Via Glenn Greenwald, a reminder of how one of America's underrated writers foresaw the havoc that 9/11 would wreak on American institutions, as the country hunkered down for an endless war against an enemy who was everywhere and nowhere, who could be our own citizens or mysterious men in caves abroad, in which privacy was a luxury and Big Brother was watching. Hunter Thompson didn't wait long enough to see how it will all play out before he blew his brains out, but his canny take on the day after gives us a pretty good clue.
What is Good? A Coda
Image via Wikipedia
All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment', demands that the robbery shall continue.
If our society is based on exploitation, then it is hard to break the exploitation and save the society.
Blogging to Happiness
I have been a big fan of Gretchen Rubin ever since reading her slim biography of Winston Churchill and her somewhat less slim biography of John F. Kennedy. At present, I am about half way through her latest book: The Happiness Project, in which she chronicles a year spent thinking and trying ways to live a happier life. One thing which brought Rubin more happiness was starting a blog, also called the Happiness Project. Given that one of Rubin's principles of happiness could be paraphrased as the journey is more important than the destination (though the destination counts!), it is not surprising that one of the ways she found greater happiness was through her blog.
America Launched on a Sea of Words
The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ronald Reagan had a great gift for reducing powerful ideas to shallow platitudes. So perhaps it is no surprise that, like some verbal reverse alchemist turning gold into lead, he could debase the Puritan fear of accountability to a stern deity to a bland notion of modern celebrity. When John Winthrop spoke of a City on a Hill, it was equal parts aspiration and admonition. Yes, he intended the Massachusetts Bay Colony to be an example of godliness to others, but he was also firmly persuaded that if the Colony abandoned the the path of righteousness, that God could make it an example of another sort after the fashion of, say, Sodom and Gomorrah. Reagan, in contrast, basically viewed the "City on a Hill" as a variation of the Magic Kingdom. Reagan's platitudes are just one of many ways in which modern America has watered down and caricatured the Puritans' high minded, if sometimes oppressive, ideals.
None of which is to do justice to the bitingly funny and deeply compassionate narrative of life in early America recounted by Sarah Vowell in the Wordy Shipmates. Vowell has a keen understanding both of how radically different the Puritan outlook was from our modern sensibilities and yet how deeply ingrained Puritan notions of their special place in the world are in modern America, with both comic and disastrous consequences. And in the end, some of the characters Vowell is most fond of are the rebels and misfits - Ann Hutchinson and Roger Williams -- who were forced out of the Massachusetts to Rhode Island, where they established a precedent for religious tolerance that has been a significant thread in American history ever since.
Contrary to today's secularists, Roger Williams was not concerned with limiting the state's power in matters of conscience because he was irreligious. Rather, he was, if anything, too religious, so scrupulous about his own salvation that at times he would refuse to pray even in the company of his wife and children less they tarnish the purity of his thoughts. Williams recognized, however, that the tyranny of the state in religious matters corrupts both religion and government. False doctrines can be imposed by force, but more importantly religion comes to serve secular ends.
No account of early New England would be complete without confronting the colonists' encounters with the Native Americans. Vowell acknowledges that the early epidemics that wiped out huge numbers of the native population were inevitable once initial contact was made between Indians and Europeans. However, she also observes that the subsequent genocide was not, and she vividly describes the incineration of virtually the entire Pequot tribe - men, women, and children - in one monstrous conflagration as a horrifying precedent for the centuries of massacres to come.
For any person willing to take a lighthearted look at early America, and its underside, the Wordy Shipmates is a volume not to be missed.
Ripeness is All: Zorba the Greek
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The only universal experiences are pain and death. Those of
us who are lucky experience a minimum of the former and put off the
latter as long as possible. Sadly, our chances of escaping pain and
evading death are not solely determined by the caprices of an
indifferent nature but are also subject to the folly and more
significantly the cruelty of our own verminous little species. At the
outside, the Marquis de Sade was so convinced of the universality of
cruelty that he made it a principle that cruelty was not only the
shortest route to pleasure, power, fortune, and fame, but itself and
inherently sensual and gratifying exercise. Though in our sunnier
moments we may doubt the wisdom of the Good Marquis' observations, the
dismal history of the past century alone -- an unparalleled
century of mass murder, global conflict, and exquisite torture that
would make a medieval inquisitor blush -- is enough to bolster
the arguments of even the most faint-hearted pessimist. The recent
folly in Iraq, followed by the embrace of torture, secret prisons, and
extraordinary rendition, while it may be a peccadillo compared to the
monstrous crimes of the mid-century past, nevertheless should quiet
any Pollyanna who would exempt us from the general disease of human
cruelty. So is there a reason, as Monte Python so memorably put it,
to "always look on the bright side of life."
