de Maistre and Radical chic

Theists daydream about crushing modernity, in favor of "Radical Orthodoxy".

One of Isaiah Berlin's finest works (see the side-links) was his essay about the intellectual outlook of Joseph de Maistre, the staunchly conservative Catholic Savoyard who lived through the French Revolution and wrote whitheringly against it, against modernity, against rationality, and against all points un-Catholic.

His great insight was about the dark side of human nature- how people want to be in chains, want to sin and be forgiven, want to sacrifice their lives on the altar of authority, and thus need and want to be led by their betters, or indeed by anyone with plausible authority. He saw clearly the acidic nature of rationality and atheism, which would wash away the veneration of throne and altar as divine manifestations, imperturbable and unanswerable, which best undergirds such patriarchal, hierarchical systems. He despised the French revolution, yet was fascinated by power, legitimate and illigitimate. One can see clear affinities with Machiavelli, even as de Maistre hewed devotedly to the Roman Catholic church (see fideism). He knew that to see through the contingency of such institutions and theistic rationalizations was to destroy everything- to destabilize the delicate threads of society, with no assurance that anything at all, or at any rate anything worthwhile, was ready to replace them.

Echos of de Maistre's philosophy, which was highly influential in its time, especially in reactionary Russia and restoration France, continue down to our day, through Fascism, opposition to Vatican II, Opus Dei, and most recently, in a curious phenomenon that calls itself "Radical Orthodoxy" (RO). Not coherent enough or palatable enough to be a philosphy, RO calls itself a "sensibility", and seeks the usual conservative dream of universal subservience to clergy and church- of stability promised by verities imbibed unthinkingly and enforced ruthlessly. A medieval world where being outside the church is literally unthinkable, and atheism but a rumor from far away and long ago.

de Maistre's views were a powerful antidote to the enlightenment faith in human rationality, which did indeed have an excessively sangine view of our (or at least revolutionary Frenchmen's) ability to reshape society to the ideals of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, instead authoring a rather sanguinary episode that was saved (depending on one's view of him) only by the Machiavellian hand of Napoleon and his even more sanguinary excesses abroad (admittedly, in response to the relentless aggression of the horrified theo/auto-cratic enemies of the French revolution).

Optimism or pessimism about the human condition- that is the question. In the end, even de Maistre knew he was waging at best a holding operation, since the progress of the sciences and rational thought was so demonstrable and invigorating to so many, despite the missteps along the way. It was left to the next century for the full excesses of each extreme to be made explicit in the death-grapple between Germany, with its romantic religion of Volk und Blut, and the Stalinist dictatorship of the proletariat. Each partook in some measure of both extremes, claiming rationalist sanction by way of various pseudosciences (race studies and eugenics on the one hand, and historical determinism on the other, among many others), while also feeding deeply on romantic irrationalist attitudes, including leader-cults and nationalism, to create updated terror-states.

Thankfully, other political systems have cast a less harsh light on the possibilities of reason in the guidance of human affairs, but the modern age remains deeply discomfiting to those who are not at home in the ultimately self-determined and meaningless nihilism of fully realized modernism. This nexus of self-made meaning, rampant liberty, and penetrating skepticism offend those who seek timeless truth and structure in their inner and outer lives, however illusory.

Thus Radical Orthodoxy, a minor theological revolt from the Anglican church that sidles up to Rome, (indeed holding a recent conference right by the Vatican, with the howlingly misleading title "The Grandeur of Reason"), and offers patently irrationalist mystical maunderings to communicate its "sensibility". A sensibility which offers a critique without criticism- a cry of protest against modernism without rational content, as far as I can tell (or Mr. J. Irwin either, who was there). Which seems, at base, to wish its way back into the early middle ages, when life was good for the clergy, everyone knew their place, and none of the doubts introduced by the Renaissance had yet reared their head, let alone the utterly corrosive skepticism of modernity. Indeed, they have something of a bone to pick with the eleventh century pre-scholastic Duns Scotus, [ed. note- a correspondent points out below that Scotus was 13th-14th century, and taught at the height of scholasticism] and his excessive use of reason! No community will be conceivable outside the church, and while the church will be perfectly humble and humanistic, somehow nothing could be done or authorized without its sanction.

What is the Grandeur of reason, in their eyes? Well to quote Irwin, "What brings this reductionism to pass, it is claimed by both [pope] Benedict and Radical Orthodoxy, is the ‘self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable’." The grandeur of reason turns out to be its extension and broadening into faith- thus giving blind faith the name "reason" just because, well, reason has a nice ring to it in this modern age, doesn't it? Apparently the outright proclamation of faith, pure and simple, is unappetizing for theologians who call themselves "thinkers", so their answer is to slap the sticker of reason on whatever they happen to hold as faith, and hope no one notices.

The self-applied moniker of "Radical" is not RO's only claim to chic, for they are self-avowedly postmodernist as well. Whatever claims to deconstruct modernism and reach beyond the horrors of penetrating rational thought is their friend, and postmodernism is certainly that, since in most understandings it attacks the very capability of humans to understand anything, as per Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault, to the point that their own writings demonstrate what they set out to prove. It is a fellow obscurantism with which the RO theists feel very much at home. All the same, they appear blind to how postmodernism is even more thoroughly critical of the "logocentrism" and other universal narratives that RO wishes to shelter from thought than it is of the residual certainties of modernism.

For that is the point of RO, isn't it? To proclaim, propagate, and enforce an orthodoxy (kerygmatically, as they would say) without skepticism, quarter or second thought. That is why they yearningly look up to the Catholic church, which stands as such a monolith of unappealable, unapologetic, infallible orthodoxy in a sea of doubt and skepticism, even as it quietly steers its ship with the times, claiming to be best friends with the Muslims and Jews after all, casting off limbo with a press release, settling pederasty case after case as quietly as it can, and otherwise reluctantly trimming its course to the critiques of enlightened reason and morality. And the ruby slippers, dresses, and hats- out of this world!

de Maistre would be deeply pleased by the continued appeal of ultra-conservative thought. His battle goes on and on, one golden age replaced by another in the rear-view mirror, and those who have authority based on nothing other than superstition and tradition deathly afraid that the winds of reason will lift up their skirts and blow them away.

Incidental links:

• Mullahs and the postmodernists.
• Fascinating and revolting tale of a postmodernist taking it to the limit.
• The Sokal hoax, uncovering postmodern pretensions and obscurantism.
• A theist puzzles over RO.
• A correspondent provides an excellent primer on RO.

The meaning of charisma

It is curious how religion propagates through charismatic personalities. What does that say about its truth?

The charismatic personality is something mysterious and powerful. People such as Bernie Madoff, Robert Schuller, Joan of Arc, Steve Jobs, Jesus of Nazareth, and Barak Obama project an aura of complete conviction and meaning that leads to great social power. When everyone yearns for meaning, those who seem to have it figured out and wrapped up with a bow, yours for only $99.99, are the purveyors of the ultimate product.

This came to mind while reading that the televangalism empire of Robert Schuller is falling apart amid his attempt to grant, and then revoke, succession to his son, also named Robert Schuller. Do scientists and engineers spread their "truths" by such fragile and nepotistic means, dependent on the salesmanship of motivational speaking and the intimacies of televised rhetoric? Apparently not.

Personal meaning is the currency of charisma, and speech its medium. Obama electrified the nation with his "journey" which said implicitly that we collectively might not be bad people, but good people. We might not be torturers, bigots, and killers, but a generation that heals and transcends the divides of race, terror, and culture. What that meant for each of us was powerful, and resonated increasingly the more we learned of his capacity to be the change through his own moral composure and competence.

Very well- the political system has granted us the means to re-imagine and redefine our social meanings. It is religion, however, that traffics in even more ultimate meanings, purporting to situate us in narratives of cosmic importance, artfully contrived out of the many myths and imaginings of our ancestors, refined into a supremely addictive product that, once ingested and believed, appears to be virtually impossible to kick.

Whether it is the story that we are loved unconditionally and utterly by an invisible god, (though if we do not believe we will burn in hell forever), or the story that we are on the side of good with our god Ahura Mazda in an eternal fight against evil, as proclaimed by Zarathustra, each religious construct exists to situate us as meaningful, valuable beings in what is otherwise an intrinsically meaningless universe.

What is different about these narratives, each full of meaning, yet so different in their premises and plausibility? Must personal meaning come from narratives involving supernatural beings, or can it also derive from reality-based narratives? That is the existential question, and the answer is that reality-based meanings are always relational and relative. They are situated in our historical, social and intellectual worlds, which are fluid and changing as new issues, new goals, and new forms of consciousness arise. They can never be absolute.

