Henry

From a delightful short essay by David Langford on footnotes in literature.

bq. My favourite helpful annotation in fantasy appears in Lord Dunsany’s story “The Bird of the Difficult Eye”, where “beasts prowling in the blackness gluttered” at the doomed protagonist. Gluttered? A footnote is provided: “See any dictionary, but in vain.”

The essay discusses Alasdair Gray’s use of fictional footnotes, but curiously fails to mention his Lanark, an almost uniformly depressing novel, with a happy ending which is only described (implied?) in the endnotes to a nonexistent final section. It also mentions in passing J.G. Ballard’s short story, “The Index” (which nabakov talks about in the comments to this post on ‘Indexing as Artform’). Of course, Anthony Grafton has written an entire book on the genealogy of the footnote. However, despite frequent displays of Grafton’s personal literary flair ( e.g. “Like the high whine of the dentist’s drill, the low rumble of the footnote on the historian’s page reassures: The tedium it inflicts, like the pain inflicted by the drill, is not random but directed.”), the book confines its scope to the academic footnote, almost entirely ignoring its exotic fictional cousins. Finally, Scott McLemee writes about the guilty pleasures of reading reference books for entertainment, and solicits nominations for “favorite reference books” to provide “diversion, edification, or moral uplift .” My personal favourite is Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, available in a thoroughly outdated (and thus vastly more entertaining) edition here. Fowler's English Usage (again available in an antiquated edition) runs a close second, although I understand that its most recent edition has lost much of the vigour and charm that earlier versions had.

Update: I’d always assumed (without reading it) that Fowler’s “The King’s English” was an early and rather different version of “Modern English Usage.” Not so; they’re separate (if related) texts, and the link above is to the former rather than the latter.

Stephen Bainbridge ruminates on Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels and the reasons for the success of the British Navy in its wars against Napoleonic France and the US. He gives a brief discussion of a paper by Douglas W. Allen, which analyzes the institutions of the British Navy as a solution to a set of principal-agent problems. Now, the paper is interesting, but it seems to me to be flawed, in a manner that’s unfortunately rather typical of many economists who analyze social institutions. Allen treats the rules of the Navy as an efficient solution to a set of monitoring problems, where the British state wanted to make sure that its captains, officers and seamen fought well on its behalf. In other words, he’s making a functionalist argument.

Now the functionalist part of the story is an important one; the British Navy clearly existed for a reason. But if the Aubrey-Maturin novels provide any sort of an accurate picture of the institutions of the British Navy, there’s strong countervailing evidence to suggest that many of the institutions of the Navy were less intended to maximize the overall efficiency of the Navy as a fighting machine, than to provide powerful actors in the Navy with the opportunities for individual gain. Viz., the institutionalized prerogatives of pursers to engage in certain forms of peculation. The right of admirals to a third-share of any prize money won by captains under their command. The need to pay sweeteners to those in charge of the docks to provide timely repairs. The arbitrary system of promotion, which depended at least as much (and probably rather more) on patronage and political connections as on merit. Not to mention Aubrey’s (and Hornblower’s) continual source of complaint – the miserable official allotment of gunpowder, which meant that captains had to lay in their own supplies to have any chance of fighting successfully at sea. Now I imagine that one could construct “just-so” stories which explained why most (or all) of these institutionalized features of Navy life contributed to the overall goal of maximizing the Navy’s efficiency as a fighting machine. But they would be just-so stories – not especially convincing on their merits. To the extent that O’Brian is right (and he clearly did a hell of a lot of research), the institutions of the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars weren’t even a second-best solution. They were an ungainly compromise between a wide variety of different actors, each of whom had a strong streak of self-interest, and the ability and desire to bargain in order to achieve that interest, whatever this meant for the British Navy as a fighting force.

Update: title changed following comment from Kieran

An unexpected follow-up to my last post ; Brad DeLong reacts bitterly to Guenter Grass’s op-ed in the _New York Times_, which is itself apparently the transcription of a radio talk given in Germany. Grass is harshly critical both of the all-devouring market and of the current state of German democracy. Brad finds that it can’t be an accident that Grass never mentions the words “Jew,” and concludes by describing Grass as “crypto-Nazi scum.”

