inanis et vacua

What is Corruption?

We let our public people and ourselves off easy. If a congressman hasn’t violated a statute in a provable way, we won’t call him corrupt. For several centuries, however, political corruption wasn’t understood as a crime, though it often enough resulted in bribery and other specific crimes. Corruption was simply the commandeering of public institutions by private interests. By that definition, of course, our entire political system is deeply corrupt. Indeed, under the effective, as opposed to the paper constitution of the nation, the corporations are the fourth branch of the Federal government; and any attempt to limit their power and income amounts to an insurrection. The health care companies and arms manufacturers have a prerogative right to their exorbitant profits, which is why their supporters, who have internalized the American religion of corruption, are sincerely scandalized by suggestions that the public good should sometimes impinge on private interests. Thus in the current debate about health care, we hear that a public option is impermissible because it would provide better services at lower cost than private insurance firms and thus lower their returns to capital or even drive them out of business.

Intelligent Design: Part Deux

Although I’ve been frequently told that the sage does nothing and everything is accomplished, I have reason to believe that the non-sages sometimes do get results by doing something and that they haven’t just been following their noses all this time. Paleontology certainly suggests that the pace of cultural evolution—the development of new tools, the succession of artistic styles—picked up sharply someplace between homo erectus and yours truly with the implication that a greatly increased capacity for insight and planning was involved in that giddy acceleration. In the history and prehistory of our species, intelligent design has resulted in rapid change, in drastic contrast to biological evolution, whose incredibly slow pace reflects the absence of even a moronic mind.

Various people have pointed out the irony that the same people who insist that a divine intellect has to be postulated to explain the emergence of the machinery of life are big fans of the master role of non-intelligent processes in the working of human societies. Automatic market mechanisms are trusted to turn blind selfishness into effective cooperation. Simple instincts allow termites to build arches from their own shit; why look for a fundamentally different kind of explanation for the rise of Microsoft? Even scholarly non-ideologues sometimes show a predilection for this sort of thing. Hence attempts to reconstruct the early history of agriculture usually assume that these developments just naturally happened because hunter-gathers dropped seeds near their huts and one thing led to another. Or consider accounts of the invention of writing that finesse the transition from pictographs to a system that can actually reproduce a specific language as if this process didn’t require figuring out something that wasn’t obvious at all.

Historians of technology sometimes distinguish inventions that want to be invented from those that don’t, airplanes as opposed to helicopters, buttons as opposed to zippers; and there may be something worthwhile about this idea. Nevertheless, it is obvious that not only all innovation, but also the ordinary operations of civilization require thoughtfulness. Heraclitus asserted that every cow is driven to pasture by a blow. That may work for cattle, but no human economic system would even succeed in getting its floors swept if the janitors didn’t have an idea of what it meant to clean things up. Rewards and punishments—the cattle prods and the cookies—motivate systems of action patterned by language. They are useless in the absence of higher mental functions. For better or worse, we just don’t act like ants in an anthill, a fact that can be verified by comparing San Francisco to the actual anthills described in Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson’s most recent book, Superorganism. All that said, arriving at a new pattern of behavior does require a more conscious intrusion of mind into habit than routine work; and developing and implementing a cooperative plan is still more problematic, which is probably part of the reason we’d like to think that it’s all automatic.

The definitive tome on the history of premeditation in human history remains to be written. It’s certainly the right time to address the topic because, short of relying on the mercy of God, current circumstances demand that we get together and figure out how to fly the plane. We need to look at the precedents. Autopilot is simply not an option in the face of resource depletion and environmental degradation, not to mention the California constitution. Instinct and custom are far more comfortable, far more loveable, than thoughtful action; and in eras when the consequences of bad innovations are likely to be worse than the results of going with the flow, automatism may even be adaptive. Under contemporary conditions, however, the principled rejection of reason and responsibility we call conservatism is simply suicidal, though, to be fair, you have to admit it doesn’t require as much committee work as doing the right thing.