Religion offers absolute meaning staked on completely exterior references. That is why the supernatural is such a fixture of the religious experience. It offers a separate geography for the safe-keeping of ideals, dreams, and wishes, completely unsullied and unaccountable to the here and now. That is also why religious leaders claim their truths and guidance to be unchanging (even infallible!), even as they work tirelessly to keep up with social trends, or else give up the ghost to others that do.

The artists of religion are its charismatic preachers and especially prophets, who offer themselves as mediums of divine inspiration and fulfillment, conduits to a more perfect world. But of course that ideal world is not separate or absolute, but is entirely a matter of imagination, and some of its imagineers are more in tune with the times and persuasive than others. The competition between such imaginative visions is called theology, except when it degenerates into actual warfare, in which case it is called Jihad, or Crusade, or the thirty-years war, etc.

A similar phenomenon takes place these days on the "motivational" speaking circuit, where luminaries of rhetorical skill and celebrity draw audiences searching for meaning and fulfillment, though this time it is, as a rule, meaning in their work, and fulfillment in the form of money. The economic system relies on many jobs that are extremely hard to construe in any deeply meaningful way, yet people need to find meaning to keep their sanity. Thus the need for motivational speaking, which reframes the work of capitalism as life fulfillment, as Olympic-caliber competition, or as military valor. Inspiration comes in a kaleidoscope of heroic forms.

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These threads all come together in the work of the Reverend Dr. Creflo A. Dollar, whose Christian ministry (and "Change Experience" revivals) promise earthly prosperity and eternal happiness, all for a low contribution, since, as his scriptural motto goes: "Give, and it shall be given unto you".

Most divines naturally look down their noses at this crass mixture of the sacred and the prosperous, as if real human meaning could never be found in this world, but only in the next. In this position they may be less personally fraudulent than the Reverend Dollar, but they are still selling what has to be termed a big lie. Indeed, Christians often will argue that they recognize that their Christ story is, on the face of it, so preposterous and absurd that they would be the last to believe it, were it not that it really did happen and really is true. (Unlike all those other religions!)

Anyhow, the common denominator in these insprirational interactions is the imaginative construction and infusion of meaning into human existence- an existence that has little meaning on its own, and thus cries out for assistance, whether high or low. Assistence comes from those who have the gift to convey their own certitude and faith so well that they can sweep others up into what has been called in Steve Jobs's case, a "Reality distortion field". That was the job of the shaman, as it is of the priest and pastor today. Humans are very suggestible- a property that is essential to our sense of meaning and continuing social existence, but which is also prone to misuse by advertisers, con men, politicians, et al., when not studiously counterbalanced with skepticism.

In government, this essential skepticism has been installed by means of constitutions, separations of power, checks and balances, and party competition, so that suggestibility and mania can be slowed down by some degree of automatic critique and review.

It was the wisdom of the enlightenment to agitate for a similar check on religious zeal: the policy of dissociating it from the state. Given that religions come in all intensities and sizes, and do not necessarily have internal checks and balances, their effect on the society in general needs to be limited lest, as is so common historically, they unite with the state and its instruments of coercion to carry their zeal to all, whether voluntarily receptive or not (see Constantine, et al.).

This separation protects the society at large from religious extremes, but does little to protect those caught in the clutches of religious movements from their own suggestibility. Whether the cult is small (Scientology, CUT) or large (Christianity), human suggestibility and its allied capacities of total belief and commitment can lead to tremendous grief (as well as to tremendous happiness).

And that in the end is the meaning of charisma. Like scientific knowledge, it is a tool that can be used for good or ill. But it is in some ways far more powerful than knowledge alone, since it puts that knowledge to active use. It can unite and carry people into common projects that uplift, give meaning and improve the world, but its generated meanings can just as well be profoundly destructive, as the extreme movements of the twentieth century (Nazi-ism, Boshevism, Mao-ism) make so clear. The charismatic leader can only express and channel what his listeners are prone to hear- what is current or nascent in the zeitgeist. Thus we as individuals have a reciprocal duty to cultivate the better angels of our natures, both in our routine debates and in our responses to extraordinary leadership.

Each of us individually has a duty to recognize our susceptibility to charismatic suggestion and to bring skepticism to bear. But more deeply, we have to recognize that our own skepticism and reason is insufficient in the face of our biases, so we need to seek humility and continually listen to and face honestly what critics have to say. And we should lead our lives, defining our own meaning, rather than following the dictates of others, living or dead.

Related links:

• Old but good book on human herd instincts, by Wilfred Trotter.
• Topical cartoon.
• Suicide-martydom correlates more with service attendance than with religious belief.

PTSD politics

Thoughts on Palestine as a case of PTSD politics.

Trauma and victimization are profoundly and permanently damaging. Recent stories about Iraq veterans show the permanent changes that can be wrought by PTSD, analogous to the permanent brain alterations that follow tobacco, alcohol, or cocaine addiction. Our brains are plastic and impressionable, degraded by degrading conditions. People who are ground down by traumatic conditions are prone to act irrationally and harbor bottomless resentments. Conversely, those brought up in security and prosperity tend to be optimistic and open-minded. That is the underlying rationale for America's "special role" in world affairs, borne as much of our long-term prosperity and security as of our ideals and political example.

To illustrate, the post-9/11 mood on the east coast, especially in Washington, was completely out of proportion to the threat posed, either by the World Trade towers attack or the antrax attacks. The terrorists terrorized (some of) us out of our collective wits without doing very much damage in absolute terms, mostly because Americans had been coddled for decades in a placid, secure country whose major questions revolved around the levels of interest rates and consumer confidence. Our much-vaunted ideals collapsed in a heartbeat, replaced by the vengeful drum-beating of an opportunistic president.

Imagine how we would have reacted had such devastation rained down on us on a daily basis, as in the recent Gaza war, where proportionate damage would have been 83,000 dead per week in the US. Or the recent civil carnage in Iraq, where proportionate damage in the US would have been roughly 20,000 to 30,000 dead per week, every week, for six years. The mind reels at what would have happened to our society. (Compare also the current US-wide death toll of ~825 per week from car accidents and 8,300 premature deaths per week from tobacco).

With this perspective, we can appreciate the intransigence and horror of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. Locked in enmity and mutual trauma, they hate and are hated. They seek revenge and self-respect in the face of dehumanization. The open each other's scabs, and rub salt in the wounds.

Who is at fault? Well, the problem started with the displaced trauma of European antisemitism, reaching its climax in the holocaust.* While Palestinians where largely pro-Hitler and antisemitic by long Islamic tradition, they were peripheral to the convulsive drama of Europe's Jews .. until those Jews showed up on their doorstep, looking for a home. The Zionist project long pre-dated World War two, but that was when a trickle turned into a flood, and integration of the rising tide of Jews became impossible. They wanted their own space- Lebensraum, one might say- in Palestine.

They pursued all sorts of means, fair and foul, to get it, ranging from purchases of land to terrorism of the local Arabs. Already from the start, the Palestinians had dysfunctional politics, self-defeating reponses, and some bewilderment as to why, exactly, they were supposed to give up their land because some Europeans had been evil to other Europeans. The claims of Jews to their promised land fell on deaf Palestinian ears, as did the pleadings of the British, who were nominally in charge of the territory. The whole deal just did not make any sense.

Yet with force majeure on their side, and the sympathy of the former colonial powers as well as the US and the UN, the Israeli state was born in the teeth of Arab enmity- teeth which were shortly chipped and broken on the highly westernized military know-how of the young Jewish state in the 1948, 1967, and 1973 wars, culminating in Israel's control of the entire territory of Palestine. Incidentally, as a Europeanized, Westernized outpost, Israel also fulfilled in an ironic way the dreams of the European Crusades for conversion and repossession of the so-called "holy" land.

The traditional and Biblical method of dealing with the Palestinians at this point would have been to kill the males of age and sell the rest into slavery. Unfortunately, the requisite markets for slaves no longer existed, and the Jews had raised their ethical norms in the intervening millennia. Forced exile was another option that was explored, (called, in our hygenic age, "ethnic cleansing"), but naturally, no neighbor wanted to take in the now-traumatized and bitter Palestinians, or indirectly thereby help Israel out of its enormous problem.

So Israel was faced with an existential and moral conundrum: how to deal with an embittered enemy on their doorstep, in territory under their own control, within their own ethical precepts, so recently sharpened by their own travails? The answer was to semi-officially apply a water torture of gradual land purchase and expropriation driven by the most rabidly religious settlers, (who, because they are viewed as "more Jewish" than other Israelis, are given a pass on their unethical behavior and fanaticism, not to mention the irony of being excused from military service), along with big helpings of degrading treatment and collective punishment of the Palestinians via the ensuing occupation. In return, the Palestinians mounted what resistance they could, generally small-scale terrorism and guerrilla warfare.