To put it mildly, Brad’s critique of Grass is misconceived (he’s already gotten a lot of remarks to this effect, a couple of which are themselves a bit over the top, in his comments section). “Crypto-Nazi scum” are extraordinarily harsh words to use to describe anyone other than the David Irvings of this world, and they don’t fit here. Grass’s talk was about Germany’s post-war record. He doesn’t use any of the code-words that Holocaust revisionists or sneaking regarders use. Grass states directly that Germany can never get away from its historical burden. He also makes it clear that Germany’s acknowledgment of its dreadful past is one of the few things worth being proud of in the post-war period (Brad notes this, but by some logic that I can’t quite follow, sees this as further evidence of Grass’s crypto-Nazism). Grass’s leftwing nationalism-that-has-harsh-words-to-say-about-Germany-as-a-nation is complicated, but I don’t know of anyone who believes that Grass is even slightly sympathetic to Nazism, given Grass’s own eloquent excoriations of the Nazi era. Even in this article, one of Grass’s indictments against Germany is its swiftness in rehabilitating former members of the NSDAP, and giving them high government positions.

A fair amount of Brad’s animus seems to be aimed at Grass’s description of capitalism as a new totalitarianism _in potentia_. But this is an entirely respectable view with long historical antecedents among democrats as well as authoritarians. Was Karl Polanyi, for example, a crypto-Fascist? Nor is Grass’s disquiet with the current state of a parliamentary government beset by lobbyists and special interests evidence of Nazi leanings. Again, it’s an entirely respectable political position – and one shared by a wide variety of people on both the left and the right of the democratic spectrum. Grass is quite evidently an old-style social democrat, with a hankering for a more radical version of the Soziale Marktwirtschaft that’s responsive to social needs as well as the profit motive. It’s a position with which one can very reasonably disagree, but it certainly doesn’t make him a Nazi.

Update: In a revision to his post, Brad seems to be withdrawing his criticism of Grass’s claim that Germany has had a better record of dealing with its past than some other countries. However, he still seems to believe that Grass is “crypto-Nazi scum.” As best as I can make out, this is because Grass doesn’t explicitly mention the particular Nazi animus against the Jews in his talk. Given that Grass’s talk was very clearly about the post-WWII German state rather than the Nazi era, and that he spoke clearly and unambiguously about Germany’s continuing historical burden, I can’t see that this helps Brad at all. It seems to me that Brad has made, and is continuing to make an extremely strong claim (and a claim that implies that Grass should be shunned by right thinking people) on the basis of extremely weak evidence. I’ve enormous respect for Brad – but I simply don’t see how he can stand over the claim that Grass is “crypto-Nazi scum” given Grass’s track record, and the evidence that he (Brad) has provided to date.

Update 2: It appears that Brad has indeed modified his position on this, and has struck out his reference to Grass as “crypto-Nazi scum,” but the strikeout doesn’t appear in Firefox due to a formatting problem. Thus, his restatement is considerably more generous than I first thought, and most of the above update is thus entirely redundant.

The _Economist_ does its little bit to try to shut down the “Capitalism debate” that’s starting to happen in Germany. Franz Müntefering, who’s chairman of the German Social Democratic Party, has compared certain financial firms to ““swarms of locusts that fall on companies, stripping them bare before moving on,” and the _Economist_ plays the Nazi card.

THE metaphor of the swarm of locusts devouring all in its path is as old as the Bible. But when politicians, particularly German ones, use it today to attack groups whose behaviour they don’t like, it is hard not to be reminded of Nazi propaganda against “social parasites” and “blowflies”. Such comparisons, even though they are by no means signs of anti-Semitic thinking, are especially regrettable when uttered so close to the anniversary of the end of the second world war.

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There’s an important debate on the politics of Bush’s tax cuts in _Perspectives on Politics_. Larry Bartels’ paper, “Homer Gets a Tax-Cut,” argues that Bush was able to get his tax cuts through because of disconnections in public opinion – while voters’ don’t like inequality and the rich getting richer, they have trouble in “connecting inequality and public policy.” According to NES data, better informed voters were much more likely to express negative views about the tax cuts than less informed voters (interestingly, the data suggests that the relationship between voter information and support is a lot more complicated for the estate tax). Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson argue in contrast that voters knew what they liked, and that “large majorities of voters expressed clear hostility to the tax cut’s size.” In their argument, the tax cuts got through less because the public don’t draw certain connections, than because the Republicans were highly successful in framing the public debate and in framing the _policies themselves_ so as to slash tax rates on the rich without arousing widespread unrest (there’s an excellent discussion of the strategic deployment of ‘phase ins,’ ‘time bombs’ and ‘sunsets’ in the tax-cuts).