Friendly Advice

With all the problems that Obama will face as he takes office, prosecuting members of the previous administration for their many violations of the law will surely be a low priority. It would seem vindictive and unnecessary. If I were a principled and canny Republican, however, I would insist on a full accounting with all the trimmings even if it meant that some of my friends and colleagues did hard time. Allowing the guilty to escape may seem like a good thing from a partisan point of view, but what it would actually do is establish the precedent that the executive can get away with anything. The last administration invented a utopian solution to many of its problems by essentially legalizing crime, but the Republicans won’t like it when and if the Democrats play by the same rules or lack of rules. I won’t like it either.

I’d like to believe that the people who are currently taking power are morally better than those who they are supplanting, if only because they don’t have to meet a very high standard to do that. However, I also suspect that part of the reason the old order broke the law so freely was not simply a function of their ideology, which at its margins was pretty close to a combination of the Fuhrer Prinzip and a Tammany Hall license to steal, but also resulted from a generally low level of competence. Criminals tend to be stupid and conversely the stupid tend to be criminals. Just as man-eating lions are usually just the animals too old and sick to take their proper prey, dangerous men are often simply not clever enough or disciplined enough to achieve their aims in a constructive, lawful manner. For all their jabbering about John Galt, nothing so characterized the outgoing bunch more than its consistent mediocrity. They weren’t good at much and stole because they didn’t know how to earn. But even if the new men and women turn out to be more able, even considerably more able, and therefore capable of accomplishing their aims without cheating, the power of precedent is so great that I’m afraid that the executive will continue to abuse the Constitution under their charge. If Chaney and Gonzales go to prison, that will be less likely. Maybe somebody at the National Review could make this point in a featured article…

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Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray.

In Backgammon, It’s Called the Running Game

McCain is suspending his campaign for the moment and calling for a postponement of the Friday debate. The dramatic (or erratic) moves are understandable granted the marked decline in his fortunes that has taken place over the last ten days or so as the financial crisis made even the lowest information voters notice how badly his party has handled the economy. He’s in the situation of a chess player with a bad position who complicates the game even at the cost of making inferior moves—a perfectly rational strategy that many losing candidates have tried, though it does seem to work better in chess than politics. McCain’s desperation did not just begin, however.

The Palin nomination was already a capitulation to circumstances, a Pearl Harbor attack that inflicted temporary pain on the enemy but probably guaranteed defeat. So long as McCain had real faith in his prospects, he kept his distance from the crazy right faction of his own party and tried to run as a moderate. By signing up Palin, he ensured himself of the fanatical support of 40% of the country; but he also gave up on winning the middle. The most probable result of his surrender to the Culture War right is an increased prospect of losing less badly purchased at the cost of forgoing any reasonable chance of eking out a win.

Der Alte

John McCain got confused again last night in an interview about American foreign policy towards Latin America. The details aren’t particularly important—nobody really thinks McCain is unaware that Spain is in Europe. He’s not Palin, after all—but the episode and the somewhat panic-stricken way his spokesmen covered for him is getting to be routine. There’s nothing mysterious going on. McCain is simply getting senile, a fact that is hardly surprising in view of the man’s age and medical history. Time, torture, boxing, cancer treatments, and heavy drinking will do that to you. And blaming the guy is also beside the point since he has far more serious things to apologize for than mere decrepitude. The question is, do we really want to witness a long process of increasingly embarrassing public gaffes, all relentlessly denied and covered up by the PR sharks while a subterranean succession-struggle plays out in the White House basement? That wouldn’t be a very pleasant spectacle even in settled times, but it might be fatal in an age in which great power competition is awakening from its post-Cold War slumber and economic and environmental crisis require an energetic response.

Of course it is possible that McCain’s mental state is better than it appears to be, and the remarkably uninformed or merely strange remarks he makes reflect his previous level of ignorance rather than the advent of dementia. If so, his age remains a serious issue because one can hardly expect a 72-year old to learn on the job—heck, I’m 63 and you can’t teach me anything! McCain is certainly not going to rethink his assumptions or listen to new ideas. What you get it is some fraction of what the man was ten or twenty years ago; and if that wasn’t all that much to begin with, you can’t expect that McCain will turn out to be an American version of Adenauer, Mandela, or Gladstone.

By the way, is it decent or patriotic for Republicans to support the candidacy of an obviously incompetent man? Why do they keep nominating people like that?

A Proverb from the Chinese

The Federal bailout of AIG is demonstrating an important point: the alternative to regulation is not laissez faire; it’s socialism.