exclusion doesn't refer to urban heat islands: it refers to comments such as this: "Keith has asked me to send you a timeseries for the IPCC multi-proxy reconstruction figure, to replace the one you currently have. The data are
attached to this e-mail. They go from 1402 to 1995, although we usually stop the series in 1960 because of the recent non-temperature signal that is superimposed on the tree-ring data that we use." There has been extensive discussion on the web about how stopping the data in 1960 is crucial to supporting the hockey-stick interpretation. You ought to know that this, not the urban heat islands, is what is at issue.

14. "But realize that many of the questions of why data is "manipulated" in a certain way is often addressed in the peer-reviewed literature." Again, the peer-review process has evidently been skewed. "This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the "peer-reviewed literature". Obviously, they found a solution to that--take over a journal!
So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently
sit on the editorial board. .... I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it
until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor." And recollect that this is part of the indictment: that they have also corrupted/abused the peer-review process.

14. Your divergence problem (which seems to be what I referred to in data exclusion, not heat islands) links seem to endorse what the critics say: the tree rings don't show support for global warming, and the global warmers come up with theories to explain away the significance. If there's more to it than that, your links don't show what you're talking about.

15. "Summary: they used proxy data which diverged after 1960. proxy data is often only good for a limited period matching the conditions of the original proxies, so there is a limit to the degree which can be extrapolated, thus the need for additional temperature proxies outside of the initial ranges." This apparently repeats #14: it states a theory for why you can't use the data, apparently so as to fit the global warming theory. I could be wrong, of course; this gobbledygook is a far cry from English. It also seems to show how cautious one should be about all this paleodata, with proxies of limited power having to be added to one another.

16. "Leaving out data so you can test it against your predictions is not selective use of data, but testing your hypotheses in the only way you can given that one can't actually run the laboratory experiment testing the same thing." This links to a highly intemperate post, which says nothing about leaving out 40 years of data. As far as I can tell, it doesn't speak to Climate-Gate at all - which is not surprising, since it was published in September. Surely, Gowanus, you don't think that a blog-post published before the Climate-Gate scandal erupted is dispositive?

17. "Data collection and processing errors happen in science, that they get discovered and corrected is a feature, not a bug." The question is what happens if the errors are verging on fraud. But even if they aren't, part of the correction is also noticing the incompetence of the people making errors, and the thought that the theories built upon these processing errors might be wrong.

18. "Statistical techniques to discover information from the noise is not fakery, but progress." Statistical techniques can be mistaken. To quote Clive Crook at the Atlantic: "One theme, in addition to those already mentioned about the suppression of dissent, the suppression of data and methods, and the suppression of the unvarnished truth, comes through especially strongly: plain statistical incompetence. This is something that Henderson's study raised, and it was also emphasised in the Wegman report on the Hockey Stick, and in other independent studies of the Hockey Stick controversy. Of course it is also an ongoing issue in Steve McIntyre's campaign to get hold of data and methods. Nonetheless I had given it insufficient weight. Climate scientists lean very heavily on statistical methods, but they are not necessarily statisticians. Some of the correspondents in these emails appear to be out of their depth. This would explain their anxiety about having statisticians, rather than their climate-science buddies, crawl over their work."

19. "Take the time to try and understand why some data might be dropped." I did. Your links simply repeated the point: "Bluntly put, the climate scientists who have devoted their careers to proving global warming is happening do not believe that Steve McIntyre is a legitimate scientist whose real goal is the advancement of climate change science." This, and every other reason adduced, is irrelevant. They are not supposed to care about the character of their opponents, or to refuse to provide data because they have made a judgment about their scientific legitimacy. The refusal to provide data to McIntyre because of their opinion of his character is the heart of their malfeasance - again, this is why they should resign and why you should condemn them. The page you link to says "Does that exculpate them? Absolutely not." And that is the bottom line - one you refuse to acknowledge.

20. "Methodologies used to process datasets are usually cited in the peer-reviewed literature." Note previous comments about peer-reviewed literature. And note Alpheus' links to the comments on these methodologies, not available in the peer-reviewed literature, showing all the massaging of data papered over in the published methodologies.

21. "Most of the criticism is focused on the manipulation, not on the reason. Without the necessary context, one can't judge even with the derived dataset and the code. The context is the methodologies cited in the peer-reviewed literature." The climate critics also focus on these methodologies. But again, the methodologies are themselves dodgy, and what is at issue. It's somewhat circular - the data supports the methodologies, the methodologies support adjusting the data, which supports the methodologies.