In my view, Hacker and Pierson have the better of the argument. Even if Bartels is correct in suggesting that they overestimate the degree of latent public opposition to tax cuts, Hacker and Pierson are surely right in pointing to the key role of agenda manipulation and policy shaping by Bush and the Republican leadership in getting the tax cuts through. They also draw out some very important connections between the changing role of leadership in Congress, the activities of anti-tax lobbies like the Club for Growth and the new tax-cutting agenda. But it’s also interesting that both articles agree that you can’t explain the political success of the tax-cuts by saying that Americans are happy with increases in inequality, and the rich getting richer. Bartels shows that the survey data points unequivocally in the opposite direction. Also interesting is Bartels’ aside that “the public as a whole likes ‘big business’ even less than it likes people on welfare, liberals, feminists, the news media and the Catholic Church.” What this says to me is that there is space for a much greater degree of left-populism in American politics than we’ve seen recently. The problem is not that the arguments of anti-tax Jihadists like Stephen Moore and Grover Norquist accord well with American public opinion; it’s that these extremists have been very successful in using the Republican machine to manipulate the political agenda.

There’s been a minor controversy recently over Naomi Oreskes’ literature study in _Science_. Oreske found that of 928 paper abstracts on climate change, taken from the ISI database, precisely none disagreed with the consensus view that anthropogenic climate change is real. Now Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University says that after searching the same database, he’s found 34 article abstracts that “reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the “the observed warming over the last 50 years.”” Peiser wrote a letter to _Science_, putting forward his alternate findings, which Science declined to publish; in Peiser’s view using “a contrived technicality as an excuse.” This has gotten some attention from the Telegraph, which hints at skulduggery and low standards in high scientific places.

Now, however, Tim Lambert has gotten Peiser to cough up the goods – the 34 (now, for some mysterious reason, 33) scientific abstracts that cast doubt on anthropogenic global warming. Tim is inviting readers to go through the abstracts, and record their own conclusions. My take after reading them: the claim that Peiser’s 33 abstracts “reject or doubt the view …” is completely unsustainable. There’s one undoubted rejection of the anthropogenic case (no. 27) – but it comes from that well-known arbiter of peer-reviewed scientific neutrality, the ‘Ad Hoc Committee on Global Climate Issues’ of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. There are a few others that could be construed as scepticism (the explicit ones appear to be either outdated or else personal views), but the vast majority of the papers that Peiser cites don’t even begin to make any general arguments about global warming, let alone claims that the anthropogenic argument is bogus. Abstracts no. 12, 13 and 25 aren’t even _scientific research_; they appear to be postmodern inquiries into the construction of scientific authority. If I’d been asked (while wearing my hat as a member of GWU’s Center for International Science and Technology Policy) to review Peiser’s letter and evidence for possible publication in a peer-reviewed journal, I’d have rejected them summarily, and made some fairly warm comments in my rejection letter. I’d have done exactly the same if it had been making the opposite argument (that is if Peiser had used similar evidence to argue that there was support for global warming). Simply put, I don’t think Peiser’s evidence even begins to provide proper support for his claims. But, in fairness to Peiser, he’s made the evidence that he’s using publicly available, so you can go over to Tim’s place and take the taste-test for yourself.

Two blogospheric manifestations of Beckett. First, Maud Newton links to an old piece in the Guardian, defending the critically panned novel, _Mercier and Camier_ as a good starting-point if you want to start reading Beckett. While I agree, I think that his early novel, _Watt_ is even better; it’s a sort of evolutionary missing link between Flann O’Brian and Beckett’s own later work. Some very fine jokes; I especially like the railway porter who is both “stout” and “bitter.” If you start by reading Beckett’s earlier novels, you’re more likely to get and enjoy the less obvious (but still real) comedy of his later work. _Waiting for Godot_ is a very funny play if you’ve got a particular sense of humour.

But if you really want to find out about the brighter side of Beckett, you need to ask Janice Brown. Mark Kleiman gives her grief for perverse reading and misattribution in this widely cited (and rather scary) speech, but by far the best bit is her stirring closing paragraph, in which she puts Beckett to work ladling out some Chicken Soup for the Conservative Soul.