Zorba the Greek is an extraordinarily life-affirming story. It
also has an rich appreciation for human folly, cruelty, and
narrow-mindedness. Amidst frigid aristocrats, mad monks, brutish
villagers, and vain adventurers, Zorba stands like a rock of conjoined
masculine power and compassion. A former soldier, he has had his
fill of killing. (An inveterate serial romantic, he has certainly
not lost his interest in women.) As a mine boss, he is first to
share the danger of the miners; as a man, he is the first to stand
against the village on behalf of a persecuted woman. Along with his
backer, a mine owner tormented by a bookish vision of Eastern
mysticism, Zorba cheerfully runs one enterprise after another into the
ground with great gusto and joie de vivre, literally extracting every
ounce of pleasure from wine, women and song, for he is a master of the
Greek instrument the Santuri and is enthralled by dance. Even as the
shadow of the First World War looms, Zorba is undaunted. Better than
his bookish companion or the cloddish villagers, Zorba understands not
only pain and death but life, pleasure, and love. For this, he towers
above the Lilliputians who surround him.
Stranger Things . . .
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Sex, Space, and Salvation
For ECD.
Jubal Harshaw is a grumpy old man who surrounds himself with beautiful women and an electric fence in an Edenic retreat in the Poconos in
Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. This is a good thing,
since he has an uncanny talent for irritating almost anybody, redeemed
by a keen wit and a nose for the sweet spot in a bargain. When there
is blood in the water, Harshaw smells it. The key clue, among quite a
few, that this balding contrarian is a stand in for author Heinlein
himself is that he largely makes his living by spontaneously dictating
short stories. Although his periodic pontifications on the nature and
history of almost anything gives the game away almost as easily.
Harshaw, among other roles, serves as the chorus expounding upon the
themes of sex, freedom, stories, and salvation that comprise the major
themes of the book. The book is technologically uninspired but
conceptually bold; the space motif liberates the author by allowing
him to imagine a radically asexual Apollonian immortal consciousness
from Mars with which to contrast short-lived, sex-crazed humanity.
The criticism of a classic, even in such a typically underrated genre
as science fiction, is not to be undertaken without trepidation. In
this case, Heinlein's magnum opus wears rather better than perhaps his
second best-known book, Starship Troopers, in which hyperactive
soldiers in futuristic body armor combat giant "bugs" for mastery of
the universe after taking control of the earth. Much science fiction,
and Heinlein's work is no exception, is rather glandular, driven by
the kind of testosterone soaked combination of lust and aggression
most typical of young men in late adolescence. The question is
whether there is anything more.
For all his vaunted conservatism in other matters, Heinlein's Stranger
in a Strange land is an unqualified endorsement of free love, at
least, ahem, so long as it takes place between men and women, in fact,
the more women the better. Big busted, round hipped, conventionally
sexy women, mind you, although there is the occasional deviation, such
as the carnival woman who is tattooed with religious imagery from head
to toe. She becomes one of the central female figures in the book, a
kind of sideshow earth mother who heads up the cult of Mars.
And why not, after all, since the carnival is also one of the central
themes of the book? Not the Mardi Gras, but the fairground sideshow.
The book is clear that it regards all organized religion as variations
on the sideshow, scams run for suckers. The twist is that the book's
hero, Michael Valentine Smith, may be expropriating religion's carny
methods to lead mankind to a higher truth. Smith, abandoned on Mars
as a baby and reared by Martians, possesses uncanny telekinetic
powers, bodily self control, and mental discipline beyond the wildest
aspirations of an Eastern mystic. In addition, the Martian culture he
comes from is one in which communitarianism is so advanced, indeed so
intrinsic, that notions of money and property do not exist and radical
self-sacrifice is as normal as self-preservation in our society. On
the parched surface of Mars, interdependence and intimacy is
symbolized through the sharing of water; offering a stranger a drink
makes him (or her) a lifelong blood-brother, or rather, water brother.