22. "When dealing with the politics involving climate change, I can see why not everyone would want to have to defend in public every minute, nanoscale detail to groups that wouldn't listen even if everything was released." As Alpheus said, they want to destroy the world economy; they can take the time to defend every damn detail in public, until the cows come home. And what they want is not at issue; their scientific duty is.

23. "Personally, I support releasing all datasets and algorithms." And you should be suspicious of people who didn't, for so long.

24. "But the truth is that IPCC reports are aware of this and "the divergence problem" is a well-known data anomaly that the report acknowledges and discusses how that data should be dealt with." They do mention it - minimizing it and, as you put it, presenting it as an anomaly; it is a problem because it departs from the theory of global warming. What to say? No, they're not complete frauds. But they divvy up the data so that what presents problems is an anomaly, a problem, and they use data that stops at 1960, and sure they provide a footnote, but they're still using that partial series to support their larger theory. It is a dodgy massage - even when footnoted. But let me put it this way: they are certainly honest enough about the limitations of the data that it provides considerable support for a skeptic unwilling to place much weight on the data behind global warming.

I think Alpheus or I responded to all your other points at some point or another. You wanted me to address all your points directly: this, at 3:44 AM, is an attempt to do so!

UPDATE: Looking over this, I notice how many of these point are rehashes of the exclusion of the 40-years of tree ring data, which does seem to be cited in the climate change literature. I'm willing to say that particular point doesn't matter so much, drop it to the bottom of any list of critiques of the global warming camp, and generally forget about it.

In a Nutshell: Why I Don't Buy AGW (UPDATED)

2009-11-30T11:31:00.008-05:00

Okay...I want a post I can point to for a succinct explanation of why I'm a global warming skeptic. This post will be updated as needed and the updates (other than the addition of further links) will be clearly indicated. Here goes:

1. I think the burden of proof lies with those who argue for significant anthropogenic global warming (AGW). They're the ones who argue that there's a serious threat and that we need to take costly measures to avert that threat.

2. I don't think the AGW people have proven their case until they can show that the current warming trend is unprecedented. I don't think they've shown that. The historical record seems to indicate that at various times the world has been dramatically warmer than it is now. AGW proponents used to deny this; they've been steadily giving way to skeptics since 1995 on the crucial issue of the "Medieval Warm Period" (MWP). Initial assertions that the MWP was probably not much warmer than today, or was probably confined to the North Atlantic region, have largely collapsed. Michael Mann (Penn State), Phil Jones (UEA-CRU), Keith Briffa (UEA-CRU) and other key figures of international AGW research spent years ridiculing skeptics like Steve McIntyre while denying them access to their data. But virtually every release of new data -- most recently Briffa's publication of tree-ring data in September, 2009 -- has weakened the AGW position (link). Mann appears to be conducting a rearguard action in defense of the hockey stick, but his latest publications are already being overtaken by new data (link).

UPDATE 12/4/09: A good summary of AGW's pre-Climategate weaknesses that matches my own assessment of the field very closely, and with greater authority, can be found here: link.

3. The behavior of AGW proponents like Mann, Jones, and Briffa -- coupled with the attitudes and practices revealed in the recent UAE-CRU data hack -- give one cause to doubt their impartiality. It seems undeniable that they have an agenda, and will massage or suppress data in the service of that agenda.

Now, given that a central prop of AGW seems either shaky or nonexistent, and the very people who continue to claim to have established that prop in some form seem to be agenda-driven, why should major policy changes be based on AGW at this time?

More on The Economist

2009-11-30T01:19:00.002-05:00

Another annoying thing: they wrote:

For seething American nationalists, his only achievement there was to embarrass the nation by bowing to Emperor Akihito. There was all the customary talk-show outrage over what much of the rest of the world would view as a gesture of cultural courtesy.

They really don't get it: American citizens are sovereign; we bow to no men, and certainly not foreigners. We do not defer, and certainly not out of 'courtesy.' (A quick Google search finds that John Adams, when minister to Great Britain, did bow to King George. To which I say: precedent, pooh! He shouldn't have.) And of all Americans, the president least of all should bow.

You may disagree. But The Economist blithely ignores the argument. Subjects to Her Majesty; not free citizens of the Great Republic; why bother to read such lesser breeds without the law?

I wonder if the French President ever bows? I hope not.

This Isn't What's Usually Meant by "Data Dump"

2009-11-29T09:45:00.005-05:00

Good news, everyone! (as Professor Farnsworth might say). The folks at the the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit are going to release their data. What's left of it, that is:

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

Nice.