It is clear that Israel has fundamentally violated its own morals and those of the modern enlightened age in its treatment of the Palestinians. The Palestinians for their part have violated the same norms, though they never subscribed to them, and would never have presented any problem had their territory not been disturbed in the first place. At any rate, the problem is one for the Israelis to resolve, since it is they who have the power: the airforce, the billions in weaponry supplied by the US, the nuclear bombs. For them to claim that the Palestinians are not "partners for peace" is totally disingenuous, since the historical process they have sponsored has rendered the Palestinians justifiably aggrieved, embittered, and traumatized, not to mention powerless in all respects other than to say the one word they can manage ... "No".

It might be useful to note here that there are only two ways to win a war- one is to kill the enemy, and the other is for the enemy to give up. An enemy who refuses to give up is one you can not defeat, (see Vietnam), thus the importance of winning "hearts and minds" in the current parlance, which is far more important than realized, even now.

I had thought that the border wall against the West Bank was the beginning of a good solution, hewing the old adage that good fences make good neighbors. But unfortunately, the Israelis placed the fence not on the 1967 border which would have been the logical (and legal) place to put it, but snaking through Palestinian territory, breaking up numerous communities, all in an effort to include as many settler zones as possible, and to impair as many Palestinian communities in their vicinty as possible.

And on top of that, they still couldn't stay out of the West Bank or Gaza, continuing to build settlements on the other side of the fence, building roads restricted to Israelis, blocking Palestinian roads, patrolling, subjecting Palestinians to checkpoints, blockading trade from time to time, bombing and destroying buildings, etc., etc., etc. So the fence has been highly successful from the Israeli perspective, keeping the other side at bay and pacified in a state comparable to apartheid, as Jimmy Carter put it. But it has not been an equitable boundary upon which to build a peaceful or neighborly relationship.

That is where we are now, and the way forward is for Israel to do what is right- not to give up its own territory in the form of a "right of return" for Palestinian re-assimilation of Israel, but to fairly divide the territory using the 1967 border as a starting point, and make that division stick by getting out of the Palestinian side completely, with a relocated fence. The Palestinians will need a road corridor to communicate between the West Bank and Gaza, so negotiations could exchange land, inch-for-inch, for such a corridor in exchange for selected settlements on the Israeli border.

We can grant that the Palestinian political system is thoroughly dysfunctional, corrupt, and self-defeating. That is no reason for Israel to not do what is right- to disengage its expropriation and occupation activities and let the Palestinians take care of themselves (with reasonable means to do so, like ports of their own in Gaza, open trade, etc). Only by disengaging will either side be able to heal its particular traumas and wounds.

Additionally, the Palestinians have been egged on and used by their false friends in Iran and Syria, doing themselves precious little good, and keeping them from tending to their own interests. The only way to break these relationships is to cut the ground from under the extremists by unilaterally offering and carrying out a fair deal for the Palestinian people.

At this point, one might ask about the Gaza situation. Didn't Israel disengage there, and didn't Hamas keep sending rockets into Israel? I would offer that compared to the problems of outright occupation, the problems of occasional rockets were minor. Additionally, the disengagement was far from complete, since Israel turned around and blockaded the elected Hamas government and otherwise made life very difficult for Gaza. And the proper solution to the rocket attacks was (and remains) to reply with immediate return fire to the point of rocket origin- easily possible with basic spotting capability- rather than to wait in silence, and then indulge in a frenzy of collective punishment, intended to "send a message" or "teach a lesson" in the form of 100-to-1 killing rates ... lessons that are never learned at the point of a gun. (See a revolting piece of embedded reporting in TNR.)

The remaining problem will be their continuing economic relationship, which is extensive. Palestinian workers endure dehumanizing daily crossings to work in Israel, and many other critical if fraught relationships exist. No doubt Israel will be tempted to exert pressure on its neighbor in perpetuity by these means, its economy being far more vibrant and influential. It is, of course, a temptation to be resisted, since nothing good comes of such pressure, as amply documented in the relationship to date. Israel's interest on every count- demographically, economically, and strategically, is to promote the economic development of Palestine, and Israel should offer treaties to that effect.

In the same vein, it is not Israel's job or right to control the tunnels or other trade routes into Gaza. If Gazans want to import their own bombs, tanks, etc., they should be able to do so. Using such weapons is another matter, but it is ultimately deceptive as well as futile to claim disengagement from the Palestinians while controlling their most basic contacts with the outside world. Without having responsibility for themselves, Palestinians will never take responsibility vis-a-vis Israel.

At any rate, the solution lies in fairness, separation, and disengagement. The only power the Palestinians have is to say no to the Israeli offers of peace, to offer token resistance with small arms and suicide terror, or rioting and rocks when pressed to extremis. Even this power/resentment would largely dissolve if Israel unilaterally provided a fair and sustainable territorial solution as outlined above, rather than continuing to treat the Palestinians as subhuman objects of slow-motion expropriation. And how do we get Israel to do what is right? Simply by withdrawing our various forms of support if they don't. Whether Israel got to this intransigent and immoral position consciously or not, the US has the leverage to dislodge them from it. (See a Cohn piece on tough love..)

It is sad and ironic that, to realize their Zionist dream, Jews turned around and created the very ghettos, dehumanization, and hatred that they fled in Europe. It is time to recover the humanity of both sides, by giving the Palestinians what is right (with or without negotiations) and allowing both sides to begin a healing process that will take generations.

Related links:

• Podcasted discussion along the lines above, with Antony Loewenstein, heard after I wrote this.
  
• Bush secretly supplies arms to Fatah, in hopes of a coup against Hamas.
  
• Friedman makes similar points, indirectly.
  
• Cohen, on how similar rational engagement with Iran would be extremely helpful.
  
• Lengthy podcast on Israel and the fence, putatively "balanced".
• Lengthy historical treatment.
  
• Frontline segment about settlers.
• Later article on Obama's reluctance in this area.
• Later, Hitchens with an excellent piece on Israeli clerical extremism

Incidentally, an excellent review of Darwin, on this anniversary

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* Let me note as an aside that one of the anti-semites in chief was none other than the founder of Protestantism- Martin Luther:

Martin Luther, "On the Jews and their lies", 1543

My advice, as I said earlier, is: First, that their synagogues be burned down, and that all who are able toss in sulphur and pitch; it would be good if someone could also throw in some hellfire. That would demonstrate to God our serious resolve and be evidence to all the world that it was in ignorance that we tolerated such houses, in which the Jews have reviled God, our dear Creator and Father, and his Son most shamefully up till now, but that we have now given them their due reward.

... Third, that they be forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country.

... Fourth, that they be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing.

... So let us beware. In my opinion the problem must be resolved thus: If we wish to wash our hands of the Jews' blasphemy and not share in their guilt, we have to part company with them. They must be driven from our country.

... But since they lack the power to do this publicly, they remain our daily murderers and bloodthirsty foes in their hearts. Their prayers and curses furnish evidence of that, as do the many stories which relate their torturing of children and all sorts of crimes for which they have often been burned at the stake or banished.

How to read DNA

A review of DNA sequencing technologies, from the paleolithic to the bleeding edge.

While one of the greatest discoveries of the last century, indeed of all time, was the role and structure of DNA, it did not amount to much in practical terms until methods were devised to read its code- its sequence. There has been a fascinating evolution in technologies to read DNA, and I have experienced a good share of it. Most methods are dependent on harnessing nature's own enzymes that replicate DNA in increasingly clever ways. The resulting flood of information will serve the age-old project of "know thyself".

DNA exists in almost endless lengths (bacterial genomes are typically circular, and the average human chromosome is 1.3E8 base pairs in length). So the first step in sequencing, in typical reductive fashion, is to break this linear structure into small pieces, place them into bacterial mini-genomic circles with independent replicative ability (plasmids or their relatives), and replicate/amplify them to large amounts that can be handled, sampled, sequenced, filed, bar-coded and stored.

The paleolithic method of sequencing (I've used it a few times) is based on chemistry instead of on enzymes, and is called the Maxam-Gilbert method, after its developers. First, one cuts a large batch of DNA at a specific sequence site with what is called a "restriction" enzyme- a pair of molecular scissors. Then its ends are labeled with radioactive phosphorous (P32), and one of the two ends removed with yet another restriction cut, and the remaining DNA split up into several pools, treating each pool lightly with quite hazardous chemicals that modify the DNA at certain bases (hydrazine at T and C, dimethyl sulfate at G, and formic acid at G and A). The individual units of DNA are called nucleotides, and their key parts are called bases- the A, G, C, and T of the genetic code, after their basic pH.