But the root of the power of the Man from Mars lies in a total
comprehension and mental assimilation of ideas and matter under the
rubric of "grokking". "Grok," which at least among the readers of
science fiction has passed into the common vocabulary, signifies
variously completely understanding an idea, experiencing a feeling,
assimilating an object. When the Man from Mars reads an
encyclopedia as part of his early education, he "groks" it by
simultaneously memorizing, understanding, and expounding upon it
within days. He "groks" objects so thoroughly that he can either move
or disintegrate them at will, thus making him an unusually difficult
target for those who wish him ill, to no avail since he is also able
to "grok" their intentions while they are well out of range.
In the end, it is no wonder that Stranger in a Strange Land became a
kind of "Hippie Bible" (See Wikipedia) when it came out in the
sixties: organized religion is revealed as a con game; free love is
the order of the day; property is a primitive evil; self-discipline
and self-sacrifice are the paramount values. For all its tang of
adolescent sexuality, Stranger in a Strange Land leaves one with the
sense that humans need to be more loving, giving, and tolerant toward
one another, because no one else is going to do it for us. In the
end, there are worse words to live by than Jubal Harshaw's favorite
toast, "To our noble selves, damned few of us left."
Law and the Long War: The Subversion of Democracy
It is a shibboleth of the Right that anyone more liberal than Rush Limbaugh is a "traitor" to his country; the egregious Ann Coulter even wrote an entire book about liberal "Treason." The shrill rhetoric and exaggerated alarums over the bogeymen of the Left betray a deep-seated unease about American democracy, however. Modern American democracy is committed above all to the orderly transfer of power through stable institutions designed to express the will of the People. Secondarily, American democracy is committed to the proposition, familiar to every student who ever dipped into the Federalist Papers, that no one locus of power is ever to be trusted completely. A government of limited powers can best be preserved by encouraging each of the three branches of government to jealously guard its prerogatives and ensure that no other branch overstepped its authority.
In contrast, modern American conservatism, as repeatedly expressed in the eras of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush the Younger, is infatuated with the cult of the man on the white horse, the strong central executive who will put all to rights because he is not bound by the petty considerations of law or morals that bind lesser mortals. (See Bombing of Cambodia, Watergate, Iran-Contra, War on Terror.) The Party panders in the pursuit of power to the racaille of the American South, who have historically been the pillar of slavery, segregation, States Rights, Jim Crow, and the Southern Strategy and who now form the electoral core of the rump of the party of Lincoln, (Teddy) Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Rockefeller, but the Republican Party does not fundamentally believe in fulfilling the will of the people. Rather, theirs is the paternalism of the plantation owner and the corporate executive, the "Quality" who will ensure that the teeming swarthy masses do not threaten white privilege in America, endowed upon the white man by grace of God, the gun, and the smallpox. The alternative would be to recognize equality and welcome participation in the political process by all Americans. (Anyone who doubts the overtly exclusionary tendency of the contemporary, conservative American South need only review the disproportionately anti-Obama vote of white southerners compared to the overall vote in their own states and to whites in other parts of the country, or anecdotally the interview footage of white Southerners in Kentucky before the election.)
The first two chapters of Benjamin Wittes' Law and the Long War starkly illustrate this modern tendency in the modern politics of the Republican Party. Proceeding under a theory of the "unitary executive," the Bush Administration sought to consolidate the emergency powers it had assumed immediately after the crisis of 9/11 on a permanent "wartime" basis. In his first chapter, "The Law of September 10," Wittes seeks to show not only that there was some continuity between the anti-terrorism efforts of the Clinton and Bush Administrations, but also that there were some theoretical precedents dating from World War II (or earlier) for the Bush Administration's insistence that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Al Qaeda and the Taliban and that it needed no authorization from Congress to regulate its treatment of those captured in the wake of 9/11. In particular, Wittes points out that Guantanamo had been used prior to 9/11 for the indefinite preventive detention of HIV positive illegal immigrants, and that the Clinton administration had pioneered on a limited scale the practice of extraordinary rendition, or "outsourced torture," that later became a staple of the Bush Administration's "War on Terror." Wittes concedes that the Bush Administration was totally lacking in legal justification for its actions in only one area: its decision to disregard the jurisdiction of the FISA Court over the conduct of electronic surveillance.
Wittes explains the readiness of the Bush Administration to disregard legal and moral norms in pursuit of the so-called "War on Terror" precisely in terms of the Bush Administration's public insistence on casting the conflict almost entirely in wartime terms and its concomitant contempt for any argument that legal guidance or Congressional authority was relevant to prosecuting the conflict.