On Reading The Economist

2009-11-29T00:36:00.002-05:00

* Their leader involves prescriptions for how America should deal with its deficit in a world where America possessed an entirely different political class, and probably an entirely different people. As a second-best, they say that America should raise taxes.

* They think the stimulus has already worked, apparently under the impression that some significant fraction of the money has been disbursed.

* They endorse the fierce urgency of dealing with climate change. Their calm assurance registers a publication date somewhat before the East-Anglian e-mails went public.

* They tell me a great deal about the recession in Mexico. I am mildly glad to know, but at heart indifferent.

It's probably just as well I don't subscribe.

"Are You Satisfied with the Jury, Ms. Boxer?" Asked the Stranger Mockingly*

2009-11-28T20:58:00.010-05:00

Tonight, Turner Classic Movies is showing the film version of Stephen Vincent Benet's short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster." In the olden days, apparently, senators' services to their constituents extended even to legal representation in supernatural court cases.

It makes me wonder: if I needed to win a lawsuit against the devil for my immortal soul, what present-day U.S. senator would I want representing me? If John Edwards were still in the Senate, I'd pick him in a heartbeat on the presumption that he'd be an even more unscrupulous lawyer than Mr. Scratch. But if my choice is limited to senators currently in office, I find myself at a loss. "The Devil and Harry Reid"? "The Devil and Al Franken"? "The Devil and Olympia Snowe"? "The Devil and Robert Byrd"? "The Devil and Chuck Grassley"? "The Devil and Roland Burris"? "The Devil and Frank Lautenberg"? Uh....

I guess part of the problem is that half the choices have probably already sold their own souls -- or would, if the devil just made them the right offer. Come to think of it, I'm not sure that a couple of senators (Leahy, Schumer) aren't Satan himself in disguise. The only senator I can think of who even has the character and stature to go toe-to-toe with the Prince of Darkness is John McCain...but he couldn't even beat Barack Obama, for goodness' sake!
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[*"Please address me as 'Senator,'" Barbara Boxer snapped. "I worked hard for that title!"]

"Which is Highest?"

2009-11-28T12:22:00.006-05:00

Apropos of Withywindle's thoughts about loyalty in politics, a passage from Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer (chapter 33):

Once more I heard footsteps, now the slow, firm tread of a man; I knew at once that it was Master Malrubius....He came into my circle of vision. His cloak was dusty, as it always was save on the most formal occasions; he drew it about him in the old way as he seated himself on a box of properties. "Severian. Name for me the seven principles of governance."

It was an effort for me to speak, but I managed (in my dream, if it was a dream) to say, "I do not recall that we have studied such a thing, Master."

"You were always the most careless of my boys," he told me, and fell silent.

A foreboding grew on me; I sensed that if I did not reply, some tragedy would occur. At last I began weakly, "Anarchy..."

"That is not governance, but the lack of it. I taught you that it precedes all governance. Now list the seven sorts."

"Attachment to the person of the monarch. Attachment to a bloodline or other sequence of succession. Attachment to the royal state. Attachment to a code legitimizing the governing state. Attachment to the law only. Attachment to a greater or lesser board of electors, as framers of the law. Attachment to an abstraction conceived as including the body of electors, other bodies giving rise to them, and numerous other elements, largely ideal."

"Tolerable. Of these, which is the earliest form, and which is the highest."

"The development is in the order given, Master," I said. "But I do not recall that you ever asked before which was highest."

Master Malrubius leaned forward, his eyes burning brighter than the coals of the fire. "Which is highest, Severian?"

"The last, Master?"

"You mean attachment to an abstraction conceived as including the body of electors, other bodies giving rise to them, and numerous other elements, largely ideal?"

"Yes, Master."

"Of what kind, Severian, is your own attachment to the Divine Entity?"

I said nothing. It may have been that I was thinking; but if so, my mind was too much filled with sleep to be conscious of its thought. Instead, I became profoundly aware of my physical surroundings. The sky above my face in all its grandeur seemed to have been made solely for my benefit, and to be presented for my inspection now. I lay upon the ground as upon a woman, and the very air that surrounded me seemed a thing as admirable as crystal and as fluid as wine.

"Answer me, Severian."

"The first, if I have any."

"To the person of the monarch."

"Yes, because there is no succession."

"The animal that rests beside you now [Severian's dog Triskele] would die for you. Of what kind is his attachment to you?"

"The first?"

There was no one there. I sat up. Malrubius and Triskele had vanished, yet my side felt faintly warm.

The point appears to be that our loyalty to an abstraction (like "America" or "democracy") must partake of the most primal of commitments -- that the progression of loyalties must in some sense circle around to its beginnings -- or loyalty becomes dangerously fragile and perhaps even morally questionable. How such a circling-back is to be achieved is a difficult question.

