The Lizard Brain

William Timberman1 Comment

I stepped out the back door this morning to light my pipe and promptly encountered a pale-green horned caterpillar, with black markings, about as long as my index finger and almost as thick, humping its way across the raised concrete walkway between the house and the garage. It lowered itself painstakingly down the step to the sidewalk and rippled onward toward the back yard. At that point a lizard dashed up to it, looked up at me, and dashed back out of view — a flick of lizard lightning which almost made me jump.

Absent-mindedly trying to honor the Prime Directive, I stepped back into the shadow of the garage, hoping to see without being seen. I should have known better. The lizard dashed up again, looked me directly in the eye and dashed back. The caterpillar continued humping slowly along, oblivious to its approaching doom. When the lizard deemed the relative distances between himself, the caterpillar, and me to be propitious, he dashed up yet a third time, neatly nipped off the caterpillar’s head, and dashed back to his hiding place under a sprig of rosemary beside the long wall of the garage.

The dying caterpillar’s reflexes coiled its body into a tight spiral. The lizard peered intently at me from under his rosemary sprig. I watched for a minute or so longer, hoping to see the final disposition of his prey, then relented and stepped back inside the house. When I went back out again an hour later, all evidence of the preceding melodrama had disappeared.

How does it go, Nature red in tooth and claw…? I suppose I should be grateful that there aren’t any tigers under the rosemary.

Must We Say It Yet Again?

William Timberman

Despite the contempt expressed for honest people by modern campaign managers, foreign policy experts, and the heads of national intelligence services, honesty is not a form of mental retardation. People who tell the truth as they see it aren’t stupid. They’re very well aware that in the short run, lying can be effective in getting you something you want, or in keeping something you don’t want at a distance, and they know as well as anyone does that the commercial and political advantages accruing to adept practitioners of the dark arts of modern advertising and propaganda are real enough. So why do they still continue to believe, against all the accumulated evidence, that honesty is the best policy?

The answer, it seems to me, is based on a principle that you might call the diminishing marginal utility of cleverness. If one lie succeeds in its purpose, a clever person is probably justified in thinking that a second lie will work just as well. A truly sophisticated clever person, equipped with the all the latest sociological and neuroscientific research, and in control of a major media outlet or two, might well conclude that he can make a lie serve as well as the truth for the majority of those he wishes to influence to his own benefit. As it turns out, however, lying doesn’t scale as well as the research predicts.

Abraham Lincoln is famous for saying that you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Maybe not, but given the tools available these days, there seems to be no shortage of clever people willing to give it a try. The jury is still out on whether or not their innovations will ultimately prove to be successful, at least in the terms which matter to them. What we do know is that a society which reaches the point at which everyone lies about everything all the time is more likely to experience a terminal exhaustion than a resurgence of interest in the truth. The late, unlamented Soviet Union is probably the best example we have of what happens when the substitution of systematic lying for honest discourse reaches its apogee.

The much-quoted witticism about the Soviet economy: They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work, sums up the consequences very nicely. We may lack the power to unmask the liar, or refute his lies, but we can certainly succumb to paranoia, cognitive dissonance, apathy and finally, a general collapse of trust. Just how smart, I have to wonder, is anyone eager to contribute to such an outcome? Whatever the answer, to remain honest seems to me a more attractive ambition for anyone with a concern for his immortal soul, even if it means that the smart money will always be invested with someone else.

Brief Encounters with Austrians

William Timberman

Fiat Currency. Fractional Reserve Banking. Collectivism. Curse words as familiar these days on the Intertubes as socialist or liberal used to be at Baptist church suppers. Disciples of the Austrian Holy Trinity  — Hayek, Von Mises, and Rothbard — are everywhere these days, and everywhere eager to counsel us that any houses we build in the future must be paid for, not with electrons and promises, but with actual money — you know, hard money, money you can bite down on, money that you can toss up in the air like Scrooge McDuck, and actually feel it hit you on the head when it comes down. They’re having none of this stuff that any government can conjure on a computer, and any central bank can issue. They claim that civic virtue is what’s driving them, but I suspect that they’re just out of breath chasing events that they don’t understand, and consequently need a rest more than they need our attention.