These chemical reactions are only roughly base-specific, and hit other bases as well, so the whole thing is woefully inefficient. The DNA is then further chemically processed to break the backbones at the modified bases, and the mixtures are eletrophoretically separated on a gel that allows fragments differing in length by a single nucleotide base to be distinguished. The radioactive label on one end ensures that only those fragments spanning from the radioactive label to the randomly cut point appear on the X-ray film that is exposed to the gel.

All the other methods to sequence DNA use the magic of DNA replication enzymes (polymerases) to read sequence, using methods devised by Fred Sanger (who is one of only three people to have received two nobel prizes in science). They do this by getting the enzyme to incorporate occasional bases with some special property- the nucleotides either stop chain elongation at random positions, allowing fragments like the ones described above to be produced directly by the polymerase, or they have other complex modifications to be described below. The enzyme does the work of reading along the DNA, and the experimenter coaxes it to tell which nucleotide base it is seeing as it goes along.

The original Sanger method used radioactive tracers such as P32 or S35 to detect the resulting DNA fragments, but advances in fluorescence technology have revolutionized this aspect of biology, as so many others (one of the latest nobel prizes went to fluorescence labeling technologies for proteins)

How do these enzymes know where to start? The DNA is continuous, but just like in a book or a chapter or a page, you have to start somewhere. And since the text in this case is A, T, G, and C with no further punctuation, the problem of knowing where you are is quite a bit more difficult than in a book. Usually a "primer" is used to start off the DNA polymerase- a short DNA fragment that can be made by pure chemistry, perhaps 20 nucleotides long, which hybridizes to its complementary sequence in the target DNA (after it has been heated up to melting temperature). If the cloning was done in clever fashion (abutting the DNA fragment to be sequenced right up to a known part of the cloning plasmid), then the same primer can be used for an entire sequenceing project.

The original human genome project used a variation of this method, where primed DNA polymerases on templates are fed a low ratio of nucleotides that have both chain terminating capacity, (di-deoxy, as opposed to DNA's single deoxy), and also have fluorescent labels (different for each of the four bases). Then the full four-label reactions with their resulting synthesized fragments are run through an extremely tiny (capillary) electrophoretic gel, at the end of which a fluorescence detector reads off the labels from the size-sorted fragments as they travel past. This is done with expensive machines, using miniaturized reactions that attain large scales of operation, taking all this work out of the hands of regular bench scientists.

A more recent technology is the 454/Illumina system (named for the companies they are offered by), which has finally dispensed altogether with the electrophoretic separation step, which has been such a painful bottleneck.

These systems lay single molecules of template on tiny islands on a glass slide (or a bead), and do an in-place PCR amplification step to park at lot of copies at that location. Then the sequencing step is performed, with A, G, C and T successively washed over all the template islands, and a luminous flash registered wherever a single step of incorporation takes place, before the next washes and next step of polymerization is performed, etc.

The virtue of this system is its extreme miniaturization and large parallelism- many different molecules can be laid down, amplified, and sequenced in one experiment. However, the read length is paltry- only about 35 (Illumina) or 300 (454) nucleotides, compared to the 800 nucleotides regularly attainable with the gel-sorting methods above.

Read length is critically important, since the next step for all these technologies is the reverse of reductionism: the re-assembly of the sequence from all the individual sequence reads, like doing a jigsaw puzzle. The reads (for a whole genome, say) are all poured into a computer program which lines up sequences that overlap, building back up to the sequence of the entire source DNA as best it can. As with jigsaw puzzles, the bigger the pieces you start with, the easier the puzzle is to solve, to an almost exponential degree.

Last, and most amazing, a recent report in Science introduces what is sure to be the next iteration- monitoring the production of a single strand of DNA on a single polymerase from a single template strand with an extremely miniaturized apparatus. Originating in the labs of Watt Webb (of which I am an exceedingly minor alumnus), and Harold Craighead at Cornell, this technique uses an odd optical property to peek into extremely tiny volumes of solution (one zeptoliter ~1E-21 liter).

It turns out that if you shine light through holes made in a conductor whose diameter are less than half the light's wavelength, the light does not get very far. If a solution is put into those holes, you can look at the fluorescent properties of the super-tiny volume right at the floor of the hole (containing in this case a DNA polymerase with template) without being distracted by the rest of the solution which may contain a high concentration of other fluorescent compounds (nucleotides). The fluorescence system looking into the bottom of the hole essentially just "sees" the occasional one or two fluorescent molecules bouncing along the bottom, or binding to the polymerase located there.

The sequencing method is then to add a solution of four different fluorescent nucleotides which contain color labels at their outer-most phosphates, which get clipped off as they are added to the growing chain. The polymerase attached to the bottom of the view-hole can use and incorporate these nucleotides with no problem, and fluorescence from the incoming nucleotide appears transiently, as it is positioned in the enzyme's active site, but before the reaction takes place that clips off the label and incorporates the rest of the nucleotide into the growing chain.

Thus the detector sees a parade of distinct fluorescence signals, one by one, as the lone polymerase does its work synthesizing a new DNA strand along the template. The tricky part is that this process happens stochastically. One incorporation event may go fast, the next slow, as diffusion of the nucleotides and even quantum effects come into play. Several incorporations of the same nucleotide may occur in succession on the template, requiring the observers to make sure they are tracking the pauses in fluorescence that occur between each step of the elongation reaction. Much of this uncertainty can be resolved technically, and also by doing a few replicates.

One advantage of this method is that read lengths are substantially increased. The researchers (who have now duly set up shop in Silicon Valley) show an experiment using a circular template with alternating G (red, below) and C (blue) halves to run off a potentially infinitely long sequencing read. They report a rate of ~3 bases incorporated per second under their conditions, with clear alternation of C and G signals, up to 4,000 nucleotides in an hour's time. This is very promising for problems in genomic sequencing like the occurrence of repetitive regions that are very difficult to piece together from short sequencing reads, and one may hope that these lengths can be extended and the polymerization times speeded up as the technique is further optimized.

All these advances mean that it will not be long before individuals can get their entire genomes sequenced at a reasonable price. The information will allow divination of the future, in the form of improved personal medical prognoses as we slowly learn more about how the genome works. And also divination of the past, since complete genomes will allow geneological analysis of unprecedented detail and depth. Our long evolutionary inheritances reside in these ~3 billion base pairs, and bringing them into the light will generate great benefits, individually and collectively.

Incidental links:

Steven Pinker on his own genome.

Very basic TED talk on genomes by Barry Schuler.

Dire warnings about privacy issues.

Chief Marin

Marin County is named after a Coast Miwok whose story is movingly told by Betty Goerke.

Not so long ago, in a galaxy not very far away, the concrete and asphalt of Marin County did not exist. Animals roamed at will, the air was pure, and the seasons passed in regular succession without the threat of expiring into the maw of global industrialization. The county was dotted with people who wove baskets of grass, gathered mussels from the bay, wove feathers into their headbands, and told abundant stories from their past, and from their imaginations.

Local anthopologist and archeologist Betty Goerke recently gathered what evidence there is about these native Americans into her book "Chief Marin: Leader, Rebel, Legend". There isn't very much, since they spoke their stories rather than blogging them, but Goerke is judicious in setting the scene and reading as much as possible from what there is. I highly recommend it.

The principle horror she describes is the California mission system. Now curiosities and museums, the missions were outposts run by Catholic priests, first from Spain (1775 to 1821), then from Mexico (1821 to 1846). The priests had final say over all matters at the mission, including command over small military detachments assigned to them. They regarded baptism as a one-way street, cajoling natives into baptisms that they hardly understood, then sending military parties out to recover any "neophytes" who dared to go home again.

Once inducted into the mission system, neophytes were treated like slaves, worked under military guard in the fields, housed in segregated "dormatories" from which there was no escape, and paid only food and clothing enough to subsist. A fascinating contrast is presented by Fort Ross, a Russian outpost slightly to the north, whose clergy made no project of enslaving the natives, nor did the military harrass them most of the time, but let them trade with and work for the fort on relatively equitable terms. "Runaways" from the Spanish to the Russian establishment were thus a constant problem. Goerke writes "Father Amorós (of the San Rafael mission) sent out a force of a few soldiers and neophytes to retrieve and harass those who had fled to Colony Ross.", and quotes the Russian Achille Schabelski, who "saw several tents of unhappy fugitives from Mission San Rafael, who, taking me for a Spaniard, fled to the mountains.". One native chief said that the Spaniards "were bad men who took his kinsmen captive and make them work like cattle in the fields".