While Wittes' attempts to show legal continuity and at least theoretical justification for the Bush Administration's disregard of legal and moral norms in its prosecution of the so-called "War on Terror" seem a little strained, he is quite persuasive on the legislative and political dynamics that guided the Administration's actions. Wittes' formulation has almost the ring of a Greek tragedy. Persuaded in their hubris that any request for legislative authorization from the Congress would diminish the inherent power of the "unitary executive," the (Vice) President's men, particularly David Addington, strongly resisted any suggestion that they ask the Congress for legislation to regulate the custody of terror suspects and adjudication of their cases. Wittes identifies three important consequences of the Administration's arrogance. First, they failed to recognize that whatever small quantum of executive authority might be lost to the Congress, the authority of the executive is vastly magnified when bolstered by statute, as Justice Jackson long ago pointed out. Second, they failed to recognize that the supine Congress — Republican or Democrat — was ready to give them anything they requested. Third, they underestimated the willingness of the Supreme Court to step in and fill the vacuum left when the Administration bypassed the Congress, resulting in a series of highly embarrassing Supreme Court decisions that in fact undermined executive prerogative and enhanced the reach of the Court.
In Wittes' view, the normal dynamic of American democracy should be that the President proposes, the Congress legislates, the President executes, and the Courts, if necessary, adjudicate. The Bush Administration turned this dynamic on its head. The President, recognizing no limit on his authority, was brought up short by the Court, and then sought to control the damage by seeking legislation from the Congress to limit or overturn the Court's rulings. Such a course of action is not only woefully inefficient, but it drastically undermines the Administration's moral authority for any action it might take, particularly when the rebuke comes from a notoriously conservative Supreme Court. It is one thing to take action with the full endorsement of the nation's deliberative and legislative bodies; it is quite another to suffer public rebuke from the nation's highest court and then to be seen frantically manipulating a rubber-stamp Congress in order to proceed with a course of action that has been roundly condemned. Moreover, proceeding in such a manner is a course of action that, once the immediate fires had been extinguished, could only be undertaken by men with a fundamental contempt for representative democracy and a complete lack of concern for the damage they might do to our institutions and our freedom.
Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy
Just discovered Yale Law School's Avalon Project, a collection of major historical documents from ancient times through the twenty-first century. It looks as though it will repay a second, and third, look.
Blog Discussion of the War on Terror
Public Affairs Blogger Thomas Nephew and Legal Affairs Blogger The Talking Dog are holding an extended online discussion of Benjamin Wittes' book Law and the Long War about the War on Terror and its deformation of United States law.
Profit Without Honor
Corporate Irresponsibility: America's Newest Export by Lawrence E. Mitchell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Corporate Irresponsibility was probably destined never to be a popular book from the day it was written in 2001. Not only did it run counter to American business orthodoxy, but it takes a self-consciously scholarly approach from the outset. Any book the first third of which is devoted to a Kantian analysis of the deontological justification of the corporate form is unlikely to garner a wide audience outside academia. This is a shame, because this book is a thoughtful exploration of deep rooted flaws in American corporate law and practice, flaws which are considerably more apparent now than when the book appeared. From the outset, Mitchell questions the fiction of corporate personhood, a creation of the Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century that endowed the corporation with the same legal rights as individual persons. Mitchell sees this as a tragic mistake. A corporation possessing all the legal rights of a person may incorrectly be thought to share the motivations, inhibitions, and interests of a natural person. In fact, however, the corporation, particularly in its American form, owes but one loyalty and possesses but one motivation, the maximization of short term profits and stock prices.
Mitchell questions the little examined assumption of American culture that short term profit and societal benefit are coterminous, formerly expressed in the notorious comment that what is good for General Motors is good for the country. (Not such a popular sentiment since the recent collapse of GM.) In fact, an exclusive focus on short term stock price not only blinds the corporation (and the people to run it) to such obvious externalities as pollution, but also even to the financial decisions that would be in the best interest of the corporation and its stockholders, much less employees, customers, and the public.