Yes, hard money would certainly slow things down for a time. People who presently have access to hard money, or can imagine themselves having access to it in the future, think that this would be a Good Thing, inasmuch as it would a) give them more leisure to lecture us on eternal verities, and b) keep the political fantasists and other rabble at bay until better security measures could be devised.

They’re wrong, of course. It’s not just that they’d have to put down the masses of people pissed at being forced to give up their iPads and go back to grubbing on somebody else’s acreage all day with only a dish of oaten gruel as their reward at the end of it. They’d also have to figure out how to finance a dozen nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and accompanying battle groups to replenish the gold they’d frittered away producing goods that no one but themselves had enough hard money to buy.

So what else is on offer, and who’s offering it? These days, business as usual, of the kind prescribed by Wolfgang Schäuble on the far side of the Atlantic, or Hank Paulson closer to home, has about it the unmistakeable odor of wishful thinking. Slightly left technocrats agree, and offer us Keynes instead. They swear it’s because his theories work, but I suspect that at least part of their enthusiasm arises from the notion that adopting his theories would put them in charge again, which for them, if not for us, is reason enough. Revolutionaries are still trying to exhume Marx — brush the grave-mold off his burial suit, put a little touch of rouge on his cheeks, they say, and  he’s good to go again. With all due respect for what he accomplished in his day, I doubt it.

We need to do better than this. What do we mean by freedom? What do we mean by prosperity? Is capitalism — any form of capitalism — really essential to either? Who’s minding the store anyway? I can’t really blame the Hayekians for asking similar questions, but when it comes to answers, I’d as soon consult my local astrologer.

…And I’m in the Kitchen. WIth the Tombstone Blues.

William Timberman

President Obama is golfing with John Boehner. Frau Merkel is resting comfortably, but avoiding her finance minister until Sarkozy’s love bites fade. MIchele Bachmann is now Snow White. The Seven Twelve Dwarfs are still dwarfs. The Wall Street Journal makes Leopold Bloom the mayor a denizen of Dublin. David Brooks blames Fannie and Freddie. Juan Cole is burning his trash. It’s June 18, 2011, and this is the news…

Mortem Confundit Magus*

William Timberman

Businessmen say going forward instead of in the future. Our Secretary of State says that Muammar al-Qaddafi must acknowledge what the International Community requires of him. A respected liberal economist, defending the necessity of nuclear power plants, remarks that it’s unlikely that the Chernobyl accident produced more than 50,000 excess deaths world-wide. He seems to take it for granted that this simple statistic will rekindle our faith in Atoms for Peace.

Why does no one in public life sound like this any more?

It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

The wizard can bare his breast to the assassin’s dagger without blinking, and the Son of God can carry his own cross with confidence to Calvary because their mortal forms are mere teaching points. Abraham Lincoln understood this in a way that our present leaders do not. Secure in the vast powers at their disposal, they seem to have forgotten that they’re nevertheless as mortal as the rest of us, and that, in the end, their powers are only on loan to them. We can’t afford such a luxurious forgetfulness; we have to deal with the consequences of their actions every day. It wouldn’t hurt, I think, to remind them of that fact from time to time.

*The wizard confounds death — from the 1981 fantasy film, Dragonslayer — a wonderful bit of whimsy, part Sorcerer’s Apprentice, part Arthurian legend. This line is spoken by no less grand a thespian than Sir Ralph Richardson himself, in the role of an old wizard with a flair for Shakespearean declamation even in Latin.

WordPress Boogie-Woogie

William Timberman1 Comment

After being lost in the fog like Brigadoon for more than a month, Dogtown is back. The story is an all-too common one, I’m afraid. In order to resolve some nasty response-time issues, Dogtown’s host, GoDaddy, offered to move everything to a more capable server. When they did, things broke, which gave me the opportunity to learn more about WordPress and MySQL database management than I ever wanted to know.