Eventually, the Spaniards (dragged down by their theocratic tendencies) were replaced by Mexicans, who, enacting the enlightenment ideals of the time and of their own liberation, decided to release the natives with shares of the land, abundant livestock and produce from the missions. Yet corruption carried the day, and the local authorities managed to leave the native Americans with virtually nothing at all. The land they fled to was not generally recorded and deeded, with dire future consequences as Mexico gave land grants to sundry soldiers and other well-connected non-natives. While settlement was sparse this problem was not immediately apparent, but as white settlers arrived and after the Bear flag revolt revisited all the deeds in California, the die was cast for total displacement and disenfranchisement (Native Americans were not granted citizenship until 1924).

In many ways the native conditions were even worse during this time of "freedom", since the native Americans were hunted for sport and impromtu slavery by both Mexican (by General Vallejo and his relations, among many others) and white settlers. Goerke writes "In the North Bay, according to most accounts by the settlers and the military, the Indians were pursued for capture rather than murder, because the rancho owners needed men to work as laborers. ... the outcome was the same: murder, rape, and enslavement."

The role of Chief Marin in all this is rather murky. He flits in and out of the scene as a sometime pillar of the San Franscisco and San Rafael missions, sometime rebel leader harrassing the missionaries and hiding out on islands in the Bay, sometime prisoner (escaping several times), and sometime ferryman and trusted pilot about the bay. At one point in prison, he fends off a priest as follows: ".. told him with the greatest sang-froid that if the priest would not bother him while he was alive he would give his permission to make a Christian of his dead body. With this statement he dismissed this tormentor." He was respected by his adversaries, which led General Vallejo to suggest his name for the County across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. But all Goerke has to work with are baptismal, wedding, and burial records in the mission archives, and the much later histories and recollections of Vallejo and other Californios (Mexicans), after they were themselves expropriated by the inrushing horde from the east. In the end, her book is most moving in evoking the life of the Coast Miwok before, during, and after the traumas of colonization.

I'll close with one last quote from the book, from the early mission period, referring to the Russian explorer Otto von Kotzebue:

Twice a year, some of the Indians received passes that allowed them to return to their native villages for a brief period. Kotzebue observed: 'This short time is the happiest period of their existence; and I myself have seen them going home in crowds, with loud rejoicings. The sick, who can not undertake the journey, at least accompany their happy countrymen to the shore where they embark, and there sit for days together, mournfully gazing on the distant summits of the mountains which surround their homes; they often sit in this situation for several days, without taking any food, so much does the sight of their lost home affect these new Christians.'

Reduction or emergence?

How bad is reductive thinking, and how useful is the concept of emergence?

Nothing gets new age folks, theists, and other supernaturalists upset like the reductive scientific approach to knowledge. What could be more dry, stultifying and un-holistic than the practice of smashing a mystery to pieces and figuring out how those mundane pieces fit back together? In a similar vein, some scientists are becoming enamored with "emergence" as a way of describing the novel properties of complex systems that may not be "reducible" to more elementary phenomena, or at least whose relationship to them is unknown or obscure. A proponent of this angle is scientist Stu Kauffman, who sits on the fence of using sacred language while promoting what is at heart a Spinozist, Einsteinian, secular view of reality- that if one must have a god, it should be one of reality in its incomprehensible totality, not an infantalizing, tribalizing, patriarchal, and blood-soaked totem.

One confusion in this debate is the question of whether we can possess truth. As Hume and Kant described, we can not know reality in a comprehensive way. We can model aspects of it more or less accurately, and follow pragmatists like William James in making practical benefit and closeness to concrete reality the metric of a model's accuracy. That is the best we can do. We would like to be omniscient and god-like, but we are not, and no amount of imagining will get us there.

How does one use past events to predict future ones? The first step is of course to understand past events. And we can not do that without breaking them down into their component relationships. Whether one hypothesizes supernatural causes or natural ones, every event in the world has its causes, and our analysis of the past consists of enumerating what these are, both in principle to find out whether such causes are possible, and in practice, to find out whether such causes actually connect to their hypothesized effects. Once all the pieces are laid out and understood, we can build the abstract models we use to "understand" the world. Thus we come full circle, synthesizing what has been previously reduced, into mental models of reality that are (at best) powerful, useful and accurate. This as holistic as we can reliably get.

Ideally, these causal relationships are tidy enough to be described mathematically, like Newton's gravitation. But phenomena like biology are not so tidy, and there we have to make do with more or less localized causes like chemical principles, molecular shapes and interactions, and ecological constraints, combined with the relatively general principle of natural selection. Because of our mental incapacity to grasp reality whole, as well as our lack of the knowledge to even begin that task, grasping it in bits and pieces is the only way forward, and has allowed imposing edifices of practical abstract knowledge to be constructed back up out of those pieces. In short, reductive thinking is hugely successful, just like the practice of breaking down tasks to smaller levels has allowed great complexity to flourish in economic affairs, in software programming, in manufacturing, etc.

There is a huge temptation to believe that we take a shortcut, that we can grasp the whole of reality by force of intuition, through our unconscious mental capacities, or in consulation with ancient gurus possessing esoteric wisdom. It is true that in some areas, such as the social sphere, intuitions can be powerful ways of knowing- faster at any rate than explicit rational capacities. But of course there are many other areas, like the natural world at scales other than our common experience, where this is not true at all, since the evolution of our intuitive faculties failed to account for quantum mechanics, the deep histories of geology and biology, celestial mechanics, and much else. And even where it is powerful, intuition is not dispositive. In the end we have to use reason to tell whether intuition has been accurate, as the current Madoff financial scandal makes so painfully clear for his conned customers. The close relative of social intuition is the intuition of spirits and spiritual "realities". While clearly palpable to many people, its effects never have been and never are verified by reason, and appear to be fundamentally in error. Believers thus must take refuge in faith alone, for what that is worth.

Once such refuge is taken, other forms of knowledge become a threat rather than a boon, making believers nervous about those taking the reductive approach to knowing. Faith requires mystery, which requires ignorance. Those who would reveal and resolve mysteries strike at the very heart of faith, for where can god live but in the gaps of knowledge? What room is there for esoteric and transcendent human (or super-human) potentials in a world where humans are material beings down to their very electrons?

Returning to reductionism, the product of reductive and integrative analysis is still an incomplete view of reality, and will always remain so. Thus the attractiveness of other modes of thought that offer greater vistas at various levels of fatuousness, like holism, Gaia theory, Gnosticism, etc. "Emergence" is a relatively sober term used by scientists to describe phenomena that can not be easily constructed (in our minds, at least) from more elemental phenomena, such as the emergence of weather patterns out of the complexity of atmospheric physics, or the emergence of social networks out of the buzz of the internet.

I think the concept of emergence is however simply a label for ignorance. If we can not build a complete model of how a butterfly's wingbeats affect the weather a year hence, it is not because of a supernatural principle that generates emergent properties out of thin air, as it were, but because we are ignorant- both of the full causal chain that these wingbeats put in motion, and of the overall chaos/noise in the system which may allow this effect to either amplify or damp out to nothing. Chalking a phenomenon up to emergence may be a shorthand for cases where complexity totally overwhelms our capacity to analyze what is going on, but it is not in itself explanatory, since causes are still afoot, and we would be better off trying to understand them rather than labelling them with a word.

A case in point is natural selection- Darwin's mechanism of biological evolution. How does that arise from simpler phenomena? Or must we label it emergent, and leave it at the biological level only? Its principle lies in competition, which exists at all sorts of levels, from chemical to astronomical. On the astronomical scale, the gravitation of massive objects leads to competition for mass accumulation, forming the lumpiness that we see as galaxies, stars, black holes, nebulae, etc.

Chemicals compete automatically as well in their race to lowest energy, reacting with the first possible partners that come along, sucking the most reactive species out of a collection, then the next reactive, and so forth. Such competition is part of the basis for pre-biotic evolution, where vast numbers of organic chemicals, combined with abundant inputs of energy, appear to have generated reactive units of increasing sophistication, both in terms of competing for metabolic resources from the medium, and eventually also in reproducing themselves- the ultimate case of emergence, as it were.

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Incidentally, emergence also pops up in the philosophy of consciousness, renamed in this case "emergentism", which goes something like: while the world may be causally closed, complex properties like consciousness can not be understood as made up of more elementary ones (or be reduced to them) but exist de novo, as new empirical facts, understandable only at the appropriate level. It is rather telling that the Wiki page on this topic offers a series of chemical examples that are then acknowledged to be entirely reducible after all.