One example (mine, not Mitchell's) might be the Walt Disney Corporation's relentless pursuit of extension of the copyright term in order to protect its proprietary interest in Mickey Mouse. It has long been recognized, and is acknowledged in the United States Constitution, that copyright is an appropriate temporary measure to ensure that artists and writers are compensated for their work and encouraged to produce more of it. In general, however, works should pass into the public domain as soon as possible so that ideas will be widely disseminated and older works can inspire new ones. (Shakespeare might never have written a line if he had been subjected to a rigorous enforcement of today's copyright laws. The author of the ur-Hamlet would no doubt have sued!) An individual artist only needs to have an artificial monopoly on his creative work for the duration of his lifetime, or perhaps a little longer to provide for his children. This is consistent with the principle of limited copyright, and flesh and blood is likely to demand little more. Only the corporation, which exists in perpetuity, or until dissolution do us part, is likely to demand a perpetual copyright with no regard for the free flow of information or the general welfare, although it may cloak itself in the rights of the very artists it exploits through draconian distribution contracts. The corporation knows no conscience, only profit.
Under these circumstances, the incentives for corporate behavior (or misbehavior) make a real difference in light of the absence of the kind of restraint normally to be expected from individuals. Unfortunately, the corporation in its American form takes to extremes an emphasis on short term stock price and exclusive obligation to shareholders that exacerbates corporate asocial (or antisocial) tendencies. While there seems to be consensus that long-term planning is necessary for the long-term health of corporations, the insatiable demand of stockholders for short-term returns can clearly undermine the long-term health of the corporation. Obvious examples include such cost-cutting measures as slashing the research department and reductions-in-force of necessary personnel. On another level, the focus on short-term profit encourages America's takeover culture, in which companies that do not maximize their short-term stock price are susceptible to hostile takeover and leveraged buyouts that saddle them with massive debt. (The argument that performance is driven by takeover threats is, of course, tautological so long as performance is primarily measured in short-term returns.)
To address the distortions that focusing on short-term stock price imposes on corporate behavior, a central reform that Mitchell proposes is to reduce the influence of stockholders on corporate governance. Ideally, Mitchell argues, one could largely eliminate it by making corporate boards self-perpetuating. The Yale Corporation, which governs Yale University, is largely run this way (although the alumni representative is elected). Shareholders would naturally, retain the power to invest or disinvest in the corporation so as to protect their investment, although on the investor side of the equation, Mitchell also proposes a variety of incentives to curb day trading and other short-term trading that distort the market rather than improving market efficiency. Mitchell's reform of corporate law would ideally act to encourage longterm planning by corporate boards and long-term investing by stockholders. Recognizing that it is unlikely that stockholders would ever completely relinquish the power to elect the board, Mitchell offers as a compromise elections that would occur not annually, but only after the board had served a term of several years. At the same time, Mitchell proposes to extend the amount of time between reports, rather than issuing them quarterly, to encourage a longer view on the part of investors. (However, one might question whether modifying behavior by withholding information is an effective or desirable strategy.) Although the book is not long, Mitchell does deal with a host of other issues, including the disgusting tendency toward self-dealing that has lately so outraged the public, as managers award themselves massive bonuses even as their companies go under. Mitchell outlines the problem as inherent in the wide scope given board members under the "business judgment rule," under which conflicts of interest on the part of board members can be excused if they are approved by a majority of the "non-interested" board members. Given the reciprocity that characterizes corporate boards, allowing the Courts to abdicate their oversight responsibility in the name of the business judgment rule is a recipe for institutionalizing conflict of interest. Mitchell endorses stricter legal oversight of boards to regulate their conduct, but fundamentally is more concerned with how corporations behave within society than with oversight of the personal conduct of board members.
A short review does not do justice to this dense but penetrating analysis of the tectonic flaws of America's corporate structure, an analysis that has proved as prescient as it is generally unheeded. Timely today, it would have been more timely reading for America's policymakers when it came out.
Where is Willie Stark When We Need Him?
A Last Good-bye to Bill Buckley
Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir by Christopher Buckley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Christopher Buckley's bittersweet memoir of his final year with his stylish mother and famously conservative father lends a human scale to a couple that so often appeared larger than life. Personally, I was never particularly enamoured of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s politics or even his books, despite being piqued by God and Man at Yale and amused on occasion by the capers of fictional CIA agent Blackford Oakes. However, from the time I was a small boy who loved big words, I was flattered to be compared favorably to the legendarily eloquent Buckley, for whom it was perfectly natural to toss off a word like "postprandial" when one intended to take a stroll after a lunch. (Despite his legendary command of the English language, it was apparently his third language.) In addition, although no sailor myself, I have always had an outsized admiration for anyone who could captain or navigate a wind-borne vessel. Ironically, I have not read Buckley's celebrated sailing books, but I have admired his exploits on the water based on second-hand accounts. Finally, anyone who is able to make a good living through his pen earns a certain amount of admiration from me. As Samuel Johnson famously said, "No one but a blockhead would write except for money."