Freedom requires us to have courage; to live with our own convictions; to question and struggle and strive. And to fail. To Fail. Recently, I saw a quote attributed to Samuel Beckett. He asks: “Ever tried? Ever failed?” Well, no matter. He says, “Try again. Fail better.” Trying to live as free people is always going to be a struggle. But we should commit ourselves to trying and failing, and trying again. To failing better until we really do become like that city on the hill, which offered the world salvation.

This passes beyond misprision into an appalling sort of creativity. What _would_ that city on the hill look like if Beckett were the architect? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Update: small changes following comment from Jacob Levy.

Update 2: title changed following realization that a Bad Pun was trapped in the post’s main body, waiting to be liberated.

Kimberly Morgan, who guestblogged with us a couple of weeks ago, spoke a little while ago on the BBC World Service about the politics of childcare in Western Europe and the United States. It’s a great interview.

There seems to be some discomfort among a couple of commenters (and perhaps in the blogosphere more generally) with the argument that the US is itself culpable for torture when it hands prisoners over to a regime that the US State Department and the UN describe as a “systematic” torturer. A historic analogy might help clarify matters. On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were arrested by the police in Nashoba County, Mississippi. They were then released by the police at night, on the side of a rural road, where they were picked up by the Ku Klux Klan and then murdered. Now, there’s no evidence that the police told the Klan to beat these young men to death. But they certainly had good reason to expect that something horrible was going to happen to the civil rights workers. Unless you are prepared to maintain that the police weren’t culpable for the deaths of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, it’s hard to argue that the US isn’t culpable for handing prisoners over to regimes where they have good reason to believe that these prisoners will then be tortured (especially if, as seems to be the case, the US then expects and receives information from these prisoners’ interrogations).

There is one difference, but it turns on an empty legalism. The US apparently seeks assurances from the regimes to which it sends prisoners that they will not torture them. To return to the historical analogy – if the police had gone to the Klan before releasing the young men, and asked the Klan for an assurance that they would not be murdered, would this get the police off the hook? Hardly; any assurances that were granted would have been incredible. Just as they are in the case of extraordinary renditions – there is overwhelming evidence from the testimony of Maher Arar and elsewhere that these prisoners are indeed tortured. As, indeed, the US fully expects they will be. One of the interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo and elsewhere was to threaten prisoners that they would be rendered to their home governments if they didn’t cooperate; evidence that the US fully understands that these prisoners will be tortured if they are shipped abroad. Nor is there any remotely plausible alternative explanation that I’ve seen of why the US is shipping these prisoners to regimes known for torturing their prisoners rather than keeping them within its own system of prisons and shadow-prisons (where it could presumably interrogate them itself).

The New York Times, which has been doing sterling investigative work, reports that the US has sent “dozens” of detainees to Uzbekistan under the extraordinary rendition program. This at a time when the US State Department has issued a report noting the prevalence of torture in Uzbekistan and pointing to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture’s conclusion ” that torture or similar ill-treatment was systematic.” As I believe is quite well known, Uzbeki specialties include the “boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers” as well as the boiling of prisoners to death. And the US response?

A senior C.I.A. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he would not discuss whether the United States had sent prisoners to Uzbekistan or anywhere else. But he said: “The United States does not engage in or condone torture. It does not send people anywhere to be tortured. And it does not knowingly receive information derived from torture.” (my italics)

Or in other words, don’t ask, don’t tell. It is nothing less than appalling that this has happened, is continuing to happen, and is an official (if unacknowledged) US policy. Indeed, it’s not only appalling; it’s criminal. No other conclusion is possible than that the United States of America is deliberately and consciously shipping people to third party regimes so that information can be tortured from them. This is general knowledge. Yet it isn’t being acted on. Those who have introduced this policy and overseen it shouldn’t just be forced to resign. They should be prosecuted as war criminals.

Stephen Bainbridge articulates my suspicions as to what’s going on with the President’s proposal for means-tests on Social Security – that focusing the program more directly on the poor would weaken its political support (and thus make it easier to get rid of it in the long run).