Facepalm

2009-11-27T21:58:00.004-05:00

FLG's get-rich scheme may be a little half-baked...but, as it turns out, so was this:

1. Build thousands and thousands of artificial islands that look cool from space.
2. ???
3. Profit!

On Loyalty

2009-11-27T21:24:00.003-05:00

I've gotten to the point in Cicero's Letters to Atticus where, after Caesar crosses the Rubicon, Cicero decides to join Pompey's forces. He puts it (self-justifyingly, self-importantly, doubtless) that he does not do so for principle, since he takes the Republic to be doomed; nor for any belief that Pompey will win; nor for any belief that Pompey is a particularly good man; but for gratitude, loyalty, since Pompey rescued Cicero from exile, and Cicero is in his debt.

It strikes me, reading this, how attenuated loyalty has become in our modern political discourse. (Let us assume here a partisan swipe at Democrats and liberals, even less animated by loyalty than Republicans and conservatives, but not pay over much mind to that swipe. Compared with Cicero's Rome, or the feudal Middle Ages, all Americans are remarkably disloyal creatures; loyalty to something so large and abstract as a nation-state is slim pickings by historical standards.) Truman, of course, was blamed for excessive loyalty to the Pendergast machine, and I've just been reading about Bush's 'excessive' loyalty to John Sununu. And the Bushes, pere et fils, in general are blasted for overvaluing loyalty. It seems to me that loyalty - attachment to a person, an institution, irrespective of abstract principle, 'my country right or wrong,' 'my friend right or wrong,' - is generally regarded as an immaturity, a barbarity, something to be overcome. This, I would think, is something Weber (or some other clever German) must have noticed when he talked about the rationalization of society, the reduction of morality to abstract principle; mature people love democracy, backward sorts love one another.

On the other hand, surely loyalty is everywhere as the actual motivator of behavior, political and otherwise. What are party-line votes but exercises in loyalty; isn't the actual material of politics still a matter of patrons, clients, and mutual loyalties? Soldiers still fight because they are loyal to the men in the platoon by their side; workers are loyal to their companies. I think I could add many more examples.

So, it's not so much that all this durn modern world has attenuated traditional concepts like loyalty - although I suppose it has - as that it has made us increasingly incapable of discussing loyalty in any accurate manner, even to understand our own loyalties. Perhaps I should say that loyalty is most impressive as a virtue when we have the words to articulate it as a virtue, and, lacking those words, loyalty attaches itself to vices rather than virtues.

Carl Schmitt, and his friend-enemy distinction, lurks in the background here. And amicitia.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T02:38:00.006-05:00

Scene of prosperity from the Ara Pacis Augustae (9 B.C.)

James Wood, Paul Auster, and Me

2009-11-25T19:06:00.010-05:00

James Wood, whom I like, takes an unfriendly scalpel to Paul Auster, about whom I've been fairly ambivalent. I started reading Wood's piece with something like eagerness, because I've always had the feeling that there was something cheap about Auster's novels and that he ought to be debunked as a postmodern talent. But by the time I finished reading I found myself, strangely enough, on Auster's side.

Wood's basic complaint about Auster is that he's solemnly banal, that he expects us to take situations seriously when they're nothing more than clichés. Auster's prose too, says Wood, is cliché-ridden and highly readable only because it and Auster's plots are undemanding. Auster's postmodern gimmicks are lazy as well: they subvert the text only perfunctorily, and they fail to disturb the reader because the plot never acquired enough reality for its realism to be called into question: "Because nothing is persuasively assembled, the inevitable postmodern disassembly leaves one largely untouched."

It's all such a plausible critique, and I'm quite surprised that I regard it as unfair.

I began to dissent from Wood where he asserts that we can't take the feelings of Auster's characters seriously. Here's an example, from City of Glass, of an Austerian (Austrian?) situation Wood says we can't be expected to buy into:

[Quinn] wanted to be there to stop him. He knew he could not bring his own son back to life, but at least he could prevent another from dying. It had suddenly become possible to do this, and standing there on the street now, the idea of what lay before him loomed up like a terrible dream.

Wood says Auster has offered a "balsa-wood backstory" -- the death of Quinn's son -- to explain Quinn's extravagant compulsions. It's certainly true that a dead child is a well-worn novelistic motivation, and it's also true that lost loved ones haunt almost all of Auster's characters. Somehow, though, I have trouble seeing Quinn's motivation as phony or jerry-built. People's children do die; those deaths do impact them profoundly; people do often react to loss by trying to redress it via symbolic substitutes later in their lives. Is a novelist somehow culpable for exploiting one of life's commonest and most deeply-felt tragedies?