For another example, the Philosophy Bites podcast interviewed a philosopher of mind (Tim Crane) who attempts to argue this position- for a sort of confusion and ignorance on behalf of our inability to reduce consciousness to brain functions, yet at the same time claims to not be a dualist, soul-ist, or Cartesian. The questions are excellent, the answers much less so. There is absolutely no reason to grant this veil of ignorance to the phenomenon of consciousness, (complex as it is), which is being studied assiduously, with excellent prospects for understanding that will blow away the fog of "emergentism" (see a recent post).

To close, let me offer a quote taken from a podcast interview by Ginger Campbell of one of my scientific heros, Georgy Buzsaki, neuroscientist and author of "Rhythms of the brain" (see side-links) about brainwaves, where he expresses his view of reductionism:

"The complex systems (area of engineering) offered a very rich toolkit for neuroscience to think about interactions in the brain in a new way, but it also was very important to realize that many of these ideas are important because you can view things differently, but ideas and principles that have a common thread across different disciplines are substrate-free. But whenever we want to understand the mechanisms we have to translate these interesting principles into mechanisms on a given substrate. So when I learned, and with other people we tried to say ... 'oh, the brain is a complex system which has particular dynamics and is non-linear' ... all of these things, it didn't tell me anything, as it doesn't tell anything to the average reader, because the mechanisms have to be understood and broken down into pieces. And that's where I think the responsibilities of neuroscientists lie- that the hand-waving, interesting explanations have to be translated into neuronal mechanisms. And this is where I think the new field of neurocomputation and experimental neuroscience must work together to see the ideas that spring out from your brain or from your head can be really tied to reality, rather to just express imagination."

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Incidental links:

• Radiolab audio episode on the sometimes bizarre joys of science.
• Review of the science vs religion debate in TNR, making special mention of prominent scientists who try to have it both ways, as well as the so-called Intelligent Design movement. This is a specially trenchant and thorough article- highly recommended.

Childish things

A quick note about the inauguration.

After being so moved by the inauguration, a couple of thoughts. First, the benediction by Joseph Lowery was wonderful, far more positive, rooted, poetic, and appropriate to the moment than the mess presented by Rick Warren. If we need such things, (we need the poetry, not the theism), inclusive ecumenical expressions will beat exclusive, divisive ones every time. And it was better poetry than the official "poem" as well!

The line that encapsulates the inaugural address for me is "the time has come to set aside childish things". This is the tenor that Obama is bringing, after 20 years of food fights in Washington, brought to us by the power-at-all-costs bomb-throwing of Newt Gingrich and colleagues. In several ways and times Obama touched on this theme, in what is surely an attempt to extend his personal inclusiveness and judiciousness to the general tone in Washington which has been mired in so much stasis. A government which, as Obama pointed out, has put off so many important hard decisions while deranging our institutions and public morals in favor of a fearful security state.

A Christian culture?

Do we live in a Christian culture? Or one that has long been turning into something else?

Hi, Romanus here, speaking in the second year of the reign of Emperor Decius. Delightful how we keep the old holidays- Saturnalia in early winter with its exchange of presents, Lupercalia in late winter, and Floralia in spring. The youth don't seem to be so excited about them, but I know they will come around when they get older. Many of the youngsters are going into new cults like Mithraism, Cybelism, even the Elusinian mysteries. Well, so long as they believe in something- that's all I say.

I know some scoffers ask "How can there be several hundred gods? They can't all be real, can they?". Well, I'll tell you, the more the merrier. Rome is strong from its welcome of many gods, even though Jupiter is, of course the most powerful. Rome is also strong from its cultivation of ancient ritual, from augury to animal sacrifice. The wine and sacred bread sprinkled on the sacrificed animal is as important as the haruspicy we do to verify its fitness. All is fit and proper, and all redounds to the power of Rome!

What I can't stand, frankly, are those atheists who call themselves Christians who follow the Jews in renouncing all the ancient and civic gods. How dare they? They are a danger to the morals and peace of the empire. One day they will bring it down, and woe to us then ... a dark age is sure to follow, with their pigheaded intolerance and care for nothing but their pathetic Jesus.

Remember Rome- how long it took for their gods to die ... to pass from belief into myth and literature? We still have countless living momentos of that culture, such as months, holiday festivals, language, engineering, myths and symbols. But it clearly does not signify that their culture is alive. No, it is dead, and humans have learned from it, found new ideals and founded new cultures. The same is happening to Christianity in the present day. Just as the Holy Roman and Apostolic church echos faintly the glories of ancient Rome, so we in our enlightened age echo faintly, in our festivals, institutions and language the age of Cathedrals and scholastics, when the queen of the university was theology and the best and brightest went into the clergy.

What succeeded the Roman religion was worse- intolerant, closed-minded, with fatally conflicting ideals and obsessive focus on non-reality, leading to a long dark age. Thankfully, that same Christianity, now heading down the same road of unbelief as the Roman gods of yore, is being replaced by a distinctly superior philosophy. This secular, scientific, and humanistic ethic is cosmopolitan, rational, and tolerant. Its templates and forerunners are the golden ages of yore, like those of Athens, Islam, Italy, Netherlands, and Scotland. Those who still hunger for spiritual expression continue to find many avenues, from classic religion to new age, scholarly immersion, and environmentalism. The reconciliation they seek between the sacred and the mundane is, however, strongly affected by today's tolerance and engagement with reality, so it is very hard to persevere in complete fantasies such as the supernaturalisms and fundamentalisms of old. Conversly, it is easier to cast what is real, such as nature and the cosmos, in spiritual and meaningful terms, since so much is now known of their truly epic scale and history. The core culture is wedded to progress both socially and materially through enlightened engagement with reality, and that is a hopeful and worthy position.

Incidental links:

• Barak Obama's mother was secular and raised him with no religion.
• Podcast presenting the Jesus myth hypothesis. At any rate, the evidence either way is minimal.

Keynes lives!

Why Milton Friedman was wrong, and Keynes was right.

Fiscal or monetary, that is the question. Milton Friedman insisted that monetary stimulus alone could solve recessions and depressions. That is to say, the Fed fiddling with interest rates and bank reserve requirements could correct any macroeconomic bubble fallout and liquidity problems. Paul Krugman wrote a fine article laying this argument to rest, since in the current crisis, (and in Japan's of the 90's), interest rates are at zero, yet deflation and other dislocations still threaten. However he did not really delve into why a fiscal stimulus can do what free money to the banks can not. (A slate guy tried to, though).

Meanwhile, David Brooks decides that since he has no understanding of fiscal policy, the whole thing is very risky and shouldn't be attempted (in the hallowed tradition of doubt mongering on tobacco, climate change, etc.). And the Cato institute puts out the ever-helpful advice that what would fix the current economic problem is a large dose of tax cuts.

With all the years and brains devoted to economics since the great depression, one would have thought that more was learned. Indeed, more has been learned, but media megaphones are usually held by those who have other interests than the pursuit of disinterested economic theory. I am no economist, so once again, caveat emptor!

We find ourselves in an odd place. A massive credit bubble has collapsed, slicing values of assets, loan portfolios, loan collateral, and investments of many sorts to fractions of their former bid-up values. The musical chairs of greater-fool (and unregulated) investing has ended, with substantially fewer chairs than players. The prospects of many kinds of future cash/investment flows has suddenly declined, inducing a whiplash effect on the banks that deal in future-denominated assets (i.e. credit). All that free money on loan from the Fed is filling craters that used to be shiny assets but now turn out to be hockey pucks, or, though the magic of leverage, craters of debt.

So the Cato guy is right- funnelling free money to the banks (and even buying up their stock to provide capital) is not going to force them to lend- not in declining economic times when the next shoe to drop may be their own. The banks play a key role in the system, and monetary policy is essential to keep banks solvent, preventing total collapse, and for setting the stage for economic recovery. But it is not enough if lending is not yet attractive, either due to the wounds already inflicted by the collapse, or due to the lack of positive growth prospects.

Monetary policy alone is enough for many things, like slaying inflation, and mild recession balancing. But deflationary spirals appear to be beyond its reach. Banks and other major investors have fled to safety- specifically, to the safety of T-bills, and that is the key to the conundrum. Banks can clear a small profit from investing their zero-rate Fed money at T-bill rates, and any other investor interested in safety goes there as well. So the government ends up with vast amounts of low-interest money siphoned from the economy. What to do with it?

The obvious answer is to recycle it back into the economy, through a stimulus package like the ones being contemplated currently. The point of monetary policy, after all, is to maintain economic activity, especially jobs, so that the tender flame of money flowing around the economy does not sputter and go out. If the banks won't step up to the plate and the government is seeing a glut of cautious investment dollars coming its way, then it simply has to employ those dollars to give the flame a bit more fuel. Of course, if the government spends the money (as it would in a stimulus) instead of lending it (as the Fed does), then it is setting up future generations to pay back all those T-bill holders in the form of taxes.