Matt Yglesias talks about the difficulty that liberals and the left have in saying what they’re for and what their opponents are against, in a pithy one-sentence format.

the problem was that people didn’t even seem to understand the right kind of thing to be doing. What makes the conservative pitch work is that while it’s general enough to be broadly appealing, it’s specific enough that liberals will have to reject it. The submissions we got tended to either operate at an overly-broad level (“we’re for good things happening and against bad ones”) or else to just be policy laundry-lists.

It’s important to recognize that for these purposes you need an idea that conservatives would reject as a self-description. If you say, “we’re for the middle class, not just the wealthy” conservatives will say, “no, we’re for the middle class.” You may think (correctly) that this is an inaccurate description of the consequences of conservatism, but it’s not how conservatives see things. Liberals, on the other hand, really aren’t for low taxes. And part of the genius is that we wouldn’t say that we’re exactly for high taxes either.

I don’t have an answer for him; I’m not that good at snappy one liners. But I do have a strong feeling that the answer lies somewhere in the left and right’s attitudes towards risk. Modern conservatives tend to fetishize risk as being a good thing in itself – see John H’s extended interrogation of David Frum’s claims that the risk of hardship and privation are character-building. There’s something similar going on in the insistence of many conservatives that the welfare state destroys character, and that Social Security, universal health care, bankruptcy protection and so on are bad things in themselves. This points towards the same conclusion as the libertarian argument that markets are good, but for different reasons – it’s less concerned with increasing individuals’ ability to make choices, than ensuring that they’re exposed to the brisk winds of chance and market forces. The left wants to provide a safety net in case you fall from the tightrope, but for people like Frum, the risk that you’ll break your neck is a _good thing_. It concentrates your mind wonderfully on staying up there, and makes you bulk up your moral fibre. There are some varieties of American conservatism for which this isn’t true (there’s a subdued strain of Catholic corporate responsibility, for example, here and there), but they aren’t politically dominant. Now the statement that the left’s motive is to mitigate risk isn’t a one-liner; at most it’s a loose animating philosophy. But whatever one-liners we come up with should reflect that philosophy, or something like it – it’s what really divides the left (as broadly conceived) from the currently dominant version of American conservatism.

Lorelei Kelly at Democracy Arsenal writes:

Two cliches that the conservative movement lives by: “Nature abhors a vacuum” AND “Half of winning is just showing up”. So conservative leaders proceed to destroy public infrastructure–thereby creating a vacuum–and then outsource its replacement to their friends and allies. A great example of this occurred with the “reforms” implemented by the Contract with America–the de facto elimination of much of the cooperative informal infrastructure like staffed caucuses–that helped Members stay educated and also built alliances between Democrats and Republicans on issues of interest (like arms control or the environment). Congressional staff from the old days refer to 1995 as “the lobotomy of Congress”. Gingrich had no need for these informal venues … he consolidated formal power of recognition to himself and simply outsourced substantive policy needs to the Heritage Foundation. The left had nothing similar to Heritage in 1995. Now we’ve got Center for American Progress, but also years of catching up to do.

While Kelly is bang on in her diagnosis, I don’t think that think tanks like the Center for American Progress provide a very good solution, useful though they may be in other senses. Much of the dumbing down of political debate in the last decade was indeed an intended consequence of the Gingrich revolution. Congressional institutions which provided impartial information were axed, and replaced by spin from handpicked “experts” and right wing think-tanks. The prime example was the closing of the Office of Technology Assessment (which had peeved Gingrich by exploding some of the bogus science underpinning the Star Wars initiative). Still, creating “our own” think-tanks isn’t a solution to the underlying problem (although it may be a necessary political strategy). It would be far preferable to try to recreate some of the previously existing infrastructure, as Congressman Rush Holt has proposed (it wasn’t very expensive in the first place). This would make it far more difficult for bullshit artists like Senator James Inhofe to get away with murder on the floor of Congress. Doubtless, this would sometimes prove inconvenient for the left, whenever the existing research or scientific consensus presented awkward or uncomfortable facts for left-wing policy positions. But it would improve the quality of political debate in areas such as stem cell research, global warming and missile defence, where right wing politicians continually and persistently make claims that are bizarrely at odds with the existing body of scientific research.

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If you do an Amazon search for “Glenn Reynolds,” the movie Troll II appears in the first page of results, beating out Reynolds’ book with Merges on space law and policy (the latter is actually quite a useful volume, and the reason I was doing the search in the first place).