More importantly, though, my recollection of City of Glass is that Quinn's motivation -- his vain desire to undo the loss of his son -- is the most real thing in an utterly surreal and improbable story. In fact, it's almost all we're left with at the end of the novella when the plot as a whole unspools into futility. Likewise with other works by Auster. In Oracle Night, for example, the story-within-a-story and the strange coincidences all fizzle, and what's left is the guilt, pain, and desire of Sidney Orr and his wife.

Reading Wood, and especially his comments on Auster's new novel Invisible, I became more and more persuaded that this might be the point of Auster's fiction: the reality and value of human feelings in the face of a world which is simultaneously banal and insane -- even, perhaps, in the face of all the absurd deformations to which attempts to represent world and self are subject.

I admit Wood's point about Auster being readable because the prose is relentlessly conventional. I'd lay even more stress than Wood does on the fact that Auster's plots are full of sex and cute mystifications and the quasi-erudite trivia that readers of contemporary novels tend to love. And maybe these aspects of Auster's books explain the greater part of his popularity. But....

But doesn't Auster somehow manage to make us relate to, and identify with, his outrageously illusive, paper-thin characters? I would claim that he does, and, having thought about it a bit after reading Wood's critique, I think I would identify this as Auster's major strength as a novelist. Isn't it remarkable that we can work up so much compassion not just for Quinn and Orr but for trivial, doomed mannequins like Nashe and Pozzi in The Music of Chance? Isn't the sympathy precisely the Austerian quality that's flagrantly missing from the Auster parody at the start of Wood's article? Isn't it possible that readers respond to Auster in part because the pervasive disconnect in Auster's books between inner soul and outer world is something that many of them, lost amid the twenty-first century's free-floating signifiers, actually feel?

Maybe not. Wood could no doubt make an excellent case that the defense of Auster I've just sketched is pedestrian and reveals my own lack of taste. Nevertheless, after reading Wood, I feel as if I finally have the kernel of a plausible justification for having enjoyed some of Auster's books.

Miscellaneous VII

2009-11-24T20:28:00.003-05:00

* Observed in class today. With some advance warning, so I was a little more sparkling than otherwise. However, it wasn't all that different from the way I teach on a good day. It felt solid, and nice. Observing prof seemed happy.

* An analogy that came to me in class: the Gentleman's Agreement and the 1980s car quotas both involved 'voluntary' restrictions by the Japanese of exports to the US, one of people and one of cars. An interesting parallel - and one I'd never have thought of if I hadn't taught this course.

* The job wikis make it sound as if two of the few jobs I applied for have already chosen non-Withywindle people for the second round of interviews. However, certain geographical moves are now excluded possibilities, which is a silver lining.

* Looking at who got jobs I applied for last year - Unbelievably Prestigious University hired someone with no publications whatsoever, and an unfinished dissertation. I'm sure Hated Successful Rival has a brilliant dissertation, and all sorts of reasons to deserve the job, but this rankles.

* Got proofs for my edited book of primary sources. I will work on them over Winter Break. I am happy I've done something to provide easier access to primary sources for the world at large.

* Happy Thanksgiving!

Incredible (UPDATED)

2009-11-24T14:21:00.008-05:00

Fox News is the only major TV network covering the climate change data hack?

Yet more evidence for the bizarre truth: Fox is fairer and more balanced that the rest of the television media. I haven't known Fox to bury a major news story whose coverage favors the Left.

UPDATE: CBS has now done a story on the CRU hack -- on its web site. (A good story, actually, with details like how even the FORTRAN code from CRU includes comments like "Apply a VERY ARTIFICIAL correction for decline!")

Reasons

2009-11-24T08:58:00.005-05:00

I've just learned that the bishop of Providence, Rhode Island, has denied communion to Representative Patrick Kennedy because of his stance on abortion.

I was a little surprised. I had assumed Kennedy was being refused the sacrament because he's a complete douchebag.

United Provinces

2009-11-23T15:56:00.002-05:00

Maybe the proper model for the European Union is the United Provinces - a completely tangled mess of local authorities exercising veto power on the central government. Except the UP had Holland & Amsterdam as the driving motors to get things done, and even a self-confident Germany wouldn't be quite so powerful within Europe as Holland & Amsterdam were within the UP. But still: it is worth recollecting that a completely tangled mess can do quite well for decades or centuries.

Vaguely inspired by FLG's link to a Charlemagne post.