That is where the theory of a stimulus gets interesting. The ability of future generations to repay all this money is going to depend on whether they end up better off (i.e. more productive) than we are today. If they are, then repayment will be a piece of cake. If not, they may be faced with currency devaluation or inflation as round-about ways of reneging it. The money thus should ideally take the form of investments that serve the common good in economically beneficial ways, especially in the long term. Usually, this kind of allocation is best left to private parties (forgetting for the moment the monumental short-sightedness demonstrated by our management culture in both the dot-com and finance bubbles), but now, of course, willy nilly, this decision is up to the government.

Let's consider a few different uses of the stimulus:

1. Tax breaks, as per the Cato guy. This has the virtue of leaving the decision of how to invest the money with private citizens. Unfortunately, among the rich, the money is quite likely to end up in T-bills or their equivalent once again ... not a productive use of the money at all, either short term or long term. At the lower end of the income spectrum, the extra money is likely to be spent rapidly, which is indeed good in the short term, since it would fuel the flame of economic activity in a generic way. But it would not constitute any kind of productive investment, especially if used towards the basic needs of food and gas that are likely targets. This kind of spending will maintain the economy, but productive investment must change the economy.

Incidentally, we do not know quite how stimulated the economy should be. If it was overheated and inflated two years ago, and if it is depressed and sagging today, where is the happy mean? That is a delicate question, indicating that the stimulus should be kept to a fraction (like 1/4) of the total wealth lost in this downturn. Economists probably have decent ideas about it, however. One sure-fire measure is the unemployment rate. Below is another measure, part of a Taylor rule presentation, courtesy of a treasure trove of economic data at the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

2. Foreclosure amelioration. Plummeting conditions in the real estate market underlie much of the current pain. Banks do not know how much their loans are worth, builders do not know when they will ever be able to get back to business, and wealth continues to evaporate. It would do a great deal of short-term good to prop up the mortgage industry with renegotiations and refinancing, as is being done now with voluntary programs with the banks and breathtakingly low interest rates. But this is dangerous as well, since we do not know what the natural level of the real estate market should be. If the government takes over loans that later slip further under water, what have we gained? Not much. And the unfairness of helping the most profligate mortgage holders while responsible holders get left paying the taxes to clean up the mess is also quite unattractive.

One idea is to develop incentives that encourage banks to resolve foreclosures by transforming them into market-rate rentals rather than evicting and selling at extremely steep losses. The flood of foreclosures is the worst kind of panic selling that hurts everyone- banks, householders, and the economy. The government could use HUD, or another agency along the lines of Fannie Mae to buy up titles to such properties and manage them, for eventual sale when the market improves.

3. Specific projects. Stimulus money would ideally to go into economically beneficial investments, like targeted education, power grid upgrades, green technology, research, broadband upgrades, and health system upgrades. The record of government direct investment is decidedly mixed. It brought us the internet and the highway system, but also the boondoggles of synfuels, hydrogen cars, the space shuttle, and nuclear power. Government tends not to do well in big projects, but can effectively broker small projects, as is done by the peer review system that has been such a stellar method of resource allocation at the NIH.

I'd like to see at least part of the stimulus go to small grants awarded rapidly on a peer reviewed basis on the broadest range of topics, from the arts to green technology to social policy development. Let a thousand flowers bloom, and perhaps a new internet will take root.

These investments will help shape the economy that will remain after the economic crisis is over. Short-term thinking is not useful, and over-allocation to any one sector (like research, for instance) would create unsustainable growth leading to retrenchment later on. Thus we will be shaping consciously what the future will look like, anticipating what the market will do once the current crisis, and the government participation it has called forth, leave the stage.

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Incidentally, we might ask whether we even want economic growth!

• Later link- Krugman narrates the same story, summer 2009.

Politics of temperament

A temperamental argument for political resentment

Continuing last week's discussion of psychological types, the book Please understand me also has some trenchant things to say about the educational system. Following on Carl Jung's four-dimension system, Kiersey and Bates condense it into four basic types, mixing in a bit of Hippocrates to get the "Dionysian", "Epimethian", "Promethian", and "Apollonian" temperaments. To be crudely brief, the Dionysian (SP) temperament is experiential, impulsive, and freedom-loving, the Epimethian (SJ) duty-bound and methodical, the Promethian (NT) intellectual, curious, and self-directed, the Apollonian (NF) imaginative and highly empathic. Schools tend to be run by and for the Epimethian type, and teachers have a rather hard time understanding students who do not obey directions, line up in rows, seek approval, and do their work on time- a description of the Epimethian temperament. 

This regime serves the Dionysian type particularly poorly- the student who has to be active, who learns by doing and handling things, whose impulses must be obeyed and expressed, who, as the authors state, needs to "fly the plane, drive the truck, climb the mountain, toot the horn". These students lose interest quickly, tend to say to their neighbors in class that "this is stupid!", and run off to join the military right after high school, if indeed they make it through at all. They think about now much more than the future, and handle people, negotiations, and crises well. They make up over one-third of the population, and according to the authors are massively under-represented in higher education. Not because they are not intelligent, but because their style of learning is not suited to the dominanat style of teaching. One can easily make an evolutionary argument about this, but I'll pass on that now. Examples of this type, according to last week's political link, are John McCain and G. W. Bush- both impatient with abstractions, eager to mix it up, and who thrive on excitement and crisis.

Dionysians in our society live in a somewhat alien world that values abstraction and book learning, and many of whose ever-growing complexities are difficult to master in concrete, hands-on ways. Thus it seems that they are probable candidates for political resentment in US politics, forming a class of voters who resent the success of those who get the rewards of higher education purely because they can sit still, not because they are particularly bright- those who are the self-annointed elites, while it is the Dionysians who eagerly run the levers that actually make the world go around. Dionysians naturally appreciate leaders who, like them, denigrate pointy-headed pencil-pushers, and who "go with their gut" to make decisions. 

One problem is that, while the Dionysian has just as much native intelligence as anyone, there really is a point to sitting down and hitting the books. Impatience with abstractions can be fatal if key aspects of the world are best understood on exactly that basis. Important concepts and processes really are imparted in the precincts of higher education, though making people better leaders or more compassionate or moral are certainly not among them. This is not an argument for sending more students to college (let alone treating hyperactive students with drugs!). Indeed proposals to send all high schoolers to college are dead-wrong, sure to waste the time of both students and teachers. It is an argument to value those with different skills and temperaments by beefing up alternative hands-on education systems like trade schools, internships, apprenticeships, arts schools, etc., so that each person can flourish in the most congenial and effective way.

One can take this kind of typology too far, and no person is a pure type let alone just a type, but it seems beneficial to realize that people are different in deep ways, to the extent that they can be almost mutually incomprehensible. Thus it can be helpful to have explicit descriptions for (and appreciation of) differences that I, for example, as an Epimethian, would otherwise be oblivious to. 

Introvert's revenge

Introverts are looked down upon, regarded as abnormal, called names. But we have a weapon!

Humans are not created equal, political ideals notwithstanding. Visionary, practical, dutiful, impulsive, sensitive, brusque, intuitive, realistic, creative ... all sorts occur among us, and psychologists have labored to classify the most important and immovable types of psychological variation. Carl Jung came up with one much-used four-dimension system, nicely described in a book by Keirsey and Bates: Please understand me. (New edition.) One of the most salient of these dimensions is introvert/extravert. As Keirsey and Bates relate, extraverts give parties, and leave from them energized. Introverts leave drained, and seek private spaces and solitude instead. Extraverts feel lonely when they are alone, whereas introverts feel alone when they are in crowds!

The population apparently divides 75% extravert to 25% introvert. Naturally, extraverts run everything in society, from political affairs to social clubs and businesses. They also think that introversion is a problem- that "social skills" are essential for a "normal" life, and that not wanting to participate in social affairs is excentric, deviant and disreputable. One has to ask how introversion ever arose, and what keeps it at a stable proportion in the population (it is strongly heritable). One approach lies in evolutionary psychology- asking about the settings in which we evolved. Currently, we live in huge societies where introversion can be quite painful, and it is common for many to want to get away from the crowds into their own single-family home, cacooning in their own space with their own home theater system, etc. Clearly we never evolved at the population densities of today, but in far more modest tribal or extended family settings, where introversion was less of a problem.