There are few more difficult ways to grow up than as the son of a famous father and a socialite mother. Winston Churchill is perhaps the most notable example, having admired from afar his imperious, syphilitic father and fashionable, flirtatious mother -- reportedly a consort of no less than than the King of England. Christopher Buckley, similar in kind if not degree, seasons his admiration for his famous parents with a clear-eyed and painful acknowledgment of their many shortcomings public and private. Patricia Buckley, once one of New York's most celebrated hostesses, apparently frequently found it impossible to distinguish between truth and fiction on topics as diverse as her reasons for not finishing her college education at Vassar to visits from the Royal Family in her youth. Christopher's Buckley's relationship with his mother was often stormy, but his complex blend of admiration and antagonism toward his father is the potent cocktail that really fuels this story and carries it to its poignant conclusion. Bill Buckley's Olympian detachment from quotidian concerns resulted in over 90 books, thousands of pages of articles, hundreds of television appearances, and friends and acquaintances among the most celebrated persons of the day. Coupled with Buckley's steadfast convictions, conservative views, and Catholic certitude, Buckley's sense of himself could be alternately entrancing and insufferable. And his personal recklessness in his boat and in his car whether his family was aboard or not bespeaks a level of self-absorption that contrasts sharply with moments of familial generosity. Ultimately, of course, laboring as an author in the shadow of your more famous father, subject to criticism alternately enthusiastic and capriciously cruel, is a cross no son should have to bear, even if it is assumed voluntarily.
Christopher Buckley, despite the traces of bitterness that lace this confection, writes with wit, grace, and self-awareness of his attempt to reconcile himself to the complex emotional inheritance bequeathed to him by his parents. In doing so, he seems ultimately to come to terms with the repeated betrayals inflicted on him by his prevaricating mother. The wounds left by a half century of fighting and making up with his father require a slower reconciliation, brought about in part by his father's slow physical decline and the constant devotion it evoked. To his credit, the senior Buckley, whose unfailing mental acumen carried him through the completion of biographies of Goldwater and Reagan even as he succumbed to kidney failure, diabetes, skin cancer, and general physical enfeeblement, was mostly good-humored and gracious toward his son as he approached his end. In the end, the younger Buckley's vocation as a humorist and the elder Buckley's personal civility and generosity shine through the tangled emotions of this real life soap opera featuring one of America's first families.
We Shall Overcome
Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice by Paul Butler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
As a former student of Professor Paul Butler, I was not surprised to find his book refreshing in its candor, raw in its emotion, and revolutionary in its outlook. At bottom, Professor Butler's analysis is grounded in the radical notion that the government should respect people's right to be secure in their persons and property, a right formerly enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Even more fundamentally, he argues that we should re-embrace freedom in this country in ways that range from not incarcerating nonviolent offenders to decriminalizing drugs. Our prisons, he points out, have made our lives more dangerous by serving to indoctrinate nonviolent offenders in the ways of violent crime. Not only are we squandering lives that might otherwise be productive, but we are also creating a contempt for law not seen since Prohibition and extending police power in a manner not consistent with a free society.
Ironically, Butler points out that prosecutorial bullying coupled with the indiscriminate use of paid informants ("snitches") has radically undermined the rule of law. Indiscriminate prosecution leads to a fatalistic attitude in some communities that come to regard prosecution more as an inevitable misfortune than an avoidable sanction. Paid informants not only undermine community trust and generate false information, but they also allow some of the worst offenders to carry on a life of crime in the knowledge that the police will protect and excuse their paid informers.
As the book's title suggests, Butler derives a series of principles for approaching the problems of criminal justice that are derived from hip hop culture. No disrespect, but I am about as familiar with hip hop as I am with Russian folk dancing, which is to say, not very. Yet given the immediacy of a genre like hip hop on today's streets and among today's youth, it is all the more necessary to read books like Butler's that serve as a bridge to new ideas. Butler's ideas about selective noncooperation with the police may raise an eyebrow in some, but mostly they constitute standard advice for anyone on the wrong end of an inquiry by law enforcement: do not consent to a search, ask for a lawyer, say nothing more until you have one. Even Butler's signature advocacy of jury nullification in cases of non-violent drug offenses is hardly a notion that would shock James Madison.