Thanks to some excellent advice from GoDaddy technical support, though, and the moral support of more savvy friends, it all seems to have come right in the end, and the place is functional again. Apologies to anyone who visited during the dark time — unfettered access to everyone all the time is the intended policy here. Really.

Now, then…what exactly was I doing before the lights went out? There ought to be some half-completed drafts lying around here somewhere….

An Open Letter to Juan Cole

William Timberman

Today Juan Cole has written An Open Letter to the Left on Libya. In it, he urges …the Left to learn to chew gum and walk at the same time, meaning that it should support the UN Security Council/NATO/US bombing enterprise in Libya. (Among all these august agencies, it’s hard to know which is wearing the fig leaf — and which isn’t — but I suppose that rounding up all the usual suspects stands a decent chance of including the real actors in this latest morality play put on for us by the rulers of Oceania.)

Since my views make me more or less part of the Left, albeit not a very prominent part, I feel duty-bound to respond:

When I read of the The Responsibility to Protect, I’m reminded of the motto of the old Strategic Air Command: Peace Is Our Profession. There’s a sense in which that motto was perfectly true, and another in which it represented a ghastly moral inversion—Thanatos dressed up as Eros, complete with rouged cheeks and false eyelashes.

I remember too that the Pentagon found Dr. Strangelove insulting. Perhaps it was, but it was also a cry of desperation, which, now I come to think of it, had less to do with H-bombs per se than it did with the men who built and deployed them with such perfectly clear consciences.

I first wrote that elsewhere, for another audience, but it will do very nicely for Juan Cole today, or for anyone else overcome by such well-meaning delusions of grandeur in the future.

Saved from the American Conflagration

William Timberman1 Comment

To be placed in a shrine impervious to Russell Pearce and his bilious followers….

The Declaration of Independence

Except for the abused people referred to as …inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages…, and the people transported here against their will from their homes in Africa, and kept in cruel and abject bondage for generations, a promising beginning.

The Constitution of the United States

An intelligent and remarkably valiant attempt to mix oil and water, which managed to endure for 220 years, more or less. In its later amendments, particularly the 13th, 14th, 15th, 19th and 24th, some evidence that the promise of the founders might one day be fulfilled.

Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address

The clearest warning we ever got.

Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address

Expiation.

Emma Lazarus’ The Colossus

The promise renewed.

A Tinkerer’s Damnation

William Timberman5 Comments

Originally appeared as a comment on Autonomy for All. Reposted here with minor changes.

Tinkering…. As good a word as any for a dearth of political will. I hate to bash Brad DeLong, who’s one of the good guys, and doesn’t really deserve a snarking, but he’s a classic case of the technocrat who believes in all the seemingly correct policy solutions, yet is left as helpless as the rest of us by the madness of Realpolitik, not to mention the madness of people who wouldn’t recognize realism if it bit them in the ass.

Here’s Professor DeLong, who’s as smart as we make them these days, waxing ironic:

And here we reach the limits of my mental horizons as a neoliberal, as a technocrat, as a mainstream neoclassical economist. Right now the global market economy is suffering a grand mal seizure of high unemployment and slack demand. We know the cures–fiscal stimulus via more government spending, monetary stimulus via provision by central banks of the financial assets the private sector wants to hold, institutional reform to try once gain to curb the bankers’ tendency to indulge in speculative excess under control. Yet we are not doing any of them. Instead, we are calling for “austerity.”

It may make for decent theater, but irony is hardly the best defense against the limitations of the intellect in situations like the one we all find ourselves facing today. Neither is cognitive dissonance, as in the governor of Wisconsin — Wisconsin, for Christ’s sake — threatening to use the National Guard to shoot public employees who object to being beggared by a nasty right-wing ideologue. Or, if you’d rather read about the problems of furriners, this: The Arab World’s Triple Crisis.

If Professors DeLong and Krugman can’t handle the political implications of our manifold current crises, who can? My answer is that no one can, not and remain unscathed. Our future is no longer strictly a mattter of policies good or bad, and no matter how much we might wish it to be otherwise, the outcome has become unpredictable.