So how is (or was) introversion beneficial? Social life is far from the whole point of human existence. Though being "inner-directed" may sound egotistical, it is actually quite different. The introvert's focus on and sensitivity to non-social issues may yield better perceptions of reality- better vigilence over the natural surroundings, for instance, which can benefit everyone. Art also has little to do with social issues, but is an exploration of the inner life- what it means to be human, what kinds of novel views one can take of reality and of ourselves, what heights of feeling humans can attain. And then there is spirituality, the ultimate inner experience. When it comes to deep feelings and spiritual impulses, introverts are more likely to have them, to pay attention to them, and protect them from the mundane intrusions of the external world. That is, to be inspired. As the joke has it, spirituality is what introverts do to make extraverts feel guilty.

Thus the constant seeking that many people experience for traditions and gurus who have the most deep and esoteric things to say about the human condition. This goes back to the position of the shaman, an apparently constant part of early human society, though present in an infinite variety of incarnations. These explorers of the inner life are respected for their special powers, sometimes amplified by vigorous PR and the incomprehension that extraverts have of this other mode of life. Some of these powers are undoubtedly real, since shamans cultivate alternate views of reality that can be important antidotes to the constricted, reality-driven views of the majority. Keeping alive a sensitive, inspired, and imaginative approach to life has great utility, and human populations doubtless benefit from a vibrant mix of the various personality types- a mix that is apparent in the work of Jane Goodall and others on chimpanzees as well.

Ironically, once societies grow in size, their spiritual/religious functions are captured by those who run everything else in society- extraverts (whether tied to the state or not), who have little idea where the original inspiration came from, who take the figurative ideas of the prophets with unimaginative literalism, who create hierarchies of "spiritual" bureaucrats, and who ultimately "stone the prophets in their turn", in the words of William James. However, when the religious marketplace is free there is a constant turning to new prophets, sects, and movements that can put people in touch with the wellsprings of spirituality without the accretions of extraverted (and spiritually dead) organizations, ceremonies, and dogma.

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Incidental link: an illuminating analysis of the political campaign last spring in personality terms, involving, naturally, extraverts exclusively.

In praise of Jimmy Carter

In four years, Carter did more good than Reagan did in eight.

One of the more annoying aspects of the recently expired Republican hegemony in American politics was its odes to Ronald Reagan. Every candidate was a soldier of the Reagan revolution, every thing Reagan did was tinged with gold, and every opportunity was taken to add his name to airports, government buildings, etc.- we even came periously close to a Reagan dime!

But if one considers the actual issues and how they have turned out over time, this turns out to have been somewhat premature, to say the least. On such topics as winning the cold war, managing the economy, establishing energy independence, even advancing gay rights, Jimmy Carter was out ahead, and will come to be appreciated in the light of history as being not only on the right side of key issues, but also more effective.

First off, the Iran hostage crisis. Ultimately, it was not Carter's fault that the hostages were taken, or how they were treated. The time-honored protection of diplomats should have had special resonance in a traditional culture like that of Iran. The Iranians only besmirched their own position for decades to come by violating norms that they rely on, as do all other countries. On the other hand, it was the US which played the key role in installing and propping up the Shah (thanks to the Republican Eisenhower administration, after Truman refused British overtures on the issue), with the chickens coming home to roost on Carter's watch. The US was/is also the implicit guarantor of the entire international system, so Iran's breach of diplomatic behavior was a way to topple an apple cart that was in large part owned by the US, and would be seen that way around the world, fairly or not. Carter was caught in the news glare of a transfixed nation, and was also unwilling to negotiate with Iran on the base terms that Reagan may have pursued. The Iran-Contra affair later made clear just how corrupt Reagan's dealings with Iran were- not exactly a high point for US international relations.

In energy issues, it goes without saying that Carter was more foresighted and disciplined than Reagan, cardigan or no cardigan. Reagan let energy independence projects slide, let conservation effors slide, let fuel efficiency standards slide, not because the US had become more self-sufficient in energy, but because OPEC had collapsed as more production arrived from other foreign sources. This was never going to be a long-term solution, even in the absence of consciousness about global warming. Peak oil, though still a far-off concept, was surely a proper concern for policy makers, domestic production having peaked some time previously. It was poor policy to increase reliance on foreign oil supplies, most of them in countries with strategic, human rights, and other entangling problems (Russia, Venezuela, Mexico, Nigeria, the entire Middle East).

With respect to Central and South America, the difference is again quite startling. Carter finished negotiations with Panama to sell the Panama canal, against heavy domestic opposition- a deal that has given us rich dividends in a stable canal and improved relations with the entire region. In contrast, Reagan pursued a proxy war with the Sandanistas and supported rightist thug-ocracies in Honduras, Guatamala and Panama (later to be cleaned up by George H. Bush). This amounted to reliving shades of Vietnam, and today, the Sandanistas are once again in power in Nicaragua through democratic means. On the other hand, Reagan's invasion of Grenada, gratuitous though it may have been, was warranted and provided that country a measure of stability after successive coups by Bishop and Coard.

In general economic policy, the overriding issue of the day was inflation. Inflation was finally slain by Paul Volcker, who was willing to turn the screws on interest rates until the money supply finally contracted. And who appointed Volcker? Jimmy Carter, mid-way through his presidential term. The price for this act of bravery and principle was the deep recession that brought Reagan into office. In contrast, Reagan took advantage of Carter's fiscal discipline by spending freely with deficits (called voodoo economics at the time)- giving unfunded tax cuts to the rich and building a cold-war military that we didn't need. This culture of profligate deficit spending for consumption rather than investment has continued to this day, exemplified by the current Bush administration. Indeed the whole tenor of Reaganism- hatred for effective government, business uber alles, deregulation, and supply-side trickle-down tax give-aways now is coming back to haunt us as the culture of borrowing and business "self-regulation" comes to a painful end.

Finally, the feather in the cap of the Reagan administration usually is given as winning the cold war. Who really won the cold war? Was it Kissinger/Nixon offering friendly detente with the one hand while playing the China card with the other? Was it Reagan with a bulked up military and dramatic talk about the evil empire? Was it Bush père, with his Aikido approach of letting the giant fall of its own weight? Or was it Carter, with his emphasis on human rights and principle in foreign policy? I think it goes without saying that Reagan's policies had very little to do with the collapse of the USSR. It collapsed from internal sclerosis and economic stasis, as well as the political/cultural vacuum of long-lapsed Marxism/Leninism. Indeed, Reagan's saber-rattling and proxy wars served here, as they generally do, to strengthen the targeted regime rather than weaken it. And as far as military strength is concerned, the USSR had, and Russia still has, more nuclear missiles than we do, however decrepit the rest of their military was at the time.

My bet for the most influential policy that brought down the Soviet Union was the focus on human rights and basic freedoms, first by the Helsinki accords, and then by the Carter administration. It was this policy that gave heart to Soviet dissidents like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, and which struck directly at the core of USSR's self-justification. If the people were poor, they might still appreciate egalatarian principles. If the state was corrupt, it was still a great state- a pluralistic nexus of many nations in the USSR and an empire of many more on its borders. But if the basic human values that the ideology of the USSR supposedly most valued were hollow, as was reluctantly admitted by Kruschev in the post-Stalin era, and on which the Helsinki accords continued to shine a light, with, for instance, the highly publicized defection of Jews, then what was left? What was the point of continuing to be in opposition to the liberal European/American mode of state and government, which had shown itself to be both prosperous and decent?

Of course later times have abundantly highlighted the basic decency and perspicacity of Jimmy Carter, including the honor of a Nobel peace prize. His current observations on the Palestinian question are particularly acute, proclaiming that Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is shameful and akin to Apartheid. It is imperative that the Israelis be given some tough love. But I'd like to put my vote in to rehabilitate Carter's presidential legacy as well- to appreciate that his administration was one of our best, if not most popular at the time, with long-lasting benefits to the nation.

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Incidental link to an obituary for Griffin Bell, another fine Carter appointment.

Son and Prophet

In praise of BlackSun and his blog

I've followed the blog of Sean Prophet for some time and recommend it as a fascinating view into the religious mind. Sean is the son of Mark and Elizabeth Prophet, founders of the Summit Lighthouse, also known as the Church Universal and Triumphant (CUT). This small cult was founded in 1958 by Mark in the theosophist and "I AM" (not to mention John Bircher) traditions, believing in a sort of ancestor worship, by way of "ascended masters" and truly bizarre incantations called decrees. Sean and his sister Erin were groomed to inherit the leadership, and were well educated. This education had the unintended consequence of making Sean an atheist, and he spends most of his blog plumbing the depths of the cult experience and religion in general. Thus his adopted nom de net of BlackSun. Erin has also left the cult and written a book on her story.

High points include Sean's general comments on belief and philosophy, an extensive narration on his father's role in the church, and numerous posts on the cult's extraordinary apocalypse prophecy and bomb shelter project, traceable to that vintage cult classic of John the Revelator.

Best wishes for the solstice and the holidays!