Later in the book, Butler raises questions about the possible uses of technology in providing alternatives to mass incarceration. However, he does not attempt to answer them, much less address the broad implications of placing intrusive monitoring devices in the hands of the bullying police and prosecutors he so eloquently decries elsewhere. Such a discussion deserves at least a book of its own, preferably one that examines the commoditization of information technology as a counterweight to Big Brother.
Butler concludes the book with a series of suggestions for citizen action with which anyone who believes we can shape our culture by improving our environment should find themselves in immediate sympathy. While in some ways a pastiche of personal memoir, social analysis, legal primer, and citizen handbook, this book is a compelling read and a call to action for anyone who has ever had a moment's concern about crime or racial justice in America.
Overclocked
I have just read the first of Cory Doctorow's short stories in Overclocked, which are available for download under a Creative Commons license. It has the virtues, among others, of a) being short, b) illustrating an important point about a fundamental freedom, c) alluding to George Orwell, d) relying on the common programming concept of recursion, and e) availing itself of an innovative legal structure for marketing and distribution purposes. All in all, it's "Science Fiction" in the best senses of both terms.
Postscript to Outliers
A minor postscript to Outliers is that it is the first Amazon Kindle book I have read, although I read it not on a Kindle but on an iPhone. All in all, it is delightful to have a book always at hand. The book was quite readable, and really my only reservation is that charts did not always reproduce well on the iPhone. In addition to Amazon, I am heartened to see that high quality e-books continue to be published by ereader and others.
Outliers
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers is uplifting because it promises us we can master our destinies. What at first blush might correctly be seen as a debunking of the notion that genius is the sole product of mysterious innate ability is also a celebration of the confluence of natural ability, unusual opportunity, dedicated practice and good fortune that has produced such prodigious individuals as Bill Gates, Bill Joy, Steve Jobs, Canada's hockey champions, classical musicians, Asian math champions, New York's Jewish lawyers, and even a bestselling half-Jamaican Canadian author.
An essential ingredient in Gladwell's recipe for genius is hard work, at least 10,000 hours of practice before one reaches true proficiency in any discipline. A predicate for that kind of practice, however, is not merely inner discipline but opportunity. Bill Joy and Bill Gates had rare opportunities in the form of essentially unlimited free access to programming time on computers at a time when such access was a rare commodity. Coupled with this rare access in their youth, they along with most other household names in the computer industry were able to gain such extraordinary experience at just the moment when the computer industry was undergoing a tectonic shift from the clunky batch-programmed mainframes that had hitherto dominated the industry to the revolutionary light personal computers that represented the future. A few years earlier and they would have been wedded to the mainframe dinosaurs of the past, a few years later and they would they would have been too late to play a critical role in shaping the future and would simply have joined the herd rather than leading the charge.
Gladwell's conclusion is that once we dispense with the notion that genius is spontaneous, innate, and mysterious, we are liberated to cultivate it. To be sure, not every seed will grow to be a Giant Sequoia, but even the seeds of the Giant Sequoia will come to nothing if they are cast upon dry stone. And Gladwell broadens his analysis to include not merely a condemnation of lack of opportunity, but also a critique of culture. In successive examples, he shows that the occupations cultures pursue, the hardships they suffer, and even the syntax of their language and content of their manners can have a critical effect on their economic success, job performance, or intellectual achievement. Far from succumbing to a crude determinism, however, Gladwell holds forth the possibility that by enriching our children's opportunities and examining our thinking, we can create the conditions necessary for civilization to flourish in new abundance.
Wild Ride
Wild Man : The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg by Tom Wells
My review
rating: 3 of 5 stars
It is a peculiar feeling to read a painstakingly detailed, fully-indexed 604-page biography and get the feeling that the author has simultaneously a pathological aversion to his subject and an irresistible fascination with him. Tom Wells chronicles in depth Daniel Ellsberg's strained relationship with his mother, who died young in a tragic family car crash. He dwells on examples of Ellsberg's self-centeredness, his lasciviousness, his womanizing, his vanity, his procrastination, his social alienation, and the spiraling irrelevance of his later years. Wells even repeatedly seeks to downplay the significance of Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers, the ultra-secret Rand Corporation study of government deception of the public during the Vietnam War that made Ellsberg a household word when he released it to the New York Times.
While I am not one to assume that whistleblowers, much less perhaps the greatest whistleblower of all time, are plaster saints, I am a little put off by the degree of Tom Wells' antipathy toward his subject. To be fair, I have never met Daniel Ellsberg. I do think Ellsberg was tormented by the war, and possibly by his complicity in it. I would not be surprised if he had some personal demons or made some reckless choices. Nevertheless, he remains a man whom I admire intensely, because he did have the courage to stand up and expose the lies of the most powerful government on earth.
Moreover, for all the flaws in this long book, the writing is crisp and there are many moments of intense drama, my favorites being the antics of the Chuck Colson and the White House plumbers on behalf of the troglodytic Richard Nixon and Ellsberg's mad cross country campaign to elude the FBI. In a national game of whack-a-mole, the Department of Justice would secure an injunction against one paper seeking to publish the papers, only to have two more copies pop up in different papers across the country. Among his other accomplishments, Ellsberg's act led directly to the decision in New York Times v. Sullivan that the government could not under the First Amendment impose prior restraints on the press to prevent publication of material, such as the Pentagon Papers, to the release of which it objected.
The final word on this book is that it is a critical biography in a good sense. It thoroughly examines its subject, stripping away myths, scrutinizing flaws. It is hard to believe that there is a wart on its subject that is not put under the magnifying glass. And yet, it also attempts to give us the measure of Ellsberg the man, and I think it succeeds in spite of itself. By that I mean that despite the author's professed low opinion of Ellsberg, and studious attempts at documenting it, I find it hard not to think of Ellsberg as a (flawed) giant of our times. More than can be said, perhaps, of his nemesis, Richard Nixon.
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm?
| What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane. | |
| Dedicated Reader | |
| Literate Good Citizen | |
| Book Snob | |
| Non-Reader | |
| Fad Reader | |
| What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz | |
Via Andrew Sullivan.
Universal Acid
is how Daniel Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea describes the effect of Darwin's theory of natural selection in almost every area of modern intellectual inquiry. Dennett sees Darwin as providing a revolutionary explanation of how the complexity of life can exist without positing a cosmic intelligence directing its development. In a running comparison with Turing and Von Neumann's discoveries in the area of artificial intelligence, Dennett describes evolution as an "algorithmic" process that operates much the way computer programming does: simple instructions can produce complex results.
Dennett defines an algorithm as having the following characteristics:
(1) substrate neutrality: The procedure for long devision works equally well with pencil or pen, paper or parchment, neon lights or skywriting, using any symbol system you like. The power of the procedure is due to its logical structure, not the causal powers of the materials used in the instantiation just so long as those causal powers permit the prescribed steps to be followed exactly.
(2) underlying mindlessness: Although the overall design of the procedure may be brilliant, or yield brilliant results, each constituent step, as well as the transition between steps, is utterly simple. How simple? Simple enough for a dutiful idiot to perform — or for a straightforward mechanical device to perform. The standard textbook analogy notes that algorithms are recipes of sorts, designed to be followed by novice cooks. A recipe book written for great chefs might include the phrase "Poach the fish in a suitable wine until almost done," but an algorithm for the same process might begin, "Choose a white wine that says 'dry' on the label; take a corkscrew and open the bottle; pour an inch of wine in the bottom of a pan; turn the burner under the pan on high; . . . " — a tedious breakdown of the process into dead simple steps, requiring no wise decisions or delicate judgments or intuitions on the part of the recipe-reader.
(3) guaranteed results: Whatever an algorithm does, it always does it, if it is executed without misstep. An algorithm is a foolproof recipe.
The mindless process of natural selection, by which selective pressures winnow out species from amongst the rich diversity of random mutation, is just such an algorithm — or group of algoriths — Dennett argues. As such, given millions of years to operate, it is perfectly capable of explaining the complexity of modern life, the existence of humanity, and the development of consciousness.
Such an explanation based on randomness and mindless algorithms dissolves in its elegant simplicity many traditional explanations of humanity's place in the universe, engendering quite a bit of hostility, hence the moniker universal acid.
Rushdie Deserves His Knighthood
India Knight makes a compelling case in the Times on why Salman Rushdie deserves his knighthood and why a free society should not be afraid to award it to him.
When I heard about the outrage over the knighthood, I went looking for a copy of Midnight's Children. Both Midnight's Children and the Satanic Verses were sold out at Borders, so I picked up a copy of the Moor's Last Sigh. Besides being tantalized by the title, I figured that it was my modest contribution to the Rushdie defense fund.
On a completely unrelated note, who knew that Rushdie was married to Padma Lakshmi, the host of television's Top Chef?